The Hollywood Jihad Against American Sniper

By Daniel Greenfield
1/25/2015

American Sniper is the movie that should not have existed. Even though the book was a bestseller, nobody in Hollywood wanted the rights.

 And why would they?

 The Iraq War already had an official narrative in Hollywood. It was bad and wrong. Its veterans were crippled, dysfunctional and dangerous. Before American Sniper, Warner Brothers had gone with anti-war flicks like Body of Lies and In the Valley of Elah. It had lost a fortune on Body of Lies; but losing money had never stopped Hollywood from making anti-war movies that no one wanted to watch.

Even the Hurt Locker had opened with a quote from leftist terrorist supporter Chris Hedges.

An Iraq War movie was supposed to be an anti-war movie. There was no other way to tell the story. Spielberg’s own interest in American Sniper was focused on “humanizing” the other side. When he left and Clint Eastwood, coming off a series of failed films, took the helm, it was assumed that American Sniper would briefly show up in theaters and then go off to die quietly in what was left of the DVD aisle.

And then American Sniper broke box office records that had been set by blockbusters like Avatar, Passion and Hangover Part II by refusing to demonize American soldiers or to spin conspiracy tales about the war. Instead of pandering to coastal progressives, it aimed at the patriotic heartland.

In a sentence you no longer expected to hear from a Hollywood exec, the Warner Brothers distribution chief said, “This is about patriotism and all the things people say the country is lacking these days.”

The backlash to that patriotism and the things the country is lacking these days didn’t take very long to form and it goes a lot deeper than snide tweets from Michael Moore and Seth Rogen. Academy members were reportedly passing around an article from the New Republic, whose author had not actually seen the movie, but still denounced it for not showing Chris Kyle as a bigoted murderer.

Hollywood progressives are both threatened and angered by American Sniper. And with good reason.

The most basic reason is the bottom line. Between Lone Survivor, Unbroken and American Sniper, the patriotic war movie is back. Hollywood could only keep making anti-war movies no one would watch as long as that seemed to be the only way to tackle the subject. Now there’s a clear model for making successful and respectful war movies based around the biographies and accounts of actual veterans.

Hollywood studios had been pressured by left-wing stars into wasting fortunes on failed anti-war conspiracy movies. Matt Damon had managed to get $150 million sunk into his Green Zone failed anti-war movie before stomping away from Universal in a huff. Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe had a real budget estimated at around $120 million, but had opened third after Beverly Hills Chihuahua whose titular tiny dog audiences preferred to either star and their political critiques.

But why spend over a hundred million on anti-war movies no one wants when American Sniper has already made over $120 million on a budget only half that much?

Hollywood progressives don’t look forward to having to write, direct and star in patriotic pictures and if they can’t destroy American Sniper at the box office, they can taint it enough that no major star or director will want to be associated with anything like it.

Adding to their undercurrent of anger is the way that American Sniper upstaged Selma at the box office and at the Academy Award nominations. Selma is a mediocre movie, but it was meant to be a platform for the usual conversation that progressives want to have about how terrible Americans are. Instead audiences chose to see a movie about how great Americans can be even in difficult times.

There’s nothing that threatens the left as much as that.

In a Best Picture lineup that includes the obligatory paeans to gay rights and the evils of racism, American Sniper distinctly stands out as something different. It displaces Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, the previous sure winner which had its obligatory drunken Iraq War veteran claiming that the war was fought for oil, with an authentic veteran instead of Hollywood’s twisted caricature of one.

American Sniper and Lone Survivor signal a shifting wind in which the focus of movies about the War on Terror moves from the organizational conspiracy theories that Hollywood liked to make to the personal narratives of the men who fought in them. Many of the smarter progressive reviews of American Sniper grapple with the fact that the time when they could even have their favorite argument is going away.

Progressives would like Dick Cheney to be the face of the war, but are forced to deal with a world in which Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell will be how America sees the conflict. The lens through which the left liked to view the war, its obsessions with WMD, Bush and the path to war, have been eclipsed by the rise of ISIS and the return of American veterans. Their worldview has become outdated and irrelevant.

