'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize (Beyond horrible)

Reader Supported News ^ | January 22, 2015 | Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

[2ndDivisionVet]

I saw American Sniper last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to. Like most Clint Eastwood movies – and I like Clint Eastwood movies for the most part – it's a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.

It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food. Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to be about anything (except things like "character" and "narrative" and "arc," subjects they can talk about endlessly).

This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you'll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says "Whatever!" whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.

Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper?

Not much. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.

The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried.

No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.

But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.

Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.

It's the fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense to so many people, that's the problem. "American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!" gushed Brandon Griggs of CNN, noting the film's record $105 million opening-week box office.

Griggs added, in a review that must make Eastwood swell with pride, that the root of the film's success is that "it's about a real person," and "it's a human story, not a political one."

Well done, Clint! You made a movie about mass-bloodshed in Iraq that critics pronounced not political! That's as Hollywood as Hollywood gets.

The characters in Eastwood's movies almost always wear white and black hats or their equivalents, so you know at all times who's the good guy on the one hand, and whose exploding head we're to applaud on the other.

In this case that effect is often literal, with "hero" sniper Chris Kyle's "sinister" opposite Mustafa permanently dressed in black (with accompanying evil black pirate-stubble) throughout.

Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie. There's the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the "human story."

Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle's officers suggests that they could "win the war" by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America's peaceful occupation of Sadr City.

When hunky Bradley Cooper's Kyle character subsequently takes out Mustafa with Skywalkerian long-distance panache – "Aim small, hit small," he whispers, prior to executing an impossible mile-plus shot – even the audiences in the liberal-ass Jersey City theater where I watched the movie stood up and cheered. I can only imagine the response this scene scored in Soldier of Fortune country.

To Eastwood, this was probably just good moviemaking, a scene designed to evoke the same response he got in Trouble With the Curve when his undiscovered Latin Koufax character, Rigoberto Sanchez, strikes out the evil Bonus Baby Bo Gentry (even I cheered at that scene).

The problem of course is that there's no such thing as "winning" the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues to this day to spread beyond Iraq's borders.

Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that killing Mustafa was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It's a scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from Seattle to Savannah.

The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children.

They're the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has mostly been over just how much of a "hero" Chris Kyle really was. One Academy member wondered to a reporter if Kyle (who in real life was killed by a fellow troubled vet in an eerie commentary on the violence in our society that might have made a more interesting movie) was a "psychopath." Michael Moore absorbed a ton of criticism when he tweeted that "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards …"

And plenty of other commentators, comparing Kyle's book (where he remorselessly brags about killing "savages") to the film (where he is portrayed as a more rounded figure who struggled, if not verbally then at least visually, with the nature of his work), have pointed out that real-life Kyle was kind of a dick compared to movie-Kyle.

(The most disturbing passage in the book to me was the one where Kyle talked about being competitive with other snipers, and how when one in particular began to threaten his "legendary" number, Kyle "all of the sudden" seemed to have "every stinkin' bad guy in the city running across my scope." As in, wink wink, my luck suddenly changed when the sniper-race got close, get it? It's super-ugly stuff).

The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too.

They did this after Vietnam, when America spent decades watching movies like Deer Hunter and First Blood and Coming Home about vets struggling to reassimilate after the madness of the jungles. So we came to think of the "tragedy" of Vietnam as something primarily experienced by our guys, and not by the millions of Indochinese we killed.

That doesn't mean Vietnam Veterans didn't suffer: they did, often terribly. But making entertainment out of their dilemmas helped Americans turn their eyes from their political choices. The movies used the struggles of soldiers as a kind of human shield protecting us from thinking too much about what we'd done in places like Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.

This is going to start happening now with the War-on-Terror movies. As CNN's Griggs writes, "We're finally ready for a movie about the Iraq War." Meaning: we're ready to be entertained by stories about how hard it was for our guys. And it might have been. But that's not the whole story and never will be.

We'll make movies about the Chris Kyles of the world and argue about whether they were heroes or not. Some were, some weren't. But in public relations as in war, it'll be the soldiers taking the bullets, not the suits in the Beltway who blithely sent them into lethal missions they were never supposed to understand.

And filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.

[wardaddy]

I just noticed

Those poor defenseless....libtards take note why we like our guns.....Rwandans look fortunate enough to have been shot rather than hacked or beaten to death though that poor woman was obviously violated

And libs again take note....the perpetrators of that mass murder largely escaped justice

At least on this planet

So much for the state protecting or avenging you

The notion Abu Ghraib was an atrocity is so derisive of those of humanity who have actually perished in atrocities

What’s this prick Taibbi look like I wonder

[HiTech RedNeck]

Send this guy a 12-pack of yellow Call Of Duty Mountain Dew. Our compliments.

[Gene Eric]

I’ve told you this before, but I’ll say it again... I like the cadence of your posts. Reminds me of, though not identical to, Christopher Walken.

But you’re absolutely correct — selective outrage to suit a political agenda. This regressive attribute is one of the distinct qualities that separates the Left from normal, empathetic humans.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Video of Taibbi: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2015/01/22/rolling-stones-taibbi-american-sniper-ludicrous-and-idiotic-chris-kyle

[HiTech RedNeck]

There is a happy medium between “harden heart and don’t care a whit” and “make a federal case over a molehill.”

