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Movie Review: 'Letters from Iwo Jima'

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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 Operation Ma