Flags of Our Fathers (Widescreen Edition)
List Price:
Our Price: $4.28
You Save: $8.71 (67%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD releases
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford, John Benjamin Hickey, John Slattery, Ryan PhillippeBrand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Korean (Original Language); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 132 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-02-06
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Dreamworks Video
Movie Reviews of Flags of Our Fathers (Widescreen Edition)
Movie Review: A different America than the one in the history books
Summary: 5 Stars
"Flags Of Our Fathers" is a movie perfectly-suited for these times, examining the intersection of war, publicity, money and heroism. With objective sobriety, director Clint Eastwood dissects how the U.S. government used the most famous photo of World War II - the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima - to drum up last-ditch support for war bonds.
The Greatest Generation? The power of this movie is how it reinforces that title by cutting it off right at the knees. The subtext and commentary is so significant that it forgives its imperfections of vaguely written characters and workmanlike performances. In fact, "Flags Of Our Fathers" almost depends on its blandness. Its aim is no less than busting the myth of American heroism.
It does so by retelling the story of that iconic shot revealing the cost of its existence through the men who starred on that war bond tour: medic Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), runner Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and front-line solider Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). They were in the photo almost by accident, raising the second flag that day on Mount Suribachi. But it was the second picture - not the first - that told the thousand-word story.
Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes - the only three in the picture who survived Iwo Jima - were whisked away from battle to meet President Truman and fumble their way through speeches. In one absurd moment, they scale a paper model of the mountain to plant Old Glory in front of 100,000 fans at Chicago's Solider Field. In another, they eat ice cream sundaes in the shape of the flag-planting.
The stoic, decent Bradley manages to keep his calm, but Hayes, a sensitive man whose Native American heritage is tossed back at him in offhand, racist jokes, gets into booze and fits of self-loathing, bawling in an embrace with a fallen comrade's mother. Gagnon soaks up the adoration, yet finds himself compromised and controlled. The celebrity - and the pressure to pander - is a significant burden. If you haven't erected a heroic complex, it's hard to be one.
The tour is intercut with The Battle For Iwo Jima. It was the kind of fight that put an exclamation point on the cruelty and illogic of World War II: More than 25,000 men died for a tiny Japanese island, whose use as a bomber airstrip was a happy accident discovered during the battle. After most of the men had died.
Eastwood captures the struggle with brutal elegance. Because Iwo Jima was a volcanic island, the sand was black sulfur, and the director desaturates the film stock to match it. The result is a moonscape of empty, stark wilderness, a tropical desert of flares and silent snipers. Distinctive and moody, existential dread oppresses the soldiers on that island, and cinematographer Tom Stern effectively uses shadows, especially in a scene where Doc discovers a friend in a sulfur cave, mutilated.
What a hellish, ugly, alien setting it is. As if to suggest its permanence, Eastwood casts this desaturated pall on the stateside tour scenes, too. In that crucial way, "Flags Of Our Fathers" draws out that emptiness to comment on the sheer suck of life that WWII was for this country.
We can see, quite well, that the war, along with the Holocaust, devastated the reckless, forward-leaning (and often fighting) spirit of Europe, castrated it, rendered it lifeless, without much hope, especially after half of it was consumed by new, equally Cold War.
But what did it do to America? Looking back on my primary education, I'd describe my impression as thus:
WWII catapulted the US to the top of the geopolitical polls, where it played a 40-year BCS Championship with the USSR Commicats, emerging, finally, with good quarterbacking from JFK and Reagan. It minted our military and moral superstardom, and created a story of elemental greatness needed to win that game of nukes and subs and spies - to sustain us in those hours when a balloon was shot down at the Berlin Wall, or Nadia Comaneci scored her perfect 10s.
In its final act, "Flags Of Our Fathers" hacks away at that aura. Wonderfully edited by Joel Cox, it follows the men's arcs after the tour and, through them, charts the numb, sick psyche of America underneath the hoopla of victory. We see divorce. Death. Distance. Loneliness. And beneath that is the insignificance imposed on the men by themselves and others, and the search to reverse it.
Thoreau's quote about the mass of men resonates here, with one twist: Gagnon, Bradley and Hayes were plucked from that mass to represent America, arisen. Their duty done, they are inserted back none the fuller or richer, more quiet and desperate.
It leads one to wonder: If not these lives rewarded, just which kind of life should one lead? Maybe desperation is the lot, in victory or defeat. Maybe it's the condition. For the stuff that really makes Ira and Doc heroes are the small duties they carry out in these final scenes and that they are of no great consolation or purpose is part of the tragedy.
What is righteous feels more like suffering. What is "truth" feels aberrant. America has backed itself into a corner of greatness, of pulling off one magnificent feat of strength after another, and "Flags Of Our Fathers" puts the image under the microscope to find a cacophony of citizens pleading "not I."
This portrait of America severely differs from that in "We Were Soldiers" and "Saving Private Ryan," and while those movies serve their place, thank Eastwood (and Steven Spielberg, who developed it) for this one. It is solemn, wise and more poignant than its initial diffidence would make it seem. It is one of the best movies of the year.
