Matt Taibbi takes down American Sniper like a sniper- Page 1

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 1:08pm

The whole thing's a pull-quote:

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.




… 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?)...

Updated On: 1/22/15 at 01:08 PM

[SonofRobbieJ]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 2:27pm

These two paragraphs get at the heart of the issue for me:

'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.'

I've yet to see SNIPER, so I can't comment on that movie specifically, but the point about the movies that dealt with returning Vietnam veterans is exactly right.

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 2:30pm

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $128,010,000 82.8%
+ Foreign: $26,500,000 17.2%
= Worldwide: $154,510,000

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 2:35pm

^^^ It's always good to hear from "the center"!

"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.

Oh, yeah. And you too, Fantod!

Updated On: 1/22/15 at 02:35 PM

[haterobics]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 2:36pm

Does box office trump a discussion on whether a movie has something valid to say or is irresponsible?!

Maybe you need to see this movie with a crowd, since when I saw American Sniper on my screener copy at home, I didn't get any thrill or rah-rah out of the scene he said was greeted with cheers, etc. The movie just seemed flat and boring to me.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 2:37pm

Only to libertarians. Sorry, centrists. And people who wouldn't know how to look at the politics of a commercial work of art even if they got a million dollars for it.

[javero]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 3:08pm

#opinionsandazzholes

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 3:23pm

#andlibertarianzzzzzzzzz

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 3:41pm

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $128,010,000 82.8%
+ Foreign: $26,500,000 17.2%
= Worldwide: $154,510,000

[madbrian]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 3:50pm

In other words, Fox News has high ratings, so it must be good.

[ErikJ972]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 3:56pm

What's the point of posting the box office gross over and over without comment? Like we didn't know, or the article doesn't point out, that the film is a commercial success.
And if we're going to just by box office than I suppose Avatar is the most important film ever made?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:36pm

"Like we didn't know, or the article doesn't point out, that the film is a commercial success."

You know what's funny? If you have the patience and scroll and scroll and scroll through the banished troll j_jacob_jingleheimer or whatever from yesterday, you see the same frantic posting and reposting of the same link to that same march of the same people ALLEGEDLY chanting that they want "dead cops" as The Abscessory posted here. Remember? "SAY YOU DON'T WANT DEAD COPS! SAY YOU DON'T WANT DEAD COPS!".

Birds of a feather and all that.

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:43pm

I am not a bird.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:45pm

Birdman Grosses
Domestic: $28,861,319 68.3%
+ Foreign: $13,400,000 31.7%
= Worldwide: $42,261,319

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:46pm

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:48pm

This is the one Best Picture nominee I really don't want to see. I've already seen a swell of support for it on Facebook among "Libertarians" as the "tragedy" that "Americans" face in war with exclamations on how much they cried and how it's the "truth" and on and on and on...

The ones holding up this film as some sort of statement on how the film illustrates how we really don't WANT to fight in war are often those who seem the most enthused at the prospect of war in the Middle East and heartily support it, whatever the reason.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:48pm

Blank City Grosses
Domestic: $116,037

[CarlosAlberto]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:49pm

I am not a bird.

No dear, no you are not. You may be a lot of things but a bird ain't one of them.

[Kad]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 4:56pm

For those who DID see the film, how does it compare, tonally, to Zero Dark Thirty?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 5:06pm

When I asked Fantod that, he said neither film was political AT ALL. That was why I knew I would never see Plastic Baby Daddy Starring The Hunky Elephant Man after the anti-feminist Kathryn Bigelow claptrap.

Oh, and if I win that BWW award (although just the nomination is honor enough), I will just have to hand it right over to Phyllis Rogers Stone.

Updated On: 1/22/15 at 05:06 PM

[haterobics]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 5:12pm

I think the problem here is that Eastwood directed it, which means it is just ... there. It didn't seem to try and make a point, but just shoot what was written on the page... and I think that is the problem in this case, since the end result is a tofu of a movie that absorbs and takes on the taste, agenda, and talking points of whoever watches it.

