Somebody actually told me today that they wouldn't see #Selma because it looked depressing, yet they really wanted to see #AmericanSniper.
— Cinema Dave (@FhantomFilms) January 19, 2015
From Mr. Charles P. Pierces’ review “Selma and the Way We Look at America“:
… The attack on the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge is as good or better than any action scene I’ve seen in any war movie, and it far surpasses the kilted grunting-and-groaning for which Mel Gibson won in Braveheart, and the bloody war-porn for which people never will stop congratulating Stephen Spielberg. To me, the clearest message that DuVernay puts forth in this film is that it is, in every sense that matters, a war movie. Tactics are different. Nonviolent protest is the weapon wielded by one side, but it was a weapon nonetheless. That one scene on the bridge blows up the cotton-candy redemption myth of the Civil Rights Movement into tiny splinters. The people who led this Movement are the equals of any generals in American history, and John Lewis (to name only one person) is as much a combat veteran as John Kerry ever was. That is the truth of things that DuVernay puts front and center, shrouded in clouds of tear gas, throughout the movie…
Tragically, we American like our war movies the way we like our snack food: Pulverized, mixed into a fine slurry with plenty of HFCS and artificial flavoring, and extruded in air-packed, uniform pellets wrapped in shiny brand names…
.
Every word in this paragraph is condescending hogwash including “with” and “an.” http://t.co/Pxr5xJfawD pic.twitter.com/Od4IBzZ54R
— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) January 19, 2015
Eastwood film ‘American Sniper’ sets box office record while setting off flurry of racist tweets http://t.co/Jc48wvjB65
— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 19, 2015
'American Sniper' is a big hit for Americans who fantasize about shooting Arabs but are afraid to go where Arabs shoot back.
— CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) January 16, 2015
Villago Delenda Est
CJ Werleman nailed it.
“Home of the Brave” my ass. A nation of cowardly pants-shitting blowhards.
Ted Nugent is the prototype contemporary American.
Ruckus
Haven’t been to a theater to see a movie in nearly 10 yrs. This one sounds not only worth going but necessary to see.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Hunter got it right “Fear and Loathing……..”
Tommy
@Ruckus:
About the same here. The last time I saw a movie in an actual theater was The Simpsons movie. Only reason I did that was I was out of town, bored, and it seem like a way to burn two hours.
Seanly
I love the ad campaign for American Sniper: I’ve seen at least 3 or 4 different scenes JUST IN THE ADS where the sniper is on a satellite phone to his wife. Shooting starts & he drops it. WTF – is the entire movie the big macho killing machine calling home every 10 seconds to gripe about his K-rations and then he has to go full GI Joe because the terrrrrorrrissst interrupt his call?
I want to see a mashup of Jodie Foster saying “Dr. Lector? Dr. Lector” with the scene where the hero has dropped the sat phone…
Cckids
@Villago Delenda Est:
John Stewart took Huckabee apart tonight for his Beyonce bullsh*t; referencing Huck’s jamming with Nugent. I was only disappointed in Stewart for not bringing up the dog incident when Huck was ragging about the Obamas as parents.
That man is a huge waste of oxygen.
Mandalay
I’ve nothing against John Lewis, and I don’t much care for Kerry as a politician, but that claim by Pierce is a big pile of streaming crap.
A needless and mindless comparison. When will the swiftboating end?
Gretchen
@Mandalay: Why is it a pile of steaming crap? Lewis got the crap beaten out of him, fighting for a cause, which sounds like combat to me. And Kerry was wounded twice in Vietnam, which also sounds like combat-wounded to me, despite the stupid purple-heart bandaids by the chairborne division at the Republican convention. What’s your cutoff for claiming combat-wounded?
Gretchen
@Cckids: exactly. Huck’s kids torture dogs. Obama’s kids listen to Beyoncé. Who should be lecturing whom about proper parenting?
scav
All those everyday ‘mercans may see themselves as being all ‘Mercan Sniper! but the world is seeing something more along the lines of Le Petit Journal’s latest.
Well, actually, there’s even more but I’ll use the clips from C&L as brief (LPJ’s rather enjoying life in this actually latest one. I watched some of the actual fully shows, they seriously hunted Fox News people down in the streets, it was very satisfying.
