I'm No Superman

With Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy all wrapped up and Marvel's film division absolutely monopolising the "fun" corner of the comic book adaptation market, Warner Brothers has turned its eye to dark-and-edgifyin' another iconic DC superhero. The result, in case you've been living under a rock for the last year, is Man of Steel, and it is a complete and utter failure of a motion picture.

Man of Steel more-or-less follows the template set by the marvelous Superman: The Movie back in 1978, with a few changes both major and minor to bring it in line with modern sensibilities (or more accurately, a film executive's idea of modern sensibilities), and a few more just for the hell of it - nearly all of them for the worse. It begins as that film did with a lengthy prologue set on the alien planet of Krypton, where leading Kryptonian scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) has failed to prevent the planet's imminent destruction. The only hope left for the survival of the Kryptonian race lies in he and wife Lara Lor-Van's (Ayelet Zurer with the absolute worst performance in the film, all glassy-eyed stares and stilted line deliveries) infant son Kal-El, who is sent away to Earth despite the best efforts of mutinous General Zod (Michael Shannon, whose performance is typically unhinged but distressingly free of nuance), who kills Jor-El in the process. For his crimes, Zod and his most loyal officers are banished shortly before Krypton is destroyed.

In the first of many abrupt shifts in the story, we find ourselves in the company of the adult Kal-El (Henry Cavill) on Earth, now rechristened Clark Kent, who is disillusioned with his life and searching for any trace of his Kryptonian heritage. For the next hour and change Clark's childhood in rural Kansas with adoptive human parents Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane respectively) is doled out piecemeal via flashback, inserted crudely into the present-day narrative at seemingly random intervals. As if this weren't fractured and aimless enough, we're also introduced to investigative reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams), who crosses paths Clark at a US military dig site in Canada and becomes determined to find out more about him. Fractured and aimless it is, but this first act is still home to the majority of Man of Steel's best moments. Adams's Lois Lane is the only wholly successful modern update to the material, and if she is thus given appallingly little to do in exchange, she at least walks out with her dignity intact. The "Clark's childhood" material, meanwhile, is home to many terrific tiny character moments between the young Clark (played at 9 by Cooper Timberline and 13 by Dylan Sprayberry) and his parents. Lane is a perfect emotional anchor and remains so throughout the film, while Costner is nearly good enough to make the severe character missteps in the script actually work out in his favour.

Ah, yes, here is where things get really thorny. Starting with scriptwriters David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan's (who also produced) decision to render Jonathan Kent as a far more morally grey and distant role model for the young Superman, Man of Steel embarks on a voyage that ends in the total character assassination of its hero. Towards the end of the first act things seem to be headed for something of a course correction: Clark is reunited with his biological father in the form of a holographic projection, who at least pays lip service to the notion that people are capable of greatness and that Superman's most important power is to unite them in reaching it, through dialogue that is largely taken from Superman's more iconic comic book outings. Indeed, a genuinely compelling middle act starts to take shape where this more troubled  version of Superman learns to love and trust the people of America and offer his services as their protector before that trust is tested in a huge way.

I was fully prepared to start really liking the film at this point, but then it chooses to sidestep having a middle act entirely. Instead the running time is given over over to the third act, nearly a full hour of relentless and desperately uninteresting action sequences. Many things explode, many buildings crumble, entire city blocks are laid waste, an unthinkable level of human life is wiped out, and Superman apparently does not give a shit. Here is where it becomes abundantly clear that Goyer and Nolan don't understand or care about a single fucking thing that they said earlier in the movie. Their Superman blithely decimates nearly an entire city without batting an eyelid, happily writing off any loss of life as necessary collateral damage to defeat the bad guy, and oh boy does "defeating the bad guy" take on a meaning that would ordinarily only be allowed to do so over Superman's dead body (as it does, literally, at one point in the comics).

