The twist in Steven Spielberg's 'American Sniper'

In early May, Steven Spielberg signed on to direct American Sniper, despite talk just two months earlier that the director's next DreamWorks project would be about the border conflict in Kashmir. Decorated SEAL and sniper Chris Kyle wrote the book of the same name based on his experiences over multiple deployments to combat zones, including Iraq. With over 150 confirmed kills, he became the military's most deadly sniper. Bradley Cooper had picked up the film rights to the bestseller, which takes a sometimes flippant tone about the job of killing. Sounds like a straightforward military movie, right? No.

In this week's New Yorker, a feature elaborates on the full story and tragic ending to Kyle's life. After leaving active duty in 2009, Kyle struggled with PTSD and maladaptive behaviors connected to his stress, like heavy drinking. He started organizing activities like antelope hunts with other veterans to help them transition to life at home. A desperate woman at his kids' school heard about Kyle, and begged him to help her son, Eddie Ray Routh, who was also struggling with PTSD. In early February, Kyle and another man took him to a shooting range. There, Routh turned the gun on them and killed Kyle and his friend. Now Kyle's story has a sad epilogue that wasn't present in the original property acquired by Cooper.

There's another twist in the New Yorker story that could call into question Kyle's book. He told a number of stories, like of a time he killed two carjackers and was let off by the police, that have since been called into question. Kyle may have been a teller of tall tales. Will Spielberg accept these embellishments, or film a movie that's more in line with the confirmed facts?

Before director Kathryn Bigelow's successes with Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, military movies tended to bomb at the box office, and few received outstanding reviews from critics. Now, with the war wrapping up, the tide is changing, and Spielberg's film could be part of that shift. Stylistically and thematically, I picture the movie having shades of Munich and the post-invasion scenes in Saving Private Ryan, but I also see him injecting some of the melancholy home life present in E.T. In order for this movie to work, I think the screenplay (currently being penned by Paranoia's Jason Dean Hall) will have to alternate between combat sequences and those on the homefront, to better set up what will happen to Kyle at the end. But is there even a lesson or order to the madness of his death?

The story reminded me of the senseless killing of Robin Williams' character by a patient in Patch Adams. After Kyle's murder, his wife Taya has aligned herself with the NRA, maintaining her support for guns. The New Yorker piece hints that the severity of Routh's delusions indicate that he may not have even had PTSD, but perhaps been bipolar or schizophrenic. But then again, many people with diagnoses of PTSD have murdered people, often spouses, after returning home. Spielberg has a complex story on his hands, with no happy ending. But for this veteran director to abandon another project, he must feel he has the key to unlock this story and bring it to the big screen.

Weighing in on 'The Lovely Bones'

By Sarah Sluis

Many of the people turning out to see The Lovely Bones on Friday will have read Alice Sebold's haunting book. Told from the perspective of a dead girl, Susie Salmon, after she is raped and murdered, the book brought insight into the aftereffects of such a misunderstood and shrouded crime. Profoundly nuanced, its shaded morality gave its characters emotionally complex reactions to the tragedy.

After reading Alice Sebold's memoir of her own brutal rape, Lucky, I felt I understood The Lovely Bones even more: being a victim of such a terrible crime leads you to experience events as though they are outside yourself. You can easily lose a sense of agency. Instead, you often feel as though you are watching things happen from above. Susie narrating the events going on in her family from heaven is not much different than how she might have experienced life had she been raped but not murdered.

Sadly, much of this is lost in Peter Jackson's interpretation of The Lovely Bones, which completely misses the tone of the book. Most grating is his vision of heaven. He seems more interested in giving his special-effects company a lot of work than motivating the move to fantasy. The surroundings, rich and lush and detailed, stick out from the rest of the movie.

Many people have praised the performances in the movie (and I agree with the assessment that Stanley Tucci has a standout role), but some lines sounded really, really bad and misdelivered to my ears. I saw the actor instead of the character. I suspected part of this was related to the tone. When you're trying to make something wispy and ephemeral, and fail, it can lead to dialogue that feels quite odd.

