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poo poo like this makes me appreciate Black Hawk Down more in retrospect among the crop of "modern" war movies. Yeah, that movie shows American soldiers as being pretty uniformly Nice People, but at least it has the decency to hammer home how horrible combat is, how inept and/or just plain out of control the powers that be are before and during a battle, and ends with a title card explicitly saying the whole thing ended in failure and all the nice American boys you saw getting turned inside out and poo poo and dying in agony accomplished absolutely nothing. The Somali "bad guy" they capture and talk to at the beginning of the film was right all along and it isn't even a little bit subtle about it. It's not a masterpiece but it feels like one compared to this kind of poo poo. e: "I'm here to kick some rear end!"  (Falls out of helicopter, breaks back) sean10mm fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 15:09
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myshl0ng posted:*same movie but brown guy killing whites* This is an obvious troll, but Django Unchained got a good amount of criticism here, so still nope.
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Jan 27, 2015 18:19
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Looking back on it I think Chuck Norris ' s Delta Force movie was a more nuanced take on the Middle East than this one.
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Jan 29, 2015 18:58
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Exactly - the film does not handle Kyle's inner life in the same cavalier way as it does the depiction of a totally simplistic and righteous war. His professional skill adds dimension to his silent grunts, but not in a way that causes empathy. His inability to cope with home makes him rugged, not sympathetic. That's why he's constantly thanked for his service onscreen and off, the film flat out refuses to deal with the situation. So in that way it's less q celebration of war and more a celebration of denial and ignorance. It's fostering those who thank you for your service instead of giving them something to think about. I'm a really  veteran of uncool deployments that would make terrible Hollywood movies, but here's my take on it, for whatever it's worth:I think part of the disconnect is the difference between depicting suffering caused by war (realistic, good, valid, whatever you want to call it), and making a martyr out of a lovely person for a "noble cause" that was loving poo poo (which is artificial, insincere, lovely, evil, whatever you want to call it.) To be a martyr you have to die for a purpose so noble that your suffering and death shows you are a wonderful person to be admired. The problem is that this guy was a shitbird who suffered for something super stupid. Real people probably really suffered SOMETHING like he is shown to have suffered, and it probably feels real to them and helps the movie resonate with so many people, but the whole thing is framed in a way that is really loving lovely if you think about it for a second. Saying suffering for America makes you awesome and admirable without reference to the politics of the war causing the suffering ISN'T apolitical, it's pushing like the shittiest possible "orders justify anything" view of things. Also, people thanking you for your service are almost always using you as a prop to show off to the people around them how REAL AMERICAN they are. Or they're just super gross people whose approval makes you want to die. Every once in a while the person is just being nice and can't think of anything else to say, though.e: Looking back at this post I don't think it's super articulate, but hopefully it makes some kind of sense. 
sean10mm fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 16:33
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Cole posted:In what way? Well, his actual biography is full of poo poo that was clearly just made up, and the movie just ignore the fact that he's a huge dumb liar.. But the movie also invents things that contradict the actually believable parts of his biography too, and in ways that make him like a much worse person. He says he'd never shoot kids, for instance, which he does in the movie, and he said he respected the dead guy he talks poo poo about in the movie.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:06
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Cole posted:I was being genuine in my question. I bought his book but haven't been able to read it yet due to schoolwork taking priority. I'll take a look at it though. The point is that the movie doesn't try to deal with the actual guy, either his good parts or his bad parts. His hard-and-fast "no dead kids" rule might have had interesting real implications, like getting his friends killed, because war is full of lose-lose poo poo like that. But instead he's a martyr to Doing the Hard Things Other People Won't without reference to if any of it did anybody anywhere any good. They made a monument instead of a memorial, a martyr instead of a tragedy. They used honest elements to be lying fucks.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:16
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It's The Passion of the Longinus, or the real-life LOL NO travails of the Roman Empire's greatest side-stabber and javelin-er of barbarian looters, and how he bore his many sufferings with manly stoicism right up until the end. 
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Feb 7, 2015 18:41
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I would not go so far as to call him the American Horst Wessel, but it's not looking good. Well to be fair, Wessel knew as well as anybody that pimping ain't easy. Or am I misunderstanding your point? 
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Feb 7, 2015 18:49
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Cole posted:That isn't the movie's fault. That is people's fault for being lazy and gullible. Filmmakers who aren't making documentaries have no responsibility to anything but the MPAA and the studio that funds the movie. Explicitly deceitful thing deceives people, its makers have no responsibility for their actions. Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will had no real-world consequences and their makers bear no responsibility for making the world a shittier place because, whelp, people be dumb! Do you generally look at things in terms of how the victim "had it coming"? Do you think being a huge fraud is cool and good if you can get away with it using a semantic dodge? Do you really find nothing contemptible about the filmmakers marketing something as being true-to-life as hard as they possibly can without literally calling it DOCUMENTARY: THE DOCUMENTARY STORY, then not using it being a literal documentary as a responsibility dodge when they get called on being lying fucks? That's the hill you want to die on? 
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Feb 22, 2015 15:16
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Fangz posted:The US loving loves the military. It's mostly insincere though, saying you support the troops is for most people just how you show off how much of a Real American you are. Nothing is lower effort than saying in a poll that you like something that it makes you look good to like.
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Feb 24, 2015 13:59
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Lurdiak posted:I would argue that the loss of life made less of an impact than the destruction of iconic buildings. I mean, obesity probably kills 300,000 Americans every year and you don't see us spending $5 trillion trying to win that battle. It's obviously not about the raw number of people killed.
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Mar 5, 2015 14:48
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:Hah, I love how even British graffiti is polite. Like multiple people offered coherent commentary and someone that disagrees just says "get a grip" instead of spraypainting "gently caress you" next to a giant dong or something. What stands out how dumb, easily disprovable and generally terrible these lies are. I could come up with better self-aggrandizing lies in the time it takes to take a dump.
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Mar 13, 2015 19:21
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