I saw "Pearl Harbor" over Memorial Day weekend (and I'm really not used to spelling harbour without a u). It was so bad, except for the war scenes, which were disturbing. Hell, the romance was worse than Episode 2 because they were pompously trying to hammer a certain emotion into your head.. it was sort of like during every scene, you could imagine a guy standing in front with flashcards reading, "Heart-wrenching Romance" or "Comical Interlude" or "Ominous Foreshadowing" or "Delightful Irony."

For a war movie, it depicted the Japanese pretty well, unlike quiet a few low budget Chinese war movies I've seen ("The Japs are killing grandpa! Nooo!"). I'm surmising that a lot of the Japanese actors were actually American-born, so that they spoke real Japanese but badly. :) I know this from watching tv shows where they'll hire American-born Chinese to play Chinese Government Agents or whatnot, and they'll be speaking Chinese, but so badly you know they were born here. Or they'll say that the Chinese people are speaking Cantonese when they're actually speaking Mandarin. And sometimes they'll fake their lines because nobody actually understands them, so they'll say things like, "The coconut is on fire, fool!" dramatically and to the uninitiated it'll still sound like they're discussing important military secrets. I've heard that Lucy Liu does this a lot on Aly McBeal. Though a lot of the Japanese soldiers in Pearl Harbor (the ones that had no speaking lines) were played by Chinese people, which my mom said wasn't surprising because many self-respecting Japanese people wouldn't want to be in that movie. I wondered if Chinese people might be uncomfortable playing Evil Japanese Soldiers (tm) sort of like it might be discomfitting for Jews to be playing Nazis, but she said that they'd probably enjoy the opportunity to play the part as villainously as possible. Hell, we all look alike. Which brings me to this discussion.

Me: Hey mom, in Chinese war movies, are the Japanese people played by Chinese actors?
Mom: Yes.
Me: Then how do they distinguish between the Chinese soldiers and the Japanese soldiers?
Mom: For the Japanese soldiers, they paint on an evil mustache.

I suppose if you were really low budget you could hire the same actors for each side, so you'd have one shot of a trench where all the Chinese soldiers are, then stop shooting, have all the actors change uniforms, paint on evil mustaches and run over to a different trench, and then start filming the scenes with the "Japanese" soldiers. God, that'd be ghetto.

I thought it was hilariously funny when Alec Baldwin teaches the pilots to say, "Wo shi mei guo ren." ("I am an American" in Mandarin) NO! Ya think??? And what else could you think the blonde guy waving frantically and yelling in really bad Chinese is supposed to be?

Anyhow. For Pearl Harbor, the "Let's kill them all!" mentality was rather disturbing, because it was such a double standard. You've all see then trailer as little kids play baseball and the women are hanging up their laundry to dry and stop to watch the Mitsubishi Zeroes fly in low over Pearl harbor to prepare to slaughter their innocent fathers and husbands and whatnot.. but then it's like, "Whee! Let's bomb TOKYO!" I think it'd have been more interesting if they'd done parallel structure with the Japanese army.. I mean, it's not a Japanese story, obviously, but just little things. Like you'd see a shot of the interior of.. Rafe.. what's his face (Maybe they just said Rafe as a pronunciation of the R.A.F, but I got the impression that was the name of the guy Ben Affleck was playing) 's airplane, and you'd see a picture of his girlfriend on the dashboard, and then you'd see a shot of the inside of the Miscellanious Japanese Pilot Who's Trying to Shoot Him Down's airplane. I think it would have been a good touch for there to be a picture of a random Japanese chick inside his plane too.

But I guess only America has happy-go-lucky hotshot pilots with loving girlfriends. Because everyone knows that all Japanese are homicidal war machines with no personalities or social lives. I don't know how much retribution the Japanese "deserved," but I'd say they got more than enough with Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This whole killing thing sucks, no matter who does it to who.

Actually, I think it was Red that had a picture of his girlfriend and Rafe had a little oragami bird. Which makes me wonder, Hey dude, if you hate Japanese people so much, where'd you learn to fold oragami?? Eh????