Reviews

While rather interesting at times, the only people this movie will convince are Americans themselves.

The movie went to great lengths trying to explain that American interventionism was humanitarian based and not based on greed or colonialism. They used the example of Iraq selling more contracts to non US based firms, in fact firms that were not directly involved in the US invasion (putting aside how short sighted this argument is and how it doesn't understand world markets, all of which I will bore the people reading this to explain why that argument is faulty) can be easily rebutted: Africa. The USA keeps involving herself in the middle east but the humanitarian disasters are all in Africa and based around the Congo civil war which over 5 million people died. Why intervene in the Balkans for some 250,000 people when the biggest humanitarian nightmare is the Congo? The Rwanda genocide (a spin off of this larger civil war) claimed 800,000 lives. Srebrenica claimed 8,000 (and largely fighting age men). That's a factor of 100 in magnitude difference.

Lastly, the movie made her own achilles heel without realizing it: Taiwan. Just like the first world war was started over Serbia due to bigger powers having competing interests, so can Taiwan. With US insistence on protecting it at all costs, the world risks a thermo- nuclear war. With no such assurance, the world risks a very minor, very local conflict.

In the end, the reason the US keeps up the gigantic spending is because people don't want to be fired. Think about it. The military is now the largest employer and an effective lobbyier. Despite bases in Europe serving no purpose (whose going to invade Germany again?) we maintain them because the people paying our congressmen don't want to see their budgets cut.

....Is the best way to describe this movie. It will keep your eyes glued but otherwise won't provoke much else. The storyline seems to me to be a rather weak way to tie together the sex scenes, which outside a porno are some of the raunchiest 80's Hollywood will have to offer (and both female and male frontal nudity).

Outside of this, the storyline is typical and utterly predictable. Rich, bored Northern European housewife seeks excitement and sexual fulfillment somewhere primal and vibrant: in this case Yugoslavian immigrants (specifically shown to be Serbian and Montenegrin).

Of course this message is debasing to both cultures involved. Since I'm Serbian/Montenegrin I found the caricatures of my culture insulting, but more often than that: incorrect. But I didn't let this influence my score. It's very watchable and at the same time very forgettable.

I'm just writing this review to point one thing out, the true story of Michael Nicholson (whom this movie is based off) involves him adopting and rescuing a Serbian girl named Natasha, not a Bosnian (Muslim) girl named Emira. Plenty of Serbian's themselves died in the siege of Sarajevo as we made up over 1/3 of the cities population. I'm not sure what the motive was behind switching the girl's ethnicity but I can only suspect that it was motivated by Hollywood's desire to uncomplicate a complicated mess as well as pander to public consensus that Serbs were the aggressors and the 'bad' guys while Bosniaks (Muslims) were the victims, 'good' guys.

As far as the artistic merits of the movie herself, I liked how she interwove real footage with fiction, blurring the distinction. I also found it refreshing that such a marginal topic was brought to the big studios even though no one really watched. In the end though, the movie was okay, maybe even good but not great. The acting was fairly flat and the character development was mostly two dimensional. When the movie finishes, you forget about it.