American Sniper
POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Sunday, June 7, 2015 01:32
VIEWED: 12920
PAGE 6 of 8
Quote:
Originally posted by SHINYGOODGUY:
By the way, I think you're dead wrong about 2016. No way a Republican will be sitting in the White House come Jan 2017.
SGG
Have no idea who you have been replying to.
But you seem to have gotten this one. The GOP is in desperate search for another Ford/Dole/McCain/Romney east-coast liberal who can lose the national election for them. Jeb Bush, Christie, Romney could each do the trick. Which lame candidate will DNC fill the vacuum with?
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Quote:WWII.
Originally posted by SHINYGOODGUY:
. . . since when did we ever have a greatly planned one?
There was a plan for the Nazis. There was a plan for after the Emperor surrendered. That is why the firebombs did NOT destroy Hirohito's Palace. Iraq = No Plan for after the victory. It is easy to imagine a Nazi insurgency after Hitler was dead. It would have been worse than the Iraq insurgency after Hussein was toppled. America would have needed 100,000 Chris Kyles to get the Nazis under control again after the War was over.
You know a movie that did the affect of war on the warriors as good as American Sniper? The Return of the King. It was as Hollywood realistic about PTSD as American Sniper's version of PTSD.
Frodo has a mental breakdown and has to sail off into the sunset with the Elves because he can't live with Hobbits. Same with Bilbo, who never married because he was too crazy and still craved the insidious power of the Ring. At least Sam kept his sanity. He went back to his wife and child.
The Return of the King is fantasy. Couldn't be more than that since there never was a Middle Earth. On the other hand, Iraq does exist and American Sniper could have been so much more than Chris Kyle's tall-tale war-fantasy with a dash of PTSD.
Too bad Clint Eastwood didn't do more realism for whatever reasons. Clint did not need to bother himself because the audience knows no more actual facts about the Iraq War than they know about the Middle Earth War. All they know for fact is how they feel when they walk out of the theater, so why should Clint care about facts more than the audience does? Get out of way, worthless information! Here comes Clint to kick your ass.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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This is the most coherent response yet, plus you tied it in with a movie.
Excellent.
WWII had D-Day, so it makes perfect sense. ROTK was an excellent fantasy sword and sorcery movie, maybe a bit long and overwrought with melodramatic moments, but something that captures the imagination. PTSD, well actually, yeah I get it. To me, The Ring represented man's obsession with absolute power - controlling the destiny of men, of having your deepest primal urges succumbed to. It is a winding road, but you still get to crazy town nonetheless. Yeah, it works.
But it's not quite the same as killing and slaying hundreds and being covered in blood, and within those hundreds and millions are some innocents - the collateral damage of war. I don't think that's normal, and so it "works" on the psyche, our human makeup, to deliver the host to crazy town. Now, there are the perverted who get their rocks from inflicting pain and misery - they are known as criminals, the criminally insane (no PTSD there). In filmdom what comes to mind is Apocalypse Now. A definite journey into the dark world of Insanity brought on by combat, but notice how it doesn't affect those already deep in the jungle. This IS their life, a daily struggle to survive - no PTSD there, except of course, for the GIs sent there to tame the savages. The Horror!!!
Now that was filmmaking, Coppola's brilliance shone through. Eastwood's story is much more simplistic, bare, to the bone - that's his style. There are times when that is called for, and it does the trick. Did it show that Iraq was one giant clusterfuck? It was in the background, but it wasn't the main theme of this particular story. But injecting more facts into a story about a man, hell, injecting facts to any story to make it more real, would make it a documentary. Perhaps that would have been more effective, but then, and I mean this with all the sincerity Hollywood can muster up, it wouldn't make MONEY.
Actually, in thinking further about the ROTK comparison (regarding PTSD)...............I'm starting to see how that could be. War and the ravages of war could definitely bring about all manner of crazy, no matter if you live it daily or make the occasional side trip, you still wind up at the same location.
SGG
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I really happen to believe that, not for any political reason of allegiance, just common sense. The GOP has been consistently painting themselves into a corner over such things as immigration and the like, spectacularly so, and doing it in a manner that highlights the crazies above all else.
Would you vote for a crazy person?
Plus the reason you gave - the search for intelligent life on planet GOP.
Not that the Dems don't have their share of crazy, it's just that the ship is going down in flames and the crew is throwing gas on the fire. Plus, what, they have about 9 candidates and nary a one is worth a damn. Even Walker has shown that he's no Dole/McCain/Bush, Sr.
It's going to happen my friend, even if they put up a wall from here to China 40-feet tall, it's going to happen (by 2060). The country is changing and people better get with it or be left behind. The GOP will be exactly that, the Grand Old Party.
