Flags of Our Fathers

[Penelope]

Well, my complaint wasn't about a Scorsese/Eastwood redux (my memories of the 2004 race will forever be colored by Hilary Swank's unnecessary 2nd Oscar, so Marty vs. Clint is the last thing I think of), but the implication that the race is already decided on two reviews. I was meaning to echo Tee's thread about declaring a "lock" so far in advance. We may have some pretty sure nominees, but we don't have any guaranteed winners, yet. Marty could still win; Bill Condon could win; Inarritu could win; Stephen Frears could win; heck, Soderbergh could win again. (My hope for this year is that the precursor awards spread the wealth around, in EVERY category, so that we have some genuine suspense.)

As for the reviews, my gut tells me that these two are more glowing than what the general consensus will turn out to be. Poland isn't reliable--he always seems to have an ax to grind--but Kris Tapley and Jeff Wells are rather lukewarm about it. I may be wrong, but I don't think it will have quite the passionate response that Million Dollar Baby had.

[Sonic Youth]

When did this turn into a race between Scorsese and Eastwood? Talk about peeves of the season....

I agree with this as well. Is it really necessary to go through this kind of showdown yet again? It’s so reductive and boring. The two won’t even be going head-to-head. It’ll be Eastwood versus Condon, if anything. Now, if we had another Bening-Swank situation, I’d expect everyone to jump on that but we don’t.

Well, sure. Which is what happened on this board two years ago, thanks in no small part to the yearly re-emergence of good ol' Mashari. No, not even close to the extent of other boards, and that's a blessing. But it's on people's minds elsewhere, and it would be folly to believe it isn't on the backs of people's minds here.

And how reductive will this board get if Ang Lee and Paul Haggis were to go head-to-head with two strong frontrunners in a future year?

Geez, it was just two innocent words. Yet, even though they were posted in a small font, they apparantly loom much larger than the two reviews I posted beneath them, like an afterthought. I suppose I could have not said them at all, but what's the point? Someone else would. Had no inkling the two flippant, offhand words would bring up such a paradox: a heated discussion about something that should not be discussed. Also had no inkling that two of the most significant reviews of the year would go unnoticed.

Now, does anyone have anything to say about the reviews?

[OscarGuy]

I think everyone's discounting Marty's support...perhaps rightly so but The Departed is an effective movie, it's possibly going to be a box office success and with Eastwood at two Oscars already and, though I'd love to see it happen, Condon doesn't seem a likely recipient, Marty does have a good shot this year.

[Penelope]

Sonic, I occasionally drop in at Oscar Watch, but only for a glance at early reviews and some gossip; otherwise, I can't stand the infantile banter. Can't remember the last time I looked at the IMDb boards. What's Chud?

[Reza]

Now, if we had another Bening-Swank situation, I’d expect everyone to jump on that but we don’t.

And amen to that.

[flipp525]

When did this turn into a race between Scorsese and Eastwood? Talk about peeves of the season....

I agree with this as well. Is it really necessary to go through this kind of showdown yet again? It’s so reductive and boring. The two won’t even be going head-to-head. It’ll be Eastwood versus Condon, if anything. Now, if we had another Bening-Swank situation, I’d expect everyone to jump on that but we don’t.

[Sonic Youth]

When did this turn into a race between Scorsese and Eastwood? Talk about peeves of the season....

Whaddaya mean when?? You haven't seen all the chatter by self-pitying Marty supporters on Oscar Watch and Chud and imdb?

(Lucky you.)

[rudeboy]

When did this turn into a race between Scorsese and Eastwood? Talk about peeves of the season....

I agree with this sentiment entirely. It would be a depressing oscar season indeed if it comes down to only these two chaps again, which fanatics all over the internet seem now to be anticipating.

[kooyah]

As much as I enjoy some of Clint Eastwood's films (Million Dollar Baby was, well, rubbish), I couldn't stand the notion that he take another Oscar from Scorsese.

What I can't stand is this notion that Martin Scorsese MUST have an Oscar. For the last few years, it seems that people have been foaming at the mouth, demanding that Hollywood throw awards at Scorsese. If he wins one, fine. If he doesn't, who cares? My favorite filmmakers (Terrence Malick, Wong Kar-wai, Richard Linklater) haven't won Oscars and in all likelihood never will. I'm fine with that.

Martin Scorsese is already a person of immense stature in Hollywood. People have seen and continue to see his films. He has an immense amount of respect in just about the entire film community. He's not hurting for work. An Academy Award isn't going to offer him much more by the way of validation.

