In 2014, the year that he turned 84, Clint Eastwood had two movies in theaters — his 35th and 36th as a director. The first of the two was Jersey Boys, an adaptation of the jukebox musical that told the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The Jersey Boys film came out in June, earned about $47 million at the North American box office, and barely left a mark on the cultural imagination. That had been happening with a lot of Clint Eastwood films. Eastwood’s directing career was long and varied. There had been hits and flops and Oscars and critical bombs. By the second decade of the 21st century, Eastwood was steadily cranking out workmanlike mid-budget fare, usually adapting real-life stories and telling them in ways that were not terribly imaginative. Jersey Boys’ reception wasn’t much different from how Invictus or Hereafter were greeted. By that point, for Eastwood, it was routine.
Six months later, on Christmas Day, Eastwood’s American Sniper opened in limited release, and it went wide a few weeks later. What happened next was not routine. American Sniper had about the same budget as Jersey Boys—something in the neighborhood of $60 million—and it earned more than that in its first weekend of wide release. Over the next few months, American Sniper became a genuine cultural phenomenon, racking up $350 million at the domestic box office and setting off a whole lot of noisy bad-faith cultural skirmishes. Along the way, the movie just barely skirted past The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 and Guardians Of The Galaxy—the latter of which featured a very different Bradley Cooper performance—to become the biggest hit released in 2014. American Sniper was a true anomaly, a violent R-rated drama that conquered the box office in an era of zippy franchise fare. It’s worth asking how this happened.
The short answer is that American Sniper won by fashioning itself into a culture-war football — or, perhaps, by being thrust into that role. This was a lucrative thing to be. In 2004, Mel Gibson turned Good Friday into a bloody spectacle, and his The Passion Of The Christ became, domestically speaking, the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history, a record that it still holds. Five years later, in less showy fashion, The Blind Side made a white-savior hero of a McMansion-dwelling Tennessee lady, and it earned more than $250 million and won an Oscar for Sandra Bullock. American Sniper has a few things in common with both. Like The Passion Of The Christ, Eastwood’s movie depicts its story as one of gruesome righteous sacrifice. Like The Blind Side, it offers up red meat to Red State America, a part of the country that claims it never gets to see its heroes on screen.
With American Sniper, Eastwood and relatively inexperienced screenwriter Jason Hall adapted a memoir from Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL reputed to be the deadliest sniper in the history of the American military. The film was already in development when Kyle was killed—murdered by another Iraq War veteran with PTSD at a shooting range—in 2013. Chris Kyle was not a terribly complicated figure. In his book, he wrote with pride about all his killings, describing Iraqis as “savages” and never showing anything like remorse. Kyle also wrote that he shot dozens of looters from the roof of the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, which is one of many straight-up lies in the book. (Jesse Ventura also successfully sued Kyle’s estate over a false claim that Kyle had punched out Ventura in a bar once.) Chris Kyle was, by all accounts, extremely good at his job, and he also seems like a puffed-up fabricator who couldn’t wait to make up stories about his own heroic deeds. Simply making a movie with Kyle as its hero was a political act, whether or not it was intended as one.
American Sniper earned good reviews, and it got six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. (On its own, Sniper outgrossed the combined domestic earnings of that year’s seven other nominees.) But in the wake of its success, plenty of critics dismissed Eastwood’s movie as a right-wing fantasy. Seth Rogen, for instance, tweeted that American Sniper “kind of reminds” him of the Nazi propaganda movie from Inglourious Basterds before posting a statement that his tweet was “not meant to have any political implications.” At the same time, plenty of right-wing commentators seized on any criticisms against American Sniper—which of course drove more attention to the film, and helped it sell more tickets.
The fans and critics of American Sniper both see the film as a black-and-white fable, and I don’t think the film itself really reflects either depiction. I can see how people got that idea. Clint Eastwood, whose whole screen persona has long reflected a certain type of idealized American masculinity, had only just made his speech at the Republican National Convention two years earlier, famously arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama in a stage-prop chair. Eastwood and his producers made American Sniper with the cooperation of the Kyle family, and they didn’t depict Kyle’s death because Kyle’s widow asked them to leave it out. The film itself shows Kyle refusing any suggestion that he might feel bad for all the people he killed: “I’m willing to meet my creator and answer for every shot that I took.” If you’re trying to argue that American Sniper is militarist propaganda, or at least hagiography, the evidence is there.
For me, though, American Sniper makes the most sense as a work of subjective filmmaking. Watching the movie, we see the world the way Chris Kyle does. We see Kyle’s father (Ben Reed) making a dinner-table speech about how all people are sheep, wolves, or sheepdogs. We see Kyle as a young man grasping for purpose and finding it when he sees a news report about an embassy bombing abroad: “Look what they did to us.” We see Kyle being briefed on life in post-invasion Iraq, being told that “any military-age male who’s still here is here to kill you.” We see his friends going through horrible, painful deaths. We don’t see anything about the American government’s decision to go to war in Iraq, and we don’t see the Iraqi people as fully realized characters. But these aren’t propaganda choices. They’re filmmaking choices.
Eight years before American Sniper, Eastwood directed Letters From Iwo Jima, a movie where the terrifying and faceless enemies are American soldiers and where the real villains are the commanding officers who keep sending people out to die. American Sniper has nothing as obviously critical as that. But the film never really makes Kyle a glamorous figure. Instead, he’s someone given the terrible power of deciding whether or not people should die. In the very first scene, Kyle stares through his scope, trying to figure out whether or not he has to kill a mother and a kid. He shoots them both, and he doesn’t look happy about it.
In a lot of ways, American Sniper depicts Chris Kyle as a fucked-up, damaged person. He kills again and again and again, to the point where it becomes mechanistic. His one big triumphant moment—taking out an enemy sniper who’s more than a mile away—is ultimately a self-defeating decision that almost gets Kyle and his team killed. At a friend’s funeral, the dead man’s mother reads a letter that her son wrote questioning what he was even doing in Iraq. Kyle is incapable of asking those questions, and he tells his wife (Sienna Miller) that his friend died because he even considered the greater morality of the war : “He let go, and he paid the price for it.” Soon afterwards, Kyle blanks out at a barbecue and almost kills a dog. Whenever he’s at home in his family’s house, he looks deeply out of place. Battle has taken away his ability to be a functional human being in peacetime.
The real-life Chris Kyle seemed perfectly happy soaking up attention, but the movie version of Kyle simply can’t accept gratitude. When a fellow veteran approaches him at a car-repair shop and thanks him for saving his life, Kyle has no idea what to say. He only finds some semblance of inner peace when he’s spending time with other soldiers who have been destroyed in battle, and that new sense of purpose also leads directly to his death.
I don’t think American Sniper glamorizes Chris Kyle, but it definitely valorizes him, which isn’t quite the same thing. The movie’s depiction of Iraqis is deeply fucked. The enemy sniper, for instance, gets action-movie gun-preparation scenes, with ominous supervillain music. Another Iraqi figure, a made-up character known as The Butcher (Mido Hamada), uses a power drill to torture a little kid to death in front of his family. When Kyle says, “They’re fucking savages,” the movie seems to agree. That could just be the nature of its subjective approach, but it’s those moments where American Sniper feels most consciously political. Maybe Eastwood is making a point about how war flattens things out and forces people to force each other into clear-cut friend-or-enemy categories. Or maybe Eastwood really is depicting Iraqis as savages. He never makes this stuff easy to figure out.
Eastwood himself came to American Sniper late. Steven Spielberg, whose Saving Private Ryan had been the last real war-movie blockbuster before Sniper, originally planned to direct; Eastwood came aboard a few weeks after Spielberg dropped out. But American Sniper is still distinctly an Eastwood movie. It’s fast and businesslike, and the supporting characters sometimes feel like complete afterthoughts. Eastwood’s no-nonsense style led to one bit of notorious silliness: the scene where Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller hold a plastic doll that’s supposed to be a baby. (The baby who’d been cast was sick, and the back-up baby didn’t show up. Eastwood simply isn’t the type of director to wait another day to find another baby when there’s a doll sitting right there.)
But that same frill-free Eastwood style gives American Sniper a lot of its blunt-force effectiveness, too. Bradley Cooper, bulked-up and marble-mouthed, is pretty magnificent as Kyle. He underplays everything, and he never spells out how you’re supposed to feel about this character. The battle scenes are tense and ugly and chaotic. Eastwood never really indulges in action theatrics. Instead, he pushes us through the horrors of war with a sad and propulsive sort of grace. That’s probably another reason why American Sniper made all that money. It shows horrible things, and yet the movie itself is extremely watchable. It sucks you in.
