Rating: 
Summary: Boring, Anti-War, But Nice Camera Work
Review: A boring anti-war peace that spends as much or more time on Vietnamese women as it does on American. One of the American women questions whether her husband may have been a murderer. The "lead" woman complains about her husband having been in "this" war. There's comments about how the Vietnamese people were never a threat to us. When she finally gets to the place where her first husband died it seemed like she spent all of 30 seconds there and then went on. What happened there? What was the battle? How long did it last? The drawing of where their spouse was injured was sobering. The visuals of Vietnam showed a lush, if backward, country. The title implied a discussion of American women, not war in general and the effect of the war on Vietnamese women -- which is more of what this documentary showed.
Rating:
Summary: Boring, Anti-War, But Nice Camera Work
Review: A boring anti-war peace that spends as much or more time on Vietnamese women as it does on American. One of the American women questions whether her husband may have been a murderer. The "lead" woman complains about her husband having been in "this" war. There's comments about how the Vietnamese people were never a threat to us. When she finally gets to the place where her first husband died it seemed like she spent all of 30 seconds there and then went on. What happened there? What was the battle? How long did it last? The drawing of where their spouse was injured was sobering. The visuals of Vietnam showed a lush, if backward, country. The title implied a discussion of American women, not war in general and the effect of the war on Vietnamese women -- which is more of what this documentary showed.
Rating: 
Summary: oscar nominee and sundance winner, an excellent portrait
Review: An Oscar nominee, Sundance 99 winner, and Golden Spire winner. On January 1, 1968, Barbara Sonneborn's husband, Jeff Gurvitz, left to fight in the Vietnam War. Eight weeks later, on February 29, 1968, he crawled out of a foxhole during a mortar attack to rescue his radio operator and was killed. Sonneborn learned of her husband's death on her 24th birthday. "We regret to inform you..." read the official notice. When his personal effects were returned three months later, his dog tags and wedding ring were encrusted with his own blood. The shock and grief eased with the years, but not the anger. On January 1, 1988, twenty years after Jeff's death, Sonneborn woke up suddenly determined to do something about his death in the Vietnam War. She began to write Jeff a heart wrenching letter to tell him the impact that his death had on her life. She recalls the night before he left, writing, "You were so alive, so filled, filled with life... How could you not come back?" This on-going letter is the narrative thread of Regret to Inform. In all those years Sonneborn had met only one other Vietnam War widow. She knew that she wanted to find other widows on both sides of the conflict, to understand how their husbands' deaths had shaped their lives. What could be learned from these women's stories about war, loss, survival and healing after all these years? Sonneborn knew she had to go to Vietnam to find the place where her husband was killed, and to talk to other widows. Her documentary film Regret to Inform is both her response to her experience and the agent of her catharsis. Sonneborn interviewed over 200 widowed women by phone and in short pre-production interviews, and another 43 in person, 25 of these in Vietnam. Widows include Norma Banks, April Burns, Le Thi Ngot, Charlotte Begay, Nguyen Thi Hong, Diane Can Renselaar, Tran Nghia, Lula Bia, Grace Castillo, Phan Thi Thuan, Phan Ngoc Dung, Truong Thi Le, Thurong Thi Le, Truong Thi Huoc, Nguyen My Hein, and Nguyen Ngoc Xuan.
Rating:
Summary: Boring, Anti-War, But Nice Camera Work
Review: I had been looking for a copy of Regret to Inform for several years now. I finally had a chance to watch the documentary and I was blown away. This is a very painful documentary to watch. It deals with the widows of the Vietnam War and how they dealt with the experience of losing their husbands and also about the years after. Surprisingly, this documentary also features Vietnamese women who lost their husbands in the war (the Vietnamese call it the American War). I have read many soldiers accounts of the war (Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Robert Mason, etc) and I have read histories of what happened and why on the political side of the conflict. What I have very little experience with is the homefront, the families of the soldiers. Regret to Inform does not address any political ramifications of the war or the reasons for it. Regret to Inform has everything to do with the women. It is a painful story to watch unfold. The American widows have had to deal with their men going to a foreign country and to kill people who did nothing to them. One Native American woman recalls how her husband saw how similar he looked to the Vietnamese and how incomprehensible it was that he would be called to kill these men. Another woman tells of her husband who came home, but was already dead. He held on for years, but suffered the affects of Agent Orange. For him, going home from Vietnam was only the beginning of the war. The Vietnamese widows have a similar, but somewhat different story to tell. While they deal with the same grief from the loss of their husbands, they also had to deal with the fact that the war was on their lands, in their homes. They say American soldiers walking through their villages, killing their children. This is the story that they are telling, of the horror of being in the war, but not fighting it. Their homes were bombed as they try to feed their families. They have both physical and emotional suffering and it is difficult to comprehend the nature of their suffering. This is a powerful and painful film. Because of the very nature of the subject, this is an anti-war film. It was nominated for an Academy Award. This is an excellent film.
