Clint Eastwood's AMERICAN SNIPER

I'll see it eventually, preferably for free. Michael Moore says it's partly antiwar.

@DennisThePerrin
Since Clint Eastwood balanced FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS with LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, might AMERICAN SNIPER be followed by EMAILS FROM FALLUJAH?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wpwpoi2EXo

From what I understand, the post-war good Chris Kyle did in real life before he died is mostly ignored in the movie so there's more time for killin'.

I have no interest in watching this

Is Coop naked in it

xxp From what I understand, his making shit up about beating up Jesse Ventura, shooting looters after Hurricane Katrina, and shooting a couple of dudes in Florida in a road-rage incident is also ignored so

I have no interest in watching this

― everyday sheeple (Michael B), Wednesday, January 21, 2015 12:38 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

From the get-go, Chris Kyle's military career is all about responding to terrorism. Kyle joins up after al-Qaeda bombs the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. We see him and his wife Taya's stunned reactions to 9/11.

And then, bam. Kyle's at war in Iraq. The film does not contain, as best I can tell, a single reference to George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, or weapons of mass destruction. There's no Dick Cheney, no Colin Powell at the UN, no anti-war protests. The film implies that the Iraq War was a deliberate response to 9/11.

In fact, the Bush administration premised its 2003 Iraq invasion primarily on the alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

...Once the film has established the invasion as a righteous response to 9/11, which it wasn't, and the war itself as a black-and-white battle against evil al-Qaeda terrorists, when the truth is far murkier, it then carries that narrative to its logical conclusion: opposing the Iraq War, or even insufficiently endorsing its glory, is tantamount to betrayal.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/21/7641189/american-sniper-history

xxp From what I understand, his making shit up about beating up Jesse Ventura, shooting looters after Hurricane Katrina, and shooting a couple of dudes in Florida in a road-rage incident is also ignored so

I'd never heard of the guy before I started seeing trailers for the film, and only just started looking up stuff about him in the last couple days. What a hero amirite. Great job picking 'em, Clint.

Posted in detrius thread: : http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2015/01/a-professional-film-critic-answers-your-american-sniper-questions.html

this movie wd've been made without Eastwood btw

while it may be convenient for the filmmakers, i feel like the fact that so many of chris kyle's post-war issues (lies/delusions, the libel suit, his murder) are attached to pending or recently resolved court cases - making them things that if portrayed in a film could lead to legal fuckery - is being ignored.

i saw the movie last night and don't really think kyle comes off as anything other than a skilled soldier who is a fucking mess at everything else, and a PTSD basketcase. i didn't feel like it said "well he got fucked up in the head but he sure did kill a bunch o' them terrorizers so it's all gravy."

This guy watched himself put rounds through the heads and hearts of dozens of humans. Armoring his psyche by dehumanizing his targets was a necessary first line of defense that any soldier would grab at, but it doesn't actually work very well. Of course he was a PTSD basket case.

Was listening to late night R4 recently and they played an interview with Kyle, (from not long before he got offed and he was plugging his shitty book) he sounded like a nightmare person. I find this movie as crude as any IS propaganda, more like American Dogshit. Lol @ people projecting deep psychological trauma onto such a worthless fucking inhuman war-husk type cliche. I wanted my money back from my illegally downloaded DVDscr after 45 mins, how horrid that stolen time was. All this wasn't Sienna great? stuff needs to stop as well, she just as faceless and shit as everyone else in this travesty.

I feel like I need to watch this in order to have an informed opinion about it, even though everything about it makes me recoil

"...Once the film has established the invasion as a righteous response to 9/11, which it wasn't, and the war itself as a black-and-white battle against evil al-Qaeda terrorists, when the truth is far murkier, it then carries that narrative to its logical conclusion: opposing the Iraq War, or even insufficiently endorsing its glory, is tantamount to betrayal."

