Keyword Archive:
Japan

Lust, Caution (2007)

Saturday, March 8th, 2008
★★★★★

lust-caution.jpg

Whatever the merits of his various films, you have to admire Ang Lee’s ability not to be pigeonholed as a filmmaker. There aren’t many mainstream filmmakers with as varied a résumé, including comic book movies (Hulk), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), gloomy family dramas (The Ice Storm) and genre-bending love stories (Brokeback Mountain). Thus it’s probably no surprise that he seems perfectly comfortable handling this Chinese-language character study masquerading as a spy thriller.

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Pearl Harbor (2001)

Saturday, December 1st, 2007
★★★★★

I’d just like to say that if there are any more back home like you, God help anyone who goes to war with America.

If Fox’s 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! was a little too academic and dry, then Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor is simply all wet. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve rarely seen a movie find more ways to put the wrong foot forward. The tacked-on romantic triangle makes Titanic look like Jane Austen and Shakespeare combined. The historical accuracy is slightly more suspect than O.J. Simpson. The special effects turn one of the most solemn moments in American history into a video game.

Pearl Harbor

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Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

Saturday, December 1st, 2007
★★★★★

I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant fill him with a terrible resolve.

Think of this movie like a long, slightly boring lecture in history class, only with explosions. This attempt to do for the attack on Pearl Harbor what The Longest Day did for the D-Day invasion of Normandy succeeds on so many technical levels that it’s a shame that it fails to engage the audience emotionally in its subject matter.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

However, while it was initially a failure at the box office, I wonder if the film ultimately managed to recoup its budget through royalties from licensing pieces of the film as stock footage. It’s hard to find a movie about World War II in the Pacific over the next twenty or thirty years that doesn’t reuse at least a few shots from Tora! Tora! Tora!

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Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007
★★★★★

For our homeland. Until the very last man. Our duty is to stop the enemy right here. Do not expect to return home alive.

Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of our Fathers is a tighter, more intimate film, focusing on a more sharply drawn collection of characters and following their story in a more coherent way than the first film could manage.

Letters from Iwo Jima

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Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007
★★★★★

That airplane of yours looked exactly like a ruptured duck.

Despite being produced explicitly as a propaganda film during World War II, this adaptation of Ted W. Lawson’s account of his own experiences as a pilot during the famous Doolittle raid on Tokyo is a remarkably authentic account of the daring air attack on April 18, 1942. Still, some elements of this are sufficiently dated that this is one classic film that could stand a modern remake.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

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Lost in Translation (2003)

Thursday, October 20th, 2005
★★★★★

Can you keep a secret? I’m trying to organize a prison break. We have to first get out of this bar, then the hotel, then the city, and then the country. Are you in or you out?

Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation has been a frustrating little movie for those of us who have championed it. I saw this movie in the theater when it first came out and loved it. I recommended it to friends and family members, most of whom saw it on video. Their response was almost unanimous: it sucked, nothing happened, the two main characters were a couple of passive lumps who never did anything. First I checked the obvious alternatives. Either my friends and family had all seen the wrong movie or they had been replaced by alien pod people. How could such intelligent, rational people take such a passionate dislike to this little gem of a movie.

Lost in Translation

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Run Silent Run Deep (1958)

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005
★★★★★

A fleet boat of the Navy, with most of her fighting capability intact, and you’d take her back to Pearl! I don’t believe it!

Day five of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Run Silent Run Deep is a crackerjack sub picture that gets a lot of the specific details of life on a WWII U.S. fleet submarine right while the general events of the plot are pure Hollywood. The dialog and procedures aboard the submarine are spot on, thanks to generous cooperation from the U.S. Navy.

Run Silent, Run Deep

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