American Sniper

I always liked Eastwood movies and enjoyed almost all of the ones that I watched and own many of them on disk. Unforgiven, in my opinion is a masterpiece. In Gran Torino Eastwood performs unbelievably well at that age. His old movies such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and the other in that genre are excellent. He made two movies back to back about the Pacific War which I liked them both very much. His Dirty Harry series didn't attract me very much but is OK. The only movie of him that I haven't watched to the end is Firefox. This is a movie that he plays the role of a pilot who is given this mission to go to Soviet Union and steal a newly designed and manufactured jet, MIG-25 code named Firefox by NATO.

The movie was actually for years on my list but regardless of its good start it falls into a series of tedious dialogue that I could not tolerate and left it to watch later but that later has not come yet. When I realized that American Sniper was directed by him, I was a bit surprised because my thought was he was against War in Iraq. Maybe I was wrong and still am. Anyways I went to watched the movie yesterday and I watched it in Ultra AVX which is supposed to have better sound and picture quality. It was fine. No complaints and it is a bit more expensive than the usual plays and I was told the movie had not been provided in regular format. Fine again! It is an OK movie and I have to say that I expected more but that is what it was! I really didn't expect to see the same American shit cliché such as meeting girls at the bar, throwing up after drinking so much alcohol, American wedding which is always shown very fancy with handsome groom and beautiful bride, people rising glasses and all shit that we are tired of. I think Eastwood could have offered more of Chris Kyle by eliminating these nonsense from the movie. The film is based on a book of the same name by Kyle and I saw that during Christmas in Chapters but didn't buy it because I still have unread books in my shelf but now I'm thinking maybe I should buy it and compare it to the movie. Bradley Cooper's performance is OK but is it something worth OSCAR? I'm not sure. I should look at the other nominees performances. The movie is also nominated for the Best Picture award but I'm not sure it's that good. There's no doubt that politics play a big role in an extravagant ceremony such as Academy Awards which is watched by millions around the world. So nominating American Sniper is probably a message to be conveyed that America's decision to start a war in Iraq was justified and what Kyle and his fella soldiers did too. This is fine as well. I am truly thankful to Americans for what they did to the country that imposed a long war of 8 years to my native homeland. Iraqis killed many innocent civilians, used chemical weapons against ground troops and civilians as well and destroyed the country's infrastructure. But does American Sniper is big enough to win OSCAR's Best Picture? I have not seen any of the other nominees and I don't know how good they are but American Sniper is a story of a skillful soldier who does a good job and is a fine movie. That's all. it definitely is not as big as Unforgiven which won as many as 4 major OSCARS. 

The battle scenes are very real and the other actors are fine. Their role is minimized as the movie revolves around Kyle, most of the time. His wife is the other one who is portrayed a bit but she falls into the same cliche shit that we have seen over and over. 

American Sniper, I originally though, would be a movie that I would enjoy watching over and over on disk and added to my over 350 title collection but as much as I like Clint's movies and the story of Kyle, I'm not sure now if that will be. 

(Photo: Kyle, in baseball cap with his instructor. He has been credited as the most lethal sniper in the US history with 160 confirmed deaths)