Dustin Hoffman gets paroled from Folsom State Prison, Los Angeles after six years and you've got to wonder how things could possibly go. 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.) 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.
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).
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.
