Johnny Mad Dog

As you may have noticed in my great and not so great things about living in Belgium post, one of my favourite things is a little magazine which comes out every Wednesday called Agenda. It lists every film showing in Brussels, summarises it in French, Dutch and English, and tells you which cinemas are showing what, and at what times. It’s actually amazing.

So for a few weeks I’d had my eye on a film called Johnny Mad Dog, since I read part of an article in one of the other weekly newspapers not long after we arrived. Each week I was getting more nervous it wouldn’t be on anymore the following week. So the other day I decided to just go and see it… on my own!

Golly, so it was the first time I’ve ever been to the cinema on my own, and it was raining and getting dark as I left, and I’d never been to this cinema before and didn’t take a map. But I found it without too much trouble…. And the building itself was SUCH a treat.

The cinema is called Styx and is a small local cinema in Ixelles (the area I live in), and when I say small… I mean small. It reminded me of the Kinema in the woods I used to go to when I lived in Lincolnshire because it had only two screens, and whilst no interval in the middle of the film, it was just as cheap! Only 5€ to see any film, any time! Amazing.

So I had to wait outside Salle 2 for about 10 minutes because there was still a film showing when I arrived. Then the 3 of us waiting went in while the credits of the previous film finished, we were all there on our own so I didn’t feel as awkward as I would no doubt have done at one of the big UGC cinemas or such like. And yes, salle 2 was indeed TINY. I’m not sure you can imagine, there were 5 seats per row, and 6 rows of seats. The screen was just a wider and more permanent kind of white screen, the kind you might have in a classroom.

It was a bit awkward waiting for the film to start as we were all there on our own, so just were sat in silence (lol) and then a couple came in talking VERY loudly, and even though it was only adverts, I couldn’t help but feel slightly indignant that they were being so “inconsiderate”, though I wouldn’t have given it a second thought in a normal cinema!

Anyhow, they piped down when the film began. I couldn’t decide if I actually wanted to see this film or not, it’s summary in Agenda says:

“With great stylistic dash, Sauvaire immerses the viewer in the insane world of an African child soldier”

And I’d started watching the last king of Scotland a few days before, and chickened out after about 50 minutes… it definitely wasn’t the easiest film in the world to watch… I guess I wanted to because it’s real. Things like this really happen around the world and I feel really uniformed about them. I’m thinking at the moment about potential dissertation topics too and as there are several former French and Belgian colonies in Africa, I’m wondering if I might be able to find a way of finding a question to write about that relates somehow to one of them, although it would be hard to research.

Sorry I’m no “Ms. Savvy” when it comes to writing about films lol, but I still haven’t even decided if I liked this one or not. Mainly because of the content… obviously you can’t “like” that. The style of the film was interesting and the unknown actors were brilliant… it was a bit crazy trying to understand though as the original language is English, but it’s a very heavily accented version of English, so I understood parts in English from the speaking, and others from the French subtitles.

I can’t say I’d “recommend” it … I guess if you’re interested then look it up on imdb and see for yourself if you think you can put yourself through it. I guess it was worth it. I do feel a little better informed, and a little less naïve about who child soldiers really are. But it’s impossible to walk away from a film like that feeling anything but disbelief that things like this still have to happen to children around the world.