Actually, MOST movies are "too dumb to criticize." Time for some book-readin'.

It's a preachin' kind of Sunday.

I tend to avoid American mainstream movies, as they tend to be depressingly stupid. Two hours expended to glare in pained annoyance, while books await reading, strikes me as a poor bargain even when drunk.

Lately I've been avoiding social media expressions of polarized dumbassery, whether emanating from knee-jerking parties to the right or left. It is increasingly evident that social media was developed to be abused by the 99%, go the glee of the 1%, as the ones who should be marching together to take back what is theirs instead attack each other.

It's called divide and conquer, folks, and you buy into it every single day. Rather than emulating 19th-century peasants prostrate on their knees, praying to the Tsar (or the Koch Brothers, or "fill in the blank: with the name of any multinational corporation) for some measure of hope, perhaps we might commence a shift aimed at taking some of it back.

Without knowing or caring why the sniper was sent to Iraq in the first place -- why soldiers are sent anywhere throughout history -- it's all diversion and fluff. Metaphorically, we cannot all work "for" ourselves, but we needn't work for the Man, either. Ideas and words matter, and it's never too late to invest in the time required to grasp their meaning.

Sermon concluded.

'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

Almost.

 ... Filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.