AMERICAN SNIPER (Clint Eastwood 2014)

[Johann]

Even if I saw it my opinion wouldn't change. I think I add a lot, without even seeing it. lol

How can a movie be "devastating pro-war" and "devastating anti-war" at the same time? Don't they cancel each other out?

[Chris Knipp]

They don't cancel each other out, they show complexity. That's the interest of the film. It is certainly pro war by the implication of its format but as I quoted Michael Moore saying (see above)"there is also anti-war sentiment expressed in the movie." I quoted Denby's thumbnail review based on his full one earlier for the dramatic way it states the movie's complexity.

[Chris Knipp]

I had overlooked Armond White's (30 Dec.) review, where he discusses the movie sympathetically but critically from his now open conservative and Christian stance that he adopts for his weekly pieces for National Review. He notes the cutting away of the title, contrasts Cooper here with the bullish, boorish role of Channing Tatum in FOXCATCHER, calls Kyle as depicted a "working class hero," the movie as ambivalent, not anti-American.

Compare Cooper’s Star Wars Storm Trooper strut to Channing Tatum’s oafish gorilla step in Foxcatcher and you have the visible difference between an ambivalent American movie and an anti-American one. Cooper romanticizes the guileless, unsophisticated virtues of cowboys, jocks and working men while Tatum (and a porky Mark Ruffalo, both under the smug guidance of politically decadent Bennett Miller) appeals to Blue State cynicism.

You don't get such views intelligently expressed (or expressed at all) elsewhere.

Too much of American Sniper is merely conventional, while Cooper, bulked up like an Oscar stunt, has gone past it to something genuine.

American Sniper’s got that Eastwood problem: terse but banal. It covers up lack of commitment with Eastwood’s typical middle-of-the-road Hollywood Conserva-liberal fudging on issues of patriotism and war fatigue.

White as his contrarian, smart best. Recommended for a fresh viewpoint.

[tabuno]

American Sniper didn't make my top ten list, but not for all the controversy. In fact, what I was most impressed about the movie was its character study element. I thought Clint Eastwood presented the psychological transformation of a solider in war very well. I was reminded about how Natalie Portman's performance in Black Swan (2010).

[Johann]

A germane link:

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/26/amer...zergnet_382328