Here is a summary of films reviewed on today's show:
Self/less squanders an interesting idea in a movie that is
never more than a bland action film. There is nothing at all memorable
about this movie and viewers would do better seeking out John
Frankenheimer’s Seconds or Paul Verhoven’s Total Recall.
The moviemakers of Magic Mike XXL have created exactly what they set out to do and they’ve done it very effectively. But the Magic Mike sequel
constitutes a sort of mainstream pornography in the same way as Nicki
Minaj music videos, Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, and the Miss USA
pageant. It’s about looking and lusting but nothing beyond that.
Like a lot of children’s pictures, Minions is intended to keep
the attention of viewers under the age of twelve and it will do that.
But the film is little more than a feature length toy commercial that
probably should have premiered on home video.
Dope is a flawed movie. It introduces some provocative ideas
about race and racial representation but neither the ideas nor its
story are fully formed. However, Dope has a lot in it that is
unique, especially in the mainstream cinema marketplace, and there is
as much to admire about the film as there is to admonish it.
Girlhood is a thoughtful and well-made picture. It isn’t
necessarily a feel good movie but it is shot through with honesty and
the filmmakers have a good handle on their subject matter without
resorting to sentimentality or becoming condescending.
You can find full text of every review in the Sounds of Cinema Review Archive.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Film Reviews: July 12, 2015
Here is a summary of films reviewed on today's show:
Inside Out is one of the better films to come out of Pixar and it is certainly the studio’s best feature in several years. This is the rare animated film that transcends the family audience. Even if the conceit is simplified, Inside Out is beautifully made and tells an engaging story.
Ted 2 is a disaster. It's intermittently funny but it's also extraordinarily lazy. The only reason this movie exists is because the first Ted made a lot of money and it’s clear that the filmmakers put no more thought into it than that.
Love & Mercy is an unusual biopic in its structure and approach. The movie comes across a little incomplete but what’s here is impressive and Love & Mercy succeeds in large part due to its terrific central performances.
Terminator Genisys aspires to the greatness of the early films in this series. It falls well short of James Cameron’s films but it is certainly better than Terminator Salvation and is about on par with Terminator 3. Genisys is ultimately an average action picture with a lot of story problems.
His Way is a fun tribute to Hollywood producer Jerry Weintraub. It is mostly a puff piece and audiences aren’t going to learn much about how movies get made from watching it but His Way is a very entertaining story of a man who was at the epicenter of the entertainment industry for four decades.
You can find full text of every review on the Sounds of Cinema Review Archive.
Inside Out is one of the better films to come out of Pixar and it is certainly the studio’s best feature in several years. This is the rare animated film that transcends the family audience. Even if the conceit is simplified, Inside Out is beautifully made and tells an engaging story.
Ted 2 is a disaster. It's intermittently funny but it's also extraordinarily lazy. The only reason this movie exists is because the first Ted made a lot of money and it’s clear that the filmmakers put no more thought into it than that.
Love & Mercy is an unusual biopic in its structure and approach. The movie comes across a little incomplete but what’s here is impressive and Love & Mercy succeeds in large part due to its terrific central performances.
Terminator Genisys aspires to the greatness of the early films in this series. It falls well short of James Cameron’s films but it is certainly better than Terminator Salvation and is about on par with Terminator 3. Genisys is ultimately an average action picture with a lot of story problems.
His Way is a fun tribute to Hollywood producer Jerry Weintraub. It is mostly a puff piece and audiences aren’t going to learn much about how movies get made from watching it but His Way is a very entertaining story of a man who was at the epicenter of the entertainment industry for four decades.
You can find full text of every review on the Sounds of Cinema Review Archive.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Controversial Films 2015
Today's episode of Sounds of Cinema was the annual Independence Day program in which I celebrate freedom of speech by taking a look at banned, censored, and controversial films. Note that this is not intended to be a complete list of controversial titles, just a selection of noteworthy pictures that have rattled the cage. For more information on controversial films, see the links at the bottom. You can also check out the blog post for last year's episode.
Cruising (1980)
Dir. William Friedkin
Based on the novel by Gerald Walker and some actual events, Cruising told the story of a New York City police detective who went undercover in the gay S&M club scene to investigate a series of murders. At that time Hollywood movies barely acknowledged homosexuality at all and when they did the films typically depicted gay men as violent and dysfunctional predators. After a draft of the script was leaked, the gay community mobilized against the picture. Cruising was shot on location at some of New York’s leather bars and members of the gay community would show up on the street where the production was filming, spoiling the sound recording with whistles and chants and using reflectors to shine lights into the shots and distract the crew. Director William Friedkin acknowledged that Cruising wasn’t flattering to the gay community but he defended his film by pointing out that it was based in part on true events. In the thirty-five years since Cruising’s release there has been ongoing debate about the length of the picture. For years Friedkin insisted that forty minutes of footage was cut from the movie in order to achieve an R-rating. More recently, the director clarified this and said that the excised footage was pornographic and that it was included in the original version of Cruising only to give the filmmakers something to cut out and appease the MPAA’s ratings board. In 2013 Travis Mathews and James Franco helmed the movie Interior. Leather Bar., a pseudo-documentary about filmmakers recreating that forty minutes of footage.
Blackfish (2013)
Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Blackfish is a documentary film about orcas kept in captivity at oceanic zoos. The film focuses on SeaWorld and a killer whale named Tilikum. According to the documentary, orcas are ill-suited for captivity because of their size and social needs and SeaWorld has made that worse for its animals by keeping them in tanks that are too small, separating mothers from their offspring, and generally mistreating the dolphins. The movie further claims that the treatment of Tilikum has made the animal pathologically violent which in turn has led to Tilikum deliberately injuring and killing SeaWorld staff, including trainer and performer Dawn Brancheau.
The veracity of Blackfish’s claims has been disputed. SeaWorld launched a media campaign to counter the documentary, claiming that the filmmakers used emotionally manipulative sequences that distorted the truth about orcas in captivity and the deaths of SeaWorld personnel. Former SeaWorld trainers Bridgette Pirtle and Mark Simmons, who were interviewed in Blackfish, later distanced themselves from the movie and said that the filmmakers cherry picked their comments and exploited the death of Dawn Brancheau. However, an OSHA investigation concluded that SeaWorld had failed to protect its employees.
Blackfish had a devastating impact on SeaWorld. Following its release, attendance at SeaWorld parks plummeted and the company’s stock price tanked, resulting in rounds of layoffs among SeaWorld’s employees and the resignation of its chief executive. The public outrage prompted by Blackfish led Southwest Airlines to end its partnership with SeaWorld and New York and California state lawmakers proposed legislation that would ban orca captivity altogether. More recently SeaWorld was hit with a class action lawsuit by park visitors who felt they had been duped.
I Spit On Your Grave (1978/2010)
Dir. Meir Zarchi / Steven R. Monroe
Originally released in 1978 under the title Day of the Woman, this film tells the story of a young female writer who retreats to an isolated cabin to work on a book and is gang raped by a group of locals; this sequence takes up about twenty-five percent of the movie’s running time. After recovering, she lures her attackers one by one into gory traps. As Day of the Woman, the picture didn’t get much notice but in 1980 it was re-released with the title I Spit on Your Grave and the movie gained national attention when film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel blasted the movie on their syndicated television show. I Spit on Your Grave was cut by seventeen minutes in order to achieve an R rating from the MPAA and it was banned in several European countries as well as Canada. While some of these bans have been rescinded, I Spit on Your Grave was banned in Ireland as recently as 2010.
I Spit on Your Grave is one of the most consistently condemned films of all time but it isn’t without its defenders. In the book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover makes what is probably the most cogent defense of I Spit on Your Grave by comparing it to the highly esteemed Hollywood drama The Accused. Clover argues that the two movies have a similar premise but in The Accused the victim resorts to the legal system to achieve justice. As Clover points out, this promotes a false sense of security; the truth is that the legal system frequently fails sexual assault victims. By comparison, I Spit on Your Grave implicitly suggests that it is up to women to save themselves. It’s also worth pointing out that despite the way this film is treated as an aberration from civilized cinema, the ethos of I Spit on Your Grave is ultimately no different from movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish, the only major difference being that a woman avenges herself instead letting a man do it for her.
A remake of I Spit on Your Grave was released in 2010. That movie was just as brutal as the 1978 version but it had a slightly different approach. Where the original film was unequivocally the story of the victim, the remake was much more about the perpetrators; after the assault sequence the men stew in their paranoia and guilt until their victim returns to claim vengeance in death sequences that were inspired by torture films like Saw and Hostel. The remake of I Spit on Your Grave didn’t cause nearly the uproar that the original did but the poster art was controversial. The one sheet replicated the iconic design of the poster to the 1978 film and detractors argued that the imagery sexualized a rape victim.
