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 ...
This is a bad sign.
Isn't that special?
Perhaps we can look forward to seeing a movie about how hard it was on holocaust guards next.
Japan was the agressor nation. If we hadn't stepped in it would have ruled the Asian Pacific. It would have sooner or later turned it strength against our west coast.
I don't give a flying figg about the Japanese hardship on Iwo Jima and it is an embarassment that anyone does.
My Dad was a WW II vet, may the Lord rest his soul. He said a lot of guys in his neighborhood never made it back home. Let's remember the staggering American death rate in WW II and stop trying to be politically correct about this topic. More Americans would have died, out fathers and grandfathers possibly among them, if America hadn't made an all-out effort to defeat Japan's war of aggression.
Et tu, Clint?
Not necessarily so - I've read some other articles about the film depicting the Japanese as showing very accurately the cruelity and degrading treatment the soldiers endured. I don't see anything wrong with showing what it was like for the Japanese as long as it doesn't try to rewrite Japan's history vis-a-vis WWII in a favorable light.
"Controversial"? What's Controoversial about it? It's one of the most moving photos of all time. Do I give a rat's ass if the agressor nation doesn't like it?
Wrong, Clint! It is ALL "about winning and losing"!
And, because we won, instead of them, you are free to think such drivel and produce accordingly.
Big time loss of respect here...
But we've already had plenty of films showing how "tough it was" on simple German soldiers...
Any rational government in Japan's position would have surrendered after the fall of the Mariannas. You just didn't need to be Albert Einstein to figure it out at that point.
It's a brit newspaper, so I don't pay such words any attention! They still teach their schoolchildren they "let us have" the "colonies" because we had become a burden to them.... ;)
The Japanese were every bit as genocidal as the Nazis, and were even more brutal and inhuman on the battlefield. It sounds like Eastwood's doing a 'Munich.'
"Perhaps we can look forward to seeing a movie about how hard it was on holocaust guards next."
LMAO
Hey Clint, do you feel lucky? Do you?
Maybe he has Alzheimer's or something, because this seems very strange coming from him. I was disgusted by his pro-euthanasia position in "Million Dollar Baby" but this is deplorable. We were only fighting Japan because they attacked us.
When there are no more standards or absolutes, the rape of Nanking becomes no different than the bombing of Berlin. That's where this looks like it's heading. Lately, in recent documentaries about that war, I have caught the occasional whiff of relativism - little things that I can't precisely pinpoint but that leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes it's nothing more than a tone of voice or the selection of a particular adjective. Some time ago, the Smithsonian got into all kinds of trouble with their display about the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If my memory serves me, they failed to give proper credit to the prevailing wisdom - at the time, and since - that so many lives (Japanese and American) were spared by the forcing of the surrender. The Japanese were prepared to defend the home islands to the last man, woman and child. I think it matters that they started the whole thing. Call me silly ... Makes me want to go back and reread Ernie Pyle's description of London in flames in December of 1940.
Brokeback Iwo huh? Nice.
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