Tag: American Sniper

‘American Sniper’ Review: A target only Clint Eastwood could hit

It’s been a few days and I’ve let American Sniper wash over me slowly. If I had written this review the day I watched the movie it would have likely have been one continuous glowing epitaph. It will go down as one of my finest moments in a darkened theater. I simply loved the movie. The acting by Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller were particularly good as the leads of the real life Chris and Taya Kyle—as the rest of the cast was just fabulous. It was very easy to forget that the characters on the screen were actually in a movie. It was also easy to forget that the director Clint Eastwood shot most of the picture around California—given that most of the move took place in sets dressed up to look like Iraq. American Sniper takes you away into a bold story of masculinity, love, drama, and geopolitical circumstances on a scale that seemed as simple as a jazz piece, yet as infinitely complex at every level as the most involved, and beloved classic novel. It is truly a wonder of filmmaking exposition.

As much as I love Steven Spielberg as a director and still consider his Schindler’s List to be the pinnacle achievement in film—I think American Sniper just surpassed it as for very complex subject matter conveyed through raw brutality, hope, and cleaver strong characters toward a resolution not so cleanly wrapped up by the climax. During development for American Sniper Spielberg became hung up on the story inflating the script to over 160 pages. Due to budget constraints at Warner Brothers, Spielberg had to bow out with his hands up in frustration when the studio wouldn’t budge. Warner Brother knowing they had a big problem called up old reliable—Clint Eastwood—the ultimate minimalist director at the top of his game and asked him to take the helm—which he did. The result is likely the best movie in Clint Eastwood’s career—which has spanned over five decades now.

On August 5, 2013, Spielberg dropped out of directing the picture. By August 21, 2013 Eastwood signed on. Upon arriving at the script by Jason Hall, Eastwood immediately went into action. By March 14, 2014, Sienna Miller joined the cast. Principal photography began on March 31, 2014 in Los Angeles. In just six short months Eastwood had delivered a movie ready for production and whipped through the shooting schedule quickly so that by June the company was doing its pickup shots. The film was ready to present to the AFI Fest on November 11, 2014 just six months later. Eastwood had masterfully taken control of a very complex subject matter complete with grieving families, a high-profile lawsuit by Jesse Ventura, a murder trial, and a Hollywood community split in half politically by the subject matter to fly through the production in a way that lesser directors would have been terrified of—to deliver a sheer masterpiece to the movie screen. The only real knock to the movie is that the babies in the film looked like dolls, instead of real infants. Considering the liability of using real babies on a set—I can’t blame Eastwood for the decision. Other than that—the movie was stellar in every way.

I remember when Chris Kyle was murdered and was very aware of the book American Sniper because of the Ventura lawsuit. I had respected Jesse Ventura until I saw what he was doing to the widow Taya and I had my doubts about who said what against who during a bar fight between Kyle and Ventura. So I was turned off to the book waiting to see the evidence as time passed. When Ventura was awarded over a million dollars against the Chris Kyle estate my heart dropped because I wanted to believe that the person Glenn Beck spoke so highly of was everything he said he was. America needed a hero, and it looked like Kyle was just another inflated, propped up celebrity backed by cardboard supports. But, I trust Clint Eastwood. I know how he works. I knew how the Warner Brothers deal evolved—I knew how Eastwood came on board while reading American Sniper so I figured if there was a fraud in the story, Eastwood would sniff it out. So I watched carefully all of Eastwood’s interviews as he did promotional work for Jersey Boys over the summer of 2014 and was intrigued by his beard growth and even in how his stature had changed a bit to reflect the actor I had come to know two decades before. The American Sniper project was having a wonderful effect on Clint Eastwood. Here’s what I think happened.

