Movie Review: 'Letters from Iwo Jima'
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...