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Awww....the film didnt say what the rude pundit wanted it to.
Smh
The empty chair can't come soon enough....
American Sniper's Failure
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/...our-house.htmlThe Rude Pundit pushed aside as many preconceived notions as he could when he watched American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood-directed, Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who chalked up the most kills of any sniper in the military during the Iraq war. As you may know, the film has become a political battlefield between some on the left who see it as glorifying the Iraq engagement and those on the right who see it as a celebration of the innate good of the American soldier.
And even while viewing it, the Rude Pundit thought the film had been treated unfairly by many of its critics. Sure, it offers few sympathetic Iraqis, but no one faulted Saving Private Ryan for not spending time with the nice Germans. As for the racist remarks by Bradley Cooper's Kyle and the other soldiers, well, sorry, if you want polite talk about the ostensible enemy, you probably shouldn't watch a war film. Also, Eastwood and writer Jason Hall weren't really under an obligation to hew closely to Kyle's story. It ain't a do entary.
So, really, truly, the Rude Pundit is coming at this from as open-minded a position as possible. (Does he have to list all his family members who are or were in the military?) And he thinks this:
American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.
After a set-up where Kyle is about to shoot a child in Iraq, we get what can best be described as a psycho killer origin story. Kyle learns to hunt at an early age, something his father tells him he's good at. The father fills his sons with nonsense about their place in the pecking order of the universe. This hypermasculine bull plays out, as it does in Texas, with Kyle becoming a rodeo rider who joins the Navy to become a SEAL after he sees the U.S. embassy attacks in 1998. That leads to his brainwashing during his training (apparently, SEALs have to constantly be wet). In short order, he meets a woman, Taya, the World Trade Center attack happens, he gets married, and then he's sent to Iraq. We get no sense that the invasion of Iraq happened 18 months after 9/11. Then, boom, we're in Iraq and the tedious pattern of the film is set: shooting people in Iraq, coming home to weepy, concerned wife, rinse, repeat for four tours.
Ultimately, the film fails not because it doesn't present the Iraqis in a more complex way, but because it banks on our credulity. It treats us like we're ing idiots who are willing to forget anything about the truth behind the invasion of Iraq. It counts on our ing idiocy in order to convey it's simplistic message that American soldiers are awesome and everyone else needs to shut the up.
So we get scenes of Americans going house to house to find insurgents. They break down doors and rush in, grabbing anyone they can. When one Iraqi man protests that they are in his house, Kyle says, "I don't give a it's your house." Then they berate and threaten the man until he gives up the name of a specific enemy torturer, "the Butcher." (Seriously, names in this film are dunderheaded. One soldier is, swear to Christ, "Biggles," like a in' cat.) That family, the only "good" Iraqis we see, ends up having the father and a son brutally murdered. In another scene, the soldiers barge into an apartment and, more or less, take a family hostage so they can use the apartment for surveillance on some "Hajis." Of course, it turns out the father is hiding weapons. Of course, he ends up dead.
Through it all, all the people he shoots (and, truly, Bradley Cooper seems like he's acting in a different, much deeper film), all the scenes of him watching fellows soldiers get killed and wounded, all the psychological damage he does to his poor wife when he calls her during firefights, Kyle maintains a pathetic belief in the good of his mission and in the protection of his "brothers." It has an effect on him - he suffers from PTSD - but the film wants us to believe that it was necessary. So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.
It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.
And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.
American Sniper exists, then, to play to that lie, to silence anyone who would point it out. , once Kyle goes to war, the movie is so devoid of any rationale for being in Iraq that no one mentions Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction. Even George W. Bush isn't mentioned. The film fails, too, because all it's really saying is that, if you put some soldiers somewhere and tell them to do something, they will defend each other and do the job. The fact that the leaders of their country betrayed them in the most elemental way possible never enters the equation. So all we're left with is killing Iraqis because Iraqis are trying to kill us, if we care whose house it is.
At some points, the Rude Pundit wondered if Eastwood was trying to frame it this way, but, when the credits roll, after Kyle's murder at the hands of a disturbed vet, we are treated to scenes of the motorcade heading to his funeral, the streets lined with people with signs and American flags. No, then. We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us. We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.
Awww....the film didnt say what the rude pundit wanted it to.
Smh
I'm expecting Rambo with a sniper rifle, which is probably why I haven't watched it yet. Hollywood has a long history of spinning hero movies about wars...
Did you see Rambo 3 when that was fighting alongside the Taliban? Those brave mujaheddin Freedom () Fighters!
Kyle was psychopath, by the words in his own book, and a LIAR. figgers you rednecks would venerate him
Did you see Rambo 3 when that was fighting alongside the Taliban? Those brave mujaheddin Freedom (
lol simpleton.
Kyle was psychopath, by the words in his own book, and a LIAR. figgers you rednecks would venerate him
1. The Film Suggests the Iraq War Was In Response To 9/11: One way to get audiences to unambiguously support Kyle’s actions in the film is to believe he’s there to avenge the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The movie cuts from Kyle watching footage of the attacks to him serving in Iraq, implying there is some link between the two.
2. The Film Invents a Terrorist Sniper Who Works For Multiple Opposing Factions: Kyle’s primary antagonist in the film is a sniper named Mustafa. Mustafa is mentioned in a single paragraph in Kyle’s book, but the movie blows him up into an ever-present figure and Syrian Olympic medal winner who fights for both Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and the Shia Madhi army.
3. The Film Portrays Chris Kyle as Tormented By His Actions: Multiple scenes in the movie portray Kyle as haunted by his service. One of the film’s earliest reviews praised it for showing the “emotional torment of so many military men and women.” But that torment is completely absent from the book the film is based on. In the book, Kyle refers to everyone he fought as “savage, de able” evil. He writes, “I only wish I had killed more.” He also writes, “I loved what I did. I still do. If cir stances were different – if my family didn’t need me – I’d be back in a heartbeat. I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” On an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show he laughs about accidentally shooting an Iraqi insurgent. He once told a military investigator that he doesn’t “shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.”
4. The Real Chris Kyle Made Up A Story About Killing Dozens of People In Post-Katrina New Orleans: Kyle claimed that he killed 30 people in the chaos of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a story Louisiana writer Jarvis DeBerry calls “preposterous.” It shows the sort of mentality post-war Kyle had, but the claim doesn’t appear in the film.
5. The Real Chris Kyle Fabricated A Story About Killing Two Men Who Tried To Carjack Him In Texas: Kyle told numerous people a story about killing two alleged carjackers in Texas. Reporters tried repeatedly to verify this claim, but no evidence of it exists.
6. Chris Kyle Was Successfully Sued For Lying About the Former Governor of Minnesota: Kyle alleged that former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura defamed Navy SEALs and got into a fight with him at a local bar. Ventura successfully sued Kyle for the passage in his book, and a jury awarded him $1.845 million.
7. Chris Kyle’s Family Claimed He Donated His Book Proceeds To Veterans’ Charity, But He Kept Most Of The Profits: The National Review debunks the claim that all proceeds of his book went to veterans’ charities. Around 2 percent – $52,000 – went to the charities while the Kyles pocketed $3 million.
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/23/7_en...erica_partner/
and the guy was a religious, crusading, Muslim-savage-hating, murderous psychopath, and totally ignorant of why he was in Iraq, and actually thought after all these years that Saddam/Iraq did WTC attack, and not about BigOil. Of course, he could have wisened up like "friendly fire" Tillman
If he wanted to "protect save the lives of his buddies", he should have been aiming at Wash DC and Repugs who wasted 5000+ of his buddies' lives.
Went and saw it last night, wasn't expecting it to follow the book closely and it didn't. I wish they would have touched more on how Kyle took the marines under his wing and taught them and trained them. I enjoyed the movie for what it was, pretty powerful ending.
I'm not interested in seeing a sniper movie myself. I know a guy who went to sniper training. It's a military job, like others, that doesn't deserve any special award or acknowledgement. From what little I understand of it, I don't think it should be glamorized or sensationalized. Nor, should it be exploited in a negative way.
It is what it is.
It was a story worth telling, but the actual movie wasn't that great IMHO.
I plan on seeing it, but you've got to be the first tea party republican to say that.
Blondie made it for $60M, already grossed $120M+, and probably created, will inflame and/or create quite a few "savage" Muslim terrorists around the world.
then how does that make it a failure?
I didn't say the film was a failure, financial or otherwise.then how does that make it a failure?
Kyle was a messy failure in many ways. Ultimate failure was thinking therapy for PTSD victim was to go shooting! LOL
Yeah. That's ing hilarious.
smh
When does Hollywood ever tell the actual story though? Like in Dallas Buyers Club when the main character wasn't a sucker in the movie.
Yeah, that was pretty dumb.
It's gonna sail past $300 mil (domestic) in a week or two. Add another $200 mil overseas, WB will be laughing their way to the bank.
American Sniper: anti-Muslim threats skyrocket in wake of film's release
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015...eats-skyrocket
Did you actually read your link?
yes, did you?
If anybody wants to read about the greatest sniper in history.....check out Carlos Hath .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Hath
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