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Lots of discussion about American Sniper all over
the Net. Generally speaking things breakdown
along the usual political lines. They just do.Ya got tons and tons of rightwing writers saying
“its not political, and even if it is, its accurate”And ya got leftwing writers saying,
“War movies are political, and this one is inaccurate”Everyone seems to agree the cinematography and
“craftsmanship” in the movie are first-rate.The two main views are
represented below…fwiww
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http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/22/dirty-harry-goes-to-iraq/
A Cultural Essay
Dirty Harry Goes To Iraq
by JOHN GRANT….Like the Iraq War itself, Eastwood’s movie begins by exploiting a historically inaccurate delusion and, then, sustains itself for two hours on the mission to protect US soldiers against the insurgency that arose in opposition to the US invasion and occupation based on the initial delusion….
…Any honest skeptic equipped with even a cursory understanding of the antecedents to the Iraq War will see what’s going on here. It’s not a debatable issue: We know now for sure that Iraq had absolutely nothing — nada, zilch — to do with the downing of the twin towers in New York. Dick Cheney’s persistent claims to the contrary, the secular Muslim Saddam Hussein, once our ally, was a bitter enemy of al Qaeda. But in 2014, the film’s producer, writer and director decided on a clean and efficient plot line that hinges on the highly emotional image of the towers falling. The real Chris Kyle may have absolutely believed in this fictional connection, but a protagonist’s delusion is not a defense for emotionally perpetuating such a costly fiction (many call it a “lie”) in a narrative film about the war. But, then, that’s what “popular” filmmaking is all about, and Eastwood is, if nothing else, a maestro of popular American storytelling. Whether or not one respects such a corrupt decision, the fact is American Sniper is an extremely well-made movie….
….
Over the years, he has honed this very masculine style and become a popular film director exploring the American psyche mostly from the reactionary right — though his films are always a dialogue with issues on the left. American Sniper is no different with its limited contrapuntal theme of PTSD and homefront family adjustment.All that storytelling talent is on the screen in American Sniper. Like the war itself, the film is aggressive, masculine and highly kinetic. The film’s sound effects are rich and thundering in the theater; its camera work is direct and bold. There’s a real “shock and awe” feel to the piece. MRAPs roar out of the FOB with a menacing hugeness. Any sense of reflection is missing, and historical and political context are willfully left out of the story. When confronted with leftist criticism suggesting the film got the Iraq War wrong, producer and star Bradley Cooper reportedly said, “It’s not a film about debating the war; it’s a character study.”
Cooper is right: The film is a character study — a highly controlled character study that clearly leaves a lot out. But all it takes is watching Fox News champ Sean Hannity’s groveling before the film for a full hour special to realize Cooper may be a likable, talented actor, but he’s dead wrong when he says the film isn’t part of the debate about the Iraq War. In a larger context, it’s also very much about violence and militarism in America in these very complicated and troubling times.By avoiding contextual issues — specifically, the reasons SEAL sniper Chris Kyle was in Iraq killing those 160 Iraqi insurgents — the film is art that operates as propaganda in a cultural context. Film-making skills are not to be sneezed at, but to use a classically egregious example, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of the Nation was also an extremely well-made film. As for Iraq War films, to contrast Eastwood’s film, the plot that drives the Matt Damon film Green Zone is getting to the bottom of all the things that don’t add up in the search for WMDs. In that film, making sense of the war’s confusing context is the goal, while in American Sniper, the goal is hero worship and avoidance of anything that sullies that story…. See link….’
========================http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/mark-tapson/eastwoods-american-sniper-republican-propaganda/
Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper’: Republican Propaganda?
By Mark Tapson….Now comes American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood and based on the memoir of the same name by the late SEAL warrior Chris Kyle, whose 160 confirmed sniper kills (and almost 100 more “probables”) in the Iraq war made him a legend. With the film, the openly conservative/libertarian Hollywood icon Eastwood dared to buck the trend and make a movie that refuses to muddy the moral waters.