[Penelope]

When did this turn into a race between Scorsese and Eastwood? Talk about peeves of the season....

[jack]

I only started reading the McCarthy review, but you words Sonic: "Poor Marty" kept me from reading further.

As much as I enjoy some of Clint Eastwood's films (Million Dollar Baby was, well, rubbish), I couldn't stand the notion that he take another Oscar from Scorsese.

I've yet to see The Departed, but it looks great... Looks can be deceiving, thought, and quite frankly, The Departed can be a pile of shite, but if they Academy consider it, I pray to whatever that they grant Scorsese his Oscar.

I've lost interest that he wins for his masterpiece. Let him win, and then let him make his masterpiece.

[Sonic Youth]

Everyone ready?

A review from Variety and one from Hollywood Reporter. It can be summed up in two words:



<span style='font-size:7pt;line-height:100%'>Poor Marty.</span>



Flags of Our Fathers


By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety

Ambitiously tackling his biggest canvas to date, Clint Eastwood continues to defy and triumph over the customary expectations for a film career in "Flags of Our Fathers." A pointed exploration of heroism -- in its actual and in its trumped-up, officially useful forms -- the picture welds a powerful account of the battle of Iwo Jima, the bloodiest single engagement the United States fought in World War II, with an ironic and ultimately sad look at its aftermath for three key survivors. This domestic Paramount release looks to parlay critical acclaim and its director's ever-increasing eminence to strong B.O. returns through the autumn and probably beyond.

Conventional wisdom suggests directors slow down as they reach a certain age (Eastwood is now 76), become more cautious, recycle old ideas, fall out of step with contemporary tastes, look a bit stodgy. Eastwood has impertinently ignored these options not only by undertaking by far his most expensive and logistically daunting picture, but by creating back-to-back bookend features offering contrasting perspectives on the same topic; the Japanese-language "Letters From Iwo Jima," showing the Japanese side in intimate terms, will be released by Warner Bros. in February.

One way to think about "Flags" is as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" of this generation. That 1962 John Ford Western is famous for its central maxim, "When the truth becomes legend, print the legend," and "Flags" resonantly holds the notion up to the light. It is also a film about the so-called Greatest Generation that considers why its members are, or were, reticent to speak much about what they did in the war, to boast or consider themselves heroes.

Skillfully structured script by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis throws the audience into the harrowing action of the Iwo Jima invasion as a personal memory that can never be softened or forgotten. But the brutal fighting is eventually juxtaposed with the government's use of the celebrated image of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi for propaganda and fund-raising, with scant ultimate regard for the "heroes."

Reflecting its origins in the bestselling 2000 book by James Bradley (son of one of the central figures) with Ron Powers, tale is framed around a son's search into the wartime exploits of his father John Bradley, one of the six men pictured raising the flag. The I.D.ing and matching of some old-timers to their younger selves is never the easiest thing to do, and the same goes for getting all the names immediately straight for a bunch of young soldiers wearing identical uniforms and very short hair.

But the camera focuses on a handful of the 30,000 troops that landed on the inhospitable spec of volcanic ash and tufa that is Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945 to dislodge some 20,000 well-fortified Japanese.

Among the men are John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the only Navy man in a group that otherwise includes Marines: Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), Native American Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the highly capable leader Sgt. Mike Strank (Barry Pepper), Hank Hanson (Paul Walker), Iggy Ignatowski (Jamie Bell), Harlan Block (Benjamin Walker) and Franklin Sousley (Joseph Cross).

Such is the carnage at the initial landing (the Americans suffered 2,000 casualties that first day alone) that there will be some temptation to compare the scene to current co-producer Steven Spielberg's justly celebrated D-Day invasion sequence in "Saving Private Ryan." But Eastwood does it his own way, impressively providing coherence and chaos, awesome panoramic shots revealing the enormity of the arrayed armada and sudden spasms of violence that with great simplicity point up the utter arbitrariness of suffering and death in combat.

The visual scheme Eastwood developed for the picture is immediately arresting. Perhaps taking a cue from the island's black sand, as well as from WWII's status as the last war shot, from a filmic p.o.v., in black-and-white, pic is nearly as monochromatic as anything shot in color can be. Dominated by blacks, grays and olive greens, cinematographer Tom Stern's images have a grave elegance, a drained quality that places the events cleanly in history without diminishing their startling immediacy.

