Reel Entropy

So, it’s called American Sniper, but he spends most of the movie leading door-to-door teams. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Remember The Hurt Locker? Well, American Sniper is basically that with a sniper instead of a bomb disposal expert.

The movie tells the ostensibly mostly true story of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper, who also produces), a SEAL sniper who accumulated 160 confirmed out of 255 probable kills over four tours in Iraq. He garnered widespread fame among both the military and the insurgency, called “The Legend” by one side and “The Devil of Ramadi” by the other, which eventually put an $80,000 price on his head. Kyle also participates in door-to-door searches and leads teams hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), an Olympian insurgent sniper.

American Sniper’s most obvious characteristic as a film is how similar it is to The Hurt Locker. In terms of setting and aesthetics and in terms of visceral appeal, they are the same movie — Sniper is significantly faster, but they’re both about watching high-tension situations against guerrilla warriors in Iraq. Locker is the better of the two because William James is a more interesting character and, though it doesn’t claim to be a true story, it’s based on an embedded journalist’s experiences and probably about as accurate as Sniper, based on Kyle’s autobiography — Kyle had a nasty streak of unverifiable claims, and some of his more famous confirmed exploits are heavily altered in the movie. But that doesn’t mean Sniper isn’t an intense, overwhelming experience in its own right.

Continue reading →

Just write “Taken 3.” “3” may be lite-speak for “E,” but that doesn’t mean it looks good. As a matter of fact, stylizing the title is never good. Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox.

The “It ends here” tagline plays heavily in the advertising, but there’s nothing material preventing a Taken 4.

In his third go ’round the super-retired-spy block, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is now the target of a massive LAPD manhunt after his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) is murdered in his bed. Mills uncovers a vast criminal conspiracy aimed square at him, and, in Taken tradition, karate chops the whole damn thing in the neck.

Tak3n isn’t worth taking seriously — it’s bad, not for a particular reason as much as it’s just low-grade.

Continue reading →

Selma finished shooting in July, about a month before the shooting of Michael Brown. This is all just a big coincidence. Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Martin Luther King Jr. accepts his Nobel Peace Prize. In the next scene, four black little girls get blown away in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, one of many acts of violence perpetuated a year earlier in Birmingham, Ala. over the city’s agreement to desegregate.

Selma follows King (David Oyelowo) through the three months leading up to the Selma-Montgomery marches directly preceding Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King’s crowning legal achievement. An ensemble cast includes Keith Stanfield, Oprah Winfrey (who also produces) and Tim Roth.

Ignoring, for a moment, its horrible timeliness, Selma is an incredible film. Where the past few months have been a sea of biopics that did everything wrong, Selma does pretty much everything right. The movie doesn’t pause to point out important characters and warn the audience what’s going to happen. Some extras are obviously important because Oprah is playing them, but it’s still a much more free-flowing story. Only history buffs will know when characters are about to die, and when they do die, it’s felt deeply because they were played as just another person.

Continue reading →