The Interview (2014)
Dir. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan
The Interview starred James Franco and Seth Rogan as a tabloid television personality and his producer who are invited to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un. The CIA taps the TV stars to assassinate the North Korean dictator and bumbling hilarity ensues. The Interview was never intended to be anything other than a silly comedy but it ended up inciting an international incident. Six months before the release of the movie, North Korea criticized Sony Pictures (whose parent company is based in Japan) and sent a letter to the United Nations that called The Interview an act of war and threatened retaliation against the United States if it was released. In November 2014, about a month before the release of the film, Sony Pictures’ computer system was hacked by a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. The hack was investigated by the FBI, which concluded that the Guardians of Peace were associated with the North Korean government although some other cybersecurity experts have argued that the hack was an inside job by a disgruntled Sony employee. In the aftermath, several high profile Sony Pictures’ theatrical releases began appearing on illegal file sharing websites. But most damaging to the company were emails and other memoranda that were posted online. The documents included the private data of Sony staff and Hollywood stars, which led Sony employees to file a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming that Sony had not done enough to protect their personal information. The leaked documents also exposed company secrets and revealed embarrassing internal correspondence including impolitic remarks about high profile actors and filmmakers, particularly by Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal, who issued a public apology and was later fired. The leaked emails also revealed that Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai had put pressure on the filmmakers of The Interview to soften certain scenes in order to appease North Korea. Things came to a head ten days before the release of the film as the Guardians of Peace issued a terror threat to theaters planning on showing The Interview. The US Department of Homeland Security announced that there was no evidence of a credible threat but major theater chains, including AMC, Regal, and Cinemark, dropped the movie. Sony then announced it was canceling the release of The Interview, which made the company a target of derision by columnists, politicians, and social media, furthering Sony’s public relations disaster. Ultimately, Sony reversed its decision and opened The Interview as originally planned but with a much smaller theatrical footprint and a simultaneous video-on-demand release. The film did quite well on video on demand and it was the first time that a major studio movie had a higher gross on a digital platform than it did at theaters.
The Devils (1971)
Dir. Ken Russell
The Devils was adapted from the play of the same name by John Whiting and from the nonfiction book The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley. Set in 17th century France, the film tells the true story of demonic possession among a convent of nuns and the prosecution of a Catholic priest for witchcraft. As depicted in the film, Urbain Grandier (played by Oliver Reed) is as much a politician as a priest, and he defends the city of Loudun against the political machinations of Cardinal Richelieu. When a case of mass sexual hysteria breaks out among the nuns of a local convent, the cardinal’s operatives label it demonic possession and pin the cause on Grandier, using a religious mechanism to destroy a political enemy.
Directed by Ken Russell, The Devils is an angry political film that rails against the unholy alliance of church and state, showing how that cooperative distorts and corrupts both institutions. It is an extreme movie both in content and in style and The Devils’ combination of religious and sexual imagery made its provocative subject matter that much more troubling.
Warner Bros. financed The Devils but studio executives either never read the script or didn’t understand it and when they finally screened the movie Warner executives were shocked by what Ken Russell had made. Before The Devils was submitted to a ratings board, Warner executives preemptively censored the movie, reducing or eliminating some key sequences. When the film was finally submitted to the BBFC and the MPAA The Devils suffered additional cuts. A few years later, Warner Bros. rereleased the film to capitalize on the success of The Exorcist and put The Devils through an additional bout of editing. This was the version subsequently released on home video.
When it premiered in 1971, The Devils received polarized reactions. Professional critics frequently slammed the movie, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore condemned The Devils, and conservative religious organizations mobilized against it. However, Reverend Gene D. Phillips, a Jesuit priest who teaches film courses at Loyola University, defended The Devils and used it as part of his curriculum. Ken Russell was named Best Director at the Venice Film Festival despite the fact that The Devils was banned in Italy and actors Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave were threatened with jail time if they entered the country.
Decades later, The Devils came to be regarded as one of the most important British films of the post-war era and it has been praised by filmmakers such as Bryan Singer, Terry Gilliam, and Guillermo del Toro. British film critic Mark Kermode oversaw a restoration of The Devils that reincorporated the deleted sequences. The original cut of The Devils was finally shown publicly at a special screening held in 2004. However, Warner Bros. has refused to issue the movie in its complete form. According to author Richard Crouse, senior Warner Bros. executives are either personally offended by the movie or fear reopening the controversy. The embargo on The Devils continues despite the fact that Warner distributes such controversial titles as The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, and Natural Born Killers. In 2012 the British Film Institute was allowed to release a Region-2 DVD of the UK edition of the movie, which is still missing key sequences. The Devils has never had a Region-1 DVD release and it remains unavailable to American audiences in any form.
Straw Dogs (1971)
Dir. Sam Peckinpah
1971 was an incredible year for transgressive cinema with the release of A Clockwork Orange, Carnal Knowledge, The Devils, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Straw Dogs. Director Sam Peckinpah had already achieved infamy with 1969’s The Wild Bunch, which initially earned an X-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America due to its violence. Years later, the notion that The Wild Bunch was censored because of stylized gunplay is almost quaint, but Straw Dogs remains as provocative as ever.
The movie tells the story of a mild-mannered mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) who spends the summer with his wife (Susan George) in her rural hometown. A crew of locals makes repairs to the couple’s house, among them the wife’s high school boyfriend. Straw Dogs’ enduring controversy is mostly due to a rape scene involving the wife and two of the construction workers. Aside from the horror of depicting sexual violence, the scene continues to inspire debate because the consent between the wife and her ex-boyfriend plays out ambiguously. Also controversial was the violent climax in which the couple fends off a home invasion. Straw Dogs’ final sequence was far more brutal than audiences of 1971 were prepared for and the transformation of a self-professed pacifist into a killer remains disturbing.
Straw Dogs had a troubled reception, especially in England. The movie got polarized reviews and viewers frequently walked out of screenings due to its violence. Straw Dogs was censored for theatrical exhibition and many of the edits focused on the rape scene. But as Stevie Simkin has noted, the attempts to shorten or alter the sequence frequently distorted its meaning and actually made the scene more problematic. After the passage of the 1984 Video Recordings Act the movie was withdrawn from British circulation until 2002.
Straw Dogs was very much a film of its time. In many respects it is a reworking of the western, Peckinpah’s genre of choice, and it has one foot planted in the masculinity and sexual politics of an earlier era. The film’s other foot is set in 1971 amid a vibrant feminist movement, social unrest, and controversy over the war in Vietnam. Those competing sets of values were (and still are) a combustible mixture. But what is most upsetting about Straw Dogs is its implicit suggestion that our civilized veneer disguises the ugly truth of human nature: that we are violent, bestial creatures. Flawed as it may be, Straw Dogs presents that thesis with complexity and nuance. But, like its director, Straw Dogs is also confrontational and its fight with censors (both liberal and conservative) is at least partly a result of its hostile tone and the refusal of authorities to engage with the movie’s ideas and contradictions.
The Moon is Blue (1953)
Dir. Otto Preminger
In the early years of Hollywood, the movie industry established the Production Code Administration, which was a censorship organization run by the Motion Picture Association of America (and a precursor to the contemporary ratings board). The PCA was created in light of state sponsored censorship that was widespread at that time. In 1934, when the PCA was founded, it was not uncommon for states or major cities to operate their own censorship outfits, cutting or banning movies that were deemed to be unacceptable. The legal groundwork for this was laid by the 1915 Supreme Court case Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, in which the court determined that motion pictures were industrial products, not art, and therefore were not protected by the First Amendment. The PCA was intended to establish industry-wide standards of morality that would stave off calls for censorship and create the impression that Hollywood was a responsible industry that didn’t require outside regulation.
The Supreme Court changed its mind in 1952. The verdict of Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson confirmed that motion pictures do indeed deserve First Amendment protection. That ruling set the stage for the demise of most censorship boards and signaled the beginning of the end of the Production Code.
Filmmakers immediately began testing the new limits. Released the year after the Burstyn v. Wilson decision, Otto Preminger’s The Moon is Blue concerns a woman who is aggressively courted by two men. The movie is fairly innocuous but it includes discussions about sexuality and the dialogue featured words like “virgin” and “seduce” and “mistress” which were not allowed under the Production Code. The PCA refused to issue the film a seal of approval but instead of cutting the objectionable material United Artists withdrew from the MPAA and Preminger took the unprecedented step of releasing The Moon is Blue without a PCA seal. The film was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency and challenged by several state and local censorship boards but the controversy turned the film into a hit at the box office. When The Moon is Blue was banned by the Kansas Censorship Board, the filmmakers filed suit in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the ban was struck down and the Kansas Censorship Board was dissolved.
Wired (1989)
Dir. Larry Peerce
In the early 1980s, John Belushi was one of the biggest names in Hollywood. Having been among the original cast members of Saturday Night Live and coming off of comedy classics such as Animal House and The Blues Brothers, Belushi had become a comic folk hero when he died of a drug overdose in 1982 at the age of thirty-three. Belushi’s widow Judith contacted Washington Post reporter (and co-author of All the President’s Men) Bob Woodward to investigate the circumstances of her husband’s death. Two years later Woodward turned out the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. The book was a bombshell that portrayed the late actor as a human train wreck whose death was hastened by a crowd of sycophants and enablers. Everyone close to Belushi, including his widow, balked at Woodward’s book and regarded it as a defamatory misrepresentation. However, the facts of Wired have not been discredited and many of the people who attacked the book were those most likely to be embarrassed by its content. (Nearly twenty years later Tanner Colby, the author of Belushi: A Biography, wrote a detailed takedown of Wired, arguing that Woodward got all of the relevant facts right but misunderstood the context of those facts.)
A movie adaptation of Wired was attempted throughout the 1980s and its production was an extraordinary case of Hollywood blackballing. According to a report in Time magazine, Creative Artists Agency, generally considered to be Hollywood’s most powerful talent agency at that time and which represented many of Belushi’s friends and co-stars, warned Hollywood studios to stay away from the project. (Michael Ovitz, president of CAA and Belushi’s former agent, denied this.) When Wired finally lensed as an independent production, lawyers from CAA advised the producers that if their clients were depicted in the movie the filmmakers would be liable for invasion of privacy. As a result most of the characters of Wired are fictional or composite roles. Also, because the filmmakers could not secure the rights to Belushi’s Saturday Night Live skits they had to create facsimiles that invoked his characters without actually duplicating them.
