Word: burma
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...history of Myanmar, as Burma is now called, resonates with melodrama and tragedy. The heroic battle of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for her nonviolent resistance against the ruling junta, is surely worth a movie. But in Hollywood the problems of one little country--or one big country with little brown people--don't amount to a hill of unsold scripts. The Burmese must have a Caucasian mediator, Laura, whose sufferings illuminate those of the locals...
...Laura Bowman seems in a perpetual Burma daze. In 1988 Laura (Patricia Arquette), the heroine of Beyond Rangoon, is with a group of tourists who want to get out of Burma before the thugs who run the place start killing everyone. But Laura has not recovered from a personal trauma back home, and when her group leaves she just...stays there. It's a pretty region--like the Mekong Delta in the mid-'60s. Now if only she can find an escort. Why, here's an amiable native (U Aung Ko). "Hello," he says, in effect, "I'm an illegal...
Cast at the last minute (after Meg Ryan left to make another American-twit-abroad epic, French Kiss), Arquette can do little but whine and pine in an impossible role. And the film simply forfeits belief with its notion that Laura, who stumbles through Burma like a girl in a monster movie after she's seen the giant ants, is a physician. She hardly seems smart enough to be a patient...
...amidst the genocidal Burmese civil war, Boorman "lapses into banal visual stereotyping," saysTIME's Richard Corliss. "The rebels are thin, winsome, saintly, while the nasty soldiers have bad skin and potbellies. And the film simply forfeits belief with its notion that Laura (played by Patricia Arquette), who stumbles through Burma like a girl in a monster movie after she's seen the giant ants, is a physician. She hardly seems smart enough to be a patient...
Aung San Suu Kyi undoubtedly was Burma's most prominent political prisoner, but there are thousands more being held in jails there. No Burmese is exempt from being dragooned into acting as porter for soldiers, and for those in the rural and ethnic areas it has become a way of life. The release of Suu Kyi is a hopeful step in the political liberalization of Burma. In her the generals who rule the country have the best chance of coming to peace with the Burmese people. SAMUEL LIN Hong Kong...