Word: nam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to Lord Palmerston, nations have no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests. That maxim contains a warning the Bush Administration should heed as it deals with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam...
...been more than 14 years since the last Americans were lifted off the embassy roof in Saigon, a televised vignette of ignominy that is still replayed in the U.S.'s memory. Now Viet Nam has suffered its own setback: after more than a decade of trying to defeat a rural insurgency in Cambodia, a Vietnamese expeditionary force has given up and gone home...
...years the U.S. has demanded just such a withdrawal as a precondition for the normalization of relations between Washington and Hanoi. Viet Nam hopes that diplomatic recognition by the U.S. and removal of the trade embargo will end its isolation and lead to an influx of Western aid, trade, credits and technology. Many Vietnamese recognize that their political and economic system is a shambles. Some officials admit privately that they can run wars but not countries...
Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) of In Country, an adaptation of the novel by Bobbie Ann Mason, is a direct, even artless, projection of this healing spirit. There is nothing metaphoric about the empty space left in her life by the war; her father was killed in Viet Nam before she could know him. Her mother having remarried and moved away, Samantha has chosen to stay behind and share the tumbledown family home in Hopewell, Ky., with her uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), a veteran damaged by the war in some way he refuses to name. Now in the summer after...
...spirit. She has a girlfriend contending with an unwelcome pregnancy. But the film starts to gather force and direction when a dance, organized to honor the local Viet vets, works out awkwardly. And when -- at Samantha's insistence -- Emmett and Mamaw join her on a pilgrimage to the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the movie achieves real power. Director Norman Jewison understates his final sequence with admirable tact. No melodramatic shocks of recognition, no epiphanies -- merely simple people silently touching the names of loved ones inscribed on the memorial, tentatively, thoughtfully restoring connections. It is just fine, just right...