After politely & briefly responding to numerous people's fawning reviews of the film 'American Sniper' with, "I...

After politely & briefly responding to numerous people's fawning reviews of the film 'American Sniper' with, "I didn't like it," I've been pressed to elaborate why. Here, all at once, is my 2 cents why:

It tired to do what 'The Hurt Locker' and to a lesser extent 'Zero Dark Thirty' successfully did, but unlike Bigelow's incredible films Eastwood's drips with cheap sentimentality, cheesiness, blind jingoism, xenophobia bordering on abject racism, and nearly breaks its back bending over backwards to ass-kiss its biographical subject.

Granted it was based on a self-aggrandizing, un-corroborateable, jingoist, xenophobic autobiography, so Eastwood didn't exactly have the greatest jumping-off point, but Eastwood has now established a habit of making hollow films about subjects which his entitled old white straight male ass has no insight to offer (racism with 'Gran Torino', the Iraq War & being a soldier with this).

In the opening scene of 'American Sniper', Cooper's character catches his girlfriend cheating on him, and she accuses him of being a bad lay, which he kind of just dismisses. Eastwood strikes me as someone who's familiar with this accusation, and now he's brought the same level of impotence and dismissiveness of it to his filmmaking—we're unsatisfied Clint, it's apparent you don't know what you're doing, and it's not that we don't "get you" or whatever; it's because you, Clint, are a bad lay.