Liberal critics bristled. In the end-of-the-year issue of New York magazine, film critic David Edelson began his review of American Sniper with an ad hominem attack on the director for his political conservatism. Referring to Eastwood’s playful address to an empty chair representing President Obama at the 2012 Republican National Convention, Edelson wrote that “Eastwood looked as if he were slipping into doddering dementia.”
He goes on to admit that American Sniper is “a crackerjack piece of filmmaking” and that its star Bradley Cooper “is very impressive” in the lead role; but morally, he says, Eastwood “has regressed.” Because the movie doesn’t condemn what Edelson calls “the Iraq occupation,” then it must be dismissed as “scandalously blinkered” and nothing more than “a Republican platform movie.”
A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times correctly states that American Sniper “reaffirms Mr. Eastwood’s commitment to the themes of vengeance and justice in a fallen world. In the universe of his films — a universe where the existence of evil is a given — violence is a moral necessity, albeit one that often exacts a cost from those who must wield it in the service of good.” This is a distinctly conservative world view which Scott finds ethically arguable and potentially dangerous; nonetheless, he concedes that “much of [the movie’s] considerable power derives from the clarity and sincerity of its bedrock convictions.”
But the only moral conviction that the left can accept about the Iraq war is one which condemns our role in it. Hence Scott goes on to assert that Eastwood “edits the history in which [the story] is embedded,” although he doesn’t say how. The implication is that Eastwood’s “troubling” moral perspective does not allow for the foreign policy critique that Scott requires from a Hollywood war movie. Indeed he writes that “though George W. Bush’s name is never invoked, ‘American Sniper’ can be seen as an expression of nostalgia for his Manichaean approach to foreign policy.”
That approach is too simplistic for the left, who are uncomfortable with the notion that there are good guys and bad guys, and even more uncomfortable with the notion that Americans are the good guys. Progressives pretend that they see the world as more “nuanced,” when in fact what the left calls nuance is usually moral equivalence; for them, America at war is always in the wrong, and the people who want to kill us do so because they have legitimate “grievances.”
Scott doesn’t like the fact that Chris Kyle’s enemies “are identified only and repeatedly as Al Qaeda,” and neither does Edelson, who complains that “the people Kyle shoots always represent a ‘savage, despicable evil.’” This leads one to suspect that the critics would have preferred that Eastwood show our soldiers killing innocent Iraqis as well, not just the bad guys. “As in many jingoist war movies,” Scott writes, “the native population are portrayed as invaders of our sacred space instead of vice versa.” But we weren’t at war with the native population, of course; we were at war with the savage, despicable evil of international terrorist Saddam Hussein and of the insurgents who were terrorizing the natives.
Critics like Edelson and Scott don’t criticize the heavy-handed politics of left-leaning films or directors. They didn’t call George Clooney’s and Matt Damon’s jihadist recruitment movie Syriana “scandalously blinkered.” They didn’t dismiss Sean Penn’s Valerie Plame snoozefest Fair Game as a “Democrat platform movie.” They didn’t say that Brian de Palma – whose disgusting Redacted portrayed our soldiers as raping, murdering occupiers – had “regressed” morally.
But let a right-leaning director make a film that strives to be apolitical, and progressives – for whom everything is political – must politicize it so that they can then condemn it as jingoistic. “The politics of the Iraq war are entirely absent” in American Sniper, Scott wrote, “which is a political statement in its own right.” So he magically declares it “a propaganda film,” just as Edelson called it a “Republican platform movie.” Conservative directors are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
In a sense, though, American Sniper IS a Republican platform movie – or at least, a conservative platform movie, because it reflects the wisdom that, in A.O. Scott’s own words, “violence is a moral necessity that often exacts a cost from those who must wield it in the service of good.” Soldiers are not political. They are at the service of our country, at the mercy of our politicians, and at the command of their superiors. Thus, to echo Tennyson, “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.” Conservatives recognize that and honor them for it. As much as it may aggravate the left, American Sniper is not about politics, but about an American hero at war with Islamic evil….see link…
Dunno if this has been posted:
http://espn.go.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/101699/no-one-gets-more-help-than-russell-wilson“…Seattle’s defense has a knack for playing its best when Wilson and the offense are at their worst. Since the start of 2012, Wilson has had 22 games with a QBR below 50, including 15 wins. In those games, Seattle has held its opponents to an average QBR of 34.0 and has had a per-game defensive efficiency of +7.3. In Wilson’s games with an above-average QBR, the Seahawks have allowed a 45.7 average QBR and have had a +2.4 defensive efficiency rating.
