Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

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Fletch F. Fletch
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Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

#1 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Wed Mar 28, 2007 9:37 am

Don't you just love double-dipping?

From DVDActive:
Title: Flags of our Fathers (IMDb)
Starring: Adam Beach
Released: 22nd May 2007
SRP: $34.99

Further Details:
Paramount Home Entertainment has sent over artwork for the two-disc collector's edition of Flags of our Fathers which stars Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford, Barry Pepper, Ryan Phillippe, and Paul Walker. This Clint Eastwood directed film will be available to own from the 22nd May, and should retail at around $34.99. The film itself will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, along with a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track. Extras will include an introduction to the film by Eastwood, a Words on the Page featurette, a Six Brave Men featurette, a Raising the Flag featurette, as well as featurettes on the visual effects and the historical facts surrounding the film. Seperate HD DVD and Blu-ray releases will also be available for around $39.99 a pop.
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Joe Buck
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Location: New York

#2 Post by Joe Buck » Wed Mar 28, 2007 4:28 pm

Psssh.

The world is just getting cluttered up with not-so-special obsolote editions. Landfills overflowing with old Warner snap cases. I wish the public would fight the power and let the studios know that we aren't willing to be swindled any longer.

Ghaaa!

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tavernier
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#3 Post by tavernier » Mon Apr 02, 2007 8:50 pm

From Warner press release:
Letters from Iwo Jima will be available on 2-Disc Special Edition for $34.99 SRP in widescreen format. A 5-Disc Collectors Edition with the 2-Disc Special Edition DVD of Letters from Iwo Jima and 2-Disc Special Edition DVD of Flags of Our Fathers, plus a 5th bonus disc, will also be released to showcase these companion films as one complete masterpiece for $49.96 SRP.
Street date is May 22.

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Highway 61
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#4 Post by Highway 61 » Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:00 pm

I'm a major Eastwood fan, so I'm pleased that he's finally getting what looks to be a packed release. Still, I'd rather see new releases of Bird, A Perfect World, Bridges, and countless others.

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Jeff
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#5 Post by Jeff » Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:33 pm

Full specs from DVD Times:
[quote]Warner Home Video have announced the Region 1 DVD release of Letters From Iwo Jima for 22nd May 2007 priced at $34.99 SRP. Clint Eastwood's second film about Iwo Jima chronicles the Japanese defence of the island.

Features on this 2-Disc Special Edition include:

* 2.40:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
* Japanese DD5.1 Surround
* English, French and Spanish subtitles
* Red Sun, Black Sand: The Making of Letters from Iwo Jima - An inside look at the creation of the film with all key players
* The Faces of Combat: The Cast of Letters from Iwo Jima - Cast members introduce the characters they portray in the film
* Images from the Frontlines: The Photography of Letters from Iwo Jima - A still photo montage
* November 2006 World Premiere at Budo-kan in Tokyo
* November 2006 Press Conference

Released by Paramount on the same day is Flags of our Fathers (2-Disc Special Edition) which will also be available as part of a Letters From Iwo Jima / Flags of our Fathers 5-Disc Commemorative Edition from Warner priced at $49.96 SRP. The fifth disc of this set is the A&E documentary “Heroes of Iwo Jimaâ€

brandofo
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#6 Post by brandofo » Thu May 29, 2008 6:41 pm

Letters from Iwo Jima / Flags of Our Fathers (Five-Disc Commemorative Edition)

ImageImage

5 Disc Commemorative Collector's Edition includes Flags of Our Fathers 2-Disc Special Edition Letters From Iwo Jima 2-Disc Special Edition and bonus disc including 1) Heroes of Iwo Jima (History Channel documentary hosted by Gene Hackman) 2) To the Shores of Iwo Jima (Academy Award nominated 1945 UA short)

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hearthesilence
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Re: Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

#7 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:16 am

For anyone planning to see this for the first time, I'd recommend viewing both in the order listed in this thread title: LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA first, then FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS.

At the time they were released, most people saw them in reverse, which was also the order they were released. This was a business decision as FLAGS was made first and also the film that was supposed to have more box office potential in the U.S. (It flopped while LETTERS became a sizable international hit despite the low U.S. gross.)

LETTERS on its own is much more refined in terms of craft, writing and everything else - most critics considered it the stronger of the two and not surprisingly it was nominated for some major Oscars, unlike its twin. This is one reason why it's better to see it first - it plays as a stronger set up for the other film than vice-versa.

