I understood Melania Trump’s outfit for the Inauguration. Retribution comes to mind, and appropriately so. Nobody should expect to get away with what they did to the Trumps under any circumstances. And being a person who expresses herself through fashion, I understood Melania’s message clearly. She’s the same age as my wife, so culturally, we all share the same references, and the first thing that came to my mind was the Clint Eastwood film, High Plains Drifter. Melania says what she needs to tell through fashion, and she was holding the Bibles for Trump at his swearing-in; her look was undoubtedly expressive. It was stylish and, for most people, very stunning. Indeed, she did not take the safe road. However, after I saw Trump’s speech to Davos, I knew precisely what they were doing, and it was undoubtedly the appropriate message.
Now, what have I been telling you all along?
You can tell that, as a couple, they have talked about this moment and what they would do if they had the opportunity to return to the White House. And by the way that Trump spoke to the very people who had plotted his destruction, the people I call the Desecrators of Davos, Trump knew what he needed to do. With her big wide-brimmed hat, Melania Trump might have been the visual expression of President Trump himself. But President Trump personally delivered the much-deserved rebuke right in front of their faces to some of the most evil people on planet Earth. He was doing on a large scale what the movie High Plains Drifter did in a fictional sense to a much smaller town called Lago, set in the old west and the efforts of western expansion that explored the challenges psychologically of a people trying to settle in a remote part of the world while trying to manage the temptations of a lack of law and order.
In the movie, a wonderfully psychological thriller that was one of the early directing efforts by Clint Eastwood, which he also starred in, a stranger rides into town, and he appears to have very superior gunfighting skills, for which the city wants to hire him to protect them from three bandits that are about to be released from jail. The three criminals want revenge for what the town did to them. They hired them to kill Marshal Duncan over mining rights to the city, and in the process, the entire town was a little bit guilty of the murder. Once the killers were put in jail for the crime, they swore revenge upon release, which is why the town now was seeking to kill the killers by hiring the strange gunman, Clint Eastwood. It’s a very good movie and certainly one of my favorites. I don’t mind saying that I loved the film so much that it inspired the contents of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, because, in both cases, the contents are about much more than what is shown at face value. I talk about being a ghost in my book and life because of the lessons I learned from that great movie, High Plains Drifter. You can often do much more in the world as a ghost than as a flesh and blood, earthly figure. The town is paralyzed with fear and guilt by all they have done to the point where they will do anything the Stranger says. Anything. And when I saw Trump talking to the Davos crowd, it was the same thing as Clint Eastwood showed in that movie, where the entire town served him, hoping to erase their guilt for past crimes by committing all new ones and appeasing a power they recognize as being superior to them.
Of course, the Stranger punishes everyone in town who has revenge coming. And we find out at the end that the Stranger all along looks to have been the ghost of Marshal Duncan. He knew what he was doing because he was the person that they had all killed. And he came back to life to get revenge on them all. And I know that look on Trump’s face, the confidence that comes from surviving death and getting another chance to get revenge on the people who hurt you. I try not to make all these stories about me, but I use my personal experience to give a foundation to any testimony. And I know what it feels like to survive circumstances where you were almost killed but are spared by the Armour of God to bring to the world revenge in the way that God understands it. It is a very satisfying feeling when you realize that God puts his hand on you to be his instrument of retribution. And, after the assassination attempts against Trump right before the election, you can tell he’s feeling it. I have walked away from major, major, very devastating car crashes at high speeds, over 100 miles an hour, and slept like a baby that was unharmed just a few hours later except for a few bumps and bruises. I have been shot at lots of times. I have had many plots for my demise fail spectacularly by people who are very good at those kinds of things, and I was able to make complete fools of them over and over again. It was amazing that Trump’s assassin missed his head by just millimeters. Such a close call certainly gets your attention and shows divine intervention. But I can count more than 50 times I have experienced such a rare occurrence, which is statistically impossible once, let alone that much. I don’t think about it much daily, but watching Trump at Davos reminded me of all those times, and statistically speaking, it’s far more than luck at work. That’s why I talk about the Book of Ephesians so much; it is the best literature in the world at describing the power and need for the Armour of God. It’s a very real thing for a few select people fortunate enough to experience it. But to feel it, you essentially have to face death and survive. And once you realize that the hand of God is on you, you fear nothing.
