American Sniper

My first gasp of disbelief came early into this movie, when sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is about to shoot an Iraqi boy who is carrying an explosive device. He has him in his sight and is about to pull the trigger when, CUT, all of a sudden Chris is a little boy, hunting with his dad in the Texas woods. A leisurely flashback then introduces us to young Chris. Born into a God fearing family, with a father who looks like the Brawny paper towels guy, Chris defends his little brother from a bully at school -- an American hero in the making.
This cut is one of the most dishonest, dispiriting choices I have ever seen in a film, and it happens at the very beginning. Director Clint Eastwood eventually goes back and shows how Kyle finishes the deed, but the damage is done. This morally complicated killing, an opportunity to show the savagery of war and what it makes people do, has been scrubbed by a bath of homespun Americana. Once our heart strings have been tugged, it's hard for the audience to think that the guy who was forced to make this choice is anything but a hero, because we just saw how courageously he defends his little brother, how, at a tender age, he steals a Bible from church, how he grows up to be a rodeo cowboy, how he feels the call of duty at the news of attacks against US embassies abroad.
We are not to entertain any doubts that he is righteous.
I do not doubt that Chris Kyle was an outstanding soldier who served his country well. I respect his sacrifice and admire his marksmanship. I am not going to discuss U.S. foreign policy or get into partisan politics. My problem is with simplistic narratives like this movie, which pervade the culture thanks to the unhealthy fixation with heroism that afflicts this country. This fixation is directly related to the insane fetish for guns, which is also in evidence in the film.
It's bad enough that we are the only country on Earth that has an industry devoted almost exclusively to the manufacture and exporting of mind-numbing superhero and guns and explosions movie franchises. But when these childish narratives are used to coat historical events, such as the Iraq war, our very tragic, messy, complicated, hellish, costly (and out of sight, out of mind) foreign wars are sanitized and banalized with the mythology of comic books. This is scary because people eat it up. And people eat it up because it is in the nature of movies to rouse us to emotion. Movies are extremely powerful. They affect and influence us consciously and, even more strongly, subconsciously. It's never "only a movie".
Had Eastwood stayed in the moment, had we seen this man shoot a boy carrying an explosive within the first minutes, we would have had more of a truthful grasp on the hard realities of war, and the unspeakable things it makes people do, on both sides. However, the American narrative of heroism is rarely concerned with the unspeakable (unless it's perpetrated by the enemy), or the gray areas, or moral dilemmas. It is concerned with aggrandizement. I say American because many heroic stories are deeply complex: take your pick of Shakespeare. In other countries immensely heroic journeys can happen to two characters in an apartment. The oversimplification of the world into good guys and bad guys is a uniquely American phenomenon.
American Sniper is based on the true story of a man appropriately nicknamed The Legend, the deadliest sniper in US military history. Kyle was brought up in this very culture of heroism and gun worship and so this narrative is natural and organic to him, as it is to millions of viewers who have these kind of stories in their cultural DNA. The filmmakers then further shape Kyle's story into a mythical entertainment, and, in the name of dramatization, sink into many gross simplifications.
For starters, the four tours of duty that Kyle served in Iraq are used as a backdrop to an appalling mano a mano between Kyle and his Iraqi counterpart, a sniper who had been an Olympic gold medalist. By the time, long into the movie, when it became apparent that Eastwood was going to make this "duel in the sun" the climax of the film, my disbelief had turned to disgust. Not only is the Iraq war boiled down to a pissing contest between two equally proficient dudes, but the vulgar, cartoony choice of showing the bullet as it travels out of Kyle's rifle cheapens and disrespects every sacrifice every American soldier has made, and every life that has been lost or maimed, Iraqi and American. It turns the war into a video game.
Zero Dark Thirty is similar: one determined tough cookie nails Osama Bin Laden. Must be Wonder Woman.
I don't see how it helps American soldiers that the rest of society, which is deliberately shielded from the carnage of our wars, should perceive their sacrifice as something out of a video game. If it is a game, how can anyone take it seriously? The Vietnam war ended in part because it was shown week after week in the evening news. The public was appalled. In our time, we have seen little if any footage of the wars, we don't honor the dead as they arrive or adequately help the damaged as they struggle, let alone consider the people whose countries we invade.
Cinematically, there is nothing in American Sniper that has not been done more powerfully and effectively in other war movies, most recently, The Hurt Locker. There is nothing insightful except the tepid introduction of the topic of post traumatic stress disorder. Eastwood is heavy handed on the battle scenes but timorous on the subject of PTSD, which has been notoriously underestimated by the Pentagon. In this movie it looks like every soldier is getting all the help they can get.
Eastwood flirts with the idea of challenging Kyle's gung-ho patriotism but shies away from articulating a powerful contrasting viewpoint, a glaring omission, considering that Iraq was fought under false pretenses. Instead of his Iraqi counterpart, why not confront Kyle with an Army buddy who has real qualms about the quagmire? The one soldier who intimates doubt is shot two minutes later and Kyle thinks he was killed because he stopped believing in the mission. His relentless hero complex is borderline pathological, but the movie does not have the balls to go there. That would have been a far more interesting film, but not so pristinely heroic.
An evil Iraqi called The Butcher, a real life character, is a sadistic torturer and enforcer, but he has no American counterpart. Eastwood includes an indolent American soldier, but there are no homicidal sadists or the kind of unhinged seekers of violence that lurk in every army, including this one. The movie cherry picks the liberties it takes with reality.
Only one remarkable scene summarizes what an invasion by a foreign army feels like. An Iraqi whose house is searched and taken over by Kyle and his soldiers invites them to eat because it is a Muslim holiday. We see the soldiers feasting at the table as if they were right at home, noisily bantering in English, oblivious to how invasive, insensitive, arrogant and rude they are. Of course, the Iraqi turns out to be an insurgent. Of course Kyle smells him out all by himself.

