Flags of Our Fathers

Hello, everyone~!!
I'm so glad that it's the weekend because I finally could have a chance to sleep as much as I want! Hahaha~. Anyway, I'm going to talk about the movie I watched on Wednesday with Yuiko. The movie we watched was "Flags of Our Fathers". We went to the theater in Shinjuku after school.

As you might already know, the story of the movie was about the battle of Iwo Jima which is known as one of the most bloodiest battles of the war. In this movie, the director, Clint Eastwood, focused on the people who were at the front, especially on the 6 men who raised the American flag there. That photograph was on the newspapers. In fact, at that time the US government thought that this battle would last just for about 5 days or so and they were supposed to win easily. Contrary to their expectation, however, the Japanese soldiers held on so tightly. The government had to do something to agitate the masses. So the men on the photograph were sent back to the US to be called as heroes. But they were hestating and not so sure about being called that way because they thought that the real heroes were the people who couldn't come back to their homes, and that they just happened to be there at that time. So they struggled hard for a long time to accept themselves as heroes. I think that the director tried to show us how the image of heroes was made by the government.

The first thing that came to my mind while watching this was that I should have read the book first because I realized that I hardly knew anything about the battle. (I thought the show about this battle which I happened to find on iTune's podcast was helpful to undestand, but I'm not sure if it was.) I did know that there was a battle in Iwo Jima, but I didn't know much about the detail. So it was a bit hard for me to catch up with the story. Also, I could easily imagine that the director tried to tell audiences about as many details as he could, but for me it was too much to deal with. When I see a movie, I always find someone who enables me to feel empathy even though his/her character has nothing to do with mine. But this movie didn't provide characteristic things about each of the 6 men very much, so it made me confused. However, the movie made me realize a natural fact that it' s people who fight in wars, not the government. We just watch the politicians talk about the strategies and criticize other's on TV, but we need to pay more attention to the people at the front. I have to admit that we now are kind of likely to get used to hearing the news talk about the death toll in Iraq on a daily basis, but we should remember that there are many people who are waiting for the soldiers to come back safely. (Just to imagine the story like Green Day's music video "Wake me up when September ends" happening a lot makes me really really sad...)

Well, I really enjoyed watching this movie, but I try not to say if it was good or bad because I think it's not the kind of movie which could be judged by that standard. Instead of doing so, I'll say it's worth watching. Also, another version of this movie will be at theaters in December 9th. It's called "Letters from Iwo Jima", and I'm looking forward to watching it. The director tried to look at the battle from the American point of view when he made the film "Flags of Our Fathers" and in the movie "Letters from Iwo Jima", he looked at it from the Japanese side.

Okay.... it was interesting for me to watch a movie like this because I rarely watch war films because sometimes it's too heavy. So I'm glad that I could enjoy it this time.

See you soon~!今日はちょっとまじめモードですね★（It seems like I'm in a serious mood now!）