In October 2013 Dina Eastwood filed for divorce which finally was granted on December 24th 2014 ending 18 years of marriage. Eastwood did what most men do under those types of emotional escapades, he turned to masculine camaraderie to heal any misgivings he might have had at the time and buried himself into his work. Much like the subject matter in his films, Heartbreak Ridge, Kelly’s Heroes and even Where Eagles Dare, Eastwood found the subject matter of American Sniper soothing—and redeeming. His wife had run off with another man—an old high school buddy. Eastwood handled the situation calmly and in a manner very similar to how Chris Kyle dealt with his cheating girlfriend at the beginning of American Sniper.   There was a subtle pain to the scene that was classic Clint Eastwood—and something only he is able to put on-screen.

Throughout the rest of American Sniper there were many similar scenes where the relationship between Taya and her husband Chris were strained. One scene was before the birth of their first son. Chris feeling like he should have been in Iraq shooting bad guys wondered why he was going to the shopping mall with his wife. The moment was broke up by the sudden birth of their son. It was a scene filled with pain, hope, and an earnest attempt to capture the essence of living daily life and all the obligations that tug on our souls. It was again only a scene that Clint Eastwood could have directed in an obvious male bonding experience he was having with Bradley Cooper who was a co-producer on the movie. American Sniper was more than a movie for all the people involved, Eastwood, the real wife Taya, Bradley Cooper–a role of a lifetime for him—and even the memory of Chris Kyle. They were all using the movie to heal themselves and thus their product is healing a nation who is watching this movie and instantly connecting to it.

There is a scene in Magnum Force where Clint Eastwood is on the shooting range for a competitive duel with his police force rival when his buddy “fatso” tells him he’s “never been smoother.” Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character in the movie was dealing with some really intense emotions about friendship, betrayal, trust in law enforcement and an egotistical boss seeded with corruption. Under hard emotional circumstances, Dirty Harry hit the shooting range like a well oiled machine. Eastwood understands that kind of thing and has put it in many of his movies. But in American Sniper his mastery of that well oiled machine has never been more evident.

Steven Spielberg would not have been able to make American Sniper. It would have been good, and likely would have come out like Munich. It would have been a decent movie, but not great. American Sniper took a person like Clint Eastwood to guide the complicated subject matter through a mine field off and on the screen to deliver a product to Warner Brothers quickly, cheaply, and efficiently.   American Sniper from the onset was a real life expert shot that only a few people in the world could make leading to an ending that was much more metaphorical than it otherwise would have been.

Eastwood rarely uses slow motion in his movies. Yet when the shot was taken at the end of the film from Chris Kyle toward his ultimate rival—Eastwood slowed the bullet down so everyone could see it flying across the Fallujah cityscape. It was a shot that meant more than just a flying projectile intended for an assassin’s head. It was the story of American Sniper itself and in the end the bullet hit its target and a nation could finally breathe a sigh of relief. It’s not too much to say that American Sniper is the result of a long career by Clint Eastwood who was born to make this movie and perhaps this movie only. Eastwood had made a lot of great films—but American Sniper is the result of a new gear that no modern director possesses—and only he could wield. Warner Brothers is lucky Steven Spielberg backed off the project. They made the movie for a fraction of the budget but more importantly, it will go down as one of the best movies to come out of their studio in their long and storied history.

Long after the Academy Awards ceremony in the spring of 2015 takes place American Sniper will be a favorite movie—particularly among men. It speaks to a man’s warrior bound heart honestly. Over Christmas I was speaking to my father-in-law who had been hiding in his basement at his personal movie theater watching Mark Walberg’s movie Shooter—which is a story about a sniper who has to fight for his own survival against forces that have turned on him. He was down there as the rest of the family socialized for Christmas. But for him, the movie spoke to him much more powerfully than all the good tidings of joy centering on Holiday festivities. Shooter is a good movie particularly for gun enthusiasts—and he loves it. There is an honesty to it that cuts through all the B.S. normally associated with disjointed groups of people from all different backgrounds trying to mesh themselves into a cohesive family unit for the sake of photographs and memory. In the future, American Sniper will be the pinnacle achievement of such movies and will be many people’s favorite to view when they want to touch the face of America and the heart of a real warrior. For my father-in-law, it will be the movie he tucks away into his private theater to watch so to see the purity of what America was always intended to be. He’ll forget about Shooter. We’re not talking about a slack-jawed hippie when we talk about my father-in-law, but a former school teacher and multi-degreed academic who has late in life become quite a gun enthusiast.