Once production of Wired was finished the film’s producers attempted to secure a distribution deal with Hollywood studios but no one would touch it. Whether that was due to lobbying by CAA or the quality of the picture is unclear. Wired was released in 1989 by independent company Taurus Entertainment and the film was one of the most bizarre biopics ever made. The story begins with Belushi’s death and when his body is transported to a morgue, Belushi wakes up, crawls out of a body bag and revisits his life in the company of a guardian angel. This is crosscut with scenes of Bob Woodward (played by J.T. Walsh) investigating Belushi’s death. The resulting movie plays as a cross between Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Had the movie worked it might have revolutionized the biographical film genre or at least become a cult movie but Wired was a disaster both creatively and financially, playing in theaters for just eleven days. Actor Michael Chiklis, in his first starring role, played John Beluish and expected that Wired would launch him to stardom but instead it nearly destroyed his career. Dan Aykroyd, who was Belushi’s costar in The Blues Brothers, very publically blasted the film and had actor J.T. Wash fired from the 1990 movie Loose Cannons because of Walsh’s involvement with Wired.
Wired had VHS and laserdisc releases but it has never been issued on any other format and the movie has all but disappeared.
Missing (1982)
Dir. Costa-Gavras
The 1970s and 80s saw the release of several movies about political upheaval in Latin America. Among the most provocative of these was 1982’s Missing. Taking place in Chile just after the coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as head of state, Missing is the true story of the search for Charles Horman, a journalist who disappeared while investigating links between the Chilean military and the United States government. The movie is primarily the story of Horman’s father and wife as they follow the journalist’s trail which ends in the discovery of the Pinochet government’s monstrous crimes and evidence that the United States’ intelligence services were involved in destabilizing the South American country. The film portrays American diplomats as uninterested in Horman’s disappearance and insinuates that they conspired with the Chilean government to have him killed.
Missing caused major waves at the time of its release. The movie was banned in Chile under Pinochet’s regime. Alexander Haig, then Secretary of State under the Reagan administration, issued official denials about the events dramatized in the film. Nathaniel Davis, the former US ambassador to Chile, filed a libel lawsuit against director Costa-Gavras and Universal Pictures, even though Davis is not portrayed by name in the film. In response to the lawsuit, Universal pulled Missing from the home video market. The lawsuit was dismissed in 1985 but Missing remained unavailable on home video until 2004.
In 2014 a Chilean court ruled that the United States’ intelligence services played a role in Charles Horman’s death.
American Sniper (2014)
Dir. Clint Eastwood
American Sniper was an adaptation of the memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who served four tours in the second Iraq War and achieved the highest number of confirmed kills of any sniper in the history of the United States military. The movie adaptation of American Sniper was the source of a very intense debate among political pundits and film critics as well as on social media.
A lot of the controversy over American Sniper centered upon the credibility of Chris Kyle. Some of the scenes appearing within the book and stories Kyle told in interviews were later shown to be embellishments or outright lies, most notably Kyle’s claim that he had punched actor and former Minnesota governor (and military veteran) Jesse Ventura in the face during a bar brawl. Ventura sued for defamation and won. The movie version of American Sniper did not acknowledge Kyle’s lies and it omitted the disputed sequences of the book but that did not absolve the issue. As film critic Amy Nicholson wrote, “When a film erases the fact that its subject was a fabricator, then that itself is a lie.”
The release of American Sniper also created an opportunity to relitigate the case for going to war in Iraq and Chris Kyle became the proxy for that renewed debate. As an author and as a character in a movie, Chris Kyle echoed many of the pro-war talking points from a decade earlier. The anti-war crowd painted Kyle as a psychopath, a racist, and a tool of imperialism, sometimes comparing American Sniper to Nation’s Pride, the faux Nazi propaganda film featured in the climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The debate continued well after the film’s theatrical run with showings at college campuses protested and sometimes cancelled.
Like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper landed directly on a cultural fault line and it benefitted financially from the controversy. The movie’s characterization of Chris Kyle as a rugged American cowboy-type who was deeply patriotic was very appealing to a conservative audience and the attacks on the movie by perceived liberal critics turned buying an American Sniper movie ticket into a political gesture. As a result, American Sniper became the highest grossing release of 2014 and the second highest grossing R-rated film of all time (just $21 million behind The Passion).
Looking at the controversy over American Sniper with some distance, it’s clear that a lot of the arguments for and against this movie missed their mark. The picture did reiterate the case for the Iraq War but it also contained a dramatization of post-traumatic stress disorder that is irreconcilable with war propaganda. On the other hand, the Chris Kyle portrayed in the movie is a humble and agreeable person who struggled with killing people, quite the opposite of the way Kyle described himself in the pages of his memoir. Ultimately, American Sniper is a movie that didn’t tell us very much about Chris Kyle or the war in Iraq but the controversy over the film did say a lot about American culture and the fraught relationship between motion pictures and reality.
Harold and Maude (1971)
Dir. Hal Ashby
Harold and Maude was a quirky comedy about a despondent young man who falls in love with a free spirited old lady. Released in late 1971, the movie did not get much traction at the box office. However, when Harold and Maude played at the Westgate Theater in Edina, Minnesota in early 1972, the film found a dedicated and enthusiastic audience. As word spread about the reaction to this film, Harold and Maude got a second wave of theatrical showings that turned the movie into a hit and resulted in a loyal cult following. As described in Dave Kenney's book Twin Cities Picture Show, the film was so successful that Edina’s Westgate Theater ran Harold and Maude for two years. By 1974 the movie actually drew protesters who picketed outside the theater demanding that the management play something—anything—other than Harold and Maude.
Sources
Cruising (1980)
Dir. William Friedkin
Based on the novel by Gerald Walker and some actual events, Cruising told the story of a New York City police detective who went undercover in the gay S&M club scene to investigate a series of murders. At that time Hollywood movies barely acknowledged homosexuality at all and when they did the films typically depicted gay men as violent and dysfunctional predators. After a draft of the script was leaked, the gay community mobilized against the picture. Cruising was shot on location at some of New York’s leather bars and members of the gay community would show up on the street where the production was filming, spoiling the sound recording with whistles and chants and using reflectors to shine lights into the shots and distract the crew. Director William Friedkin acknowledged that Cruising wasn’t flattering to the gay community but he defended his film by pointing out that it was based in part on true events. In the thirty-five years since Cruising’s release there has been ongoing debate about the length of the picture. For years Friedkin insisted that forty minutes of footage was cut from the movie in order to achieve an R-rating. More recently, the director clarified this and said that the excised footage was pornographic and that it was included in the original version of Cruising only to give the filmmakers something to cut out and appease the MPAA’s ratings board. In 2013 Travis Mathews and James Franco helmed the movie Interior. Leather Bar., a pseudo-documentary about filmmakers recreating that forty minutes of footage.
Blackfish (2013)
Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Blackfish is a documentary film about orcas kept in captivity at oceanic zoos. The film focuses on SeaWorld and a killer whale named Tilikum. According to the documentary, orcas are ill-suited for captivity because of their size and social needs and SeaWorld has made that worse for its animals by keeping them in tanks that are too small, separating mothers from their offspring, and generally mistreating the dolphins. The movie further claims that the treatment of Tilikum has made the animal pathologically violent which in turn has led to Tilikum deliberately injuring and killing SeaWorld staff, including trainer and performer Dawn Brancheau.
The veracity of Blackfish’s claims has been disputed. SeaWorld launched a media campaign to counter the documentary, claiming that the filmmakers used emotionally manipulative sequences that distorted the truth about orcas in captivity and the deaths of SeaWorld personnel. Former SeaWorld trainers Bridgette Pirtle and Mark Simmons, who were interviewed in Blackfish, later distanced themselves from the movie and said that the filmmakers cherry picked their comments and exploited the death of Dawn Brancheau. However, an OSHA investigation concluded that SeaWorld had failed to protect its employees.
Blackfish had a devastating impact on SeaWorld. Following its release, attendance at SeaWorld parks plummeted and the company’s stock price tanked, resulting in rounds of layoffs among SeaWorld’s employees and the resignation of its chief executive. The public outrage prompted by Blackfish led Southwest Airlines to end its partnership with SeaWorld and New York and California state lawmakers proposed legislation that would ban orca captivity altogether. More recently SeaWorld was hit with a class action lawsuit by park visitors who felt they had been duped.
I Spit On Your Grave (1978/2010)
Dir. Meir Zarchi / Steven R. Monroe
Originally released in 1978 under the title Day of the Woman, this film tells the story of a young female writer who retreats to an isolated cabin to work on a book and is gang raped by a group of locals; this sequence takes up about twenty-five percent of the movie’s running time. After recovering, she lures her attackers one by one into gory traps. As Day of the Woman, the picture didn’t get much notice but in 1980 it was re-released with the title I Spit on Your Grave and the movie gained national attention when film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel blasted the movie on their syndicated television show. I Spit on Your Grave was cut by seventeen minutes in order to achieve an R rating from the MPAA and it was banned in several European countries as well as Canada. While some of these bans have been rescinded, I Spit on Your Grave was banned in Ireland as recently as 2010.
I Spit on Your Grave is one of the most consistently condemned films of all time but it isn’t without its defenders. In the book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover makes what is probably the most cogent defense of I Spit on Your Grave by comparing it to the highly esteemed Hollywood drama The Accused. Clover argues that the two movies have a similar premise but in The Accused the victim resorts to the legal system to achieve justice. As Clover points out, this promotes a false sense of security; the truth is that the legal system frequently fails sexual assault victims. By comparison, I Spit on Your Grave implicitly suggests that it is up to women to save themselves. It’s also worth pointing out that despite the way this film is treated as an aberration from civilized cinema, the ethos of I Spit on Your Grave is ultimately no different from movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish, the only major difference being that a woman avenges herself instead letting a man do it for her.
