Flags of our fathers

If it seems like I'm seeing a lot of movies lately, it's because I am. Gloria can't do very many things but she has an appetite for experience yet, and movies and lunch are the two things she can almost always do. Sometimes it's hard to find a movie she can watch. So I figured that since she had enjoyed the first fifteen minutes or so of "The Black Dahlia" before it turned into a sordid lump of grim stupidity, mostly on the grounds that it looked like her early youth, "The Flags of our Fathers" might actually work out for her, in spite of being a war movie. She thought "Rang de Basanti" was good too, and that was not only about people you'd have to call terrorists but it was also heavily subtitled. So we went.

It's certainly hard to watch for long stretches. I'll have to say that once again the trailers were misleading. The trailers look like the whole movie happens Stateside except for a few minutes. But really I'd say half the movie is Iwo Jima, and that most of Iwo Jima is in battle, waiting for battle, or cleaning up after battle. And like all new modern war movies, there's no cutting away from the severed head and so on. There's one body they didn't show us, and since by then you've seen a lot of awful things, it's very effective not to show that one.

Remember what I've been going on about, regarding suffering at the movies? I freely admit I had to spend a fair amount of time looking at the ceiling and letting the movie play out in my peripheral vision. I did suffer in those scenes. But here's the thing: it was worth it. This is not a movie that slaps you in the face over and over with bloody guts just to show how hip it is to the realities of war and to inflate the special effects budget. There's something going on. There's a real story, and some real questions -- no answers, really, despite the kind of weird moral-to-the-story voiceover at the end: that's just tacked on because ol' Clint or maybe Spielberg couldn't walk away and leave the thing just hanging there. But really, they could have: the last words have already been expressed really well by the story itself and it just doesn't add anything to have them intoned.

Really this movie isn't about an analysis or a position or an ideology. Good thing, too, because honestly Clint Eastwood's politics stink. He seems to do pretty well with a movie that just looks at stuff, though.

The movie seems to think it's all about what a hero is or isn't, but I think it's more general than that: when you look at the things that the people back home are doing, and hear them justify themselves, there's a definite parallel, which is unsettling to say the least.

Anyway, it's very well crafted, and it's compelling, and it feels very authentic. Opening day at the Green Valley there were lots of cars in the parking lot, but maybe they were there for "The Prestige" (which the other caregiver gets to take Gloria to because she couldn't believe the war movie could be bearable and because I kind of wanted to see "the Prestige" with the nice fellow).

Gregory Bateson used to say that nothing happend for just one reason. He said everything is overdetermined. So the overdetermining factor in me seeing this movie is Johnny Cash singing about Ira Hayes dying drunk a few years after the war. It turns out the movie not only has a very attractive man (Adam Beach) playing Ira Hayes, but it spends quite a lot of time on him so you really get to understand him.

At this point Joe Bob would list all the kinds of fu in the movie and then say "check it out," but I'm not Joe Bob.