Yesterday afternoon I saw Nguyen Huu Muoi‘s Scent of Burning Grass, a highly emotional antiwar film that is Vietnam’s official 2012 submission for the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. It’s basically a Vietnamese All Quiet on the Western Front about four North Vietnamese lads suffering the horrors of the Quang Tri battle of 1972, which was almost entirely a North Vietnamese vs. South Vietnamese face-off. It may be based on the personal experience of screenwriter Nhuan Cam Hoang, although this is just a guess.

I was affected by the depictions of suffering because I’ve never seen a Vietnamese-perspective drama about the Vietnam War, and because it reminded me once again (as if I needed reminding) that all combatants in conflicts such as these experience acute hell in more ways than I’d care to imagine. So despite the film’s problems, I was moved. There I was in a small theatre filled with Vietnamese, the only Anglo, watching a story about their pains and losses as it were, or rather the pains and losses of their fathers and grandfathers. I was inescapably affected.

But Scent of Burning Grass does, due respect, have problems. Or one problem, I should say. I’m speaking of an insufficient level of exceptional talent and refined professionalism, or at least the kind of exceptional talent and refined professionalism that would warrant even-handed comparison to the work of All Quiet‘s Lewis Milestone or, say, Paths of Glory‘s Stanley Kubrick or any number of respected wartime dramas.

The fim’s low budget creates technical believability issues that are irksome but not fatal. What is fatal, in my humble view, is that each and every actor has been told to over-act — to make feelings so explicit and upfront that one can’t help but feel annoyed.

And the digital projection at the theatre was appalling at times. Hardware commands would appear and light from the booth flooded the screen and compromised the image. Small-point-size English subtitles had been pasted into the margins of previous existing French subtitles that were slightly larger and yellow-tinted. This was tolerable except every so often the English subtitles would disappear for two or three or four minutes at a time.

A production guy whom I’ve been speaking to at Hanoi Film Festival parties told me that Scent of Burning Grass is, in his view, a “commemorative film” commissioned by and/or pushed along by the government rather than one that came out of Vietnam’s artistic community as it were. He was saying that there isn’t a sufficiently concentrated community of film artists in Vietnam, from which a process of honing and refinement and self-criticism naturally results.

And yet despite all this, I felt Scent of Burning Grass. And I’m glad I saw it.

Watch both Love Is All You Need trailers and tell me the German-dubbed version isn’t preferable. The half-English, half-Danish version, as Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet wrote, has Pierce Brosnan “playing an Englishman living in Denmark running around speaking English while everyone else is speaking Danish and they clearly understand him and he understands them, so why aren’t they all speaking the same language?”

Thomas E. Ricks “is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post…he currently writes on defense topics, has a blog at ForeignPolicy.com” and basically knows whereof he speaks.

Occasionally Criterion jacket-cover art will convey an alternate-universe take on a well-known film that half convinces you that you haven’t quite absorbed everything the film has to offer, even though you’ve seen it 15 or 20 times. The white birds (which have to be seagulls and not pigeons) are an interesting invention. Their presence suggests that Elia Kazan‘s 1954 Oscar-winner was directed by Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini.

The goodies: (a) new 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition, (b) presented in 1.66, 1.33 and 1.85 aspect ratios (a landmark decision that brought about, in my humble view, the eternal discrediting of Bob Furmanek‘s research-fortified 1.85 fascism, and thank God in heaven for this), (c) commentary from Richard Schickel and Jeff Young, (d) new conversation between filmmaker Martin Scorsese and critic Kent Jones, (e) Elia Kazan: Outsider (1982), an hour-long documentary, (f) New documentary on the making of the film, featuring interviews with scholar Leo Braudy, critic David Thomson, and others, (g) New interview with actress Eva Marie Saint, (h) Interview with director Elia Kazan from 2001, (i), Contender, a 2001 documentary on the film’s most famous scene, and (j) New interview with author James T. Fisher (On the Irish Waterfront) about the real-life people and places behind the film.

Plus a booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Almereyda and reprints of Kazan’s 1952 ad in the New York Times defending his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, one of the 1948 New York Sun articles by Malcolm Johnson on which the film was based, and a 1953 Commonweal piece by screenwriter Budd Schulberg.

In a Variety “Actors on Actors” piece, Kenneth Branagh has called Keira Knightley‘s Anna Karenina performance “breathtaking…her effervescence of spirit is tangible and irresistible. Her whole being seems to blaze with a ferocity that is mesmerizing.