In High Plains Drifter, it isn’t revealed until the end of the movie that the Stranger is the ghost of Marshal Duncan, which then explains why he knew so much about the characters he was torturing throughout the movie, using the guilt of their crimes as a weapon to destroy them personally. It also explains why the Stranger had no fear of death because he had already gone through that ordeal and was resurrected by the hand of God to enact revenge on the wicked. It’s a wonderful story, and retribution is a morality of its own. Trump, dealing with the most sinful people on planet Earth all collected together, did precisely what he needed to do. And all they could do was sit there and take it. Trump, with the Armour of God on him, knew what they had all done, and he was intent on making them all choke on their guilt. This is precisely what happened at Davos at the end of his speech. They clapped like fools toward their own demise. And Trump earned the right to do it because they tried to kill him many times over. He survived to come back to the White House and give retribution to all those worldwide who were in on the many crimes against him. Whether it’s a little fictional town called Lago from High Plains Drifter or the entire global community of politicians and business leaders plotting to rule over us all, retribution was the theme. And a well-deserved theme defined best by Melania Trump’s fantastic attire at the Inauguration. A retribution well deserved by an executor of justice for which Trump became the Hell-hound from the grave to bring justice to those who deserve severe punishment for the crimes they committed against all humanity.
It wasn’t always how it is now; there used to be good movies, and they were far from woke. And it surprised me when Steve Bannon brought up one of my favorite movies on his podcast, the Warroom, at the end of the year in 2023 because I don’t hear many people who even know what it is. But it reminded me of several things, one of which is the answer to all the woke options out there. Going into 2024, the best movie ever made that deals specifically with the 2024 election is Magnum Force, with Clint Eastwood from the five-movie Dirty Harry series. It is a unique plot that deals with police corruption, crime and punishment, and doing the right thing while society is trying to drag you into doing all the bad stuff. It also reminded me of how I raised my children; every year on New Year’s Eve to bring in the new year, we would watch the Dirty Harry marathon, where we watched three of the movies on New Year’s Eve, then two more on New Year’s Day. But among them all, my favorite of the five, was Magnum Force, and still is. So it certainly got my attention when Steve Bannon recommended the movie on the Warroom. Magnum Force is about that fine line between right and wrong and features a group of cops who go rogue to eradicate the bad guys, which has evolved into real life dramatically in the current FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies as discussed through the Trump administration’s exposure of their various antics. It’s much worse in real life than in 1974 San Francisco when the movie occurred. But the problems are the same and people can watch those movies and see how things have gone wrong today because those movies were warnings all those years ago of what was coming.
When people ask me, which happens every week, why I’m not in the movie business, the answer is that I wanted to make movies like Magnum Force, and Hollywood isn’t built to accommodate those movies anymore. I think it’s great that there was a period when movies like Dirty Harry movies were made, and they certainly provide a quick check that we are not all crazy compared to how things are now. I used to show the film to my kids and their boyfriends, then spouses, every year, not just for entertainment but to show them how values have evolved and that America was once a place that made movies like Magnum Force to express ideas through entertainment that were valuable to the audience. When we look at what San Francisco has become, the warning signs were always right there, and they were apparent to me when the world was still good and made sense. I was showing my kids these movies to close out a year and usher in the new one to teach them values, which looks to have worked. They are emotionally solid people even now, even the tag-alongs who emerged from those relationships. They might have thought of me as old fashioned at the time, a dad showing them old Clint Eastwood movies that were much slower than the quick-cut movies of today filled with woke messaging. But they watched them to appease me and to spend time with me. And even now that they are in their 30s, it’s become a running joke in our family that they still remember and value.
What’s so special about Magnum Force, directed by Ted Post and written by excellent writers, is that it deals with corruption and how it happens, either by the side of the criminals or the cops who are supposed to enforce the law to keep society together. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character finds himself locked in a vice between those two forces, representing the very fine line that often presents itself in these cases that is more than realistic. When I was growing up, I wanted nothing more than to make my movies using Magnum Force as an example. But I was so frustrated with the business because it had changed so much that I moved to other things. My brother lived in California for a while and has some producer credits, so we know what we are talking about when we say it; they don’t make movies like Magnum Force anymore for many reasons. One big one is that movie writers are too busy getting lattes on the Santa Monica Pier rather than living life and letting that experience show in their art. Most of these young people don’t even know how to shoot a gun because they have grown up in such a woke period. They don’t have the experience to write a gritty crime drama like Magnum Force because they don’t understand the complexities of life, so how can they write about it? But compared to what’s being made today, Hollywood is way off the mark. But it wasn’t always that way. If you want to see great movies, they used to make them. You don’t have to put up with the crap they make now. You can always watch the old films about real problems unfolding way ahead of their time.
I did run into someone who knew about these old movies, even though it’s a mild influence. But someone noticed that one of my carry guns is a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum, the most powerful production handgun in the world. It used to be the .44 Magnum by S&W back in the days of the Dirty Harry films, and I always found his reasoning for using such a large weapon for police work compelling. I carry an S&W .500 Magnum with the extra long barrel, over 8 inches, because so many of the bad guys these days are wearing Call of Duty body armor they can get off Amazon, and they can get armor for their cars, so it makes sense. You don’t want bullets bouncing off windows and off of people, even in populated areas where people could be hurt subsequently. You have to hit what you aim at, which is a theme of the Dirty Harry movies in general, which are about so much more than movies made now are. But for a sanity check, most of America used to think in the way that the Dirty Harry movies are represented, and I would argue that they still do. Watching them now, they are much better than the garbage produced in Hollywood. And I would say that you have options if you are looking for entertainment and a way to understand the themes and actions coming at us in 2024. Watching Magnum Force will be far more valuable than the nightly news. And you may learn something. It had warnings that people scratched their heads at in the past, including John Wayne, who thought Clint Eastwood’s character was too cynical and not “pro-American” enough. But as we have learned over the next 50 years, what the Dirty Harry movies were all about is what we see now. And it can be scary unless you know how to walk that fine line, which is the point of the movies entirely.