A remake of I Spit on Your Grave was released in 2010. That movie was just as brutal as the 1978 version but it had a slightly different approach. Where the original film was unequivocally the story of the victim, the remake was much more about the perpetrators; after the assault sequence the men stew in their paranoia and guilt until their victim returns to claim vengeance in death sequences that were inspired by torture films like Saw and Hostel. The remake of I Spit on Your Grave didn’t cause nearly the uproar that the original did but the poster art was controversial. The one sheet replicated the iconic design of the poster to the 1978 film and detractors argued that the imagery sexualized a rape victim.
The Interview (2014)
Dir. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan
The Interview starred James Franco and Seth Rogan as a tabloid television personality and his producer who are invited to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un. The CIA taps the TV stars to assassinate the North Korean dictator and bumbling hilarity ensues. The Interview was never intended to be anything other than a silly comedy but it ended up inciting an international incident. Six months before the release of the movie, North Korea criticized Sony Pictures (whose parent company is based in Japan) and sent a letter to the United Nations that called The Interview an act of war and threatened retaliation against the United States if it was released. In November 2014, about a month before the release of the film, Sony Pictures’ computer system was hacked by a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. The hack was investigated by the FBI, which concluded that the Guardians of Peace were associated with the North Korean government although some other cybersecurity experts have argued that the hack was an inside job by a disgruntled Sony employee. In the aftermath, several high profile Sony Pictures’ theatrical releases began appearing on illegal file sharing websites. But most damaging to the company were emails and other memoranda that were posted online. The documents included the private data of Sony staff and Hollywood stars, which led Sony employees to file a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming that Sony had not done enough to protect their personal information. The leaked documents also exposed company secrets and revealed embarrassing internal correspondence including impolitic remarks about high profile actors and filmmakers, particularly by Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal, who issued a public apology and was later fired. The leaked emails also revealed that Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai had put pressure on the filmmakers of The Interview to soften certain scenes in order to appease North Korea. Things came to a head ten days before the release of the film as the Guardians of Peace issued a terror threat to theaters planning on showing The Interview. The US Department of Homeland Security announced that there was no evidence of a credible threat but major theater chains, including AMC, Regal, and Cinemark, dropped the movie. Sony then announced it was canceling the release of The Interview, which made the company a target of derision by columnists, politicians, and social media, furthering Sony’s public relations disaster. Ultimately, Sony reversed its decision and opened The Interview as originally planned but with a much smaller theatrical footprint and a simultaneous video-on-demand release. The film did quite well on video on demand and it was the first time that a major studio movie had a higher gross on a digital platform than it did at theaters.
The Devils (1971)
Dir. Ken Russell
The Devils was adapted from the play of the same name by John Whiting and from the nonfiction book The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley. Set in 17th century France, the film tells the true story of demonic possession among a convent of nuns and the prosecution of a Catholic priest for witchcraft. As depicted in the film, Urbain Grandier (played by Oliver Reed) is as much a politician as a priest, and he defends the city of Loudun against the political machinations of Cardinal Richelieu. When a case of mass sexual hysteria breaks out among the nuns of a local convent, the cardinal’s operatives label it demonic possession and pin the cause on Grandier, using a religious mechanism to destroy a political enemy.
Directed by Ken Russell, The Devils is an angry political film that rails against the unholy alliance of church and state, showing how that cooperative distorts and corrupts both institutions. It is an extreme movie both in content and in style and The Devils’ combination of religious and sexual imagery made its provocative subject matter that much more troubling.
Warner Bros. financed The Devils but studio executives either never read the script or didn’t understand it and when they finally screened the movie Warner executives were shocked by what Ken Russell had made. Before The Devils was submitted to a ratings board, Warner executives preemptively censored the movie, reducing or eliminating some key sequences. When the film was finally submitted to the BBFC and the MPAA The Devils suffered additional cuts. A few years later, Warner Bros. rereleased the film to capitalize on the success of The Exorcist and put The Devils through an additional bout of editing. This was the version subsequently released on home video.
When it premiered in 1971, The Devils received polarized reactions. Professional critics frequently slammed the movie, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore condemned The Devils, and conservative religious organizations mobilized against it. However, Reverend Gene D. Phillips, a Jesuit priest who teaches film courses at Loyola University, defended The Devils and used it as part of his curriculum. Ken Russell was named Best Director at the Venice Film Festival despite the fact that The Devils was banned in Italy and actors Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave were threatened with jail time if they entered the country.
Decades later, The Devils came to be regarded as one of the most important British films of the post-war era and it has been praised by filmmakers such as Bryan Singer, Terry Gilliam, and Guillermo del Toro. British film critic Mark Kermode oversaw a restoration of The Devils that reincorporated the deleted sequences. The original cut of The Devils was finally shown publicly at a special screening held in 2004. However, Warner Bros. has refused to issue the movie in its complete form. According to author Richard Crouse, senior Warner Bros. executives are either personally offended by the movie or fear reopening the controversy. The embargo on The Devils continues despite the fact that Warner distributes such controversial titles as The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, and Natural Born Killers. In 2012 the British Film Institute was allowed to release a Region-2 DVD of the UK edition of the movie, which is still missing key sequences. The Devils has never had a Region-1 DVD release and it remains unavailable to American audiences in any form.
Straw Dogs (1971)
Dir. Sam Peckinpah
1971 was an incredible year for transgressive cinema with the release of A Clockwork Orange, Carnal Knowledge, The Devils, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Straw Dogs. Director Sam Peckinpah had already achieved infamy with 1969’s The Wild Bunch, which initially earned an X-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America due to its violence. Years later, the notion that The Wild Bunch was censored because of stylized gunplay is almost quaint, but Straw Dogs remains as provocative as ever.
The movie tells the story of a mild-mannered mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) who spends the summer with his wife (Susan George) in her rural hometown. A crew of locals makes repairs to the couple’s house, among them the wife’s high school boyfriend. Straw Dogs’ enduring controversy is mostly due to a rape scene involving the wife and two of the construction workers. Aside from the horror of depicting sexual violence, the scene continues to inspire debate because the consent between the wife and her ex-boyfriend plays out ambiguously. Also controversial was the violent climax in which the couple fends off a home invasion. Straw Dogs’ final sequence was far more brutal than audiences of 1971 were prepared for and the transformation of a self-professed pacifist into a killer remains disturbing.
Straw Dogs had a troubled reception, especially in England. The movie got polarized reviews and viewers frequently walked out of screenings due to its violence. Straw Dogs was censored for theatrical exhibition and many of the edits focused on the rape scene. But as Stevie Simkin has noted, the attempts to shorten or alter the sequence frequently distorted its meaning and actually made the scene more problematic. After the passage of the 1984 Video Recordings Act the movie was withdrawn from British circulation until 2002.
Straw Dogs was very much a film of its time. In many respects it is a reworking of the western, Peckinpah’s genre of choice, and it has one foot planted in the masculinity and sexual politics of an earlier era. The film’s other foot is set in 1971 amid a vibrant feminist movement, social unrest, and controversy over the war in Vietnam. Those competing sets of values were (and still are) a combustible mixture. But what is most upsetting about Straw Dogs is its implicit suggestion that our civilized veneer disguises the ugly truth of human nature: that we are violent, bestial creatures. Flawed as it may be, Straw Dogs presents that thesis with complexity and nuance. But, like its director, Straw Dogs is also confrontational and its fight with censors (both liberal and conservative) is at least partly a result of its hostile tone and the refusal of authorities to engage with the movie’s ideas and contradictions.
The Moon is Blue (1953)
Dir. Otto Preminger
In the early years of Hollywood, the movie industry established the Production Code Administration, which was a censorship organization run by the Motion Picture Association of America (and a precursor to the contemporary ratings board). The PCA was created in light of state sponsored censorship that was widespread at that time. In 1934, when the PCA was founded, it was not uncommon for states or major cities to operate their own censorship outfits, cutting or banning movies that were deemed to be unacceptable. The legal groundwork for this was laid by the 1915 Supreme Court case Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, in which the court determined that motion pictures were industrial products, not art, and therefore were not protected by the First Amendment. The PCA was intended to establish industry-wide standards of morality that would stave off calls for censorship and create the impression that Hollywood was a responsible industry that didn’t require outside regulation.
The Supreme Court changed its mind in 1952. The verdict of Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson confirmed that motion pictures do indeed deserve First Amendment protection. That ruling set the stage for the demise of most censorship boards and signaled the beginning of the end of the Production Code.
Filmmakers immediately began testing the new limits. Released the year after the Burstyn v. Wilson decision, Otto Preminger’s The Moon is Blue concerns a woman who is aggressively courted by two men. The movie is fairly innocuous but it includes discussions about sexuality and the dialogue featured words like “virgin” and “seduce” and “mistress” which were not allowed under the Production Code. The PCA refused to issue the film a seal of approval but instead of cutting the objectionable material United Artists withdrew from the MPAA and Preminger took the unprecedented step of releasing The Moon is Blue without a PCA seal. The film was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency and challenged by several state and local censorship boards but the controversy turned the film into a hit at the box office. When The Moon is Blue was banned by the Kansas Censorship Board, the filmmakers filed suit in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the ban was struck down and the Kansas Censorship Board was dissolved.