Rating: 
Summary: powerful and painful
Review: I had been looking for a copy of Regret to Inform for several years now. I finally had a chance to watch the documentary and I was blown away. This is a very painful documentary to watch. It deals with the widows of the Vietnam War and how they dealt with the experience of losing their husbands and also about the years after. Surprisingly, this documentary also features Vietnamese women who lost their husbands in the war (the Vietnamese call it the American War). I have read many soldiers accounts of the war (Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Robert Mason, etc) and I have read histories of what happened and why on the political side of the conflict. What I have very little experience with is the homefront, the families of the soldiers. Regret to Inform does not address any political ramifications of the war or the reasons for it. Regret to Inform has everything to do with the women. It is a painful story to watch unfold. The American widows have had to deal with their men going to a foreign country and to kill people who did nothing to them. One Native American woman recalls how her husband saw how similar he looked to the Vietnamese and how incomprehensible it was that he would be called to kill these men. Another woman tells of her husband who came home, but was already dead. He held on for years, but suffered the affects of Agent Orange. For him, going home from Vietnam was only the beginning of the war. The Vietnamese widows have a similar, but somewhat different story to tell. While they deal with the same grief from the loss of their husbands, they also had to deal with the fact that the war was on their lands, in their homes. They say American soldiers walking through their villages, killing their children. This is the story that they are telling, of the horror of being in the war, but not fighting it. Their homes were bombed as they try to feed their families. They have both physical and emotional suffering and it is difficult to comprehend the nature of their suffering. This is a powerful and painful film. Because of the very nature of the subject, this is an anti-war film. It was nominated for an Academy Award. This is an excellent film.
Rating: 
Summary: "Regret to Inform" Not Even Close to What I Expected
Review: I read the description of this video and the earlier Amazon reviews and developed the expectation that this would be a loving tribute to a husband lost in a tragic war. However, upon viewing it I instead quickly discovered that it is a thinly disguised anti-war and anti-American film. The interviews with Vietnamese women who lost husbands in the war is a continuing series of consistent allegations of degenerate conduct and inhuman brutality by American soldiers, and only near the end of the video is it disclosed that the majority of these women were active participants in the Viet Cong. These women were not non-combatants, and such interviews and comments hardly constitute the "common bond and ultimate understanding" claimed by the video. The interviews with American widows is yet equally biased. One woman labeled her Navy pilot husband a "murderer", another woman still harbors anger toward her husband for dying in Vietnam and leaving her alone, and yet another considered injuring her husband to prevent him from serving. These interviews are not a balanced representation. The closing scene of the video is little more than a forum for placing blame for the war on America with an accompanying exoneration of the Vietnamese communists for any responsibility or wrongdoing. The video jacket claims it is "deeply affecting", and it is quite correct. It affected me enough that I "regret to inform" you that this video should be clearly labeled as to its content, and correctly placed in the propaganda category.
Rating:
Summary: "Regret to Inform" Not Even Close to What I Expected
Review: I read the description of this video and the earlier Amazon reviews and developed the expectation that this would be a loving tribute to a husband lost in a tragic war. However, upon viewing it I instead quickly discovered that it is a thinly disguised anti-war and anti-American film. The interviews with Vietnamese women who lost husbands in the war is a continuing series of consistent allegations of degenerate conduct and inhuman brutality by American soldiers, and only near the end of the video is it disclosed that the majority of these women were active participants in the Viet Cong. These women were not non-combatants, and such interviews and comments hardly constitute the "common bond and ultimate understanding" claimed by the video. The interviews with American widows is yet equally biased. One woman labeled her Navy pilot husband a "murderer", another woman still harbors anger toward her husband for dying in Vietnam and leaving her alone, and yet another considered injuring her husband to prevent him from serving. These interviews are not a balanced representation. The closing scene of the video is little more than a forum for placing blame for the war on America with an accompanying exoneration of the Vietnamese communists for any responsibility or wrongdoing. The video jacket claims it is "deeply affecting", and it is quite correct. It affected me enough that I "regret to inform" you that this video should be clearly labeled as to its content, and correctly placed in the propaganda category.
Rating:
Summary: Some woud rather forget, but his film remembers...
