Cinema au Robert Benton!

RIP to an underrated “one of those guys” that really should've been "one of THE guys" but never quite broke the mold, at least in an obvious way.

When I was in last summer I saw what I consider my first Benton (really my second bc I saw The Late Show years earlier but didn't realize that was him). It was also somehow my first time seeing a film theatrically in another country, and what…

Full of heartbreak in nearly every frame. A living embodiment of the maxim that children can't start or end wars but bear the brunt of them.

I suppose the neglect it has received in of readily available critical writing is thematically fitting then in a cruel way, despite living on the Criterion Channel (and youtube), having a run at Film Forum in a new restoration, and probably being the most "popular" film to come out of North Vietnam.

Felt…

Perhaps it’s fitting for a film so elusive that Abel seems to have the fuzziest of memories about the making. At the q&a I attended, when asked about what he thought of the film seeing it 20+ years later, he said something to the affect of “I was like who the fuck made this?!” And when Willem Dafoe remarked that he ed a lot of improvisation on set, Abel said “you do?”

Other highlights from said q&a:

- “when I…