As I said in my review of Richard Jewell, the movie—it was an important film that every Trump supporter should see. For that matter, everyone should see the new Clint Eastwood film as it tackles an obscure truth that we live with every day, the nature of power to corrupt those worst to rise to the top of institutionalism. In a society that values perpetual bootlickers and places them in the highest ranks of institutionalism, it should never be questioned why things go wrong yet they do, and that is the precise point of the film. I think its important to mention that it was distributed by Warner Bros. which is the same company that produced Joker, which I thought was the most destructive film I have seen in a long time. In many ways this is the answer to the questions brought up in the Joker and its nice to see our 1st Amendment hard at work. These are the types of choices that we should have as a free society.
I have serious doubts however that Richard Jewell will win any Academy Awards which obviously the studio is hoping to get nominated for. The real-life performances provided in Richard Jewell were certainly worthy of awards, but the politics of the matter is the problem. This film was certainly a direct offering to the 60 million and more Trump voters who have been wanting for a long-time options from the kind of world that went after Richard Jewell cruelly, and unjustly. Even with all we know about our modern FBI and its connections to the Department of Justice, what we have read through the direct text messages of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok which could have easily have been the plot line of Richard Jewell, we are still reluctant to name the beast and call a spade a spade. The point of the movie was a good one, and worthy of best picture of the year for Warner Bros. but the question is one that no institutionalist wants to ask. Rather, they will prefer the Joker’s anarchy to the legitimate questioning of power through constitutional means offered by Richard Jewell.
I generally only have time to talk to really smart people professionally, so it amazes me during the holidays every time, when I get a chance to talk to normal people—people who care more about Ohio State football than the trivial complexities of Freudian legalizations wrapped with the bows of institutionalism which ultimately had a love affair with Karl Marx a long time ago and are still spawning children of thought to this very day. I don’t enjoy talking to those kinds of people with small talk because they don’t care about the big things in life, and for me, those are the only important things. Big things. It was simply stunning to hear so many normal people not understand why Nancy Pelosi is holding back on sending her impeachment votes to the senate, or how people don’t understand the relevance of what Peter Strzok did in the FBI, or the nature of James Comey the former FBI Director who was drunk with power, conspired with anti-Trumper John McCain to attempt a coup right in front of our faces, and expect not to get caught. For many, they just don’t have the mental horsepower to think about such things so they don’t even try and it never ceases to baffle me to their lack of curiosity.
But then someone like Clint Eastwood comes along and nails it with great simplicity pulled into focus in a way only a master storyteller could. Richard Jewell is a far better film not just politically, but ethically than Joker even without the fancy soundtrack and dynamic cinematography. The ultimate question is asked, and the protagonists provide the answer through the direction of the story, which in this case is even more difficult because a lot of the players in the story are still alive and it was true. Can we trust our media, can we trust our government, and the answer is no. Should we move toward anarchy and throw the baby out with the bathwater as they did in the Joker—of course not. That is what made the Joker a cheap shot where Richard Jewell was a true examination to a very modern problem within our functioning republic.
There were several very powerful moments in the film including at the beginning when the attorney friend of Richard Jewell gives him a hundred-dollar bill and says it’s a quid pro quo which everyone should know by now what it means. Jewell says he understands the meaning of the term and its then that Watson Bryant says that he expects in exchange for the Benjamin that Jewell will not become corrupt with power as he fulfills his dream of becoming a police officer. And in several scenes behind Bryant is a sign that says, “I fear my government more than I fear terrorists.” Bryant’s girlfriend and assistant is from Russia and is always there to remind him that likely the government is lying to protect itself as she is the first to believe the story of Richard Jewell’s innocence. And of course, at the end of the film when Jewell finally sticks up for himself, when he leaves the FBI interrogation with Bryant behind him smiling the door to the glass room closes with a the camera fixated on the reverse image of the FBI logo. This was a film that openly questions our government and for that, the Academy should be applauding. Unfortunately, most members of the media culture are precisely like Olivia Wilde’s character of Kathy Scruggs.
