'Toilet Paper from Sulfur Island'
Clint Eastwood's new movie, "Letters from Iwo Jima" has been widely considered by critics to be one of the best films of 2006.  The film took home the award for best foreign film at this week's Golden Globes and was named Best Film of 2006 by both Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures.  For a film that has yet to have its wide release in the U.S., there sure is a lot of buzz surrounding it.  In his film, Eastwood tells the story of the of the invasion of Iwo Jima during World War II from the viewpoint of the Japanese using all Japanese actors speaking mostly Japanese.  The film was released in Japan on December 9th and for limited release in the U.S. on December 20th, in order to be eligible for Oscars consideration.

So why am I telling you all of this?  I don't usually tout movies I haven't seen and I don't even like Clint Eastwood-directed movies with the exception of "Unforgiven."  That movie's sweet.  Most of the time, I find Eastwood movies to be melodramatic and kind of dumb.  I'm willing to give this one a chance.  But what is interesting to me about this film are those characters on the movie poster above.  A blogger named Tian wrote Wednesday about the meaning of the characters in Chinese.  I have also confirmed Tian's definition from two different Chinese people I know.  While the writing is in Japanese, the first three characters and the last two are Chinese characters (many of Japan's characters are derived from Chinese language).  The three characters in the middle are Japanese hiragana.  In Japanese, the title means "Letters from Iwo Jima."  No problem there.  However, if a Chinese person were to see the movie poster, he or she would read the title as "The Toilet Paper from Sulfur Island."  Both Chinese people to whom I showed the poster giggled and covered their mouths.  And one of them was a dude.  As Tian points out, before the film is released in China, they better fix this ad.  Or else the Chinese might think this film is something to wipe their ass with.

•What Tian Has Learned: Toilet Paper From Sulfur Island

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