American Sniper is a must see movie. Once it is seen, it will quickly become many people’s favorite war movie. It took the heroics of Chris Kyle to get it started followed closely by his tenacious wife. Then it was Bradley Cooper who produced it, gained all the weight to look like Chris and to get so close to the project that he knew the character inside and out and back again. But ultimately it took a heavy-hearted Clint Eastwood who took 84 years of life experience and a recent divorce to make a movie about men and the hard decisions they often have to make when life presses down hard. And in the end when regrets are demanded, they are refused the way testicular fortitude expects—with firmness that punches through death itself to the heart of honor we all crave to carry. American Sniper is more than a movie. It’s a philosophy that is uniquely American and it is one that will make future Fourth of Julys much more reminiscent of what the Founding Father’s always intended—and give reverence to the wonderful freedoms provided by the Second Amendment.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

Another Kind of American Hero: Taya Kyle and how love can manifest resurrection

One of the reasons that I am most happy about the astounding support and box office numbers for the new Clint Eastwood movie, American Sniper is because of the redemption it is bringing to the widow of the slain military hero Chris Kyle—the most deadly sniper in US history. In the span of two years Taya Kyle has had to deal with the death of her husband, a defamation lawsuit by Jessie Ventura, and the ongoing circumstances of the trial of her husband’s murderer Eddie Ray Routh. It has been a painful period for her—the pressure would have crushed lesser people. But she held up and stood strong, and finally through Eastwood’s movie her husband’s memory has been given proper context and a bit of closure has finally become possible. It was commendable that she held it together when attorneys told her to let things die down before making too many public statements because of the upcoming murder trial. The movie was planned before Chris Kyle’s death, so it took a lot of emotional stability for her to continue with the project—which few are talking about. It had to be difficult. And when she was told to put a lid on her comments—she did what she felt was right to preserve her family’s memory—which is one of the most heroic aspects of American Sniper.

On Feb. 11, Eddie Ray Routh is scheduled to stand trial for killing Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL played by Bradley Cooper in the film. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Routh, who confessed to shooting the deadliest sniper in American history and Kyle’s friend Chad Littlefield two years ago at a rifle range southwest of Dallas. Routh, a former Marine, plans to introduce evidence that he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and mount an insanity defense, but the enormous profile of Kyle in the wake of American Sniper‘s success could present some complications.

The Warner Bros. film “is going to be an issue,” J. Warren St. John, Routh’s attorney, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “Can there be a fair trial?”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/how-american-sniper-could-complicate-764712

Then there was the Jessie Ventura case where the former wrestler, governor, and conspiracy theorists went after Taya just because her husband had damaged his ego in a best-selling book.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune explains…

In a section of his book called “Punching Out Scruff Face,” Kyle describes a confrontation with a “celebrity” at a 2006 wake for a Navy SEAL. He claimed “Scruff Face” made disparaging remarks about the war, the United States and President George W. Bush, provoking Kyle to punch him in the face.

Kyle later identified “Scruff Face” as Ventura.

In a federal trial last summer, Ventura won a $1.8 million verdict from the Kyle estate after convincing a jury that Chris Kyle had defamed him by writing that he decked Ventura in a bar after he made disparaging remarks about SEALs. Taya Kyle is the executor of the estate.

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/289097651.html

For Ventura it is obvious it was always about the money because he has done far more to damage his own reputation than the bragging rights of two military veterans in a bar arguing over the Iraq war. The differences between the two men are essentially the differences between Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. Taya is personal friends with Glenn Beck because their values about things are essentially aligned. Jessie Ventura is friends with Alex Jones because their values are aligned. Both are considered radical right-wingers, but they are ideologically as different as the sun and the moon. They only thing they really have in common is that they are both located in space.