It’s movies like this that ultimately educate those who don’t read many books and are not intellectually curious about the world around them. They just want their chicken wings and their Bowl game football to distract them from moment to moment without the impediments of questioning the validity of it all. Trump supporters have been questioning things for a long time and that 60 million number is growing. Hollywood doesn’t necessarily want people questioning things, but I did find it extremely interesting that Leonardo DiCaprio was one of the producers of Richard Jewell. I always watch the credits of a new movie at the theater to the very last one, because there is a lot to learn from doing so, and what I see happening in Hollywood is a change in focus. Even when a terribly irresponsible movie like the Joker is made and the executives at Warner Bros. are betting chips on several potential winners that may be politically opposed—they all make money for the studio which is the name of the game, a trend can be seen emerging. I don’t think Richard Jewell would have been made before the Trump election. Nobody would have understood how to play the parts because our assumption of behavior would not compute the evil it takes to behave the way the FBI and the media did.
There was a scene where Bobi Jewell watched on television the terrible things that Tom Brokaw said about her son and in many ways that was a very powerful scene because that was all of us watching television every day. A few years ago we looked at figures in the media and we liked them until we have witnessed them turning on us over the 2016 election and it has been shocking, even very painful. People who don’t pay much attention to these things do so for the same reason that the Jewell family did, even if they were desperately naive. Bobi Jewell told her son to work hard at defending justice and he believed it whole heartedly, like most of us do and when faced with the terrible evil that those working in the media and the FBI are just as flawed as the worst of us, it is a grim reality that hits home painfully. And that is the essence of this great movie Richard Jewell. It tackles a great pain with a youthful buoyancy found only among very high intellects, but it doesn’t talk down to anybody. Its just a story that has a hard truth attached to it, and for that, it deserves the best awards that it can get. But to ol’ Clint Eastwood, I would think that the best reward he could receive is that people watch the movie and learn something from it. If not at the theater, then when it streams soon from our home televisions. And that is something that every single American should do at least once.
Since the heroics of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos on that fateful train to Paris where they stopped a terrorist attack, I have to admit that I have been hoping to have the same encounter whenever I travel. It must have been a very gratifying experience to be able to beat the shit out of a terrorist. That’s why I think the movie version of that famous event will do extraordinary business, because in America I think my feelings are quite common when it comes to terrorism, whether it was the neighbor to a church in Texas who stopped the shooter that unleashed a barrage of bullets into the innocent with a gun of his own, or the countless episodes in just the last few months where law enforcement and private citizens have done the same the moment they heard that, crack, pop, crack of .223 bullets splitting the air toward dreadful intentions. Leave it to Clint Eastwood to capture that American gusto in his newest film The 15:17 to Paris, which is set to release on February 8th 2018.
I’ve ridden on trains through France, just as that trailer set up the story, and I experienced very much the same emotions—especially in regard to the European baby Cokes. Eastwood is a master of the movie making craft at his mid-80s maturation and nobody does the little things better these days than him. I said it at the time that when Eastwood decided to make a movie of the book written by the three heroes that he’d do great things with the project—and he did by casting the three guys to play themselves in the movie. That took extraordinary confidence on his part and I think the result that ends up on-screen will be incredible. America needs a story like this right now and especially under a Trump White House, the cultural phenomena that it has a chance to become are ripe for the exemplary.
It’s obvious that Eastwood is going to explore the how and why these three ordinary kids become the heroes they did—and I’m quite certain that the answer will reside in the philosophy of Americanism. I remember when the guys were being praised after the event around the world for their heroism and thinking—why them? There were over 500 people on that train that day, and why was it three Americans who stopped the terrorist? Well, I know the answer, but the world has been banging its head against the rails trying to come to grips with it. The reason of course is that we make Americans from the time they are little kids into their adulthoods with a sense of self-purpose—with an assumption that they can do and be whatever they want in life. In Europe they are raised quite differently, because they have a history of bloodlines and aristocracy that keeps them from assuming that their destinies are largely in their own hands.
The idea that an individual can make a difference and do anything is an American concept. Not everyone in America gets it obviously, but the concept is there for anyone to answer and in the case of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos, they certainly did and Eastwood’s direction for the film will no doubt explore that. People inclined to fate might otherwise just sit there and let the events of terrorism do what they will do—and people will live or die accordingly. But changing that fate is something that you can see in the eyes of Spencer Stone in that preview—which is what Eastwood was obviously after when he decided to cast them in a movie about themselves. He wanted to show audiences what that looks like—to believe to their very core that if they wanted to change the fate of something, then individual action was the key to doing so. Some wimpy actor can try to mimic that behavior, which is how Eastwood pulled off the great work he did for American Sniper. But with something like this, in the age of terrorism—how best to combat terrorism but to teach people not to be so damn afraid of every little thing. So bullets are coming at you. Maybe some hit you. So what? But for a chance to beat the crap out of a terrorist and stop the death of hundreds of people who might otherwise have international consequences—who wouldn’t want the opportunity to do what these three guys did? I’d love the chance.
