American Sniper (2014)

The verdict is still out on whether or not Clint Eastwood hasn't just been dead for years, and really it's some kind of voodoo sorcerer using his reanimated corpse puppet to bitch about “political correctness culture,” like he's so senile in his old age that he forgot that Gran Torino was just a movie and is now just acting it out forever in some hellish loop. And we're all too nice to tell him.

But maybe we shouldn't be so nice. Eastwood, after all, hates what pussies our generation has become for caring about racism. So I think we should toss the baby out with the bathwater and stop caring about offending senile old people like him, too.

If Eastwood wants the kind of culture where we just say whatever we want with no repercussions, allow me to say his movies have sucked ass for years. He can't do it anymore. All his recent movies are hack work garbage. And yes, especially the one about the American military. What was that one called?

Oh yeah – American Sniper.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

I realize it's weird that we're doing this so soon after 9/11. There. The elephant in the room has been addressed. This is a supremely lame and boring movie for something that should feel so important. It chronicles the life of Chris Kyle, the “American Sniper,” who killed a record number of people over in the Middle East in the war. The way this movie tells it, though, is more like an overt love letter to blind patriotism with no actual character or drama. Watching this thing was like listening to my conservative uncle blather on over a Thanksgiving dinner, getting drunker and drunker. So, yeah – not fun.

Not that I expected “fun” out of this movie, but I did expect something. And it didn't deliver! The first 20 minutes rushes haphazardly through Kyle's childhood and into adulthood, when he and his brother find his wife cheating on him in his house. None of it is really given any importance or drama – why should we care about any of it and why is it being shown? It's not very interesting. The dialogue fucking sucks, too. Gotta love when he finds his wife cheating on him and she just flat out says “I'm doing this because I want attention!”

...That is not good writing. Unless her character is just super self-aware and in touch with her emotions, it's god-awful dialogue.

"I have a deep well of personal issues stemming back to the absence of my father in childhood which now causes me to act out in ways that some men may find to be dishonest. I use sex as a crutch to hide my crippling emotional deadness and during the day I feel ashamed, but I can't stop," - a deleted scene in the film involving this character, who is the most in-touch with her emotions out of any of the characters

It just gets worse from there – he meets a girl at a bar and they hit it off in the most cliché and hollow way, exchanging horrendous dialogue on their second scene together about how perfect she is and how he wants to be together forever. Pass the barf bag! She even admits that they barely know each other, which I think was her character breaking from the mundanity of the script and saying something that made sense before the idiocy pushed her right back down.

Love at first sight.

There's just no complexity to these characters. Every interaction between every character is a safe bare minimum slice of vanilla, like the writers were afraid any diversion from the most standard, nonspecific dialogue would alienate their viewers, like they are that fragile-minded. Is there even a point in going over much more of it? Every relationship is exactly what you'd expect it'd be if I told you who was talking to who, AND you were just a really boring, unimaginative person. Kyle and his brother? Just the most empty, banal jocular quips back and forth, bro! Kyle and his wife? “I love you, please don't go back overseas, you can't see what this is doing to you.” Repeat ad nauseam. That's literally all there ever is in this fucking movie.

"My whole existence is based on wanting you not to be in war. I have no other personality. Oh God, I'm having an existential crisis! What is the meaning of anything in life? Am I just a two-dimensional character written down sloppily and hastily to finish a script? Is life just a meaningless black void of nothingness?" 

If it seems odd that I am harping so much on this, well, shouldn't a biopic trying to honor and respect a guy's life be a bit more interesting than just this stale, generic kind of characterization? It's practically a Made for TV movie so far as the writing goes. Yes, as Michelle and I both noted when watching this, it's obviously going for the whole “rah rah America, fuck yeah” conservative attitude. But does that mean it also has to be a bad movie? I just have to ask these questions.

Also, there's really not much conflict to be had when the whole point is that he is a great and untouchable shooter in war. Not like he ever struggles with THAT aspect... and since there's no real drama otherwise, it just comes off as flat.

