No Man's Land
Director: Danis Tanovic
Year Released: 2001
Rating: 1.0
This is a comedy? After watching the film and then seeing the trailer - which tried to make it all seem sly and tongue-in-cheek - this came as a genuine surprise, since I thought not one single second of Tanovic's suck-up Oscar bait was funny or even mildly amusing. The film does a fabulous job of ignoring certain facts about the Bosnian-Serbian War, namely all the details people should know about the war and don't (it uses some news footage to give a very brief idea of the human atrocities committed). But this Samuel Beckett-in-Bosnia thing simply doesn't work and comes off as being almost ridiculously trite - it thinks that by capitalizing on a recent event in history it can sail through effortlessly on one idea that every political figure on CNN has already talked about, namely how no one took responsibility for the war, and the U.N. was useless as a peacekeeper. Go find Joe Sacco's Safe Area Goražde for some genuinely offbeat reporting.