+1

finally I agree w xelab about something. (not like I would actually watch this tho)

such a worthless fucking inhuman war-husk type cliché

eh, dehumanizing people is nagl

xxp chris kyle definitely believed these things (which, to be clear, I don't believe) and i suppose the argument against him/the movie is that by bothering to tell the story of such a person you effectively endorse what he believed, but idk. it can't be that simple

In his book he says everyone he shot was evil, no exceptions. So I guess that's okay.

such a worthless fucking inhuman war-husk type cliché

eh, dehumanizing people is nagl

I don't have the energy to debate the virtues of a redneck with a penchant for murdering people presented as a good ole hero, in the backdrop of the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I've only read a chapter here and there but he mostly seems remarkably un-reflective.

i think you'd have to be pretty un-reflective if you killed dozens if not 100s of people

you need not attribute a single virtue to the guy, but he was still a human being. that is hardly a ringing endorsement, but at least it does give him credit as something more complex than a heap of dogshit

But why make a film that is so celebrative of an illegal war and a complete fucking worthless arsehole to boot?

forget it

Yeah but dogs eat all sorts of things

xxp

the movie portrays him as a true believer and, later on, a complete wreck; it doesn't espouse a definitive opinion on whether his beliefs were right or not. when he returns to civilian life he's regarded as a zoo animal more or less, and when some dude recognizes him at an auto shop with his son and calls him a "hero," cooper gets all rigid and uncomfortable as hell - not graciously receiving the praise.

to be fair, cooper's performance (which is astounding) may have ascribed more contemplation/humanity to him than he deserved, and a more honest version of the story would show the extent of how awful he was in his delusional post-war behavior (as well as give a better portrayal of iraqi society - probably the biggest problem). it is not a perfect movie and clint's motives for making it may be suspect, but it's also more complex than the loudest pundits on both sides are claiming it to be.

xp

why make a film that is so celebrative of an illegal war and a complete fucking worthless arsehole to boot?

to make money by validating the desperate need of americans to think that they never kill except righteously. surely you'd understand that desperation better if you, your family, or your close friends were hip deep in that gore, or had been killed in some country we'd invaded.

forget it

don't we all wish we could?

rationalizing isn't just a river in Egypt, you know.

The intended message and Clint's motives are much more suspect after his famous "empty chair" bit at the republican convention.

there is one compelling scene, at a soldier's funeral, where the KIA soldier's anguished mom is speaking before those gathered and asking good questions about the war, but then the scene is cuts abruptly. wish i had the script.

fwiw I thought it sucked -- it really just played more like a narrative of some dudes tours in the war, which we've seen 1000 times; the home stuff was cliched as hell.

this movie wore out its welcome really quick. ignoring the obvious sanitization of the real-life Kyle (which was bound to happen), the film was way too abrupt in almost all of the non-battle sequences. Kyle sees a news report about terrorism, has redneck-Che Guevara moment and abandons being a cowboy for the Seals. PTSD Kyle suddenly finds his center after one visit to a therapist. (Leaves out his alcoholism which would have been an actual interesting thing to explore).

The war sequences, while nicely shot, had a bit of a 'been there' feel to it, though thankfully didn't turn into the barely-veiled patriotism of Black Hawk Down. And of course, any civilian whose home they invaded turned out to be a 'bad guy' (except the one family man they got iced, I guess).

While I did like Cooper's performance, too much of his character came from Sienna Miller's dialogue. "YOU'RE SO DISTANT", "EVEN WHEN YOU'RE HEAR YOU'RE NOT HERE", "YOUR HEART IS BEATING OUT OF YOUR CHEST". is it too much to ask to just let the dude's facial expression do the talking for once?

clear Oscar bait, though bland as hell.