Oscars 2013: The Morning After

As you must know by now, the ceremony was deemed sexist, racist and offensive by a lot of people.  For the most part, it was.

I’m loath to join the "can’t take a joke" bandwagon. What offends me the most is that Seth McFarlane’s humor was petty and mean spirited. It was vulgar, lowly TV humor, rather than something fit for the ocassion. He tried to be too Hollywood with snide, unfunny inside jokes. As Captain Kirk said, intending to be ironic, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler should host everything. Ain’t that the emess.

When you watch a ceremony live, you want to like what you are seeing. It takes a while for the smarm to sink in. That was the case with that stupid boob song. The more I think about it, the more inane and inappropriate it seems. That stupid bear talking shit about Jews was immediately appalling and really unfit for an audience of billions (who probably already believe in a Jewish conspiracy anyway). Using a little girl to joke about George Clooney's sex life, sleazy.  

There were some highlights. Mostly provided by women.

I know I have tirelessly campaigned for the excision of musical numbers from the show, but Shirley Bassey belting Goldfinger was one of the greatest highlights of all time.  So was the inimitable Babs singing  The Way We Were and looking younger by the minute. The evening got off to a lovely start with Charlize Theron expertly dancing with Channing Tatum a la Ginger and Fred. These were the only moments with class. The rest was humor devised and intended for that famous demographic so coveted by Hollywood, 15 year-old males. At least the suits got a taste of their own medicine.

For a four hour ceremony, there were too many irrelevant moments. I love William Shatner, but he is beyond irrelevant. The Oscars are not about TV, they are about the movies.  But we are in an age of small screens, so this is what we get. Smallness. 

Chicago? Whatever the fuck? Utterly irrelevant.

The singing cast of Les Miserables was a giant clusterfuck, just like that movie: a supernova of dreck.

The obits were the best part, as usual, but us Latinos are extremely pissed that Lupe Ontiveros, the quintessential Latina maid, was snubbed. We won’t forget.

There were some righteous wins. Anne Hathaway’s was not one of them. But Ang Lee’s was,  so was Tarantino’s, so was Amour, so was Jennifer Lawrence. The best supporting actor category was a tough one, and Waltz was as right to get it as any of his peers. Daniel Day Lewis once again comported himself like the King of Class. He happens to have a sense of humor, plus nobody wears a tux like him.  