2014 was not a big box-office year. If American Sniper had come out a year earlier, it would’ve been the year’s fifth-highest grosser. A year later, it would’ve been utterly obliterated by The Force Awakens and Jurassic World. American Sniper was an American phenomenon, right down to the title. Globally, Sniper didn’t even make the box-office top 10. (Around the world, Transformers: Age Of Extinction was the year’s biggest hit; it made nearly twice as much as Sniper.) Still, it’s pretty remarkable that a grimy, gore-drenched character drama was able to rule the American box office at a time when franchises dominated. Throughout American Sniper, Chris Kyle and his team wear the skull logo of the Punisher, the Marvel Comics vigilante who became an icon for cops and soldiers. In the year of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians Of The Galaxy, that adapted skull logo managed to beat out anything that Marvel itself had on offer. That won’t happen again. Honestly, it’s probably good that it won’t happen again.
Two years after American Sniper, Clint Eastwood came out with Sully, a film that used many of the same filmmaking techniques to tell a story about an American hero who wasn’t comfortable with being called a hero. Sully was a decent-sized hit, but it wasn’t a cultural phenomenon. Here, the menacing figures weren’t Iraqi insurgents; they were geese. You couldn’t build a culture-war narrative around Sully. It was just a good movie. In the 21st century, you’re not going to dominate the box office just by making a good movie. You need to stake out a place in the world. Whether intentionally or not, American Sniper did that. It reaped the rewards.
The contender: My favorite of the 2014 hits was a very different image of American militarism. The aforementioned Captain America: The Winter Soldier isn’t the paranoid ’70s political thriller that it sometimes pretends to be, but the film does present a more panoramic view of armed forces—one where those forces aren’t necessarily all that concerned with keeping people safe. Winter Soldier is also just a fun spectacle with a charming central performance and a couple of the best action scenes that ever come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If I had to pick a 2014 movie about an American super-soldier, it’d be the Marvel movie every time.
Next time: Disney reinvents a dead franchise as a zippy, crowd-pleasing nostalgia trip with The Force Awakens.
205 Comments
This is one that I saw months after it came out and found it deeply unmemorable. It might have played better to Americans but it was very blah compared with Guardians or Winter Soldier which were far more memorable.
I saw the movie and enjoyed it, even as I realized it was giving Chris Kyle a much nicer view than he deserved. I’d read a profile of him some months earlier, after he’d been killed, and he did not sound like a great guy. The reviews of the movie were positive, and while I’m as bleeding-heart liberal as they come I’m not one to shun a movie solely based on its politics.I think it’s the kind of movie that makes it really easy for people to see what they want in it, and ignore what they don’t. Conservatives see Kyle as a hero who shoots bad brown people. I saw him as (yet another) tool of America’s history of projecting its power overseas and how average Americans serve the interests of the powerful. He was clearly depicted as having awful PTSD (or movie-PTSD, anyway), which I thought sent the message “look how much war fucks people up,” even though the real Kyle evidently did not. I agree that it’s hard to say what Eastwood did or didn’t intend. I do think that it had a couple of the tensest scenes in recent memory, like when Kyle’s really, really hoping he doesn’t have to shoot the kid. Heck, that scene was in one of the trailers and even without any of the other build-up or context in the movie, it was one of the tensest things I’d ever seen.My final reaction to it might be this: Yeah, the movie goes to lengths to show how fucked-up war has made Kyle, but it never seems to do anything to get at the roots of the problem: the militarism, imperialism, and capitalism that led to us sending thousands of Americans to die pointlessly overseas. It seems to say that he was in a bad situation, but it wasn’t his fault, so let’s treat him like a hero and not think too hard about the rest.
I’ve often thought of how differently, and perhaps better, this movie would have been received if it was about a fictional character. As it is, it’s really only based on the real Chris Kyle, and Eastwood sort of makes him into what he wants anyway, so he might as well have just given him a different name. Then again, the movie might have made much less money if he did that, so I can understand why he didn’t.
Totally agree, and I have stopped watching this type of “based on true events” movies and shows altogether. If a story is interesting enough for me to want to see, I don’t want a fictionalized version of it. Eastwood is a particularly lazy storyteller in this way. He doesn’t give a crap about Chris Kyle, American Sniper is a fictional movie that depicts a fictional character except for the name. But he’s more than willing to use that name to sell tickets.The other problem when you view life as a movie, is that there has to be a bad guy, even if you need to create one. This movie of course turned Iraqis into savages. They’re not, but a war movie always needs an enemy, so Sully is an even better example.
I love airplanes and the “Miracle on the Hudson” is a truly captivating event worthy of many retellings, but I refused to watch Sully because I was so turned off by the trailer where they depict the FAA people as the dumb bureaucratic bad guys just out to persecute our hero. Watch enough actually true stories depicting the absolutely herculean-to-the-point-of-heroic efforts that accident investigators go to, all in an effort to save lives, and it should bother you to see them reduced to Eastwood’s easy bad guys. Same reason I had no interest in Eastwood’s version of the Richard Jewell saga. He’s a great director for sure, but his penchant for this kind of stuff is also pretty hack-y.
Every single based on true story depictions do it completely wrong. Even the Crown which I love, that whole scene with the guy breaking in and having a heartfelt conversation with the Queen was pretty ridiculous, but also long enough ago that it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the ones that were so recent.
Yeah, the movie goes to lengths to show how fucked-up war has made Kyle, but it never seems to do anything to get at the roots of the problem: the militarism, imperialism, and capitalism that led to us sending thousands of Americans to die pointlessly overseas.It’s amazing the career U-turn from Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima, which interrogate those roots directly, to American Sniper and the filmmaker he’s been since. Eastwood used to be a guy who used his status as a gun-toting, gravelly voiced conservative icon to present ideas that were somewhat subversive. I think the main theme of his work since is summarized in the moment when Kyle’s spotter hisses at him “They’ll fry you if you’re wrong.” He’s mainly using his reputation as a maverick director to present stories of embattled white men with propaganda messages that fit the Fox News worldview pretty squarely: “War is hell but those brown guys are evil people who should be killed,” “The government and media are corrupt forces who wrongly question the righteous actions of heroic white men,” that kind of stuff. The fact that he delivers those themes with more subtlety than the guys who make films for Kevin Sorbo or Stephen Baldwin makes the propaganda more effective, because Eastwood’s films will be seen by (and could persuade) people who aren’t already part of the MAGA crowd.
Don’t think this is a fair summary of the film at all, but this idea that Eastwood had some sort of ideological realignment *in his late 70s* is funny to me. As if the guy who directed those earlier films is a world away from this.
“The fact that he delivers those themes with more subtlety than the guys
who make films for Kevin Sorbo or Stephen Baldwin makes the propaganda
more effective, because Eastwood’s films will be seen by (and could persuade) people who aren’t already part of the MAGA crowd.”This reminds me of the discusions of Paul Verhoeven, whose satires are put together so much better than straight movies about who and what he is satirizing that the people he is satirizing thing he’s making a straight movie.
Invoking Verhoeven reminds me of Eastwood’s one attempt at Verhoeven-style absurdist satire, which didn’t go terribly well:
I was going to write a comment about how misunderstood I think this movie is, and what a typically excellent write up this is, but you echoed 99% of what I was going to say better than I could, so I’ll just say this: I think I agree with everything you wrote except for the last paragraph. The impression I got wasn’t “let’s treat him like a hero”, it was just “here’s a deeply messed up person—make your own conclusions”, but with the pretty clear implication throughout the movie that he definitely was not a hero. Honestly, thinking back on the movie, I kind of think that if anything, it was almost an indictment of hero worship, with the implicit message of “you think this guy is a hero? Cause he’s not—look at how messed up, in so many ways, he was”.
I suppose maybe “look at this hero” isn’t quite accurate. But as Breihan said in the original article, I think the movie does valorize him: You should feel bad for this guy! He was in a bad situation and suffered but he deserves your respect! Which is maybe true for the character, but certainly not for the real Kyle, and it has an undercurrent of implicit acceptance of the situation to begin with, as if to say, “Hey, there was no way to avoid this.”
Yeah, this write-up is an interesting take, but even with the most charitable reading, the movie is still part of a longstanding cinematic tradition of depicting the true horror of war as the damage it does to the psyches of (usually) white American soldiers. I’d argue that is not great, particularly as the country’s dominant anti-war narrative.
People are arguing that you can take this movie any way you want depending on your own political biases, and while there is some truth to that, the reality is that 90% of viewers either thought it was saying “Kyle was a hero who shouldn’t be questioned” and “the system has screwed this guy up, and he deserves our pity.” “Maybe we’d be better off if we were slightly more critical of dudes for their willingness to execute brown children even if they feel sort of sad about it” is a reading the movie itself actively discourages, even ignoring the fact that it glosses over a lot of the more unsavory aspects of Kyle’s personality and was made with the cooperation of his family.
I’m glad there has been more nuanced discussion of Chris Kyle in recent years, back when the movie came out even questioning his heroism would end with a conservative lynch mob coming at you. I…might give Trump credit for breaking conservative virtue signaling with his John McCain remarks….nah.
