What a surprisingly entertaining film. I loved the verbal exchanges between the Serbian and Bosnian soldiers. They acted like a married couple. Two men (actually 3) in a trench—the trench of life, desperately trying to survive (the marriage), doing everything they can to infuriate the other, never taking responsibility for the problems (“you started it, no you started it”) blaming each other, blaming each other’s families (aka their respective countries) kissing and making up (so to speak), and making sure neither one gets anything in the end.
Although the dialogue between them is simplistic, it is chocked full of thought-provoking reality. I loved it when each of them had the opportunity to say, “Because I have a gun and you don’t.” Isn’t this so indicative of how war works? It never really ends; the outcome just goes, each time, to the side with the most power at any given moment.
Cera, lying there with a mine under him, represents the idea that conflict and war are a constant threats. Cera never moves. He also never dies—at least not in front of us.
And what’s the world around the war doing? “There’s nothing I can do without a decision of the UN General Assembly.” (I’m not sure what this guy’s rank was.) Other typical remarks were, “I have to get permission from my superiors.” and “We now have a simple new system in force” that will take care of this matter. (Yeah, right.)
The end of the movie reveals lies, lies, and more political lies. They carry off a dead body, thinly masking the fact that the bomb-clad soldier is still in the trench. I was really disappointed by Ms. Livingston when the videographer asked her if she wanted him to film the trench at the end. “No,” she said. “A trench is a trench.”
Indeed, the film depicts the absurdity of war, but also the absurdity of life when we don’t try to live in peace or create a peaceful environment around us.
The link below provides an audio review of this wonderful film. You may have to listen to another movie's short preview first. 
The Seamstress (Xun Zhou) is transformed when two young men introduce her to forbidden Western books in "Balzac and the Little Chinese Princess." 
The movie has been co-written and directed by Sijie Dai, based on his own best seller, in which the young men find a cache of forbidden Western books and read them aloud to the Seamstress. They also teach her to read and write. The novels are by Balzac, Dumas and Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary perhaps inspires the seamstress to one day leave the village and set out alone to walk to the city. The boys protest, passively and let her go. To be sure, by this time she's been through harrowing experiences and is no longer the innocent we first met, but still: Is this a success story about literacy, or a failure to communicate? Some of my favorite episodes from the novel are well visualized in the movie, including the way Luo and Ma travel to a nearby town, watch Korean films and return to describe them to the villagers with great drama (making up most of the details). There's also the drama of Luo's sudden departure for the city, and an emergency that Ma helps the Seamstress to survive. But somehow the principal characters seem oddly remote from their own lives. We're not sure what literature means to them (aside from the sentimental assumption that it is redemptive). And we're not sure how deep the love between Luo and the Seamstress can possibly be, considering the way they eventually part. When the movie violently yanks us 20 years into the future for the epilogue, it is an unsatisfactory one in which one character shows his video footage of how the mountain district was flooded after a new dam was built, but the two men are never really clear about their feelings for the Seamstress or each other. There should have been more urgency at the time, more powerful memories afterward, and less complacency about the way the Seamstress disappears from the story.I do believe that books are redemptive. I believe that no child is without hope who can read and has access to books and the time to read them. That alone can change a life. But in "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" the city boys go through the motions of transforming the Seamstress through books, without the how and why. What does she think -- do any of them think -- about the strange foreign worlds described by Balzac and the others?I am reminded of the scene in Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" where the young hero has a shrine to Balzac; Seamstress has a sort of shrine, too, a hidden grotto, but without Truffaut's perception about how his character changes. And after some initial hardships, the lives of the boys seem to become easier, and filled with free time; there's no sense that the Village Chief represents a real danger to them, and a scene where Luo treats his tooth is badly acted and seems awkward. The elements in the story push all the right buttons, but the buttons don't seem to be wired to anything. 