Finally, there's the rape and murder scene. Given that a child is involved, and the movie's PG-13 rating, it's not surprising that this vicious act is omitted. But instead, Jackson moves quickly from the terror of anticipation to a confusing scene where at first she's actually fleeing, and then she's fleeing in her mind, before finally pausing for a brief moment when she realizes what's happened to her. It missed the mark for me, to the point where I was sitting in the movie theatre in disbelief about how the movie was skipping over one of the most painful, but necessary, moments of the story. What I really wanted was a still moment where the audience was forced to dwell on what was happening. Though I already thought the tone was messed up by then, this really sealed it for me.

This omission will be a comfort to some, and for others it may be all they need to conjure up enough horror. Hollywood Elsewhere, for example was happy with the decision, explaining "I really, really didn't want to go there, even glancingly," and liked Jackson's "decision to show her escaping from her own death, running away from something that has happened but is so horrible that she instantly imagines or wills herself into a fantasy-escape mode." For me, it was not enough to carry through the rest of the movie. In the book, the rape and murder is always on your mind, and it's always on the characters' minds. I didn't feel that way watching the movie.

Given the subject matter, this is the kind of movie that people will see only if motivated by must-see reviews touting its artistic merit. Not many people want to be subjected to a Schindler's List if critics are coming out calling it "so-so." By comparison, Precious has garnered glowing reviews. It, too, shows the rape of a child (much more graphically) and her escaping to a fantasy world. Compared to the elaborate world created by Jackson, her escapist moments are downright spare, but the movie works by keeping us grounded in Precious' dismal reality. Translating Alice Sebold's prose to film, which requires depicting these events on-screen instead of in one's head, is a tall order, so it's not a huge surprise that Jackson didn't succeed. Those that have read the book should skip it or go in with managed expectations.

Amateur filmmaker arrested for murder he wrote in screenplay

By Sarah Sluis

For all the borrowing that goes on between real life and fiction, occasionally people step over the line.  Severely.  After writing a screenplay called House of Cards about a man who posed as a woman online and then lured his dates to their death by arranging to meet them in person, the man, Mark Andrew Twitchell, allegedly went out and committed the crime.  Police seized the screenplay, which had already been the subject of a dubious "work now, maybe get paid later" Facebook casting call, and possibly was in the midst of shooting:

"I'm casting all of these roles personally so just contact me through facebook to start the process. We're short on time so the sooner the better.

Roles are non paid for House of Cards but we are working on a $3M feature right after this with major A-list talent and I remember things like work ethic and true acting chops when considering roles for that too."

As he wrote in the screenplay, Twitchell reportedly hacked into the e-mail account of the victim and sent a message saying he had left town to go on a tropical vacation.  More details involving the method of the killing and disposal of the body also match up to the screenplay.

The screenplay itself was inspired by the television show "Dexter," about a vigilante serial killer.  Adding another twist to the sordid tale, the man who was killed was apparently his second target.  A first man, attacked while wearing a mask, escaped and did not report the incident--perhaps out of embarrassment for his involvement in online dating?  The "Dexter"-inspired screenplay was not the first of Twitchell's rip-offs: he helmed an unauthorized, 60k "fan film" featuring Star Wars characters a few years ago.

The odd things is, I could imagine the Twitchell story itself being turned into a movie: a film about a
man who makes a film about murder, then commits it.  With this idea in mind, I was reminded of the 1960 Michael Powell film Peeping Tom, a creepy and self-implicating movie about a man (a member of a film crew) who films the murders of his victims.  He gets a voyeuristic thrill out of watching and re-watching his victims' deaths.  The problem is, you're watching his secret films too, and enjoying (or tolerating) them, putting you in the same camp as the twisted serial killer.  If you hate the killer, you must address your own love for the suspense and thrill of his actions.  Twitchell has already been brought into custody, but the bizarre events put a shivering reverse on the oft-heard "based on a true story."

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