Cooper was just conflicted enough about killing people, but then he did. And when he came home, he was kind of troubled, but not much. So, the movie is flexible enough that you can sort of make it say whatever you want.

I went in this without reading about this guy, knowing about this guy, or reading about any controversy or anything in advance, and I waited for the film to sort of tell me what it was about... and then the end credits rolled.

[TazTarney]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 5:13pm

How gracious of you Namo! What a class act! That's going to strike big with the voters. Back to you Joel.

[darquegk]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 5:32pm

I thought it was going to be a very dark psychological thriller about a sniper who snapped. The super-tense television commercial campaign lent itself to this interpretation.

Apparently, it's not that at all. I was expecting a chilling reboot of Rambo, but instead it's G.I. Joe with a MFA.

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 5:32pm

from Salon.com:

As Salon’s Laura Miller discussed in her memorable review of Kyle’s memoir (which provoked considerable ire among his right-wing admirers), the real Kyle, who by his own reckoning shot more than 250 people in Iraq — before being shot himself by an unstable fellow veteran — absolutely thought of himself as a steadfast warrior for good in a Manichaean universe. He stood tall against the “bad guys” and “savages” of the Islamic world, confirming the worst Arab-held stereotypes by getting a “Crusader cross” tattooed on his trigger arm. He apparently never questioned the politics and strategy behind the sequence of events that sent him to Iraq in the first place, and couldn’t be bothered with parsing fine distinctions between al-Qaida, the Saddam Hussein regime, the Iraqi civilian population and the foreign fighters from all over the Islamic world who later joined the Iraqi insurgency. Unsurprisingly, his memoir never mentions Abu Ghraib or Gitmo or “enhanced interrogation” or the total absence of Iraqi WMD or any connection between Iraq and 9/11. He recounts telling a superior that he wished he were free to gun down random unarmed people based on his own godlike judgment, but was nonetheless obeying the military’s pantywaist rules of engagement.

It’s true that Eastwood and Hall – and especially Cooper, an actor who can display visible internal torment without apparently doing anything – have made the movie’s Kyle more sympathetic, more complicated and less of a raging dumbass. I’m aware of the disputes between people who attack “Selma” for its lack of historical veracity and those who are exercised about the depiction of Chris Kyle straying from documented facts. It’s a deeply uninteresting game of gotcha, in my judgment – both movies offer an interpretation of real events for specific narrative purposes, and I think both choices are generally defensible. Go ahead and attack Eastwood for making a movie that’s totally uninterested in the underlying politics of the Iraq conflict, and that depicts its Arab characters in cursory and stereotypical terms. That’s entirely legitimate, and indeed I think those America-centric aspects partly undermine the film’s aims. But to assign Eastwood some Bush-Cheney war-booster agenda because he supported Mitt Romney in 2012, or even because some unknown proportion of moviegoers have seized on it that way, simply isn’t fair.

“American Sniper,” the movie, is a character study about a guy who sees himself as fundamentally honorable and decent, but whose simplistic moral code turns out to be exceptionally poor preparation for the real world and real warfare. How well Eastwood accomplishes that goal, whether or not it’s worth doing and how much that may or may not reflect the real story of Chris Kyle are all matters for debate. In Cooper’s marvelously contained physical performance, Kyle’s beefy, cheerful Texas certainty seduces us part of the way toward his self-righteous vision of himself. Or it does if you let it, and depending on how you process the film’s opening scene, in which Kyle faces a decision about whether to shoot a woman and child on a Fallujah street who appear to be carrying a grenade. The Marine serving as his spotter groans, “Man, they’ll send you to Leavenworth if you’re wrong.” I couldn’t help reflecting that, no, they almost certainly won’t.


“American Sniper” and the culture wars: Why the movie’s not what you think it is

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/22/15 at 5:48pm

Plastic Babygate!