Word: saigon
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...memory recedes at generational warp speed. Those who remember, remember. But a senior in college now was born three or four years after Saigon fell and changed its name to Ho Chi Minh City. I see the black POW-MIA flag still flying (though frayed) above a post office or police barracks in Massachusetts. No one raised an outcry of political correctness when John McCain referred some weeks ago to his North Vietnamese jailers as "gooks" - the feeling being, I guess, that his years at the Hanoi Hilton earned him a pass...
Ford joined the group of legislators pushing General Dwight Eisenhower to run for President. Soon Ford was on the delegation with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to monitor the Korean cease-fire. Then he went to Saigon: "I remember the French generals with all their spit and polish giving us a two-hour briefing on how they were going to win the war in Vietnam." It would be President Ford who inherited the final convulsion of that tragic war, made indelible by the pictures of desperate Vietnamese on a rooftop stairs trying to get on a departing helicopter. Ford...
...pass before my eyes, I feel myself sink again into the murk, sucked back into the violence and stupidity, the sleaze and failure, the narcissism and paranoia. It all comes back: riots at the gas pumps, terrorists on every flight, double-digit inflation, the last ignominious helicopters out of Saigon, the explosion of crime, the lousy cars from Detroit, Nixon's sweating upper lip as he says good-bye, the Club of Rome's gaudy apocalypse, the massive dumbing down of everything, and the perfect denouement - the Ayatollah and the hostage crisis...
...often faces some interesting artistic challenges. Besides the flying tire in the finale of "Cats," Huessy had to land a helicopter onstage in "Miss Saigon" and lower a fully furnished mansion to the stage in "Sunset Boulevard...
Snapshot parables from today's Saigon: a young woman (Nguyen Ngoc Hiep) befriends a leprous poet; a pedicab driver idolizes a bitter whore; an American visitor (Harvey Keitel), who sired a child back in the war days, returns to search for his daughter. Writer-director Bui, who left Vietnam when he was two, returns to graft these daintily sentimental tales onto rapturous vistas, photogenic faces and a long history of colonial hurt. Alas, Three Seasons, a Sundance prizewinner, shows little more than Bui's fondness for visual and narrative cliches. A better director will have to make the definitive "post...