Posted on 01/25/2015 12:32:49 AM PST by 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.
A lot of ink sure is being spilled by the Left over such an inconsequential movie.
Kinda like their twin obsessions with the irrelevant Sarah Palin and the trivial TEA Party.
Earlier this week, New York magazine’s Andrew Rice reported that journalist Matt Taibbi had left First Look Media, the journalism startup of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Today four of Taibbi’s former colleagues reveal, in a detailed blog post published on First Look’s own site The Intercept, why exactly Taibbi left the company. It’s not pretty.
Omidyar hired Taibbi in February to establish and staff a digital magazine alongside The Intercept that would cover finance and politics. The project was far enough along to have a name—Racket—and a rough launch date of sometime this fall. From the beginning, his First Look colleagues say, Taibbi frequently clashed with upper management and openly resented the company’s byzantine internal politics, under which Omidyar himself was charged with authorizing itemized expense reports.
These tensions exploded earlier this month, after a female staffer leveled a complaint against Taibbi for his behavior:
These simmering problems came to a head this month when a Racket staffer complained to senior management that Taibbi had been verbally abusive and unprofessionally hostile, and that she felt the conduct may have been motivated, at least in part, by her gender. [First Look President John] Temple conducted an investigation, and First Look determined that while none of the alleged conduct rose to the level of legal liability, the grievance bolstered their case that Taibbi should not be the manager of Racket.
http://gawker.com/matt-taibbi-left-first-look-media-after-female-staffer-1652961860
“little fairy tale”
Fairy tail? Good Lord, this guy thinks Kyle’s story is a fairly tail?
Read a book, doofus.
I’m not much of a movie goer but I WILL see this one.
Many Tories were forced to emigrate to Canada or Britain. The militant ones who joined Tory militia units tended to end up dead (see Battle of Kings Mountain). There exists a precedent for dealing with the like of this Taibbi fellow.
So this reviewer wants us to NOT fight back against those that kill us?
He thinks, no he is a liberal so that means he ‘feels,’ that all problems can be solved by lots of hugs-n-luv.
You first sunshine.
From RS and Matt Taibbi it’s guaranteed to be a hit piece.
Agreed....a really awful flick.
He needs a shrink badly but he needs Jesus even worse.
“he prepared a cream pie made with horse sperm”
Yew. . .given this guy is such a sleazy “douche bag”. . .one can easily imagine HOW he got the HS to do that.. . .yew. . .
Anagrams Never Lie!™
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone = It ton LGBT abnormalities.
Anagrams Never Lie!™
That being said, maybe the story here is NOT one of moral conundra or the soul-wrenching clash between conscience and compassion. Maybe it is simply a man telling his story.
Contrary to the liberal talking points, it is NOT a simple "black hat/white hat" drama. There are numerous instances in which Kyle reveals the changes wrought on him by his experiences. His wife repeatedly states that the war has changed him, and at one point makes him confront the ultimate question any soldier faces: why? He answers it simply, yes, but maybe that's because that's the way Chris Kyle saw the war. When he refers to the enemy as "savages," maybe that's because that's the way Chris Kyle (and a vast number of others) see a cult that regularly beheads women and children and sees torture as a pleasant way to while away a Sunday afternoon. And since "American Sniper" is Chris Kyle's story, he gets to tell it his way.
Again, when he is talking to the psych after his final tour, he is asked if he has regrets. He says yes, but not that he killed. His regret was that he couldn't save more of his fellow soldiers. Again, a simple answer but a powerful motivation. And a legitimate one.
Even his zenith moment, the kill shot on Mustafa, was a mixed bag. Yes, he finally got the dreaded rival, but it nearly cost him his life. There were two camps: one said take the shot regardless; the other said wait for another day and don't give away your position. In a lot of ways, that summarizes the choice he had to make over and over again: taking the shot means a risk, but NOT taking the shot does too.
The loons who want to turn this into a hero-worship movie or a pro-war propaganda piece are viewing it through their own distorted lens. They're trying to make a moral epic out of one man's journal
Rolling Stone should be named ‘Rolled Up Stoners’, because the magazine is read by drugged marijuana smokers.
Contrast this with a man who was consumed with guilt and regret (even as his own life was in a tumble due to his own struggles with PTSD) not because he regretted what he had done in past tours, but because even though he viewed himself as capable and able to do so, he was not back in Iraq for another tour, and was not saving men he thought he could be saving.
Those are two very different portraits of different men (a word used a bit freely to describe both of them) and we can use the "Reasonable Man" approach and put this contrast in front of an average person and see which one is more worthy of respect.
Just more typical liberal groupthink.
“... it’s a simple, well-lit little fairy tale...” “...a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale...”
There are some 165 (confirmed) to maybe 250 (possible) who’d likely argue the “fairy tale” aspect of Taibbi’s assessment - if Kyle hadn’t made sure they weren’t still around to do so.
Rolling Stone glorified and tried to make a pop star out of a Muslim bomber who blew up little kids in Boston.
We know which side of civilization they are on.
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