Novel Eye

I wish I hadn't heard anything about this before I went in, because having heard it wasn't very good I didn't find it very good. And I really would have liked to have. I think I shall have to watch it again in a different frame of mind. That said, it's like Casablanca turned on it's ear. Instead of the noble Ilsa, we have the ignoble Lena. Instead of the jaded Rick we have the weary Jake. And we have Tobey Maguire playing the kind of character you hope dies a horrible and painful death. And instead of the heroic but barely seen Victor Lazlo, fighting the Nazis, we have Lena's husband, a mid-level nobody, who was as she puts it, "Good with numbers," in a postwar world where the world has too many shades of grey. Lena does what she must to survive, to survive in a brutal, primitive place. It's so hard for us to understand today, or even, I think for older Americans to fully understand what it must be like to be in countries in the aftermath. ...