American Sniper... go see it

[LanternWaste]

75. I watched the film last week, and it's little more than a Lee Greenwood song

I watched the film last week, and it's little more than a Lee Greenwood song overlayed onto visual patriotism.

Saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.

Eastwood plays down to the lowest common denominator and gives us clear-cut good guys and clear-cut bad guys, and simply leaves too much on the table when the difficult questions come up.

However effective it is as a piece of cinema (arguable-- but Eastwood does know the basic of film), even a cursory look into the film’s backstory raises disturbing questions about which stories we choose to codify into truth, and whose, and why, and the messy social costs of transmogrifying real life into entertainment.