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American Sniper

Opens Fri., Jan 16 at Cinerama, Pacific Place, Ark Lodge, and other theaters. Rated R. 132 minutes.

There was a time when American Sniper would’ve been an ideal Oliver Stone project—a story of the battlefield and the homefront, of ideals and damage. Its subject is Chris Kyle, the sharpshooter whose action in four Iraq War tours reportedly made him the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. A Texas rodeo rider before he joined the Navy SEALs, Kyle was nicknamed “Legend” by his fellow soldiers and the “Devil of Ramadi” by Iraqi fighters. His life had a lurid ending—a terrible irony that reframes his story in a larger context of troubled veterans and PTSD.

Imagine Oliver Stone’s high-strung emotionalism and blunt-force style brought to bear on this scenario. Now imagine its opposite: That’s Clint Eastwood’s deliberately neutral take on the material, a measured directorial approach that is likely to disappoint those looking for either a patriotic tribute to the troops or a critique of war and its effects. Kyle is ably played by a hulked-up Bradley Cooper, who leaves out neurotic shadings in favor of a straightforward turn that seems fittingly non-complex. Cooper lets his body do the acting; every time Kyle returns from his various tours, he looks like a caged animal inside his home, as though he’s grown too large to be comfortable away from battle. Sienna Miller, as Kyle’s wife Taya, is good at both the early courtship and the later worry over her husband’s increasing aloofness.

The film, scripted by Jason Hall from Kyle’s memoir, has some standard-issue military bonding and uneven dialogue. What really works is the way it’s structured around parallel sequences, nowhere more intensely than the repeated images of the sniper at his gun, scanning the world for insurgents. One such sequence is the film’s most unnerving: As Kyle idly looks through his gunsight at passersby on the street below, he talks to his wife on the phone, half a world away. They speak of her pregnancy and flirt a little, and throughout this pleasant banter his eye remains at the rifle’s scope. Eastwood cuts to the TV screen in her apartment, flashing the number of American dead in Iraq; he cuts to the view through the gunsight, as random Iraqi people pass under the crosshairs. The conversation could be taking place in an Applebee’s, or a suburban backyard, but the finger stays on the trigger and the eye searches for threats. In other places in the film, Eastwood’s uninflected approach has a flattening effect. Here it creates one of the most chilling scenes in recent American film. Robert Horton

Appropriate Behavior

Opens Fri., Jan. 16 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 90 Minutes.

Because Desiree Akhavan has been cast in a recurring role on the new season of Girls, her visibility and pop-culture credentials are about to be certified in a new way. And good for her. But this 30-year-old writer/director/actress had already staked out her position in the Voice of a Young Generation sweepstakes as creator of the web series The Slope and the indie feature Appropriate Behavior, a success at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Maybe Girls needs her more than she needs Girls.

Now Appropriate Behavior opens for its regular run, after garnering a nomination for Best First Screenplay in the Independent Spirit Awards. (Which raises the question: Why is an actual teeny-tiny indie like this competing against obviously bigger films such as Birdman and Selma? The Spirit awards have always been kooky that way.) Akhavan plays Shirin, a Brooklynite trying to recover from a breakup with Maxine (Rebecca Henderson). A millennial named Maxine? All right, it’s sort of retro, so we’ll let it pass. We see Maxine mostly in flashback, which allows us to deduce that maybe these two weren’t particularly well-matched to begin with. Shirin tries to move on with a variety of bisexual encounters and a new job teaching filmmaking to a group of 5-year-olds. The film’s indie-hipster-Brooklyn world is easy enough to take, and Akhavan’s observations are amusing if not earthshaking.

What seems most promising about Akhavan’s directing talent is her very specific eye. There’s no reason a scene in a lingerie store should be distinctive, but the interplay among Shirin, pal Crystal (a funny Halley Feiffer), and a touchy-feely store manager culminates in a wonderfully odd, wordless exchange of awkward glances. And the whole movie is set within Shirin’s Iranian-American community, complete with an overachieving older brother and unusual party customs. When Akhavan shows partygoers leaping over an open flame as part of a Persian ceremony, she veers close to My Big Fat Greek Wedding territory. Shirin’s still in the closet to her nice-but-traditional parents, so that hurdle gives the movie some conventional suspense. These storytelling devices long predate Akhavan’s immediate influences, whether we’re talking about Girls or ’70s-era Woody Allen. Despite the nudity and a scene involving a threesome (Shirin is tri-curious, apparently), Appropriate Behavior really isn’t as edgy as it might appear. Robert Horton

PThe Search for General Tso

Runs Fri., Jan. 16–Thurs., Jan. 22 at 
Grand Illusion. Not rated. 73 minutes.

