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...