Saturday, March 23, 2002

Harrison's Flowers (IMDB) (Netflix-no listing)
A determined wife (Andie MacDowell) searches for her missing-and-presumed-dead combat photographer husband (David Strathairn) in the insanity that tore apart Yugoslavia last decade. Give points to MacDowell for making the best of fairly weak writing and direction, both by Elie Chouraqui, who never builds any real suspense (an enemy soldier walks near where she's hiding to --wait for it-- take a leak, then walk away without discovering her) and whose dramatic reversals feel like a speed bumps in a gated community. While the scenes of civilians being murdered are horrific, they seem inserted mostly to make the movie "important." The big winner here is Canon, for pervasive product placement of its cameras.