'American Sniper'

Joyless In Fallujah

I had never even heard of Fallujah until *we* (the Coalition of the unWitting) invaded Iraq and found ourselves a quagmire. You kept hearing this was just like Vietnam and that the *allied* (we use this term loosely) were seeing terrible casualties. If there's a place in the 21st Century one wouldn't want to know about, it would be Fallujah.

Of course in movie land, it's exactly the kind of place where curious and dubious legends are born so we had 'the Hurt Locker' depicting defusing IEDs (another abbreviation we came to learning loathe in the 'aughts) and now we have a movie about a sniper who made his name in that shitfight. If it weren't Clint Eastwood directing, I might not have watched this film.

As it is, it's a true-story-loosely-based-on-fact - the usual recipe for a misleading, misrepresentation time of entertainment. Are we assholes for wanting this entertainment? Perhaps. This film certainly lends credence to such a view.

What's Good About It

It's typical Clint Eastwood fare. It's aesthetically stripped down and pretty simple and to the point. Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller put in reasonable performances and the special effects in the war scenes are in most part not distracting or annoying. Fallujah as a theatre comes over as the shithole one expects, and the campaign is gruesome as one remembers from reports.

I have a lot of complaints about this film as well as those who are complaining about it. it's a cornucopia of reasons for complaint but one thing that it is, is competent and well done (and not necessarily well-handled). The problem is that competence alone might not get you over the line into the good graces of history. After all Nazis at Auschwitz were competent at what they were doing.

What's Bad About It

It's a film that lends you the suspicion that the times have passed Clint Eastwood by. The kind of moral compass necessary to navigate the moral signposts of this film are very old. It predates a lot of the values we've come to embrace in the lat 40 years.

Also, Chris Kyle is a dodgy witness to his own actions. Okay, he's worse than that, he's been known to be a liar, so much so that Jesse Ventura pursued him into courts and won a defamation suit against him. And while you wouldn't hold a Hollywood testimonial biopic to be representative of the man, the film is incredibly circumspect and reticent about the more obvious faults of the man.

The film also skips over the many issues of a hunter shooting animals going to being a sniper shooting people instead. I walked out of the film feeling like I witnessed a film about a man who got PTSD and his solution to his problem was to become a psychopath.

It's not a *bad* film, but it's an immensely difficult film to leave one's politics at the cinema door and just watch. You get itchy with the desire to dispute the portrayal of what is essentially a killer on the loose that has state sanction to whack people for perceived intent. It's a heavy chore, trying to ignore these things.

What's Interesting About It

The film itself is pretty prosaic. It simply describes events with the utmost of simplicity. Whether they're relevant or made up events to make a life make some kind of biopic-narrative sense, it's really straightforward. What is not straightforward is the ideological battle that has burst out in the media as a result this film, and trying to parse this film for what exactly it means.

We can dispense with the gun nut NRA defences of the film. You expect the lobby of shooters to be in praise of a shooter who shot a bunch of people regardless of faith or gender or creed or age. You expect people who like shooting to be in praise of the shooters. Empathy for the shot doesn't come into it with these people so it's worth drawing a line and saying the NRA/gun-loving endorsement of this film is as shallow and stupid as it is psychopathic and self-interested to the point of being masturbatory.

What we have to tangle with a bit is the criticism levelled at the film auto whether it is misrepresenting the truth or rewriting history. One of the crits levelled against the film is that it attempts to justify going into Iraq on the basis of 9/11. Facts of the matter are - and much as it kills me - the George W. Bush administration were at pains to paint Iraq as somehow connected to the 9/11 events in order to go into Iraq. So while there is no connection whatsoever between 9/11 and Iraq, it is true that America went to war with Iraq after the events of 9/11 using it as a pretext.

