1987 war, dir. Barry Levinson, Robin Williams:
IMDb /
allmovie. A laugh a minute in
good old Vietnam.
Well, this is much more a Robin Williams concert video, with
occasional bits of plot, than it is a film that's trying seriously to
say anything. I know that many people regard Williams as a comic
genius, but he's never really worked for me; I can see what he's
doing, but it doesn't engage my enjoyment, and here at least there's a
lot of punching down. Ooh, says his character with a funny voice, I'm
(foreign, gay, stupid), I just don't get it do I? Look at the silly
man, ha ha.
Perhaps because I'm not readily thrown into sympathy with Cronauer I
can't help noticing how heavy-handed the attempts are to get me there:
all the grunts on the ground love him (cut away to what might as well
be stock footage, though I think it was filmed afresh for this, with
Williams or contemporaneous music on the soundtrack), and all the
people who don't love him are Bad People with No Sense Of Humour who
should Just Let Him Do His Thing.
And to be fair the one constant note in all the contemporary reviews
was that those on-air segments are the good bit, whether the reviewer
liked the film overall or not. The rest, well, it's a simplistic plot
mostly about how Our Hero is horny, tries to get involved with a local
girl (she tells him to stop bothering her and go away, but he doesn't,
ha ha what a card), and eventually comes to the entirely unexpected
realisation that maybe some of the locals don't actually love
Americans. Gosh. (Why doesn't Tuan just say "go down this street and
you'll meet lots of pretty girls"? Weirdly there's no mention at all
of prostitution in the film.)
On the other hand, this is the only one of this batch of Vietnam films
that tries to show the Vietnamese people as having a working society,
as being something other than prostitutes, thieves, victims, or The
Faceless Enemy. It's not much, but it's something.
As usual if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
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