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Letters From Iwo Jima airs tonight, Saturday Feb 16th on AMC at 8pm Eastern time.

Good film, that one...

Excellent movie. Both of Clint's movies on Iwo were good, but Letters was the best of the two.

A few months ago I went to rent the "Clint Eastwood movie about Iwo Jima," intending to get the one from the American point of view.  But I didn't know the title and accidentally picked up the one from the Jap point of view - "Letters from Iwo Jima."  I thought it would stink.  I was wrong.   Good movie.

Boooo....[:D]

Cruel, cruel Marines for disrupting the peaceful Japanese Imperial expansion.
In the movie you can see the real truth how POW's were treated by the Japanese.
They fed them, patched them up, and talked to them about the good ole days back in the USA.
Rubbish...

Enough said.
See the topic on the main forum from some time back.

Page 7, it's a locked thread now.[;)]

Clint Eastwood and Steven Speilberg should make a movie about the Bataan death march.

My dad used to employ a old guy to work his land, this guy was IN the Bataan Death March, spent 3.5 years as a POW.

Didn't talk too much about it... except that he hated all asians until the day he died about 10 years ago (guilt by association).

He said the absolute worst thing about being a pow was the boat ride from the PI to Japan. It was a month long, and he said it was the worst part.

And, naturally, in typical military snafu, when he was freed at the end of the war, since he had enlisted and his time wasn't quite up yet, the military made him be an mp for a year and a half. His total arrests during his time as an MP? Zero, because he just couldn't care what they guys did.

PS Letters from Iwo Jima was a great movie. Flags of our Fathers sucked.

ORIGINAL: Halsey

Boooo....[:D]

Cruel, cruel Marines for disrupting the peaceful Japanese Imperial expansion.
In the movie you can see the real truth how POW's were treated by the Japanese.
They fed them, patched them up, and talked to them about the good ole days back in the USA.
Rubbish...

Enough said.
See the topic on the main forum from some time back.

Page 7, it's a locked thread now.[;)]

I think the point was rather that not ALL Japanese soldiers engaged in atrocities, and not ALL US Marines were paragons of the Geneva Convention. Remember, the primary audiance for the film was American.
(Personally, I thought it was a bit far-fetched. You get an order to sit in a nice safe hole and watch two POW's after 3 weeks of terror and misery..., and instead you shoot them and head back into the line of fire?)

Yeah, seemed a bit silly, didn't it?

BTW, it was a mistake to start this thread in the first place, given the massive catastro*uck that Halsey refers to above...

ORIGINAL: Terminus

Good film, that one...

I enjoyed the film, but I couldn't say it was good; Eastwood went to such incredulous lengths to make some Japanese -- esp. the commanding general -- seem sympathetic that it stretched the film's credibility.

I think the intended audience of Letters was Japanese, so between that and Flags of our Fathers, Clint really cleaned-up at the (international) box office.

IMDb link to "Letter from Iwo": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498380/#comment

ORIGINAL: Joe D.

ORIGINAL: Terminus

Good film, that one...

I enjoyed the film, but I couldn't say it was good; Eastwood went to such incredulous lengths to make some Japanese -- esp. the commanding general -- seem sympathetic that it stretched the film's credibility.

I don't know..., it wasn't as if he made a vary large percentage of them sympathetic. Most Japanese officers were potrayed as fanatics, bullies, and downright stupid. Somebody had to be a sympathetic charicter, or you wind up with "Barry Lyndon"---4 hours of "I don't give a shit about anybody in this picture."

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl

ORIGINAL: Joe D.
I enjoyed the film, but I couldn't say it was good; Eastwood went to such incredulous lengths to make some Japanese -- esp. the commanding general -- seem sympathetic that it stretched the film's credibility ...

I don't know..., it wasn't as if he made a vary large percentage of them sympathetic. Most Japanese officers were potrayed as fanatics, bullies, and downright stupid. Somebody had to be a sympathetic charicter, or you wind up with "Barry Lyndon"---4 hours of "I don't give a shit about anybody in this picture."

Artistic license aside, Japanese officers don't get to be generals/admirals by being nice, especially under the Code of Bushido.

Ken Wantanabe was more believable in "The Last Samurai" than this flik. Frankly, I prefer my Japanese officers as portrayed by Sessue Hayakawa (Hell to Eternity, The Bridge on the River Kwai); he must have committed seppuku more than any actor in Hollywood.

Slightly OT.

One of the things I found very interesting was the opening and closing scenes of the movie. For some odd reason, I have always been intrigued by battlefield archeology.

While I found some references to the bag of letters being found in 2005, I could find no indepth web site talking about battlefield archeology on Iwo Jima. Apparently there are thousands of Japanese soldiers still entombed in caves, with little effort to recover their remains.

That could be a life-long career for me. Too bad you can't make a decent living doing that.

Regards,
Feltan

I think we all understand that there were regular guys there, just wanting to go home and not be killed, on both sides.  And there were also atrocities committed on both sides.  I had a history teacher once who basically told us they killed some Japanese guys who snuck into their camp on some island.  Of course, you never knew with him.  He was a veteran but he liked to pull our legs, too, on some of his stories.

What I didn't like is that it was subtitled with text at the bottom so I couldn't play WITP without having to miss a lot of the lines.[:D]

The subtitles were rotten quality, too. They were too small, and had no background of their own. When the movie background was white or very light they were impossible to read.

ORIGINAL: Feltan

... Apparently there are thousands of Japanese soldiers still entombed in caves, with little effort to recover their remains.

They should be treated like the remains of sailors in sunken ships; and didn't the Iwo CG tell his men that their fighting positions were their tombs?

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl

Somebody had to be a sympathetic charicter, or you wind up with "Barry Lyndon"---4 hours of "I don't give a shit about anybody in this picture."

LOL thats exactly how I felt after/during watching Fargo. Man that was a waste of two hours.

ORIGINAL: Panzerjaeger Hortlund

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
Somebody had to be a sympathetic charicter, or you wind up with "Barry Lyndon"---4 hours of "I don't give a shit about anybody in this picture."

LOL thats exactly how I felt after/during watching Fargo. Man that was a waste of two hours.

Almost all the characters in Fargo weren't supposed to be sympathetic, save for the pregnant police chief. It was like the last Seinfeld episode w/Jerry and his friends in prison for "failing to help"; in the Seinfeld series, these NY'ers only helped themselves, w/hilarious results.

Well, I enjoyed it. A lot. And if that means that I'm an uneducated miscreant, I'll remain one and enjoy it.
And I watched it twice on AMC, back to back!
To be honest, I wanted to make a post last night saying I watched it, but I'll never forget how my posts about movies got hijacked and locked in the past. [:(]

Ahh, the main character was on the Last Samurai, thats where I saw him before! And one of the officers was the Japanese fighter on Jet Li's Fearless too!

ORIGINAL: ilovestrategy

... And I watched it twice on AMC, back to back!

Was it any better with the commercials?