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Saw Letters from Iwo Jima tonight.
It's a very good movie but tracking down Eastwood's sources is going to be a bitch. It's also about the saddest thing I've ever seen - it's a film about 22,000 men who are going to be dead by the final reel. As cinema, Letters from Iwo Jima is gripping as Flags of Our Fathers was notably not. Taken together, the two movies give lie to the two great, necessary myths of war: that all our soldiers are heroes and all their soldiers are monsters. In truth, heroes and monsters are the flat ends of the curve and most of us are just... us.
It's a very good movie but tracking down Eastwood's sources is going to be a bitch. It's also about the saddest thing I've ever seen - it's a film about 22,000 men who are going to be dead by the final reel. As cinema, Letters from Iwo Jima is gripping as Flags of Our Fathers was notably not. Taken together, the two movies give lie to the two great, necessary myths of war: that all our soldiers are heroes and all their soldiers are monsters. In truth, heroes and monsters are the flat ends of the curve and most of us are just... us.