'Out Of Africa' & 'Out Of Africa'

After I read Out of Africa, I really wondered how they were going to make it into a film with all the loose narrative bits and marginal characters that would've been received well among the common moviegoer.

As it turns out, Out of Africa the book is almots nothing like Out of Africa the film.

The film takes bits and pieces from the book and some other biographies and texts to create this relationship between Karen Blixen and Denys Fitch Hatton.

In the book, her relationship with Hatton isn't even on the radar in the book as he appears to be a character and came and went out of Blixen's life as she tended to a coffee plantation in Kenya.

In reality, Hatton and Blixen were lovers and suffered a series of separations and miscarriages throughout their fated relationship that ended with his death in the airplane accident.

Both, however, are fitting tributes to the mother country of Africa, the devastation of culture and resources by colonizers and brilliant landscape that the country once held.

It's a fitting tribute consider the last 40 years of civil wars, takeovers, coups, dictators, death and corruption. It's a small fingerprint of what that continent used to be and will never be again.

Two film notes: In the scene where Meryl Streep's fighting off the lion attacking her cow, the lion was supposed to be tethered by his back leg. He wasn't, so Streep's reaction to the proximity of the lion is real.

Also, Streep was apparently nervous during the scene where Robert Redford washes her hair. There was allegedly some very pissed off hippotamuses in the general vicinity. And hippoes don't take kindly to strangers.