It’s easier for the left to vent its anger on American Sniper than to deal with its own irrelevance. The most shocking thing about the movie is not any political statement, but its presumption in dealing with the Iraq War and the men in it as if it were WW2. It doesn’t confront the left; instead it acts as if the left isn’t there. It fails to acknowledge the entire worldview through which Hollywood dealt with the war.

The left spends most of its time living in its own bubble and is shocked when events remind it that the rest of the country does not really share its opinions and tastes. American Sniper’s success is one of those explosive wake-up calls and the left has responded to it with all the expected vicious pettiness.

A billboard for the movie was vandalized and attacks from lefty outlets like New Republic and Vox not only target the movie, but the dead man at the center of it. The smear campaign against Kyle has reached new lows, because in death he has become an even more powerful symbol of everything that the left hates.

Hollywood tried to “Vietnamize” Iraq in the popular imagination. American Sniper shows they failed.

Whether or not American Sniper wins the requisite number of Oscars, its impact on Hollywood and on ordinary Americans will not go away. The anti-war movie is in eclipse. The movies that tell the stories of the sacrifices that American veterans have made in the war against Islamic terrorists are rising.

Sultan Knish

The Media Fought Clint and Clint (and Romney) Won

by John Nolte 7 Sep 2012
 

 Our last remaining American icon has every right to be proud of how effective his now legendary appearance before the Republican convention has proven itself to be. First off, he made a complete fool of the elite media that spent the better part of four days running around like old, humorless, spinster hens clucking with phony well-I-never! indignation over Clint daring to mock The One.

Secondly, that mockery penetrated, drew blood, and is still drawing blood.

Thanks to Eastwood's hilarious and unforgettable stagecraft with an empty chair standing in for President Obama, overnight, Obama went from being an empty suit to, yes, an empty chair. So perfect was this piece of theatre that earlier this week there was a successful Empty Chair Day organized by the grassroots in New Media and, throughout the remaining days of this election, the specter of the "empty chair" will be synonymous with America's deflating enthusiasm for Obama and his inability to command the crowds he once did.

Today, Eastwood doubled down on how awesome he is by granting his first post-convention interview -- not to Diane Sawyer, not to "The Today Show, not to "60 Minutes" -- but to his hometown newspaper, "The Carmel Pine Cone."

What a snub to the corrupt media. Just when you think you can't love this man any more, right?

Here are some highlights:

Eastwood’s appearance at the convention came after a personal request from Romney in August, soon after Eastwood endorsed the former Massachusetts governor at a fundraiser in Sun Valley, Idaho. But it was finalized only in the last week before the convention, along with an agreement to build suspense by keeping it secret until the last moment.

Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign aides asked for details about what Eastwood would say to the convention.

“They vett most of the people, but I told them, ‘You can’t do that with me, because I don’t know what I’m going to say,’” Eastwood recalled.

And while the Hollywood superstar has plenty of experience being adored by crowds, he said he hasn’t given a lot of speeches and admitted that, “I really don’t know how to.” He also hates using a teleprompter, so it was settled in his mind that when he spoke to the 10,000 people in the convention hall, and the millions more watching on television, he would do it extemporaneously.

“It was supposed to be a contrast with all the scripted speeches, because I’m Joe Citizen,” Eastwood said. “I’m a movie maker, but I have the same feelings as the average guy out there.”

Remember, it's the very same media that constantly whines about how scripted these conventions are and always tries to paint Romney as the cautious, buttoned-down, boring white guy -- that refuses to give Romney credit for making the decision to put Eastwood in primetime and to allow him to wing it.  

Rather than credit Romney for this, Obama's Media Palace Guards have attempted to use Eastwood as a club to distract from Romney's convention speech (which was much better than Obama's). Of course, this is an irony which will never penetrate the elite media bubble.

More:

AFTER A week as topic No. 1 in American politics, former Carmel Mayor Clint Eastwood said the outpouring of criticism from left-wing reporters and liberal politicians after his appearance at the Republican National Convention last Thursday night, followed by an avalanche of support on Twitter and in the blogosphere, is all the proof anybody needs that his 12-minute discourse achieved exactly what he intended it to.

“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told The Pine Cone this week. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties, but I was aiming for people in the middle.” …

“I had three points I wanted to make,” Eastwood said. “That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job. But I didn’t make up my mind exactly what I was going to say until I said it.”

