The classic Chinese story collection Strange Tales of Liaozhai receives its most opulent adaptation yet with Painted Skin. A remake of King Hu’s 1993 film of the same title, this Gordon Chan-directed release mixes old-style Hong Kong Cinema panache with new generation stars and visual effects, resulting in an unexpected and wildly entertaining mixture of action, drama and tragic romance. Top Chinese actresses Zhou Xun and Vicki Zhao face off as two women who love the same man, a soldier played by the handsome Aloys Chen. Donnie Yen lends the film a solid martial arts presence, while Betty Sun (Fearless) and Singapore actor Qi Yu Wu (881) fill out the supporting roles. A box office hit in both China and Hong Kong, Painted Skin is Hong Kong’s official entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2009 Academy Awards.

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Letters from Iwo Jima is a retelling of the Battle for Iwo Jima during WW2. The island is a volcanic rocky island that hold the strategic location being the door leading into the heart of the Japanese home islands, and thus became the prime target for US forces.
The film is based partially on 2 Japanese novels of that battle and partly fictionalised.

Produced by Clink Eastwood as a two-parter WW2 opus telling the battle from both the US and the Japanese perspectives. Although it is an American director’s effort I decided to put this review into my Japanese-Korean movie review blog as the language of that film is in Japanese.

Where Flags was a great disappointment, Letters hit the jackpot.Eastwood did not bring any western emotional baggage into his story telling of Letters from Iwo Jima, but was able to look at the battle from the Japanese perspective. No one, US nor Japanese, was perfect but so very human; capable of great bravery in the face of withering gun fire, as well as utter cruelty
Ken Watanabe as General Kuribayashi is the perfect General, able to command the respect of the lowly infantryman, as well as a masterly tactician and strategist. His plan was not to stop the invading US forces from landing, which he considered impossible to achieve. Therefore, his plan was to stop the US forces from moving inland away from the beaches, making the landing zone a death trap where his artillery and mortars were zeroed in.
He also abandoned the past infantry tactics that the Japanese forces had used, namely the senseless banzai charges that causes needless deaths in the face of machinegun fire. He also forbiddened his soldiers from committing suicide.

Letters from Iso Jima is a sensitive story from the point of view of a young Japanese drafted to defend the island.
He left behind his wife and does not want to die. His fellow soldiers were similarly like him and caught in a situation beyond their control and want nothing more than to get out of it with their lives intact.

Cast:

Links:
Wikipedia – About Iwo Jima
Wikipedia – The Battle for Iwo Jima in WW2
Wikipedia – Letters from Iwo Jima

Rating: 4 out of 5
Clint Eastwood did not make a mess of this movie. It is sensitive and moving film of young men caught in a war not of their making and wanting nothing more than to live. Instead they were forced to fight; kill or be killed. Most of them died……