Review: Nominated for an Oscar in 1999 and winner of best documentary and best cinematography at Sundance, this little film is tremendously intense. Twenty years after her husband was killed in Vietnam, filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn interviewed more than 200 American and Vietnamese women widowed by the war. She traveled to Vietnam to interview the Vietnamese widows and the scenes in Vietnam are haunting with their magnificent cinematography and graphic stories as told by the women. In between the interviews, and sometimes in the background, she uses rare archival footage to reinforce the individual stories. The American women are living with the memories long after their husbands' deaths, wondering about what happened over there. There's a woman who wishes she had the nerve to smash her husband's hand to keep him from going, a woman whose husband wasn't killed in Vietnam, but came home sick with multiple cancers from Agent Orange, a Native American woman whose husband, a former rodeo rider, felt a racial connection to the Vietnamese people. Most of all though, it was the Vietnamese women whose stories were the most moving. After all, the war took place on their land. They also lost children and parents and had their homes burned down. Some of them were tortured and all of them have memories of murder and destruction. It is all so very very sad. Yes, this is an anti-war film, produced many years after the Vietnam war, at a time when people would rather forget. But for those whose lives were forever altered, there is no forgetting. This film remembers.
Rating:
Summary: Some woud rather forget, but his film remembers...
Review: Nominated for an Oscar in 1999 and winner of best documentary and best cinematography at Sundance, this little film is tremendously intense. Twenty years after her husband was killed in Vietnam, filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn interviewed more than 200 American and Vietnamese women widowed by the war. She traveled to Vietnam to interview the Vietnamese widows and the scenes in Vietnam are haunting with their magnificent cinematography and graphic stories as told by the women. In between the interviews, and sometimes in the background, she uses rare archival footage to reinforce the individual stories. The American women are living with the memories long after their husbands' deaths, wondering about what happened over there. There's a woman who wishes she had the nerve to smash her husband's hand to keep him from going, a woman whose husband wasn't killed in Vietnam, but came home sick with multiple cancers from Agent Orange, a Native American woman whose husband, a former rodeo rider, felt a racial connection to the Vietnamese people. Most of all though, it was the Vietnamese women whose stories were the most moving. After all, the war took place on their land. They also lost children and parents and had their homes burned down. Some of them were tortured and all of them have memories of murder and destruction. It is all so very very sad. Yes, this is an anti-war film, produced many years after the Vietnam war, at a time when people would rather forget. But for those whose lives were forever altered, there is no forgetting. This film remembers.
Rating:
Summary: Looking back with tears in our eyes
Review: Some have called this documentary "propaganda," and I can understand that point of view since there is no mention of Viet Cong atrocities here; but since this was made some thirty years after the war was over, it can hardly be propaganda. It does present a limited point of view, that of the women who suffered because of the war, but that was film maker Barbara Sonneborn's intention. She wanted to show how she personally suffered because she lost her husband in the war and how she has come to grips with that loss, but more than that she wanted to show how other women also suffered and what the war meant to them, including, and perhaps especially, the Vietnamese women. After all, it was their homes that were bombed, not ours. Imbedded within and at the heart of Sonneborn's reflections is the story of Xuan Ngoc Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American woman who served as her translator. Nguyen tells her personal story beginning with the sight of the bombs falling on her village and that of her five-year-old cousin being shot by an America soldier (who became horrified at what he had done). She tells of her stint as a prostitute for G.I.'s, her marriage to an American soldier and her coming to America, the end of her marriage, and the implications of her life afterwards, raising her son and becoming Americanized, and finally her return with Sonneborn to the country of her birth. She is the heroine of this film, a woman who faced the horrors of war, did what she felt she had to do, somehow survived in one piece, and now looks back with tears in her eyes. Sonneborn's documentary owes part of its effectiveness to the contrast between the black and white and fading colored film shot during the war and the brilliant rush of greenery so beautifully photographed today. The effect of seeing the verdant fields of today's Vietnam contrasted with a land torn apart by bombs and sickened with Agent Orange is to show that despite all the damage and death of the war, the fields and those who tend the fields, recover. In this sense--and John Hersey used the same idea in his book, Hiroshima (1946), when he described how the grass grew back after the atom bomb--the futility of war is demonstrated. We kill one another with a ferocious abandonment; nonetheless, the greenery returns, even if, as Carl Sandburg implies in his poem, "Grass," it is fertilized by our blood. Consequently this film cannot but play as an indictment of the war in Vietnam, and for some, as an indictment of all wars. I will not argue with that. As anyone who has really thought long and hard about war knows, from Sun Tzu to General Powell, it is always best to avoid the war if that is possible, but there comes a time and a circumstance in which one has no choice. The jury has long since rendered its verdict on the war in Vietnam. We are reminded of that every time we hear a commentator say, "We don't want another Vietnam." But there is an enormous difference between the horrendous stupidity of our involvement in Vietnam and the absolute necessity of defending ourselves against the aggression of the fascists and imperialists during World War II. And the war being fought today against terrorism is also one that cannot be avoided. I see Sonneborn's film as a reminder not only of the horror of war, but of our responsibility to be sure that our cause, as Bush has it, "is just" and our methods restricted to the task at hand, and that the suffering of those involved be ended as soon as humanly possible.
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