peteg's blog

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep (1996)). Based on a novel by Giuliano Da Empoli. Emmanuel Carrère helped with the adaptation.

The idea was to take a look at how present-day Russia emerged from the Yeltsin era under Putin, coming at it from the view of confected "wizard of the Kremlin" Vadim Baranov (who I later read is a fictionalisation of Vadislav Surkov). He's played by Paul Dano who does not succeed in the lead. Dano delivers tonnes of exposition in a style that is intended to be coldly insinuating. He somehow lands manic pixie dream squeaky party girl Alicia Vikander who is tasked with breaking up the sausagefest. She knows what she wants (excess) but I was never convinced Dano could satisfy that, and she never seemed to enjoy her spoils anyway. For reasons often unknown she just disappears from large parts of the movie.

But the main draw was Jude Law who does function very effectively as Putin. He got the body language down and the brutality, opacity and sheer rapacious vacuity of the ideology across; it seems at this time Putin is paranoid but not as (insecurely) paranoid as he appears to be now. He too lacks much outward expression of the joy of being the new Tzar. Things flag whenever he's not on the screen.

Beyond the obvious decline in civil liberties the movie fails to explain what really changed since the 1990s; apparently it's just a game of oligarchs underpinned by some emotional manipulation of the masses, a fending-off of Western influence in Ukraine. The present-day framing interview with Jeffrey Wright seemed inessential. The visual metaphors are crass. Yorick Le Saux's cinematography is uninspired which is weird as he did far better with, for instance, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Little Women (2019), and Blitz (2024).

Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars.

Kindle. Eventually inevitable due to the gravitation of Malick's movie (1998).

This is Jones's take on the Guadacanal campaign of 1942/1943 that was "the first major Allied land offensive against Japan" of World War II. (Guadalancal, for those of us born long after, is one of the Solomon Islands.) It's relentless, well written, never boring, sometimes hilarious and yet somehow not as iconic as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961); Witt is a bit like Yossarian in being doctrinaire but is not as overtly philosophical about it. (Perhaps the relative lack of enduring recognition is because, like Milton Friedman and the money supply, everything reminds Jones of sex.) The cast of characters initially seems daunting but are sufficiently distinct that they're not hard to follow. His deft treatment of PTSD ("combat numbess") was perhaps novel at the time.

Goodreads. Maxwell Geismar at the New York Times at the time.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan (2016), Peninsula (2020)) who has made yet another zombie flick. Choi Kyu-seok helped him out with the script. Jun Ji-hyun (Assassination (2015)) led. Generally underbaked.

For generic reasons of revenge mad genius bio-scientist Koo Hyo-hwan cooks up a "virus" and a "vaccine" and proceeds to inconvenience not only the attendees of a biotech conference (where the colony concept is explained to us by Steve Jobs-ish CEO Kom Jeong-tae) but also the civilians in the shopping mall in a high-rise building in Seoul. The survivors/counter-revengers, quasi-led by strong-willed scientist Jun Ji-hyun, dwindle by the numbers. Much of the plot hinges on highly suspect reasoning; for instance, how do the responders even know there's a vaccine? Quite often the players (human and post/sub-human) hang around, inexplicably inert, waiting for a cue. Pretty much all of the characters suck. The ending threatened a sequel. Bring me the zombie king.

I wish the Koreans would get around to remaking Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. The zombie genre has seen a lot of innovation including the conceit used here. Seongyong Cho: two-and-a-half stars, "another typical zombie movie which does not surprise me a lot." Fungal not viral.

Written and directed by Michael Haneke. Drug up for reasons unknown; perhaps for Juliette Binoche who leads with Daniel Auteuil or maybe because the precis evoked the early parts of Lost Highway (1997). I did not understand this movie.

Video tapes (how quaint) mysteriously arrive on the doorstep of the middle-class Parisian couple that contain surveillance footage referring to unshared events in the man's childhood. Their son is becoming more troublesome as he undergoes puberty (no other motivation is provided). The police are mostly as disinterested as I was.