And make those points Clint Eastwood did.

The best part is that all the polls show people loved Clint's appearance and you can bet that all the media interest in his appearance drove a lot of people online to see it for themselves (over a million YouTube hits alone). So a lot more people heard Eastwood's message who otherwise might not have if the corrupt media hadn't made such a stupid and phony fuss over it.

If anything illuminates how biased, dishonest, and bubbled our elite media is, it's that the very same talking heads who labeled Clint's performance an embarrassment are the very same talking heads who were falling all over themselves last night to praise Jennifer Granholm's  hysterical buffoonery.

The media's manufactured Eastwood kerfflufle proves once again that the media is not only disconnected from reality, but are constantly trying to manufacture reality.  But they forget it's not 2008 anymore and that they can no longer say something like "Eastwood flopped" and make it so. And here's why:

[Eastwood] had no idea that overnight, a rebellion had erupted online against the media’s condemnation of him, with thousands of bloggers, Twitterers and commentators calling him, “a genius,” “1,000 times more brilliant than the media,” and saying he’s “only gotten better with age.”

They also started posting their own versions of Eastwood’s empty chair in droves (“eastwooding”), and, on YouTube, replays of his remarks at the convention were being viewed millions of times.

That's right, New Media had Eastwood's back and the old, dying corrupt media wasn't able to get away with its "manufactured reality" this time.

"Media's got to know its limitations."

 Big Journalism

Just how wrong did the media get Clint Eastwood?

September 3, 2012
 by Karl

Admittedly, I am late to evaluating Clint Eastwood’s RNC performance. However, the fact that the pundit class is still critiquing it days later is one indicator of how shrewd it was as political theater. Accordingly, it is worth noting just how wrong some of the Eastwood analysis has been, even from those defending the speech.

The harsh, conventional wisdom about Eastwood’s decidedly unconventional approach to the convention is that it was the ramblings of a senile old man. Even may of Eastwood’s defenders have described it as rambling. This likely makes Eastwood’s day.

After all, who is Clint Eastwood? He is one of the top actors, directors and producers of motion pictures in the world. Most of the world — and almost certainly everyone tuning in to the RNC Thursday night — knows this. Yet most of the analyses of his RNC appearance are based on the notion that we were not witnessing acting. That mass suspension of disbelief may be the highest tribute Eastwood will ever be paid as an actor. If you think the Eastwood on stage was the only Eastwood there is, watch him promoting J. Edgar on The Daily Show last November. I have little doubt he will be equally sharp promoting Trouble With the Curve in the next few weeks.

Moreover, as a director, Eastwood has a reputation of knowing exactly what he wants. Also, he does not prefer to do many takes: “The big question, for me, is how to do it *** so the actors can perform at their very best and with the spontaneity that you’d like to find so that the audience will feel like those lines have been said for the very first time, ever. Then you’ve got a believable scene.” That approach is entirely consistent with Eastwood’s talent as a jazz pianist, someone who enjoys improvising within a framework.

The fact that Eastwood’s performance was not loaded into a teleprompter does not mean it was unplanned.

If you doubt that Eastwood was not simply winging it, don’t watch his performance — read the transcript. There may be no better indicator of just how intentional Eastwood’s performance is than to compare the visual impression he gave with the text delivered.

Eastwood begins with a touch of Admiral James Stockdale, but Clint answers the question of why he is there. The fact is that everyone really knows why Clint is there — to make a political statement. But Eastwood, in mentioning that Hollywood is perhaps not as monolithic as the stereotype suggests, is making a subtle suggestion to the audience he wants to reach: you may be part of some left-identifying group, but it’s okay to disagree and there may be other quiet dissenters in your group.

Eastwood then introduces the dramatic device of the empty chair, which in this context also echoes the political metaphor of the empty suit. This has been remarked upon, particularly as an echo of comedic dialogs from people like Bob Newhart, so I won’t dwell on it here, although it reappears below.

