144 - Letters From Iwo Jima review

Years ago, I would visit my great-great uncle in Mississippi. He would share dozens of stories about his service as an infantryman in the Philippines during World War II. On one occasion, he went into the bedroom and came back with a box full of photos and war medals. But none of the contents belonged to him; they were the possessions of slain Japanese soldiers that he claimed as war prizes.

Clint Eastwood’s "Letters from Iwo Jima" does what few other American films have done by telling the story exclusively from the point of view of an old enemy, specifically the men my uncle fought over 60 years ago. It’s a companion piece to Eastwood’s excellent "Flags of Our Fathers," which covered the 1945 fight for Iwo Jima from the American side. The battle may be the same, but the shift in both screenwriter and perspective makes for two entirely different, yet complimentary viewing experiences.

The narrative follows two protagonists, one real and one fictional, throughout the bloody battle for the small, strategically important piece of rock. The dignified General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) leads the Japanese defense of the island, a task with no chance whatsoever for victory. The Imperial Navy has been all but destroyed, with supplies and reinforcements impossible once the Americans attack. Though defeat is certain, Kuribayashi dutifully sets to fortifying the island, digging an elaborate series of caves and tunnels designed to slay as many Americans as possible.

Amongst the soldiers defending the island is Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker with a baby he has never seen back home and zero natural talent for combat. While Kuribayashi watches the battle develop through field glasses and reports, Sagio witnesses the terrifying ordeal from the front.

Despite the extraordinary amount of acclaim and awards heaped on Eastwood over the past few years, he is nowhere near a great director, but a skilled, utilitarian one. Consistently, his films are only as good as the material he works with, no better, no worse. The hype surrounding "Letters from Iwo Jima" reminds me of the fuss over Eastwood’s 2004 Best Picture winner "Million Dollar Baby," a solid film that received attention and awards severely disproportionate to what it actually deserved.

"Letters From Iwo Jima" tries very hard to be a relevant war film, with mixed results. The Japanese characters fall into several easy to identify archetypes; the dignified and pragmatic commanders, the dutiful but terrified soldiers, and the wild-eyed, fanatical officers. It’s not that these characters lack interesting features, but by the end of the first half-hour, we’re left with few surprises, even concerning their individual fates.

Particularly questionable is a scene where Eastwood and screenwriter Iris Yamashita suggest a degree of moral equivalency between the Japanese and the Americans. Students of World War II must take issue with this, as the Japanese of the time followed an honor code that forbid surrender yet allowed for actions such as raping Chinese women with bayonets. Make no mistake, they were oftentimes the Nazi’s equal when it came to cruelty. It is unquestionable that war crimes occurred on the American side, just as they do in any army during virtually any war. But the comparison to the Japanese is irresponsible, utter nonsense.

While largely ineffective as an insightful look at human nature, the film has great merit as a historical piece. Despite an unnecessarily hazy chronology (the film makes events that took days or months appear to be much shorter), the look at the inner-workings of this strange army is quite fascinating.

These men were a product of a culture that attached paramount importance not on life, but on death. In one indelible scene, an entire squad blows themselves to pieces with grenades rather than face defeat. It never seems to occur to most of them that it would be a greater service to their loved ones back home to go out fighting rather than committing suicide, while even mentioning surrender is an executable offense. At other points, junior officers brazenly disobey orders to retreat, launching futile attacks into overwhelming American fire because they don’t see their commanders as aggressive enough. Where the Americans in "Flags of Our Fathers" were devastated at every life lost, the Japanese in this film are literally ordered to embrace their bloody, vain ends, whether they like it or not.

It’s this aspect of the film that earns my slight recommendation. "Flags of Our Fathers" is the vastly superior piece both as entertainment and as an indictment of how war shreds entire generations to pieces, but "Letters from Iwo Jima" provides an effective counterpoint to it, the spirit of forced collectivism versus that of individualism. After all, those men in my uncle’s photos had stories, too, and it should be told by someone, however flawed it may be.

3 out of 5

143 - The Last King of Scotland review

What is it about murderous dictators that people find so mesmerizing? It makes sense that anyone who could gain absolute control over the government of an entire country should be charismatic, but one would think people would have ceased to be amused with tyrants a long time ago. "The Last King of Scotland" has a great scene where a dictator holds a press conference and practically charms the pants off of the foreign journalists, intercut with the protagonist witnessing firsthand just how horrendous the ruler’s atrocities are.

That dictator is Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker), the real-life President of Uganda from 1971-1979, whose reign spelled doom for hundreds of thousands of lives. The protagonist is Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a Scottish medical school graduate who finds himself less than thrilled about following in his painfully dull father’s footsteps. Nicholas takes a globe, decides that he’ll travel to wherever his finger happens to land, and spins. He lands on Canada and chooses to spin again, and before long Nicholas finds himself at a mission where the local witch doctor receives four times the business.

Not long passes before Amin passes through Nicholas’ area, and the good doctor eagerly attends a rally, where he finds himself quickly swept up by the ecstatic energy of the crowd. On the way out of the area, Amin’s car gets in an accident, and Nicholas is dispatched to patch up the president’s hand. When Amin sees Nicholas’ Scotland T-shirt, he eagerly swaps his own war medal laden coat for it, happily proclaiming his undying love for all things Scottish. In the blink of an eye, Nicholas has a job as Amin’s private physician.

Being around Amin, an imposing hulk of a man with violent mood swings, is like navigating through a minefield. At one moment he’ll be happy and warm, and affectionately showering Nicholas with gifts and introducing his as an old friend. He drafts the bewildered Nicholas to advise him on matters such as architecture and foreign policy, of which he has approximately zero expertise. When Amin shifts in the other direction, he angrily berates those around him for virtually any reason. The film’s most memorable exchange occurs when a panicked Amin demands to know why Nicholas didn’t advise him to do something, to which Nicholas responds "I did say you should do that!" Amin quickly replies "Yes, but you didn’t CONVINCE me!" Reality exits primarily for Amin’s amusement.

Like the vast majority of mainstream films about troubles in Africa, the tale comes through the lens of a Western observer, not the Africans themselves. Nicholas represents an ideal observer for a Western audience; a smart, educated professional, almost entirely apolitical, a little reckless, and treading the thin line between brave and naïve. His experience reflects that of many with a conscience who end up close to a madman, as the gradual weight of the truth about Amin (and his own culpability in his atrocities) becomes unbearably heavy.

We don’t spend time with Amin unless Nicholas does, but when we do, it’s mesmerizing. Whitaker justifiably won a Golden Globe (rare since the Globes usually seem to be chosen by a dart thrower) for the performance, a chameleon-like job destined to conjure his image to mind whenever Amin’s name is mentioned, similar to how George C. Scott’s performance as General George S. Patton is virtually more recognizable than the image of the actual man. Despite knowing how vile he truly is, Whitaker actually succeeds at making Amin creepily sympathetic and even funny before the more heated meltdowns occur.

While the portrait of a monster stirs, the film’s gradual transformation to a political thriller is unfortunate, with an even more awkward segue into a real life crisis at the close. If not for a grisly torture that puts anything in "Saw III" to shame, it would be outright forgettable. But the film never does stumble too far, and the images of Amin, a jovial, brutish murderer, easily imprint themselves into the audience’s consciousness.

4 out of 5

142 - Children of Men review

What a terrifying film this is. Many sci-fi and horror films use monsters and aliens and psychotic killers to generate temporary fear, but Alfonso Cuarón’s "Children of Men" has a premise so diabolical that I am hard pressed to think of one to match it in sheer dread.

We are introduced to London, circa 2027. For reasons unknown, humanity has ceased to be fertile. The youngest person on the planet is 18 years old, such a worldwide celebrity that his murder provokes an outcry that makes the one caused by Princess Diana’s death seem tame. Many have no memory of what children even look like.

It’s a world that simultaneously seems unrecognizable and painfully familiar. Britain’s geographic position makes it the sole remaining power, one ruled by a fascist government that herds hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into concentration camps that bring images of the Holocaust to mind. Bombs blow people apart at coffee shops and stormtroopers viciously beat and gun down immigrants on sight. The rebel organization fighting against the government lends credence to the belief that "freedom fighter" is merely a euphemism for "terrorist."

The contemplation of one’s demise is hard enough on its own. Here, the death of each person represents not only an individual end, but also a step towards the curtain call of the entire human race. We’re watching not just the characters, but humanity itself as a bloated, decaying organism, collapsing on itself in unbridled fear. And with the cruelty and hatred of man blazing full force, we reluctantly ask ourselves, do we even deserve to survive as a species?

Theo Faron (Clive Owen) doesn’t seem like a man who would think so. A bored office drone who lost his concern for life when his infant son died 20 years ago, he survives a horrific bombing, only to trudge to work and fake despair to get the day off. Things begin to turn around when Julian (Julianne Moore), his ex-wife and now terror cell leader, recruits (read: bribes) him to secure travel papers from his cousin, a government subsidized artist.

In a brief scene that paints the human condition as well as any film this year, Theo asks his cousin how he continues to produce art even though in less than a hundred years no one on earth will be around to see it. The cousin smiles and simply replies "I just don’t think about it."

The papers are for Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a young woman of seemingly minute importance. That is, until she brings Theo aside and reveals her very pregnant figure. In the blink of an eye, reality has warped yet again, and hope, which has been an antiquated notion for two decades, has returned in force. Theo tries to get Kee and her miraculous baby to a near-mythical group of scientists that may or may not actually exist, with the help of Miriam (Pam Ferris), a midwife who was at the front lines of humanity’s disintegration, and Jasper (Michael Caine), a political cartoonist turned pot grower.

Cuarón’s direction and the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki are nothing short of stunning. The documentary style shots are very long and thoughtful, rarely cutting even when it seems impossible that the camera could hold its place. A long shot seen from entirely within an SUV has the characters go from idle chitchat to running for their lives from a mob and the police. And a battle sequence throughout a concentration camp has scores of gunfire, dead bodies, tanks and explosions, all without a cut. I would accuse Cuarón of trying too hard to artistically top directors such as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg if he didn’t actually succeed so well at doing so.

But the most moving and memorable component of "Children of Men" is in the story. By illustrating the stark brutality of mankind, Cuarón highlights what makes us worth saving. It takes violence and evil to make kindness, perseverance, and sacrifice truly inspiring. That a film this scary and tragic can imbue the viewer with such hope truly is a miracle.

5 out of 5