The characters are weak stereotypes; Binoche made the most sense as a bewildered wife. Husband Auteuil is mystifying. The couple inhabits a highly-paid literary fantasy land that has surely been eroded by now. Both are so quick to jump to conclusions and stand on their own amour-propre that we rarely get access to anything factual. I guess this is one way for the guilty to respond when challenged (guilt being an obvious theme of the movie) but it is unsatisfying that so many scenes dragged on or replayed earlier scenes with minor variations. I was not engrossed and things did not conclude satisfactorily; it wasn't so much that the plot dangles as the motivations remained opaque or trivial. For instance, why did Maurice Bénichou (Majid) cut his own throat at that plot-convenient time?

The cinematography is harshly digital, of a piece with the video tapes. Most of the movie is dialogue in tell-don't-show mode.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie". A. O. Scott wants it to be deeper than it is. Wikipedia. All claim the mystery of who sent the tapes is answered in the final shot — I was too impatient for it to be over to scan the frame sufficiently but apparently it was the sons wot did it — and if that was the (trite) intention then we needed to see more of the other characters.

Kindle. Deb Olin Unferth's follow-up to Barn 8 (2020). A short-and-punchy holiday in post-apocalyptic sci-fi (much like Tim Winton's latest) with all the tropes, so much so that it does not seem very original or insightful. I read it in a day in the hope it would level up.

We start after the depop event, with mother dragging daughter to a solipsistic Atlantis to escape the surviving humanity. (Things are gynocentric throughout.) We soon learn that most of the men (mostly ineffectual/emasculated) have departed for Mars (Total Recall (1992) without the brunettes, blondes, Arnie, mutants, everything) but "Command" likes to send crews to the heavily degraded Earth in search of saleable tat. You'd expect it all to be heavily AI-mediated but it isn't, not really.

Escaping her mother's Hermicity our femoine escapes to the oh-so-clean desert (think Dune (1965) or Mad Max without the fashion) for an internship at a research lab. There she takes a bullshit job (futilely shovelling sand) rather than become part of "the company"'s machine, preferring to do her intellectual labour in the privacy of a container-house (Winton's The Shepherd's Hut (2018), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)) that she purchases with her inheritance. (The mechanics of food, water, sanitation, money or any other technological or economic thing are not in Unferth's wheelhouse.) On a frenemy-funded rec trip she meets the love of her life, a fake human robot who has undergone extreme beauty surgery after being stolen as a child (Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)). Later her mother uploads her consciousness to a Sputnik-esque vehicle (Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Permutation City (1994)) and slips the bounds of this solar system.

The appearance-enhanced character is also functionally augmented (Neuromancer (1984), Highlander (1986)). This somehow leads to an all soul-and-feeling ending (Asimov's later/fat Foundations) that — and my eyes may've glazed over by this point — felt like a very modest variation on the concluding movement of John Brunner's Threshold of Eternity (1959) which also centred a female spirit, albeit one with more apparent agency.

The writing is relentless, mostly not funny but occasionally hilarious. Unferth likes the idea of human volition so the apocalypse is lowrez nuclear and not some slow-burn expiration of the ecology, and there's some point to the genetic preservation efforts. I don't think she had a moral point to make (unlike Ned Beauman), at least not one of any arresting novelty. Some clangers were clearly intentional (and amusing), others pointed to an underbaked understanding of systems: humans are natural too, and just the latest in a long line of ecocidal totalitarians.

Lincoln Michel acknowledges Unferth's derivativeness but protests that her "playfulness" cures all. Goodreads was generally unimpressed. tl;dr — just an appropriation of geek culture.

A Michael Redgrave jag from The Lady Vanishes (1938). Produced and directed by Tony Richardson from a script that Alan Sillitoe derived from his own short story. In black-and-white. In two sittings due to a lack of grip.

Abiding post-war privation in 1960s Nottingham yields an idle, youthful Tom Courtenay up to a borstal (juvie) for unsurprising reasons that are uncovered later on. (Even the TV set comes in for suspicion.) Some G-rated antics with the house leader does not impede the governor (Redgrave) taking a shine to him, given his promise as (wait for it) a cross-country runner. There's not much hope on offer (maybe a whiff of happily-for-a-while with squeeze Topsy Jane, she of few aspirations) and even those are squelched by an ending that denies things as prosaic as class solidarity.

The cinematography is very workmanlike, perhaps due to budget limitations. It generally functions as a time capsule. Not as pointy as other English social-realist projects of the era (e.g. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Mostly grim with the odd flash of (gallows) humour. The psychologist came in for a tepid shellacking.