Eastwood then proceeds to use this comedic device to deliver — as Mark Steyn noted in passing — some of the toughest political attacks on President Obama heard during the entire RNC. A number of the traditional speakers strove to play on swing voters’ disenchantment with the failed promises of Hope and Change. But notice how tired and traditional that just sounded in your head. Mitt Romney (likely with help from a professional political speechwriter) did it pretty well: “You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.” But did anyone do it as powerfully and emotionally as Eastwood’s segue from everyone — himself included — crying with joy at Obama’s historic victory to the tears we now shed over 23 million still unemployed, which Clint bluntly called a national disgrace?

This was the first part of Eastwood’s simple and effective argument. Eastwood points out — in a prodding, joking manner — that Obama was elected to bring peace and prosperity, but failed to bring either. That Eastwood may disagree with the GOP on some war issues is perfectly alright in this context, because, as suggested earlier and explored further below, Eastwood is not really targeting Republicans.

Eastwood then arrives at his Joe Biden joke: “Of course we all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic party. Just kind of a grin with a body behind it.” That last part is not accidental in a performance featuring an empty chair. But the first part is even more dangerous. For the last 3+ years, we have been accustomed to having Biden as safe material for humor, while Obama has been kept off-limits. Eastwood leverages the latter into the former, suggesting that Sheriff Joe is the real brains of the operation. Ouch! No wonder Team Obama got annoyed enough to respond.

Having delivered these punches regarding our dire situation with velvet gloves, Eastwood then does the softest of sells for the Romney/Ryan ticket. As Jesse Walker noted, it was almost more of a pitch for Not Obama. Again, there was nothing accidental about the nature or placement of this speech within Clint’s imagined dialogue.

Eastwood concludes by summing up the GOP case to undecideds and rebutting the main point Dems seem to advance for Obama. First, “[p]oliticians are employees of ours… And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let ‘em go.” Second, “we don’t have to be metal [sic] masochists and vote for somebody that we don’t really even want in office just because they seem to be nice guys or maybe not so nice guys if you look at some of the recent ads going out there.”
Eastwood was not “rambling.” He improvised within a structure, making a clear and concise case for dumping Obama.

Eastwood’s approach to this performance was not accidental. Eastwood is — by reason of his resume — the foremost expert in the world on Clint Eastwood fans. Harry Callahan may have understood that a man has to know his limitations. Eastwood knows his… and he also knows his strengths. A man does not produce and star in dozens of Clint Eastwood movies without having thought deeply about and received the benefit of copious market research into what appeals to people about Clint Eastwood.

From the standpoint of political science, it would be fair to hypothesize that appeals to both disaffected and libertarian voters (which is something of a feat) in a way that Mitt Romney could never hope to do. More colloquially, it would be fair to suggest that Eastwood appeals to the sort of people who gravitated to H. Ross Perot in the Nineties. He appeals to people who distrust institutions, who think that conventional politics fails the American people. The sort of people for whom Harry Callahan, Will Munny, Frank Horrigan, Luther Whitney and Walt Kowalski have an emotional resonance.

So why would Eastwood deliver a conventional political speech? Had he delivered his material as a series of slick-sounding zingers, it would have been the sort of speech the media expected from Chris Christie’s keynote address. But that would have been: (a) not in keeping with the Romney campaign’s softer approach; and (b) diminishing and disappointing to Eastwood’s target audience. Most of the chattering class failed to grasp this. Some on Team Romney failed to grasp this. But the evidence coming in, both anecdotally and from polling, suggests Eastwood still has his finger on the popular pulse in a way pols and pundits never will.

Hotair

Clint Eastwood and Disrespect

By Nelson Hultberg

The political left in America is outraged at Clint Eastwood’s recent presentation at the GOP convention. The shock and disbelief of Rachel Maddow at MSNBC and the Blitzer gang at CNN is heavy with condemnation of this inimitable American icon.



The establishment media response has basically come down as follows: “Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” “What was he thinking?” “Have the Republicans gone daft?” “The Democrats must have sent Clint to the GOP so as to sabotage their convention.” “This was inexcusably disrespectful.”

Yes, indeed, it was disrespectful. But what kind of humans allow themselves to be enslaved by a Marxist mandarin and his bureaucratic henchmen with a smile on their face and kind words about their enslavers? Craven humans, that’s who! Obedient victims who, as Ayn Rand told us, “sanction their enslavement.” And unfortunately that is what the American people have become, obedient sanctioners who are willing to give up their freedom with a smile on their face and kind words for the usurpers in Washington who are so zealously destroying the freedom and sanity of our lives.