Clint Eastwood as I’ve said before is my favorite movie director—he has been for a while and he’s only become better over time. So I’d go see this movie regardless of what it was about and who was in it. Every film he does could be his last, so he appears to be putting a lot of love into each one of them while he still can—which is very admirable. But even for him the timing of this movie and the way it will be presented I don’t think could come under better circumstances. America has had a year of Trump. The economy is booming, tax cuts are coming, the Deep State is being exposed and cleansed of its activists—the world is respecting us again and terrorists are on their heels. All that has largely happened because normal every day Americans have had the courage to do their part in Making America Great Again and Clint Eastwood has captured that in this film.
Warner Bros. will have a massive hit on their hands when they release this, because we are all feeling it, and we want this story. Once we see this story it will only accelerate the process which explores what makes Americans different in a positive way—what makes them run toward danger when others cower and pray for mercy? That’s what The 15:17 to Paris is all about. As I said, I’ve been on a train across the French countryside, so I can relate to those opening shots. And in Paris which many consider to be one of the greatest cities in the world—I can say that Americans are very easy to spot. We think different, and not in a bad way. We like our Cokes bigger, we enjoy more food—we tend to be bigger and stronger as a result—but more than anything we like what we like when we want it, because we come from a culture that feeds that nature in us. We don’t like long lines—we don’t like public transportation—because we want to be in charge of our own destinies whenever possible—and we don’t like to be pushed around. When someone points a gun in our face, we have more than a few of us who will charge that attacker for the glory and pride of doing so no matter what might happen afterwards because we were born free and recognize quickly around the world where tyrants look to oppress—and we naturally don’t like it.
I will be one of the first in line to see The 15:17 to Paris. I can’t wait!
Rich Hoffman
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I was very excited to learn that the next movie Clint Eastwood is working on is the film version of the book by Spencer Stone, Anthony Salder and Alek Skarlatos, called The 15:17 to Paris. The book like the movie chronicles the heroics of those three young men as they stopped a terrorist attack on a train to Paris and became worldwide heroes before even turning 25 years of age. The heroes are all boyhood friends and the story will display how their lives intersected to that key point in history, and honestly, I think only Clint Eastwood could make the movie version of that book. Even more stunning to me was that Clint has cast the guys to play themselves in the film which is really unprecedented for a feature presentation. Clint Eastwood is such a good director, and the three guys so naturally charismatic that they all felt only those people could tell this very unique story and I’m excited about it. If anyone wondered what Clint Eastwood’s answer to American Sniper might be, this is certainly it. This film will play well in the core of America and will resonate around the world deeply concerned about terrorism.
But the news about that film reminded me that I had not yet seen Sully, Eastwood’s last movie about the Miracle on the Hudson where Chesley Sullenberger lost both engines in his commercial flight A320 aircraft over New York City and had to land somewhere. The trouble was that in New York at only a few thousand feet altitude there was no place to land without coming down on someone’s home or building. People were going to die one way or another unless Sully—the 40+ year airman working for US Airways could think of something fast—which he did. He landed the big plane on the Hudson River, literally the only place he could have and it was his unusually quick thinking that saved the lives of all 155 passengers on board.
Well, I knew the story and had read the book so I felt I knew what was going to happen so I waited for the film to come to home entertainment systems and was a little upset that it wasn’t available to rent on either the PlayStation network or Amazon Prime. A film that had done as well as it had should have had a decent rent value. It did make $238 million worldwide so it was inconvenient to me that it wasn’t easy to watch—because I wanted to see it over the weekend after I had heard the announcement of The 15:17 to Paris. So we went to Wal-Mart, bought the Blue-rey, and watched the film over some carry-out from Chili’s—and it was just a wonderful movie.
It is a shame that Clint Eastwood is now 87 years old because I want to watch movies directed by him for the next hundred years. The guy is just sooooo good at what he does. It’s the kind of thing that only a person with 60 years in the business could pull off. Eastwood does these big, gigantic true stories full of top-tier actors and production talent and he presents them as small piano music scores underplayed just right From a production stand-point Sully is a great movie. It was nicely paced, wonderfully photographed and compelling—even though we thought we already knew the story. But the NTSB needed someone to blame for the insurance claim made by US Airways and that was where the drama really kicked in and had me very interested. Again, I think only Clint Eastwood could have told this story in this way.
I love the competency of pilots. They are one of America’s greatest contributions to the word. They are by their very nature solid people who do not panic easily—otherwise they wouldn’t be pilots. Watching the bonus footage on the Blue-rey I learned that Harrison Ford is really the person who got the story rolling by introducing Sully’s book to the producer Frank Marshall. From there it found its way to Eastwood and production started right after American Sniper was making a lot of money at the box office for Warner Bros. But this was a movie about pilots from pilots and Harrison Ford may be known for his roles in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but in reality, what he really is, is a pilot. We might recall the time he landed his vintage aircraft on a golf course shortly after having engine trouble out of Santa Monica. His landing was very similar to Sully’s only he hit harder. Sully at least had water to soften the hit. So here were a couple of pilots bringing to light a story about pilots and securing a director who knew better than to get in the way of the story. What ends up on-screen is really a wonderful depiction of the employees of US Airlines—not just Chesley Sullenberger.