I think the word “hero” is somewhat unhelpful in this context, without a definition. Does the film portray him as a good guy doing good things? Can safely say no. But does it portray him as a martyr to a good cause – a man who did what needed to be done, and sure it messed him up, but we should appreciate those who are willing to sacrifice their soul to keep America safe? Maybe, and that can be a dangerous message to send.
yeah this is really the whole thing, thanks for carrying the ball into the endzone, great article, really good point in your comments. glad this movie is able to push past the lowest possible interpretaion – the fox news red meat, because bradley cooper really is a revelation in the role.
Honest question: Why is war considered worse when its done against people with darker colored skin?
Eastwood is actually really good at making movies about how violence reverberates and changes everyone it touches. I am not sure whether he means to make films that do this or not, but it is what he is doing. Hollywood is filled with actor that would express more liberal politics that never less give a steady stream of movie that take an almost porngraphic delight in mayham and delight that one very tough man with righteous angry can put the world right. Eastwood, as a director, isn’t going to give you that movie. (As an actor he did, which makes the whole thing even stranger.)
I think Unforgiven should prove making films like that is his intent. It’s considered his masterpiece and I’d say it’s as clear a mission statement and commentary/self-reflection of his career up to the point as you’re going to get.
That’s a good point, it is the explicit theme of Unforgiven, in something like Million Dollar Baby who can give alternative readings but Unforgiven could not really be read any other way.
Gran Torino was a great example of that, his character is 100% awful and unpleasant despite being a nominal war hero, the key is he does not see himself as a hero at all nor the situation he was put in as heroic. It still falls a bit into dirty harry cliches but props for not going the Death Wish route, he dies unarmed and killing nothing except the Jesus Christ Pose.
Yeah, pretty much what you said. To me, the movie was a depiction of PTSD. Anyone trying to neatly have it fit their agenda is missing the point.-d
I’ve become uninterested in Eastwood films, even before his absurd asshole-yells-at-chair performance, and so have never bothered to see this (there are plenty of films I actually want to see out there still), but thanks for this carefully honest, thoughtful comment.To an as-usual good article.
Yeah, I think Eastwood gave more nuance that he’s given credit for, but it would’ve been much better as a fictional character.
I don’t think the movie is pro war, the heavy emphasis on PTSD and Eastwoods work with Flags of Our Father’s and Letters from Iwo Jima makes it clear. But that’s a problem in and of itself. Chris Kyle never suffered from PTSD, he would absolutely brag about shooting women and children and sleep soundly. Intentional or not, you are making a hero out of a highly flawed individual if I’m being generous. The fact the movie ends with funeral footage hammers home this is a lionization. Its saying flaws and all, he is deserving of your respect. Side note but its jarring to look back at a Republican Party that used to say your not American if you question if a habitual liar was a good man. Now its all about the army is full of Marxists, fucking hell. Bottom line, its a well made film, but I absolutely believe irs right wing propaganda, intentionally or otherwise. Letters this sure as hell isn’t!
American Sniper and Flags of Our Fathers are both perfectly good movie, but it’s incredible how much better Letters From Iwo Jima is than either of them. But one thing they definitely have in common is a view of war as essentially futile and dehumanizing, which is surprising coming from a guy of his age and political leanings. Then again, maybe the fact that he was drafted during Korea was enough to make him think long and hard about the awfulness of war, even though he never ended up being anywhere near combat.
It’s probably no coincidence that Letters from Iwo Jima took a jaundiced perspective on militarism and military hierarchy and was also not about the United States military.
Bingo! When it’s about a non-American power invading places and blowing shit up, then it’s problematic. And, of course, non-Americans just aren’t cut out for the warrior lifestyle, natch.It’s not about war being bad; it’s about “Don’t fuck with ‘Murrica, and bend over and spread your cheeks if ‘Murrica chooses to fuck with you.”
This lines up with the fact that Sully was about bureaucracy asking a hero questions, isn’t that annoying? When the point of investigations is so that there’s no next or you at least know what worked last time beyond, have Sully Sullenberger be your pilot.
Agree about Iwojima. It’s one of the best anti-war movies ever. If I ever had any belief that war could be glorious, it was erased after reading Tennozan (which is about Okinawa, but has many of the same heart shattering realizations).
The blessing and the curse of being the ‘Own the Libs’ party the GOP has become. You have no moral compass worth a damn, but that also means you’re free to turn against anyone at any time to suit whatever your needs at any moment. It doesn’t have to make sense or be consistent, just do it!
Honestly I doubt you should take Kyle’s word on his mental health, especially as we’ve seen conservatives absolutely stake out the realm of self-projection in recent years. The guy loudly proclaiming “I’m totally fine” was probably not, in actuality, fine. Telling everyone all those people were terrorists who deserved to die was his way of dealing with the reality. Had he not died by someone else’s trauma it’s entirely possible his own would have caught up to him.
I don’t think the typical NY Times Middlebrow art maker gets how much discussion of mental health issues like PTSD and addiction there is in the right wing world, and I also don’t think they get how much those things can be used to reinforce right wing values.Which is why we get depictions of therapists in things like Falcon and the Winter Soldier or Mare of Easttown as tough but fair facilitators of an ultimately liberal viewpoint of greater empathy and ability to function. They’re a lifeline in a sea of denial and ignorance.The truth is that the right wing world knows about mental health issues, they talk about PTSD all the time, and they’ve turned these topics into political fodder. On a broad level, they’re sources of resentment used to attack mainstream institutions. I think that’s the level where Sniper operates, and NY Times Middlebrow critical types were so stunned to see issues openly depicted that they couldn’t imagine it might not exist except as reinforcement of the liberal viewpoint.The even darker piece of right wing openness toward mental health is thankfully a place where Eastwood doesn’t really go. There is a cottage industry of right wingers who profit from peddling bogus therapies for PTSD, addiction, and other issues, often intersecting with the political missions of the leadership of the religious right.There’s also evidence that right wing extremists deliberately recruit people living with PTSD or other issues, seeing them as useful tools. Middlebrow liberals are, as usual, behind the curve of how the right operates, and this level of ignorance is being exploited.
It sounds like what you’re describing is that the right talks about PTSD and addiction and related mental health issues (but possibly not other mental health issues), but instead of focusing on how to heal them, focuses on how to exploit them, either directly (let’s recruit guys with PTSD because they’ll make for good killers) or as a way to valorize those people and show how tough and American they are (his PTSD makes him a hero!). I’m just spitballing here; I’ll freely admit I’m one of the blinkered liberals who doesn’t really know what the right is doing internally 😉
There is a very considerable therapeutic industry on the right, some of it well intentioned and a piece of it is even effective. You’ll see some substance abuse counselling that isn’t significantly different from what you might get anywhere, for example.
But the reactionary tendency to reject anything associated with mainstream evidence-based approaches often creates big problems. On top of that is problem of the grifter heart of the right — there’s a huge bias toward making bucks off of everything, and that rots away thoughts of working on someone’s problems as an end in itself, and turns them into marketing opportunites and profit centers.You can also add in a lot of bigotry that turns being gay or being outspoken for women’s rights or disrespecting conservative parents into being something needing a peculiar version of counseling.There are obviously lots of problems with mainstream therapeutic methods and practitioners, and some of them parallel what exists on the far right. But the level of creepiness and exploitation on the right is a lot worse overall.
Agreed. I have to assume the PTSD was twisting our collective arms to be sympathetic toward someone who—by what accounts I have read—was not deserving of sympathy at all. I won’t judge whether he is a hero or not, but real-life Kyle is not who was portrayed on the screen.
This movie reminds me of early Tom Clncy novels, in hat it’s definitely pro-military with an obvious lean to the political right, but it doesn’t really interrogate why that is. It’s enjoyable enough wherever you sit on the political spectrum or however much you know about the “real” Kyle of the memoir. It’s just not a particularly memorable movie and doesn’t feel like it had much of a cultural legacy beyond fake baby jokes.I also can’t fathom what a Spielberg version of American Sniper would look like, even post-peak late Spielberg seems too emotional for the material..
It would have more sharks and dinosaurs in it
Or at least a kid saving the day at some point.
That version of Shindler’s List was weird.
“Hurry the Nazis are coming!”“Send out the velociraptors with sharks strapped to their heads to delay them, ET!”
I suppose that Eastwood could have paused to get a baby blanket to cover the doll up.Still have not seen this film, no interest then or now. Worth it?
Eastwood is notorious for taking the absolutely bare-minimum amount of takes on set, even as an actor. Jeff Bridges mentions – I think it was in the documentary Final Cut: The Making & Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate – that when he was making Thunderbolt & Lightfoot. Directors, other stars, would say on an Eastwood film “There’s another thing I’d like to try with this” or “Can I try there scene where I do this instead?” and if they’d already done two or three takes, Eastwood would just say “No. I think we got it” and that was that.