If there was justice in the world, Beasts Of The Southern Wild was utterly ignored and so was Zero Dark Thirty. They are simply bad movies. Is Argo a Best Picture? No. That award should have gone to either Django Unchained or Amour, which is at another level of artistry altogether. But well crafted, competent Argo won because it is about Hollywood. They love nothing better than self-congratulation.

Jimmy Fallon would have been a delightful host. Michelle Obama dancing with Fallon to advocate against obesity, ultra cool. The White House getting in bed with Hollywood in such an overt fashion, reeks of starfucking from the Presidency and is totally tasteless, inappropriate and wrong. I’m secretly enjoying whatever fallout is happening in the White House over this ridiculous decision that got her, who has done no wrong so far, associated with a sexist, racist and offensive telecast. 

Dress-wise: Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence and Robin Roberts were stunning. Everybody else looked like a chandelier from Vegas crashed on top of them.

See you next year. 

Golden Globes 2013 Post Mortem

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler ruled. They were funny and charming and we love them. They were totally awesome and better than any male host in a loooooong time. Seth McFarlane may be toast.
The best gag of the night was the channeling of show biz cluelessness by Kirsten Wiig and Will Ferrell when reading the supporting actress category. That was hysterical.
Jessica Chastain wore the bed sheets of the Beverly Hilton. She almost did a Sally Field there with her speech about how hard she has worked. Spare me. Then she talked about defying convention when what she did in that movie is the most conventional stuff: I'm the relentless hero who will stop at nothing to get Osama Bin Laden. Get over yourself. There was nothing original about your character nor the way you played her.
Which reminds me, very few actors (these ceremonies just go to show the kind of narcissistic nutjobs most of them are) know how to be gracious when giving a speech. Hence, best acceptance speech of the night, Daniel Day Lewis, using metaphors about bringing mice to his wife, being faux humble (but believable) towards his fellow nominees, smartly avoiding politics and generally campaigning to get the Oscar by dint of sheer classiness. What he said about Tony Kushner's words was so eloquent....
Ben Affleck too, sweet, smart, mentioning the troops. He should run for office.
Adele was the best. Natural, funny, sincere and delightful.
Everybody else reeked. I'm talkin' to you, Anne Hathaway, trying to pull off a Meryl Streep, in adoration of your fellow female thespians, but I ain't buying it. Like I do not buy that poor Zooey Deschanel was an inspiration in any way, shape or form to Lena Dunham ever. It was gracious, if totally fake of Dunham to include her. Dunham, who looked like a giant Hershey's kiss, should wear comfy shoes next time. I like that she has not yet hired a personal trainer.
At this moment I must interject that I do not give a rat's ass about any of the TV shows. I know it is gauche, and considered totally unhip for me not to be obsessing about television with the rest of you, and I still don't give a fuck. I'll let you gasp, to paraphrase Christoph Waltz: I don't have cable. I only like 30 Rock.
Now, Anne Hathaway at least gets props for articulation, for rehearsing her little speech, committing it to memory and nailing it, something that Jodie Foster, WHO KNEW MONTHS IN ADVANCE she was going to have to stand there and not be cut off by music, could not muster.
What the hell was that? This is my biggest beef with her "coming out/not coming out in front of y'all" extravaganza. She is an actress. She is used to learning lines. She knew she was getting this trophy. It would have had more impact (in the right way), would have been much more dignified and meaningful, if she had decided not to wing it. I have always thought of Foster as an intelligent actress, but she was inordinately aggressive, full of herself and gynormously obnoxious. Obviously, she is still very conflicted about this topic, which she has every right to be. But she had an opportunity to impart some classy words of wisdom and instead she sounded like someone's batty aunt on coke. With all due respect, it was a little bit like Clint Eastwood talking to the chair. And Mel Gibson's bewildered punim... the face that launched a thousand gifs.
As I have said before, anybody who gives any sort of prize to the catastrophe that is Les Miserables, must be deaf and blind. Someone is drinking some very potent kool-aid with this attempt at alternate reality. This movie is absolutely dreadful. I want to understand why it is being celebrated. It's based on an old, dreary musical, based on an even older novel about a revolution that no one cared about. What is going on?
Argo as best film was an interesting upset. I think Lincoln is still going to sweep the Oscars. Which made me wonder about the mysterious, inscrutable ways of the HFPA. Maybe Lincoln is too "hurray for the USA" for the aliens that run that racket. Maybe they just love George Clooney (producer) too much. Who knows. But that was interesting. And in defense of this show: it is more fun than the Oscars, but less involuntarily hilarious. And it sometimes recognizes the work of people that the Oscars don't. Like Jack Black or Ewan McGregor or Marion Cotillard, or other people who were ignored by the Academy. There are no musical numbers and no songs, thank God, and it feels less bloated and self-important. Plus everyone in it is, at the very least, tipsy.

