{"id":1197,"date":"2014-06-18T20:58:12","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T20:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/?p=1197"},"modified":"2026-03-31T19:40:39","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T19:40:39","slug":"the-quiet-transamerican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/?p=1197","title":{"rendered":"The quiet transamerican"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/external-content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fm.media-amazon.com%2Fimages%2FM%2FMV5BNTk4MjNjMDAtMWI2MS00NmE3LWJjYjQtNjRhNWNkOGNiMTg4XkEyXkFqcGc%40._V1_.jpg&amp;f=1&amp;nofb=1&amp;ipt=635dcce9036f7b18ce839e8fba21429855fcc2bae28f5b95a7fc9bdbfd92e451\" alt=\"Transamerica (2005)\" width=\"372\" height=\"528\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0407265\/?ref_=nv_sr_1\">Transamerica<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(2005)<\/p>\n<p>One week before\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sex_reassignment_surgery\">sex reassignment surgery<\/a>, Bree Osbourne (Felicity Huffman) discovers he fathered a child years ago during one of his few sexual encounters with a woman.<\/p>\n<p>Bree&#8217;s therapist refuses to give final approval for the operation until he meets his son, so Bree travels across the country to bail Toby (Kevin Zeggers) out of jail.<\/p>\n<p>His mother committed suicide and his stepfather was abusive, so Toby ran away from home and makes a living as a male prostitute. Feeling guilty, Bree agrees to take Toby with her to Los Angeles.<\/p>\n<p>When their car and money are stolen, Bree visits her estranged parents asking for help.\u00a0There, Toby awkwardly attempts to seduce a horrified Bree which forces him to reveal the truth. Hurt and angry, Toby runs away while\u00a0Bree returns home alone to have the surgery.<\/p>\n<p>Weeks later, Toby arrives at Bree\u2019s doorstep bragging about his acting career in homosexual pornographic films and they begin a tenuous reconciliation.<\/p>\n<p>Most famous for her television work in\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Desperate_Housewives\">Desperate Housewives<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sports_Night\">Sports Night<\/a>, <\/em>Felicity Hoffman manages to make Bree both villainous and heroic. We sympathize with her struggle to find herself but cringe at her indifference to her family and friends.<\/p>\n<p>Kevin Zeggers rose to prominence as a child in the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Air_Bud_(series)\"><em>Air Bud<\/em> films<\/a>.\u00a0 His performance as Toby established him as a serious, dramatic actor.<\/p>\n<p>Burt Young is immortalized as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paulie_Pennino\">Paulie<\/a>\u00a0in the <em>Rocky <\/em>films, but his career has been otherwise indistinguishable.\u00a0 He&#8217;s solid as Bree&#8217;s father, Murray Schupak.<\/p>\n<p>Canadian actor Graham Greene was nominated for an\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/63rd_Academy_Awards\">Academy Award for his work in <em>Dances with Wolves<\/em> (1990)<\/a>, but his career has mostly consisted of small, character roles.\u00a0 He&#8217;s strangely effective as Calvin Many Goats, a trucker with an awkward crush on Bree.<\/p>\n<p>Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan breathes life and vibrancy into what could have been a stock, one-dimensional character as Bree&#8217;s estranged mother Elizabeth Schupak who sees Toby as a way to make amends for her past mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>The movie captures the confusion surrounding <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Transgender\">transgender<\/a>\u00a0issues.\u00a0There&#8217;s a lot of uncomfortable material about sexuality, but pretending problems don\u2019t exist won&#8217;t solve them.\u00a0This film is biased towards a sympathetic view of transgender issues, but it never pretends Bree&#8217;s decision doesn&#8217;t have moral consequences or doesn&#8217;t deeply affect other people in the world.\u00a0 It may be her decision, but it\u2019s not just about her.\u00a0 This is a fair and honest film about a difficult, emotional subject.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/external-content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themoviedb.org%2Ft%2Fp%2Foriginal%2Fxk5XdHkD3AnS20TUgkkpHpraS6T.jpg&amp;f=1&amp;nofb=1&amp;ipt=31a3517f1b23b134d5c0f2ef0946e10005c72fcfe67f15cd7b4b24b9d6815574\" alt=\"The Quiet American (2002) - Posters \u2014 The Movie Database (TMDB)\" width=\"295\" height=\"443\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0258068\/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1\">The Quiet American<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(2002)<\/p>\n<p>The political machinations of America&#8217;s early involvement in Vietnam serve as a backdrop to this complicated love story.<\/p>\n<p>From <em>Dirty Rotten Scoundrels <\/em>(1988) to <em>Sleuth<\/em> (both the 1972 and 2007 versions), to <em>Hannah and Her Sisters<\/em> (1986) to his recent work with Christopher Nolan, and the fantastic <em>Children of Men<\/em> (2006), the majority of Michael Caine&#8217;s films are very good. This film joins <em>Jaws: The Revenge<\/em> (1987) as notable exceptions.<\/p>\n<p>Vietnam is overdone, and\u00a0Brendan Fraser is not believable as Alden Pyle, the duplicitous American who befriends the morally upright journalist, Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine).\u00a0I like Fraser, but he&#8217;s better in big, over the top productions than small films like this. He&#8217;s a\u00a0poor man&#8217;s Harrison Ford.<\/p>\n<p>The movie wants to be poetic and literary, but it&#8217;s too heavy-handed, and the implicit parallels to American involvement in the Middle East are not subtle.<\/p>\n<p>All of this could have been forgiven however, if this <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Quiet_American\">adaptation of Graham Greene&#8217;s novel<\/a>\u00a0weren&#8217;t really boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Transamerica\u00a0(2005) One week before\u00a0sex reassignment surgery, Bree Osbourne (Felicity Huffman) discovers he fathered a child years ago during one of his few sexual encounters with a woman. Bree&#8217;s therapist refuses to give final approval for the operation until he meets his son, so Bree travels across the country to bail Toby (Kevin Zeggers) out&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/?p=1197\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The quiet transamerican<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[30,948,945,949,530,944],"class_list":["post-1197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-progress","tag-adaptations","tag-brendan-fraser","tag-felicity-huffman","tag-graham-greene","tag-michael-caine","tag-transamerica","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1197"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14854,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions\/14854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tenkmovies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}