Couldn't possibly be as dull as J. Edgar.

although i've said relatively good things about the movie, if it wins oscars for anything other than maaaaybe cooper's acting i would be pretty incensed. it's got plenty of faults (the rushed-ness described by hammer smashed, the portrayal of most iraqis). it's no hurt locker - in terms of nuanced approach or the skill of its making - not by a long shot.

xpost J. Edgar was noteworthy for its pastiche of homoerotic hotel room fight sequences

hahaha oh god that movie was such a clusterfuck

The other thing I didn't like about this movie, which ok, you can't entirely blame the movie for, is the type of people it attracted to the theatre. Hearing a patron next to me salivate when the kid picks up the grenade launcher and start uttering "Shane"isms like "c'mon, pick it up", practically getting a hard on anticipating Cooper blowing a young kid's brains out, was one of the grossest things I experienced this weekend.

but most of all the people
that's America to me

and then the caricatures as well.

"hey, man, I'm going to abandon my post up here and go door to door with the people down there cos I'm bored. Wanna join me?"

'NAHHHH man, I want to LIVE, see. Those people down THERE? They made the wrong decision - nahhhh, I wanna return home ALIVE and stuff, did I mention I like being ALIVE!"

"WELL then! If you're still alive after this, don't come find me, coward! How dare you not abandon your post with me!"

everything about this being a thing is so awful and predictable, including a second of me finding this cypher attractive, i'm as silly as a xiu xiu lyric sometimes.

hurt locker wasn't all that good, either

Kat Bigelow is the worst

conservative apologia runs all through her stuff, even going back to her vampire movie (which I like)

i think she's talented, but that movie falls apart when you see it a second time. there's not much to it other than the inherent suspense of the situations.

I'm doubting the idea that movies need to be watched a second time

I liked THL and will probably be disappointed if I rewatch it, but that's the case with 99.99 of movies, a lot of which aren't great and are often barely good anyway.

You Kaelite! xp

I watch the great stuff multiple times. There's more than enough.

Older stuff I rewatch more than stuff in the last 30 years. I bought The Third Man yesterday and I'm wincing through Alida Valli's scenes.

never did provoke that reaction in me... it's still great no matter.

"I'm wincing" implies yer 'watching' and posting, WHICH EXPLAINS A LOT.

I will never unerstand people who find any rah-rah aspect to THL or ZD30. The former has a clear thesis - war as drug, like the intro states - and sets about proving it, simply. The latter's climactic raid is so horrifically clinical and catharsis-free that it colors the entire film.

there are many things wrong with it w/out it being rah-rah.

zdt that is

That's fair.

some people say i laugh too much

a parrot bit me

From the internet comments I read about this movie from fans, I picture it as literally just an hour and a half of Cooper picking off evil-looking muslim terrorist badguys with a counter ticking up at the bottom of the screen, followed by him kissing a baby wrapped in an American flag.

dude pay attention it's a fuckin bald eagle wrapped in an American flag

I don't really know anything about this movie other than ppl I went to high school won't stfu about this on Facebook

a robot bald eagle xp

Watched this - screener - and yeah Cooper is excellent but it's cliché ridden as mentioned above. I feel I've seen this same desaturated H'wood war film a few times over already. Also - the main "villains" are straight out of a Sinbad flick down to the goatee and the predominant wearing of black. Eastwood's films seem to be resembling him more and more these days: devoid of color and teetering close to senility.

I will never unerstand people who find any rah-rah aspect to THL or ZD30. The former has a clear thesis - war as drug, like the intro states - and sets about proving it, simply. The latter's climactic raid is so horrifically clinical and catharsis-free that it colors the entire film.
--Simon H.

otm, as morbs says ZDT does indeed have some problems, but neither of those movies are cheerleading for a goddamn thing imo

idk isn't the issue (one issue) that ppl have w/ zero dark thirty not that it's cheerleading but that it pretends to take the sober middleground by presenting torture as a grim but necessary reality?

Yes.

http://www.clickhole.com/article/confused-about-how-youre-supposed-feel-about-ameri-1771

http://www.avclub.com/article/kid-rock-has-thoughts-american-sniper-seth-rogen-a-214199

it pretends to take the sober middleground by presenting torture as a grim but necessary reality

This IS cheerleading, and it's exactly this kind of crap which has made "torture = I'm fine with it!" an acceptable, even popular, opinion in American political discourse. totally loathsome.