Wired (1989)
Dir. Larry Peerce
In the early 1980s, John Belushi was one of the biggest names in Hollywood. Having been among the original cast members of Saturday Night Live and coming off of comedy classics such as Animal House and The Blues Brothers, Belushi had become a comic folk hero when he died of a drug overdose in 1982 at the age of thirty-three. Belushi’s widow Judith contacted Washington Post reporter (and co-author of All the President’s Men) Bob Woodward to investigate the circumstances of her husband’s death. Two years later Woodward turned out the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. The book was a bombshell that portrayed the late actor as a human train wreck whose death was hastened by a crowd of sycophants and enablers. Everyone close to Belushi, including his widow, balked at Woodward’s book and regarded it as a defamatory misrepresentation. However, the facts of Wired have not been discredited and many of the people who attacked the book were those most likely to be embarrassed by its content. (Nearly twenty years later Tanner Colby, the author of Belushi: A Biography, wrote a detailed takedown of Wired, arguing that Woodward got all of the relevant facts right but misunderstood the context of those facts.)
A movie adaptation of Wired was attempted throughout the 1980s and its production was an extraordinary case of Hollywood blackballing. According to a report in Time magazine, Creative Artists Agency, generally considered to be Hollywood’s most powerful talent agency at that time and which represented many of Belushi’s friends and co-stars, warned Hollywood studios to stay away from the project. (Michael Ovitz, president of CAA and Belushi’s former agent, denied this.) When Wired finally lensed as an independent production, lawyers from CAA advised the producers that if their clients were depicted in the movie the filmmakers would be liable for invasion of privacy. As a result most of the characters of Wired are fictional or composite roles. Also, because the filmmakers could not secure the rights to Belushi’s Saturday Night Live skits they had to create facsimiles that invoked his characters without actually duplicating them.
Once production of Wired was finished the film’s producers attempted to secure a distribution deal with Hollywood studios but no one would touch it. Whether that was due to lobbying by CAA or the quality of the picture is unclear. Wired was released in 1989 by independent company Taurus Entertainment and the film was one of the most bizarre biopics ever made. The story begins with Belushi’s death and when his body is transported to a morgue, Belushi wakes up, crawls out of a body bag and revisits his life in the company of a guardian angel. This is crosscut with scenes of Bob Woodward (played by J.T. Walsh) investigating Belushi’s death. The resulting movie plays as a cross between Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Had the movie worked it might have revolutionized the biographical film genre or at least become a cult movie but Wired was a disaster both creatively and financially, playing in theaters for just eleven days. Actor Michael Chiklis, in his first starring role, played John Beluish and expected that Wired would launch him to stardom but instead it nearly destroyed his career. Dan Aykroyd, who was Belushi’s costar in The Blues Brothers, very publically blasted the film and had actor J.T. Wash fired from the 1990 movie Loose Cannons because of Walsh’s involvement with Wired.
Wired had VHS and laserdisc releases but it has never been issued on any other format and the movie has all but disappeared.
Missing (1982)
Dir. Costa-Gavras
The 1970s and 80s saw the release of several movies about political upheaval in Latin America. Among the most provocative of these was 1982’s Missing. Taking place in Chile just after the coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as head of state, Missing is the true story of the search for Charles Horman, a journalist who disappeared while investigating links between the Chilean military and the United States government. The movie is primarily the story of Horman’s father and wife as they follow the journalist’s trail which ends in the discovery of the Pinochet government’s monstrous crimes and evidence that the United States’ intelligence services were involved in destabilizing the South American country. The film portrays American diplomats as uninterested in Horman’s disappearance and insinuates that they conspired with the Chilean government to have him killed.
Missing caused major waves at the time of its release. The movie was banned in Chile under Pinochet’s regime. Alexander Haig, then Secretary of State under the Reagan administration, issued official denials about the events dramatized in the film. Nathaniel Davis, the former US ambassador to Chile, filed a libel lawsuit against director Costa-Gavras and Universal Pictures, even though Davis is not portrayed by name in the film. In response to the lawsuit, Universal pulled Missing from the home video market. The lawsuit was dismissed in 1985 but Missing remained unavailable on home video until 2004.
In 2014 a Chilean court ruled that the United States’ intelligence services played a role in Charles Horman’s death.
American Sniper (2014)
Dir. Clint Eastwood
American Sniper was an adaptation of the memoir by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who served four tours in the second Iraq War and achieved the highest number of confirmed kills of any sniper in the history of the United States military. The movie adaptation of American Sniper was the source of a very intense debate among political pundits and film critics as well as on social media.
A lot of the controversy over American Sniper centered upon the credibility of Chris Kyle. Some of the scenes appearing within the book and stories Kyle told in interviews were later shown to be embellishments or outright lies, most notably Kyle’s claim that he had punched actor and former Minnesota governor (and military veteran) Jesse Ventura in the face during a bar brawl. Ventura sued for defamation and won. The movie version of American Sniper did not acknowledge Kyle’s lies and it omitted the disputed sequences of the book but that did not absolve the issue. As film critic Amy Nicholson wrote, “When a film erases the fact that its subject was a fabricator, then that itself is a lie.”
The release of American Sniper also created an opportunity to relitigate the case for going to war in Iraq and Chris Kyle became the proxy for that renewed debate. As an author and as a character in a movie, Chris Kyle echoed many of the pro-war talking points from a decade earlier. The anti-war crowd painted Kyle as a psychopath, a racist, and a tool of imperialism, sometimes comparing American Sniper to Nation’s Pride, the faux Nazi propaganda film featured in the climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The debate continued well after the film’s theatrical run with showings at college campuses protested and sometimes cancelled.
Like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper landed directly on a cultural fault line and it benefitted financially from the controversy. The movie’s characterization of Chris Kyle as a rugged American cowboy-type who was deeply patriotic was very appealing to a conservative audience and the attacks on the movie by perceived liberal critics turned buying an American Sniper movie ticket into a political gesture. As a result, American Sniper became the highest grossing release of 2014 and the second highest grossing R-rated film of all time (just $21 million behind The Passion).
Looking at the controversy over American Sniper with some distance, it’s clear that a lot of the arguments for and against this movie missed their mark. The picture did reiterate the case for the Iraq War but it also contained a dramatization of post-traumatic stress disorder that is irreconcilable with war propaganda. On the other hand, the Chris Kyle portrayed in the movie is a humble and agreeable person who struggled with killing people, quite the opposite of the way Kyle described himself in the pages of his memoir. Ultimately, American Sniper is a movie that didn’t tell us very much about Chris Kyle or the war in Iraq but the controversy over the film did say a lot about American culture and the fraught relationship between motion pictures and reality.
Harold and Maude (1971)
Dir. Hal Ashby
Harold and Maude was a quirky comedy about a despondent young man who falls in love with a free spirited old lady. Released in late 1971, the movie did not get much traction at the box office. However, when Harold and Maude played at the Westgate Theater in Edina, Minnesota in early 1972, the film found a dedicated and enthusiastic audience. As word spread about the reaction to this film, Harold and Maude got a second wave of theatrical showings that turned the movie into a hit and resulted in a loyal cult following. As described in Dave Kenney's book Twin Cities Picture Show, the film was so successful that Edina’s Westgate Theater ran Harold and Maude for two years. By 1974 the movie actually drew protesters who picketed outside the theater demanding that the management play something—anything—other than Harold and Maude.
Sources
- 50 Most Controversial Films at Sky Movies
- 50 Most Controversial Movies Ever by David Fear, Joshua Rothkopf, and Keith Uhlich at Time Out New York
- 50 Most Controversial Movies of All Time by Simon Kinnear at Games Radar
- The 101 Most Controversial Films of All Time at Listal
- “Disturbo 13: The Most Disturbing Films of All Time” by Stanley Wiater from Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film edited by Christopher Golden (Book)
- “Exorcising Cruising” (DVD)
- The Friedkin Connection by William Friedkin (Book)
- Men, Woman and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover (Book)
- Most Controversial Films of All Time by Tim Dirks at AMC Filmsite
- Movie-Censorship.com
- Obscene, Indecent, Immoral, and Offensive: 100+ Years of Censored, Banned, and Controversial Films by Stephen Tropiano (Book)
- Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils by Richard Crouse (Book)
- Straw Dogs by Stevie Simkin (Book)
- Twin Cities Picture Show by Dave Kenney (Book)
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Controversial Films on Sounds of Cinema
Sounds of Cinema's annual look at controversial films will air on Sunday, July 5th. It has become a tradition on this show to spend Independence Day weekend celebrating freedom of speech by looking at movies that were censored, banned, or were otherwise controversial. The 2015 edition of this program will feature all new material so even if you've tuned in for past broadcasts don't miss this episode. The last eighteen months has offered a host of new controversial titles such as Blackfish, American Sniper, and The Interview and those will be featured alongside many other films, some of which you may not have realized were controversial in the first place.
Sounds of Cinema can be heard at 9am on 89. 5 KQAL FM in Winona, MN and at 11:00am on 89.7 KMSU FM in Mankato, MN. If you are outside the broadcast area you can still hear the show via live streaming from each station's website.
Sounds of Cinema can be heard at 9am on 89. 5 KQAL FM in Winona, MN and at 11:00am on 89.7 KMSU FM in Mankato, MN. If you are outside the broadcast area you can still hear the show via live streaming from each station's website.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
James Horner Retrospective
Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema took a look at the films of composer James Horner, who died last week in a plane crash. Horner had been scoring movies since the late 1970s and throughout his career he had worked with several notable directors on some of their best films including James Cameron, Edward Zwick, and Mel Gibson. Here are some highlights of Horner’s career.
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
James Horner got his start working on low budget science fiction films and monster movies. The crew of the Roger Corman production Battle Beyond the Stars also included James Cameron, credited as an art director. Horner and Cameron would later work together on several of Cameron’s biggest films.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
James Horner graduated from low budget sci-fi pictures to major Hollywood studio films with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Following 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Wrath of Khan was an attempt to reimagine the series with an action-oriented approach and Horner’s score was instrumental in that shift. Horner would return to the series for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Brainstorm (1983)
One of the lesser known titles of Horner’s filmography but one of his most popular works among score aficionados was 1983’s Brainstorm. Directed by renowned special effects technician Douglas Trumbull, Brainstorm was a science fiction film about scientists who develop a system of recording and playing back other people’s experiences.