Eastwood also cast some of the real people to play in this film, like the air traffic controller and the ferry driver who first arrived on scene to rescue people from the stranded aircraft. What all these people did in a moment of crises was very admirable and Sully turned out to be one of the most inspirational films I have seen in a long time. I had a feeling it would be good which is why I went out of my way to see it, but it turned out to be one of those extraordinary movies that you just don’t forget. Eastwood not only captured the heroics of the Miracle on the Hudson, but he captured well the spirit of New York in a crisis. In the end, even though the National Transportation Safety Board had been looking for someone to blame they came around to seeing things Sully’s way and the story really became an interesting commentary on the nature of individualism standing up to the necessities of institutional collectivism without really making anybody look bad. The members of the NTSB were after all just doing their jobs in the context of it—but the situation was so extraordinarily individualistic that no part of that institutional framework had even considered such a possibility—even in hindsight during simulation runs.
History will remember these late in life film contributions of Clint Eastwood as being a very accurate commentator on American life. Taken as a three-part trilogy, first with American Sniper then with Sully culminating with The 15:17 to Paris Eastwood is telling of the same type of lost America that he did in his Dirty Harry movies—only now with the all-encompassing view of an 87-year-old man who has literally seen it all and done it all. And he’s telling these true stories in a way that will resonate for centuries. Clint Eastwood is proud of the role that America plays in the world and he finds that joy in these little stories without being cheesy, or over-the-top. Now that I’ve seen Sully and will likely watch it several more times, I am really excited for The 15:17 to Paris. That film may turn out to be the best of all and it will come out in a time where Trump is reshaping the concept of Americanism to fit Eastwood’s vision—and that has a lot of power—and it will happen at a perfect time.
It was refreshing to hear my favorite actor, Clint Eastwood say what many of us were already thinking. That is why he has had such a successful career as an actor and director of motion pictures primarily for Warner Bros. Studios. In his mid-80s, I admire him immensely and I relished it when in Variety magazine he stated when asked about why he was supporting Donald Trump for president that we are “living in the pussy generation.” He’s right. Millennials are a lost cause; many have grown up fatherless, or with step-parents raising them with guilt filled ambiguity. Most if not all of them have been raised in a liberalized public education system, a communist oriented college experience, and a progressive media that has turned their minds to mush. I feel so sorry for them—because I know many.
When I was a kid in the area of Liberty Township, Ohio it was rare to find a kid who went to my school who hadn’t had the experience of bailing hay for someone, grandparent, neighbor, friends parents—someone. Now, it is extremely rare for a kid to even know someone who has a farm. These kids of the pussy generation haven’t learned hard work from anybody, and it shows in their lives. When they are in their thirties and forties we are in a lot of trouble not only in America, but around the world because those kids are not ready for life. When people like Eastwood and Donald Trump—classic A Type “American bred men” are gone there won’t be anyone around to teach these kids and their kids anything—except old—outdated movies. We are literally on a precipice and a lot really hinges on this upcoming election. With Trump—there may be a chance to reverse course. Without Trump in the White House, the type of American men who made America an exceptional country will be lost forever.
That isn’t to dismiss the contributions of women. It’s just that the role a man plays in the raising of children and the nurturing they provide toward a positive society has been terribly neglected, and we are just beginning to see the horrendous cost to our society. But it’s not all bad—there are a lot of things that give me hope, and I’ll talk about those things because a lot really hinges on the point of a needle regarding the philosophic approach we all take in just the next couple of months. I just spent the night staying up and playing Uncharted 4’s multiplayer rounds with people around the world shooting guns and reeking havoc with glorious hoards of fantastic violence—and it was all great fun. There were thousands of people playing and picking their ammunition and with each round I played I was quite sure that socially these people might support superficial ideas that Hillary Clinton proposes against guns—but guns are very much a part of the life of Millennials. In spite of Apple’s desire to edit violence from their electronic devices, gun violence and play fighting has left the playgrounds of school yards and moved online much more furiously than I ever experienced as a kid.
I also watched secretly the Batman Versus Superman movie and I found I liked it a lot. I say secretly because my wife can’t watch that movie until the new JusticeLeague film comes out—for a lot of complicated reasons. I find I understand those characters in that DC universe and ironically, I can relate to their “meta human” condition. For instance, in regard to Wonder Woman—she turned away from mankind over a hundred years ago and she at the end of the film is contemplating if saving mankind is even worth it. Believe me, I can relate. I am on the same precipice right now. If Trump gets elected, I may stick around, if not, I will likely do as she did and turn toward my own personal Amazonian paradise and let the world rot. Like Batman, I find hope in the fight for mankind—but it’s an Ayn Rand destination with H.P. Lovecraft villains oozing from inter-dimensional space that is the threat. For mankind to turn toward socialism I would have to say “see you later.” That’s just stupid. I don’t want to live in that world. With these movies, the various films entertaining these young people, there is some rather deep philosophy going on that the Millennials are getting exposed to that is more sophisticated than the days of Clint Eastwood—so there is some positive evolution going on that is worth noting. It doesn’t get reported on the 24 hour news cycles, but it’s certainly obvious at 2:30 in the morning playing online games through PlayStation, that something special is going on. Movie characters had a huge impact on my upbringing and Clint Eastwood led the way.
