There's Stupid and Then There's Jesse Ventura Stupid!

Pat Dollard quotes washed up has been Jesse Ventura comparing Chris Kyle to the Nazis, on liberal Alan Colmes show.

American Sniper and #FakeBabyGate

There did appear to be one tiny flaw in the otherwise great movie American Sniper. It's quite minor, and I only mention it because I wasn't the only one to notice it.

First of all, a confession: TMZ on TV is one of my guilty pleasures. I very seldom venture over to their website, and I could care less about most celebrity gossip. However, there is a very dysfunctional family vibe about the people who work there, and I enjoy watching the sibling type camaraderie that goes on there. (And occasionally, I get a new candidate for the Friday Night Babe.)

So, last night, they bring up what appeared to be a "fake baby" in American Sniper. The scene is where Mrs. Kyle finishes feeding her baby, Chris picks up the baby, holds it for about twenty seconds, then lays it in its crib. For about thirty seconds, that "fourth wall" of film making was breached, and I thought about the constraints upon filmmakers when filming small children and infants. That's it. About 30 seconds. When Bradley Cooper picked up his "baby", it looked like one of those life sized dolls. But soon, the story picked up again and I forgot all about the problems with using babies in films.

In case you don't know, there are very strict child labor laws concerning small children and infants. Thanks to Obamacare, most infants can only work 20 hours a week. (I'm kidding!) Most TV and movie productions that involve small children and infants, typically cast twins when they can, so that when one kid's time on camera expires, they bring in kid #2. Because of time constraints and the fact that children do not always stop crying on cue, life like baby dolls are often used for long shots of the kids, because their stage mothers are the prop people.

Commonly, when you see a baby on TV, you see really tight close up of the baby and long shots of the kid in a crib or bassinet. Less frequently do you see a two shot of someone actually holding a squirming, kicking, sometimes crying baby.
The exception to this is childbirth scenes. The frequently used "I'm giving birth right now" scene which concludes with the rookie who just assisted a childbirth hands a somewhat slimy older infant to it's "mother", and says, "It's a boy/girl!"

As a veteran father of five, who has been present at the delivery of multiple babies, I know something about handling newborns. I was there to catch my daughter as she came into world, with sure hands,like Tom Brady handling a slightly deflated football! When it comes to handling babies, I'm your man! Having some familiarity with the scene, I generally try to guess the age of the large "newborn" with the big, perfectly shaped head, that's being handed to its "mother" on TV and movies. Fortunately for directors, newborns cry a lot, as do older babies being handed about by strange actors. This works for them.

Again, #FakeBabyGate was a very small distraction for me, because either some poor mother has a kid with a head like a Cabbage Patch doll, or they used a real doll. I personally have the solution to the problem: CGI

A computer generated baby violates no child labor laws and only cries and coos when the sound man tells it to. I'll stop trying to guess the ages of the infants smeared with goo that get handed to their fake mothers, and you'll probably save a little time, money and grief in trying to work with babies.

After my remarks about eliminating jobs for babies in Hollywood,  I believe that I am starting to channel my inner W.C. Fields, so, we'll just leave it at that!

Update: According to the clip from the Today show, Infant #1 was running a fever and infant #2 was a 'no show', so they went with an uncredited performance by a plastic doll.

American Sniper and the UnAmerican Sniping of it

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to go online and watch Glo Zell interview President Obama, or see American Sniper. Wow! It was powerful and hard hitting! Man, that President Obama sure knows how to give an interview!

Get real! I saw American Sniper and I must say it exceeded my expectations. To do any sort of a decent movie review, I'd have to include a lot of spoilers, and I don't want to do that. I want you to see this movie and experience it as unbiased as possible the first time.

I knew the basic story before I went to see it, but the movie is gripping enough that even when you know how it will end, it keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Much of the film is a character study of how Chris Kyle became the man he was, how he dealt with hardships, and relationships, and sorrow and loss. Also his struggle with the morality of taking a human life, even when it will save the lives of others. And what this does to a man's soul as he looks upon evil and does battle with it day after day. The film also deals with his wife, struggling to maintain her life and family in spite of a husband who deploys for months on end, and may not ever come home.

Some of it is a gritty, sometimes brutal, but realistic telling of what our soldiers endured in the Middle East and what their families endured at home. It is rated "R". It is definitely not a movie for children. The violence is at times quite graphic. The language is the language of fighting men, more fitting for the locker room than the parlor. I did not find it distracting. Some might.

The acting is top notch. Bradley Cooper could be a ringer for Kyle. The director, Clint Eastwood, knows how to get the maximum performance from his actors and how to capture that on film. When the credits rolled, I sat in my seat for a while, wiping away a few tears. It is a moving story about a real, down to earth guy. Not a super hero or super spy, but a real American hero.

As I sat there, I tried to picture how anyone could not be moved by this movie, even Leftist tubs of lard like Michael Moore. One thing that occurred to me, was that there was a lot of truth in this movie. Being confronted with truth may be so foreign to some that they are uncomfortable in its presence.

It was in no way a "propaganda" film. What did they propagandize? "Join the SEALS, go through brutal training, get shot at or blown up, and if you do make it home you ay be messed up psychologically, missing a few limbs and have you wife and kids leave you"? Great! Sign me up!

There is one message that Chris Kyle carried, and that was it was important for him to protect his country. That his country was worth defending and even worth dying for. That may have sent Leftist blowhards like Moore, if he ever even saw the film, into a catatonic state. (No, not California!)

Chris Kyle is the Alvin York of our time. If you are of age, you should see this movie. It is a well crafted piece of cinema, and leaving the theater, I was hard pressed to remember any movie I had ever seen that was better than this one or had greater emotional impact.

Still haven't.

If you faint at the sight of blood, don't see it. If violent movies give you bad dreams, don't see it. Wait 'til it comes on TV and they'll edit out some of the language and gorier parts. The rest of you, go to the theater and see it at least once. Soon. In addition to seeing a fine, well crafted movie based on the true story of an American hero, every dollar that it makes at the box office is a big...raspberry (kept it PG-13, didn't I?) to the leftist tools who are trying to discourage people from seeing it.

Vote with your wallets, America, for movies about true American heroes, and maybe Hollywood will finally take a hint about what the American public is longing to see.

Five stars out of five.

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