Man of Steel is terrible Superman, then, but bad adaptations are often good cinema in their own right, which is ultimately their only responsibility. This particular adaptation, unfortunately, is not good cinema by any definition that I'm comfortable using. It borrows liberally and without thought or skill from Nolan's Batman films, all slate greys and jerky camera movements (a particularly awful shot during the Krypton sequence crash zooms in, then out, then in again in a single take) and frantic editing, without any consideration to why those films used that aesthetic the way they did. Where Nolan had an eye for physical plausibility and practical effects, keeping the action contained to a human-level idea of "large", Man of Steel is operating in a far grander register of giant shiny spaceships and cities being levelled and civilizations facing extinction; a register that is entirely incompatible with the gritty pseudo-realism of the visuals. On top of this, almost every scene is rotten with lens flares that would make JJ Abrams blush at the freedom with which they are allowed to obfuscate the on-screen action.

All of this is to say that it's director Zack Snyder's finest work since his 2004 debut, Dawn of the Dead. Hideous though the visuals might be, they are in every way an improvement on his last four efforts. Slate grey is an improvement over orange and teal, crash zooms and shaky-cam are preferable to pervasive speed ramping, and so on. What's more, he portrays the deaths of Superman's parents with a callous disinterest, expecting the cloying soundtrack to do the emotional heavy lifting. Not something that any director should be proud of, for sure, but for Snyder it represents the first and only time that he has successfully portrayed violence and mayhem without actively fetishising it, in Man of Steel or any other film. The film is not entirely free of directorial dick moves - a stupid gesture involving herds of CGI African fauna nearly scuttle what is otherwise the film's most (and only) successful feint towards spectacle, and there's a fantasy sequence involving Zod and Supes that is a fucking disaster of the heavy-handed visual metaphors and subsequent masturbatory wallowing that are a pervasive element of Snyder's back catalogue.

I understand (though I also reject) the desire to update Superman to appeal to a modern, more cynical audience, but what we have in Man of Steel is scarcely worthy of the name (not that it seems to want it; "superman" is used only twice in the film, and only mockingly at that). It's both morally and visually ugly, so larded up with expensive CGI and self-concious attempts to ape other contemporary superhero films that it aged more in the time it took me to leave the cinema than its forebear has in 35 years.

4/10, and it owes its supporting cast a hell of a lot for that

Something Something Black Sabbath Lyric

I can't be the only one suffering from Marvel fatigue by now, surely? I understand that they want to establish a consistent brand, but the fact that they've functionally remade Iron Man five times now with varying quality of acting and humour has well and truly worn thin. That said, the acting and humour are the best they've ever been in Iron Man 3, so consider that a recommendation if you're still thrilled at the thought of yet another entry in Marvel's long line of highly competent and deeply anonymous blockbuster filmmaking.

The acting and the humour really are top-notch, actually. Iron Man 3 trades the first two films' director Jon Favreau (who still puts in an appearance as Happy the overbearing security guard) for Shane Black, who also wrote the screenplay. Black previously collaborated with Iron Man 3 star Robert Downey Jr. on the wonderful Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, where their personalities as director and actor were seemingly a perfect fit. If nothing else, Iron Man 3 proves that it wasn't a fluke - Downey Jr. hits a new peak as Tony Stark here, after coming off as a little disenchanted with it in The Avengers, while Black's acidic wit hasn't dulled at all (although it has been reined in; this is a PG-13 blockbuster).

Iron Man 3 opens with its absolute worst gesture: we're dumped in the middle of a flashback to 1999, being narrated by present-day Tony Stark. Flashbacks and voice-over are lazy storytelling at the best of times, but here it's only used to crudely insert a new villain into Tony's past for no reason that is ever satisfactorily paid-off. Why does Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) have to have crossed paths with Tony Stark prior to the present-day events of the movie? It never really ends up informing either character's motivations. Things pick up after that, at least. The voice-over is quietly taken out the back and shot while we catch up with Stark after the events of The Avengers. Things haven't been going too well - he can't sleep and he's been plagued by anxiety attacks ever since, and it's straining his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Meanwhile, America is being hit with a rash of terrorist attacks masterminded by the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley), and no-one can quite figure out how he's doing it. Eventually he ends up on the wrong side of Stark's ire, but before Stark can take action his home is destroyed and he's sent on the run, without his expensive toys to back him up.

