The Quiet American

[tabuno]

Can Michael Caine pull out the Oscar for best actor? The Quiet American is a character-driven movie with the prelude to the Vietnam War as its backdrop. America lingers ominously in the background. This is a serious drama, not an epic or adventure-thriller, nor a blockbuster movie. Caine's role is much more conflicted and complex than Denzel Washington's 2001 Oscar performance in Training Day. Caine faces difficulties on two different levels, his romantic life and his professional life. Whether or not the other Best Picture nominees will lift their nominated Best Actor stars up above Caine's more dimunitive role only time will tell. It's uphill contest for Caine from here.

[dave durbin]

How did you feel about the movie itself? It hasn't opened around here yet -I think- and I was curious to talk to somebody who had seen it. What did you think?

[tabuno]

Conspiracies afoot in Vietnam and it isn't so such about a who-done-it movie than who gets the girl all the while done in a serious, character drama. I didn't get bored in the movie. I didn't mind that it didn't have the explosive action of Spider-man or the prolonged agony of "Saving Private Ryan" because this movie wasn't about those things. It was about an aging man who must make a decision about what he stands for in order for him to remain human during which time explosions occur and he puts his life in jeopardy. This is like a Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt movie but without all the mental craziness and antics and more focused on the degradation as well as the beauty that inhabits Vietnam in the 1950s prior to America's direct involvement in the war. I enjoyed the movie because it spend time on the characters, their dilemmas, and the betrayal and deceit that can occur as well as the eventual outcome.

[Perfume V]

I was keen to see it, mainly because of Caine, but also because I'm growing to like Graham Greene. Also, I was interested to see Brendan Fraser in a straight role - he was good in Gods and Monsters, and most people seem to forget he was ever in anything other than goofy comedies and blockbusters.

Sadly, it just wasn't playing anywhere around here. Even the local arthouse cinema seemed to pass over it, which is a sad state of affairs indeed. It's as if the wrangling over its release after 9/11 tainted it with a sort of damaged-goods smell, in the same way that the decades-long production of Gangs of New York was probably responsible for that movie's solid-but-not-great box office performance.

If Miramax have any sense, they'll give it a limited reissue a la Wonder boys to capitalise on the Oscar nominations.