Word: viet
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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...
...Viet Nam represents a great jagged gash in the fabric of American history, an ugly tear in a tapestry that people once believed had been woven out of high ideals and simple decency. A few years ago, when it became obvious that it was time to repair that rent, our popular culture took on something of the air of a vast quilting bee, with writers, filmmakers and TV producers bending over their restorative needlework...
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...
...matters as it portrays teen life in a small town. Samantha has a boyfriend who does not match her in wit and 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...
...scene then briefly changes to a swamp in Vietnam where that group of American soldiers is quickly shot down by the Viet Cong. It changes again to a high school graduation in 1989 where the commencement speaker tells his audience in words hauntingly reminiscent of that wartime sergeant that the class of '89 is the best America has to offer and that by struggling hard, they can forge an America that the world will respect once again...