vietnam war Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Review: Journey from the Fall
Filed under: Drama », Foreign Language », Independent », Sundance », Theatrical Reviews », Cinematical Indie »
The American version of the Vietnam War generally ends on April 30, 1975, the day the last of the U.S. troops and diplomats boarded planes and helicopters and left Vietnam. But for many Vietnamese, especially for those who had been loyal to the toppled South Vietnamese government, the fall of Saigon and the takeover of the Communist Viet Cong government was only the beginning of a long, terrible journey. Many of these citizens, loyal to the former government, found themselves incarcerated in Communist "re-education" camps for years. Still more Vietnamese, many of them women and children, fled Vietnam for other Southeast Asian countries or America, and became known as the "boat people."
The journey of the "boat people" of Vietnam has never before been documented in an American film, but if it took this long to do it right, it was worth the wait. Writer/director Ham Tran did countless interviews with Vietnamese refugees and survivors of the re-education camps to make certain his script for Journey from the Fall was authentic. The scenes in the re-education camp are brutal; Tran and his production team had little to work with in the way of historical photographs, and none of the re-education camps exist anymore, so they had to re-create the setting largely from the compiled information they gained from interviewing survivors. Tran interweaves his tale with a Vietnamese tale about Le Loi, Emperor of Vietnam and founder of the Le Dynasty way back in the early 1400s.
New On DVD - Date Movie, Freedomland, Winter Passing
Filed under: New Releases », DVD Reviews », New on DVD », Home Entertainment », Columns »
• Date Movie - Nowhere in the formula "Comedy = Tragedy + Time" does "Cruelty" figure in, something that this caca-palooza -- "from 2 of the 6 writers of Scary Movie" -- sets out to correct from the very first scene. When they introduce us to morbidly obese Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan), it is with ridicule as they paint her as a hideous beast that makes men vomit and turn gay. Of course, when we remember that 2 of the 6 writers of Scary Movie were Wayans Brothers, whose stock in trade is that kind of cruelty, it makes sense (even if these are another two writers.)
A parody of romantic comedies like Bridget Jones's Diary, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Hitch, this lame spoof goes for the easy laugh almost every time, beating to death with a golf club every gag with the subtlety of, well ... someone who beats someone else to death with a golf club. The "13" in the movie's "PG-13" rating would seem to be either a limit for either I.Q. or emotional age, as the movie's show pieces are either juvenile blue bits or have something to do with either poop, pee, puke or pus (the dreaded "4 P's"). Putting gifted comic actors like Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge in this stinky mess makes them both stinky by association, though as time goes by, the whole lot of them will only be guilty of contributing to a vast background of white noise that we will have learned to filter out when we grow up. Presently #64 on the IMDB's Bottom 100 of all time.
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