Bosley Crowther. Like The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) the title is better than the movie. He struggled with the accents.

Kindle. Inevitable after Enrigue's excellent You Dreamed of Empires (2024). Once again ably translated by Natasha Wimmer. Lengthy, too much so.

Notionally Enrigue is telling us about Geronimo, one of the last of the militant Apaches. He does this on a multitrack which allows him to defer many interesting bits to the end. The first story is an account of a Mexican recovery party on the trail of a woman who was abducted. (Those of us unfamiliar with Apache lore may harbour suspicions that she is Geronimo's mother, him being deemed so exceptional by all those who encounter him.) Another recounts Geronimo's eventual surrender to the U.S. Army in what struck me as a post-civil-war mop-up operation; putting to use the now-permanent army in settling and taming the southwest, completing the conquest of the continent. Some of the military manoeuvring and shenanigans are amusing. Other parts sink into the swamp of excessive research and/or Cloud Atlas (2004). Cinematic for sure.

Less vital but probably more important to the author is an interspersed present-day travelogue through Apachería. I struggled with his essentialism: the Apache bloodlines doubtlessly persist but I can't see this as any kind of victory if the culture has been so thoroughly disrupted if not destroyed. The ranking of manliness amongst the peoples of the area (Mexican, European settler, native American) was a bit trying.

Dwight Garner wrote a thoughtful review. "Enrigue is filibustering, leaning too heavily on his research." "This is a long book (456 pages) that feels even longer." Indeed Enrigue's take on his own citizenship status(es) could make for a great read. Goodreads.

Jacques Audiard's immediately-previous feature to The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005). Again Tonino Benacquista was his co-writer but this time it's an original conceit.

The setup has repressed, semi-deaf, overworked secretary Emmanuelle Devos hire recently-released Vincent Cassel as an office menial at a construction firm. He assists her rise with some larceny and heavying of some counterparties and she helps him out with her lip-reading skills when it's time for a heist. His parole officer Olivier Perrier gets his own track (something about his wife of 35 years) that does not seem to be particularly relevant or convergent. Her bestie/sister (?) Olivia Bonamy never passes up an opportunity to remind her of what she's been missing out on as a wallflower. She develops a taste for power and a willingness to use it that he learns to appreciate. It's good and sometimes fun. I'm not sure the concluding movement held together but by then it doesn't really matter.

Audiard opted for far more continuity and fluidity here. I enjoyed Cassel's performance the most of those I've seen from him. Devos seemed a bit old for the role (surely she would've cracked before hitting her mid-30s) but succeeds with her nervy, expressive face. The cinematography was good. The soundtrack is well-modulated, a precursor to Sound of Metal (2019).

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. The criminality is merely the way they "discover deep compatibility". Tonnes of hostility. A. O. Scott. A film of two halves. Peter Lennon interviewed Audiard at the time.

Director Jacques Audiard's feature immediately-previous to A Prophet (2009). For reasons unknown he and Tonino Benacquista thought the world needed a retooling of James Toback's early Harvey Keitel vehicle Fingers (1978) that I haven't seen.

Romain Duris leads as an implausible enforcer/real estate wheeler/dealer who semi-secretly pines to pay homage to his deceased concert-pianist mother by (wait for it) becoming a concert pianist. Father Niels Arestrup, far less robust here, tasks him with extracting funds from recalcitrant tenants. One of his business partners (Jonathan Zaccaï) uses their need to meet random people late at night as cover to cheat on his wife (Aure Atika); like several threads here the capricious revenge Duris takes for the imposition just dangles. His sessions with Vietnamese piano coach Linh-Dan Pham were full of promise but only once or twice really landed. I didn't feel any of the characters were especially well drawn.

The whole show is disjointed, more a series of occasionally-effective scenes that didn't add up to something with a point to make. The cinematography was often trying: jittery and of unclear purpose. But you can discern the shape of his next (and far more successful) project.

Roger Ebert: three stars and an inaccurate review. Stephanie Zacharek.

And yet another UK prison drama. Milquetoast David Jonsson is slated for early release due to overcrowding but has to navigate sharing his cell for his last few weeks with psycho Tom Blyth, fresh from Aylesbury. Blyth has empty-headed ambitions to dominate the drug trade in their wing but the established order (Alex Hassell and Corin Silva) stand their ground.