I’m reminded by the scene in Ed Wood where a tall actor hits his head on a doorframe on film and rather than get a new take, Wood decides to keep it on the grounds that this sort of thing would be a common occurance for the character.
See, that’s actually smart. Way better than a crotchetty old chair-haranguer simply going with “Don’t have time for this shit. Use the fake baby.”
What I find amusing is that I didn’t notice the fake baby at all when I saw the movie. I guess I just didn’t look at it while it was on-screen.That said, I don’t know why they didn’t swaddle it in a blanket so that you couldn’t see any of the actual doll. They had to know that it was going to look fake on camera.
Why do another take? Its perfect!
I think the real reason was Wood didn’t have the money to buy any more film than the bare minimum required, if that.
There’s a scene in “Rocky” where Rocky’s boss, Mr. Gazzo, is arguing with Rocky and the actor who played him, Joe Spinell, has an asthma attack mid-scene. He reaches in his pocket, gets out an inhaler, sprays it in his mouth, and just keeps going, in-character the whole way. Stallone said it amazed him, but he also managed to not break character! It happens near the 1:20 mark in this clip.
Yeah, I remember him saying why do a scene with 100 takes if everyone feels they got it on take 1 or 2? He’s incredibly efficient, which makes him incredibly valuable as a filmmaker beyond his legendary reputation: his movies finish on time, on budget, and actors can slot in a movie of his knowing it won’t overrun for months and they’ll have to lose another job as a result.
To wear down William Shatner is one acceptable reason.
I love the fact that Brad Dourif was clearly on a filming break from Deadwood when they interviewed him for that, based on his facial hair.
Only if you’re a particularly big Bradley Cooper fan IMO. He’s excellent in it, but the film itself is at best not very interesting.
Nailed it!
Anything for Rocket. I’ll do it. I’m probably wary because of the people who like the movie for what I think are poor reasons.
Yes. For the reasons laid out in the article, which are right on the money, especially Cooper turning in an astonishing performance.
Hard to say. It’s a good movie, but not anything I’d call “essential” viewing. If you were ever curious if Bradley Cooper could be a “serious” actor, it’s worth checking out. But then he made A Star is Born, playing basically the same gruff notes, so if you’ve seen that, you’ve got the gist of what he brings here.
A lot of people are talking politics, but a lot of that is projected onto the film. Eastwood was trying to be apolitical. I’d recommend it for the tension, so if you like movies like The Hurt Locker, this is in that vein, but with sniping instead of bombs. Otherwise, you can keep on keepin on, without missing much.
My friend is a an assistant director who’s worked on many major productions. She said it’s hard to film with an infant because, legally, they can only be under the bright lights for a very brief time each shooting day. Usually, you have to have two or three infants on hand in order to film a scene, but dolls are sometimes used when you don’t have the infants. Eastwood did a poor job and got caught “cheating.” But what they were doing is not unheard of at all.
An interesting side note – Eastwood’s previous film Flags of Our Fathers dealt with the story of John Bradley and the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. Long after the movie was made, an investigation revealed that Bradley himself was not in fact one of the flag-raisers in the famous photo after all (he did raise the first flag but, like several others, wasn’t present for the second one).After further investigation, another of the three marines focused on in that film was also found to not have been present in that famous photo.
stolen valour is so much more interesting than actual valour.
If I remember correctly, there’s no indication that the misidentified men were lying. They were involved in one flag-raising, but didn’t know if that’s the one that was photographed or not. Obviously, a lot was happening at the time, they were in a stressful situation, and many of the people involved were dead just a few days later, making it difficult to verify anything about it. Not to mention that “stolen valor” implies people taking credit for combat exploits or acts of heroism, which raising a flag during a lull in the fighting certainly doesn’t qualify as.
I agree. Its not so much stolen valor, as its fog of war. This happens all the time. Its only important here because its one of the most famous photos in American history.
This was really recent. Like last two years recent. Its fascinating how such an iconic moment in US history could have such a massive misconception.
Winter Soldier is still my favorite MCU movie- the fight scenes are just SO GOOD. They are so well choreographed. I love how the entire movie builds up the Winter Soldier as this just badass mofo, and when he and Cap finally throw down…. It DOES. NOT. DISAPPOINT. That first Cap vs. Winter Soldier fight is SO good. The movie moves at a crisp pace, I think Scarlett Johansson really comes into her own as Black Widow here, I love the way they introduce Sam and his friendship with Cap, the way it moves the overall MCU story arch is great (S.H.I.E.L.D. had been in the background all throughout Phase 1, and just taking them completely off of the chess board I think was a great move for opening up the Avengers to do more stuff), the dialogue is solid and it’s not too over-the-top too-clever-for-their-own-good dialogue, there is SO MUCH to love in this movie.
Winter Soldier is still my favourite MCU, with only the big battle in the sky falling into the familiar third act conclusion of Marvel films post ‘Avengers Assemble’ (we had to call it). At the time I wished Alexander Pierce had been revealed to be the Red Skull in disguise, but now I see that would have been too on the nose for how evil the bad guys were.
I think Scarlett Johansson really comes into her own as Black Widow here,
Scarlett is great in this, but I do wonder how we’d all feel about Sharon Carter/Agent 13 if she’d been allowed to retain the story that was given over to Black Widow. As I understand it Scarlett didn’t originally commit to being in Winter Soldier, so the script focused more on Sharon. Then Sca-Jo had a change of heart and all of that character background/budding friendship with Cap gets shifted over to BW.I think it’s a shame that there was never a scenario in which both Sharon and Natasha could both have received strong story arcs. Alongside introducing Falcon to MCU, we could have had a spin on Cap’s Kooky Quartet.
Agreed. Since all Sharon existed for in The Winter Soldier is to give Cap a case of the not-gays.
Well I don’t think that’s quite fair. Sharon also fights Crossbones guy in the command-center.
It always irritated me that the MCU took so much from the Ed Brubaker run, but reduced its female lead to what was effectively a cameo part.
The relationship between Cap and Black Widow in this film is one of my favourite plutonic relationships between a male and a female in any film. It just works.
Maybe I’m a sucker for their chemistry from the earlier film, “The Perfect Score”, tho.
Winter Soldier is the absolute crown jewel of the MCU. Breihan’s right in that its reputation as a spy thriller is a little overblown. It’s very much an action flick with some spy elements, but WHAT an action flick it is! It’s so good that it also gave us (secondhand) two of the best moments from Endgame: a fun tease of “ooh, are we going to get another elevator fight!?” follwed almost immediately by “hail, Hydra.”
Don’t forget “On your left”…
Hell, it made “Iron Man 2″ a slightly better movie when it revealed that Sen. Stern was Hydra. That made his motivations to get the Iron Man armor all the more sinister since he was really trying to get it for Hydra.
It is so good at the spy-thriller stuff that it makes me forget that it ends with the three giant floating aircraft carriers.
Ha, yeah there’s definitely a “big superhero action finale,” but I think we’re more forgiving of this one because the directors stage it as eye candy while they focus on the Cap/Bucky conflict. No one was really worried about the guidance chips (or whatever,) we just knew that the rest of the characters needed something to keep them busy while Steve made one last attempt to save his pal.
I love Sam singlehandedly taking one of them on! Really showcases how agile his wing suit is.
The only thing bad about Winter Soldier was that kneecapped Agents of Shield for almost the complete first season (remember when Marvel was still actively incorporating AOS into main MCU continuity?). AOS was a pretty ho-hum show because they had to keep “Ward is Hydra” reveal in the can until this movie came out.
But then those last few episodes of season 1 were so good!!
Yeah, the (*SPOILER FOR SEASON 1 AGENTS OF SHIELD*) Ward is Hydra reveal is one of my favorite plot twists of all time. Not only was it utterly surprising (I don’t remember anyone speculating it ahead of time), but it was one of those twists that not only made him a much more interesting character, but it made the previous episodes better in hindsight. The stiff generic bland good guy Ward of the first half of Season 1 wasn’t poor writing; it was a deliberate ruse to cover up a fairly f’d up real personality.
Yep – it’s probably Chris Evan’s best performance as Cap and Scarlett Johansson’s best performance as Black Widow, and it is HANDS DOWN the best pure action movie in the MCU. I was really hoping Falcon and the Winter Soldier would ape more of The Winter Soldier, but it really only managed to hits those heights at a few moments here and there.
Cap’s “price of freedom of high” speech is just the right level of earnest and inspiring. I also love how ScarJo goes from being all flirty and mysterious in the beginning of the movie, the way she was in Iron Man 2, but then when the chips fall down and shes on the run she finally can be herself around Cap. I thought ScarJo sold that transformation really really well.
Yeah, what I really appreciate about the Russo films is that they paint Nat as a fully fleshed out person compared to the Whedon Avenger films where she exists surface-deep to be ogled and “The Action Chick” and nothing more. Nat and Steve’s friendship and ease around each other in Winter Soldier (that car scene!), Civil War (that funeral scene!), and Endgame (that sandwich scene!) is one of the best dynamics in the MCU.