Taibbi says some things.

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.

ok he has to be having a fucking laugh with this. irrespective of this movie, it's not hard to list at least 10 eastwood directed- or starring movies that aren't the least bit black and white in their morals or politics.

I was gonna say, "Has he seen Unforgiven?"

hits its mark in the last few paragraphs imo

(in case it isn't obvious this is not a movie I am going to actually watch fwiw)

xp its true the latter half of the article has some otm points for sure

Americans don't want to watch movies about the horrible consequences of their collective stupidity, they want to watch ultimately uplifting, if occasionally harrowing, stories of individual Americans triumphing against adversity.

like, as a fan of clint movies that are legitimately great and complex, i can say that american sniper is...not even close. and it's got problems. i just did not view it as the on-its-face propaganda rag that a lot of folks i read/talk to/agree with politically painted it to be

dude he doesn't triumph against a goddamn thing the movie m/l ends with him hiding from his family in a bar

I was not referring to this movie specifically, but to Tabibi's larger point about the focus of American war movies over the last 50 years

well, yeah, there's a reason why this made 100 million in a weekend and why people forget that movies like syriana or paradise now (latter is about palestine, but thematically taking on middle east issues from a nuanced perspective) even existed. and im sure that plenty of folks in certain areas of our country viewed AS as a rah-rah, kill dem terrorizers movie.

FWIW, i saw this in downtown boston, w a huge crowd and it did not receive any cheers. mostly silence throughout. a few laughs at the profane zings here and there, that was it. i also wonder if taibbi actually knows what jersey city is like bc it's not really that kind of liberal.

The only reason I can think that you vigorously defend this garbage is that you are a complete twat.

xelab do u hate freedom

As a Jersey City resident am curious what theatre he saw this in? Couldn't see a crowd at, say, the Loews Whatever-plex in Newport Mall getting up and cheering.

xelab, how many times have you seen this?

oh shit the limey goon squad has arrived

I have seen it once and it is fucking garbage.

xp

get to back to twitter/FB you tedious prick

oh shit the limey goon squad has arrived

― i'm tellin you it was kenard (slothroprhymes), Thursday, January 22, 2015 4:10 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

much better than a wordy milquetoast kiss-ass taking a compelling let's-not-get-carried-away-about-dissing-clint-eastwood stance

lol be still my heart you've hurt me so

man knives are really out today lol

like, as a fan of clint movies that are legitimately great and complex, i can say that american sniper is...not even close. and it's got problems. i just did not view it as the on-its-face propaganda rag that a lot of folks i read/talk to/agree with politically painted it to be

So this is the post that made slothroprhymes the guy who applauded Bush when he said the Axis of Evil line and voted for a GOP Senate in 2002.

he is saying it to gain favor with clint bc he posts here

what's John Yoo's ILE name

clint wrote this on thread Michael Yonkers on board I Love Music on Sep 4, 2002

hi,
i forgot to mention that the micro lp will very likely soon be a subpop CD and i'm sure no one will have any trouble getting their paws on that...
best,
clint

doxxed

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7rVUpVCcAELXzE.jpg

#deblasio

xpost
hahaha i know that clint he's cooler than eastwood

I want my money back alfred

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.

i don't even like eastwood's movies all that much (well, the ones he's directed in the past 25 years or so) but didn't he basically start getting a ton of critical hosannas precisely for making films that foregrounded moral ambiguity as a kind of "revision" of genre archetypes? thinking in particular of unforgiven, but also his two WWII films and a lot in between.

political pundits getting movies wrong again.

don't read this btw as any kind of a statement about american sniper, which i haven't seen.

also i think the evidently differing receptions of this film in e.g. boston and the deep south is an effect that's very much in keeping with the goals of the studio -- to be successful the film has to function as different things to different people.

also, xelab, you seem smart enough, but you keep reverting to name-calling and really rash opinions on this thread. maybe you could step back and recognize that things are just a little more complex than you initially made them appear? i dunno, just to lower your blood pressure if nothing else...

also I'm not sure eastwood's personal politics are as relevant as they may at first appear. he votes republican while bigelow no doubt votes democrat, but their films have the same kind of purposefully ambiguous ideological positioning (even though we could argue about which films are smarter).

slothroprhymes thinking like a movie critic -- eegads, impeach him

what's that a reference to?

