Last weekend we saw Venus and today Letters from Iwo Jima, and both were really good, each in its own way.

Venus: Remember the gorgeousness of Peter O'Toole in his Lawrence of Arabia days? Could anyone have looked as delicious as he did with those blue, blue eyes? Well, now he's old, sad to say, and those blue eyes are a little rheumy and surrounded by a sea of wrinkles. BUT he's as terrific as ever in this wonderful film, though the indignities of old age are catching up with him, or at least his character. He could easily come across as an old lech in this film in regard to his relationship with the niece of one of his cronies--she has been sent to take care of the crony and is truly a fish out of water in the world of these old guys. And it's a neat trick that his "old lech" desires reveal an impotence that does not erase the desires or lessen his ability to see her as a person and also in an almost mythic dimension (he calls her Venus), not a "vile" intrusion as described by his crony. One of my favorite scenes in the film is P O'T, his crony and another old guy at their daily meeting in a local breakfast joint and getting into a fistfight. One does not know whether to laugh or cry--generally they just read the obits to see how many columns their old pals get. I don't want to give too much of this film away because it is so worth your seeing if you get the chance. Or just wait for the DVD--it will hold.

Cling Eastwood is really an awesome filmmaker and Letters from Iwo Jima is another awesome film. I didn't see its companion film, Flags of Our Fathers, which got lukewarm reviews, but this one is outstanding in its ability to treat the tragedy of Iwo Jima with sympathy for the Japanese without faulting Americans. The film opens with a contemporary view of the Iwo Jima landscape, now a benign beach with soft breakers on the beach. I thought of being at the Normandy beaches a couple of years ago--the English Channel was as calm as a bathtub and the sun was out. I tried, unsuccessfully, to imagine what it must have been like there in 1945--what it sounded like, looked like, smelled like. Eastwood goes far in this film to show the viewer exactly that. The cinematography is terrific--Eastwood blends old footage with new footage so carefully in terms of color and atmosphere I could hardly tell where one ended and the other started. Ken Watanabe, who plays the Japanese commander, Kubiyahashi (sp?), could easily have dominated this film, but there are other characters whose names are not familiar to me that fill out the roster with great skill. I have a hard time describing the film. Certainly it depicts the ugliness of war, but more than that it depicts the futility of the Japanese defense of the island and the varying reactions of Japanese soldiers to their dilemma. In many scenes I was hard pressed to figure out where they were taking place and which character was which, and I wondered if that was intended to underline the chaotic disorder of battle. My favorite character was a young man named Saigo, a baker with a wife and an infant daughter he has not yet seen, who wants only to be NOT a soldier and to stay alive. He just seemed so real to me--he does honorable things as a soldier but he also recognizes how really stupid so much of what he is asked to do is and manages to elude the disasters that await him at every turn. Though Speilberg was one of this film's producers, Eastwood managed to prevent him from ruining the film with one of his sappy, sentimental endings.

And having seen Letters, I've now seen all the Oscar best pic nominees: Babel, The Queen, Little Miss Sunshine, The Departed, and Letters. I keep seesawing between Babel and The Departed, but I think Babel will pull it off, though Scorcese could get best director for Departed. I hope he does.

Tomorrow I'm committed to taking my 11-year-old GD to see Epic Movie--groan!