FLAGS doesn't get bogged down as much when seen after LETTERS as it plays off one's (presumably fresh) memory of that film. It also partially rectifies the main issue a few detractors have had with LETTERS: that it shies away from the uglier side of the Japanese military during WWII. Besides the occasional moments where we shift to the Japanese POV and see some brutal combat moments from their perspective, FLAG's thesis on hagiography also harkens back to what we've just seen portrayed in LETTERS. I always thought FLAGS worked better as an essay rather than a dramatically engaging film, and watching it after LETTERS seems to confirm that - it works impressively as commentary when it has a preceding film to play off as well.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

#8 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:38 am

Also David Ehrenstein posted a link that's no longer active, but I'll reproduce the review below, just in case archive.org disappears on us. In light of the criticism being fired at American Sniper, it's strange that we're talking about the same filmmaker behind both projects (and again, these two particular films should be considered the same work):

From Flags of Our Fathers to Letters From Iwo Jima: Clint Eastwood’s Balancing of Japanese and American Perspectives

By Aaron Gerow

History, like the cinema, can often be a matter of perspective. That’s why Clint Eastwood’s decision to narrate the Battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and the Japanese point of view is not really new; it had been done before in Tora Tora Tora (1970), for instance. But by dividing these perspectives in different films directed at Japanese and international audiences, Eastwood makes history not merely an issue of which side you are on, but of how to look at history itself.

Flags of Our Fathers, the American version, is less about the battle than the memory of war, focusing in particular on how nations compulsively create heroes when they need them (like with the soldiers who raised the flag on Iwo Jima) and forget them later when they don’t. Instead of giving the national narrative of bravery in capturing Iwo Jima, the film shows how such stories are manufactured by media and governments to further the aims of the country, whatever may be the truth or the feelings of the individual soldiers. Against the constructed nature of public heroism, Eastwood poses the private real bonds between men; against public memory he focuses on personal trauma.

The Japanese edition, Letters from Iwo Jima, could—and perhaps should—have been about similar issues, but Eastwood changes his approach to history itself with this film. It, like Flags, begins decades after the war is over, but tells its story not through the traumatic flashbacks of the survivors, but effectively through the letters of soldiers unearthed from an island cave. Flags is about how to remember the war, giving a new view on an incident everyone knows; Letters is about listening to those who fought it, trying to create a memory tableau of something most people, including Japanese, know little about.

Mostly relating the battle as if it is the present, Letters is a more conventional war film. If Flags is an ambitious attempt to deconstruct the Hollywood war movie and similar media that work to create fictions of heroism, Letters, initially inspired by Eastwood’s encounter with the letters of General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, the Japanese commander on Iwo Jima, appears more simply as an American effort to understand the complex human beings on the other side, to tell the world that they were brave too.

And some of the figures are fascinating. Kuribayashi (Watanabe Ken) had studied in the United States, wrote loving letters to his son with comic illustrations, and protected his men against abusive officers; his close associate, Baron Nishi (Ihara Tsuyoshi), was a gold medalist at the Los Angeles Olympics and a friend of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. These two are in conflict with more traditional officers like Ito (Nakamura Shido), who seem more concerned with achieving a glorious suicidal death than defending the island and thus delaying the Allied forces’ march on Tokyo. Under Kuribayashi’s unconventional command, a garrison that was supposed to fall in 5 days lasted for 36. (The result was that just 1,083 of Japan’s 22,000 troops from army and navy units survived. The United States suffered the highest casualties of the Pacific War to that time. The 70,000 Marines thrown into the battle suffered 26,000 casualties including 6,821 deaths.)

The fear when one country’s artist dabbles in another nation’s history, is that unwitting mistakes of fact and interpretation will be made. Usually the problem is inaccuracy or distortion, but that does not figure much here: the drama is convincing, the characters well developed, and the acting superior. The question is whether this film, like The Last Samurai, might unwittingly feed into and actually bolster the contemporary rise in chauvinist nationalism in Japan. Some of the Japanese ads for Letters from Iwo Jima in fact seem to promote the movie along those lines.

