Posted on 11/15/2007 5:28:24 AM PST by SJackson
What this movie is going to be about is evident from the start because they telegraph it with a flare gun. We fade in to the latest casualty report from Iraq. It's bad news, the report and the movie, really a filmed polemic that gives new meaning to the term "talkie." Here Hollywood liberals showcase their incoherence and fondle their favorite incantation.
In Lions for Lambs, the war on terror is nothing more than a replay of Vietnam. Ambitious, warmongering politicians are sending kids, especially blacks and latinos, to die in fields afar, victims of inept strategy and an overextended, racist, and imperialistic nation that has had its day. How to dramatize, that is the question.
The movie may be about the war on terror but viewers don't get to see terror in action, say a live beheading on a website, or even footage of 9/11. They only hear characters talking about terror, and that won't cut it in cinema. As Richard Grenier used to say, out of sight out of mind is the easiest way to stack the deck. The actual terrorists remain shadowy figures whose islamofascist ideology gets no definition. The dramatic effect is to render the enemy illusory, as though the war is about nothing.
No so for Senator Jasper Irving, played by Tom Cruise. He has a new plan for Afghanistan, forward movement of special forces, seizing the high ground. He brokers this plan to reporter Janine Roth, played by Meryl Streep. She is a baby boomer, now 57, who cut her reportorial teeth on Vietnam. She leaves few sixties clichés unturned, and at one point even quotes the Who, "same as the old boss." She is an encyclopedia of anti-Iraq-war boilerplate, not even very good as that.
Cut to Afghanistan, where the special forces are on the move. Their helicopter – another Vietnam symbol – takes fire en route to en route to a supposedly unoccupied mountain, the result of bad intelligence. Two soldiers, Arian Finch, who is black, and Ernie Rodriguez, generic latino, take hits and fall to the mountain. They thus Symbolize the Way the War on Terror Victimizes Minorities, another Vietnam canard. See Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam, for the real story.
Cut to "A University in California" – think Berkeley –where professor Stephen Malley, played by producer Robert Redford holds forth with student Todd Hayes. He is supposed to be one of the Best and Brightest but shows little evidence of smarts. Neither does the professor come off as particularly erudite, though he poses well and he sure can talk. He even explains the title, based on the view of German soldiers in World War I that the brave British grunts fought like lions for the cowardly "lambs," who commanded them. See the parallel? The conversation between professor and student makes little sense, but some realities emerge.
Arian and Ernie, it turns out, were two of Malley's students. They enjoyed much opportunity – athletic scholarships, for example – but then they volunteered to fight for America in Afghanistan. Professor Malley, who fought in Vietnam and was injured protesting the war after he came back, simply cannot understand what would prompt anyone to do such a thing for a racist nation that neglects the inner city and other sins.
Screenwriter Michael Matthew Carnahan has Arian and Ernie saying that, with military experience, they will be able to return home and do Many Good Things in line with a liberal agenda. If they come home, that is. Out on the mountain in Afghanistan they are both wounded and half buried in snow as the Taliban move in. Lt. Col. Falco calls in air strikes and mounts a rescue operation. Will it arrive in time to save them?
Cut back to Washington, where Janine Roth doesn't know what to do with this story. She is tired of swallowing the official propaganda that got us into this mess, and so on. Trouble with Iran is looming and Jasper Irving is hinting at nukes with his rhetoric of "whatever it takes."
Arian and Ernie are convinced the rescue mission will be late, which it is. They stand together in the face of the enemy. The Taliban gun them down while commanders watch the slaughter on the big screen. Music up with a swell. Message: join the Army and you are throwing your life away. Cut to Janine Roth, riding around Washington in a cab, tearfully observing Arlington cemetery and the White House. Todd Hayes still doesn't know what to do, despite the advice of Robert Redford, who wants him, and every member of the audience, to be a sixties' reenactor.
Utterly contrived and tedious to the point of punishment, Lions for Lambs is unlikely to satisfy even the most vocal critics of the war on terror. For those on the other side, this agit-prop even fails as self-satire. But it does serve as a reminder that, for the Hollywood liberal elite, America is always the villain and inherently bad – except, of course, for their mansion, Mercedes-Benz, and three-picture deal with Paramount. The film also confirms that there will always be a vast gap between that elite and those who volunteer to throw down with the Taliban.
It pleases me that this movie is a flop.
I bet it wins lots of academy awards though!
Lions for Lambs, the new movie directed by and starring Robert Redford, is designed to move us away from the "black-and-white" rhetoric of the war on terror and instead draw our focus to the "gray areas." This is necessary so that there can be a debate on issues--a debate we have been "denied" over the past six years.
I know this because I heard Robert Redford say it before a screening of Lions for Lambs at the Museum of Modern Art, where the movie was met with rapturous applause by an audience studded with has-beens, including a Mohawk-sporting Randy Quaid, Andrew (Pretty in Pink) McCarthy, Adam (Counting Crows) Duritz, and Janine (Northern Exposure) Turner. Redford's main hope, he said just before his film unspooled itself over the course of 88 of the most barren minutes anyone has ever spent at MOMA, is that his new film will make us think. That is, indeed, a noble purpose. So let me say on behalf of the American filmgoing public that we collectively owe an inexpressible debt to Redford for deigning to slalom down from his pristine Utah mountaintop to compel us to make unaccustomed use of our underutilized gray matter.
