Mountain Views News          Saturday, January 24, 2015

11

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Mountain Views-News Saturday, January 24, 2015 


SEAN’S SHAMELESS REVIEWS: 

AMERICAN SNIPER 

Jeff’s Book Picks By Jeff Brown

By Sean Kayden

UNTAMED: THE WILDEST WOMAN 
IN AMERICA AND THE FIGHT FOR 
CUMBERLAND ISLAND by Will Harlan 


Carol Ruckdeschel is the wildest woman in 
America. She wrestles alligators, rides horses 
bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that 
she built by hand in an island wilderness. A 
combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane 
Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who 
has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on 
Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast 
of Georgia.Cumberland, the country’s largest 
and most biologically diverse barrier island, is 
celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral 
horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie once 
owned much of the island, and in recent years, 
Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service 
have clashed with Carol over the island’s future. 
What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist 
with only a high school diploma becomes an 
outspoken advocate on a celebrated but divisive 
island? Untamed is the story of an American 
original standing her ground and fighting 
for what she believes in, no matter the cost.


VANESSA AND HER SISTER: A 
NOVEL 

by Priya Parmar 


London, 1905: The 
city is alight with 
change, and the 
Stephen siblings 
are at the forefront. 
Vanessa, Virginia, 
Thoby, and Adrian are 
leaving behind their 
childhood home and 
taking a house in the 
leafy heart of avant-
garde Bloomsbury. 
There they bring 
together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous 
artistic friends who will grow into legend and 
come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. And 
at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, 
gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, 
the writer. Each member of the group will go on 
to earn fame and success, but so far Vanessa Bell 
has never sold a painting. Virginia Woolf’s book 
review has just been turned down by The Times. 
Lytton Strachey has not published anything. E. 
M. Forster has finished his first novel but does 
not like the title. Leonard Woolf is still a civil 
servant in Ceylon, and John Maynard Keynes is 
looking for a job. Together, this sparkling coterie 
of artists and intellectuals throw away convention 
and embrace the wild freedom of being young, 
single bohemians in London. But the landscape 
shifts when Vanessa unexpectedly falls in love 
and her sister feels dangerously abandoned. 
Eerily possessive, charismatic, manipulative, 
and brilliant, Virginia has always lived in the 
shelter of Vanessa’s constant attention and 
encouragement. Without it, she careens toward 
self-destruction and madness. As tragedy and 
betrayal threaten to destroy the family, Vanessa 
must decide if it is finally time to protect her own 
happiness above all else.The work of exciting 
young newcomer Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her 
Sister exquisitely captures the champagne-heady 
days of prewar London and the extraordinary 
lives of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.


SMALL VICTORIES: SPOTTING 
IMPROBABLE MOMENTS OF GRACE 

by Anne Lamott 


Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and 
community in essays that are both wise and 
irreverent. It’s an approach that has become 
her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott 
offers a new message of hope that celebrates 
the triumph of light over the darkness in our 
lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may 
seem small, she writes, but they change us—our 
perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives. 
Lamott writes of forgiveness, restoration, and 
transformation, how we can turn toward love even 
in the most hopeless situations, how we find the 
joy in getting lost and our amazement in finally 
being found. Profound and hilarious, honest 
and unexpected, the stories in Small Victories 
are proof that the human spirit is irrepressible.


