Serial, Scribe, American Sniper

I finished the podcast Serial this week and didn't really see what the fuss was about. Serial was a production of the popular radio show This American Life. In it, reporter Sarah Koenig and her team examined the murder case of Adnan Syed, a high-schooler whose ex-girlfriend was murdered. Adnan was convicted and is in prison, but Koenig is determined to find out if he was wrongly convicted. The first few episodes were pretty interesting, but about midway through the series I started getting a bit bored. Funny thing, too, as that sometimes happens when I listened to This American Life.

 

 

Bob Ryan was a heralded sportswriter for the Boston Globe, and last year he released a memoir called Scribe. It's an interesting look at Boston and national sports. I especially enjoyed his account of the Dream Team taking on the world in the 1992 Summer Olympics. Turns out the idea to send pro basketball players wasn't an American plan, but was done to show the rest of the world that international basketball might be played at a higher level if NBA players were involved. In the years following, the international competition improved to the point that a gold medal wasn't a given for the USA. Ryan sounds a little too full of himself a few times, but I'd rather have that than bland storytelling.
 

I still have three Oscar-Nominated films to see, but so far my favorite is American Sniper. The film is about Chris Kyle, a Navy Seal sniper who does several tours in Iraq and in doing so seemingly loses his former self to the war. The film shows him being increasingly obsessed with the war, to the detriment of his family. I thought Bradley Cooper was absolutely excellent in the lead role, going from free-spirited cowboy to family man to sniper. The battle scenes are incredibly tense, and I thought the film did an excellent job of showing how it might be terribly difficult to go back to daily life after serving. 

After writing this, I heard discussion about what was different between book and movie, as there were incidents in the book that were left out of the movie.  This really doesn't detract from the movie for me.  When I walked out, I felt that this was the most important of the Oscar nominees that I'd seen so far (I still have to see Selma and The Imitation Game), because I think any reminder of the costs of voluntarily serving the country is a good thing.  My only real quibble with the film is that I would have liked to see more of what it took for Kyle to re-acclimate to civilian life, as it seems to happen kind of abruptly.