Yes, it's super-frustrating. It was even more frustrating to live through. If you have forgotten or were too young to understand, but want a flavour of what that debate looked like, you can go right back to the 2004 entries of this very blog to see for yourself how frustrating the events were. Even allowing for that, in all fairness to the film it is true that 9/11 happened and then troops were sent to invade Iraq. The film does not justify or condone it, it just delivers it as matter of fact. There is no glorious scenes of the drive into Baghdad or clips of 'comical Ali' being dead wrong about his pronouncements on behalf of the government of Iraq. And if one were a soldier, that would have been the experience of events.

It's really not a fair criticism to say this film supports the argument that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. The opposite is more true. The film is snidely ironic in showing that 9/11 led to the difficult (and probably needless) street-to-street fighting in Fallujah. The problem of arguing that the film supports such a notion is that it's not taking the film on its own terms, it's whipping it with an ideological lash.

Cheering For The Killer

The other disturbing challenge is that the film gives us a cold-blooded killer as the guy for whom we're cheering; and it's really awkward. This isn't a picaresque, and this isn't a complete bit of fiction made to challenge middleclass values. The film kicks off with accounts of his childhood where shooting animals and beating up on other kids is justified. The guy joins the SEALs and shoots things really well, so he ends up as a sniper. His first kills are a civilian woman and child who try to lob a grenade at American troops. Tell me the bit where it gets pleasant because well into the film you want  to look for an escape hatch from the oppressiveness of the killing.

This is probably what war really is like, where it's distasteful traumatic choices all round, and then you pull the trigger at the shitty challenge du jour. Even so, the film sure doesn't make you feel good about it and anybody waving the star-spangled banner on the back of this is clearly, clearly, CLEARLY, an idiot.

The criticism levelled at the film is that it shows a total lack of empathy for the Iraqis who are not given proper identities except for characters how get shot, maimed and tortured. It's true. One can only surmise that the inner world of Chris Kyle was barren as the desert. That part, I blame the sources material, his autobiography. This is not a guy I would have wanted to know or with whom have had drinks.

If people thought Chris Kyle was a great guy on the basis of this film, then they're probably mentally deficient.

All Disquiet On The Iraqi Front

Back in my 20s, I had a hunch that maybe my generation - the Generation X for whom this blog is written - would get by without a war. That unlike the Baby Boomer generation that was saddled with the Vietnam War, Gen X would merely be drawn to minor conflicts like Grenada or even Panama where overwhelming US supremacy made for short, sharp, one-sided affairs. This was true even of the Gulf war, waged to evict Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait with a definite, self-imposed finish line. Then, the George W. Bush administration befell this earth and the rest is what we have of this miserable 21st Century so far.

The Iraq and Afghan wars became the wars for Gen X. And it has been much worse for Gen X than it was for the Baby Boomers for the single reason that both wars have driven America into the deepest debt, and the whole world economy has been dragged down by America's debt.

The war in both Afghanistan and Iraq were put on credit, so to speak as the Bush Administration went into deficit to fight 2 wars it had not financed, and then cut taxes for the rich. By the time he left office, he had given rise to the Global Financial Crisis as well as a crazy amount of national debt. Because what we borrow today subtracts from what we earn tomorrow, essentially the Bush Administration spent the money to be earned by Gen X.

The question then becomes what exactly did the Bush Administration buy with that debt. So far it seems it bought sweet fuck all. Thus it seems incredibly small potato stakes to be arguing whether this film is pro-war or not. The real question is, how on earth is anybody going to legitimate the value in the Iraq War?  Iraq is where our generation got sold down the river together with the future, for a song.

So with all that, the film singularly fails to answer the question, was the Iraq misadventure with all the chaos, mayhem, vitriol, divisions it unleashed, and the political acrimony that has resulted in our polity, the death and destruction... was it really worth it? If all we have to take away is that this guy in Fallujah killed lots of Iraqi combatants, semi-combatants, hemi-combatants and hemi-demi-semi-parital-almost-noncombatants through his great marksmanship, is that all that great? Is this film going  to be the equivalent epitaph to the Iraq War that 'All Quiet On The Western Front' was to World War I? Seems really striking in its paucity to me.

'American Hustle'

A Story Set In NYC, 1978? Count Me In

Spoiler Alert!