An American Tail (1986)
In the 1980s Don Bluth directed several animated films. The output was mixed but several titles were quite successful. James Horner provided the music for a few of Bluth’s animated features including The Land Before Time and An American Tale. For An American Tail Horner partnered with songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and the soundtrack included the song “Somewhere Out There.” The single version of the song, performed by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram, became a hit.
Aliens (1986)
James Cameron and James Horner worked together for the first time as director and composer on 1986’s Aliens. The production was very difficult and Horner found the experience frustrating as he had little time to write or footage to work with. As a result Cameron and Horner didn’t speak for many years. However, Horner’s score from Aliens was quite effective and it included the track “Bishop’s Countdown” which has been heard in countless movie trailers.
Willow (1988)
Another of James Horner’s frequent collaborators was Ron Howard. Their first film together was 1985’s Cocoon. Their next collaboration was 1988’s Willow. Based on a story by George Lucas, the film was a fun sword and sorcery fantasy and it featured one of Horner’s most popular scores.
The Rocketeer (1991)
Long before comic book heroes were in vogue, director Joe Johnston helmed 1991’s The Rocketeer, based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens. Johnson had worked on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films and he gave The Rocketeer a similar look. The movie was not a great success at the time but it has since become a cult favorite. Fans of the film often speak favorably of James Horner’s score but unfortunately it’s not currently available.
Sneakers (1992)
A lot of James Horner’s music was big scale orchestral scores which befit the blockbuster science fiction and action pictures he frequently worked on. One exception in his filmography is 1992’s Sneakers. The film tells a complex story of espionage and cryptography and Horner’s score is very intricate and understated. The score also features saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Nicholas Britell wrote this tribute piece on the music of Sneakers.
Clear and Present Danger (1994)
Tom Clancy was one of the most popular novelists of the 1980s and 90s. His military thrillers frequently centered on CIA analyst Jack Ryan and several of Clancy’s books were adapted into successful films with Harrison Ford playing Jack Ryan in 1992’s Patriot Games and again in 1994’s Clear and Present Danger. Horner provided the music for both of those entries in the series.
Legends of the Fall (1994)
One of James Horner’s regular collaborators was director Edward Zwick. Horner scored several of Zwick’s films including Glory, Legends of the Fall, and Courage Under Fire. Zwick’s movies were frequently about people in the midst of violent historical events and Horner’s scores amplified the heroism of the characters and provided a romantic tone for the historical background.
Braveheart (1995)
James Horner collaborated with Mel Gibson on several films including The Man Without a Face, Apocalypto, and Braveheart. The Braveheart score is arguably Horner’s most popular work and it is frequently used in movie trailers. The CD release achieved such impressive sales that a follow up album, More Music from Braveheart, was issued in 1997, shortly before the release of Titanic, which would also have a follow up CD release, Back to Titanic.
Titanic (1997)
After several years apart, James Cameron and James Horner mended their relationship and collaborated again on 1997’s Titanic, for which they would both receive Oscars. You can hear a lot of echoes of Horner’s work from Patriot Games and Braveheart in this score. The music of Titanic became one of the bestselling soundtracks of all time, powered by the song “My Heart Will Go On,” which could be heard at virtually every wedding, high school dance, and karaoke bar for the next year.
The Missing (2003)
Ron Howard and James Horner worked together on a number of films including Apollo 13, Ransom, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and A Beautiful Mind. One of their most unusual collaborations was 2003’s The Missing. A mix of westerns, noir, and a touch of horror, the score mixes action cues with dark, brooding music and some Native American influences.
Avatar (2009)
James Horner re-teamed with James Cameron on Avatar. Like Cameron’s other work, Avatar was big and ambitious and it required more than a year of work from Horner. The alien Na’vi culture of the film had its own language which Horner incorporated into the music.
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
James Horner got his start working on low budget science fiction films and monster movies. The crew of the Roger Corman production Battle Beyond the Stars also included James Cameron, credited as an art director. Horner and Cameron would later work together on several of Cameron’s biggest films.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
James Horner graduated from low budget sci-fi pictures to major Hollywood studio films with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Following 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Wrath of Khan was an attempt to reimagine the series with an action-oriented approach and Horner’s score was instrumental in that shift. Horner would return to the series for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Brainstorm (1983)
One of the lesser known titles of Horner’s filmography but one of his most popular works among score aficionados was 1983’s Brainstorm. Directed by renowned special effects technician Douglas Trumbull, Brainstorm was a science fiction film about scientists who develop a system of recording and playing back other people’s experiences.
An American Tail (1986)
In the 1980s Don Bluth directed several animated films. The output was mixed but several titles were quite successful. James Horner provided the music for a few of Bluth’s animated features including The Land Before Time and An American Tale. For An American Tail Horner partnered with songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and the soundtrack included the song “Somewhere Out There.” The single version of the song, performed by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram, became a hit.
Aliens (1986)
James Cameron and James Horner worked together for the first time as director and composer on 1986’s Aliens. The production was very difficult and Horner found the experience frustrating as he had little time to write or footage to work with. As a result Cameron and Horner didn’t speak for many years. However, Horner’s score from Aliens was quite effective and it included the track “Bishop’s Countdown” which has been heard in countless movie trailers.
Willow (1988)
Another of James Horner’s frequent collaborators was Ron Howard. Their first film together was 1985’s Cocoon. Their next collaboration was 1988’s Willow. Based on a story by George Lucas, the film was a fun sword and sorcery fantasy and it featured one of Horner’s most popular scores.
The Rocketeer (1991)
Long before comic book heroes were in vogue, director Joe Johnston helmed 1991’s The Rocketeer, based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens. Johnson had worked on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films and he gave The Rocketeer a similar look. The movie was not a great success at the time but it has since become a cult favorite. Fans of the film often speak favorably of James Horner’s score but unfortunately it’s not currently available.
Sneakers (1992)
A lot of James Horner’s music was big scale orchestral scores which befit the blockbuster science fiction and action pictures he frequently worked on. One exception in his filmography is 1992’s Sneakers. The film tells a complex story of espionage and cryptography and Horner’s score is very intricate and understated. The score also features saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Nicholas Britell wrote this tribute piece on the music of Sneakers.
Clear and Present Danger (1994)
Tom Clancy was one of the most popular novelists of the 1980s and 90s. His military thrillers frequently centered on CIA analyst Jack Ryan and several of Clancy’s books were adapted into successful films with Harrison Ford playing Jack Ryan in 1992’s Patriot Games and again in 1994’s Clear and Present Danger. Horner provided the music for both of those entries in the series.
Legends of the Fall (1994)
One of James Horner’s regular collaborators was director Edward Zwick. Horner scored several of Zwick’s films including Glory, Legends of the Fall, and Courage Under Fire. Zwick’s movies were frequently about people in the midst of violent historical events and Horner’s scores amplified the heroism of the characters and provided a romantic tone for the historical background.
Braveheart (1995)
James Horner collaborated with Mel Gibson on several films including The Man Without a Face, Apocalypto, and Braveheart. The Braveheart score is arguably Horner’s most popular work and it is frequently used in movie trailers. The CD release achieved such impressive sales that a follow up album, More Music from Braveheart, was issued in 1997, shortly before the release of Titanic, which would also have a follow up CD release, Back to Titanic.
Titanic (1997)
After several years apart, James Cameron and James Horner mended their relationship and collaborated again on 1997’s Titanic, for which they would both receive Oscars. You can hear a lot of echoes of Horner’s work from Patriot Games and Braveheart in this score. The music of Titanic became one of the bestselling soundtracks of all time, powered by the song “My Heart Will Go On,” which could be heard at virtually every wedding, high school dance, and karaoke bar for the next year.
The Missing (2003)
Ron Howard and James Horner worked together on a number of films including Apollo 13, Ransom, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and A Beautiful Mind. One of their most unusual collaborations was 2003’s The Missing. A mix of westerns, noir, and a touch of horror, the score mixes action cues with dark, brooding music and some Native American influences.
Avatar (2009)
James Horner re-teamed with James Cameron on Avatar. Like Cameron’s other work, Avatar was big and ambitious and it required more than a year of work from Horner. The alien Na’vi culture of the film had its own language which Horner incorporated into the music.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Christopher Lee Retrospective
Sunday’s episode of Sounds of Cinema spent some time taking a look at the filmography of Christopher Lee, who passed away last week at the age of 93. Lee’s career spanned more than six decades and included literally hundreds of credits. Here are a few highlights.
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Dir. Terence Fisher
Christopher Lee terrified the baby boomer generation in the role of Count Dracula, starting with 1958’s Horror of Dracula. He would play the role nine times and Lee is widely considered to be among the definitive screen Draculas. However, Lee grew weary of the part and was dissatisfied with some of the later films.
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Dir. Terence Fisher
Based on the novel by Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out features Christopher Lee in the role of a good guy attempting to protect a young man from being drafted into the service of Satan. The Devil Rides Out was among the better films to come out of the Hammer studio.
The Wicker Man (1973)
Dir. Robin Hardy
Among the films Christopher Lee was most proud of was 1973’s The Wicker Man in which he played Lord Summerisle. The film is an unusual but highly regarded British horror film. In 1973 The Wicker Man was edited and abused by its distributor with the original elements inadvertently destroyed. A longer version of the film was discovered recently and released under the title The Wicker Man: The Final Cut.
