Wisconsin Film Fest Part 5

WINGS OF DEFEAT

Wrapping up my abridged film-festival experience (not a darn drop of rain or snow after I left early!) was a really great documentary profiling Japanese soldiers trained as kamikaze pilots in the final days of World War II. Of the many documentaries to choose from, all I had to do was read the topic of this film to make it one of my essential viewings that weekend. The filmmaker does have a connection to this story as a Japanese-American whose late uncle was trained as a kamikaze pilot, but that personal connection is not entirely relevant as the film allows for these complex yet likeable people to tell their personal stories. In a contemporary setting, this movie is very powerful in the light of a worldview after 9-11 that has reinforced the view of the 'other' as a monolithic evil entity. While I can understand the difficulty in finding sympathy for the modern version of suicide warfare based on terrorism and fanaticism, the human perspective of the Japanese side makes you understand their motivations, and allows you to sympathize even more with the individuals trained (some would say brainwashed) to die for their country as they were caught up in the war machine. The riveting scenarios that allow these men to fail their missions and live to tell their tales are powerful, vulnerable tales. I’m trying not to generalize here, but I think the suicide bombers of today are led to believe in a threat to their livelihood that is almost entirely existential. In the case of these Japanese soldiers preparing for a homeland invasion by the Allied powers, it’s incredibly difficult to label these people as evil fanatics, and more easy to them serving a hopeless patriotic cause through desperate measures. If you believe in the viability of moral gray areas in history, this is a very good documentary. It actually reminds of the film experiment of Flags of Our Father / Letters From Iwo Jima (I've only seen the latter), as far as it claims both sides had a noble reason to fight.

BON COP, BAD COP (supplemental entry)

And finally, we get to the Netflix online viewing I watched that same weekend to make up for the weather-induced early departure that allowed me to miss two interesting films from South Korea and Denmark, probably my two favorite foreign-film countries. This movie was in the 2008 Wisconsin film fest program.

This “foreign film” is from Canada but feels a little odd because it’s a bilingual film that takes place in the francophone and Anglophone parts of the country. Very odd that our neighbors to the North live in places that look and feel like America, but with French being spoken occasionally! This is pretty much an amusing buddy cop movie where a Montreal cop and an Ontario cop team up to solve a killing spree, but it’s understated and off-kilter in perhaps a uniquely Canadian way. I recommended this to my friends that lived in Burlington, Vermont for several years, since Montreal was the closest major city to them.

Once again, I’m very happy I went to this festival, and love the atmosphere and venues. I thought my freaky weather turnarounds would be over by April in Wisconsin, but I learned my lesson. I really want to have mini-film festivals using the movies from the programs for the past 2 years that I have access to on Netflix Instant.

For now it’s back to normally scheduled entries, including a masterpiece of a film essay on the 1999 movie Winslow Boy shortly, as part of the Film Snob series that just might be completed by the time of Obama’s reelection.