Got it? Good.

Okay, so forget the amazing cast for a moment. This movie is only partly about that. The rest of the movie is plot and dialogue and all those things that make sense of it which is the normal movie deal, but the truly appealing thing about this film is its production design and costume design. From Christian Bale's hairpiece to Amy Adams' insanely pointy high heels to Bradley Cooper's tight curls and beard and chains look to Jennifer Lawrence's piled-high-blonde-mess hair to an appearance by Robert DeNiro as the scary mafia don sporting Ray Ban wayfarer frames as regular glasses to Jeremy Renner's *amazing* bouffant do, this film for me, was all about the glory of production design.

I know some people love Edwardian period pieces with the hats and hair and frocks and rollers. I just love period pieces set in the 1970s. There. I've said it. And if they can nail the look, the vibe, the mood, the feel, it gets an extra 3 stars out f 5 from me.

So really, we're only talking about whether this movie deserves another two stars with its writing direction, acting, cinematography, editing, and sound combined, is a worthy question.

What's Good About It

A complicated long con that involves the FBI is an interesting setup. What gets even more interesting is how the story covers a great area of corruption, which in the light of recent events in NSW, seems exactly to be the kind of problem a Federal Agency should be looking into. It's made clear in the film that Renner's Carmine Polito does take the money, but only because he is prevailed upon to take the money by Bale's Irving. This opens the door to further busts of politicians who take money but it is clearly entrapment. It's certainly an interesting take on the Abscam chapter of he FBI.

The editing is pretty snappy and it gets through a lot of complicated story in a quick sequences. Perhaps that too is an homage to the 1970s films that did a lot of adventurous cutting that died out in the 1980s as studios decided to buy the snake oil sold by story consultants that flashbacks didn't work and that stories should go from the beginning to the end in a linear fashion. This film clearly shows the folly of such ways with its clever construction and juxtaposition of scenes.

The disco scene is also a big winner with its references to 'Saturday Day Night fever'. Cooper and Adams do a credible pastiche of Travolta and Gorny's moves from the earlier film. It's a weird kind of pleasure because it telescopes 1978 popular culture down to a bunch of  shots and dance moves and then goes back to the plot. But the film is full of such pleasures. DeNiro's appearance as the big mobster boss from Florida evokes at once 'The Godfather II', 'Taxi Driver' and 'Goodfellas'. The fact that it is talking about Atlantic City alone evokes 'Boardwalk Empire' - and it even has a couple of actors from the TV series doing cameo roles. It's a film for film buffs. It's almost a tragedy they couldn't find a role for Joe Pesci.

Oh, and the cars, man! Those 1970s American beasts of Detroit...

What's Bad About It

In trying to capture the 1970s 'look', the cinematography veers towards the lighting style of the 1970s which is flat and hard. Apart from the fact that it's very unattractive, it makes the film less compelling than if it had been shot with more sculpting of shadows. The 1970s films looked that way because budgets were thin and the film stock was slow. You had to blast 2k and 5k lights to get any kind of reading. I think there were better ways of conveying the 1970s than going for that 1970s film look.

Also, I know they're great songs but it leans too heavily on the hits of the 1970s. Yes, Paul McCartney and Wings' 'Live and Let Die' is a great song for the big transition; but this is like the third film where I've seen it used outside of the Bond movie 'Live and Let Die'. The best one would have been 'Grosse Point Blank' where Martin Q. Blank emerges from his car to see the house he grew up in has been turned into a convenience store. If you can't beat that one, maybe you shouldn't be using that song.

What's Interesting About It

The ricochet of 'Boardwalk Empire' runs right through this story. Not only do we see the familiar mugs of Shea Whigham (Eli in BE) and Jack Huston (Richard in BE), we're regaled with the remains of an Atlantic City casino. There's something poetic in the casting of Jack Huston as one of the gangsters awaiting Irving and Agent DiMaso.

