At school, Owen is bullied by a trio led by Mark (Jimmy 'Jax' Pinchak, "Hostage"), but he suffers in silence, explaining away his injuries as clumsiness. His mother (Cara Buono, "Mad Men's" Faye Miller) is a religious woman who only drinks wine while Owen eats and fights on the phone with the father she's divorcing. Every one he targets will meet a bad fate. When we meet Owen, the pale and bony boy with the abnormally large eyes and forehead is wearing a very creepy mask, spying on them with a telescope. It's a creepier film altogether until it loses its pacing in the second half, closing with a penultimate and final scene which suffer in comparison to "Let the Right One In." Reeve's adaptation dispenses with the lives of its protagonists' adult neighbors and its a good move. The score (Michael Giacchino, "Up"), too, adds to the overall effect with its droning horns and kettle drums. Moving the setting from Sweden to Los Alamos, New Mexico, a town whose very name evokes images of death (nuclear testing), was inspired (the film's opening shot of emergency vehicles snaking through the snowy hills is breathtaking) and Reeves's stars Smit-McPhee and Moretz both give more compelling performances.
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But Abby is intrigued by Owen and one night he finds her tapping at his window asking for him to "Let Me In." American remakes of well regarded foreign films are almost always poor imitations, but director Matt Reeves ("Cloverfield"), adapting the John Ajvide Lindqvist novel and screenplay, has made a film that plays better than the original - for its first half.
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Tales From Iwo Jima is released in UK cinemas on Friday 23rd February 2007.Lonely Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, "The Road") finds his new neighbor Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz, "Kick-Ass") sitting barefoot in the snow in their apartment complex courtyard one evening and she tells him she cannot be his friend. Put the two films together and you get an involving wartime epic that also serves as an indictment of the lies governments will tell to keep their soldiers fighting. Caught in the middle of this conflict are the frightened grunts, who mostly just want to get home to their wives.Įastwood directs his performers with great skill, and brings a weary, astringent eye to the carnage that unfolds on Iwo Jima's blackened sands. Wanatabe's commanding officer is a trained strategist, but he is frustrated by his officers, who will commit suicide by hand grenade at the drop of a hat, thus damaging the army's already slim chance of victory against the US. What we get, in this long, sober and sad movie, is a bitter conflict between modern warfare and an enshrined ideology that regards dying in battle as an honourable sacrifice. It's a better movie for that, as well as the decision to play everything in Japanese with English subtitles. Where Flags of our Fathers dealt with the public relations story behind Iwo Jima, Letters is more closely focussed on the battle itself, and leaves the island only in a few brief flashbacks. Returning to the pivotal second world war battle, this time from a Japanese perspective, Eastwood has fashioned a quietly powerful indictment of the war's wanton waste, and anchored it with a fearsome performance from Ken Wanatabe.
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This is the second of Clint Eastwood's double bill of films about Iwo Jima, although the tone and colour palette is so similar to last year's Flags Of Our Fathers that it could easily be the second half of the same movie.