On the fifth day of fighting, some Americans reach the summit where a great deal of the Japanese firepower is concentrated, and six soldiers plant a small stars-and-stripes. Shortly after a larger flag is sent up and, in an event only shown in the film considerably later, six different men, Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes among them, responding to a photographer's half-joking question of, "O.K., guys, who wants to be famous?," put their muscle behind pushing up the new flag held in place by a heavy length of pipe.

At once, AP photographer Joe Rosenthal's shot became arguably the most iconic image of the American war. No faces were identifiable in the photo, leading to some confusion as to who was even in the shot, and three of them were killed soon after.

But the surviving three are spirited back to the mainland to spearhead a final war bonds drive. Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes are treated like gold-plated heroes everywhere, all the while being confronted by replicas of the flag raising made of papier-mache or even ice cream.

Of the three, Gagnon embraces his sudden celebrity, gallivanting around with his fiancee and expecting great things to stem from it. Already haunted by the horrors he witnessed, Bradley copes in a subdued way. But Hayes, whose story was dramatized onscreen in 1961 as "The Outsider" with Tony Curtis, of all people, portraying the Pima Indian, can barely hold it together.

Feeling from the outset that their participation in the tour is a "farce," that the real heroes are the guys who died or are still out there fighting, Hayes drinks heavily, embarrassing himself while having to stomach the everyday casual racism of being called "chief" or being refused service.

And once they've done their bit raising billions for the government, they're left on their own to put their lives back together. It's not an easy road, particularly for Hayes, who in one moving, genuinely Fordian moment, treks a long distance for a brief visit with the father of one of his fallen comrades.

Given this dramatic, wrenching arc, Hayes' story becomes the heart of the movie, and Beach, who previously played a Native American in the Pacific campaign in "Windtalkers," unquestionably takes the acting honors with it, delivering a full sense of the character's pain and sense of entrapment in an absurd situation. Other perfs are thoughtful, credible and deliberately unspectacular, although Pepper supplies special power as the leader the young men need as they come face to face with the enemy.

The director and editor Joel Cox find an effective and comfortable rhythm for the drama's parallel tracks. Spectacle is by no means limited to the battle scenes; one major setpiece is an enormous rally at Chicago's Soldiers Field where the men are expected to scale a large model of Mount Suribachi and plant the flag. Perhaps the most felicitous of the film's many outstanding visual effects is the elimination of the recently built flying saucer-like addition to the venerable stadium.

The film's themes are so thoroughly embodied in the drama as it's told that there is no need for explicit statement of them, which makes the final bit of narration about the nation's need for heroes seem unnecessary. Another minor flaw is a Hollywood backlot look to a couple of Chicago street scenes.

Otherwise, "Flags of Our Fathers" is exemplary in its physical aspects. Combination of exteriors shot on the black beaches of Iceland with CGI work conveys a vivid and comprehensive feel of the godawfulness of Iwo Jima.

This and the forthcoming "Letters" represent the final work of the late, great production designer Henry Bumstead; no one could wish to go out on a better note. Pic is dedicated to him and two others who died during production, Eastwood's longtime casting director Phyllis Huffman and flag-raising photographer Rosenthal.

The director himself composed the spare, effective musical score.

-------------------------------------------------


Flags of Our Fathers


By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter

Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" does a most difficult and brave thing and does it brilliantly. It is a movie about a concept. Not just any concept but the shop-worn and often wrong-headed idea of "heroism."

The movie performs this task amid the fog of war on Iwo Jima in 1945, when the Associated Press' Joe Rosenthal took the iconic photograph of six American servicemen raising Old Glory on Mount Suribachi. The movie deconstructs that moment, shattering it into a jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks and flash-forwards, to explore how that photograph turned into a major prop of the U.S. government's war bonds campaign and how the government designated the three surviving flag raisers as "heroes."

From a boxoffice standpoint, this might be a rare instance of having your cake and eating it, too: The film also takes a hard, unblinking look at the cynicism and PR manipulation that went into the war bond tour and what we today recognize as the nascent fluttering of the cult of celebrityhood, when the three surviving flag-raisers were among the most famous men in the U.S.


Yet Eastwood packs the movie with action as tough and bloody as such benchmark films as "Saving Private Ryan," "Black Hawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers." Nor does he ever deny the sacrifice and achievements of the men who fought and died in the battle for Iwo Jima. So the movie should attract viewers across the political spectrum. Critical acclaim and year-end awards can only expand its potential boxoffice.