I do really appreciate just how normal Cap and Nat are around each other, in an entertainment industry that usually seems incapable of admitting the existence of platonic friendships. Actually, I appreciate how normal Cap is with everyone. *Sigh* I’m really going to miss Evans-Cap.
One thing I wonder is what it would have been like to have seen this movie not knowing who the Winter Soldier actually was from the comics. I wonder if the reveal lands as hard as it does for Cap, or if most people were like “oh yeah, I figured that was him.”
Speaking as someone who went into the movie still believing “No one stays dead in comics, except Uncle Ben and Bucky”, I had roughly the same reaction to the reveal as Cap, yes.Is Uncle Ben still dead in comics, or has that been messed with too?
This is the 3rd time he’s had to write about Winter Soldier in the runner-up spot (“John Wick” got the nod in the 2014 A History Of Violence article, and “Guardians Of The Galaxy” was written up for the 2014 Age Of Heroes article). And, that’s a damn shame.
LOL thats true! Although I definitely get GotG being the “more important” movie, in terms of just absolutely shattering the expectations. And John Wick is, well, it’s John Wick haha
Winter Soldier is my favorite MCU – beginning to end. (Or, you know, “on your left” to “on your left”.) There’s not a wasted moment, the fight scenes are superb, and the dynamics between Cap and Sam, and between Cap and Natasha, are superbly done. Very natural and true to their characters.As for American Sniper…. I saw it. Thought Cooper did really well, and made Kyle a more human-seeming character than he was in real life, but I really didn’t understand the point of the movie. Hard to see Cooper as a tragic OR a heroic figure, but maybe that’s me being a bleeding heart commie liberal socialist. Who can tell the difference between a plastic baby and a real one.
I think my only complaint about the fight scenes, and it can be chalked up to the Russos first real go in a movie of this scale (see also: Christopher Nolan/Batman Begins), is that its editing is so insistent with rapid cutting that I wish it would just stay on a shot during a fight and breathe a little more, especially since the close quarters combat is a welcome MCU change of pace
Yeah, definitely some growing pains. Especiall considering how well choreographed those scenes are. Chris Evans shared on insta awhile back some footage of him and the HYDRA dudes rehearsing the elevator, and Sebastian Stan shared a clip of him practicing the knife flip thing. Really cool stuff
Man, I love that knife flip in that street fight EVERY TIME.
The Winter Soldier and Civil Wars are the peak of the Marvel films for me so far. Easily, though I enjoy very many.Cap is my least favorite major Marvel character in the comics, but the best in the films (even over who Thor became).
Another vote for The Winter Soldier as the best MCU film.My favourite scene, where much like real life, the bad guys win by being driven, focussed and on the same relentless page behind the scenes. It’s not flashy but it is effective.
I agree, Scarlett/Black Widow also got some rare chances to be more than the stoic badass. She goofs off a bit and does a really cute girlfriend voice when they go to that Apple store (wow they really slipped a huge product placement in there didn’t they?)
I’ve never loved this movie. The filmmaking, particularly in the Iraq stretches, is sloppy and alienating. But two things have always struck me—maybe by Chris Kyle himself. First, I’ve never bought the idea that this is right-wing propaganda. The most you can say is that it glamorizes a shitty person, and that’s fair, but I think Eastwood is using a real life person as a means to an end. Beyond that, I just don’t get how you can watch this, see how ugly war is, see how ugly the consequences of war are—there are several depictions of death and gruesome injury of American soldiers. And the scene where Kyle kills the rival sniper is a totally deflated moment. In fact, any time he kills anyone, it hurts. The idea that the film valorizes him is the exact right take, and it’s truer to Clint Eastwood’s central interest as an auteur. Eastwood loves men who withstand insurmountable odds and institutions. American Sniper is not propaganda, but the film’s version of Chris Kyle is the product of American log-lines that are pro-war and pro-nationalism. He does what he is told because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. And then at the end, the war breaks him when he calls his wife in a sandstorm, crying and quitting the war.
Second, this still might be Bradley Cooper’s best performance. The film fundamentally does not work if Cooper isn’t instantly magnetic and likable. Even when he ditches his family and ignores his fellow veterans as they suffer and die, we are still more or less on Kyle’s side—insofar as we know why he is doing what he is doing. Cooper carries this film, and his performance is unforgettable, to the point that you momentarily forget that the real Chris Kyle is probably burning in a hell.
Yeah, like a lot of artists, Eastwood’s a lot more complicated and nuanced when he puts on the director/artist hat than he is as a person. Likely it’s just because that’s how he best knows how to express himself, or telling a story is how he can best empathize with others not like him. But looking at Eastwood’s body of work, I’d say that while it’s right-leaning, it’s also got a lot of left in there too – as you say, Letters From Iwo Jima itself is a pretty stunning achievement as a mainstream Hollywood movie, one that no other filmmaker has really even attempted. But it’s a shame he started being this right-wing parody publicly because it obscures his much more interesting work. I’d imagine that’s how some probably feel about Spike Lee, though I like his public persona.And also agreed that Winter Solider is great. I did a pandemic rewatch of most of the Marvel movies, and I was pretty surprised at how few stood out, even ones I liked at the time. A lot of them were just wallpaper, and movies like Guardians or Black Panther didn’t connect, and found a lot of the humor pretty Marvelized and forced. But Winter Soldier is one of the two (the other being Iron Man 3) that caught my attention as just a really solid movie. But I’d say Interstellar was my favorite 2014 movie, even though it wouldn’t qualify here from a box office perspective. I waited to see it for months weirdly, and by then so many people had told me that it was silly or the ending was stupid that my expectations were way lower than they would’ve been had I gone opening weekend. And I just thought it was a lovely story, fun sci-fi, and a wonderful moviegoing experience.
So while I generally love action and war films this one just put a super bad taste in my mouth. Disclosure I’m Muslim and live in the ME though not an Arab. This film was just super super offensive. Lawrence of Arabia is less colonialist than this piece of hot garbage. Poor CK tortured for killing Arabs in their country over false pretences but no worries every single one of these Arabs is a Savage. Yep see even Mom’s and kids are suicide bombers etc. There is no way you walk out from this film not willing to forgive any war crime the US military. Ay have done.
Yeah, it’s super fucking weird that this review explicitly states “these aren’t propaganda choices. They’re filmmaking choices” when just about 100% of the choices in this movie were clearly propaganda. Hell, the review even acknowledges that Kyle is A) a noted liar, and B) claims to have murdered a bunch of innocent people during Katrina. Simply making a movie about this piece of shit is a propaganda choice.
I will say as a Griffin Newman-esque Box Office nerd this was one of two times in the last 10 years when an opening weekend (well, opening wide weekend) really blindsided me. It’s been pretty easy in recent years to guess what will be the big hits and what will be the big disappointments, but not this time. IT Chapter 1 was the other huge weekend that really took me by surprise.
This is a headspinning analysis. You almost completely leave out the Sienna Miller at-home storyline, which is the one redeeming part of the movie for most of us who dealt with the vast disconnect between civilians and military over the last 20 years (or in many cases, longer.)There’s a much simpler reason why the A story turned this into a hit: the Eastwood representation of Chief Kyle was the first media representation of the Iraq War that was simple enough that it finally now made sense to the overwhelming majority of Americans that genuinely didn’t understand why the hell we were there but waved their flags nonetheless. That the Chief in this apparently doesn’t much resemble the real Kyle nor his missions isn’t terribly relevant; this was a traditional Eastwood hero they could get behind.But…then came Sienna Miller. And that B story and performance is far more important, because it was the first time of the entire war that the terrible toll of what families had to deal with was widely disseminated. Unlike the Brad Cooper storyline, that one was genuine – to the point where plenty of wives decided after being warned via Facebook et al and the FRG/gossip network about what they’d be seeing decided to not watch the film since it was so devastatingly accurate as to what they went through. Even now, the new ability to communicate instantaneously halfway around the globe from a deployment in a war zone to the home front is something that is still very much being worked out, and this thing gets both the sheer terror (the phone scene, which actually did happen to one friend of mine) during the deployment as well as the aftereffect where the often complete abandonment by the military and VA afterwards of those who weren’t in good mental health had its own devastating effect.Sorry, but if you’re just going to relegate Miller to the baby scene then I don’t think you understand the film on appropriate levels to write this piece; you can argue this as a culture war piece (it certainly helped as a front in the battles) but there was a deeper aspect to it too, and you need to incorporate that to even make an attempt to get why this worked.
This is an interesting perspective and I appreciate this look at it (I really do, even if I’m about to spend two columns picking out one line in your piece) but I don’t think Breihan not covering it means he’s not qualified to write the piece. He just looked at it from a different angle. This piece wasn’t about every theme in the film – it was about why it became such a big hit (as befits the column). And as effective as the Miller stuff is I would argue that it’s not one of the main factors in it’s huge box office. Breihan’s shown from doing multiple pieces on films that overlap in his columns that he can approach and analyse films from different perspectives – just because something’s not covered here doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand the film. It just means it’s a long enough piece as it is and it doesn’t factor into the discussion he’s having.
