About The Last King of Scotland

No more baseball 'til March. I know the months will fly.
So that meant it was Monday Night Football on TV last night, and the Brett Favre love fest--er, sorry, the Packers/Broncos game--just failed to capture my interest.
(Although, the almost manic hype of the upcoming Colts/Patriots game was mildly interesting, if only because 1) we are Colts fans, and 2) as an example of how sports media can make a plain, old, regular-season football game [as Tony Dungy calmly, and rightly, pointed out] can become the apocalypse of the season. Until the next big game.)
So I grabbed the Blockbuster DVD that had been sitting on a shelf for way too many weeks (part of my online membership, it wasn't late!) and threw it in the laptop and put my headphones on.
I rarely manage to see all the Oscar movies BEFORE the Oscars, but I try to see them at some point...and you can see how long that takes me.
I knew The Last King of Scotland contained Forest Whitaker's Academy Award-winning performance, and I also knew it contained, as the warnings say, "gruesome violence." So I should have known better than to watch it just before bed.
Oh well--thank God for the fast-forward feature.
It was really, really well done. I loved the scenes that set the atmosphere of Uganda--the people, the music, the stunning country.
And Whitaker was excellent--his physical resemblance to Amin striking, too.
The actor who played the Scottish doctor gave an excellence performance; his character, however, is terribly flawed (as flawed as Amin?) -- he just makes one weak moral mistake after the other. And, just talking movie-wise for a minute, it was pretty dang obvious that nothing good was going to come of sleeping with the dictator's wife. That's just never a good idea.
I did a little research to discover what parts of the movie were real and what parts made up--Wikipedia tells about that in its entry on the novel, here»
Unfortunately, the worst parts are not made up. 300,000 died in Uganda under Amin's regime.
So I went to bed and I woke up thinkin': How do we save the world from despots?