It's mostly like a simplified A Prophet (2009) but nowhere as interesting: Jonsson's character is hopelessly naive and weak, and having him dominated by the stronger prisoners yields a far less interesting dynamic. Much of it makes little sense — why put this (fire)cracker in with someone who's almost out? why do the authorities leave these violent men who almost killed each other on the same wing? why is security in the kitchen so lax? why are the screws so cowed? etc. Perhaps the most interesting bits are the services Jonsson provides: haircuts and curries cooked in electric kettles. He's proud of his work, so much so that he's more concerned that the tea will taste funny if he doesn't clean up right away than the task ahead when the big day comes around.

Some of the cinematography is interesting: overly-brief "vertical videos" showing various goings-on are interspersed, which I guess is something of a lift from Natural Born Killers (1994). I wish these had been longer and better contextualised. Directed by Cal McMau from a script by Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran. The acting is generally fine. I wish it had tried to say something new and not just replay the odd-sock cellmate moves. Humourless.

Peter Bradshaw: four stars. "Some of the tropes are familiar, but this film sidesteps the cliches with the committed acting and fierce storytelling punch" — if only that were so.

Likely unavoidable after Whore (1991). Here Ken Russell had Kathleen Turner play a woman divided between her day job of designing women's sportswear and her evenings as a working girl who'll do whatever's required by the denizens of L.A. She strives to be the best in both roles. The script by Barry Sandler is disjointed, lurid, clunky and generally poor, especially in how it draws Anthony Perkins's god botherer who somehow identifies with her. The scenes from a marriage (between John Laughlin and a vacant-seeming Annie Potts (Bo Peep in the Toy Storys from 1995 onwards)) are boring, tepid reworkings of Rabbit, Run (1970), until Perkins got his cue. The camerawork lacks the necessary realism, and the sets etc. are too cheap and nasty, for it to work as a time capsule. In a couple of sittings due to mystification.

Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars. Silly. Severely cut to fit into an R rating. Janet Maslin. Extremely tawdry. The bulk indeed has a "flat, joyless tone" which is annoying as the first time we encounter Turner (with a john) is quite funny.

Carol Lombard (Twentieth Century (1934), To Be or Not to Be (1942)) completism. Directed by Gregory La Cava from a script that Morrie Ryskind helped Eric Hatch adapt from the latter's novel of the same name (1935). In two sittings.

The screwy Bullock family attend an NYC society event that features a scavenger hunt. The last item they need to win the show is an "unwanted man". They discover a whole trove of them at the dump on the East River but of course the only really suitable one is William Powell. He and Lombard have a few good dialogues and she invites him to buttle. All the ladies of the house fall for him and things go as they must in Depression-era black-and-white. The final half an hour is overly heavy and serious in a similar way to It Happened One Night (1934).

I enjoyed Eugene Pallette's flat, droll and very amusing performance. Alice Brady was a bit too strident for me as the mother but she got most of the really effective screwy stuff; Lombard was too giggly little-girl space-cadet ditzy self absorption. Gail Patrick is perhaps the straightest shooter as an improbably-resistible conniving femme fatale. The vibe is pure Americana: there are no problems a man can have that cannot be fixed with a job and a woman, though some may require someone with more financial engineering nous than he has. Women do not have problems that do not involve a man, and some of these can be solved with a direct approach. Everyone has a right to do what it takes to remain in their class.

Roger Ebert: four stars in 2008 as a "great movie". Frank S. Nugent at the time. IMDB trivia suggests that things make more sense if you hear "protegé" as "gigolo".

Another from director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water (2016), Relay (2024), Fuze (2025)). Also for Ben Mendelsohn who I've never thought of as particularly physically imposing. Written by Jonathan Asser.

Ultra-violent Jack O'Connell (Sinners (2025)) is fresh outta juvie and the other adult prisoners soon learn that they're in there with him. Father Mendelsohn and group-shrink Rupert Friend try to help him fit in (in incompatible ways) and while we are teased by some signs of character in the calmer scenes everyone is unregulated and underdeveloped throughout. Within this envelope there is some decent work from the actors in supporting roles (David Ajala and Anthony Welsh amongst others). The rapid-fire mumbling made it difficult to follow the nuance (if there was any). Some scenes simply do not work. Mackenzie lent too heavily on the revolving door motif. It is nowhere as absorbing a study of a violent youth or hard time as Adolescence (2025) or A Prophet (2009).