I have many Clint Eastwood looks that I do subconsciously, burned in my mind as a kid that come out everyday—so I understand how much movies can have an impact on the minds of young people. Ultimately the people I looked up to as a kid were not the people who bailed hay, and worked on their own cars in the garage. To me, they were so common that I wanted to be more than them. So it was Hollywood heroes which I set my goals to. I fully expected myself to be Christopher Reeve’s Superman. My wife actually told me that after I proposed to her and I have expected myself to live up to that high image even today. What you end up with might be more Indiana Jones, but you set the goal high and get the most that you can out of life. That is the expectation anyway. But at least I had a foundation of goodness to start with. Most of these young people from the pussy generation don’t even have that—so all they get are images on a screen or in a video game—but they can’t easily apply those things to real life because the bar is now so low that everything good seems like just a fantasy to them. So they don’t even try. But I wouldn’t say they don’t strive for it—because honestly, they’d rather live in fantasy than reality for a reason—because reality has been taken from them by a political class hell-bent on global destruction.
I know young people have been taught socialism in school and in their political life— but when it comes to video games—they understand capitalism. There is no better incubator anywhere that proves Adam Smith’s capitalism better than the video game industry. Everything in video games is built on merit, individual gratification, and free market ideas—so the idea of capitalism is there—it will just take a special kind of person from the Executive Office to bring it out in our society. In that regard, Trump is the perfect presidential candidate for the Millennial generation. They just don’t know it yet.
I don’t know how long we get to have Clint Eastwood around, or even Donald Trump for that matter. Trump is only 15 years younger than Eastwood, and when they were kids, most everyone thought the way they do now—and that’s not nearly as bad as the progressive media has attempted to paint it. There is something special about men who know how to be men, and women who love them for it. Families grow and prosper based on that necessary biological formula, and when Eastwood and Trump aren’t around anymore—people like me will be as rare in the world as the superheros of the DC comic universe. Honestly, I don’t know many people in my age bracket who think the way I do about things and under me, there are even fewer more. Eastwood is truly part of a dying culture and before he’s gone, we should seriously ask if that’s really what we want. There are many days when I seriously wonder if it’s all worth it. When I listen to Trump, I think maybe it is worth the fight. But through a business day when I deal with people who are literally pussies—even though they may be male by sexual designation—the temptation to leave mankind to rot is quite strong. It’s not because those people are stupid, or even not as smart as I am—it’s because they are just pussies and not worth the time to deal with.
Thank goodness for Clint Eastwood—like the expert in human endeavor that he is, he knew just what to say at just the right time. Trump had been willing to fight everyone leaving Hillary out of the spotlight, which helped her a lot—because the less the pussy media talks about her, the better she does, which was always the strategy. Trump quickly got back on message and the results will show quite dramatically from here on out. It wasn’t Republicans like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich who helped Trump out—likely it was Clint Eastwood’s support through a Variety interview with some 86-year-old advice from Dirty Harry himself. Trump, like me, has obviously had a lot of Clint Eastwood in his life, so I bet he did listened to the wise old director. With that, there is still hope that mankind can be saved, and Trump is the special kind of person who could do it—because it will take someone like him to tap into those undiscovered wells of wealth within the population of Millennials. For a campaign that was finding the Hillary Clinton Democratic Organized Crime racket hard to deal with, Eastwood may have saved mankind one last time with a derogatory word that made everyone look in the mirror—including Donald Trump. And for that, I thank him immensely.
I have a lot to thank Merle Haggard for and I’ve been thinking about them all since his death on April 6th 2016. He had a lot of great songs, but for me the most important and my personal favorite was ‘Misery and Gin.’ I was 12 years old when I saw the movie Bronco Billy by Clint Eastwood for the first time. It was and still is one of my favorite movies. It hit me at just the right time in my life. Like the Clint Eastwood character in that movie, I was socially awkward up to that point, so I could easily relate to his quirkiness. But the tenacity for which the Bronco Billy’s character stuck to his beliefs even in spite of a changing world held a lot of appeal to me—so I watched it often. One particular time was as a late teenager, I had just been in a serious car accident running around with friends. The driver crashed in a manner that should have killed everyone. I had blood running down every part of my body, and every bone hurt. It was probably the most fun I had ever had watching a movie was that particular time. I had taped Bronco Billy on a new VHS tape off television and enjoyed watching it when I needed a lift—and as I breathed a sigh of relief at still being alive, the Bronco Billy message resonated intensely with me at that particular time. And of all the good songs in that movie it was ‘Misery and Gin’ which had taught me the most about life. Clint Eastwood wisely allowed Merle Haggard to have an extended section of the movie to sing his new song and rolled it nicely into the events of the movie—and I never forgot it.