But speaking of politics, let's talk about this movie's shitty politics. Do you think every Muslim is a terrorist? Do you think the Middle East is nothing but a bunch of gun-toting, bomb-loving terrorists who want to KILL AMERICA? If so, then this movie will really speak to you.

What kind of erudite, hard to glean point could he be trying to make here??? I just don't know.

And, look, I know they aren't going to take time out of this military war movie to show a bunch of peaceful Muslims playing with a dog in a park. I get it. But that's the problem in itself. If I can't tell whether your movie is racist or whether you were just cramped for time, that isn't a really good problem to have.

The bulk of the movie is taken up by fairly passe, dull scenes of military guys wandering around, shooting stuff, wandering around some more, and shooting stuff some more. I can't even believe how many fucking scenes there are in this movie of guys walking slowly and tensely up stairs or driving around corners in their military vehicles. It's seriously way too many.

The above two pictures = 95% of the movie. And you know I never exaggerate anything.

They do vary it up a bit, though, when they show a military funeral for some guy we didn't know. It's so boring I can't even describe it properly. Am I an asshole if I was looking at Facebook on my phone during this scene? Does it count if it was only a fake military funeral? No? Phew.

So then after some more boring action scenes, he goes back home and spends a fuckload of time with a bunch of disabled vets, and sure, it's god-awful that they got blown up like they did. But I will say there's a reason that Eastwood is showing you this in such a gratuitous manner and hammering it home, and it isn't because he really liked the concession stand in that veteran's hospital. Do veteran's hospitals have concession stands? They do for the purposes of this. Shut up.

Obviously it's horrific when things like this happen to people. It sucks. But isn't it really creepy and weird that he's basically using amputees as a political prop to make his shitty point? "See? Look at what those Muslims did to our American soldiers!" If they were real characters we already knew from earlier, and not just appearing on screen for a second at the end of the movie, maybe it'd be something else. But it just can't be ignored with the tone of this whole movie being "America good, Muslims bad." It's uncomfortable.

The film ends with Kyle going off to hang out with the guy who would kill him that same day in real life. Like many true-life biopics, this doesn't actually show anything and instead fades to black on them standing in place outside Kyle's house, making it yet another disappointing choice in a movie full of them. I get why they wouldn't want to show the guy dying. But I dunno - the way they did end it just feels a bit weak to me.

Honestly, this is awful. It sucks because it's relentlessly boring, generic, vanilla scriptwriting and moviemaking that does nothing to tell a good story. Instead it just serves as a hollow pro-America propaganda piece. And I'm not against the troops or anything – certainly, good for them if they chose to go over there and do what they do. I wouldn't want to do it. But it's not like I needed THIS movie to tell me America is good. If Eastwood thinks he needs to make this to drive that point home, maybe he needs to have a bit more faith in his own country if he needs to try this hard to convince himself.

It's just so bad, though. Even if it wasn't a propaganda piece of shit, the characters are bland, the action is dull and the writing is plastic and hollow. I may disagree with Eastwood's politics, but the film is bad no matter what. This isn't some kind of lost masterpiece that just has a political view I disagree with. Bradley Cooper did a good job and I enjoyed some of his performance, but others like Sienna Miller as the wife are just bad, probably because she was given very little to work with. The other soldiers and side characters are entirely unmemorable.

Apparently, Steven Spielberg was going to direct this, but the idea he had for it was too much money for the studio's budget. So they threw Eastwood in as a consolation prize I guess. I dunno. Watching the scenes set in Iraq, I think this could've been good with a more noirish, slow-burning, artistic style of filmmaking, maybe a style that really drove home the desperation and eerieness of the darkness over there and the danger the troops faced. You don't really get a sense of that in this movie.

But the way it shows the Middle East, as solely a hive of evil villains waiting to kill the good Americans, comes off as shitty and ignorant too. I don't think it was just Eastwood being crunched for time like I joked about in the review – I think he deliberately portrayed the Middle East this way to make a fucking awful "point." And given our country's current climate, it's not helpful and is actually more harmful than anything. Again, there's no exploration of any of the complexities of this war or why we're there or whether or not we were doing any good at all, and the movie would've been more interesting with some of that. The only exploration of Kyle's character at all is "war is hell," and that isn't enough to carry a two-hour movie in the 2010s. Not exactly a striking, in-depth characterization...