[wardaddy]

I’m only posts from a cell phone and usually just late at night when I have the time

Droids or IPhones are both limited means of expression compared to a big pad or desktop

I honestly don’t know why I write like I do

I went to Ole Miss rather than State but it could be cowbell

[Gene Eric]

LOL, it’s all good FRiend. Just figured it was worth mentioning a positive attribute. No need to blame your thumbs.

[Berlin_Freeper]

Cookies, fortune

[wardaddy]

From Wiki on this See You Next Tuesday

ControversyEdit

In 2001, Taibbi wrote an article about a dispute he had with a New York Times writer. Taibbi gleefully described how he prepared a cream pie made with horse sperm and humiliated the writer by throwing it at his face and photographing the encounter.[22]

In March 2005, Taibbi’s satirical essay, “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope”,[23] published in the New York Press, was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman, and Anthony Weiner. Subsequently, the editor who approved the column was fired.[24] Taibbi defended the piece as “off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes,” written to give his readers a break from a long run of his “fulminating political essays.” Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote “in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze”.[25]

Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, then accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini’s volunteered opinion that Taibbi’s book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was “redundant and discursive”.[26] The interview took place in 2010, and Taibbi later described the incident as “an aberration from how I’ve behaved in the last six or seven years”.[27]

After the death of conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, in March 2012, Taibbi wrote an obituary in Rolling Stone, titled “Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche.” Many conservatives were angered by the obituary, though Taibbi claimed that it was “at least half an homage,” claiming respect for aspects of Breitbart’s style but also alluding to Breitbart’s own openly derisive obituary of Ted Kennedy.

[Caipirabob]

Not enough anal sex, pedophilia, spousal abuse, meth use or all combined in one scene in a church for the so called “author”...

[Gene Eric]

Confirmed — an a-hole for hire.

I’m a rocker. I’ve paid my dues. Piss on Rolling Stone for its Leftwing, anti-American agenda.

[raccoonradio]

yup and his dad Mike Taibbi was a TV reporter in Boston (Ch 5) and NY etc. Surname is pronounced Tie-EE-bee. Typical left wing trash from Rolling Stoned

[HiTech RedNeck]

Enfant terrible.

[W.]

Taibbi did a fine writing job representing to all readers of this piece the immature mental status that permeates the so-called personality of many who represent themselves as liberals. They may know all the 'big words' but their arrangement on a page shows the lack of mental self-control found in most children under the age of nine.

Oh, and that pie? Total surprise he was able to refrain from consuming it upon its completion. Bravo!

[Erik Latranyi]

What is so great about this movie is that it is making liberals’ heads explode because it does not rehash the WMD issue (which they lost).

You see, in the liberal world, if you make a movie about a soldier’s life, you must debate the war itself and get dragged into various directions and political narratives.

Liberals can, no longer, just have a movie about a human’s life.....no, liberals just inject politics into everything.

[Celtic Conservative]

Matt is a 2nd generation red diaper baby. Dad was a NBC reporter, and good old Matt spent a year studying in Russia. Matt is a good useful idiot.

[jughandle]

Wattsamatta, too pro-America for you rolling stone hippies?

[RginTN]

So would that be his opinion of the 1940s Sgt. York movie? Or any other war movie that isn’t anti-war??

Geeze these leftists are so messed up mentally that feel they must trash a movie biography detailing a veteran’s military career. Guess this idiot will praise that traitor bergdhal’s movie...

[muir_redwoods]

Rolling Stone pays an idiot to explain that they don’t like war and anything about it, especially those all-important movies about war. Talk about going out on a limb. It sounds likeTaibbi is self-medicating again. The appropriately named “Matt” is railing on but the message is the same; “war is bad”. It’s amazing that one can make a living delivering such deep insights.

[SkyPilot]

The report, Matt Taibbi, is a spoiled psychopath:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi Controversy In 2001, Taibbi wrote an article about a dispute he had with a New York Times writer. Taibbi gleefully described how he prepared a cream pie made with horse sperm and humiliated the writer by throwing it at his face and photographing the encounter.[22]

In March 2005, Taibbi's satirical essay, "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope",[23] published in the New York Press, was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman, and Anthony Weiner. Subsequently, the editor who approved the column was fired.[24] Taibbi defended the piece as "off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes," written to give his readers a break from a long run of his "fulminating political essays." Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze".[25]

Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, then accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini's volunteered opinion that Taibbi's book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was "redundant and discursive".[26] The interview took place in 2010, and Taibbi later described the incident as "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years".[27]

After the death of conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, in March 2012, Taibbi wrote an obituary in Rolling Stone, titled "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche." Many conservatives were angered by the obituary, though Taibbi claimed that it was "at least half an homage," claiming respect for aspects of Breitbart's style but also alluding to Breitbart's own openly derisive obituary of Ted Kennedy.

He also obviously hates Christianity.

Michelle Bachmann was known, even to Democrats in the House, as a sweetheart personally. This hit piece was pure hatred: