The Big Picture: American Sniper Sucks (And It's Okay To Admit That) Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | |
My response to Bob and to a comment like this is simply, so what? And I am not being confrontational by saying that. So what if things like this give demographic A a woody for America. So what if it is fictionalized, I don't here people complaining about how historically accurate Selma portrays MLK. Or how The Butler played fast and loose with the facts. These are movies, and regardless of what narrative people latch on to, they are in the end, just pieces of art. It is easy to be dismissive of patriotism, doesn't mean that patriotism in and of itself is pointless. It's ok to question the validity of something "based on a true story", doesn't make the feeling evoked(or not evoked) any less relevant. Bottom line. Every time something tries to make a "statement" and it catches on, both supporters and detractors come out in droves to argue, and ultimately none of it means anything. It's still just a movie. Maybe it is a crappy movie. Maybe not. But that has nothing to do with whatever message people take from it. Like Bob said, lot's of crappy movies get praise and make money, the reason? Because movie quality is about as subjective as you can get in this day and age. Some people love seeing actors on screen, PERIOD. The movie is irrelevant. Some people need a great story to be engaged, the actors are set dressing. Neither point of view is important. So in the end, it doesn't matter what becomes popular, or what makes money. Some studios will continue to look for the next big thing, while others will try to tell a story as best they can. No amount of American Snipers or 50 Shades is going to change that. THere are 4 Transformers movies because people pay to see them, period. If no more came out, it would not matter one bit, even to the people that like them. If 10 more come out it shouldn't matter to the people that don't. | |
Confused how you should feel about America Sniper? Read this: http://www.clickhole.com/article/confused-about-how-youre-supposed-feel-about-ameri-1771 Hits the nail on the head. People mapping their politics on any movie/art piece and then telling everyone else what to think of it should be ignored. Bob included. he can't get out of his own way on this one. It's weird and kinda sad. | |
Do you know who else lost a court case posthumously? Miller from US v Miller. Incidentally this is important because it took another 70 plus years for a court case to affirm the individual right to own a gun in the US. Point being, it is VERY difficult to represent yourself in court after you are dead and expressing such a loss as evidence against the man's character id just plain stupid. As for the general charge of pathological liar, well, there seems to be a lot of that going around these days*cough*Brian Williams*cough*. | |
Then pray tell jacobbanks- what have YOU done to earn your freedom of speech :) This also ignores the fact that the movie wasn't meant for war veterans either. Considering how a decent number of them has seen it as wholly unrealistic, propoganda trash, and the Sniper the movie was based off of said that they shorned off much darker and morally questionable parts of the film to make it entirely black and white. | |
Saddam may have been a case of "better the devil you know". I mean he was a heinous tyrant, no argument there but as I understand it, the West more or less had a read on him and it was all very Cold War with him. | |
As a service member, I would like to echo this sentiment. People criticizing or even outright insulting the military doesn't offend me a whole lot. However, people using service members' sacrifice as a tool to shout others down offends me more than even if someone pissed on the Unknown Soldier's grave through a mangled American flag. These people are the ones that shit over everything that is sacrificed for. | |
I'm also in the "US war Wankfest"-movie boat. From my european prospective that's all it is. And i won't start discussions about the wars or what lead to them. Just that i think it's actual pitiful that the US needs those kinda flicks. | |
Just out of curiosity - and sincerly not lookin' to stir up anything - how can you easily dismiss similarities between both? | |
You don't have to earn freedom of speech. It's a right that already exists naturally. And what secures that freedom is using it, i.e. speaking freely, making sure that the freedom is so ubiquitous that even those in power wouldn't dare take it away from you. If you had to earn that right by being a soldier, then, ironically, you wouldn't be living in a democracy. You'd be living in a military dictatorship. | |
Why was this movie made exactly? More specifically, why this particular soldier? Chris Kyle hardly seemed like someone who deserves the sort of fame he is currently receiving among certain circles in the US. I believe Texas has decided to honour him with a state holiday. In reality, he was a rampant self-promoter and made numerous false claims and slanderous accusations. Many believe he disrespected the entire UDT/SEAL community by carrying out a smear campaign against Jesse Ventura and cozying up to the talking heads on FOX news. How many soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afganistan have written books? Surely others have equally compelling stories to be told while also demonstrating far less questionable conduct in both service and civilian life. This all could have been forgiven if the movie addressed these aspects of Chris Kyle. Instead, the narrative opted to whitewash much of his past and portray him as merely a flawed hero with a tragic story. I cannot decide whether Eastwood's overly simplistic tale of service and sacrifice is just an objectionable artistic choice or a conscious effort to disseminate the sort of "ours is not to reason why" patriotism that one sees among this movie's biggest fans. | |
How about the actual context? The only reason that it's brought up is to make comparisons to the Nazis, which are already seen as pretty much the worst historical villains out there. It's not even that much of a propaganda film, all it does is show the slightly idealized story of a sniper that fought in the Iraq war and had to deal with his demons because of it. | |
Saddam had WMD, albeit not much. Moreover, his entire strategy to maintain control of the region was to bluff that he had a metric fuckton of the stuff, which is why all our SIGINT pointed towards WMD. We had complete shit HUMINT because that syphilitic rat fucker Clinton shut down the budget for it almost entirely while in office and HUMINT networks take a VERY long time to put in place. Saddam assisted AQ and other terrorists on multiple occasions. He outright wrote checks to the families of suicide bombers, among other things. It is true that Saddam knew nothing about the 9/11 plans, but the Bush administration never once claimed he did. They just pointed out that he gave Atta assistance moving through Iraq. This was later claimed by the Bush administration's political foes as them saying that Saddam was involved in 9/11. | |
I thought that American Sniper was supposed to be a movie about the life of Chris Kyle. I haven't read the book or seen the movie, but based on the reviews that I read online, it's an anti war movie that shows how war affects the mental state of the average soldier. I don't think that it would be wise to focus on the Iraq War as a whole because the topic is too broad and complicated to explain. | |
Damn people, you forget the cardinal rule of the internet. Don't feed the trolls. But to the point, I liked the movie. It wasn't a super great movie, but it kept me engaged and it was certainly thrilling. And forget the baby, did anyone see the bullet holes when they were invading that one guy's house at night? The most fake bullet holes I have ever seen. | |
To be fair, from the tiny amount of Movie Bob's output I've seen, his rather facile politics do seem to skew pretty much every opinion he ever utters but then so does everyone's; his opinions did seem to be a bit more rudimentarily binary than others and so the stuff I saw was polemic and lacked nuance or balance. Having said that, I watched this film the other day and I struggled to see how it was Oscar worthy. If we take it on the terms that it is a "war film", I couldn't see how it furthered the oeuvre in an especially new or well executed way. It was well shot, the realism was very impressive, I thought the difficult he had when he returned and couldn't speak or communicate with his wife was effective and nicely acted but the ending seemed to shy away entirely from how/why he was killed by another veteran he was trying to help, which surely is an interesting, if not more interesting, facet of the story?
Ha ha, I forgot the baby, for a modern film with a major budget that was shambolic :) I'm not sure I'd know what a real bullet hole looks like but I will this out when I get round to a second viewing. | |
Freedom of speech is not some privilege that must be earned. It is and always should be a basic right. | |
Done nothing...except pay those taxes and provide the industry that allows the military to operate in any capacity. | |
Looking at Rotten Tomatoes right now, American Sniper (73%) is lower than the new Spongebob movie (75%). ...I don't know how to feel about this. | |
That's fair, and I kinda agree. It's disappointing how hard he pushes some things (like super-diversity), even though I agree with his sentiment. When you push an agenda that hard, you end up knocking off the on-the-fencers | |
To be honest I'm not convinced "diversity" (to use a now almost meaningless platitude) is in and of itself a virtue. Equality of opportunity, which should theoretically lead to "diversity", is a virtue; I think these two things get confused sometimes. | |
Suppose it's a good thing he doesn't care about people on the fence. | |
It may be possible that the success of American Sniper is that it is this vanilla safe war film that circumvents making a "statement" about the war. Often times, war films are so filled with messages and context that people get annoyed with them, when all people wanted to see was a proper filmed story from the war, nothing more. Oh and if you are annoyed with this one Bob, with the success of American Sniper you can bet your sweet ars that we are now getting a flood of right leaning war films. Have fun Bob, have fun. | |
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