war films Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Has Slate, the online news magazine, really been around for nine years? I only got wind of "The Movie Club" last year, when several critics -- in the form of letters to one another -- batted back and forth the hot button issues of the movie year (last year "gay movies" was one of the topics). Several critics of my acquaintance and I passed around e-mails among ourselves furthering their discussions. If you love movies, it's the must-read item for January.

This year the debate is led by new Slate critic Dana Stevens, who started her duties just last summer. She invited Wesley Morris (the Boston Globe), Keith Phipps (The Onion A.V. Club) and Carina Chocano (the Los Angeles Times) to join in the discussions. Stevens starts out with a confession near and dear to my heart: she doesn't like war movies. At last someone has the guts to say so. (I secretly suspect that no one likes war movies, but no one wants to be portrayed as an anti-American commie terrorist, so everyone pretends otherwise.)

In her short tribute to Robert Altman, Stevens also poses -- but doesn't answer -- the question of who might be the director of the 2000s. Though I wasn't invited to Ms. Stevens' party, may I suggest, off the top of my head, Sofia Coppola, with her near-masterpiece Lost in Translation and the underrated, misunderstood pair The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette? The Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul may be an even better candidate; he made his feature debut in 2000 with the amazing non-fictional, fiction film Mysterious Object at Noon, and followed it with at least two more extraordinary films, Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady. (Perhaps Clint Eastwood is a better candidate? Maybe I'm just grasping at straws here; maybe there isn't a "director of the 2000s" yet...)

In any case, Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady was the best gay film of 2005. Along those lines, Morris asks whether 2006 was actually gayer than 2005. We also have attacks against and defenses for Babel, Little Miss Sunshine and Borat, as well as many other fascinating topics. ...

In 1997, Clint Eastwood's film Absolute Power irked the Asian community for its depiction of a thoughtless, insulting Asian stereotype, a waiter in a restaurant scene. Now, ten years later, Eastwood has completely redeemed any questions from that incident with this companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, the flipside of the Iwo Jima conflict told entirely from the point of view of the Japanese. The film opened a few weeks ago in Japan, reportedly to enthusiastic response, prompting Warner Bros to change the release date from February of 2007 to December, qualifying it for awards.

Letters from Iwo Jima is significantly more interesting than its predecessor, not only because it's more focused, but also because it raises some interesting issues of cultural representation. Eastwood seems to have been very careful in his depiction, hiring the Japanese-American screenwriter Iris Yamashita to handle the details (though Westerner Paul Haggis has a co-story credit). Now we have Japanese characters that misunderstand and misrepresent their American counterparts, believing that they're cowardly and undisciplined. But amazingly, Letters from Iwo Jima is still a Clint Eastwood piece, full of his singular bravado.

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers dips below the 400-screen mark this week (362 to be precise). It seems to me that the response to this film has been polite, but not particularly enthusiastic, and so it should be interesting to ponder it a bit further.

When I reviewed this film over a month ago, I found it useful to consider the last time Eastwood directed a war film, which was exactly 20 years ago: Heartbreak Ridge. The two films couldn't be more different. Heartbreak Ridge is a gung-ho tale about a tough-as-nails soldier (Eastwood) who drinks and smokes and disobeys orders, snarling at those wimps that want to do everything by the book. Flags of Our Fathers also questions the official, by-the-book record of things, but does it in a more thoughtful, more mature manner. It's clear that Eastwood has grown up.

But at the same time, I find that the two films are very much products of their times. Heartbreak Ridge appeared right in the thick of the Rambo/Reagan years -- a simple time, when it felt good to kick some butt and raise a cheer. Flags of Our Fathers appears in a rather more complex time. On the one hand, it wants to criticize the fruitless, stupid nature of war, but on the other hand it doesn't want to appear unpatriotic or to criticize those who have nobly given of themselves to defend our country. This attempting to bridge the gap by pleasing both sides has frankly crippled most war films from the past ten years. Now a war film comes tightly wound, terrified and exceedingly serious. Even a silly action movie like The Guardian (332 screens), based on the Coast Guard, has strangled itself before it has a chance to breathe.