The conceit to this food doc—how one of the most popular Chinese dishes in America originated—is ultimately just a clever way into a much broader story of how Chinese immigrants used food to assimilate into American culture. History often reminds us of our past prejudices: the Japanese-American internments during WWII, slavery, anti-Semitism, etc. Yet the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and led to pervasive discrimination, is more often forgotten.

Yet its consequences were key in pushing Chinese Americans toward the restaurant business, as most other jobs were off limits to them. The ingenuity of how they reinvented their native cuisine for a Western palate, initially serving limited items alongside American staples like hamburgers and steaks, is the backbone of this film. Director Ian Cheney, who had a hand in King Corn, interviews historians and other Chinese-food experts (far too many of them, though the collector of Chinese menus is fascinating), as well as longtime Chinese restauranteurs and their heirs. The latter makes for the better moments here—particularly in shots of those anachronistic, lonely Chinese restaurants situated on desolate small-town highways in middle America. Their owners’ remarks are enlightening, touching on everything from the craze for chop suey in the ’50s to Nixon’s famous trip to China in 1972 that suddenly put Chinese cuisine in vogue again.

Mentions of dishes like shrimp in lobster sauce and chow mein will transport any child of the ’60s or ’70s to that one Chinese restaurant where their family ordered takeout, probably named something along the lines of Golden Palace (that’s the one my family frequented). While the question of where General Tso’s Chicken comes from does indeed get answered (taking Cheney all the way to China), the real mystery here is how a foreign cuisine came to be arguably the most beloved American comfort food. Nicole Sprinkle

She’s Beautiful 
When She’s Angry

Opens Fri., Jan. 16 at Seven Gables. 
Not rated. 92 minutes.

When is feminism going to have its Selma moment? The struggle for civil rights has been amply documented and dramatized; the Vietnam War protest movement has been well integrated into Hollywood tales (Born on the Fourth of July, Forrest Gump, etc.) and PBS programming; but second-wave feminism, the subject of this listless new doc, failed to achieve its big goal: the Equal Rights Amendment. That narrative isn’t triumphant enough for the multiplex, yet director Mary Dore tries—partly by ending her story short of the ERA’s proposal and ratification failure—to spin as many happy outcomes as possible. And, sorry to say, I’m not buying all of them.

The timeframe here is 1966–71, after the Pill, NOW, and Betty Friedan (heard in several old interview clips). “Women’s lib,” variously understood, has seized the national imagination as (mostly) young female boomers protest wage inequality, the lack of subsidized child care, anti-abortion laws, and pervasive sex discrimination. Through archival footage and some fresh interviews, Dore mostly follows the movement’s minor players to whom she had access. (There’s a poignant 7 Up effect as miniskirted marchers become gray-haired grandmothers.)

“We were used to licking envelopes,” says one woman of the secretarial jobs that prepared them to organize via mimeographed mailing lists and phone trees (the Internet of that era). Recalling the recent “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” YouTube video, one ’60s activist is seen catcalling and wolf-whistling at men on Wall Street, to ironically reverse sexual harassment. That such issues are still with us is brought home by a passing old remark that “we all know that women are overworked and underpaid”—indeed, and now with the added bonus of work e-mail to answer after the kids are asleep.

In general, however, Dore shies away from modern parallels and postscripts. She’s Beautiful simply celebrates the heroic past, blinders firmly in place. The film becomes a tedious procession of laudable figures recalling a noble cause; then it gets mired in the dull factionalism of race, sexual orientation, and class within the movement. To achieve his ends, Martin Luther King kept a lid on such divisions (as we see more in Robert Schenkkan’s LBJ plays than in the anodyne Selma). But that kind of charismatic and even imperious leadership is what wins political wars. In She’s Beautiful, Dore’s subjects can point with pride to a lot of “consciousness-raising”—there’s a phrase you don’t hear anymore—and Roe v. Wade, but those were only a few battles won. And when Dore cuts to Wendy Davis filibustering on the floor of the Texas legislature, it’s only a reminder of how some critical gains have been reversed.

So when do we see a biopic of Gloria Steinem? Cast Emma Stone in the role, and millennial women might actually show up to watch. Brian Miller

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film@seattleweekly.com