That's about as far as the plot can be synopsised without hitting spoiler territory. More than anything else, the plot of Iron Man 3 is characterised by shocking reveals, and it doesn't work at all. Putting aside the issue of predictability (I don't think I was ever less than two reveals ahead of the plot, your mileage may vary), it does awful things to the central conflict, or lack thereof. For most of its 135-minute running time, Iron Man 3 suffers from a distinct lack of a central villain, and it feels like there's a new (or a new old) one every ten minutes. Which is only compounded by the fact that none of the antagonists has much of a distinct personality, aside from Mandarin, who is entirely a gimmick.

At least the tone is mostly light. It's jokier than Iron Man 2, and probably the first film as well, and it stops the plot from getting too bogged down in its murky wheel-spinning. Eventually it culminates in an explosive climax, as these things do, and... Well, there's not a lot to say. The action is as it always has been. Did you enjoy the CGI-driven aerial combat in Iron Man and The Avengers? This is more of exactly the same. As someone who didn't, Iron Man 3 did not make me a convert. It's not a coincidence that the best film released under Marvel's studio to date is Captain America, which also had by far the smallest scale action, and it's telling that the best parts of this film are those in which Tony is robbed of his suit. Unfortunately, this only makes up about five minutes of the movie.

That's a lot of words spent discussing a movie that everyone already knows if they want to see or not. It's neither a disastrous misfire or a shot in the arm*. It's fun, in a very minor way, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit happy to see the back of it.

6/10

*At this point into the current superhero film cycle, I would welcome either with open arms.

Crood Humour

The Croods is a fucking ugly movie.

There's no other way to put it, and it's something that the movie is never able to fully recover from. Dreamworks animation have a storied history with regards to visual fidelity, with their previous films ranging from unspeakably hideous to kind of okay. The Croods is pretty uneven itself - many of the environments (quite a few of which are, admittedly, actually paintings) are quite lovely indeed, the menagerie of bizarre pseudo-prehistoric animals are a little less so, and the human characters are... well, there's where things get rocky. Bad enough that they should have the Dreamworks standard-issue waxy skin, but the poor humans in this movie suffer from a virtually never-ending series of afflictions: their hair is rendered in immobile  blocks that sit about a centimetre off their scalps, their teeth seem to float inside their mouths, their bodies don't respond to light and shadow properly, and they perpetually seem to be floating just a little bit in front of the frame. All this on top of character designs that already overshoot a comical idea of cavemen right into lumpy, inhuman flesh-things. I have no idea if it was the complicated production history (this began life as an Aardman project) or something else entirely, but The Croods does not for one second look like a 135 million dollar motion picture.

I make such a big deal of this not to condemn the film, however, but to commend directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco for making a film that ends up managing to be pretty damn good in the face of one of the most crippling flaws any film could be saddled with. Sanders, as we know from Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon (both of which he co-directed with Dean DeBlois, who sat this one out in favour of helming a sequel to HTTYD) is a fairly wonderful director of animation, capable of balancing tone, keeping the pace lively and engineering physical comedy with great panache. The Croods is not as fine as either of those movies, but it still makes for very light, breezy family entertainment - and it's at least more even than HTTYD, which I found had a deathly boring stretch towards the end.

The Croods centres on a primitive family - the Croods of the title - who live a quietly conservative existence out of their tiny cave. The family patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage, choosing to behave himself) keeps his wife Ugga (a woefully underused Catherine Keener), mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman) and three children - son Thunk (Clark Duke) and daughters Eep (Emma Stone) and Sandy (Randy Thorn) - safe through constant fear and intimidation, treating anything new or unusual as life-threatening. Most of the Crood family isn't thrilled with this way of life, but it keeps them from going the way of their deceased neighbouring families, and that's good enough for them. Eep, however, chafes under her father's strict rules and longs to explore the world outside the cave. It's on one such sojourn that she runs into Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a more evolved kind of caveman who comes bearing tidings of the end of the world. He ends up being right, and the Croods are forced out of their cave and into the big wide world. If you guessed that from this point they meet up with Guy, tensions run high, lessons are learned and family bonds are strengthened then you get absolutely nothing, because no shit they do.