The interest in Atlantic City as a story location is growing as a result of 'Boardwalk Empire'. Even an innocuous film like 'Imogene' sits astride of modern day Atlantic City. At the end of the day it seems blatantly obvious that the mix of politics, construction and gambling forms such a phantasmagorical nexus of corruption. This is true for the unfolding stories in 'Boardwalk Empire' as it is for the Atlantic City of 1978 in this film and really, if there were a working film industry in Australia, then the casinos in Australia would make fantastic story fodder about corruption.

I mean let's face it. What did it take Jamie Packer to convince Barry O'Farrell to give him a casino licence in Barangaroo? What the hell was that? And why so little pubic scrutiny? Inquiring minds would like to know. No?

True Story Loosely Based On Fact - Part 303

As the world grows smaller, we're left with fewer unknowns about our own planet and our own history. With any luck they'll make movies about Africa or the Eurasian steppes or something but in most part we know our world a lot more than we used to. Perhaps this sense of limit is driving the crop of films towards ever refined tellings and retellings of stories which happened. The alternative is to go off world and tell science fiction stories or fantasy stories - but even something like 'Game of Thrones' ends up approximating the sense of history we have from the Hundred Years War.

The drive toward verisimilitude inevitably is leading us to these stories which ride on the back of true events but are tweaked enough to make it a better narrative and a more exciting story. As I mentioned before the film works hard for its 1970s look, which in turn works hard to establish the 1970s as a sense of time and place. Maybe the only way we can convince studio executives that a story is worth doing is if something vaguely like it happened, and the screenwriter can piggyback on those events to give added gravitas to the narrative. After all, you just can't think some of this stuff up on your own.

Bra-less And Slightly Slack

That being said about verisimilitude... I just want to talk about those dresses.

For those who don't know, that's a joke Bill Bruford made about the album title 'Starless and Bible Black' when he was playing with King Crimson in the 1970s. I know it's incredibly slack of me to bring it up, but it's the perfect line to describe Amy Adams' attire in this film. Scene after scene we see her in these outfits that can only be described as 70s-daring. try as I might I couldn't really think of anybody real wearing anything like that in New York City in 1978. Maybe I was a sheltered kid; but it needs no explanation that April in NYC is still pretty cold.

Seriously, the only person I could think of dressing like that, on any regular basis was Farrah Fawcett in her 'Charlie's Angels' heyday, and maybe Diana Ross. 1978 was all about guys bearing their hairy chests so people can see the gold chains, remember?

So this whole thing of Amy Adams' character flashing so much breast in scene after scene is more the director's fetish than any kind of 1970s sensibility. If anything, there were plenty of people getting about looking like Dianne Keaton in 'Annie Hall' than these extreme get ups they designed for Amy Adams. It's just overkill. It's a nice little sleazy fantasy I guess, but it's pretty far from the way it really was.

Was 1978 Really That Cool?

You'd better believe it. Think about the great debut albums of 1978. I's just an amazing list. 'Van Halen' by Van Halen; 'Outlandos D'Amour' by the Police; 'Dire Straits' by Dire Straits; 'For You' by Prince; 'Nina Hagen Band' by Nina Hagen Band; 'Are We Not Men? We Are Devo' by Devo; 'Generation X' by Generation X; plus debut albums by the likes of Toto, Quiet Riot, Squeeze and The Cars. So yes, it was cool. Did any of this music end up in this film? No.

America under Jimmy Carter had a strange admixture of bleak cynicism and a naive kind of hippie hope. This would all get dashed when Ronald Reagan won in 1980 and it's all been trickle down economics ever since. But the way New York City was then was the cipher stone for things to come. The Greed-is-Good thing was nascent but there amidst the glam and sleaze. There was a lingering egalitarianism that meant you could be living in the same apartment block as a New York Yankee as well as a Mafia Capo. It was a strange, strange time before big time money stratified society. Maybe the 1970s was the last decade that New York belonged to New Yorkers. Since then it's become something else entirely. The strange charm of this movie is that it fits right in with the confused, dying embers of a certain kind of Americana that is no longer there.