Word: phnom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...does a mean wood-fired pizza and boasts the coldest gin-and-tonics in town. But, admits manager Benoit Jancloes a trifle sheepishly, it currently doesn't have any actual newshounds among its members. "We're mainly for tourists," he says. Discounts for members of its venerable sibling in Phnom Penh, however, are sure to tempt the odd old Asia bore to totter in and lend some authenticity...
...Herald Tribune story about felons hiding out in Cambodia due to its lack of extradition treaties further sparked his imagination. Working with writer Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart), he penned a noirish yarn about a Manhattan yuppie (played by Dillon) embroiled in a major insurance scam who travels to Phnom Penh and reunites with his mentor, portrayed by James Caan (The Godfather). The plot follows Dillon's character through sweat-soaked brothel scenes, all-night temple raves and a seedy guesthouse where French superstar G?rard Depardieu shines as the gruff hotelier...
...Most of the Western actors and crew had never visited Cambodia before and the culture shock was considerable. "The mosquitoes were as big as Buicks," recalls Caan. "When I first got to Phnom Penh, I saw whole families riding single mopeds on streets with no lanes. There were kids laying in the mud, people walking around with missing limbs. If you take a sip of the water, you're in the hospital. We're so frigging spoiled in the U.S.?people complain about being born in Brooklyn or Watts, but this gave me a whole new perspective on things...
...Bizot's account of the fall of Phnom Penh draws its power from an accretion of appalling images, coolly observed: the pavement before the National Bank of Cambodia strewn with bales of newly worthless bank notes; a former Prime Minister's wife trying to throw her baby over the embassy fence, before she is led away to be executed; a prince of the ancien r?gime, wearing his Legion of Honor medal, being turned away from the gate...
...flawed. In the first part of the book, Bizot's portrait of Ta Douch, his jailer at Anlong Veng, provides unique insight into the single-mindedness that is often the wellspring of genocide. Douch later presided over Tuol Sleng, the regime's most infamous prison, now a museum, in Phnom Penh. The horror of the tortures and murders committed there, the sheer accumulation of human gore, leads many contemporary visitors to conclude that it must have been the work of monsters. Yet in fact it was the work of the sons of the Cambodian kampung?which is precisely what makes...