Redford did not have to bestir himself, God knows. What more has he to prove? What more must he give to the nation and the world to whom he has given so much, particularly by jumping off a cliff shouting "S--t" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?
You have to be careful with them. They had a nasty tendency to you make you Sing with the Choir Invisible when hit in the rear..
I know Harry Reid and others in the Senate may wish it so, but since when do senators run the conduct of the war?
"Utterly contrived and tedious to the point of punishment, Lions for Lambs is unlikely to satisfy even the most vocal critics of the war on terror. For those on the other side, this agit-prop even fails as self-satire. But it does serve as a reminder that, for the Hollywood liberal elite, America is always the villain and inherently bad – except, of course, for their mansion, Mercedes-Benz, and three-picture deal with Paramount. The film also confirms that there will always be a vast gap between that elite and those who volunteer to throw down with the Taliban."
Remember what Mr. Jensen told Howard Beal in Network during the come-to-Jesus scene?
Welllll Hollyweird & the Hollyweirdos have all that money, and now it has to come back.
...makes more sense then ever before. ;^)
Show me any vehicle that doesn’t introduce you to fire when hit from behind at 70 mph by another vehicle twice its weight. I loved my Pinto.
So far this “Lions for Lambs” movie seems a bust. I am disappointed that Janine Turner was at the premier, as I thought she was a lot smarter than that. L4L brought in only 6.7 million with its 4th place this week, which is just over 1/3 the take for the #3 movie. That says something about Robby Redman’s draw today.
The reviewer should have used the proper terminology for British soldiers, though: grunts are American. British ground pounders are Tommies.
Redford has been and continues to be deeply paranoid. Must be bad dope...
Another flop from the most over-paid, under-educated segment of US society, Follywood “stars.”
Nobody wants to see a movie that denigrates our troops? Huh, who would have thought./sarc
After my film was done I walked past a theater playing LFL and curiosity overwhelmed me as to Who, What and How many would be inside.
Stadium seating, so I had to go into the middle of the theater.
Lo and Behold - 2 - Count 'em - 2 - people in the entire place.
I literally laughed out loud as they slumped down in their seats.
Hollywood apparently lives in a fantasy world both off and on the screen.
As of today, Box Office Mojo shows this anti-American POS grossing $7.9 million. I doubt that amount of money even pays for the makeup that was needed to fill Redford’s enormous facial pits.
- I predict this turkey will ultimately earn under $20 million at the box office but because Redford might have persuaded it’s other “stars” to work for nothing as a gesture of support, it might break even.
Failing that, Redford probably took the precaution of ensuring that funding arrangements protected him against any losses that might result, but which will allow him to go about nobly proclaiming that he took a financial hit so he could speak, “truth to power”.
This movie represents a glimpse inside the warped mind of a typical Hollywood anti American socialist. It’s a scary, hate filled landscape.
The highlights would be
1. Truman slashes Post WWII military budget to the boneDemocratic president Truman "caused" more deaths in Korea in 2 months, than Bush "caused" in 4 years in Iraq.
2. 1949 - Truman oversees withdrawal of US troops from S. Korea (merely 4 years after the US freed SK from decades of heavy handed occupation by the Japanese.)
3. 1949 - US deliberately leaves behind a weakened S Korean army.
4. 1950 - North Korean army of Communist dictator Kim il-Sung invades and occupies most of South Korea.
5. 1950 - Truman sends US troops to SK to fight a "police action" against "bandits."
6. Close to 8,000 Americans die in the first 3 months of the war.
7. Jan 1951 - 6 months into the war, the severest press censorship in memory is imposed on correspondents, who are placed under the jurisdiction of the US Army and, among other things, are forbidden to criticize the handling of the war and forbidden to send demoralizing dispatches.
8. The military draft is ramped up
9. 30,000 Americans die, fighting to refree S. Korea, during 30 months that Truman is president
Knew Redford was an oddball on a grand scale, but paranoid?
Whose the clown think gives a tinker's damn about him?
Underneath whatever paranoia he suffers & at the core of lies an enormous, monstrous out-of-control ego. There's his biggest problem, and enemy.
Hey maybe this'll be the dog to bring 'em down, the one that'll *break* him once & for finally? ;^)
"Must be bad dope..."
HA!!
Hollyweirdos are used to the best, can't blame the dope.
In Red-ford's?
...it's a dope gone bad. :^)
Yup, sure do.
The man paid, and paid dearly for the sin of loving his country.
A stain on our history & the republic.
"He showed us then and we still have the same mindset and dribble flowing from CA."
Fortunately it isn't 1957.
The Liberal-Socialists controlling Hollyweird (& their lackeys), television, newspapers etc do not control the debate anymore.
One sees the signs all over, tanking stocks etc.
The punks -- *Pinch* for example -- have blown nearly all their political capital and soon will have squandered their financial resources, as well.
Nope, the Liberal-Socialist miscreants may not realize it.
...but they're going *down*. ;^)
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