Remember – Eastwood wants a world free from the political correctness he claims is destroying us. So here's me not being politically correct: this movie sucks, and Eastwood is a cranky old man who needs to hang up his hat and retire. Fuck American Sniper.

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Review: Hereafter (2010) TH

Death doesn't always come a knockin'

On the surface, "Hereafter" is a film that takes on aspects related to the moment before death (including "close calls"), the shock of death itself, as well as the after effects of this oft-times tragic, misunderstood and hard-to-cope facet of life. We all wish things would last forever but that isn't always the case.

The film begins with separate stories involving seemingly different characters with varied age, gender and background, and, as fate would have it, makes the world a little smaller when you have a similar set of circumstances underneath all those social constructs. This is a slower moving drama that's made to relax and ponder upon. Part of the reason is due to dealing with George's (Matt Damon) ability to peak into the after life. Unlike other films that take on a person with special abilities, this builds itself up with enough time for the skeptics, myself included, to catch up. His powers aren't glorified by selling the audience a this-could-be-you storyline, but rather focuses on the search for his real self, including others who are looking at him for resolve, potential love or just plain greed. He's confident when tapping into his ability, though one can see that there are more truths in his readings of others than honesty in his own deeper feelings for himself.

"Hereafter" works as a film for the believer as well as the unbeliever, as it uses this supernatural premise to ask a pivotal question: Are some things better left alone or unsaid? Its gradual pacing can be its best friend and enemy, though it's still a movie that plays on what you wouldn't expect, often times panning a certain scene and not being so obvious on what it focuses on. This doesn't have action-packed car chases and there isn't a heart-pounding revelation at every single turn but the film manages to effectively capture some hope, acceptance, as well as realism even if the mode it's dealing with in the movie is a subject on the fence in real life.

Director: Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Mystic River, Gran Torino)
Starring: Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Bryce Dallas Howard
Website: IMDB

Review: Hereafter (2010)

I’d just like to say that there will be SPOILERS in this review, so if you don’t like those, then don’t read this one yet! Until after you see the movie. Then I encourage you to read it and tell me how right I am about it.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Frankie McLaren, George McLaren

Website: hereafter.warnerbros.com

What can you say about Clint Eastwood, anyway? He’s a legend. He’s acted in a million awesome movies and directed a ton of other awesome ones. His last film, Gran Torino, was my favorite of the ones he’s directed that I’ve seen so far, but I think this newest one beats even that. Hereafter is just a stunning piece of film.

It’s just so refreshing to see something like this. I don’t really know why, since it’s not like this movie is really doing anything that groundbreaking – unless telling a good story is groundbreaking. Eastwood’s directing style is really bare bones and simple, and surprisingly, that’s really all he needs to bring out the power in his stories, anyway. He doesn’t need anything else. There isn’t anything about this that needs to be trimmed down – he shows everything in a very stark, direct way that doesn’t try to hide anything and shows you everything that needs to be seen.

So, what is that plot anyway? Well, it’s one of those movies like Magnolia or Crash where you get a bunch of stories of different characters that are connected in some way. Although honestly this movie is better than either of those. It’s just so well done that the stories don’t even feel that separate – they really just feel like one big, entwined web, and that’s how all of these films should feel. One story involves Matt Damon as an introverted psychic who can see dead people in the mind of the living, and another involves a woman who was a victim of a tsunami. A third involves a little boy whose twin brother has been killed in a truck accident.

The cinematography is just excellent here, with great, vivid coloration, snappy, on-point shots and a huge, epic sweep to it all that makes the opening tsunami sequence one of the most memorable you will see this year. Watch as the giant wave sweeps over everything; it’s downright terrifying to imagine yourself on the ground there. It just comes right out of nowhere! There’s really no build up; just like in real life, the tsunami wastes no time laying waste to this unsuspecting Hawaii city. The randomness of it all makes the whole scene even more powerful – life is very fragile, you see.

