Flowers of War (2011)
A blockbuster Chinese/American film, directed by a Chinese director aiming at a mostly Chinese market.
Anyway, this was a very nice movie, very nice to watch, it goes down very "smooth" like a Heineken. Although it's ending left a lot to be desired: the movie felt like it finished in the middle to the end, although in many cases an ambiguous ending is better than a well characterized ending (like in Once Upon a Time in America).
What I liked about it was the cinematography and the sets, really beautiful stuff. I also liked the dynamic use of the camera in some scenes such as when the two girls are trying to escape from the Japanese soldiers and one of them jumps into the lake.
Also, one cool thing is a movie about the Japanese invasion of China, since in WW2, most Japanese soldiers didn't die fighting Americans but Chinese, actually, in their futile attempt to conquer China. It reminded me of the Japanese movie about the occupation of certain parts of Japan by the Soviet Union after WW2, something that very few people in the West are aware of.
One thing I disliked about the film was the unrealistic portrayal of combat, specially given that by the time of the film, the vast majority of combat casualties were inflicted by artillery, yet, no artillery barrage is seem in the movie. Historically, artillery barrages were the basic form of attack while infantry's role was just to advance and occupy territory, and it was not designed to be the main source of casualties on the enemy through man-to-man combat. War had evolved to the point where 80% of the soldiers died without seeing their enemy: it was either an artillery shell fired a dozen miles away, or a mortar shell fired several miles away or a bomb dropped by an airplane 20,000 feet up on the air, that killed the soldiers in the battlefield. Yet, most movies about the war depict warfare as if it were still a man-to-man fight instead of a impersonal and brutal type of warfare (movies about WW1 like All Quiet on the Western Front, are a better in that regard).
The acting was ok, some of Batman's acting left a bit to be desired though (it left me unimpressed) while the Chinese actors spoke tremendously perfect english given the historical background of the film (I mean, I think the probability a Chinese back in 1937 of understanding English perfectly was less than 1 over 100,000 while in the film many Chinese and Japanese appear to speak and understand English fluently).