Word: jima
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...View on Global Warming Three of the soldiers on your recent cover were killed in the battle for Iwo Jima, their deaths as poignant and selfless today as they were in 1945 [April 28]. Your alteration of this photograph devalues their sacrifice and that of many others. In this time of war, when so many families are receiving a neatly folded flag in honor of their fallen loved ones, your cover is truly offensive. Have we as a nation become so ungrateful? Richard Putney, Richmond...
...That theme, however, is at first artfully disguised in the film, which was written and directed by Paul Haggis, prime author of Crash as well as the writer or co-writer of such excellent Clint Eastwood screenplays as Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima. Haggis is a man with a gritty, honest sensibility, particularly attuned to life as it's lived in our country at the lower edges of society. But he's also a pretty canny movie guy, initially presenting his material as a fairly conventional mystery, with the icily contained and taciturn Hank...
...ICONIC PHOTOGRAPH OF Marines raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima remains a symbol of America's will during World War II. Yet what the famous photo captured was the second flag raising over the Japanese island. Charles Lindberg was the last surviving member of the group of Marines that raised the initial flag atop Mount Suribachi, the first time the flag had been planted on Japanese soil. Fearing it was so small it would be taken as a souvenir, a commander ordered the original flag removed. When a bigger one went up four hours later--and photographer Joe Rosen...
...pigheaded commanding officer, Henry Fonda, even as it leads to a massacre--and can still say years later, "He made it a command to be proud of." It's what Clint Eastwood was aiming for in his account of the doomed Japanese soldiers in Letters from Iwo Jima--except that Eastwood, the earnest Westerner, couldn't get much past the earnest Eastern clichés: the suicidal fanatics, the humanistic general, the humble baker turned soldier who serves as a life-affirming symbol of hope...
...soldiers in Journey's End may be as doomed as the Japanese men who make a last stand in the caves of Iwo Jima. And the conflict they're caught up in may be as futile as the one Americans are wrestling with in 2007. But Sherriff's great play has no truck with anything as lofty as patriotism or sacrifice or even conscience. After it's all over, the bacon is still frying...