SGG
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I nominate the leaders of the Iraq War for a special Oscar Award – Worst Actors. If Clint Eastwood had wanted, his American Sniper could have easily won that Oscar.
In yesterday's news, following the example of American Sniper author Chris Kyle, US Army four-star General Petraeus decided to write his very own Iraq book with his girlfriend as coauthor, but he got into trouble with the law.
Quote:https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/03/petraeus-plea-deal-revea
David Petraeus, the former Army general and CIA director, admitted today that he gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it. But he only has to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor that will not involve a jail sentence thanks to a deal with federal prosecutors. The deal is yet another example of a senior official treated leniently for the sorts of violations that lower-level officials are punished severely for.
According to the plea deal (filed March 3, 2015) Petraeus, while leading American forces in Afghanistan, maintained eight notebooks that he filled with highly-sensitive information about the identities of covert officers, military strategy, intelligence capabilities and his discussions with senior government officials, including President Obama. Rather than handing over these “Black Books,” as the plea agreement calls them, to the Department of Defense when he retired from the military in 2011 to head the CIA, Petraeus retained them at his home and lent them, for several days, to Paula Broadwell, his authorized biographer and girlfriend.
ls-two-tier-justice-system-leaks/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by SHINYGOODGUY:
I have lost total focus on the discussion at hand.
Poorly thought out war; since when did we ever have a greatly planned one?
SGG
This speaks of the lack of a greatly planned war, or so it seems.
It would help if we do not confuse this with an "Exit Strategy" - Exit Strategies are planned out for numerous wars. End of WWII in Yurk is not an example, otherwise the USSR would not have been able to extend the Cold War for so long. And the libtard's ballyhoo'd "Peace Dividend" claim for the end of Cold War was false, bogus, and misappropriated.
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I would think that you would not bring up the term "Exit Strategy" being that the Bush Administration (with Tricky Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld leading the way) organized the biggest clusterfuck this side of Vietnam.
They thought, "Hmmm, we'll just get rid of Sadam and the peons will greet us like heroes" - WRONG!
"What do we have for them behind door #2 Johnny!"
"All the blood-thirsty criminals in the Middle East from Syria to Yemen, maiming, raping and killing men, women and children in their path of destruction."
Second is right, all the American Snipers in the world won't be able to fix that mess.
SGG
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Petraeus done fucked up. Just think they tried to sneak a fastball by us, this should have been headline news, but instead we get homemade emails by Hillary.
Gee, Classified Military Secrets or Emails that they can easily subpoena, Hmmmmmm, tough choice which one is more destructive. What do you think?
I vote for Classified Military Secrets. Instead of going to jail, he gets a slap on the wrist. Naughty, naughty............now go on Time Out and think about what you did.
Meanwhile Hillary is being treated like she drowned puppies after pulling off the wings of butterflies. What a circus!
SGG
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Many people don't think a film "says" anything. They just know their visceral reactions to films. They know if they liked it or didn't. They know how they felt about watching it. They still regard the events of the plot as matters of fact as anything that happens in real life (which usually comes with "duh, he killed those people cause they were the bad guys!" And stuff like that).
People forget that somebody, somewhere (Clint Eastwood and Chris Kyle, both tall-tale tellers. Kyle has that lost libel lawsuit to prove it. ) actually came up with all that they are seeing, and did so to adverdantly or inadvertently create some kind of meaning. Storytelling is a kind of direct communication. And we've been doing it for just about forever, through fables, fairy tales and myth - we've use stories to communicate the nature of consequence, a way of articulating life's results before one can even experience them. Stories are the sign posts of modern living. Our guides to modern warfare. Well, not my guide to the Iraq War, but other people's.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I agree, generally, with your take on today's average moviegoer, most wouldn't give it a second thought beyond "good triumphs over evil."
There are some movies from the 70s that would stump them but good, people forget that sometimes the story doesn't go in a straight line.
Pulp Fiction changed that for a brief moment in time, as did Crash. Eastwood and Kyle combining to tell a tall tale, a new myth, is a nod to those days - it caused us to discuss it's merits, or lack thereof, in this thread. Don't get me wrong, Eastwood's tale is no match to those gems from my youth. But it's a gentle reminder. To me, that's what good film is about, like an abstract painting or a Picasso, you look and say something of what you feel. American Sniper might not be your cup of tea, but yet, here we are.
Storytelling is direct communication, even to those who see it in it's simplest form - good vs evil. Stories are as ancient as the sea itself, but it is the way in which we absorb and interpret them that makes us human.
SGG
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