Peter Bradshaw: three stars. Wikipedia. Shot in defunct prisons in Northern Ireland.

Probably inevitable after the recent run of Theresa Russell movies. Here she intersects with co-writer/director Ken Russell (The Devils (1971)) in the aftermath of Pretty Woman (1990). Deborah Dalton collaborated on a screenplay based on a play by Brit David Hines.

Russell leads as a working girl in L.A. She mostly serves her lines up direct to camera and a very few of those are tepidly amusing, probably because of her delivery. Benjamin Mouton is her ice-cold pimp. Both characters are stereotypes. There's nothing particularly graphic, novel or bent to it. It is unclear why they bothered with a plot. It sort-of works as a time capsule of the time and place, specifically some parts of the city closed to vehicles.

The cast is a little interesting. Brief bestie Elizabeth Morehead played Christine Kochanski in the (news to me, apparently dire) US remake of Red Dwarf (1992). (Incredibly they got Robert Llewellyn involved in that.) Antonio Fargas as a rasta, Danny Trejo a tattooist, Jack Nance a straight good Samaritan. It's difficult to know what to blame (the weak script, the witless backstories of the characters) or if the whole thing was misconceived.

Roger Ebert: three stars. At least "she isn't completely strung out on drugs." Vincent Canby: "surprisingly plain", "not pornographic", "not much of anything." "It's difficult to tell whether this was an artistic decision or one dictated by a limited budget." Caryn James on the genre at the time.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's (good) interview with auteur/star Shahrbanoo Sadat. Afghanistan's first rom-com! Di Rosso said it was made in the style of Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally... (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993)). Sadat was glad he noticed and said it was mostly shot in Germany; the footage of actual events in Kabul was archival. In a couple of sittings.

The setup has Sadat working the camera for some soft women's-interest TV shows but dying to get out and do some real journalism. Anwar Hashimi is the veteran interviewer who is saddled with her when he sets up a meeting with a Taliban commander. Their initial interactions are sweetly comedic but at some point things get disjointed and the flow of time becomes difficult to track; why, for instance, do they go for a meal together? The romantic aspect is complicated by her being married but separated (her husband is a grotesque) and if I followed correctly, him being married (with children) throughout. This is perhaps a subtle reinforcement of the title of the movie, a theme that is made overt in a series of effective voxpops. The ending seems to flail around, looking for a place to land.

By far the best scenes were between Sadat and her girlfriends: she really lit up.

Peter Bradshaw at the Berlin Film Festival: four stars. Casablanca (1942).

A return to the Rutger Hauer completism. This is a very 1980s kids movie. Matthew Broderick (in between Wargames (1983) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)) led as a thief who escapes the dungeon of a medieval town that appears to be run by Bishop John Wood (Wargames (1983), Chocolat (2000)). Hauer assists him in evading the guards and Michelle Pfeiffer's raw beauty convinces him to help them in turn. (Pfeiffer's beauty is the cause of and solution to every problem in this movie.) Leo McKern is tasked with explaining it all to us. Alfred Molina also as something-or-other.

Directed by Richard Donner (Superman (1978), The Goonies (1985), Lethal Weapon (1989)) from a screenplay by Edward Khmara, Michael Thomas (The Hunger (1983), Burke & Wills (1985), Welcome to Woop Woop (1997)) and Tom Mankiewicz (several James Bonds). Andrew Powell and Alan Parsons served up a clunky, insistent and overtly synth-y soundtrack; he failed to do for medieval Italy what Vangelis did for twenty-first century L.A. in Bladerunner (1982). The editing is very sliced up, clearly showing that the animals were insufficiently cooperative. Broderick is often in a one-sided dialogue with God which is sometimes amusing. Over two sittings as it mostly failed to grip.

Vincent Canby. Shot by Vittorio Storaro. All the ingredients, ruined by the script. Wikipedia. IMDB trivia: "Three of the castles used for this movie were owned by Italian movie director Luchino Visconti and his family."

