Reviews from the Movie Snob:

The Quiet American. (B+) This movie starts at the end, in the vein of Sunset Boulevard, with a dead man floating in the water. Suspense removed, the point is not so much the destination as the ride, and the movie delivers handsomely. Set in 1952 Vietnam, then French Indo-China, the protagonist is a jaded British journalist, Thomas Fowler, who has abandoned human feeling for anything except his young Vietnamese mistress. Then an eager young American medical-aid worker, Adam Pyle, makes Fowler's acquaintance and begins to upset his opium-enhanced lassitude. Michael Caine turns in a very good performance as Fowler, and the humid lushness of Vietnam is well-conveyed by the filmmakers. Warmly recommended.

The Breakfast Club. (C) With very little hope, I turned to the next artifact in my ongoing exploration of the 80's. Perhaps because my expectations were so low, I was pleasantly surprised by this tale of five high-school archetypes stuck together in detention on a Saturday. Don't get me wrong. There is plenty of ludicrous dialogue, and Judd Nelson's juvenile delinquent is laughably tame, and Ally Sheedy's transformation from proto-goth basket case to cutesy bowhead (not to mention her attraction to jock Emilio Estevez) comes unbelievably out of nowhere in the last ten minutes of the movie. Still, on the whole this was a much more entertaining effort than the last John Hughes product I gagged down, Sixteen Candles.