It's a hoary old plot, alright, but it goes down more than well enough thanks to a few things. First and possibly most importantly, the voice cast is firing on all cylinders to make the Crood family dynamic feel real and lived-in - they're absolutely convincing as a family of people who have known one another for years and who deeply love and can't stand each other in equal measure. In addition to this, the exact moment the plot kicks into gear and gets familiar is also the moment that we get exposed to the greater world of The Croods, and it's a terrific work of art design. Not all the designs are perfect (in particular, I never really warmed to the sabre-toothed cat that crops up throughout the movie), but most of the flora and fauna that dot the landscape of the film are a delight to see come to life in all their warped, cartoon glory. Finally, the directors do an excellent job of establishing real stakes at the climax, and making the danger facing the characters feel clear and present at all times, enough so that the eminently predictable ending actually feels surprising and earned.

Really though, the plot just fades into the background most of the time. The tone of The Croods is one of light comedy at almost all times, and that works out just fine for it. It's mostly well-assembled and elaborate physical comedy, although all of the characters except Ugga get at least one or two moments to shine in the dialogue. Not all of the humour lands; some of the physical comedy descends into too-broad slapstick, and there is one deeply regrettable animal sidekick whose jokes all revolve around the grating anachronistic humour that has plagued Dreamworks animated films since time immemorial, but I was laughing out loud more often than not.

It's hard not to feel at least a little disappointed by The Croods, and it's definitely a step down from Sanders's previous work as a director, but that still leaves it plenty of room to be big, silly and hugely entertaining, as well as position it well above the heap in the Dreamworks back catalogue.

7/10

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

I find it difficult to speak with anything approaching objectivity towards Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 film Confessions. It is, in so many ways, another in a long line of grim, misanthropic anti-thrillers that many directors, like Austria's Michael Haneke, have been producing over the last decade. And yet, while I find most of those movies to range from hateful to begrudgingly admirable, Confessions straight-up blindsided me.

The movie begins with what is essentially a its own contained short film. It’s the end of term and Class B’s teacher, Ms. Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) informs her unruly class that she won’t be returning after break. As the ensuing celebration dies down, she starts to talk about the recent death of her 4-year-old daughter, which she reveals was caused by two of her own students. After the class is well-and-truly riled up, she reveals one final piece of information, a cruel trick that she has perpetrated on the culprits (you can find out the nature of said trick in almost any synopsis of the film, but it’s such an effective shock moment that I'm loathe to spoil it).

Only after this does the story proper, adapted by Nakashima from a novel by Kanae Minato, kick into gear. The rest of the movie takes the form of a series of overlapping spoken confessions by several of the students in Moriguchi’s class as the ramifications of her actions start to take hold. As with any such film, however, the machinations of the plot are simply a springboard, here for a film about the cruelty that children are capable of, and the adult behaviour that enables it - as well as questions about the value of human life and the morality of revenge, and an attack on Japan's laws about criminal offenders to boot. Questions which, of course, the film has no interest in providing answers for. So far, so much like any other grim, provocative art-thriller.

The key difference is, I think, that where so many of those other movies traffic in an aesthetic of cynical detachment, Nakashima is operating in a style that’s much more meditative and openly emotional. Instead of feeling clinical and airless, Confessions is moody and frequently melodramatic. Nakashima tends to crowd his mise en scène, bringing the characters’ emotions out into the film frame to surround them, and renders each confession as something of a tone poem. Aiding and abetting the visuals are a small handful of licensed songs, used and repeated with the precision of a bullet (the second appearance of Radiohead’s “Last Flowers” in particular destroyed me) to create a thick atmosphere of unreality.

This heightened reality serves a double purpose of creating an environment where the most histrionic parts of the screenplay and the more outlandish plot twists feel more plausible, as well as making the ideas in play that much more confronting and affecting. I haven't seen either of Nakashima's earlier cult-hit films Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, but my understanding is that Confessions is working on a totally different level to those movies, and doesn't seem to stem from his earlier work at all.

It’s true that after all this, up to and including its twisted punchline, Confessions only really adds up to so much provocation. But effective provocation has its place in cinema too, and Confessions is, as far as I'm concerned, effective and then some. It succeeded in utterly devastating me in spite of my instinctive resistance to material like this, and left me in a state of dumbfounded awe. And for that, I can only concede defeat to Tetsuya Nakashima and his tremendous suckerpunch of a film.