“American Sniper” tells 
the true story of the US 
deadliest sniper, Chris 
Kyle, who served four 
tours of duty in Iraq. 
Written for the screen 
by Jason Hall, “American Sniper” is based 
on the autobiography American Sniper: The 
Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. 
Military History by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, 
and Jim DeFelice. Director Clint Eastwood helms 
the film’s touchy subject matter with much grace 
and precision. While controversy has surrounded 
both the film and book, as strictly as a piece 
of entertainment, “American Sniper” delivers 
exceedingly. Two-time (now a third for this 
role) Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper 
took on the role of Kyle giving a performance 
of much fortitude and vulnerability. While I’m 
not here to judge either the man himself (Kyle) 
or the idea he is or isn’t a hero and politics aside, 
“American Sniper” is a very good film. However, 
I wouldn’t say it touches the same greatness of 
classic war films. Furthermore, the Iraq war 
is depicted very narrowly as most, if not all of 
the primary attention is solely on the navy seal 
himself. Actress Sienna Miller plays Kyle’s wife 
and is able to distract the film’s prime focus of 
war in her role as she attempts to maintain their 
marriage and keep the family together. She’s solid 
for most of the film, but as the film continues 
along there’s less for her to work with outside 
the realm of being a worried military wife seeing 
firsthand the internal effects war is having on her 
husband. Additionally, Eastwood and Hall opted 
out of showing Kyle’s death on screen, which they 
present to you you with one sentence at the end 
of the film. There’s no mention of how or why it 
happened, just that it happened. 

 The film has a slight intro of Kyle’s early life—
the way his father perceived the three types of 
people there are in this world (sheep, sheepdogs, 
and wolves), his tight-knit relationship with his 
younger brother (which is barely touched upon 
as the film gets into Kyle’s military life), and his 
desire to be a cowboy. The scenes were all fairly 
traditional things you’d seen in a biopic, but none 
of it really overlapped later into the film, such as 
the relationship he had with his father or how his 
younger brother followed in his footsteps and 
joined the military as well. Cooper’s character 
is incredibly driven to protect his country after 
seeing the horrors on television (1998 United 
States embassy bombings) that he enlists into the 
Navy Seal program. He appeared like a natural 
in bootcamp and in his sniper training, as if he 
was meant for this. After basic training, he meets 
Taya Renae (Miller) and they strike up a romantic 
relationship. After they marry and shortly after 
the 9/11 attacks, in which Kyle is visibly affected 
by it, Kyle gets deployed for his first tour. It’s 
the first of four tours for Kyle, each one taking a 
toll on him both mentally and emotionally. His 
first kills are of a woman and boy who attack 
U.S. Marines with a grenade. Kyle is noticeably 
distressed by the experience, but earns the 
nickname “Legend” for his many kills (With 255, 
160 of which were officially confirmed by the 
Department of Defense). After his first tour, he 
comes home to see his baby boy for the first time, 
but as the war rages on, Kyle is determined to go 
back and kill more (what becomes the only thing 
he really knows how to do). His wife tries to have 
him stay home to focus on his family, but there’s 
no stopping him. 

 Compelled by the guilt after directly witnessing 
fellow seals dying before him, Kyle goes back for 
a fourth tour (not too long after the birth of his 
second child). He is fixated on taking down the 
rival sniper known as “Mustafa,” which by some 
miraculous intuition does so with a risky long 
distance shot. However, it exposes his sniper team 
to a great number of armed insurgents inside 
enemy territory. In the middle of the firefight, 
Kyle calls Taya and tells her he is ready to come 
home. A sandstorm provides cover for their 
hectic escape. While Kyle seemed to never be fully 
equipped for civilian life again, toward the end of 
the film he looked to be doing a lot better. Just 
like a few of the other soldiers in the film were 
displayed, I think Kyle’s desire to kill gradually 
slipped away from him. What else would he have 
to prove? Most of all, he had to live with the fact 
of being the nation’s top sniper for a war plagued 
by controversy. In the end, Hall, Eastwood and 
Cooper did a bang up job bringing Kyle’s military 
life to screen. While psychological effects of war 
were shown, they never appeared too heavy-
handed. In many ways, “American Sniper” was 
more restrained than I imagined it was going 
to be. It had a few problems here and there yet 
overall it was an engaging modern day war film. 
The emphasis was more on man being considered 
a killing machine, but along the way this idea of 
being a man was lost. That’s how I think Kyle was 
feeling as the war continued on, a lost soul torn 
between the reality he should be living (with his 
family) and the one he’s subject to be a part of 
endlessly (in war). 

Grade: 4 out of 5


On the Marquee: Notes from the Sierra MadrePlayhouse


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