No one can take away Wilson’s NFL-leading 42 wins since the start of the 2012 season, the most by any player in his first three seasons (including playoffs) in the Super Bowl era. But much of his success has been a result of his teammates; he has had the benefit of playing with the most dominant defense in the NFL and the league’s leading rusher, Marshawn Lynch, in the past three years.
… see link…”w
v“I would jump in, but i agree with every word
zn has said.”Captain Renault in Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked I tell you…”
Your views are not exactly a big surprise
either, right?Zack and I share the same politics
and approach to this stuff.
You have a different approach/politix (shrug)Btw, i have NO idea how you can see an Eastwood
movie and not see his politics. Its right there
in the material he chooses.w
v“….The 2014 Patriots were just the 3rd team in the last 25 years to never have lost a fumble at home! The biggest difference between the Patriots and the other 2 teams who did it was that New England ran between 150 and 200 MORE plays this year than those teams did in the years they had zero home fumbles, making the Patriots stand alone in this unique statistic.
Based on the desire to incorporate full season data (not just home games, as a team theoretically bring “doctored footballs” with them on the road) I performed the following analysis:
I looked at the last 5 years.of data (since 2010) and examined TOTAL FUMBLES in all games (as well as fumbles/game) but more importantly, TOTAL OFFENSIVE PLAYS RUN. Thus, we can to determine average PLAYS per FUMBLE, a much more valuable statistic. The results are displayed in the chart below. Keep in mind, this is for all games since 2010, regardless of indoors, outdoors, weather, site, etc. EVERYTHING…
One can CLEARLY SEE the Patriots, visually, are off the chart. There is no other team even close to being near to their rate of 187 offensive plays (passes+rushes+sacks) per fumble. The league average is 105 plays/fumble. Most teams are within 21 plays of that number.
I spoke with a data scientist who I know from work on the NFLproject.com website, and sent him the data. He said:
Based on the assumption that fumbles per play follow a normal distribution, you’d expect to see, according to random fluctuation, the results that the Patriots have gotten over this period, once in 16,233.77 instances”.
Which in layman’s terms means that this result only being a coincidence, is like winning a raffle where you have a 0.0000616 probability to win. Which in other words, it’s very unlikely that it’s a coincidence….
…see link…”The comments after the article are interesting, btw
w
vMontana smart? From what I’ve heard and read he was not the brightest bulb in the room. However, what he did have was the eyesight of a bird of prey ! He could literally see the entire field at the snap of the ball -and clearly. One of the greatest assets a qb can have is extremely high level eyesight. I think that is a crucial element that made Montana “great”.
I’ve read that “not the brightest bulb” stuff about Montana, but I’ve also read that
about Aikman, Marino, Ferragamo, Kilmer, Nittany etc. I dont pay much attention to that stuff.
I mean football-smart is one kind of ‘smart’. There’s a gazillion kinds of ‘smarts.’ Thats
why i have issues with IQ tests. There are so many kinds of ‘smart’ that arent tested
on those things….blah blah blah.Seemed to me, Montana had everything cept the big Arm.
He also had a Genius coach. Like Brady/Belichick.
I dont think the value of having a great coach
can be under-estimated.w
vProehl on the Catch
http://www.rams-news.com/ricky-proehl-discusses-his-famous-catch-in-the-99-nfc-champ-game-audio/“I see John Lynch all the time…you almost wanna be a jerk…”
w
v