Almost as pointless as covering Led Zeppel- oh.

David Fincher has always been a filmmaker I've felt that I should like more than I do. I mean sure, I think Se7en is one of the stone-cold best films of the 90s and I'm of the (not at all big enough) camp that believes Zodiac to be even better. Hell, I even have time for the assembly cut of Alien³ most days. Here's a director with two honest-to-god masterpieces under his belt and a strong vision all of his own. And yet, I find it very difficult to ever get very excited about any new film he brings out. You see, David Fincher has fucking awful taste in projects. Alien³? Forgivable, he was an unproven music video director at the time. But then after proving to the world he was someone to pay attention to with Se7en, he followed it up with Fight Club, a film of consummate craftsmanship that is unbearably obnoxious on the rare occasions that it isn't downright offensive. Panic Room has already been condemned by history and needs no help from me, so I will settle for describing it as 'baffling', and the only outright 'bad' film of his ouevre. Zodiac was magnificent and very much a logical next step for the director of Se7en and a sign that he was well on his way to a bright future. So of course he followed it up with the unspeakably dull Benjamin Button, a film so competent and airless that it's not even interesting enough to be bad. Naturally, it went over well with the Academy, and having got a foot in the door at the Oscars, he returned with the edgy and topical The Social Network, a witty but forgettable script by the vastly overrated Aaron Sorkin that was never unenjoyable but ultimately forgettable and felt like a waste of the efforts of many very, very talented people. Now he's back with an adaptation of tepid bestselling thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it's not entirely mediocre. And that ends up being kind of the problem.

I perhaps shouldn't have gone on at such length to start with. The thing, you see, is that there is very little less interesting than talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. By this point in time the vast majority of people will be familiar with the story: disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (in this version played by Daniel Craig) is invited to an island in the north of Sweden to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Harriet Vanger at the request of her still-grieving uncle Henrik (Christopher Plummer, who treats his dialogue like it's a race and babbles out exposition with no emotion other than the vague sense that he'd rather be elsewhere). During his investigation he crosses paths with the titular Girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a royally fucked-up ward of the state who has been dealing with an abusive carer (Yorick van Wageningen) and they join forces to get to the bottom of things, then Stieg Larsson complains about finance speculators for a hundred fucking pages.

It's likely anyone interested in TGWTDT is already familiar with one of its earlier incarnations, be it the book or the Swedish film, later adapted into a TV series as well. I certainly am - in fact, I was already pretty much sick of the story by the time this version came around. The mystery at the core is not without its appeal, but it's hardly one for the ages, and the socially conscious window-dressing feels staler and staler with every retelling.

None of this is the fault of Fincher or his incredibly talented team - in particular, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score betters even their own masterful work on Social Network, and longtime Fincher collaborators Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's gunshot editing is propulsive and timed within an inch of its life. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth paints Sweden in a pallette of slate greys and sickly fluorescent yellows that is initially perfectly atmospheric and gloomy but becomes tiresome by the end of the film's 158 minutes (a compromise with the studio - Fincher's original cut runs three hours and thank god for someone with sense stepping in). It's technically flawless and not even without its fair share of artistic merit, but it feels like so much wasted breath on (and even sometimes at odds with) Steven Zailian's functional script or even Stieg Larsson's by-turns dry and vaguely sleazy novel. It's impossible in any meaningful way to call the Swedish version a better film, but something about that version's TV-level production values and artistic sensibilities felt more appropriate to the quality of the story it was telling.

The only remarkable part of either film version, really, is its leading lady. I'm more partial to Noomi Rapace's turn in the Swedish film, who tapped some incredibly dark places to find a version of Lisbeth Salander who might actually exist. Fans of the book will likely prefer Mara's decision to play the character as written; much more artificially a Character, she still acquits herself just fine playing the hell out of it. Craig, meanwhile, is miles away from the bland charm of the original's Michael Nyqvist, happy to play the character as weary and grumpy and kind of an asshole in an incredibly magnetic way. The Swedish film landed Rapace international stardom and the chance to break into Hollywood, a move which I hope and pray pays dividends, but only time will tell. Mara doesn't seem to have attracted quite the same accolades, but with an Oscar nomination* under her belt her future looks bright all the same. If it means more performances of this calibre in future then I wish her the best of luck, and promise to try my best not to think of her as 'that girl who sleepwalked through the dreary Nightmare on Elm Street remake'.

