"After the Sunset" - the last big Hollywood production filmed in the Bahamas - was so culturally off-kilter that I was totally prepared for another whacked-out Hollywood vision of the Bahamas - part Margaritaville, part Jamaica, mon.
It seems that they can never just let us be ourselves.
There's a history to this stuff ... in my memory it'd include the
confusion of the Be
atle's "Help", and even "Thunderball" wasn't
particularly true to who we are. Let's not get in to "My Father the Hero" and other such romanticised cut-and-paste photographic and cultural mish-mashes.
The Mandalay Pictures production "Into the Blue" with Paul Walker, Scott Caan, Jessica Alba and Ashley Scott is such an exception to the "let's recreate reality in
our image" Hollywood mentality.
Besides the fact that the story was thoroughly enjoyable, if not totally predictable, it was fun to be watching a movie set in the Bahamas that pretty well just puts us out there as we are. Even if at times it really looks like something filmed for the Ministry of Tourism (the photography is fantastic ... but pretty real).
Most amazing of all, for me ... they didn't make the Bahamian characters sound like Jamaicans - with one prominent exception, but I think the [Jamaican] actor just couldn't help it! The dialect is as authentic as it gets ... one leaves wondering what non-Bahamian audiences will think of words like "Mudda-sick" and "boongy"!
Bottom line ... go see this movie!