The film is based on a book by James Bradley (with Ron Powers) about his father, Navy Corpsman John Bradley, one of the flag-raisers who nevertheless would never discuss that or any other aspect of his war experiences with his family. William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis' screenplay has a complex structure that takes awhile for audiences to read.

A soldier runs alone in a bleak landscape that looks like the lunar surface, then awakens in a cold sweat in his bed, his wife comforting him, many years later. Three soldiers, scaling a mountaintop with explosions everywhere, reach the summit and survey a sea of faces in a football stadium, roaring approval for this re-enactment of their experiences of only weeks before. Meanwhile, a man in more recent times -- we later realize this is the son, James Bradley (Tom McCarthy) -- interviews key people who knew his father.

In this manner, the movie moves back and forth in time to watch people come to grips with the question of heroism and how that flag raising became a symbol Americans desperately clung to as the war in the Pacific hung in the balance. "If you can get a picture, the right picture, you can win a war," a retired captain (Harve Presnell) tells Bradley.

The film introduces the six servicemen as U.S. warships steam steadily toward Iwo Jima. Initially it's hard to tell who's who, but Eastwood and his writers probably do this deliberately as they want us to consider these young men as ordinary Joes doing a job in combat. It is totally random how fate chooses the six -- and actually it's three as the others are killed not long after the photo is taken.

Within days the U.S. government calls the surviving flag-raisers back to the mainland: Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), a Navy Corpsman called upon to help the Marines raise the flag; Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), a "runner" who happened to bring the flag to the mountaintop; and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), an Indian who is the most uncomfortable at finding himself a national hero.

For most of the war bond tour, the trio's "minder" (John Benjamin Hickey) has double duty. He must overcome the men's resistance to playing heroes, a label they feel belongs to others more deserving. And he must keep Ira sober. War has kept the Marine's alcoholism in check; back home he fears banquet halls more than the blood-stained soil of Iwo Jima.

Then the background to the photo itself undermines the men's sense of purpose. The fact is that Rosenthal's famous photo is of the second flag-raising that day. The first occurs before Rosenthal made it up the top. When he does arrive, he finds soldiers, who had been laying a telephone line, preparing to raise a second, larger flag the moment the first one comes down. And that photo, taken blindly at the last moment, is the one that hit the wires worldwide. This leads to confusion, cleared up only years later, as to the identities of the soldiers in the photo since none of their faces is visible.

Cinematographer Tom Stern shoots in washed-out colors, much like old color film long faded so that only blues, grays, browns and flesh tones prevail. This situates the film in a hallucinatory no-man's-land between Iwo Jima and a peaceful U.S., where no one has any concept of the horrors these men endured.

There are many astonishing moments. A Japanese soldier lies dying next to a critically injured Yank, the two men now linked in death. A search of caves deep within the island causes American soldiers to realize the surviving Japanese are committing suicide with their grenades. The persistent racism Ira faces is so casual that everyone is blithely unaware of the demeaning nature of their remarks.

Eastwood's own musical score, infusing the film with understated valor and light melancholy, and Henry Bumstead's fine sets and period design are crucial components of Eastwood's vision of a world that needs "heroism" to help it understand and process the incomprehensible cruelty and sacrifice of war. Says one vet, "We need easy-to-understand truths and damn few words."

[dws1982]

David Poland's review doesn't make much sense. He claims to have been an Eastwood fan in the past, but he doesn't seem to understand him.

This is especially nonsensical:

the life and death of soldiers was as random as the flip of a coin. In the specific of the flag raisers, three survived the island and three did not. And for all the "he was the best soldier ever" crying, it could have easily been the three who died that survived and vice versa.

This is not an Eastwoodism.

Basically he doesn't think it's enough like his idea of a traditional Eastwood film.

And to complain that there aren't enough Japanese soldiers shown in the film just shows his own ignorance of the actual battle of Iwo Jima.

[Big Magilla]

Roeper raved above it while the TV Guide critic, subbing for Ebert, gave it mild thumbs up, disappointed that it wasn't more like Saving Private Ryan - apparently there wasn't enough violence for her.

[Mister Tee]

Still waiting on the Hollywood trades, but, among possibly irrelevant Internet reactions, Emmanuel Levy has raved about it; Kris Tapley gave it 3 stars; and David Poland -- Mr. Reverse Barometer -- panned it up and down.