Ultimately there's nothing concrete I can really criticise about TGWTDT beyond how damn unecessary it feels. But at the same time it's hard to respond to it with anything more than muted enthusiasm. And I'd have liked to have been able to respond to something that so many great people have toiled over with something more than such faint praise. It's frustrating in a way that nothing in the film can make up for. Maybe next time, David. I hope so. I really do.

6/10

*Hasn't got a hope in hell of winning, though.

La Dolce Vita

A Bittersweet Life (a bastardisation of the original title which translates to "The Sweet Life", because irony is a lost art) is very eager to tell the audience that it isn't fucking around. "Get the hell out of my way" it says to the opening credits as cameras swoop and fly and track in a whirlwind with Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) in the eye, finishing his meal and methodically going about his job as an employee of crime boss Kang (Kim Yeong-chol), effortlessly dispatching a group of rowdy thugs from a high-class hotel. This almost-wordless, frenetic opening sequence is almost all the character introduction we get for the rest of the film, and woe betide the audience member who isn't paying attention.

From there things fall into place fairly neatly. In a nutshell, Sun-woo is left to mind the shop for Kang while he's in Shanghai for a few days and is for the first time forced to re-evaluate his lifestyle for reasons that are not made explicit until the end of the film, if ever, but are easy enough to guess at, and he commits a couple of fuck-ups that leave him at the mercy of his own boss as well as rival kingpin President Baek (Hwang Jeong-min). With nowhere to run and seemingly nothing to live for, Sun-woo grits his teeth and swears revenge on everyone involved and from there it's off to the races.

It's a pretty well-worn story, but that's hardly a complaint in the face of where it allows director Kim Jee-woon to take things. He cites Le Samourai and Scarface (a combination which should already have eyebrows raised) as inspirations, but there's obviously more than a few overt influences at work here. The strongest voice in the film, however, is plainly that of Kim Jee-woon, and when he e.g. brazenly lifts a shot straight from Taxi Driver it's done to dynamo effect, one of a dozen grace notes that make the film just that little bit richer.

Jee-Woon is known primarily for being a bit of a magpie with genre, cherrypicking imagery, plot elements and techniques from any number of diverse and questionably compatible kinds of films and weaving them together into his own elaborate tapestry. The core of this particular frankenstein's monster is undoubtedly film-noir, with all the monochromatic palette and rise-and-fall, me-against-the-world plot setup you'd expect to follow. Following probably less expectedly are fight scenes staged like a martial arts movie or a climactic shootout that looks for all the world like a Hong Kong action movie or a handful of scenes that are straight-up gangster pastiche or so-on. It's a testament to Jee-woon's own strong visual sensibility that he's able to make it feel like part of a unified whole, in addition to being damn snazzy moment-to-moment.

And make no mistake, the thing looks fucking snazzy. I already mentioned the traditional noir colour scheme and all the delightful, shadowy compositions that it entails, but it's accompanied by flawless* cinematography that makes everything look shiny and sleek and Expensive in a very pointed and deliberate way as well as a handful of motifs that serve to provide the thematic meat and potatoes without ever forcing the script to slow everything down and throw the audience a bone to chew on. Combined with wonderful arrhythmic, abrupt editing it results in a film as driven as its protagonist that feels about a third as long as its two-hours-on-the-nose running time, and that's never a bad thing.

It's these visual reminders of the sheer inconsequence of Sun-woo's lost lifestyle that let A Bittersweet Life, like fellow genre-bending revenge story Kill Bill (and dammit I was trying so very hard to avoid comparisons to Tarantino or Miike in this review), have its cake and eat it too, providing a slick and exciting thriller edifice while constantly reminding us just how unfulfilling it ultimately is. That's overselling it all a wee bit though, though - A Bittersweet Life is first and foremost a crowd-pleaser, and an enormously successful one. That it is a formally audacious and unusually thoughtful one to boot is simply the icing on a cake that is very sweet indeed.