The ambiguous ideological positioning allows those directors, as I think you're suggesting, to land sudden January box office hits.

what's that a reference to?

― I dunno. (amateurist)

That he's thinking through his responses and judging what he sees on screen.

to be fair, i think this note from taibbi is spot on:

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

honestly the bids for "moral ambiguity" and complexity in eastwood's films have often struck me as kind hollow and ostentatious. (one exception is "a perfect world," a film i do actually like quite a bit, at least the last time i saw it.) so while his newer films may be cruder, i'm not sure there's been a big change.

(though "million dollar baby" is pretty damn crude)

xpost

who is slothroprhymes?

is this that movie about frankie valli

the overarching problem of all this shit is that yeah, there have not been any films that have accurately shown what the occupation was like for the average Iraqi person/family who had to live through America's massive fuckup. at least not that've made it to the states that I know of (please correct me on that if wrong)

Does this movie end with Cooper pointing the gun at the audience and firing off a few rounds?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Great_train_robbery_still.jpg/330px-Great_train_robbery_still.jpg

(xxp to self)and the main prob of this movie is that it does not represent Iraqis well, there's one innocent family and then villains or allies.

no it ends with him going to his death

no, Brushy Bill Reports shows up in 2035 and claims to be Chris Kyle

*Roberts goddammit

it ends with a 20-minute depiction of his brush-up with jessie ventura, then it conspicuously rewinds and chris kyle, like ray liotta in goodfellas, breaks the fourth wall and starts to tell the audience about all the shit he wrote about that didn't happen.

in the meantime, idk I tried to analyze this movie w/o preconceptions and after thorough examination I'd say most of the nuance probably comes from cooper's performance, which might not be accurate as to the true believer lunatic Kyle actually was.

then "gimme shelter" comes on over the end credits.

xpost

er not brush-up... dust-up

sorry

and probably the reactions it's deriving from the hyper righties are more common than any productive discussion it might engender.

xp to amateurist that would be fascinating honestly. glad you at least like perfect world which I think is prob his best film, non-unforgiven division.

the part where he legally changes his name to American Sniper was kind of weird tho

though it does a good job depicting his rise to the forefront of the hip-hop scene

that would prob sound like most of the latest eminem album

Sniper, no sniping!

Oh shit, apparently that's a real thing. Ugh.

you swiped it

American Sniper added $18.3 million on Friday, which puts it on pace for one of the best second weekends ever.

Among the newcomers, The Boy Next Door got off to a fine start, while Mortdecai and Strange Magic bombed.

American Sniper's $18.3 million haul is, by a large margin, the biggest second Friday ever for an R-rated movie. In comparison, The Passion of the Christ added $13.7 million, while The Matrix Reloaded and The Hangover Part II earned $10.3 million and $10.6 million, respectively. Sniper's second Friday was also significantly higher than all of 2014's superhero movies, which were in the $9 to $12 million range.

After eight days in nationwide release, American Sniper has already earned $154.1 million. On Friday, it passed Gran Torino to become director Clint Eastwood's highest-grossing movie ever. It also eclipsed Bradley Cooper's American Hustle.

The thought of all that money flowing into godless ultra-liberal Hollywood, so they can use it to undermine the morals and values that made this country great, makes me gleeful.