As mentioned in the article both American Sniper and The Passion of the Christ were mega huge hits in America, but modest-to-good box office around the rest of the world.
Neither film appealed to me, as I’m not American nor as religious as I used to be. Both films struck a chord with an audience that I assume was under served, though I believe Passion’s box office was fueled by churches organizing group trips to watch.Eastwood is a curious film maker to me. As a man he seems to stand for things I am generally the political opposite of, while as a director he seems pretty generalist. I’d say the Eastwood film I’ve seen most times is Heartbreak Ridge, as it gets repeated a lot on British telly. Yet I couldn’t tell you what that film’s message is about. Judging from this balanced (IMO) review of American Sniper, the same seems to apply here.I guess people took from it what they wanted to.
Passion of the Christ always baffled me. I saw it as religious violence-porn. I am a conservative evangelical minister, and the movie looked utterly repulsive — like a deliberate wallowing in gore. I have never seen it, by choice. The four Gospels purposefully do not jam Jesus’ blood and suffering in the reader’s face.
It’s a hilariously tacky and pretentious movie. All the dialog is in Aramaic or Latin, but during the flagellation gore literally flies at the camera. It depicts Judas’ guilt as a translucent creature with glowing eyes that looks exactly like the Predator. I’m not a person of faith, but the movie has no perspective on the meaning of Jesus’ suffering, only the horror-movie mechanics of it. That’s part of the reason the accusations of antisemitism were warranted – the movie makes no allusion to the covenant with Abraham or even the idea of a Redeemer, but it’s explicit about the Jewishness of the people who condemned Jesus (Pilate comes across as a weak-willed pragmatist; the Pharisees come across as evil). It all suggests either that Gibson has no idea how to make art about his faith, or that his faith is deeply ugly. It’s even more fascinating when you have something like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew, which was made by an avowed atheist but uses cinematic form to explore the essence of the gospel and the traditions of Christian culture and music. He sets Mary and Joseph fleeing Galilee to the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” which encapsulates centuries of tradition and meaning in a single lovely scene. Gibson, on the other hand, relegates the Beatitudes to a brief flashback and has another brief flashback where Jesus invents a chair and Mary tells him (in Aramaic) that it will never catch on.
“It depicts Judas’ guilt as a translucent creature with glowing eyes that looks exactly like the Predator.” hahaha holy shit that’s amazing.
“That’s part of the reason the accusations of antisemitism were warranted”
The accusations of anti-Semitism were warranted because the passion plays that the movie was directly based on were proudly and blatantly anti-Semitic.
I’d love a tragic downfall story of Judas, where it shows his humanity and temptation, maybe some motives or underlying reasons for his betrayal. Or even of Satan. Instead of the cartoony crap
That’s how I viewed it. No different than Hostel or Saw. And as special effects improve and the line gets pushed, those movies become less and less shocking. I compared it to DeMille’s movies and it obviously came up short. I am an atheist though, and I do wonder how much of that influenced my interpretation.
Although it’s just a touch too modernized for me, the TV series The Chosen is a great deal better. Jesus doesn’t walk around in a mystical stupor like in the old Hollywood films, he shows a sense of humor, the disciples are a real gnarly bunch of characters, and some of the scenes are very touching.
I’ll check it out
IIRC The Passion did that for one scene when it shows him just hanging out with his mother for a few minutes, acting like a human being. But other than that they definitely leaned into the stupor territory. I’d also love a Jesus as political agitator angle, though that would piss off conservatives and liberals might just ignore it
It’s a middle act with no beginning or end. What really frustrates me about the movie is that most of it is too dull and workmanlike to work as camp. When Gibson drops the pretense of telling a story and lets his shittiest impulses rip, the movie really comes alive. The scene where the giant whip-wielding guy keeps selecting larger and uglier whips from his massive whip collection plays out like a Monty Python routine, without a hint of self-consciousness. Upthread I mention the awesome Predator-Satan, but that leaves out Androgynous Glam-Rock Satan and the Little Satan Rascals who chase Judas into the desert. Unfortunately, those moments are separated by long, tedious minutes of hushed dialog, emphatic slow-mo, and cliched music.
A campy version would have been really entertaining. It was uncomfortable viewing for me, because after watching all the exploitation films I have, I was clearly one of only ones in the theater that wasn’t affected. I saw it with my teammate’s church group, so free ticket. And one of them kept stealing my popcorn.
I never saw it. Having read the book I already knew the story.
Isn’t it a very Catholic representation?
It’s hard to even say. Gibson a Catholic loon, and passion plays are a real medieval Catholic thing, but the core audience was reportedly evangelicals. I genuinely wonder if, at some level, it was just an opportunity for intensely religious people to see the kind of grimy exploitation movie the rest of us take for granted. There’s a pretty funny movie called Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party about a closeted evangelical teenager and his family, and one of the running jokes is that his parents’ friend keeps bringing up human trafficking, and she’s clearly getting off on the concept. So it is with hyperviolent snuff-Jesus.
Hes not Catholic by the way. Hes some weird sect that things modern day Catholics are too weak and liberal. Its like original Roman Catholic as in literally from the AD years.
I have heard that, though I’m not sure what made it Catholic. An unhealthy preoccupation with Jesus’ suffering in mystical Catholic writings? I gather the movie included stations-of-the-cross characters like Veronica, a woman never mentioned in the gospels. The gospels are written in such a non-mythological way, that “pious myths” elements stick out as unnatural. It’s the same way with Jesus’ death — the writers just tell what happened in a flat way. Gibson’s approach is grotesquely unnatural to the tone of the source stories.
I am not particularly religious but I would absolutely watch more biblical epics, especially with todays budgets, if they weren’t too heavy on the proselytizing or so focused on the violence like Passion was. I admired the effort and detail he put into it, including using Aramaic as the main language. But man does he go over the top with the torture. Like, I don’t think anyone would’ve survived the initial flogging, even Jesus!
I’m not sure if there’s much message behind Heartbreak Ridge other than the U.S. military’s efforts to become more professional in the post-draft era. Otherwise, it’s just a decent “boot camp to battlefield” picture inspired by the true story of a U.S. Army paratrooper using his credit card to make a payphone call to base to call in air support, because the Army’s radios wouldn’t work.The movie changed it to Marines because the Army balked at how it portrayed bickering between troops. I guess it didn’t bother USMC as much.
“I’m not sure if there’s much message behind Heartbreak Ridge other than the U.S. military’s efforts to become more professional in the post-draft era.”
You don’t think there’s much of a message behind a movie about a guy whos religious believes directly influence what he will do in a warzone?
This tips is very useful to me because i read many blogs and comments and i have to submit a comments, Now i got a clear idea to demonstrate my quality comments. update many blog in different category best clipping path service provider
“Sully was a decent-sized hit, but it wasn’t a cultural phenomenon. Here, the menacing figures weren’t Iraqi insurgents; they were geese.”A creature far, far more savage than any xenophobic depiction of armed ‘terrorists’
Where is the docurama about Burgey Sullenberger, eh, Eastwood? Real heroes pilot buses.
I SEE YOU DANCING AT THE DISCOTHEQUE.
Will there be two Burgey movies made, like when Toby Jones and Philip Seymour Hoffman were both Truman Capote around the same time?
“We gotta avoid hitting those geese, Sully!”“If I don’t take those geese out now, who knows what those monsters will do! There’s never gonna be a better opportunity, I have to take it!”
Don’t forget
“They’ll fry you if you’re wrong, Sully!”
He resorted to one of the stupidest tropes ever for the villains — the badgering panel of anonymous nags.
I don’t know why so many movies settle for this — it’s just as lazy as the use of TV news as an exposition device. “Bartender, I’ll have a Bourbon and…. hey, turn up the TV!” [ Stares in disbelief as news shows DA at press conference announcing the best friend as top suspect ]It works as part of late-Eastwood’s belief system that amorphous institutions have ruined America. But it’s awful movie making — the panel trope is inevitably impersonal, and impersonality ruins drama.
I think it’s used so often because it’s effective. You say it ruins drama, but I don’t think it does, because while the individuals on the panel might not have any personal connection to the hero, the panel as a whole is an antagonistic character that we all already recognize: the faceless, heartless bureaucrats who don’t understand what the hero was facing.However, I also think the panel trope comes in two flavors: 1) several faceless bureaucrats we haven’t seen before and won’t see again, and 2) several faceless bureaucrats plus one character who we do know. In the former, it’s as I described before, where the panel itself is a kind of antagonist we’re all familiar with. In the second, while retaining some surface similarity, it’s actually a very different trope: the bully and his minions, because in that version it’s always the character we do know who’s leading the assault on the hero’s virtue, and the other minions just grimace and nod in agreement.
