I saw The Last King of Scotland on Saturday, and as I expected to be, I was overwhelmed by Forest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin. (As I just noticed in a New Yorker commentary on another film with James McAvoy in it, McAvoy was not bad either!)

But my love of Whitaker's acting comes from Ghost Dog, by Jim Jarmusch, a movie that provides the pleasure of watching Whitaker develop a character without any music-video-style editing. The editing in The Last King of Scotland reminded me of the editing of the key scene in Philadelphia. In that scene, Tom Hanks, wearing a bathrobe and hooked up to a walking IV, explains opera to a flabbergasted Denzel Washington. But instead of letting Hanks dance with his IV and blow the audience away with his acting, Jonathan Demme pretended it was a video and did all kinds of swooping and cutting and general messing around with the images.

At least in Philadelphia it was only the one scene that was almost ruined by such editing. In The Last King of Scotland, almost every scene with the brilliant Whitaker was cut to pieces, as if Whitaker's acting were not more than enough to communicate Amin's frightening blend of charisma and brutality.

I'll take Jarmusch (or Jacques Rivette, another director who lets his actors act) over Kevin Macdonald any day!

And something happened at the cinema that I have never experienced before: the movie was interrupted, during the climactic scene, by the house lights, because someone was having a medical emergency. We had to wait 10 or 15 minutes until an ambulance came and took the stricken person out. Then the movie started again!