Did Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry play nice-nice with King George? Did they remain respectful to the tyrants who were ruining their lives? They most certainly did not. They declared the English tyrant to be a corrupt and criminal despot. They rallied their countrymen to spring up in rebellion. They stood up for their fundamental rights, as all courageous men and women do when faced with despotic bullies. They did what the valiant Chinese student did in Tiananmen Square when he stood in front of those monstrous approaching tanks.

If Jefferson, Adams, and Henry were alive today, they would have been cheering Clint on with vigorous enthusiasm. But what do we see from today’s mealy-mouth media? We see a rush to defend the tyrant mandarins in Washington and smear the rebel Eastwood. We see squawking and crying and yelps of protest. But what we really see is what lurks in the subconscious of the establishment media – fear that their Emperor is as buck naked as Dirty Harry portrayed him. This is why the vacuities at CNN and MSNBC are so outraged. Eastwood pierced deeply. He showed Mr. Obama and the empty suit Biden up for precisely what they are.

This is what disrespect is, and why it is so important when a people are confronting tyrants. Those who obey their masters and play nice-nice with tyrannical regimes live miserable lives as doormats. Those recalcitrant rebels who boldly proclaim their disrespect for the despots of history have a chance to live in freedom. They might still get squashed; the tanks might still roll over them. But they at least know that they stood up for freedom and honor in their time. They know that they did the right thing, the manly thing, not the craven, accommodative thing. When bullies are breaking the cardinal laws of life and exploiting their fellow man (which is what the statists in Washington have been doing for over 80 years now), then there is only one course of action for honorable men – disrespect – courageous, colorful disrespect.

This is what Clint Eastwood did on August 30, 2012 in Tampa. He did the honorable thing – the manly thing. He heaped contempt on the statist mandarins in Washington. He did not lay down and play nice-nice with them. He did not try to compromise with them. He did not pacify them so as to be popular. He excoriated them with his words and his attitude.

In his advice to America’s young men, the twentieth century poet E. Merrill Root wrote, “I would ask you again to dream and dare, and thus to ride again the stallion of manhood whose back is known only by those who with a brave heart grasp the mane of life and ride bareback and shouting even in God’s thunderstorm.”
Reality demands this from man, but the collectivists are at war with it. Thus their feminizing of our men today.

This is not by accident. The collectivists want a neutered man; it makes their drive for world domination all the easier. What is horrifying is that large numbers of obedient men now welcome this travesty. To be forceful, unflinching, and self-reliant in face of life’s vicissitudes no longer appeals. Modern psychology tells us that the virile Clark Gable / Clint Eastwood persona is unhealthy for society. Dustin Hoffman is to be preferred. Softness is correct; toughness is detrimental. But this is decadence masquerading as progress.

The crucible of life demands that men strive to fulfill their natures, that they stand heroically in face of adversity, that they defend the female and family with gallantry in face of the subtleties of evil. The real man welcomes this and refuses to apologize for his toughness and masculinity, his stoic steel will. For him egalitarianism and collectivism are living death. Early in life he knows instinctively that he hates the amoeba-like image of man with which Marxian-Freudian collectivism is trying to poison his soul. He loathes what the professors in college teach him. The real man senses early on that, in the words of General MacArthur, “there is a constant conspiracy against the brave” in this world. The herd mentalities of humanity wish to neuter manliness, for it stands in their way of collectivizing the world. Thus it must be purged from our lessons to the young. The real man resolves to fight this. He chooses to be in life what in essence he must be – a warrior for truth, a rock of granite, a seeker, a builder, a hero.

Clint Eastwood has exemplified such traits all his life. The weasels dislike him, and the naked emperors try to smear him with sociobabble. But there is a strain of man out there that knows his kind are the Atlases who hold up the world, that America was exceptional because she unleashed such men to climb as tall as they could dream. What we need so desperately today is for these kind of men to rise up and show massive disrespect toward the despots of Washington. Hoorah for Clint Eastwood.

Canada Free Press