Console
I just got back from American Sniper and it’s hard for me to see how it can be seen as so rah-rah Murica. The theater was sold out, which surprised me… then I realized I was in Texas. The entire movie revolves around Kyle coming up with reasons for why he does what he does.He has to compartmentalize that side of himself. There’s no sense of victory or accomplishment in the movie… just this the reality of taking young men and mangling them physically and mentally. Out of all the targets Kyle gets, none get caught or killed other than the enemy sniper. And even then killing the sniper puts the entire team in danger. The movie is really nuanced even though it hits all the patriot beats.
wasabi gasp
Twitter is kicking the back of my seat.
Emerald
Think I’ll give American Sniper a miss. However, I HAVE been going to the movies recently. We’ve got a new Regal practically across the street with RECLINING SEATS!!
And each seat has a little swiveling table, too.
Really nice.
Betty Cracker
I haven’t seen “American Sniper” yet and probably won’t until it comes to a streaming platform, but I’m wary of taking wingnut enthusiasm for the film as an indication that it’s jingoistic crap. Wingnuts are notorious for putting their own simple-minded spin on complex messages — hell, they think Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” is an appropriate campaign song!
Eastwood is a right-winger, but seems more of the Gerald Ford variety than Huckabee type. I find his politics odious, but Eastwood is a good filmmaker when he sets his mind to it and is fully capable of handling moral ambiguity and nuance. I’ll be surprised if “American Sniper” is rah-rah propaganda.
Tommy
It has been ages since I’ve been to the movies. I used to joke I lived my movie life like 9 months behind everybody else, cause I’d just buy the DVDs when they are released. I think I might have close to 300. But in recent years with Netflix and the ability to now get movies through Google Play I’ve stopped buying DVDs. Heck I’ve stopped buying VOD. There are a few recent movies I’d like to see, like Gone Girl and Boyhood, but I find myself never getting to them.
Here is why. On channels like FX and of course HBO, Showtime, and AMC I can see TV shows that have the production quality of a movie. Or you can find a diamond in the rough like Strange Empire, set “in 1869 Janestown on the Alberta-Montana border, three women band together for survival after the men in their town are murdered” by men that want to take them and use them as prostitutes (they were having none of that BTW). That is a storyline that would never be made into a movie.
Many of these TV shows seem to have better writing IMHO, and of course a far more complex storylines because they have many hours, seasons to tell a story.
Justified is a show that starts its final season tonight (already bought the entire season on Google Play). I can’t wait. Just watched the pilot of The Man in the High Castle (huge Philip K. Dick fan here — read almost everything he wrote) on Amazon, and if they pick it up as a series, wow what they could do. In the pilot they actually used CGI in a way that worked (about a first for me) to make NYC look like the Nazi’s won WWII. No wonder Amazon said earlier this week they were going to start making full length movies they’d show in theaters and also offer streaming a few weeks later.
On sites like Salon and media/television/movie related blogs there has been much talk about how the best writers, directors, and showrunners, not to mention the actors, are opting for TV shows and not movies. I don’t know if for the industry as a whole this is a good thing, but I sure as heck like it as a consumer.
I just only have so much time in the day and right now, I can’t get through all the TV shows I want to watch and even remotely find time for movies. But I know there are a lot of good movies out there, so with my Netflix membership I went with the two DVD option, fill up my queue with movies, because I feel like I have to send them back pretty fast, and I am paying for them, so I find myself forcing myself to watch movies.
That can’t be something folks running the movie studios want to hear. Doesn’t bode well for their future, but alas I guess at some level it does matter since many of the parent companies that own the movie studios also own the TV stations and the production companies that are producing the TV shows I enjoy so much.
OK, late night early AM rant ended ….
Debbie(aussie)
@Tommy: I’m envious. Here in Aus we only have ‘foxtel’ (yep Murdoch owned) as pay TV and it is very expensive. Bit of competition coming I hear, with Netflix and others. Hope I can afford it. There are quite a few TV shows I’d like to see, but I must watch from the beginning. Hate watching series out of order.
BillinGlendaleCA
I haven’t been to a movie at a theater in 11 years. It’s only been that recent because the kid wanted to go to a movie after completing Air Force basic training. Before that, it was probably Bill Clinton’s first term.
Tommy
@Debbie(aussie): Sorry to hear that. I also have to watch from the beginning as well, but maybe that is because I like a show that tells an ongoing, interrelated story (The Affair might have been my favorite new show of the year).
I got rid of cable March of last year. I used to get every cable channel my provider offered. I had to, because things like BBC American (a must for me, Dr. Who need I say more), the Green Channel, Science Channel, and History Channel International, well that was the only way to get them.
Outside of those channels, the others I listed in my other comment, with ESPN and MSBC thrown in, I didn’t really watch any of the other 200+ channels I got. This pissed me off to have to pay for them a nd I was paying more than $150/month. I could afford it, but that is about the cost of my power, water, and gas bill each month.
With Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix (which costs me about $30/month) it is kind of amazing how many shows I can get. Plus both Netflix and Hulu have a ton, I mean a ton of BBC shows (and CBC I might add) I never knew existed (like a whole world of TV opened up for me). I am freaking now officially hooked on British dramas (not the period ones so much).
Right now watching, binge watching The Fall. The lead is Gillian Anderson (of X-Files fame) and it is so nice to see her actually be able to act, because she is pretty darn amazing in this show. Waiting for a client to get me a ton of stuff for his website today (he won’t send it), so I’ll get through the rest of the first season of The Fall today and thinking of just laying down on the couch and watching all of the second season. Life could be worse :).
Betty Cracker
@Tommy: We’re also thinking about cutting the cable cord because almost all of our viewing these days is on streaming platforms — with the exception of sports. Once football season is over, we might finally pick the cable ticks off our hides for the same reason you did.
Baseball we don’t mind listening to on the radio. When football season starts again, we can watch the games that are on the local networks, mooch off friends with cable for ESPN games or head over to the sports bar for must-see games. That’s the plan now, at least.
Tommy
@Betty Cracker: I am a HUGE college football fan and it almost killed me not having ESPN. I really didn’t realize how much of a deathgrip ESPN had on college football. They are close to the “only game in town” at this point. I am also a diehard St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan. Even with I got the games on Fox Sports Midwest I tended to listen to them more than watch them.
Last year I got the MLB app. Let me listen to the radio of all games (home or visitor broadcast). Had a video game type interface that was pretty cool, especially the placement of pitches, and real-time stats (more than any human needs). A ton of almost real-time video highlights of the major plays in the game. It was $24.95 for the entire year. I found it very enjoyable.
MLB has not given out pricing for 2015, but they also have a package where you can get live video of every game streamed to your Roko, PC, AppleTV, gaming system, Chromecast, you name it. I plan to get it for a month (you can buy monthly or pay less for the entire season) this year and see if it is worth it.
So yes, IMHO you can do away with cable and get by. And for channels like HBO, I will just wait till they release the show on Netfilx and then binge watch the heck out of it.
raven
@Console: Come on, don’t ruin it for everyone that wants to whine and bitch about a film they haven’t see. It sounds to me like all the idiots that complained and protested against the “Last Temptation of Christ” without seeing. Fucking sheep.
Betty Cracker
@Tommy: Yeah, college football will be the true test for me. The mister can take it or leave it, but I am a devoted fan and must see every game one way or another. I’ll probably spend every Saturday in Gainesville or at my sister’s watching the game next fall.
I’m hoping the recent announcement that HBO will offer a standalone subscription package for streaming signals the death knell of cable’s monopoly. It’ll take awhile to pry their cold, dead fingers off our remotes, and live sports will be their last stand. But streaming will change everything, I hope. They can still bone us on broadband, of course.
Tommy
@Betty Cracker: College football almost “broke” me and drove me back to getting Dish (I had Charter Communications cable before) for basically a couple ESPN channels.
The streaming thing is just working so well for me. Especially Netflix with all the “older” shows. I am 45 but until about 10 years ago I never had cable. Often no television. So if I want to sit down in front of the TV there is almost an limitless number of shows I have to choose from.
Plus, at least the shows I watch (outside AMC, HBO, and Showtime) they all almost all seem to be on Hulu. That FX is adding a lot of shows, that was the only channel, other than the ones I mentioned above, that has many shows I watch I can’t get streaming on Hulu. But for FX’s Justified, I just bought the entire season on Google Play.
And to your point, if HBO and other channels start to offer their own streams (AMC I am looking at you!), I fear cable is in trouble. Not short term, my gut is people like you and me (I assume we are around the same age) are rare. Early adaptors. But over time people in our demo with switch.
Heck my mom who is 67, when she came over she hated Netflix and Hulu. But she had never seen Scandal nor the British version of Broadchurch. When I showed her she could watch them all, pause, no commercials, pick up on where she left off the next visit, she was blown away.
raven
@Tommy: When she came over from where? She came over after Netfilx and Hulu were introduced?
Tommy
When she came over for a visit to my house.
raven
@Tommy: Aha, I thought she came over from UK!
Tommy
@raven: No worries. Mom wouldn’t make it in the UK. Went on vacation there a few years ago with my father. Dad loved their pub and “traditional” food. Mom did not like the food. Didn’t eat much of anything why there. But then again she is a picky/strange eater.
They were in Germany on another vacation, right at the height of Asparagus season. Mom said they served Asparagus with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and for snacks.
She said this like it was a bad thing (she hates Asparagus as you might guess). I thought it sounded like a special place in heaven where I could eat Asparagus all day, every day.
Tokyokie
I remain leery of becoming dependent upon streaming services because the cost advantages they offer will vanish should net neutrality ever be done away with. I have cable (used to have DirecTV, but we decided cable was cheaper), but I find I mostly watch MLB Network and TCM.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker:
It could effectively be that in the sense Francois Truffaut described: that no war movie can ever be anti-war, because depictions of combat are inherently exciting, and it swamps any message you try to put in there.
Keith G
I haven’t seen a war movie in quite a while, as I have found the entire genre too depressing. The last such efforts I watched were “The Thin Red Line” and “Band of Brothers” (watched both on DVD a few years back). I am not counting Inglorious Basterds as a war movie.
I have been meaning to watch “The Hurt Locker” and the documentary, “Restrepo”, but I just haven’t summoned the psychic energy.
I am not sure that this is a useful formulation at all. In fact, the more I think about it, the stupider it reads. It should be enough to say that both activities were/are important, necessary, dangerous, and honorable without asserting that they are the same thing.
Betty Cracker
@Keith G: It might be an inept analogy (I don’t feel that strongly about it), but surely it’s not a Swiftboat-style insult.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
I might see one movie a year. We saw Selma on Sunday and loved it.
Keith G
@Betty Cracker:Of course. I would never say that the comparison was made to diminish Kerry. Lewis is a hero as he took real risks and suffered real injury for a just cause. A combat veteran may well have been involved in traumas which are orders of magnitude greater than anything faced by a domestic civil rights activist.
Patricia Kayden
I guess all of American Sniper‘s inaccuracies are irrelevant to its popularity.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_movie_club/features/2014/the_movie_club_2014/worst_movies_of_2014_american_sniper_glosses_over_chris_kyle_s_lies.html
debbie
@raven:
While standing in line to see The Last Temptation, a woman walked up and began yelling at me. I asked her if she’d seen the film and she then spit at me.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I was seeing the future of America.
raven
@Keith G: Watch Genration Kill
gogol's wife
That tweet about “condescending hogwash” is exactly what I thought when I read that paragraph. I almost got up off my couch to write to the NYTimes about it, then thought better of it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
’cause watching kids be blown up and defenseless people being beaten is just so much fun. Seriously, WTF?
Kylroy
@Matt McIrvin: The only review of American Sniper that I saw was from a left-leaning critic who said the film was, to it’s detriment, stunningly apolitical. Making a movie about a soldier in Iraq without touching on the politics surrounding it *at all* left the movie feeling half – written.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@raven:
Cooper and Eastwood are both very competent. Kyle is a douche.
I MIGHT see it when it is streaming…for free.
kc
@Mandalay:
Huh?
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Matt McIrvin:
Jarhead comes pretty close.
Kylroy
@GHayduke (formerly lojasmo): Wasn’t that about the First Gulf War? The one with virtually no actual combat? I haven’t seen the movie, but I remember reviews complaining that the trailers implied things were going to blow up, but the actual movie consisted of the “hurry up and wait” that defines so much of military life.
PeggyAI
As I was walking out of the theater with my daughter, I made sure to point out all the bystanders waving confederate flags & hate signs to show her why the argument of that flag as just a symbol of Southern pride is such a lie. We live in Florida & well, enough said.
Cervantes
@Keith G:
Because having to injure and kill is a greater trauma than being injured or killed?
Cervantes
@Kylroy:
Draining the politics out of that history may well have been the entire point of making the movie.
Mayur
@Matt McIrvin: that’s wither Truffaut being too clever by half, or my experience differs strongly from his assumed norm. I find full metal jacket, letters from Iwo Jima (look! Eastwood again), three kings, and numerous other war movies to leave the viewer a pretty strong distaste for war and a great deal of skepticism about the warmongering mentality.
I think the New Yorker review said it best: American sniper is both a strongly pro-war and anti war film simultaneously. The wing nuts look at it like some sort of action movie, but we also know how blind they are to nuance. Remember Reagan’s and GHWB’s campaign song choices?
Paul in KY
Certainly being a sniper is a legitimate specialty in war and is covered by the Geneva Convention, etc. That said, if the job is being done properly, it is not so hard to shoot at people who have no idea that you are targeting them or know where you are.
Paul in KY
@Gretchen: I guess if the police had used the weaponry like the VC did, Mr. Lewis would be dead. Mr. Lewis, though, was unarmed, while Mr. Kerry was armed to the teeth.
So I guess I do see the comparison.
Tyro
It used to be that the comments sections of blogs were peppered with, “I don’t even own a TV” when taking about a television series. Now everyone has a TV and brags that, “I haven’t been to the movies in 10 years!”
Tyro
@Mayur: I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie. All movies about war end up turning into anthems of celebration of blowing things up, regardless of what the directorial intent was.
celticdragonchick
@Cervantes:
Because watching a couple of your close friends getting blown to bits by a grenade while you are up to your elbows in blood trying to stem the bleeding of your squad leader…under fire…is probably pretty fucking traumatic in a way that anyone in the civilian world cannot imagine.
I did my bit in the army, but I will not even remotely claim that I have experienced anythng on the level of someone who has been under enemy fire, and it is silly to claim that the Edmund Pettis bridge march was akin to a firefight.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Keith G:
As soon as I heard about “American Sniper,” it made me think of that film-within-a-film in “Inglorious Basterds.” I know he’s currently unfashionable, but Tarantino can critique film genres from the inside out like no one else.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@celticdragonchick:
How about sitting in church and trying stem the bleeding of the six-year-old girl who was sitting next to you until the bomb went off?
I think people today forget that it really was a fucking low-scale war in the South over civil rights. Bombs went off. People were shot in their driveways or while standing in their motel rooms. The main difference is that (now) our sympathies are with the noncombatants.
Paul_D
I read Kyle’s book about a year ago and it was a chore. It had some amusing moments and decent insights, but the tone of the whole thing was so utterly cavalier -couldn’t read more than 30 pages at a time because Kyle was “aw shucks, just my job”.
Then I saw the film last week and it sucked. Just awful. About the first half hour bore some resemblance to the book then it just got ridiculous. Nowhere near close to the book. At best it’s a half-assed western film that takes place in Iraq, full of every tired cliche imaginable.
Better books on the topic IMO are Shooter by Jack Coughlin and Sniper One by Dan Mills.
Mayur
@Tyro: That’s incredibly pat. If you don’t walk away from something like Full Metal Jacket with utter disgust for war and its circumstances, I would submit you have a hard time reading visual media.
Mayur
Heck, the opening 10 minutes of [i]Saving Private Ryan[/i] (you know, the bit that triggered actual PTSD symptoms in vets who watched it) was enough, for many of my friends, to wipe out any notions of heroism and glory they might have felt about WW2. Even the so-called “good war” has been given a much more clearheaded treatment in cinema these days.
Paul in KY
@celticdragonchick: If somehow, the goons raining blows on Mr. Lewis’ head had killed him, I do not think they would have felt they had made a mistake, nor would they have been brought to ‘justice’ in 1960s Alabama.
Due to Mr. Lewis and his compadres being totally unarmed, I do think a comparison can be made.
Tyro
@Mayur: people generally don’t go to watch mass market movies because they are interested in “reading visual media.” A movie is a mass market storytelling medium with pictures. It’s why Lt. Col. Kilgore is everyone’s favorite badass.
Cervantes
@celticdragonchick:
Here was the original assertion:
I asked about the calculation involved. You responded:
So you’re saying traumas are not easily imagined or compared, and you have not been under enemy fire, and you did not march in Selma — right?
Howlin Wolfe
@Tommy: Tommy, does the MLB stream to Roku, et al., include in-market games?
Tree With Water
During our Civil War, snipers were detested by both sides. The feeling of most infantryman blue and gray was that it was mean spirited, and served no purpose other than make a terrible situation even worse. Mass killings were one thing- unavoidable. Sniping was simply considered a deadly nuisance.