I felt profoundly moved and even close to choking up a couple of times while watching Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam yesterday at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in … Read more
46 and 1/3 years ago, a hurried (some would say panicky) evacuation of Saigon, called Operation Frequent Wind, was underway. During the last days of the Vietnam War, OFW was the final phase in the evacuation of American civilians and at-risk Vietnamese before the takeover of the city by the North Vietnamese People’s Army of … Read more
Greta Gerwig during a Waldorf Astoria round-table interview for Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, snapped sometime in mid January 2010). My first question to her was “speaking as a veteran, how would you define mumblecore?” I can’t find the mp3 but her answer was clear and concise.
I’ve just come from a screening of Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. I was presuming it would be a sad, moving experience going in, and Zenovich hasn’t disappointed. Her film is simple, touching, direct — not a softball portrait that avoids the pitfalls and dark places, but a very comprehensive story of … Read more
As I waited for the lights to come down and Last Flag Flying to begin, I was thinking the following: “This is a 30-years-later Last Detail sequel ** without Jack Nicholson or Randy Quaid and minus the names of the original characters, so it’s obviously going to feel hand-me-downish — not just older and saggier … Read more
Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam, which is running neck-and-neck right now with Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, is viewable right here for the remainder of today (Friday, 2.6) and all of tomorrow (Saturday, 2.7). Again, my comments after seeing Last Days in Vietnam at the 2014 L.A. Film Festival: “The … Read more
Before The Interview premiere at downtown L.A.’s Ace Hotel theatre, I dropped by a cocktail party for Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam at the Chateau Marmont. I spoke briefly to Rory and her husband Mark Bailey, who co-wrote this excellent doc. My sense is that the Best Feature Documentary race has boiled down to … Read more
Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder (Dreamamount, 8.13) , which I saw three months ago, is an escaped-from-Bedlam, bong-hit, National Lampoon-level (the ’70s magazine, not the movies) Hollywood satire of (a) itself and (b) various Vietnam War movies we’ve all savored, particularly Platoon and Apocalypse Now. Except it’s not as low as it sounds. The tone is … Read more
Puck Everlasting The movies that seem to grab me the most are the ones that ask us to consider the mystical, the undefined, the intangibles…the ones that say “look up, look out, look beyond…there’s more to this world than what you can own, eat, taste or feel.” The latest film to do this kind of … Read more
Nutters vs. Nutters Two days ago I ran a 2004 sum-up piece about the year’s best and worst, but I may have spoken too soon. That same day a completely riveting documentary arrived in the mail from Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy, who told me the next day that it might be “the most … Read more
HE approves of The Last Days of Saigon, a forthcoming five-part series about numerous desperate, last-minute scrambles to save lives as North Vietnamese forces approached the South Vietnamese capital in April 1975. Phillip Noyce will direct with showrunner Stuart Beattie having written major portions of the script. Noyce’s The Quiet American (’02), a first-rate remake … Read more
“I think the Vietnam War drove a stake right through the heart of America. [And] we’ve never really moved [beyond] that…we never recovered.” I’ve been to Vietnam three times, and would love to return. I’ve even flirted with the idea or moving there permanently. There’s never been the slightest doubt in my mind that Johnson … Read more