Ventura made an absolute fool of himself during the trial. If the debate was with Chris Kyle, Ventura should have let it go upon his death. But to go over a grieving widow was below respectable, and he will always be known for such a gross embarrassment. And now that American Sniper is succeeding, Ventura is considering more lawsuits. It is simply unbelievable that a man would stoop so low—yet Ventura did. I think Ventura’s actions were unfathomable. No reputation is worth putting a widow through what he did. If Taya had emotionally collapsed after such an example of human vileness after the trial went against her—nobody would have blamed her.

But then came the murder trail of her husband and the concern that the killer was planning to plea guilty by reason of insanity. With all the popularity surrounding her husband it looked like Eddie Ray Routh wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial. So there was risk of messing up the trial if she continued to promote the film. But to her credit, knowing that there are serious flaws in the court process anyway—which lean in favor of Eddie Ray Routh by default—she would only get one chance to pay proper respect to her husband and that was through the Clint Eastwood film.

It really is an amazing story both on-screen and off. Through it all Taya Kyle has emerged as a hero in her own right. Her children are extremely lucky to have two parents who have provided them with such magnificent guidance. They have a hero to look up to in their father immortalized forever in the movie American Sniper—and they have a mother who has stood up to some very ominous opposition and tribulations to punch through to the kind of redemption American Sniper has given to her family. According to her husband’s killer she lost her husband to a man who simply wanted Kyle’s F-250 pick-up truck. Such a stupid loss of life over something so trivial would impact Taya forever. Fast forward to the present where pinheaded attorneys are telling her not to jeopardize the murder case by promoting American Sniper. Fortunately she has enough experience after getting burned over the Ventura case to know that she will likely not get justice in the Eddie Ray Routh case either. The best thing she could do for her husband was to get behind American Sniper—and let the legal world choke on itself.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sniper-killer-traded-soul-victims-new-truck-article-1.1255561

Taya’s story is only one of the many circling the American Sniper movie. Her heroics in the face of much misery is defiantly fuel behind the quality of the movie. Eastwood has obviously captured her spirit in his film—and it makes the movie much better. It is just one example of the kind of extraordinary feats surpassed to bring American Sniper to the big screen and why it is such a triumph to see the movie getting so much support from the public. Any other director but Eastwood would have been caught up in all the emotional drama and the film could have languished for years in development—because of all the legal cases pending. But because of Eastwood, filming started, concluded, and was distributed before the lawyers could find ways to stumble the project—which is another miracle in itself. Legal fights, grieving family members and a left-leaning Hollywood society violently against the end result. Only Clint Eastwood could have made the picture.

Like all parasites who want to suddenly hook their wagon to the star of the deceased Chris Kyle, Ventura is at it again claiming that because of his defamation suit against Taya American Sniper had a tremendous boost in sales—so he wants some of that money too. The link to the story is below. Ventura’s friend Alex Jones claims that Eastwood’s American Sniper is a giant hoax where the U.S. government is using its soldiers as propaganda pieces only to discard them when they cease to be useful. Jones utters that the whole project is designed to brainwash the American people that war is good for our society. But it is Taya who will laugh last as America has her back by supporting American Sniper at the box office. Living well is the best revenge, and because of her heroic stand against so many bullies after her husband’s death, she will get that redemption. And she deserves it.

http://controversialtimes.com/news/another-lawsuit-jesse-ventura-back-in-court-against-chris-kyle-american-sniper/

http://www.infowars.com/american-sniper-exposed-as-giant-hoax/

For every ticket sold in favor of watching American Sniper, a bad guy somewhere weeps. So for God’s sake, see the movie as many times as you can possibly can.   Taya Kyle deserves the wind in her sails that will come from it. Yeah, Chris Kyle was and is an American hero. But, his wife in many different ways was just as heroic. And that is a truly magnificent story worthy of a sequel to American Sniper.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