Zero Dark Thirty

The Hurt Locker is a much better movie. So is Paul Greengrass's United 93, the greatest film ever made about 9/11. It's worth comparing it to Zero Dark Thirty, because Greengrass avoids every single pitfall that makes Zero Dark Thirty a problematic entertainment. For one, he uses no recognizable movie stars;  glamorous faces do not remind us that this is only a movie and egregious liberties have been taken with the story. He also eschews the conventional single hero narrative for a fragmented "you are there" style, which shows massive government incompetence, as well as moments of individual courage. Perhaps because he is not American, he was able to sidestep the trite, incurable hero syndrome that seems mandatory in every Hollywood movie. Hence, United 93 honors history by rendering it as faithfully, realistically and intimately as possible. Its impact is devastating. True, nobody saw it, having no stars and dealing head on with a terribly painful collective moment; whereas Zero Dark Thirty will be much more commercially successful. One, because it is about triumph, not loss; and two, precisely because of its lack of authenticity. Even The Hurt Locker, a great American anti-war film, has more conviction and more outrage than ZDT.
My first problem with ZDT, and a cardinal sin in film, is that I was bored for a very long time before things got interesting, which only happens in the last third of the film, when they finally move to capture Bin Laden. ZDT seems to take as long as it took the US to nail Bin Laden. I wouldn't mind the procedural if it were riveting, but it isn't. It is plodding. Scene after scene dutifully documents the torture techniques utilized by the US in the war against terror. It's a deeply uncomfortable laundry list: conveniently outside of the purview of our laws, CIA agents use waterboarding, torture prisoners with sleep deprivation and hardcore heavy metal, stuff them in tiny boxes, hang them for hours, humiliate them with dog collars, and play mind games. The main torturer, played by Jason Clarke as if he was warming up for his daily tennis match, is deliberately made to be a very casual American dude who refers to his victims as "bro". I applaud the fact that we are not in for mustache twirling villains, but where is the bete noire in his soul? Are the filmmakers saying everyone can become a torturer if the justifications are strong enough?
Critics are hailing ZDT's obfuscations as moral ambiguity. I beg to differ. The movie is afraid of its own point of view, which is actually unclear. Critics are celebrating the mere fact that ZDT dares portray the issue of American torture (as if we didn't know plenty about it already), but the problem lies in how it is portrayed. I do not think that the movie glorifies torture, but I'm not sure that it condemns it. In the end, it isn't clear whether the film infers that torture helped get information that led to Bin Laden's capture or not. This is a problem. Granted, it would have been revolting to have Maya, the CIA agent heroine (Jessica Chastain, miscast), give epic speeches about the evils of torture, the kind of wishful fairy dust that Hollywood sprinkles around in its issue movies to feel better about itself. Alas, the script is content to show her silent discomfort as she attends some of the torture sessions, yet not much later in the film she daintily prods a torturer to slap a detainee. We never see how she really feels about this. Is she just following orders? Does she think the means justify the ends? It would have been interesting if we saw her take a stand, any stand. But ZDT is as wishy washy about the torture issue as the central character. And herein lies the problem: this is a contrived entertainment that takes something that happened in reality and makes it into a formula with a single heroine, therefore stripping it of any legitimacy or authenticity. It doesn't want to be Rambo, but it doesn't have the guts to go the other way. It seems as if director Kathryn Bigelow and writer/producer Mark Boal are torn between presenting a realistic portrayal of the hunt for Bin Laden, or crafting a conventional movie narrative. Had they chosen the first option, Zero Dark Thirty could have been a much stronger film. But the decision to center the story in a single heroine dooms the movie. Big deal if she is a woman. She is utterly boring as a character, just a reminder that this is a fantasy fiction based in reality, and not a film which really aims to explore the complexity of this war.
