Word: eastwoods
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...Flags of Our Fathers, the story behind that Iwo Jima image, Clint Eastwood has crafted a bold and meticulous epic. The script, by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, is faithful both to the honor of young men who became warriors in their country's service and to the tangle of impulses--noble and venal--leading a nation to demand that a war create simple messages and clear-cut heroes. The movie is about the real theater of war: how a battle campaign morphed into a p.r. campaign and, implicitly, how later generations of politicians have used symbols to sell...
...Eastwood choreographs his battle scenes with a brutal vividness that matches the most cauterizing moments of Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. A young man tries to keep his guts from spilling through the huge wound in his belly. On the beach, a severed head stares unseeing at the sky. More than one good soldier is mowed down by friendly fire. Staying alive was a matter of the most capricious luck. On the Japanese side, some soldiers wanted to control their own awful destiny: they blew themselves up with hand grenades...
...also a vanishing breed: the war hero. Soldiers surely acted exemplarily in Korea, and Vietnam, and Iraq, but each of those conflicts exhausted the rooting interest of the American public, which eventually went looking not for battlefield derring-do but for statesmen who could clean up the mess. Eastwood's compassionate, cautionary tale speaks eloquently about a time when America needed heroes, and does so when we are no longer sure what they look like--when the indelible photo op of the Iraq war is from Abu Ghraib...
...Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers adapts James Bradley and Ron Powers' book recounting the story of the three survivors of the flag raising on Iwo Jima during World War II. The event produced the most famous photographic image of the war, and the men were returned home to lead a war-bond tour, during which they were heroically--and, in their view, erroneously--lionized. Almost simultaneously with Flags, Eastwood, 76, made another film, Letters from Iwo Jima, that tells the story of the battle from the Japanese point of view. To be released...
...EASTWOOD: Yeah, I did. The thing that I liked about it is there were no stories of people bashing down walls and running through doors. It was just the common man - skinny kids out of the Depression, getting out of high school and going right into the war. Maybe with adventure in their hearts and patriotisim in their hearts, or maybe they felt it was a just a job to do. Or maybe all of the above. And then getting into battle that just was more than they could fathom. Their average age was 19. What that must have done...