Long Letters

Tonight's movie presentation at the Oldham Odeon was Letters From Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood's companion piece to Flags of our Fathers. It tells the story of the capture of Iwo Jima from the the Japanese perspective.

It's shot in a peculiar near sepia film stock (whether for real or digitally done afterwards I don't know) but the end result is a very sepia tone with the other colours, mainly the blue of sea and sky, pretty washed out. Even blood looks strangely muted.

It's also in Japanese, with sub-titles. Which would be fine except that rather than putting them in the black bar below the film they're in the shot, unless it's a two line sub-title in which case it bleeds into the black. Since they clearly can use the black why don't they all the time? It does make it very hard to read and, unlike films in French or German where I'm relying on the sub-titles more to let me keep up here I only have the sub-titles to rely on and they're damn hard to read at times. Sigh.

Anyway, enough about the technicalities, what about the movie? Well, it's OK I guess. It's all a bit worthy and it's a bit slow at times but to be fair it didn't bore me ... but I don't think I'll be rushing to watch it again. Like Downfall it may be good cinema, but it's not entertainment.