This is a great war movie” from Director “Clint Eastwood” after watching the special features, he really got a lot out these actors, “Letters from Iwo Jima” show you how cruel war is, the Japanese show you what pride and Honor mean to them, they would take there own lives for their pride. Upon arriving Annie told John she started to have vivid flashbacks after watching the movie, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” that was shown during a local hospice movie event at her facility. She told John she wanted to read the letters and share the Lombardo memories with him before these flashbacks go away. This was Annie’s dying wish.
Parents need to know that this war drama deals with a very serious subject: the defeat of soldiers who know they'll die and that their cause is lost. Thanks to that and the fact that it's deliberately paced and spoken entirely in Japanese (with English subtitles), it will likely appeal only to older teens. The explosive action scenes include brutal battles with shootings, stabbings, and the use of flamethrowers - resulting in dismemberment, beheading, burning, bloody injuries, and general chaos.
Some wounded soldiers appear in distress, and U.S. Marines take and abuse prisoners. What does 720 mean slang.
A dog is shot off screen (kids can be heard crying), and a beloved horse is killed in an explosion. A character dies of dysentery (off screen, though he's sick for some time). A couple of soldiers write letters home that reveal their awareness of their imminent bad ends. Characters smoke cigarettes, and officers drink in flashbacks. Concentrating on the battle at Iwo Jima, director 's film depicts the daily grind and worries of the Japanese soldiers that occupied the island, awaiting an inevitable attack by U.S.
We see them digging trenches and constructing tunnels for battle, and, at last, waiting to die even as they extol the nobility of their hopeless cause. General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) carries an American Colt.45, which makes him suspect in the eyes of more traditionalist officers, including Admiral Ohsugi (Nobumasa Sakagami). Saigo, a young baker recruited against his will, and the general both write letters home, Saigo to his wife and Kuribayashi to his son Taro. Each, in his own way, understands what's coming, and each embodies a certain nobility that is at once familiar from U.S.
War movies and unconventional. They question conventional wisdom and look after their fellows, but neither is inclined to the sort of unquestioning obedience displayed by the fierce Lieutenant Ito (Shido Nakamura), who, unable to convince anyone else to follow him, straps mines to his body and heads off into the night, determined to find an American tank and lie beneath it to blow it up. Elegant and sad, Letters from Iwo Jima is a war movie about loss. Director Eastwood conceived it as a companion piece to, and it is at once a more finely focused and more profound film, with violence that can never answer the questions raised by its long moments of anticipation.The film interrogates the inevitability of loss in war, even when victory is proclaimed. Superiors communicate to their men that the rationale for war is always the future. Ironically, this is precisely what's lost to those who fight, whether they come back with memories or don't come back at all.
Letters ends on the beach where it begins, refusing to illustrate a future after loss, concentrating instead on loss itself. It makes war seem too terrible to bear.Families can talk about the dedication shown by the Japanese soldiers - to their nation and sense of cause, and, more immediately, to their commander. How does the movie connect this dedication to their previous experiences? How is their behavior different from that of the U.S. Soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers? How does this movie draw connections between history and current events? How does the film argue against war, even as it admires national pride and individual soldiers' bravery?
How is the Japanese perspective (filtered through director Clint Eastwood's U.S. Lens) different from one that might be considered strictly American? Is there such a thing as the 'true' version of history?
For a fraction of a second at the very beginning of Clint Eastwood's 'Letters from Iwo Jima,' you may think that you are gazing overhead at a field of stars. In fact, you are looking straight down into the ground, at waves of black sand on the volcanic island where, over the course of five weeks in February and March, 1945, an invasion force of 100,000 Americans (two thirds of them U.S. Marines) fought 22,000 entrenched Japanese infantrymen. Only 1,083 Japanese survived the battle, while 6,821 Americans were killed and 20,000 wounded. It's a simple establishing shot: a tilt up from the beach where the Allied forces landed to Mount Suribachi, a rocky knob on the southern tip of the island where the Japanese holed up in a network of tunnels and bunkers, and on top of which the famous, iconic image of the raising of an American flag was taken. That classically heroic-looking photo, and the collateral damage from its exploitation as a propaganda tool to sell War Bonds, was the subject of Eastwood's 2006 'Flags of our Fathers,' the companion piece (or other half) of 'Letters From Iwo Jima,' though it doesn't really matter which one you see first.The opening moments of 'Letters' have a cosmic zoom-like effect, taking us from the timeless and abstract (stars/sand) into a specific place and time: 'Iwo Jima 2005,' as a title denotes.