‘Misery and Gin’ was everything that I didn’t want to be in life. It was a parody of itself, a country song that espoused all the misery that drinking, picking up loose women, and bars filled with cigarette smoke entailed. It was an extremely honest song and was one that I decided very early on that I wanted nothing to do with relating to lifestyle choices. It reminded me of several uncles I had who lived that life, and I thought they were losers. It gave me more conviction to turn away from that kind of life well before I was deep into puberty—and I am thankful for it. Regarding the night of the car accident, I was with a friend in a hot rod car after a Christmas party for the place we worked. That friend and I had a rival relationship; we would continually outdo each other on daring deeds. We took outlandish risks to satisfy the inner daredevil in us—such as playing high-speed chicken with cop cars, fighting the biggest bullies in whatever number they presented themselves and performing any risk of physical manner that opportunity allowed like jumping across high-rise roof tops. We did some really crazy things that should have killed us several hundred times over—and neither of us ever backed down from anything. But you can only push things so far. We both had a knack for coming out on top no matter how deep in trouble we got ourselves. I think I was around 17 at the time.
One thing I had on this friend is that he had difficulty with talking to girls and women. I was never afraid to talk to any girl anywhere about anything. It was very easy for me, but for him it was extremely difficult. He could never find the right words for the right girl. So I’d hang that over his head whenever I could. He’d respond by showing off more to compensate for his inequity. I had arranged for three very attractive girls to race us back to his house after this Christmas party so he was showing off in his hot rod car to do his part in impressing them. He let them get on the highway in front of us by nearly a mile and his plan was to blow by them at over 150 MPH—to show them how fearless and how powerful his car was—because we all know that girls like that kind of thing—the naughty side of them anyway. That’s when his angle was wrong and there was too much traffic on the road and his Chevy, Nova had too short of a wheel base to maneuver quickly in any kind of evasive action so he fishtailed wildly into a retaining wall after blowing by the girls and the car spun endlessly through the heavy traffic before going airborne then flipping end over end down the highway. Of course we didn’t wear seat belts in those days.
Miraculously we landed with the car pinned up against a retaining wall, nose down and pieces of the car strewn all over the highway. We were both alive and hadn’t hit any other cars somehow. But we were all sliced up from broken glass and the violence of the impacts. The police came and arrested my friend for reckless operation, endangerment and a whole host of other violations. I was free to go to the hospital. Instead, the three girls took me home and helped me get all patched up. I put duck tape on the deep cuts to hold the skin together and applied maple syrup to clot up the blood that was still dripping everywhere. After all that was over, I watched Bronco Billy after popping some popcorn and having a nice cold Coke. That is when I realized that life didn’t get any better than that. A good movie, a nice drink, and the thrill of being alive—all I needed was a nice woman to share that kind of thing with. I met my wife about 9 months later—and obviously now I live a lot like Bronco Billy did in that movie—by choice largely because I decided to after that night. It was a little more complicated than that, but looking back, it’s pretty easy to see.
Of that movie it was actually Merle Haggard’s song ‘Misery and Gin’ which communicated strongest to me. I decided I wanted no part of living anything like that life. While most everyone I have known before and since find appeal to that lifestyle—it doesn’t have to be a country honky-tonk, it could be a BW3s or a nightclub—drinking and hanging out with women who have made bad decisions in their lives and living a life of perpetual misery just wasn’t something I was going to do—and I never have. Even that night in the car, it was my love of life which was the secret ingredient that the girls liked so much and why it was so easy to get them to come along and do whatever I wanted—including patching me up. Of course nobody understood that—but I knew it was the promise of getting away from the misery and gin lifestyle that the girls had been trained which was their ultimate fate by a society stuck to that fate by their own bad decisions. I offered a release from that, something of a lottery ticket. It was very appealing to both the opposite sex, and the guy friends I had who clearly wanted to be a part of it whenever possible.
I used Bronco Billy to bond with my wife. We watched it several times a month during our early marriage and she came to understand the words of Merle Haggard very well. Without Bronco Billy, it might have been too difficult to convey to her what kind of life I intended to live. She wouldn’t have understood. But the mood of the entire movie was captured so nicely in that old Merle Haggard song and I have to thank him for it. It put my life in a positive direction very early. Without it, I probably would have still found a way, but it might have taken me a decade or two more to figure it all out. Because of his song, I was able to accelerate the process and apply it much more quickly than if it hadn’t of ever been made. So I’ll miss Merle Haggard. He made my life better in a lot of ways. He was certainly one of the greats and I’ll always be thankful. Listen to the words and maybe it will help you too.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'”
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!
The Overmanwarrior 