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Dir. Guy Hamilton
Post-Hammer, Christopher Lee continued to be cast in villainous roles and in 1974 he played Bond villain Scarmanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. Lee was related to Bond creator Ian Fleming and during World War II Lee worked as an intelligence officer and was assigned to track down Nazi war criminals.
The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985)
Dir. Philippe Mora
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Christopher Lee’s career took a downturn and he worked in some forgettable movies. Among the strangest was the part of a werewolf hunter in 1985’s Howling II, a sequel to Joe Dante’s groundbreaking horror picture. The sequel is so bad that it’s highly entertaining and can regularly be seen on late night cable. Years later, Christopher Lee had a supporting role in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2 and he supposedly apologized to the director for being in the Howling sequel.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Dir. Joe Dante
Among Christopher Lee’s underappreciated qualities was his sense of humor. In 1978 he hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live and in 1990 he played a mad scientist in Gremlins 2. The sequel was a comic send up of the first movie and Lee did the same for his public image as a villain.
Jinnah (1998)
Dir. Jamil Dehlavi
One of Christopher Lee’s least known works also contains his favorite role. In Jinnah, Lee played Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Unlike many of Lee’s other roles, this character was both a lead and a hero and Lee was able to redirect the authority and charisma he had so often used in villainous roles to portray a dignified political leader dealing with a complex situation.
The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003)
Dir. Peter Jackson
In the late period of his life, Christopher Lee enjoyed a career renaissance due to his casting as Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Count Dooku in the second and third Star Wars prequels. Lee also formed a relationship with director Tim Burton and had roles in Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Alice in Wonderland. Of these, his performance in Jackson’s Middle Earth films stand out—in part because they are easily the better titles—but also for the gravitas he brought to the part and to the movies.
Actors are lucky if they get one role for which they will be remembered. In very rare cases, actors sometimes get two such roles like Harrison Ford playing both Indiana Jones and Han Solo or Clint Eastwood as both The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry. Christopher Lee had Dracula, Saruman, Lord Summerisle, Scarmanga, and Count Dooku. Although many of his films were disregarded at the time, Lee’s body of work is nevertheless impressive and he created memorable characters that captured the imaginations of at least three generations of moviegoers.
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Dir. Terence Fisher
Christopher Lee terrified the baby boomer generation in the role of Count Dracula, starting with 1958’s Horror of Dracula. He would play the role nine times and Lee is widely considered to be among the definitive screen Draculas. However, Lee grew weary of the part and was dissatisfied with some of the later films.
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Dir. Terence Fisher
Based on the novel by Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out features Christopher Lee in the role of a good guy attempting to protect a young man from being drafted into the service of Satan. The Devil Rides Out was among the better films to come out of the Hammer studio.
The Wicker Man (1973)
Dir. Robin Hardy
Among the films Christopher Lee was most proud of was 1973’s The Wicker Man in which he played Lord Summerisle. The film is an unusual but highly regarded British horror film. In 1973 The Wicker Man was edited and abused by its distributor with the original elements inadvertently destroyed. A longer version of the film was discovered recently and released under the title The Wicker Man: The Final Cut.
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Dir. Guy Hamilton
Post-Hammer, Christopher Lee continued to be cast in villainous roles and in 1974 he played Bond villain Scarmanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. Lee was related to Bond creator Ian Fleming and during World War II Lee worked as an intelligence officer and was assigned to track down Nazi war criminals.
The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985)
Dir. Philippe Mora
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Christopher Lee’s career took a downturn and he worked in some forgettable movies. Among the strangest was the part of a werewolf hunter in 1985’s Howling II, a sequel to Joe Dante’s groundbreaking horror picture. The sequel is so bad that it’s highly entertaining and can regularly be seen on late night cable. Years later, Christopher Lee had a supporting role in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2 and he supposedly apologized to the director for being in the Howling sequel.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Dir. Joe Dante
Among Christopher Lee’s underappreciated qualities was his sense of humor. In 1978 he hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live and in 1990 he played a mad scientist in Gremlins 2. The sequel was a comic send up of the first movie and Lee did the same for his public image as a villain.
Jinnah (1998)
Dir. Jamil Dehlavi
One of Christopher Lee’s least known works also contains his favorite role. In Jinnah, Lee played Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Unlike many of Lee’s other roles, this character was both a lead and a hero and Lee was able to redirect the authority and charisma he had so often used in villainous roles to portray a dignified political leader dealing with a complex situation.
The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003)
Dir. Peter Jackson
In the late period of his life, Christopher Lee enjoyed a career renaissance due to his casting as Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Count Dooku in the second and third Star Wars prequels. Lee also formed a relationship with director Tim Burton and had roles in Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Alice in Wonderland. Of these, his performance in Jackson’s Middle Earth films stand out—in part because they are easily the better titles—but also for the gravitas he brought to the part and to the movies.
Actors are lucky if they get one role for which they will be remembered. In very rare cases, actors sometimes get two such roles like Harrison Ford playing both Indiana Jones and Han Solo or Clint Eastwood as both The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry. Christopher Lee had Dracula, Saruman, Lord Summerisle, Scarmanga, and Count Dooku. Although many of his films were disregarded at the time, Lee’s body of work is nevertheless impressive and he created memorable characters that captured the imaginations of at least three generations of moviegoers.
Monday, May 25, 2015
The Unknown Soldier – ‘American Sniper’ and the Legend of Chris Kyle
Earlier this year, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper was a source of considerable controversy. An adaptation of the memoir by Chris Kyle, the movie dramatizes Kyle’s career as a Navy SEAL sniper while on tour in the second Iraq war. As depicted in the film, Kyle achieved the greatest number of confirmed kills in the history of the United States military but he suffered from post-traumatic stress when he returned home. American Sniper landed on a cultural fault line with some calling the movie war propaganda and others praising it as a tribute to the troops. Just enough time has passed to comment on the movie without the social media rancor and with the arrival of Memorial Day (and the release of the film on home video) it’s worth trying to parse out the complicated relationship between this film and reality and its value as a motion picture.
Any attempt to disparage American Sniper’s cinematic merits is disingenuous. American Sniper is one of the most visceral war films since Black Hawk Down and the climactic battle in which American soldiers must hold off insurgents amid a sandstorm is one of the best action sequences in the recent history of combat pictures. American Sniper is also accomplished in its dramatic moments. The depiction of post-traumatic stress gives the film an unexpected emotional impact and Bradley Cooper’s performance as Chris Kyle has been universally praised.
So why the controversy? Part of the problem is rooted in the source material. It is known that Chris Kyle fabricated stories about himself. This is beyond dispute. Specifically, Kyle lied about shooting looters in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and he fabricated an incident in which he punched former Minnesota governor (and fellow military veteran) Jesse Ventura in the face during a bar brawl. Ventura sued for defamation and won, which was a surprise given the difficulty of proving defamation in court.
That Chris Kyle went about embellishing his official life story presents the filmmakers of American Sniper with a compelling problem: is it possible for someone to simultaneously be a war hero and a liar? Imagine what a filmmaker of Eastwood’s considerable skill could have done with that question. But instead of seizing the opportunity, Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall took the easy way out and ignored Kyle’s lies, omitting the disputed episodes from the film. But, as Amy Nicholson points out, “When a film erases the fact that its subject was a fabricator, then that itself is a lie.”
This leads to another problem with American Sniper. The filmmakers have fundamentally changed the character of Chris Kyle. It is one thing to alter immaterial details for narrative expediency or dramatic necessity. (The historical inaccuracies in Selma are an example of filmmakers operating well within the boundaries of dramatic license.) It is quite another to distort the subject into something that he never was.
The Chris Kyle portrayed in the movie American Sniper is a guy who joined the military in response to the September 11th attack. He is a humble man who only seeks to do the right thing and he agonizes over the lives he has taken. This is not the way Kyle described himself in his memoir. According to his own account, Kyle joined the armed forces to prove he was up to the challenge. He also wasn’t torn up by what he did in Iraq. The book includes numerous passages in which Kyle beams about his kills, wishes he had killed more, and says that if it weren’t for his family he would still be in battle.
The goal of a dramatization is not to recreate a person or an event with every nuance and detail. A drama is intended to create an impression of a person or an event. It’s a qualitative approach, one that frequently drives historians nuts. In the case of American Sniper, the changes to Kyle’s demeanor and the omission of his fibs distort our impression of what kind of a man he was. That makes American Sniper at least misleading if not outright dishonest.
So why would Eastwood do this? The answer may be found in the director’s roots in westerns. American Sniper lends itself to that genre. Before joining the military, Chris Kyle was a cowboy and while in Iraq he lived out a Wild West fantasy. The Iraq of American Sniper is a lawless desert town populated by non-white people who Kyle refers to as “savages,” not unlike the depiction of Native Americans in classic westerns; here the scalping knife has been replaced by a power drill. In one of the film’s major departures from the book, Kyle and his allies are preyed upon by a villainous insurgent sniper who, just like the classic western television shows, dresses in black and threatens caravans that our hero must defend.
One of the last great westerns by the one of the greatest directors of the genre was John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The movie concerns a man (played by Jimmy Stewart) who has enjoyed a life of fame and fortune since shooting an infamous criminal. When it’s revealed who actually fired the fatal shot, a newspaper reporter refuses to publish the facts. “This is the West, sir,” he says. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
In telling Kyle’s story, Eastwood followed the Liberty Valance rule. American Sniper is pure mythmaking and in many respects the film completes the task that Chris Kyle started. In the book, Kyle recalls his fellow soldiers referring to him as “legend.” (In fact, the Forged website sells Chris Kyle merchandise and apparel with the word “legend” on it.) Kyle’s lies weren’t fabricated for their own sake. Rather, they were about elevating his legendary status so that it would stand alongside the western characters played by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and (of course) Clint Eastwood.