‘American Sniper’: Breaking $105 Million on opening weekend and being a sheepdog

Is American Sniper the best Clint Eastwood film he’s ever done? Probably. Look, I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood so it would be hard for him to do wrong in my eyes. I knew he’d do a great job with the Chris Kyle story of the deadliest sniper in US history. I had the entire movie laid out in my mind before I even saw it, and knew it would be great. I know Eastwood’s directorial style so well that nothing really surprised me except that he’s currently 84 years old and can still make such vigorous movies of immense complexity appear so simple. He’s a jazz musician and a very wise old man who still has the heart of a 35-year-old lumberjack which was one of his odd jobs way back in the day before his acting career took off. He’s a man’s man and most women would succumb to his seductions even in his advanced years—and he knows it. He knows that hunger from women for real men and most of his movies embody that spirit in some regard—which is why women also like his movies. He appreciates that masculine quality in other men and knows precisely how to capture it on-screen. He did it marvelously in Heartbreak Ridge, Grand Torino, White Hunter Black Heart, even in Million Dollar Baby where the protagonist was a female. Eastwood has a way of getting to the primal raw nature of what it means to be a living human being from a free country.  I probably have watched Eastwood over the years as closely as Bradley Cooper watched actual footage of Chris Kyle to portray him in this fantastic movie so accurately. Yet even so there were parts of the movie where you just forget to breathe because it was so spectacularly good. I think Clint Eastwood and only he could have made this movie. It was essentially an update of the very first Dirty Harry movie played out against the Iraq war—at least in how Eastwood approached the subject. It was raw, primal, honest, sentimental, and gloriously American in spirit.

American Sniper made $105 million dollars over the Martin Luther King Day holiday which far exceeded the box office predictions—by like $60 million. It broke every box office record there was for a January movie release, and even some in every other release month—even the Mel Gibson epic, The Passion, which seemed outrageously high at $83 million. I wasn’t going to see the picture until the buzz died off a bit—because I knew what to expect. But, when I read the box office take in USA Today Sunday morning that the film was trucking quickly by the $90 million dollar mark and not slowing down I knew something phenomenal was happening. Clint Eastwood had been tapping on the glass of a uniquely American concept for a movie for nearly five decades and he had finally struck gold with American Sniper. Eastwood didn’t star in the film at all, but unquestionably, he was there in the stellar performance behind Bradley Cooper and Chris Kyle himself. As Kyle whizzed in and out of bullets on the screen and paraded down Iraqi streets with his “Punishers” bearing the emblem of the popular character from graphic novel fame—Eastwood had hit the tap-root of American consciousness and had placed it on the screen for one of the first times in cinematic history. He captured and answered on the silver screen the debate of our day—should America have been in Iraq, what makes Americans free, and what does it mean to be a good person, father, husband, brother, friend and patriot? American Sniper was a movie that a majority of the people in the United States wanted to see, and needed to see through many years of guilt and embarrassment by politicians who have squandered away the pride of our nation. Eastwood captured that spirit in a bottle through the honesty of Chris Kyle, and unleashed it like a cyclone across American movie screens with the pent-up energy of a Tasmanian Devil.

It had been a long time since I had seen a movie sell out at the theater. The last time that I can recall was the 1997 film Titanic. So my wife and I planned to see the American Sniper during the playoff games late on Sunday January 18, 2015 figuring that it would be easier to get seats in our Cincinnati movie theater during that time frame. But just to be safe we arrived three hours early and discovered that the 3:30 shows were almost sold out upon our arrival. So we snagged our tickets, did some shopping to fill the hours from then until the movie began, and braced for an onslaught of movie goers lining up as early as 2:30 to be let in to see the film which showed an hour later. It only took about 20 minutes once they started seating to fill up the giant Showcase Cinema Theater from back to front with no spaces in between. I had not seen such a thing in years. American Sniper was having its “Chick-fil-A” moment—middle America was voting against Hollywood with a ticket for the Eastwood product—and they were doing it to a consensus of stunned industry insiders who were bewildered by the epic show of support for an R-rated war movie filled with profanity and drama. This wasn’t The Avengers or Transformers where children helped make up the audience. This was a strictly adult crowd showing up stone faced to support a rare piece of Americana placed before them by a legendary director depicting a real-life American hero.

