You want to bomb this? Those are fighting words my friend!!!!!!!!
Posted on 05/27/2006 7:18:26 PM PDT by Pokey78
Two new movies based on a bloody 1945 battle are stirring up memories and forcing both sides to re-examine their history
More than 60 years after it became one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Second World War, Iwo Jima's tragic history retains the power to overwhelm. As his plane prepared to land on the isolated Japanese island last month, the actor Ken Watanabe found he could not hold back the tears. Accompanying Watanabe, who shot to stardom playing a feudal warlord opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, was another hard man of Hollywood whose time on Iwo Jima would lead to something of a professional epiphany.
When Clint Eastwood's two films about Iwo Jima, one of the darkest periods of the Pacific War, reach cinemas this year, audiences could be excused for forgetting the man behind them was once the trigger-happy Dirty Harry.
The 75-year-old director has promised Flags Of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned the island into a flattened wasteland.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
from what the Japanese actor said, this may be jujst the opposite???
Per:
"Watanabe. [the Japanese actor]'As we went through this film, we realised that until now we haven't really looked at Japan's past. We kind of looked away from it,' he said. 'But we have to look at it and accept the fact that this is what our fathers and grandfathers have done. Accepting the reality is the first step.'
Starting with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is it possible that old Clint is fronting for some younger ghost producer/director?
Read "Flyboys" which, despite the author's attempts to inject moral relativism, makes it abundantly clear that the Japanese were utter barbarians, who needed to be totally crushed.
But somehow I doubt that is what the author of this article meant.
Yes, I have so much more respect for the Japanese soldiers - who right or wrong were defending their country just like you or me - as opposed to these current cowardly sleazeballs who live to slaughter children in day care centers or families at wedding parties and restaurants.
It would have been nice for Clint to have remembered the conduct of the Japs in the rape of Nanking, the rape of Shanghai, the Bataan Death March, their "medical experiments" on helpless POWs, the building of the railroad that was involved in "The Bridge on the River Kai," and countless other atrocities. The sewed the wind and they justly reaped the whirlwind. Payback's a bitch.
I have recently watched THE FLAG RAISERS ON IWO JIMA a few times in the last week, people here seem to forget something
Joe Rosenthal was asked if he posed his shot, he thought they meant the "school photo" as he called it, the one after where they all raised their helmets and posed, and he corrected that comment, but the question was not forgotten
Also, Marine Sgt Lowrey took the very first flag raising photos and they were never released in the war due to Rosenthal's picture making first to the media. (Lowrey was a LEATHERNECK reporter and photographer, not AP)
Another controversy is the identification of just who was who in the picture. The man on the far right was misidentified and it was after the war that Ira Hayes visited Harlon Block's family and told them the story. Harlon's Mom always insisted that was her son, and the formal USMC investigation proved her correct.
Some Admiral wanted the first flag but the Marine commander refused to hand it over.
That's not true, either, the ships did see it, it was just decided to add a larger one to be seen easier.
The ships blasted their horns at the raising of the first one.
The second raising was almost a non event, no one really cared then, the excitement was over.
-Lewis Grizzard
You want to bomb this? Those are fighting words my friend!!!!!!!!
You're obviously not familiar with Lewis Grizzard or the context of my quote...No I'm not for bombing 'that', but nor am I much in the mood for showing suicidal fanatic adherents of an imperial death cult in a positive light when pitted against 19-year-old American Marines.
On that, I agree with you. I have read some of Lewis Grizzard but that was many years ago. I don't remember that quote. From what I remember, he was very anti-second amendment and that was the reason I stopped reading his books, comedy or not. Sorry to have offended you.
I will see the movies, assuming I choose to do so, when they turn up on TV and I don't mean PPV.
I was just judging by what I read there.
That's just it; when the mindset of Hollywood on War is in full gear will they still know much less say so in the film?
He was a general who won two wars -- one of a few years, the other of two hundred and fifty years. In both cases he applied bloodless, yet ruthless, tactics as his major weapon. The March to the Sea in one, the extermination of the great buffalo herds in the other.
Yet in a battle his troops fought with all vehemence and for blood and terror.
War is hell. And to try to avoid a war or keep it from being a hell, both lead to making it more of hell.
* * *
Yet war has rules too. What is the difference to each soul of each victim of the Desden fire-bombing versus the rape of Nanking? There are great differences. Death is death, but it was the indiviual brutality of rapes that most afflicted the souls -- in rape and in extremes of personal or bureaucratic tortures -- the soul is most challenged, becomes most dispirited and loses hope. And it is in releasing themselves to the most base and violent urges that the rapists and torturers rip their own souls to pieces, and the camp guards and bureaucrats suffocate them.
Next we'll see a remake of history with the Bataan march being portayed as a pleasant, two-week walking tour of the rain forests of one of the Phillipines southern resort islands.
2 Bombs weren't enough...
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