Legends are, by their very nature, larger than life. Exaggeration in legendary stories is not only expected, it is inescapable. And when real life figures are mythologized they become two dimensional. They have width and height but they do not have depth. That leaves no room for doubt or self-examination.
This is one of several ironies about American Sniper. Based on the content of his memoir, the real Chris Kyle did not possess the intellectual capacity for self-reflection. He was a very skilled triggerman but he was unable to ask why he was in Iraq and uninterested in the answer. (In that way Kyle is an appropriate symbol for a war initiated by fellow Texan George W. Bush, a man who was also incapable of sophisticated thinking.) However, the cinematic incarnation of Chris Kyle does have some degree of psychological depth. His post-traumatic stress is inconsistent with the mythological character that Kyle sought to create for himself nor is it compatible with the history of the stoic western hero. Try to imagine the grizzled characters played by John Wayne and Chuck Norris suffering from PTSD. It just isn’t conceivable. Because of that psychological depth, the movie American Sniper is not quite the piece of war propaganda that many of its detractors insist that it is. Acknowledging PTSD is to acknowledge the morally complex nature of warfare and that is inconsistent with war propaganda, which always seeks to simplify the conflict.
As a legend and as a symbol, Chris Kyle and American Sniper have been coopted by various groups attempting to use him and the film as a prop to support political and ideological positions. This has only served to further distort the matter. A lot of those writing about the film, whether positively or negatively, do so on the basis that the motion picture is a representation of reality. Memes have circulated in social media juxtaposing the image of the real life Chris Kyle with the film’s detractors, such as Michael Moore, usually calling the former a hero and the latter a loser. These memes exemplify the problems with the debate around this film.
American Sniper has been a tremendous success in part because of the controversy around it but also because it reimagined Chris Kyle as exactly the kind of figure that many Americans yearn for: a classic western hero who embodies America’s imperial power. The character on the movie screen represents two things: the patriotism, self-sacrifice, and competency we admire about the troops but also a belief in the rightness of the Iraq mission. Those two things have gotten flung together and so the fight over American Sniper has involved critics, politicians, and bloggers criticizing or defending the mission by attacking or defending Chris Kyle and then confusing the fictionalized movie version of him with who he was in real life.
When it is all said and done, American Sniper did not tell us very much about the Iraq conflict nor did it really tell us anything about Chis Kyle so as a piece of historical filmmaking the movie is a failure. But American Sniper does have value for aesthetic reasons and as a depiction of post-traumatic stress disorder. Just as Coming Home helped to dramatize the experience of returning from Vietnam, the home front portions of American Sniper playout the struggles of American service people transitioning to civilian life. That is the value of the content of the movie. The conflict around American Sniper has been pretty empty and it never really reached a conclusion in part because it was unclear just what we were all arguing about. But the confusion over what American Sniper means will make the movie a defining cinematic artifact of these partisan times.
Any attempt to disparage American Sniper’s cinematic merits is disingenuous. American Sniper is one of the most visceral war films since Black Hawk Down and the climactic battle in which American soldiers must hold off insurgents amid a sandstorm is one of the best action sequences in the recent history of combat pictures. American Sniper is also accomplished in its dramatic moments. The depiction of post-traumatic stress gives the film an unexpected emotional impact and Bradley Cooper’s performance as Chris Kyle has been universally praised.
So why the controversy? Part of the problem is rooted in the source material. It is known that Chris Kyle fabricated stories about himself. This is beyond dispute. Specifically, Kyle lied about shooting looters in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and he fabricated an incident in which he punched former Minnesota governor (and fellow military veteran) Jesse Ventura in the face during a bar brawl. Ventura sued for defamation and won, which was a surprise given the difficulty of proving defamation in court.
That Chris Kyle went about embellishing his official life story presents the filmmakers of American Sniper with a compelling problem: is it possible for someone to simultaneously be a war hero and a liar? Imagine what a filmmaker of Eastwood’s considerable skill could have done with that question. But instead of seizing the opportunity, Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall took the easy way out and ignored Kyle’s lies, omitting the disputed episodes from the film. But, as Amy Nicholson points out, “When a film erases the fact that its subject was a fabricator, then that itself is a lie.”
This leads to another problem with American Sniper. The filmmakers have fundamentally changed the character of Chris Kyle. It is one thing to alter immaterial details for narrative expediency or dramatic necessity. (The historical inaccuracies in Selma are an example of filmmakers operating well within the boundaries of dramatic license.) It is quite another to distort the subject into something that he never was.
The Chris Kyle portrayed in the movie American Sniper is a guy who joined the military in response to the September 11th attack. He is a humble man who only seeks to do the right thing and he agonizes over the lives he has taken. This is not the way Kyle described himself in his memoir. According to his own account, Kyle joined the armed forces to prove he was up to the challenge. He also wasn’t torn up by what he did in Iraq. The book includes numerous passages in which Kyle beams about his kills, wishes he had killed more, and says that if it weren’t for his family he would still be in battle.
The goal of a dramatization is not to recreate a person or an event with every nuance and detail. A drama is intended to create an impression of a person or an event. It’s a qualitative approach, one that frequently drives historians nuts. In the case of American Sniper, the changes to Kyle’s demeanor and the omission of his fibs distort our impression of what kind of a man he was. That makes American Sniper at least misleading if not outright dishonest.
So why would Eastwood do this? The answer may be found in the director’s roots in westerns. American Sniper lends itself to that genre. Before joining the military, Chris Kyle was a cowboy and while in Iraq he lived out a Wild West fantasy. The Iraq of American Sniper is a lawless desert town populated by non-white people who Kyle refers to as “savages,” not unlike the depiction of Native Americans in classic westerns; here the scalping knife has been replaced by a power drill. In one of the film’s major departures from the book, Kyle and his allies are preyed upon by a villainous insurgent sniper who, just like the classic western television shows, dresses in black and threatens caravans that our hero must defend.
One of the last great westerns by the one of the greatest directors of the genre was John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The movie concerns a man (played by Jimmy Stewart) who has enjoyed a life of fame and fortune since shooting an infamous criminal. When it’s revealed who actually fired the fatal shot, a newspaper reporter refuses to publish the facts. “This is the West, sir,” he says. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
In telling Kyle’s story, Eastwood followed the Liberty Valance rule. American Sniper is pure mythmaking and in many respects the film completes the task that Chris Kyle started. In the book, Kyle recalls his fellow soldiers referring to him as “legend.” (In fact, the Forged website sells Chris Kyle merchandise and apparel with the word “legend” on it.) Kyle’s lies weren’t fabricated for their own sake. Rather, they were about elevating his legendary status so that it would stand alongside the western characters played by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and (of course) Clint Eastwood.
Legends are, by their very nature, larger than life. Exaggeration in legendary stories is not only expected, it is inescapable. And when real life figures are mythologized they become two dimensional. They have width and height but they do not have depth. That leaves no room for doubt or self-examination.
This is one of several ironies about American Sniper. Based on the content of his memoir, the real Chris Kyle did not possess the intellectual capacity for self-reflection. He was a very skilled triggerman but he was unable to ask why he was in Iraq and uninterested in the answer. (In that way Kyle is an appropriate symbol for a war initiated by fellow Texan George W. Bush, a man who was also incapable of sophisticated thinking.) However, the cinematic incarnation of Chris Kyle does have some degree of psychological depth. His post-traumatic stress is inconsistent with the mythological character that Kyle sought to create for himself nor is it compatible with the history of the stoic western hero. Try to imagine the grizzled characters played by John Wayne and Chuck Norris suffering from PTSD. It just isn’t conceivable. Because of that psychological depth, the movie American Sniper is not quite the piece of war propaganda that many of its detractors insist that it is. Acknowledging PTSD is to acknowledge the morally complex nature of warfare and that is inconsistent with war propaganda, which always seeks to simplify the conflict.
As a legend and as a symbol, Chris Kyle and American Sniper have been coopted by various groups attempting to use him and the film as a prop to support political and ideological positions. This has only served to further distort the matter. A lot of those writing about the film, whether positively or negatively, do so on the basis that the motion picture is a representation of reality. Memes have circulated in social media juxtaposing the image of the real life Chris Kyle with the film’s detractors, such as Michael Moore, usually calling the former a hero and the latter a loser. These memes exemplify the problems with the debate around this film.
American Sniper has been a tremendous success in part because of the controversy around it but also because it reimagined Chris Kyle as exactly the kind of figure that many Americans yearn for: a classic western hero who embodies America’s imperial power. The character on the movie screen represents two things: the patriotism, self-sacrifice, and competency we admire about the troops but also a belief in the rightness of the Iraq mission. Those two things have gotten flung together and so the fight over American Sniper has involved critics, politicians, and bloggers criticizing or defending the mission by attacking or defending Chris Kyle and then confusing the fictionalized movie version of him with who he was in real life.
When it is all said and done, American Sniper did not tell us very much about the Iraq conflict nor did it really tell us anything about Chis Kyle so as a piece of historical filmmaking the movie is a failure. But American Sniper does have value for aesthetic reasons and as a depiction of post-traumatic stress disorder. Just as Coming Home helped to dramatize the experience of returning from Vietnam, the home front portions of American Sniper playout the struggles of American service people transitioning to civilian life. That is the value of the content of the movie. The conflict around American Sniper has been pretty empty and it never really reached a conclusion in part because it was unclear just what we were all arguing about. But the confusion over what American Sniper means will make the movie a defining cinematic artifact of these partisan times.
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