More proof Amy Nicholson is the worst film critic working today. She spends her review NOT reviewing the film. Dana! My bad! We’ve made it nearly to the final round of this year’s Movie Club and I haven’t defended my adoration for The Grand Budapest Hotel. Please don’t throw my cat out the window, or make me write 100 explanatory haikus as punishment, none of which will measure up to Stephanie’s John Wick ballad, which I loved much more than the film. I’ll defend it. But first, you’ve asked a question that I’m dying to discuss: the importance of truth in movies based on a true story. But when critics catch a film in a lie, we have to ask it, “Why?” That’s what matters. Take American Sniper, one of the most mendacious movies of 2014. Clint Eastwood was caught in a trap: His subject, murdered Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, lied a lot. In his autobiography, he said he killed two carjackers in Texas, sniped looters during Hurricane Katrina, and punched Jesse Ventura in the face. None of that was true. So Eastwood was stuck. Should he repeat Kyle’s lies as truth? Expose him as a liar? Instead, he pretended Kyle never claimed any of it, but when a film erases the fact that its subject was a fabricator, then that itself is a lie. The falsehoods in American Sniper are dangerous because a lot of audiences leave the theater thinking that Chris Kyle was a role model. I’ve actually gotten emails from military vets who were also troubled by the film. A lot of them are even harsher on Kyle than I’m comfortable being, in part because I’ve never served and in part because I was once attacked by Glenn Beck’s online army after poking holes in Lone Survivor. But American Sniper convinces viewers that Chris Kyle is what heroism looks like: a great guy who shoots a lot of people and doesn’t think twice about it. Watching American Sniper, I kept wondering who Kyle himself had been imitating. Sylvester Stallone? John Wayne? Or the ultimate irony, Clint Eastwood himself as Dirty Harry?
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 06:49:53 +0000
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