Clint EastwoodBack in July when the hot young cast of Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima story was announced, it was called Flags of Our Fathers, and was a stand-alone project. Since then, the story's gotten rather more elaborate: it's now a pair of films presenting two viewpoints, to be released simultaneously in the fall of 2006. The American perspective (now called simply Flags) was written by the very hot Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby), while Iris Yamashita has taken on the Japanese perspective, tentatively titled either Lamps Before the Wind or Lambs Before the Wind. (Someone somewhere misread a press release - personally, I'm hoping for Lamps. Lambs makes it sound like the Japanese soldiers were just sitting around quietly waiting to die, a scenario that seems unlikely.) Yamashita has won awards for her writing, but none of her scripts ever seem to have been produced.

Eastwood is set to direct both films; shooting on Lambs/Lamps starts in February. Man alive - as long as no one tells this guy that he's 75, we may continue to get great stuff out of him for another 50 years.