http://www.thecelebritycafe.com/feature/2015/01/clint-eastwood-bradley-coopers-american-sniper-stuns-box-office-passes-90-million

I will likely give a more formal review after thinking about it for a few days—because there is a lot to cover. But for this examination, understanding the massive show of support for American Sniper is the key subject. What was it about the film that had people showing up in such an unpredictably profound way? Well, during the movie I thought a lot about what Liam Neeson said after his release of last week’s hit movie, Taken 3, where he stated after the terrorist killings in Paris:

“First off, my thoughts and prayers and my heart are with the deceased, and certainly with all of France, yesterday. I’ve got a lot of dear friends in Paris. There’s too many fucking guns out there. Especially in America. I think the population is like, 320 million? There’s over 300 million guns. Privately owned, in America. I think it’s a fucking disgrace. Every week now we’re picking up a newspaper and seeing, ‘Yet another few kids have been killed in schools.'”

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/14/liam-neeson-america-guns_n_6472266.html

Then I watched Chris Kyle and the background he came from navigating house to house searches in Iraq and dealing which what was termed as sheer evil in the movie, and comparing the conditions of Iraq to those in America. Then it became quite clear why so many people showed up to support American Sniper. What made those barbarians in Iraq evil was that they allowed dictators to breed in their culture who then sought to spread that desire to the distant shores of America. Kyle said it in the movie, “You don’t want these people in San Diego do you?” Evil had to be fought on their soil and only there so that through passivity they didn’t end up in our back yard—as they have been doing more often under President Obama’s presidency. Terrorist cells were emboldened to attack New York under the lackadaisical watch of President Clinton, another Obama type liberal. It was eight years of 90s liberalism that gave those terrorists courage as President Bush was in his first year of office when 9/11 occurred. So a failure to bring in the kind of people who Chris Kyle represented to meet that evil far away from home to keep the fight away from the shopping malls, businesses, and industry flourishing under capitalism did not happen as it should have in the late 90s. Leaving the Iraqi people alone didn’t make them less evil. What made them evil was that they wished to impose their view of the world and understanding upon others through force which is the best definition of evil that there is. America wasn’t trying to impose its world view—it tries to free people from their oppressors. Liberals thought the war in Iraq was about oil, but it wasn’t. America has its own oil and the threat of using it is what is currently driving the prices down for our transportation costs. Iraq was always about confronting evil which America helped put in power—and had to rectify morally. For a society, an individual, or a political party to be evil, it must trample on the rights of individual thought and action to achieve its goal. People like Chris Kyle were raised to know the difference between good and evil—so he couldn’t turn away from it when he saw it. He felt compelled to kick evil’s ass wherever it was out of a natural inclination given to him by his upbringing. There are many people just like him being born and raised right now who think the same. Chris Kyle is a uniquely American type of man. You wouldn’t find him in Ukraine, or France, or anywhere in China because those cultures do not make people like him. He was born and made in America to recognize evil for what it is—and to eliminate it.

America is the freest place on earth. There is evil trying to embed itself in virtually every institution—but with free speech, and the right to bear arms, it is impossible for institutions to gain the kind of traction seen in Iraq, Iran, or China over their populations. The people in America simply won’t put up with it. Currently Americans put up with a lot, they put up with a terrible president in Obama, they put up with the entire leftist political platform points, and they put up with mismanagement of government from our schools all the way up to the highest levels of congress. But they have a breaking point and to ease their minds they have their gun cabinets in their homes to remind them if all hell breaks loose, that they are still in control. It is within that 300 million gun culture that families make heroic people like Chris Kyle. It wasn’t the military that made the man great. They simply refined the kind of man who Kyle already was. It was a father who told him there were three types of people in the world – the sheep, the wolves who prey on them, and the sheepdogs who protect the herd. His father further said, “and we aren’t raising any sheep, and we aren’t raising any wolves. Do you understand boy?”