It was on this barren little sulfuric spec in the Pacific Ocean, only about five miles from one end to the other, that so many people fought and died 60 years ago.' ' ended with a similar motion, going from memory-images of surviving Marines frolicking in the surf, to the Stars and Stripes atop Mount Suribachi and the battleships in the harbor, and finally up into the sky (another reason you might think you're looking up rather than down at the start of 'Letters,' which begins with a view in the opposite direction from the close of 'Flags'). The camouflaged artillery that proved so deadly and menacing in 'Flags' are, by the start of 'Letters,' just rusty relics at a war memorial site.
Archeologists explore Suribachi's caves and tunnels, still marveling at how the soldiers ever managed to build them.And then we're on the beach again, in 1945, as Japanese soldiers prepare for the invasion they know is coming by digging trenches in the sand. It looks like a futile, Sisyphean effort. In a letter to his wife (heard in voiceover) one of the diggers, a puppy-faced former baker named Saigo (, in a thoroughly winning performance), writes philosophically: 'This is the hole that we will fight and die in.'
Lilo and stitch hug cartoon image wallpaper for mac. They might have died a lot sooner if they'd stuck with this ill-conceived sand strategy. When the new commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (the always-commanding ), arrives at Iwo Jima, he immediately changes plans, ordering men and artillery to dig in on higher ground. These are the preparations for the massive ambush we see in 'Flags of Our Fathers.' The Japanese, who are seen as fierce, highly organized fighters in 'Flags,' aren't as well-prepared, or well-equipped, as we may have thought. Dashing Baron Nishi , the Olympic equestrian star who once partied with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Hollywood, appears on the island with his horse, as a symbolic morale-boost for the men. But in a conversation with Kuribayashi over a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Nishi approaches the military reality they face in an indirect manner: 'When you think about it,' Nishi offers, 'it is regrettable that most of the Combined Fleet was destroyed.'
This is the first news Kuribayashi has had of that particular catastrophe - but he already knows he doesn't have the manpower or weaponry he needs to resist the pending invasion. (Again, parallels to under-equipped American soldiers being asked to hold ground in Iraq without the necessary material support from their leaders at home is a part of the movie's frame of reference.)'The Imperial Headquarters is deceiving not just the people but us as well,' Kuribayashi says. It's a line that could have been adapted from 'Flags of Our Fathers,' which was also an examination of various forms of propaganda, codes of honor, and nationalistic symbolism that are among the primary weapons in any war.When young Saigo is conscripted into the Japanese army, he and his pregnant wife are stunned at the response of his neighbors and friends who, like brainwashed cultists, keep repeating that he is fortunate to be chosen to die for his country. The emphasis here is on the honor conveyed by death itself - something we see later in the film when soldiers, aware that they're engaged in a hopeless battle, choose to kill themselves rather than fight to the death. One can't help recalling the words attributed to Gen. Patton in 1944: 'Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.
You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.' In both his films, Eastwood empathizes with the 'expendable' soldier on the ground, the 'poor bastard' who is only a pawn in a war conceived by generals and politicians, some of whom have never come anywhere near a battlefield or a combat zone. And Eastwood fully commits to a boots-on-the-ground POV: The raising of the American flag, presented as a routine, off-hand task to the soldiers in 'Flags of Our Fathers' (and which would have remained that way if a photographer had not been present), is only glimpsed obliquely from afar by the Japanese in 'Letters from Iwo Jima.' Life or death, heroism or folly: It all comes down to which side you're on, and which piece of ground you're occupying, at any given moment in the battle.