I submit: “Barkeep, gimme a beer.”
CANADIAN geese.
I think it is impossible to separate Eastwood’s later career from his Republican National Convention speech. Before that, everyone knew Eastwood was a Republican, maybe even a Conservative, but he seemed like a Hollywood Conservative: low taxes, national defense, and relatively socially liberal. He made quite a few movies with complext themes about violence and conflict, like Unforgiven and Letters from Iwo Jima, that made his conservatism seem complex. But that RNC speech made him look straight-up Right-Wing. I think it imbued everything he has made since with a right-wing sheen. I certainly haven’t been eager to watch any of his movies since then. I do need to watch Sully though.
Isn’t he a libertarian and now highly regrets making that speech?
He seemed to regret it while he was making it
Yeah, that was one of those “It seemed good on paper” ideas that became painfully obviously a bad idea immediately in practice. And, to make things worse, he could just stop and had to keep going, committed to this bad speech. It was like watching a Michael Scott speech.
This would not be a substantial improvement at all.
Honestly, nowadays I’ll take a real libertarian over an extreme Right-Winger. At least when a libertarian says “the government should stay out of people’s business,” they mean it for everyone equally. The Right tends to mean “the government should stay out of how I run my business, should stop trying to teach my kids real history and critical thinking, and should stop giving money to poor brown and black people, but should give me farm tax credits and disability payments.”
But that RNC speech made him look straight-up Right-Wing. It also made him look like a complete idiot. Apparently he didn’t submit anything in writing and told the RNC people he was just going to wing it. Might have gone over well if he was an experienced standup comic or proven improviser, but… that’s not what Eastwood is known for, obviously.
He should have brought Clyde on stage for some levity.
Probably wouldn’t have been very funny by 2012 🙁
Oof. Good point. American racism, always ruining everything, even my terrible joke.
I think what is interesting about that is how pathetic his politics are in his personal life are in comparison to his movie. In his movies they are about a heroic sniper fighting a duel or an idiot being railroaded by the FBI while in real life it’s a strange guy talking to a chair or complaining about a municipal code.
Why undercut your entire post by saying you need to see Sully? woof
(Jesse Ventura also successfully sued Kyle’s estate over a false claim that Kyle had punched out Ventura in a bar once.)
I know it would probably never happen, but this event is the one I want to see dramatized.
Not even in an absurd way, mostly just because I think there’s an interesting story to be told there in the idea of how much more willing people were to believe a man who has since been revealed to be pretty prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement because of his status as a war hero, at the cost of a guy who, admittedly, already had kind of an oddball reputation before this.
Like, there’s how most people would read it on paper, and then the reality went against what most people would consider the logical conclusion.
I don’t recall “The Blind Side” being discussed as part of any culture war. It was instead a feel-good underdog sports movie (although athletics is one area where he isn’t an underdog).I had forgotten Hereafter existed. Is that the only supernatural film Eastwood has directed?
I remember it being criticized for being emblematic of Hollywood picking white savior tales, though I don’t remember a lot of pushback for that. The only other thing I remember is that Oher is/was closer to father figure, and that’s just the kind of dramatic fudge that makes me not like biopics. If you’re going to change something like that, write fiction.
I remember multiple friends wanting to read the book and getting annoyed at the detailed discussion of playing left tackle.
I don’t know that right-wingers flocked to it so much as some one the left didn’t like its “white savior” bent, even though it’s based on a true story.The movie, from what I gather, made it look like Oher’s mom was a lot more involved in his development as a football player than she really was.
Oher’s basically said he knew how to play football since childhood and the movie basically turned him into Forrest Gump.
And even if he hadn’t said that, it would have been an annoyance of the film anyway. I was beside myself at the scene where she was showing him basic fundamentals of the position. If he didn’t know this stuff, he’d never be on team in the first place. Hollywood needs to stop with the “big football players are dumb” stigma. They also need to stop with the “desperate coach will play anyone” trope. The Blind Side is a sweet movie, but its depiction of football irritated me to no end
And now I’m thinking of the Not Another Teen Movie scene where the Desperate Coach sends in the Big Dumb Football Player whose not supposed to get any more concussions and laughing.
It was corny as hell, but was mostly mindless middlebrow entertaining by-the-numbers sports movie.
I remember my parents Republican friends loving it and being pissy about the white saviour criticism because “Liberals hate anything good about white people. It’s a true story. She saved the boy! He’s in the NFL!”
Chris Kyle is probably an example of how the US military occasionally enables and lionizes serial killers.
Militaries, by their very nature, are in the business of breaking things and killing people. So they’re going to attract people who are inclined to kill and destroy. In another time, someone with Kyle’s personality and drive might have learned French and joined the Foreign Legion.
I mean, yes and no. In my experience with the military, a lot of people join just for something to do. Bear in mind, the vast majority of the people in the military are in support roles with no direct combat expectations.And even in my time with the infantry, most people were fairly reluctant to harm anyone. There was a recognition that, yes, it would be necessary at times, but relatively few people were gung ho about violence.Special Forces guys like Chris Kyle, though? A lot more of them are straight up psychopaths.
Special Forces guys like Chris Kyle, though? A lot more of them are straight up psychopaths.Did yours ever pour petrol on a laptop and light it on fire?
What horrifies me about this case is it shows a large chunk of the SAS supporting this behaviour.
Sadly they are, at many times killing machines either born that way or molded into that. Rambo (the first one) definitely hit that note perfectly. I’ve also met a few marines that were maniacs well before enlisting.
That’s a bad thing. Even worse is they’ll just drop them back into civilization when they’re done with them.
When I was in college, I was in the same dorm building as a kid from my small, central IL hometown. This guy was the son of the mayor, at the time. He would masturbate to sniper videos on liveleaks or some other website like that with the door open. He said he was only in school until his dad said he could join the Marines. He would go on and on about how he could not wait to “execute hajis.” He went on the join the Marines and get some promotions, then get sent home because he was wounded. Dude’s the Purple Heart war-hero son of the a State Representative now. I wonder if he still jerks it to videos of people getting sniped in the head.
I said, Shrink… I want to kill. I mean, kill. I want blood, gore, and guts, and veins in muh teeth. I mean Kill. KILL!
What the actual fuck.
I guess what I’m getting at is that Chris Kyle was probably a piece of shit before he went in and was an emboldened piece of shit when he came out. He could’ve had a long and lucrative political career
Not to mention that a lot of stories in his book were proven to be bullshit.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies of 2014 Post: Note: I have 3 lists this time because there was a discrepancy. When I first started posting these for the articles, I didn’t really know what metric was being used to determine which would get written up. I assumed that it was the movie that made the most money from that year total, so I posted the Wikipedia list. Once I realized that there were discrepancies, I started posted The Numbers list as well since that counted just the in-year grosses while Wikipedia has the total gross. It wasn’t until we got to 1990 that I realized that it was the domestic in-year gross. But, there weren’t any discrepancies, so I just stuck to 2 lists. But, for this year, I didn’t see American Sniper on either list. So, for this 1 time, I’m posting 3 lists. I don’t think there will be a need to after this, but I will post a 3rd if need be.Box Office Mojo:1. American Sniper, Warner Bros., $350,126,372 2. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Lionsgate, $337,135,885 3. Guardians Of The Galaxy, Disney, $333,176,600 4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Disney, $259,766,572 5. The Lego Movie, Warner Bros., $257,760,692 6. The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies, Warner Bros., $255,119,788 7. Transformers: Age Of Extinction, Paramount, $245,439,076 8. Maleficent, Disney, $241,410,378 9. X-Men: Days Of Future Past, 20th Century Fox, $233,921,534 10. Big Hero 6, Disney, $222,527,828The Numbers1. Guardians Of The Galaxy, Disney, $333,055,258 2. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Lionsgate, $323,734,502 3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Disney, $259,746,958 4. The Lego Movie, Warner Bros., $257,784,718 5. Transformers: Age Of Extinction, Paramount, $245,439,076 6. Maleficent, Disney, $241,407,328 7. X-Men: Days Of Future Past, 20th Century Fox, $233,921,534 8. The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies, Warner Bros., $220,602,017 9. Big Hero 6, Disney, $211,207,036 10. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, 20th Century Fox, $208,545,589Wikipedia1. Transformers: Age Of Extinction, Paramount, $1,104,054,0722. The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies, Warner Bros., $956,019,7883. Guardians Of The Galaxy, Disney, $773,328,6294. Maleficent, Disney, $758,539,7855. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Lionsgate, $755,356,7116. X-Men: Days Of Future Past, 20th Century Fox, $747,862,7757. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Disney, $714,264,2678. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, 20th Century Fox, $710,644,5669. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Sony/Columbia, $708,982,32310. Interstellar, Paramount/Warner Bros., $677,463,813
Sniper almost all of its money in 2015 (it went wide in January) and the majority of its money in the US, which left its international gross quite a way behind Interstellar.
