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Posted on 01/12/2015 6:27:55 AM PST by nikos1121
The defining moment of Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” plays out twice onscreen and countless more times in the mind of the movie’s central character, the late Navy SEAL marksman Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper). We are on a rooftop in Nasiriya, Iraq, a couple of weeks into the second American invasion, and Kyle — trained for battle but not yet tested by it — scans the surroundings for any seeming anomaly. A suspicious-looking man appears on a nearby balcony talking on a cell phone, only to disappear again back inside the building. Then, down below, a woman in a full burqa emerges with a young boy in tow. There is something odd about the way she holds her hands beneath the long black robe — she seems to be concealing something. Then she removes the object, a live grenade, and hands it to the boy, who begins running toward a line of advancing U.S. soldiers. Kyle sets the boy in his rifle sight and hopes against hope for fate to somehow intervene. But this is do or die, and so he pulls the trigger, earning the first of his 160 confirmed kills.
With that fateful pull of the trigger, you can all but hear the voice of another Eastwood character, the 19th-century Kansas pig farmer William Munny, consoling a green would-be gunslinger in one of the most quoted scenes from “Unforgiven”: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” And indeed, though Eastwood doesn’t appear onscreen in “American Sniper,” his aura is everywhere. That’s partly because Kyle — a terse, tightly coiled man of action — is a role that’s easy to imagine Eastwood himself playing earlier in his career.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
wanna put a spoiler alert!
American Sniper is about the only contemporary movie I would like to see.
Eastwood always delivers a quality product.
Agree.
I haven’t seen the movie. You think the article spoils it?
The review makes it sound like there’s some moral equivalency in the movie. Not a good thing at all.
I’ve seen it. It doesn’t spoil the movie. The spoiler gives you time to digest what is happening and recognize the angst that Kyle was experiencing having to make this decision. I watched and was disappointed that they didn’t develop his fellow SEAL mates in the story but within an hour and a half there was much to go over.
For me the most memorable line from “Unforgiven” is “Deserving’s got nothing to do with it”.
“It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”
There’s more: Kill a man and you send him to his judgment, ready or not. This is no small thing.
I’ll be making one of my rare trips to the theater this weekend to see this. Last time it was “Lone Survivor”.
Yes one of the few Directors in Hollywood who always produces a movie worth watching.
For me the most memorable line from “Unforgiven” is “Deserving’s got nothing to do with it”.Mine is where Eastwood's character says "We've all got it coming, kid."
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saw the trailer.....the last sentence of the first paragraph seems to tell what the trailer doesn’t...
Best scene ever (Dirty Harry?) is when he’s standing on the psycho-kidnapper guy in Kezar stadium just after he shot him in the leg. The guy says “You tried to kill me”, and he replies, “If I tried to kill you, your brains would be splattered across this field” All. Time. Best!
The only bad thing about sniping jihadi children is that they’re smaller targets.
From “The Outlaw Josie Wales”:
The bounty hunter says:
“A man’s got to make a living”
Josie says:
“Dying ain’t much of a living”
Lots of great like from that movie. A co-worker and I used to amuse ourselves by reciting lines from that flick. Our favorite was probably the scene when Josie is surprised by bounty hunters (Len Lesser of Seinfeld notoriety). “Watch it Abe, I seen him do some things.” “Shut up Lije.” Chief Dan George had a lot of good lines too. Never ending source of entertainment.
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