And still more Nicolas Roeg/Theresa Russell completism. Things open abruptly with Gary Oldman playing statues, thumb out, at the end of a bridge over the overtly marked Cape Fear River, John Lennon's Mother (1970) blaring in our space but not his. Russell soon appears in very 1980s active leisurewear fashion (hair, workout gear, bright colours, padded shoulders, braces on her teeth, a bit too much shape, dodgy Southern accent, facial expressions that do not reach the eyes) with friend Arlanda (the same but more so). She's somehow married to gerontologist Christopher Lloyd who is more interested in Sandra Bernhard and trains. This is her A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Seymour Cassel as Lloyd's boss bridges this and the Cassavettes universes.

Notionally a psychothriller but without flow; the tone is uneven and things are sufficiently cracked and disjointed (as usual with Roeg) that you have to wonder if he's actually trying for that effect (of not expecting us to suspend disbelief). The one time they cast Russell an age-appropriate bloke, well, they make him her son! — inevitably and obviously with oedipal and arrested-development implications. Oldman's performance reminded me of his unregulated punk efforts in Sid and Nancy (1986) but even more so of Udo Kier in The Kingdom (1994, 1997), and Lloyd's model trains of Europa (1991). So at least Lars von Trier paid attention. And perhaps Aronofsky. Unfathomably I have yet to see the original Cape Fear (1962) with Robert Mitchum so I missed all those references.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Not disappointing! I beg to differ. Janet Maslin. "[T]he direction is so laden with contempt for the characters." Silly. Produced by Beatle George Harrison. Written by Dennis Potter.

Dustin Hoffman gets paroled from Folsom State Prison, Los Angeles after six years and you've got to wonder if things could possibly go anywhere interesting. He lacks the menace of, for instance, Tahar Rahim, and so his interactions with his parole officer M. Emmet Walsh (and so on) taxed my credulity. Theresa Russell, so young here, too young to be so jaded, works in the job centre and is apparently at a sufficiently loose end that he looks like a good bet; she knows what she wants even if we can't see it. (How did she finance that fabulous abode? — and the Mustang. That may've been the better story.) There's some joyful recidivism. It works as a time capsule.

Directed by Ulu Grosbard from a script that IMDB trivia says was initially developed by Michael Mann, author of the source novel/experience Edward Bunker, and Nancy Dowd (Slap Shot (1977), Coming Home (1978), Ordinary People (1980)). Alvin Sargent (Paper Moon (1973), Ordinary People (1980)) and Jeffrey Boam were credited with the doctoring. Mann's involvement explains why Hoffman is more like James Caan in Thief (1981) than Hoffman in any other thing I've seen him in. Russell is not Tuesday Weld but there is a prefiguring of the diner scene here. Harry Dean Stanton mumbled like Dennis Hopper. Kathy Bates did not look convinced.

Vincent Canby.

A bum steer from Nell Minow at Roger Ebert's venue (three-and-a-half stars). This is a well-known story, about the meteorological forecast for D-Day in 1944, that could possibly have been great but is very poorly told. The cast is adequate and perhaps the direction is too but the script by David Haig and director Anthony Maras, adapting the former's stage play, is not. Andrew Scott (Locke (2013), Fleabag, 1917 (2019), Wake Up Dead Man (2025)) led as the foremost British forecaster. I thought he did OK but was always thinking that Robert Carlyle was the man for the job. Brendan Fraser took on Ike. Chris Messina drew the short straw as the overconfident American weatherman and had to deliver the same misfire time and again. Kerry Condon broke up the sausagefests with endless walk-ons and some mothering. The various attempts at getting the alpha energy flowing completely occluded the decision-making process. I guess they did succeed in making a movie about World War II with almost no Nazis in it.

Brandon Yu at the New York Times, more accurately. Fraser was miscast: he can't do gravitas. Jesse Hassenger, more brutally.

Kindle. A reductive, generic take on wartime tedium with Sài Gòn as a backdrop. The American-GI bloke is a vehicle mechanic from Wisconsin in the rear with the gear who never does any maintenance. The Vietnamese girl has little backstory and no specificity; purely essentialised. She provides the obvious services and he the fretting. Rabe appropriated the less interesting aspects of Kim Vân Kieu. The characters are bland and the writing is banal.

Goodreads was generally unimpressed. Philip Caputo at the New York Times: Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992).