Yeah, you’ll see Sniper on one of the 2015 lists.
God BoFA pissed me off so much. I was hoping for a chance to rant about the Hobbit films once again somewhere on here but it seems they never topped the box office for their year
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)The Dark Knight (2008)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)The Avengers (2012)Toy Story 3 (2010)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Avatar (2009)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)American Sniper (2014)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
I cannot abide this Grease slander!
Grease is ridiculous but it’s way, way, WAY more fun than at least half the movies on this list.
John Candy’s Polka king puts Home Alone above American Sniper for me
Sniper is so over the top in its catering to an audience with Gadsden flag bumper stickers and novelty trailer hitch testicles on their trucks, that it’s almost a parody. It makes Kyle into the old Marine Todd meme. Our theater was running a festival of the Best Picture nominees, and this was the fifth and final movie shown that day, and I let out an audible “for fuck’s sake,” when the character was bragging about always keeping his Bible with him on the battlefield. When Kyle’s fellow soldier was bragging about finding the ring he was going to give to that special girl, his imminent death was straight out of Principal Skinner’s Vietnam flashback about how Valentine’s Day is no joke. Only after seeing it, did I read articles about Kyle lying about Jesse Ventura, killing a man attempting to carjack him and telling police who to call at the pentagon to clear him, and the sniping from the Superdome, and it makes the entire book and movie seem like bullshit.
I can’t believe he would have lied about the carjacking and sniping from the Superdome. Did he not think that those could be easily disproven? I mean, I’m sure we would have heard about 30 people getting shot at from the Superdome during the Katrina aftermath, especially considering the media coverage.
Yeah, now that you mention it, “I killed thirty people from atop a building packed with literally tens of thousands of people, including dozens of camera crews, and nobody ever found out” may not be a very good lie.
I dunno, I think if you asked my Texas relatives “How many people died in the Superdome during Katrina?” they’d still tell you “maybe a thousand.”
He’s like a real life Four Leaf Tayback from Tropic Thunder. I mean, the military backs up that he was a sniper for them, but anything beyond that needs a healthy dose of skepticism. I mean why lie about Jesse Ventura? He can get in front of a microphone whenever he wants? Just say you punched out a guy in a bar, any guy.
Because the point of the story isn’t “I punched out a famous guy who’s way older than I am.” The point of the story is that Kyle said Ventura, one of the most famous people from the SEAL/UDT community, told Kyle that the SEALS “deserved” to lose men in the Iraq war (which Ventura was publicly opposed to), and that’s how he earned the beatdown Kyle supposedly administered. If that’s a lie – and considering everything else we know about Kyle’s fabrications, we should probably assume it is – it’s an incredibly sociopathic one.
I’m sure it’s standard in the movie industry, but the idea that there is a back-up baby for a baby cast in a movie makes me laugh for some reason.“Ok, bring in the baby!”
“Um, the baby is crying.”
“Forget that baby! Bring in the back-up baby!”
They try to cast twins, or even triplets, just for that reason, and because there are strict rules about how long very young children can be on set. That’s how you get Olsens.
Yeah, it’s funny in retrospect how the Olsen twins were hired for that role because that character was so young at the start. But once they grew up it’s like the show was stuck with using both of them for the role.
I don’t think American Sniper is a particularly good film, and the plastic baby is hilarious and deserves all the ribbing it gets, but I will give it credit for being one of the first films that convinced me Bradley Cooper was a good actor. While I’d seen him in a lot of films up until this point (The Hangover, Limitless, Place Beyond the Pines, American Hustle), he never really impressed me. I always found him pretty bland, and usually outclassed by whoever was playing opposite him. But he is really terrific in this, even if the real life man is notoriously gross. He actually underplays a lot and avoids making Kyle easy to identify with, portraying him as genuinely awkward and difficult to be around. And while I think he has still made way more bad films than good (his three releases the year after this were Aloha, Burnt, and Joy), I think this and A Star is Born are excellent performances, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does in the upcoming PTA movie.
You didn’t like Burnt?! I love that movie! Cooper is so believable as a troubled chef.
I hated it! Can’t remember why (it was six years ago but I recall it being incredibly clichéd) but I remember ranting about how bad it was afterwards. Looking back on my yearly lists I put it as the second worst film of 2015 – worse than Taken 3, Terminator: Genysis and 59 Shades and only less worse than the risible The Gunman. I’m not saying you’re wrong to love it, I’m just surprised someone does. Then again, I can’t remember why I don’t like it so I can’t exactly debate its shortcomings.
I’m just going to post once to say, man, I hate biopics. They’re all reductive, and if you’ve got change things as they often do to dramatize a story, they’re you’re telling a different story.
“But these aren’t propaganda choices. They’re filmmaking choices.” WTF does this even mean?
Imagine going back to mid-2012 and telling people that nine years later Cooper would have eight Oscar nominations and also be a beloved character in the biggest franchise in film.
I’d have raised an eyebrow at the Oscar nominations but by 2012 he was already being positioned as a star (he’d done two Hangovers by then) so the franchise stuff I could buy. Hell, 2012 was the year of Silver Linings Playbook so you might want to go further back a couple of years to get the full shock value of the Oscar nominations too.
To be fair, I went mid-2012, right before SLP, because other than Hangover, he was starring it the likes of Case 39, All About Steve, Limitless, The A-Team, The Words and Hit and Run, at least two of which I had forgotten existed.
plastic baby fiasco is not the only one in Eastwood’s catalog. What is sometimes framed as workman-like efficiency sometimes really is pretty much just indifference. In Mystic River there is at least one boom mic left in a shot, and I think I recall in a cemetery you can see the entire rig on tracks reflected in the headstones. The best is in Blood Work where he can view a video taken from an ATM by googling something like “ATM La Cienega 2:30am March 15″
Is it ridiculous that I didn’t notice the thing about the baby? Probably setting myself up with this, but was it that obvious in the theater?
I saw a ton of people joke about it when it came out
I don’t think American Sniper glamorizes Chris Kyle, but it definitely valorizes him, which isn’t quite the same thing. He shouldn’t have been valorized, either—Kyle was literally guilty of stolen valor, a term that gets bandied about a lot (and in some notorious YouTube videos, gets thrown at anyone wearing military camo who can’t recite the Soldier’s Creed or perform other arbitrary “proofs” of service). He claimed awards that he simply hadn’t been given, and there’s no other explanation except for deliberate fraud on his part. Stack that up with his lies about his civilian activities, and he’s just about the last person who should be the subject of a movie like this one, and someone that only the guy who performed the stunningly embarrassing “empty chair” shtick at the Republican National Convention would embrace as the sympathetic subject of a film.
Surprised to see this was the 2014 box office champ in the US. It was just a moderately successful movies that hardly registered in Australia, and I suspect in the rest of the world. I hadn’t realised until now that it was so big in the US, and I wouldn’t have thought it cracked the top 10 yet alone taken the top spot.I remember finding the movie kind of dull to be honest. Some okay war sequences that didn’t really enagage, some scenes of Bradley Cooper feeling bad, more increasingly meh war scenes, more sad Brad, cycle and repeat.
The “Kyle called Iraqis savages” line is one that got floated around in 2014 and has remained lodged in the cultural consciousness ever since. So as is often the case with such things, it isn’t too surprising when you go back and see the original context of Kyle’s passage and he says “I hated the savages I’d been fighting,” which clearly indicates he was referring specifically to Iraqi insurgents/terrorists rather than the nation as a whole.
Question is was Kyle a sociopath before he went to Iraq? PTSD can do a mind fuck on anyone especially if that mother, child kill is true
The enemy sniper, for instance, gets action-movie gun-preparation scenes, with ominous supervillain music.
Badass.
(You can take Clint Eastwood out of westerns, but you can’t take the western out of Clint Eastwood)
I haven’t seen Jersey Boys, but I’m not feelin’ that rendition of “Walk Like a Man”
One bit of trivia about Jersey Boys … I know not everyone is friends with everyone else in Hollywood but you would have expected Clint Eastwood and Christopher Walken to have at least run into each other over the years at least once at an awards ceremony or something.But I saw an interview with Christopher Walken where he said the first ever contact he ever had with Clint Eastwood was when he rang him out of the blue to ask him if he was interested in appearing in the film.
“The fans and critics of American Sniper both see the film as a black-and-white fable, and I don’t think the film itself really reflects either depiction.”
Oh good, a straw man.
I’d somehow completely disassociated the very good Flags of Our Fathers and the superior Letters from Iwo Jima from Eastwood’s repertoire. Also, Bradley Cooper’s best performance is his vocal performance work as Rocket. When he’s drunk and angry in Knowhere? Very good.
Man I remember seeing this in theaters and the entire theater was like IS THAT A FUCKING DOLL HE’S HOLDING?