This movie had the same rhythm as 'Boyhood'

Except stuff actually happened in it

(this movie was not better than 'boyhood,' btw)

a challop 360 piledriver!

this movie wasn't better than American Gangster

I wonder if the boy who got sniped for picking up an rpg had a cool but somewhat absent art dad

http://imgace.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/snoopy-celebrates-4th.jpg

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/clint-eastwood-american-snipers-biggest-766498

Contrary to the clickbait headlines, I don't think CE is saying, exactly, that the movie is "antiwar."

every director thinks they are making "anti-war" film

in a practical sense, it doesn't matter what eastwood thinks. if a substantial portion of the film's audience comes out feeling all patriotically stoked to go waste a buncha ter'rist savages, then it's a pro-war film.

this is why i'm always hella suspicious of (and deeply disappointed in) black metal bands that claim to be "apolitical" when accused of national socialist flirtations. dodging the issue does not place you above it.

well, the whole "apolitical" thing is hollywood's favorite escape clause, i recall bigelow saying ZDT wasn't a "political" film either. hell, i think Oliver Stone said that "W" wasn't political!

(which it kind of wasn't, at least not in the sense we may have wanted it to be.)

Green Berets was a humanist affair

on American Sniper and video games:

https://www.academia.edu/10316175/On_AMERICAN_SNIPER_2015_

i actually noticed this weekend, the amount of a-holes playing battlefield as snippers has pretty much doubled in the last few weeks. it's fucking annoying as all hell.

360 noscope MLG pro 420 blaze it

a lot of ppl thought "Born in the USA" was pro-war, bcz morons.

Niles Schwartz on Sniper as an Incoherent Text:

(Robin) Wood writes, “There are two keys to understanding the development of the Hollywood cinema in the 70s: the impingement of Vietnam on the national consciousness and the unconscious, and the astonishing evolution of the horror film.” The war led to doubts about patriarchal guidelines, “the symbolic figure of the Father in all its manifestations,” while motifs of the horror genre began to permeate and undermine all facets of the era’s cinema, Wood focusing on three key motifs: the monster-as-human-psychopath who is a product of “normality”; the descent-into-hell; and the doppelganger. While art strives to make coherent meaning out of human experience, the maker of the “incoherent text” perceives the chaos that art represses and reorders. With these films, meaning is defeated. Built on Classical foundations of meaning, the films are fracturing as they play out before us. They’re bewildering, and “they are works that do not know what they want to say.”

I can’t say authoritatively that Wood would read "American Sniper" as an incoherent text any more than I can affirm Clint Eastwood would nod in approval to having his work interpreted through the prism of Marxist theory, and many others might have a hard time believing “one take Clint” as a transgressive artist (though that certainly would explain the whole Invisible Obama In A Chair fiasco at the 2012 RNC). But "American Sniper," while classical enough to satisfy millions of middle American viewers and infuriate others, seems in its very design to function through schizophrenic entropy, its narrative of violent stalwart heroism riddled with cancerous doubts that malignantly enfold it.

http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/evil-against-evil-the-fascinating-incoherence-of-american-sniper

this movie's approach to its subject is sometimes also described as 'playing both sides against the middle'

No way in hell is this a pro-war text, but after the pattern sets in (horrors in Eye-raq, tensions at home) it does run out of movie, and, yeah, the Iraqis are bitches and fuckin assholes and potential threats, a fact mitigated by the film's being shot from Chris' point of view.

But "American Sniper," while classical enough to satisfy millions of middle American viewers and infuriate others, seems in its very design to function through schizophrenic entropy, its narrative of violent stalwart heroism riddled with cancerous doubts that malignantly enfold it.

that purple prose tho

yeah, i think this film basically embodies the structural ambiguity of the mainstream american cinema

and ambiguity is different than "schizophrenic entropy" (i don't value either as ends in themselves)

that review that i quoted reminds me of the cahiers article on young mr. lincoln which is sort of the ur-text for this sort of interpretation.

too many notes

when's the sequel out

american sniper vs sharktopus: reckoning

ok when's the threequel out then

American Sniper-ier