What a shock: Hollywood pushing back at "The Sniper"

I don't believe there was a "Butcher," either.

I don't necessarily think the Kyle of the book is the real guy, either. There's honesty, and there's truth, and I found the book to be a lot of tough guy bullshit. If you're that "settled" with what you did and who you are, you don't spend the time and energy it takes to embellish and concoct, which Kyle did. I think what the movie was trying to do was present a more accurate picture of Kyle's combat struggles.

That said, is the movie flawed in not showing us many of his objectionable actions upon his return? Yes, I think it is. But Eastwood is a die-hard Republican, too.

 

What Eastwood did was create the military version of The Unforgiven. A movie also celebrated by many liberals for showing the moral contradictions of
a gun slinger. Chris Kyle is the modern day Billy Munn.

I thought the book was pretty consistent with another book from another era on a celebrated military sniper- Carlos Hathcock. The book was
called Marine Corp Sniper. Hathcock was a sniper in Viet Nam and the "leader in clubhouse" with 90 confirmed kills until Kyle came along. The Marine Corp
annual sniper award is named after Hathcock. Some might say the tone of the book was macho bs, others might say "it's not braggin if you've done it". In both
books I'm sure the truth lies somewhere halfway in between.

Eastwood actually did the family a favor by making Kyle seem more human than the book portrayed him.

If Michael Moore wants to talk about a cowards way maybe he should look to Obama's estimated 4000 kills via drone strike. He just had to look at
a power point. Kyle actually had to pull the trigger.

 

If only they'd shown him curled up in a ball crying for two hours.

 

That hit its large target.

 

Noam Chomsky:

Also ignored in the "war against terrorism" is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times -- Barack Obama's global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.

Chomsky: Paris attacks show hypocrisy of West's outrage - CNN.com

 

Liberals love a good anti war story. There is a book that just won the National Book Award for Fiction.
It's called Redeployment. It's a series of short stories about soldiers on the front lines in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Each story deals with the brutality of war and the trouble that soldiers have dealing with it. It's a book that's been much celebrated
by the Upper West Side crowd and embraced by The NYT. Looking at the bio of the writer who was deployed as a public affairs
officer it's likely that he never saw a day of combat. It makes you wonder who accurate the short stories really are.

Redeployment by Phil Klay, 2014 National Book Award Winner, Fiction

 

Well, I'd say no, he isn't. Not because I find Munn's actions particularly noble, but they're almost certainly reluctant and only brought to a head after a series of extreme (and borderline absurd) circumstances open the door to revenge. It's a personal story in an age when appeal to some higher legal authority didn't exist. Munn wasn't a cog, but an independent actor. The cause was thrust upon him when it changed from its original mission (which was to avenge some cut-up women).

That's not to say Kyle didn't feel some of the same moral fuzziness that Eastwood's character felt. I suspect he did. But Eastwood sort of implies that, and leaves out the objectionable material that would have left audiences thinking otherwise. Kyle's own track record kinda says no.

If I'm critiquing the movie from a moral standpoint -- which I'm not necessarily wont to do -- it's that Eastwood didn't really allow the audience to see much of Kyle's objectionable personality. The movie "heroized" him.

 

In a film about a flesh-and-blood person the writers/director chose to emphasize some facets of him and de-emphasize others? To report a gauzy version of the truth? Unpossible!

 

I guess we differ on whether Kyle had an "objectionable personality" but agree that Eastwood in the movie did not give the audience an
accurate portrayal of who Kyle really was. I went into the movie accepting that the book was the true portrayal of Kyle and came away thinking
that Eastwood wrongly portrayed Kyle. He made him look a tad soft instead of the hardened warrior that came across in the book.

Maybe the spectrum is Bill Munn on one end and Will Kane on the other. Perhaps Kyle falls somewhere in between.

 

I haven't seen it and can't render an opinion (unlike Devil!) ... but based on my FB feed at least, the movie has taken on a quality of "if you don't like this, you hate the military."

 

Yeah, seems to be the case with my FB feed, too.

 

Hopefully I don't misdirect too far of the path but does anyone think that Bradley Cooper took HGH to
gain 40 lbs of lean muscle mass for the part? I just don't think that he could have gotten there that fast
through diet and exercise.