rhopkins
Joined Nov 2000
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Reviews5
rhopkins's rating
This movie seems to be in commercial release finally, and you should see it. It is a companion to Ruby in Paradise and Yulee's Gold, both by Victor Nunez, and has most of their virtues (and drawbacks, maybe -- for example, I don't like the sound design choices that have been made in any of these movies....).
The languid feel of the coastal towns from Carabelle to Apalachicola (Florida) is well evoked -- though the story could, I suppose, happen most anywhere. The three lead actors are all outstanding.
Many of the locales in which the film is set look very different today, after hurricanes Ivan (2004) and Dennis (2005), not to mention further commercial development.
The languid feel of the coastal towns from Carabelle to Apalachicola (Florida) is well evoked -- though the story could, I suppose, happen most anywhere. The three lead actors are all outstanding.
Many of the locales in which the film is set look very different today, after hurricanes Ivan (2004) and Dennis (2005), not to mention further commercial development.
As an epidemiologist, I say any movie that features an epidemiologist as heroine can't be all bad!
Actually, the disease scenario -- pneumonic plague spread person-to-person in a crowded city after introduction by a traveler just back from California, where she came into contact with a plague-infected ground squirrel -- is not implausible. Indeed this is the kind of scenario that bioterrorism planning is designed to detect, respond to and control. The best scene in the movie is the one in which the mayor's assistant -- this is 1991, mind you -- confidently looks in the city's emergency plan for the section on how to deal with epidemics and finds -- nothing. I like the way the movie shows the public health workers as dedicated, taking personal risks (as so many health care workers did to care for people with SARS), and ethical. What is particularly unrealistic is the way the public health workers can just walk into a hospital and start managing patients.
Also, this is the most wooden performance ever by Jerry Orbach in a minor role.
Actually, the disease scenario -- pneumonic plague spread person-to-person in a crowded city after introduction by a traveler just back from California, where she came into contact with a plague-infected ground squirrel -- is not implausible. Indeed this is the kind of scenario that bioterrorism planning is designed to detect, respond to and control. The best scene in the movie is the one in which the mayor's assistant -- this is 1991, mind you -- confidently looks in the city's emergency plan for the section on how to deal with epidemics and finds -- nothing. I like the way the movie shows the public health workers as dedicated, taking personal risks (as so many health care workers did to care for people with SARS), and ethical. What is particularly unrealistic is the way the public health workers can just walk into a hospital and start managing patients.
Also, this is the most wooden performance ever by Jerry Orbach in a minor role.
If you want to understand what is going on in Kosovo, this film is worth watching. (It's also worth watching because it is well made.) The conflicts here are between Macedonian Slavs and ethnic Albanians, in Macedonia, but I am sure differ little from what has been happening across the border in Kosovo (and in Bosnia, and in Montenegro....).