“This is Knightley as we have never seen her before so completely: a mature woman who is also impulsive, troubled, deceitful, sexual, passionate, heartbroken. Everything about her work here sears and scorches itself into the memory. This is an actress of subtlety and delicacy fulfilling her potential in a performance that comes from the depths. Like the novel itself, her work in the role is at once elegant and wild and compelling at every moment. A classic.”

Congrats to the winners of the just-concluded IFC Gotham Awards. Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom won Best Picture, and Beasts of the Southern Wild helmer Ben Zeitlin took the breakthrough director award as well as the inaugural Bingham Ray Award. Jared Leto‘s Artifact won the best film audience trophy, David France‘s How To Survive A Plague was given the Gotham Award for Best Documentary, and Terence Nance won the Best Film Not Playing at the Theater Near You prize for An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, David O. Russell and Participant Media’s Jeff Skoll were given career tributes.

As anyone might have predicted, the Gold Derby-ites (a.k.a., the Goldies) have tumbled for Les Miserables, pushing it ahead of Argo and Silver Linings to lead the Best Picture Oscar race. I had Les Miz at the top back in mid-October but Pete Hammond and Peter Travers, among others, have now ditched Argo for Tom Hooper‘s period operetta. Argo is now the proverbial ex-girlfriend — hurt, abandoned.

A friend’s wife has said that Les Miz ranks at the top of her personal weep-o-meter, and that’s often the name of the game when it comes to calibrating Best Picture winners. And then this HuffPost rave by longtime producer Jay Weston…it’s obvious what’s happening. It’s probably a lock to win.

But there’s a small cabal of Les Miz dissers out there, and I’ve just spoken to one. He’s a seasoned producer who tends toward generosity and has been around the block and loved, incidentally, Alan Parker‘s Evita — the last mainstream Hollywood translation of a musical and the last to deliver, in Hooper’s words, a musical in “through-sung” form.

“I don’t care what people are saying — this is an almost objectively dreadful movie,” the producer told me a few minutes ago. “And I know there’s a major effort underway but I don’t think it has a chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar. Anne Hathaway is fucking terrific and guaranteed to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but the early screenings have been stacked with fans of the stage musical version and it was a little embarassing at times, I thought, when somebody would start applauding after a song and nobody would join in.

“On stage Les Miserables seemed large because you’re using your imagination, but the film feels very small in a way,” he continuted. “Perhaps the biggest problem is the singing is apart from Hathaway…Hugh Jackman is mezzo mezzo and Russell Crowe is awful…he looks the part but it just doesn’t fly. And the early CG looks like a cartoon.”

An assessment of the here-and-now by TheWrap‘s Steve Pond contains elements of what I’m describing and reporting.

The usual deal when I visit and cover a regional film festival is balancing the necessity of respectfully attending and reviewing certain screenings and events with having to cover the general waterfront in the column (Zero Dark Thirty surge, coming Les Miz kickback) and going nuts in the usual hair-pulling way. What else is new?

The truth (of which I am not especially proud) is that yesterday I was a derelict guest of the Hanoi Film Festival and that all I did, really, was attend a nice festival party at a penthouse suite atop a big, swanky, Vegas-styled hotel. Apart form filing, I mean, and taking a two-hour walk in the old quarter. And that’s not much. After last night’s event I walked back to the hotel in the rain — about a 3 kilometer trek.

“In Liz and Dick, an actor who has been through several rings of hell — and may not, for all I know, have gotten back yet — portrays someone who went through something similar. Put another way, one of the most impulsively, spontaneously emotional actresses of our time portrays a similar performer.

“For all the differences in their circumstances, accomplishments, and worlds — Lindsay Lohan‘s performance (not her impersonation) is thrillingly immediate, not a composition of interpretive pieces but an incontrovertible, full-spectrum presence, even if the mirror itself is broken and some shards of character are still missing from view.” — New Yorker/”Front Row” columnist Richard Brody in an 11.26 posting.

If I was Lohan, whose performance as Elizabeth Taylor has made her one of the most reviled laughing stocks of the 21st Century and who is reportedly devastated by the pans, I would fly to New York immediately, contact Brody and absolutely insist on some sort of emotional reciprocity.

The Zero Dark Thirty aesthetic integrity train has left the station and has begun to share and confide. I’m not interested in producer-screenwriter Mark Boal‘s feelings of bafflement at the “surreal and bizarre” Republican attacks on the film, and it’s a given that Kathryn Bigelow‘s replication of the attack on the Osama bin Laden compound would be super-scrupulous. What I want to hear about is their decision to avoid the conventional emotionalism that most directors and writers would have gone for in telling this story because it “gets” people. This I respect enormously.