A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2009 Warner Home Video In 2009, Warner Home Video released The Battle of Iwo Jima Collection, a box set comprised of director Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima Duology – Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Co-produced by Eastwood’s production company Malpaso and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, these two movies examine one of World War II’s fiercest battles through the experiences of the American and Japanese troops that fought it. Legendary filmmaker Clint Eastwood cuts open the heart of war and reveals the souls of men on both sides in a landmark dual film project hailed as his masterpiece. Shot back to back to be viewed in sequence, Flags of Our Fathers is a riveting chronicle of U.S. heroes on the front lines and in the headlines at home, while Letters from Iwo Jima reveals the untold stories of the ill-equipped but fierce Japanese fighters who rallied against awesome American forces in a brutal 40-day campaign. Together, they create a triumphant, stirrin...

One of the interesting things about Clint Eastwood's  Letters from Iwo Jima  isn't so much that it's a cinematic rarity - an American-produced movie with a mostly-Japanese dialog soundtrack that qualified for a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film - but rather a celluloid bookend to another film by the same director,  Flags of Our Fathers . Both films, released a few months apart in the fall of 2006, graphically depict the Battle of Iwo Jima (code named Operation Detachment by the Americans) from two different perspectives - the U.S. side's in  Flags of Our Fathers , and the Japanese defenders' in  Letters from Iwo Jima . Considering the high cost of making an effects-heavy film, a less ambitious director-producer team might have chosen to "do" an Iwo Jima-based film in the same semi-documentary format used by Darryl F. Zanuck and Joseph E. Levine in  A Longest Day  and  A Bridge Too Far , which tell the stories of D-Day and Ope...

On February 23, 1945, D+4 of the battle for Iwo Jima (code-named Operation Detachment), five Marines and a Navy corpsman clambered up to the summit of Mt. Suribachi, a dormant volcano on the southern tip of the 7.5-square mile island; with an altitude of 166 m (546 ft), Suribachi dominates the unusually flat terrain of Iwo Jima and, as such, was an important military objective – whoever held the high ground could direct artillery and mortar fire at any point on the small island located nearly 700 miles southeast of Tokyo. The five Marines - Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, along with their Navy medic, John “Doc” Bradley – were just a small fraction of the 110,000 members of the Fleet Marine Force that were involved in Operation Detachment, but as a result of what at the time they considered a routine – almost mundane – assignment, they became immortalized when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took one of the most famous pictur...

Pros:  Great CGI dinos, good John Williams score, and at least it's fast-paced. Cons:  Formulaic story, and the third act seemed forced. Although Jurassic Park (in both novel and movie formats) was bound to spawn sequels just as Jaws did, it didn't have to fall into movie by the numbers territory, yet, surprisingly, The Lost World does just that. Even though screenwriter David Koepp, director Steven Spielberg, some cast members and all the techno-wizards are back for this 1997 sequel, one comes away from watching The Lost World - Jurassic Park wondering if Spielberg had his mind elsewhere...perhaps thinking about such projects as Amistad and Saving Private Ryan, or poring over script ideas for Indiana Jones IV . It's not an awful movie, mind you, otherwise I would not own it. But it isn't that great, either, and that is disappointing, considering it is a Steven Spielberg film. Once again screenwriter Koepp takes a few scenes from Michael Crichton's eq...

Pros:  Good cast.  Nice special effects. Nifty (if derivative) action tale. Cons:  Not the American "Das Boot."  Some weakly-written scenes. Clichés. A long time ago, back in the 1970s and when Mom was a loyal subscriber to  Reader's Digest Condensed Books,  I read the abridged version of British novelist Douglas Reeman's  His Majesty's U-Boat,  the American edition's title of  Go In and Sink! Because we gave away most of our Condensed Books volumes before our last move and also due to the passage of time, I only have very dim memories of Reeman's novel, which focused on a German U-boat which is captured intact by the Royal Navy and then used against the Axis in the Battle of the Atlantic. Though purely fictional, Reeman's 1975 novel seems to have been based on several real-life incidents involving British personnel and German submarines, some of which resulted in major intelligence coups for the Allied war effort in t...

(C) 2002 Paramount Pictures “We Were Soldiers” (2002) Directed by Randall Wallace Written by Randall Wallace, based on the book We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, by Hal Moore and Joseph L. Galloway Starring: Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe,  Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein, Keri Russell, Barry Pepper Joe Galloway : [ narrating ] We who have seen war, will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young. “We Were Soldiers,” writer-director Randall Wallace's 2002 feature film about the three-day Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, is one of the best movies about America's "lost crusade" in Southeast Asia. . Based on Lt. Gen. Harold B. Moore and Joseph Galloway's non-fiction book We Were Soldiers Once....and Young, Wallace's film version is a realistic and respectful account of the first major battle between U.S. and North Vietnamese ...