Who'll Stop the Rain
Director: Karel Reisz
Year Released: 1978
Rating: 1.5
Michael Moriarty sends Nick Nolte back home with some heroin, which for some reason is driving everyone mad - having stripped Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers of excessive detail, it boils down to a fairly malign chase movie with a few idiosyncratic characters along the way (a rich couple trying to get high, a greasy swindler, bickering baddies). Stone's book is apparently about the death of the counterculture, but it's more or less lost on film - if anything, it shows how war affects two people differently: it turns Moriarty into a near-catatonic mess while it makes Nolte's he-man (based on Neal Cassidy, if interpretations are correct) into a seize-the-day warrior. Ultimately, I was never clear why anyone would go through all that trouble for a few grand - millions, maybe - but I'm probably just looking at it from the wrong perspective.