*Assuming that the lousy colour reproduction was a feature of the DVD I was watching and not the film.

Letters From Our Fathers

It is almost impossible for me to believe that Letters From Iwo Jima (originally given the far better title of Red Sun, Black Sand) was filmed back-to-back with Flags of Our Fathers. There isn't a single complaint that I leveled at that film that hasn't been deliberately excised from its sibling with surgical precision. It's just as well, too, because the American-made film focusing on the Japanese who fought at Iwo Jima as a companion to a film that was already hopelessly indelicate could very easily have been a total disaster. Instead, it ended up the finest war movie of the last decade.

Eastwood clearly knew how much was riding on the movie, because all the stops have been pulled out in making sure everything hews as close to real Japanese culture as humanly possible. Understanding that there was no way Paul Haggis could be allowed anywhere near the material, Eastwood instead hired Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita (a woman with precisely zero other film credits, before or since) to pen the script. Haggis gets a story credit, but I suspect it may just be because Letters parallels his Flags script, as it must. The cast is also composed entirely of Japanese actors speaking their native language in place of the usual Hollywood approach of casting a slew of Pan-Asian actors and letting them butcher dialogue in a language that they quite possibly don't speak at all. I'm far too Caucasian to pass judgement myself, but the tremendous critical and commercial success that Letters saw in Japan makes me fairly comfortable in believing that there are no serious representational gaffes here.

The level of dedication shines through in the film itself. It's impossible to doubt for a second the filmmakers' dedication to their characters. If Flags was already a war film of unusual humanity, Letters bests it by a spectacular margin. Like Flags it focuses on three particular soldiers in the fight for Iwo Jima without ever really being about them at all. Where Flags was also about those men struggling to come to terms with life after the fact, Letters is instead about the fact that these men are going to die, and they know it. The letters of the title are written by the film's characters to their families, but they are written for the characters themselves, who know full-well that neither they or the letters will ever leave Iwo.

If I described Flags as 'restrained', the only adjective I could rightfully level at Letters is 'meditative'. In my review of Flags of Our Fathers I said that Iwo Jima was by far the most important character in the film*, and that it was never better than the moments it returned to that island. Letters From Iwo Jima (aside from a handful of flashbacks) never leaves those shores, and this allows it to settle into a steady rhythm, following the Japanese soldiers as they each continue trying to exist in the only way they know how. Even when the war finally reaches the island it's made to feel like an inevitable fact of life introducing further complications to the characters than the bloody combat that it really is. Even more than Flags the warfare is painted in broad, abstract strokes, with cinematography so desaturated that it more suggests colours rather than capturing them on film.

With its gentle rhythm, stripped-down aesthetic and endless reserves of humanity it's difficult not to become caught up in the lives of those Japanese soldiers yourself. When the inevitable comes and people start dying, their removal from the film's fabric feels more painful than the countless hectic, brutally violent war-film deaths. Being an Eastwood film, it's entirely unsurprising that Letters is a formal masterpiece. Being an Eastwood film, it's altogether surprising and greatly pleasing that it should so perfectly balance bitter anti-war outrage and raw emotion without ever feeling less than absolutely genuine. The director is genuinely not known for keeping his emotions in check, but he manages it here with grace to spare.

That Letters From Iwo Jima is alone the finest war film in a decade, probably more** would alone make it worthy of being remembered. The real magic, though, occurs in a roughly twenty-minute passage in the middle of the film where it directly overlaps with Flags of Our Fathers. In these moments the two films together do something that transcends either of them. No matter which of the two you are watching, it becomes impossible not to think of the very real men and their struggles on the opposite side of the battle, even as they appear no larger than ants milling about before the camera. In this way, both films (Flags especially, since it had further to climb) overcome their limitations, even many of the ones endemic to the medium, to become among the most powerful and effective anti-war statements ever conceived.

*At least, I wish I had.

**With the concession that The Thin Red Line beggars a descriptor like that.