America is the sheepdog to the rest of the world struggling to climb from under centuries of oppression. In American Sniper there isn’t one apology to the fact, which was so refreshing for the first time in a modern war movie. In the great war films of the past like the Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Saving Private Ryan there is always a bit of guilt associated with the actions of American troops—a questioning of whether or not they had a right to be involved in a far away land or not. In American Sniper there is no such guilt—there is only a resounding YES! Kyle as portrayed in the film signs up for four tours in Iraq against the wishes of his family because he felt it was his job to kill Mustafa, the Olympic sharp shooter working with the Al Qaeda forces. Al Qaeda had put an $180,000 bounty on Kyle’s head which Mustafa intended to collect. The entire film was essentially a cat and mouse game between those two rivals. Kyle felt he could not leave the battlefield with someone as dangerous as Mustafa on it killing American troops. It was impossible for his wife to understand at the time, but it was something Kyle as a man had to do, just as Dirty Harry Callahan had to hunt down and kill Scorpio in the 1971 cop drama. It was the same masculine necessity that uniquely only Americans seem to understand. And the reason they understand it is because they too have vaults of guns in their bedrooms, and can taste the kind of freedom that gives such ideas places to grow. People certainly don’t think that way in Ireland, England, France, or even Spain. They certainly don’t think that way in China, Russia, or anywhere in Malaysia, India, or even Australia. They only think that way in America because the gun culture gives liberty a place to sink roots and contemplate the effects of evil.

Most of the world suffers from indecision and political derision because they don’t have the ability to defend themselves from evil. They, like the Iraqi people, are left to always barter with evil to keep their loved ones from being killed or maimed. They don’t have the luxury to fight back against evil if the circumstances mandate it. For people like Chris Kyle, he learned how to spot evil, and stop it in its tracks from his family heritage driven in America by a gun culture. That is the reason that Chris Kyle was in Iraq, and why his “Punishers” were there to inflict justice upon evil as defined by common sense.

Eastwood with his big shoulders and typical brashness knew exactly what he was doing when he shot American Sniper. He knew the faces of most of the Hollywood elite would melt off when he showed the Iraqi people as savages who deserved to have their asses kicked if they were aligned with Al Qaeda. He knew that the progressive usurpers currently within American culture from the academic high towers of snobby scrutiny would decry him and his film to the end of the earth. But Eastwood like Chris Kyle was willing to weave through the bullets to “punish evil” as it is not only in Iraq, but in our own missteps stateside. Eastwood is shooting again not as the Dirty Harry character, but as one of the finest directors in cinema history and this time his targets are soothsayers like Seth Rogan, Michael Moore, and all the rest of the progressive despots who want to pave the flyover states with six feet of asphalt to bury the gun culture of America forever and the freedoms that come with it. To support Eastwood in this quest America showed up and surprised everyone with a show of force that has evil quivering in its boots right now from Hollywood mansion to mansion wondering what on earth they are going to do about the 84-year-old man who can out shoot them, out-wit them, and out-work them in every phase. Not even blockbuster film directors like James Cameron will be able to criticize the fabulous work of Eastwood or his newly found box office prowess. Because American Sniper is a statement from Eastwood to the future of his country—his movie will go down as one of the greatest war movies of all time. But more than that, it will be the defining film that articulates to the present and future generations what it means to be an American. We are the sheepdogs of the world. The sheep may not appreciate it all the time and the wolves certainly hate us, but we are what we are, and we have the guns to do the job because of capitalism. Pure and simple. American Sniper is made for the sheepdogs and by the box office numbers there are a lot of them hidden in the woodworks—and have always been there. They were just ignored by Hollywood as it was hell-bent on social change and reform. American Sniper has exposed those home-grown insurgents for the intentions they have always had.

American Sniper is like a nice shower after several days of riding in the hard desert. It felt good and clean to see such wonderful articulation of values which are uniquely American—without an ounce of apology. If you’ve seen it, go see it again. If you haven’t yet, what’s stopping you!

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development