Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.
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What critics compared Letters from Iwo Jima to
(The precedents include 1993’s The Joy Luck Club, 2004’s Memoirs of a Geisha, 2006’s Letters from Iwo Jima, and my favorite in this list, Justin Lin’s sizzling 2002 teen-rebel movie, Better Luck Tomorrow.)
It’s been more than a decade since “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Letters From Iwo Jima,” the last major studio pictures to feature all-Asian ensembles, and a full quarter-century since “The Joy Luck Club,” the last such production to grapple with the puzzle of contemporary Asian American identity.
Top directors from Spielberg (“Saving Private Ryan”) to Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”) to Eastwood (“Letters from Iwo Jima”) to Verhoeven (“Black Book”) have all taken on the second World War and used it to hold up a mirror to their personal styles.
Unlike such contemporary WW II epics as “Saving Private Ryan,” “Letters from Iwo Jima” or even “Pearl Harbor”—which shoehorned in the Doolittle Raid in order to give audiences something resembling a happy ending—“Dunkirk” does not use a key Allied victory as a stepping-off point for its storyline.
Audiences looking for a film that acknowledges the humanity of our Japanese enemy, of the individuality of their soldiers, are advised to go rent Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" again.
That includes, in perhaps "Hacksaw's" closest recent cousin, Clint Eastwood's tandem of "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."
(And in contrast to a director like Eastwood, who paired Flags of our Fathers with Letters from Iwo Jima, Gibson isn’t very interested in humanizing the enemy.
It has less in common with Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” (2006), say, than with Gibson’s own “The Passion of the Christ” (2004), in which the scourging of Jesus goes on and on, until you can scarcely look, and then goes on again.
I'd argue that stuff like Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies or even Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima does a fair to excellent job at it, but Truffaut has a point.
Ranged against him and his troops is a classic assemblage of honorable types that might have been lifted en masse from Seven Samurai: Hirayama, a ronin (masterless samurai) from Shimada's dojo, played by Tsuyoshi Ihara from Letters from Iwo Jima; the young samurai Hioki (Sosuke Takaoka); the rugged Saheitu Kurunaga (action vet Hiroki Matsukata); and Shimada's nephew Shinrokuro (teen heartthrob Takayuki Yamada).
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It doesn’t say violence is beautiful, but that it is necessary, placing it closer to “Unforgiven” than to Eastwood’s dreadfully reductionist war pictures “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Morally, though, he has regressed from the heights of Letters From Iwo Jima (2006).
He followed that film up with “Mystic River” (another Oscar nod) and “Million Dollar Baby” (another Oscar) as well as two very different films that looked at war through different eyes, “Flags of My Father” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”
They are the arguments in a filmography that represents a decadeslong inquisition into the attractions and consequences of bloodletting and brutality, on levels that range from the intimate and personal (“Play Misty for Me”) to the public and political and global (“Letters from Iwo Jima”).
With this film, Mr. Eastwood seems to dedicate his hawk’s eye vision of “supporting the troops” to an unpopular continuation of the ongoing war in Iraq, but his direction has none of the vigor of either of his previous war efforts, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima.
But it’s a challenging movie gesture just the same, one in keeping with the work of the director who followed up “Flags of Our Fathers” with the Japanese-language “Letters From Iwo Jima.”
It's a solidly acted, engrossing drama about the hellishness of combat, though it doesn't measure up to the indelible Saving Private Ryan (1998)or Letters from Iwo Jima (2006).
Whether the film ends up being great (“Saving Private Ryan,” “Letters from Iwo Jima”) or mediocre (“Pearl Harbor,” “Stalingrad”), the filmmakers have tried to bring the grittiness of battle to the screen to put you right there in the middle of the action.
What Spielberg does - as Clint Eastwood did before him in Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) - is make his audiences sympathetic to once-hated enemies.
Whether writing or directing or both, he's never one for nuance, and even in his best work — "Million Dollar Baby," "Letters From Iwo Jima," "Casino Royale," to name a few — Haggis seems obsessed with making sure we "get it" in every scene.
Haggis, a veteran of TV cop shows and legal dramas before he started writing for Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Letters From Iwo Jima) and winning Oscars (for the race-relations soap, Crash), has taken French filmmaker Fred Cavayé's premise and run with it.
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At any rate, the colossal amount of digital post-production, resulting in a film that is very gloomy and underlit, and desaturated to a level virtually unimaginable by normal people - think Tom Stern's work with Clint Eastwood, especially Letters from Iwo Jima , and you are still in fact thinking too colorful, but you are facing in the right direction, with the addition of a lot of steel greys and dusty browns - and the only reason I harp on this is that I can think of very little else to say about The Book of Eli.
Hablo, claro del magnífico tratado pacifista de Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line (1998) y de Flag of our Fathers (2006) y Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) de Clint Eastwood.