The central frustration of being a film critic, Steve Sailer says, is that there isn’t much opportunity to be a tastemaker, because it’s pretty obvious to most everybody whether a film works or not:
Not many people are going to go out of their way to see a frosting-centric film. But of those who do, few could deny that whatever The Grand Budapest Hotel is doing, it’s doing it quite well. In a spotty year for filmmaking, The Grand Budapest Hotel was the highest grossing Best Picture nominee, with $59 million in domestic box office revenue.
Or it was until American Sniper blew past the Best Picture field with $105 million over the four-day weekend, setting a record for a movie going into wide release in January. (For reasons that nobody can quite explain, it has been universally assumed that people would much rather spend weekend afternoons indoors at the movie theater in May and June than in January and February. But as I’ve suggested before, perhaps that’s not a law of nature.)
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The auteur theory of directing holds that filmmaking is one man’s titanic struggle to create Art. Not surprisingly, the idea was made up by young critics who really wanted to direct, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
The Eastwood theory of directing, by contrast, is that you find a decent script, hire movie stars who are also good actors, don’t waste too much time or money on how the movie will look, point the camera in the right direction, don’t make your cast do too many takes, and maybe you’ll get lucky.
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Clint’s movie just works, beginning with the now famous opening scene used in the trailer. Leave it to Eastwood to figure out that the easy way to make an effective trailer is not to mash up all your explosion shots, but to just reuse your most gripping scene, leaving potential ticket buyers wondering: What happens next?
As an aside, Sailer mentions that famously liberal Hollywood is full of gun nuts — like Spielberg.
In true Sailer fashion, he ends with a note on Orwell’s apocryphal “rough men stand ready” quote:
But American Sniper is carried by Bradley Cooper’s star turn as one of the rough men who let the rest of us sleep peacefully in our beds at night because they stand ready to do violence on our behalf, a sentiment that conservative film critic Richard Grenier attributed to George Orwell in 1993.
The Sailer review also includes a mention of William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness and a sniper duel in the book.
The trouble with using Manchester as a reference is that he was a serial liar. The book is a serial lie as near the end he admits that it was not really autobiographical even though on reading it one was led to believe it was a personal memoir.
In addition if one can get a copy of Manchester’s first edition on MacArthur (American Caesar), one reads a melodramatic rendition of Arthur MacArthur’s attacking the confederate positions uphill, fighting not only the fire raining down, but the nearly impenetrable kudzu vines that covered the hill side. The only problem with that scenario is that kudzu was not introduced into the USA until decades later. Later editions were corrected.
You’re right. Here’s what La Wik has to say:
“Because Manchester referred to himself as a sergeant in the book, in command of a “line” unit, readers would have no way of knowing that he was a corporal, and did not serve with a line company or assault platoon, but served as a map keeper and runner at battalion headquarters. The book is part fiction, part memoir”
First Marshall, now this. Didn’t makes you wonder what else we think we know about WWII was lies…
The movie “Enemy at the Gates” portrayed Zaitsev the great Soviet sniper as a hero. Michael Moore had no problem with Zaitsev.