From there the movie progresses like a trident in three different, parallel streams. Matt Damon’s story about being a psychic and insisting it’s more of a curse than a gift is really captivating. And he makes a damn good case for why it’s more of a curse, too. I mean, the guy is coaxed into ‘reading’ a girl he likes and finds out inadvertently that her dead father molested her as a child. And then she just never comes back to see him. That’s pretty harsh, and probably not even the tip of the iceberg in terms of his life. It’s just maddening how little we’re actually given about this character, and how much what we are given affects us. It’s really stunning. They could have made a whole movie about him, but they still had other stories to tell, too.

The second one is about a woman played by Cecile De France, who is attractive in an offbeat, odd kind of way, and a great actor at that. She plays a French businesswoman on holiday in Hawaii when the tsunami from the opening hit. She and her co-worker, who she is having an affair with, go home and try to continue their regular lives – note here that he later ditches her for another girl; having an affair does one very little good in the end as the cheater will just do the same thing to you. De France, after a strange near death experience, simply can’t focus on mundane worldly business anymore, and she is given some time off to get her act together. She starts writing a book and it ends up coming out very differently from what she expected…

The third story belongs to a little boy played by Frankie and George McLaren – they’re twins, and alternate playing each character, I guess. But the one the story is about is Marcus, who lives with his brother Jason and their deadbeat drunk mother, who, in a refreshing turn of events, actually really loves them and cares about them, and it’s mutual. The boys view their mother’s addiction as something to overcome, and the way they help her evade the investigators who think she’s unfit as a parent is just golden. I wish they had given her more screen time, but then again, like the rest of this movie, it’s not really that necessary. And plus, she serves as a device to let him leave the house and do what he pleases more often. Which makes up the core of his story as he needs to do that quite a bit.

He travels around to different psychics trying to find a way to talk to his brother and get closure. Some of them are pretty funny, but of course it’s building up to the obvious payoff of meeting Matt Damon’s character, who tries to escape his brother’s pushy ways by going to England to visit Charles Dickens’ house…it makes much more sense when you watch the movie, trust me. He can’t escape his demons anywhere he goes, mostly thanks to the internet.

One of the other great scenes comes when Marcus is trying to get on a train and his hat is knocked off his head, causing him to miss it. But then the train blows up anyway so I guess he didn’t miss much…this really becomes resonant once Marcus and Matt Damon meet up.

Really, this is a movie about dealing with death, plain and simple. People do it in different ways. While sadly people in the real world can’t get closure as easy as they could by simply coaxing Matt Damon into reading their palms and getting messages from them, the film still shows very realistic portrayals of people who just don’t know what else to do. And it goes both ways, as Damon’s character is human, too, and being a bridge between the living and the dead is tough, and taxing. He has emotions too, and his curse compromises any deeper relationships inevitably. Nobody gets off scot free.

I think the point is really driven home by De France, who has the smallest of the three main roles but also the most pivotal point of the film – as she is the only one who has seen the Hereafter, nameless in the film itself, and come back alive. It’s depicted in a blinding white cacophony of shaking images, with shadowy figures stumbling drearily around in a brief flash. This glimpse of what lies beyond is chilling and provocative – what else is there that the movie hasn’t shown us? It’s downright brilliant. By showing us very little Eastwood has sparked the imagination and crafted something truly inventive, intriguing.

Hereafter is just an awesome, breathtaking journey, and Eastwood’s finest directorial venture that I’ve seen to date. There’s just something so good about this movie, like a plate of hot chocolate chip cookies in the afternoon after school. Hereafter is enthralling and sophisticated, with a maturity to its cinematography and scriptwriting that is commendable – it is nothing but a pure joy to behold. I don’t know what the movie of 2010 is going to be yet, but I can tell you that Hereafter is a definite contender and a fine, fine piece of filmmaking at any cost. Seminal.