Summary of Flags of Our Fathers (Widescreen Edition)
From Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven) comes the World Was II epic Flags of Our Fathers, produced by Eastwood, Academy Award winner Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler?s List), and Rob Lorenz (Mystic River), and from a screenplay adapted by William Broyles, Jr. (Cast Away) and Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash).February 1945. Even as victory in Europe was finally within reach, the war in the Pacific raged on. One of the most crucial and bloodiest battles of the war was the struggle for the island of Iwo Jima, which culminated with what would become one of the most iconic images in history: five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi. The inspiring photo capturing that moment became a symbol of victory to a nation that had grown weary of war and made instant heroes of the six American soldiers at the base of the flag, some of whom would die soon after, never knowing that they had been immortalized. But the surviving flag raisers had no interest in being held up as symbols and did not consider themselves heroes; they wanted only to stay on the front with their brothers in arms who were fighting and dying without fanfare or glory.
Flags of Our Fathers is based on the bestselling book by James Bradley with Ron Powers, which chronicled the battle of Iwo Jima and the fates of the flag raisers and some of their brothers in Easy Company. Bradley?s father, John "Doc" Bradley, was one of the soldiers pictured raising the flag, although James never knew the full extent of his father?s experiences until after the elder Bradley?s death in 1994.
Thematically ambitious and emotionally complex, Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers is an intimate epic with much to say about war and the nature of heroism in America. Based on the non-fiction bestseller by James Bradley (with Ron Powers), and adapted by Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis (Jarhead screenwriter William Broyles Jr. wrote an earlier draft that was abandoned when Eastwood signed on to direct), this isn't so much a conventional war movie as it is a thought-provoking meditation on our collective need for heroes, even at the expense of those we deem heroic. In telling the story of the six men (five Marines, one Navy medic) who raised the American flag of victory on the battle-ravaged Japanese island of Iwo Jima on February 23rd, 1945, Eastwood takes us deep into the horror of war (in painstakingly authentic Iwo Jima battle scenes) while emphasizing how three of the surviving flag-raisers (played by Adam Beach, Ryan Phillippe, and Jesse Bradford) became reluctant celebrities ? and resentful pawns in a wartime publicity campaign ? after their flag-raising was immortalized by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal in the most famous photograph in military history.
As the surviving flag-raisers reluctantly play their public roles as "the heroes of Iwo Jima" during an exhausting (but clearly necessary) wartime bond rally tour, Flags of Our Fathers evolves into a pointed study of battlefield valor and misplaced idolatry, incorporating subtle comment on the bogus nature of celebrity, the trauma of battle, and the true meaning of heroism in wartime. Wisely avoiding any direct parallels to contemporary history, Eastwood allows us to draw our own conclusions about the Iwo Jima flag-raisers and how their postwar histories (both noble and tragic) simultaneously illustrate the hazards of exploited celebrity and society's genuine need for admirable role models during times of national crisis. Flags of Our Fathers defies the expectations of those seeking a more straightforward war-action drama, but it's richly satisfying, impeccably crafted film that manages to be genuinely patriotic (in celebrating the camaraderie of soldiers in battle) while dramatizing the ultimate futility of war. Eastwood's follow-up film, Letters from Iwo Jima, examines the Iwo Jima conflict from the Japanese perspective. --Jeff Shannon
Beyond Flags of Our Fathers
 Other World War II DVDs |  Essential DVDs by Director Clint Eastwood |  Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
Similar DVD Movies
DefianceCRAIG,DANIEL; Release date: 2009-06-02; Published: 2009-06-01; DVD
Best price: $2.66
Price in other shops:
Saving Private Ryan (Single-Disc Special Limited Edition)Paramount; Release date: 1999-11-02; DVD
Best price: $5.89
Price in other shops:
The Thin Red LinePENN,SEAN/NOLTE,NI; Release date: 2002-05-21; DVD
Best price: $5.47
Price in other shops:
Flags of Our Fathersby James Bradley, Ron Powers
Bantam; Published: 2006-08-29; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.91
Price in other shops:
The Great RaidLGF; Release date: 2011-04-26; DVD
Best price: $5.92
Price in other shops:
WindtalkersCAGE,NICOLAS; Release date: 2002-10-15; Published: 2002-10-01; DVD
Best price: $6.97
Price in other shops:
Band of BrothersHBO HOME VIDEO; Release date: 2002-11-05; DVD
Best price: $36.51
Price in other shops:
We Were Soldiers (Widescreen Edition)GIBSON,MEL; Release date: 2002-08-20; DVD
Best price: $2.79
Price in other shops:
The PacificHBO HOME VIDEO; Release date: 2010-11-02; DVD
Best price: $23.39
Price in other shops:
Letters from Iwo Jima (Two-Disc Special Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2007-05-22; DVD
Best price: $3.49
Price in other shops: