some recent films

[Oldpilot]

(Recent to me, I should add!)

Letters from Iwo Jima: I avoided this when it was at the 'plex because I resented the way the trailer for Flags of Our Fathers seemed to sneer at the Iwo Jima flag-raising and subsequent bond drive. Big mistake! Though marred by the mandatory non-judgmental approach of the era (when the Japanese are shown mistreating a prisoner, the Americans must be seen doing the same), it's about as good as a war movie is going be allowed to be.

Red Angel: A nicely done account of a Japanese army nurse during Japan's "quagmire" in China in the late 1930s. (One gets the impression from the film that the Japanese were everywhere outnumbered and outgunned.) The concluding battle scene is risible, but there are horrendous sequences of wounded soldiers being treated or maltreated in the hard-pressed front-line hospital. There's a rather revealing segment that mentions the comfort women at a forward base--they don't seem to be treated much better in Japanese cinema than they were in real life.

Nanking: I haven't seen this one yet, because it's in limited theater release and not yet on DVD. About the infamous Rape of Nanking (which again, in our non-judgmental or anyhow less-judgmental fashion is now generally termed the Massacre of Nanking). Indications are that it's not to be missed. I'll be lying in wait for it, anyhow.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford