American Sniper (5/5 Stars)

Early on in “American Sniper,” Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) sidles up to his future wife in a bar. She tells him to get lost. Why he asks? Because you are a Navy Seal she says, and Navy Seals are pushy, self-centered, egotistical, loud, etc. Chris takes most of this in a way that suggests he is in agreement with her assessment of how Nacy Seals are. He does however take issue with one adjective. “Self-centered,” he objects, “I would give my life for my country. How is that self-centered?”

“American Sniper” is an extraordinary character study. It shows the life of Chris Kyle who served four tours in the Iraq War and was credited with 160 confirmed kills as a sniper before coming home and being shot and killed by a fellow veteran with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As far as war movies are concerned it belongs in that new brand of modern cinema that makes obsolete the line between a bullshit PG rated John Wayne version of war and a slow motion violin-playing Oliver Stone version of a war. It is more like the “The Hurt Locker,” another movie that showed real brutality of a battle side by side with its strange ability to seduce the fighter to keep coming back to it. Like the I.E.D. specialist in “The Hurt Locker,” Chris Kyle only owes one tour of duty but keeps volunteering for more. Once he is home with his loving wife and kids he can’t think of anything more important than going back to Iraq to finish the war.

Cinema in general is a liberal establishment and this type of behavior is unreal to most of the people in it. They look at Chris Kyle’s accomplishments (i.e. killing a record number of people) in a very unpopular war and recoil at the idea that anybody over there could be called a hero. I hope they see this movie because the fact that Chris Kyle was nicknamed “Legend” by his fellow soldiers has far less an insidious truth to it than they think. He was “Legend” because when he watched over the battlefield with his rifle, the men on the ground were never safer. (In one scene the soldiers relieving him at his post find him in position on his rifle but stinking of urine. He wouldn’t take his sight off the street for however long it would take to piss.) In other words, Kyle saved many lives of American soldiers and that is why he is considered a hero. Unfortunately those statistics are impossible to tally. Of course one could make the argument that the entire war was wrong in the first place so it does not matter that Kyle killed people to save people if nobody at all deserved to die. I think Chris Kyle had the best retort in his book, “We didn’t vote in Congress; we didn’t vote to go to war. I signed up to protect this country, I do not choose the wars.”

I submit that this movie is apolitical. Chris Kyle surely was pro-war, but this movie takes a middle ground. How the movie shrewdly pulls this off is by assigning doubts about the war to other characters in the movie. One of his fellow soldiers asks Kyle if he ever reads that Bible he carries around. Another writes a derisive poem about ‘Glory’ that is subsequently read at his own funeral. (Kyle suggests that the attitude that brought about the poem got the soldier killed but the movie itself gives the poem reverential treatment.) Kyle’s brother upon leaving Iraq after a tour tells him, “Fuck this place” as if coming there was the worst decision he ever made in his life. The multitude of viewpoints amongst the veterans in the movie is what makes this movie pro-veteran first than about any sort of politics. If there was a veteran that felt it, this movie wants to show it. Movies about controversial topics generally make their characters choose sides and then take a side as well, which usually has the effect of judging those characters that picked the wrong side. I think it is fair to say that “American Sniper” supports everyone. Clint Eastwood directed this movie. It is arguably his best movie since “Unforgiven” in 1993. It is very inspiring to see a movie with this much energy and precision made by a guy in his mid-80s. Eastwood has made good movies in the last decade (Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino) but they generally felt like an old man who wasn’t about to make a great movie ever again made them. I was wrong.

I was also wrong about what I felt was the natural range of Bradley Coopers’ acting ability. This is arguably his best performance and a role he almost completely disappears into. If you had asked me to cast someone like Chris Kyle, Bradley Cooper would not have been my first choice. But here he gains a good amount of weight in pure muscle, grows a beard, and has a great sounding Texan accent. He pulls off two counterintuitive personality traits: Being a macho guy but not being conceited about it. That is to say he completely loses the Romantic Comedy pretty boy without completely gaining the Schwarzeneggarian action hero. The story, the performance, the very strong writing, and the clarity of the directing, elevate Chris Kyle’s life into the realm of Shakespearean tragedy. That is to say the character traits of Chris Kyle, namely his comfort with firearms and his unwavering convictions, make him great on the battlefield and at the same time provide for his downfall post-war. The last two scenes of this movie involve him jokingly pointing a revolver at his wife (perhaps the biggest do not do in the annals of gun safety) and then taking a veteran with PTSD to a shooting range because gee isn’t shooting things a fun thing to do. What is the rule for biopics: If it were completely fictional would it be any good. This movie would be great even if there were no real Chris Kyle.

There are two minor problems with the movie that I felt could have been done better. One was the treatment of Chris Kyle’s Iraqi doppelganger, an Olympic sharpshooter that plays for the other side and becomes Kyle’s main antagonist throughout the movie. I don’t believe he gets any lines and his life on the other side is unexplored. It would have been cool if we learned more about him. Also the movie’s pinnacle action sequence suffers from we may call a “Fury” problem if anyone remembers my review of that movie from last fall. The Iraqi insurgents display a stunning lack of tactics when they attack a building holding only four Americans and suffer countless casualties. That sort of thing never happens in a war and is a letdown in a movie that otherwise took the war scenes seriously. But it wasn’t that bad and didn’t wholly compromise the seriousness of the movie.

Go see “American Sniper." Bring along a sense of empathy.

Invictus (2/5 Stars) January 10, 2010

Lazy writing and poor execution waste a chance to make a great movie.

Clint Eastwood directs and Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon star in this part Nelson Mandela biopic and part underdog sports movie. The movie has three storylines. One is Nelson Mandela’s early decision to keep the colors and symbols of the Springbok rugby team, an almost sacred institution to the white Afrikaners of South Africa and symbol of oppression to the black population. The second deals with Mandela’s security guard, both white and black, and their attempts to get along. The third is the rugby team’s underdog triumph at the 1995 World Cup. The first storyline is well done and inspiring as it should be. The second and third are woefully under-researched, lazily written, and poorly executed. If the 1995 World Cup Championship were a good rugby game you wouldn’t know it from watching this movie. I still don’t even know how rugby is played. 

Morgan Freeman is perhaps the only actor in the business that could play Nelson Mandela in a movie. If I saw any other actor playing the part I would be like, “Why couldn’t they get Morgan Freeman?” He nails the gravitas, the patience, and the greatness of the man. Man, Morgan Freeman could read the ingredients off a can of tuna and it would sound profound. Having him preach reconciliation and forgiveness and recite inspirational poetry is something to behold. These are the best parts of the movie. (It’s also cool that the movie actually shot in the prison Mandela was for twenty-seven years during the reign of apartheid.) It’s a shame that the rest of the movie couldn’t have been better. If there is another movie about Mandela, Freeman probably won’t play the part. 

Apart from Freeman’s performance, the movie is very disappointing. Take the security detail story for instance. There is a tiff at first between the guards because some are black and some are white and they don’t trust each other. But over time they get along. There really isn’t more to it than that. Mandela was never shot at nor was there any scandal in real life or in this movie. This in itself is not bad, but the movie also declines to make any of the guards anything more than one-dimensional characters. They basically make snide remarks at each other for a while and then stop doing so. There is no drama here. The climax to this storyline wasn’t character based or even plot based. It was a false alarm at the rugby championship. A red herring. Though an empty threat would make sense for this storyline.

The worst part of this movie though is the incredible laziness of the rugby storyline. Rugby is never explained or talked about in a strategic sense (even though most people in the USA would not be familiar with the game), none of the athletes on the team are introduced as characters besides the coach Francois (Matt Damon), and the contests are not shot in a way that tells the story of the game itself. In fact, I would go so far as to describe the climatic championship game as B-Roll: a bunch of disconnected shots that if you rearranged them randomly would lend just as much weight to the story. This is the sort of stuff you have your 2nd crew work on while your real director is doing the important things. You have a huge problem when the most dramatic rugby play in the movie is stock footage of the New Zealand team beating England that the characters watch on their televisions. 

I’m not a huge expert on rugby (no thanks to this movie) but I have seen a couple games before. I always got the feeling that it was an incredibly rough, dangerous, badass game. The players are huge and everything is full contact. Does that sound like something you should play an acapella South African tribal chants in the background too? Does that sound like a game that you can win by doing a lot of running through town and visiting historical sites? Would it make sense for the ‘inspirational speech’ of the coach to be but a few sentences with his voice barely raised? I once saw a great documentary called Murderball about wheelchair rugby for cripples. Those rugby players had ten times more balls than this rugby team. I’m sure there were good reasons that South Africa won that year. It seems like it could be an inspiring event that helped unite the country. This movie just does a terrible job at conveying that.

There have been two movies this year that deal with South African apartheid and the reconciliation between the two races. The literal version is Invictus. The metaphorical version was this summer’s science fiction film District 9. District 9 is the better movie and I would suggest it to anyone who would want to see Invictus. 

Gran Torino (4/5 Stars) 01/02/09

Ladies and Gentlemen the Comedy Stylings of Clint Eastwood! You know someone is aging gracefully when he can fill an entire movie with old man jokes. Clint mutters, spits, and snarls over how kids are these days, his stupid family, and the new neighbors next door. Almost every sentence there is a racial epithet or an insult. You can get away with that when you're super old. You've lived too long to give a damn about what people who haven't lived as long as you think. He throws his son out of the house when he suggests moving to a retirement community. He tells his Asian neighbors to stay away from his dog. He spits near his granddaughter when she expresses his interest in his 74' Gran Torino. He spends his days taking care of his house and sitting on the porch smoking and downing Pabst Blue Ribbons. In short, this is the sort of tough guy that Clint Eastwood made a career out of. Now he's taking that guy and creating a really good comic situation by surrounding him by Hmong immigrants at the twilight of his life. Sure the plot has a gang violence center to it and a lot of the drama concerns how Eastwood tries to man up an at risk boy named Thao, but what really struck me about this movie is how funny it is. There are more than a dozen great one-liners. A lot of the attention this movie is getting for Eastwood is not unfounded. Watching I cannot imagine anyone else pulling off as good a performance. And that's not just because there's nobody left Eastwood's age that has good enough health to do it. Actually I take that back. One of the reasons this character is cool is because he's so old and still has so much life in him. When an elder tells a teenager to stop being such a pussy and calls a young priest a virgin with no life experience I knew I was watching something special.
The movie is also important in how it deals with the gang plot. In a usual Eastwood movie, say Unforgiven, you would expect the whole thing to end with a shootout. That doesn't happen here although the possibility of one is definitely foreshadowed. It does go to show that in the twilight of his career Eastwood is making an amends with the vigilante spirit he created with his wild west and dirty harry films. In this movie there is a respect for the avenues of law enforcement weird as that may sound in an Eastwood pic.

Letters from Iwo Jima 03/16/07

This is a far better movie than Eastwood's 'Flags of our Fathers.' Why? because the mistakes he made in that movie are fixed here. In this movie, we no longer have an uncertain narrative droning though the story. We always know who is talking and what they're talking about. And the stilted old man dialogue that passes for young jokes in the other movie? In this movie it is still there, but it is covered up by a Japanese language that I don't understand. I assume that what I hear sounds normal. For those reasons Letters from Iwo Jima work as a superior film.

Also in the storyline we have a more distinctive story. Instead of American's complaining about how in war there are no heroes (Boo hoo) we have Japanese who are complaining that they are going to die in a futile suicide mission for a sadistic country. Its a bit more dramatic and it works. This is like watching the Japanese Alamo. It makes for a better movie. 

The two main charachters are great. Ken Watanbe playing the general, and (what's his name) playing the insignificant private who only wants to go home. Along with other charachters that play into the Imperial code this provides a somewhat rounded view of the Japanese defense. I would very much like to know what the Japanese thought about this movie. I especially liked it.

Flags of Our Father 11/27/06

Clint Eastwood's new war movie left something to be desired. Most of it was good enough, definitely the battle scenes and the subsequent publicity tour. The biggest problem was the over abundance of voice over narration and the subsequent confusion. 
It was very confusing as to who was tellling this story, when, and how. Only at the end did I finally understand that it was the son of one of the soldiers that was visiting other veterans and interviewing them. If that's so then this story is being told by that son. So it's his story. Therefore Eastwood should have made that clear up front and then given the son more background. That way when the end of the movie come around, and it happens to be mostly about the son, I the viewer shouldn't think that the final scenes have very little to do with the movie. The movie was a bit anti-climatic. It's what's stopping this movie from becoming something other than run-of-the-mill. 

The battle scenes have a weird look to them. This isn't really a complaint, but it sort of looked like a video game and when it didn't look like a video game it looked like 'Saving Private Ryan.' On that note I really liked the casting of Barry Pepper. As one may remember he was the sniper in 'Saving Private Ryan.' Having him in this movie gave it a more authentic feel. Ryan Phillipe does a fine job too I guess. Most of the other guys I plain didn't recognize. 
There is so much talk about the flag-raising and how it was paticularly meaningless to the men who did it. But Eastwood also makes such a big deal over the flag-raising also that it completely substitutes the rest of the battle. This begs the question I think. Why didn't Eastwood make a movie about the battle of Iwo Jima and not about the flag-raising if he thought the flag raising wasn't that great. There's a look and feel to Eastwood's movies that makes them seem great, but I find that I look closer and I can never quite find the heart. The movies don't go to much farther than skin-deep. That's why I rarely watch an Eastwood film twice, although this one is definitely worth seeing once. I hope it doesn't win any oscars.