mattkpsu-217-721133

I read the book first, before watching Amazon's take on this. This is such a rich environment that the show writers could do soooo much more with. I feel like they kind of dropped the ball. They added a whole story line with the Nazis, which is interesting, but chose to leave out some other stuff that was probably kinda dry. I get that.

I think Rufus Sewell may have single-handedly saved this series. His acting is chilling and was the thing I took away from this the most. The Nazis were notorious for their huge egos butting heads, and this is probably the most interesting aspect of the TV show for me. Carsten Norgaard (Wegener) did a great job. I think the Tagomi guy did well too.

I was disappointed in the acting of the main cast, including Alexa Davalos (Juliana) and Luke Kleintank (Joe) in particular. He seems too stoic, particularly in the scenes with Rufus Sewell. DJ Qualls is a joke and miscast. I will definitely stick with it, but the first few episodes moved slowly and were frustrating at times.

Overall I'm a bit disappointed. I thought this would be an interesting period piece, and I'm a fan of (looking at) Lyndsy Fonseca, who I think is the most beautiful actress out there.

While watching this film I kept having to remind myself that it was filmed 5 years ago. Perhaps during this time, Lyndsy Fonseca has gotten a ton of experience from filming Nikita, Kick Ass, etc. and took lots of acting classes. Honestly I thought her acting was stiff and basically poor in this. The beginning scenes were especially tough to watch.

Getting past that, Eric Stoltz carried the film and delivered a believable performance. I think the supporting cast let him down. Also I wish they had developed some of the story lines of these characters a little bit better. I will say I think the kids in the film did a good job.

I was looking forward to seeing the depiction of a US POW camp. After seeing the film, I question their depiction of the prison camp. The real Fort McCoy was/is huge. There were 4000+ POW's there. From this film, you'd think it was a small place where everyone knew each other. The budget probably made it necessary to slim things down quite a bit.

Basically Juche is the concept from the Dear Leader which details how propaganda films must be structured, for maximum effectiveness and artistic value. He wrote a series of guidelines which remain today. The premise of the film is supposed to be a bunch of commune-types get together to make modern day film using these guidelines.

I just didn't get this one. I did enjoy other films about the DPRK, such as Kimjongilia. Learning about their culture and oppression is fascinating. I recently watched another DPRK Borat-style documentary, Red Chapel, which follows the adventures of a real Dutch film maker and his two handicapped friends that put on a comedy show in Pyongyang. Hard to believe that one really happened, but it did. Red Chapel, while hard to watch at times, at least made more sense. But, this one was hard to follow. Was it a mockumentary? Was it a student film that some senior made at RIT? I am still honestly not sure.