Eastwood does much to undermine the military glory. Despite ads touting the vigorous defense, very little of that is shown as the film quickly turns to the soldiers’ choice between suicide and surrender. Suicide itself is shown as a grisly—and in contrast to old Japanese war films—distinctly unaesthetic experience. Watanabe’s superbly acted Kuribayashi may show shades of Katsumoto (his character in The Last Samurai) in ordering a last charge. But there is none of Samurai’s overblown celebration of martial valor, since it is shot at night as a chaotic melee. The soul of Eastwood’s film is the baker-turned-soldier Saigo (Ninomiya Kazunari, in a strong performance), who has promised his wife to return alive and never fires a shot.

Yet one can sense Eastwood treading carefully, trying not to offend his audiences. The fact that Kuribayashi and Nishi emerge as basically liberal humanists friendly to America makes them more palatable to American viewers. Letters curiously also seems to parallel some of Japan’s recent war films like Aegis and Lorelei, which, by preaching life not glorious death, attempt to offer a kinder, gentler nationalism for contemporary Japanese (see my article in Japan Focus).

Yet just as Japanese atrocities are mostly shown in Flags and American crimes in Letters, so Eastwood completely avoids the controversial issue of how Japanese should remember the war—even though he allows some of his characters, one in fact ironically, to survive. The critique of national history through personal trauma that centers Flags is barely raised in Letters.

One thus wonders whether Eastwood, in honoring these other soldiers in Letters from Iwo Jima, may be unwittingly engaging in the same process of creating “heroes” that Flags of Our Fathers criticized, albeit for another country. The primary hero here is Kuribayashi and he is someone whom the virtually pacifist Saigo eventually comes to revere and actually fight for (though with a shovel).

Eastwood, however, by walking the tightrope between mutual deference and mutual criticism, remains somewhat detached and never openly declares what kind of hero Kuribayashi is (or should be): a public hero like the beleaguered flag-raisers in Flags, or simply a private hero (like Mike, the skilled sergeant in Flags) for a life-loving baker. Both remain open as possibilities and it is left up to the audience—and possibly the media context they inhabit—to decide. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures voted Letters From Iwo Jima the best film of 2006, proclaiming it Eastwood’s “masterpiece”.

Some may urge him to take a clearer position, but perhaps his detached but deferential stance also reminds us that cinema, like history, can often be a matter of perspective. It is up to us, not just the films, to determine the perspective, as well as our history and our heroes.

Title: Letters from Iwo Jima
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Watanabe Ken, Ninomiya Kazunari, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Kase Ryo, Nakamura Shido

Title: Flags of Our Fathers
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Barry Pepper, John Benjamin Hickey, John Slattery

Aaron Gerow is assistant professor [now professor] in the Film Studies Program and in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He has published widely in Japanese and English on Japanese cinema.

This is an extended version of a short review of Letters from Iwo Jima published in The Daily Yomiuri on 9 December 2006. It was published at Japan Focus on December 12, 2006.
Last edited by hearthesilence on Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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bearcuborg
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Re: Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

#9 Post by bearcuborg » Tue Jan 27, 2015 5:45 pm

hearthesilence wrote:LETTERS on its own is much more refined in terms of craft, writing and everything else - most critics considered it the stronger of the two and not surprisingly it was nominated for some major Oscars, unlike its twin. This is one reason why it's better to see it first - it plays as a stronger set up for the other film than vice-versa.
Funny enough, FLAGS was received better in Japan than LETTERS. At least, that's what I heard from Jonathan Rosenbaum at film festival a few years ago.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

#10 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jan 27, 2015 6:41 pm

hearthesilence wrote:Aaron Gerow is assistant professor in the Film Studies Program and in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He has published widely in Japanese and English on Japanese cinema.
I believe Aaron is no longer has "Assistant" prefaced to his title. ;~}

BTW, he has an interesting website: http://www.aarongerow.com/news/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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manicsounds
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Re: Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

#11 Post by manicsounds » Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:33 pm

bearcuborg wrote:Funny enough, FLAGS was received better in Japan than LETTERS. At least, that's what I heard from Jonathan Rosenbaum at film festival a few years ago.
Letters was more successful in Japan (with the big stars attached to it), but "Flags" opened many eyes in Japan. There are plenty of Japanese themed WWII movies, but American sided WWII movies are rarely seen (Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor" is an exception, was huge in Japan).

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hearthesilence
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Re: Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers

#12 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:35 pm

Glad to hear, moving up in academia can be excruciatingly hard!

FWIW, I also found out that General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi were actually on less than cordial terms. Since the story presented in Letters is more familiar in Japan, perhaps this is another reason Flags of Our Fathers came off stronger there?

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