Except for the fact that she is an obsessive workaholic without a life (bo-ring), we don't really know who CIA agent Maya is. It is said by other characters that she is a killer, How do we know this? She works long hours, stares a lot at screens, and is a pest to her superiors. I did not believe her character for a second. Not because she is a woman, but because, in operations like this, it is ludicrous to pretend that ONE relentless person, dead set against everyone in the CIA and the rest of the world, was responsible for the capture of that maniac. It's just immature. And don't get me started on the final frame, of her sitting by herself on a big ass military plane, crying. What is this supposed to mean? America is sad for all the torture?
The best parts of ZDT are the actual action sequences towards the capture of Bin Laden, precisely executed both by Bigelow and by the guys who play the commandos that got it done. As in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow is good at relying how soldiers actually communicate in the middle of an operation. Minimal words, all instructions. The way bombings occur, without warning, as it is in real life, is jolting. Boal and Bigelow do everything in their power to show decorum and restrain at the storming of Bin Laden's compound. Everything else reeks of fakeness. Cringeworthy plot devices creep in: it is not enough to want to capture the barbaric mastermind who engineered the loss of thousands of innocent people all over the world. As this is a movie, Maya has to have a personal reason to vow to nail Bin Laden. This turns out to be the death of some of her CIA colleagues in the car bombing of a US base in Afghanistan. Puhleeze. Albeit suspenseful, this sequence is so telegraphed, so movie-like, that one thinks that if CIA agents are stupid enough to let a car breach inspection into an American military base in that hellish part of the world, they deserve what they got coming.
Meanwhile, the filmmakers have Maya, this supposed "killer" agent, sit obediently in the back at all important meetings as the boys make plans, and then when she opens her mouth, she says a one liner that strains credulity. For a "killer" agent, she behaves like a schoolgirl, petulantly scribbling in her bosses' window the number of days that go by without capturing Bin Laden. Puhleeze.
Then there are bizarre casting choices. Were American actors afraid to make this movie? The main torturer is played by Jason Clarke with a clear Australian accent. I spent half the movie trying to figure out if Australians were farmed out by the CIA to do our torture for us. My current boyfriend, Mark Strong, does an impeccable American accent, as does Joel Edgerton (another Aussie). But why cast a British actor, Stephen Dillane, as an American national security advisor? He sounds like he's ready for tea and crumpets. This is the CIA we are talking about. Everyone needs to sound like John Wayne. As for Jessica Chastain, she tries her best but is a movie star, and hence completely wrong for the role, for this and other reasons. Remember, very few people had seen Jeremy Renner when he starred in The Hurt Locker.This makes a huge difference: better movie = less box office. In an ideal, ageless world, someone like Frances McDormand or Annette Bening would play Maya. Someone with ovaries of titanium. Someone who can look you in the eye and make you unravel. Alas.
It is well known that the filmmakers had access to some people in the government. This seems to have fettered their imagination. This movie is more interesting for all the stuff it leaves out. Was it ever discussed if Bin Laden should be captured alive and brought to trial or was it, as the movie shows, a fait accompli to get him killed? I would have loved to see this conundrum dramatized. The CIA agents in the movie don't seem to have an opinion, pro or against, of what their superiors are asking them to do. There is no conflict, no dialectic, they are just executors. This is extremely problematic, as in foot soldiers that commit atrocities and chalk them up to just following orders.
Hence, I find it rather revolting that some critics have decided to bestow a Best Film of the Year award upon this confused movie, which leaves out all sort of interesting questions in favor of an impoverished, oversimplified narrative. I find it rather repulsive for a movie to be awarded accolades just for owning up to America's unsavory policies without having the balls to have a point of view about them, either for or against. It is also pathetic to overpraise a movie just because it deals with a difficult topic in a way that isn't Rambo. This sets a very low bar.