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stevemcgarrett
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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 Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 6:29 pm Post subject: A LION DOZING: REDFORD'S CINEMATIC POLITICAL PLOY FLOPS |
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Add another asterisk for Lions to Lambs just below Costner's Waterworld in the list of ambitious cinematic bromides. Redford, the quintessential Hollywood liberal, fails to rouse even the Code Pink lesbo legends from their theater seats with this clunker.
Looks like the Pretty-Boy can't direct any more than he could act.
NOTES TO THE DIRECTOR:
1. If you want to make a good film, start by letting the audience decide how to react to your story.
2. Crafting stock characters who are one-sided ideologically and one dimensional personally leads to puppetry and propoganda, not cinematic art.
Let's hear what the Village Voice, hardly a conservative mouthpiece, has to say about Redford's latest directorial flop:
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Dull Roar
by Ella Taylor, November 6th, 2007
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy and it wasn't even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script forThe Kingdom, which would explain the presence early on of that movie's director, Peter Berg, striding around Afghanistan in a buzz cut and stiff upper lip, barking bytes from Von Clausewitz and imploring his noticeably minority foot soldiers to show the enemy "the full measure of American mean." Compared to facing the meanie back home in Washington, Republican hardbody [even the feminist writer of this piece couldn't help herself here] played by Tom Cruise in crisp white shirt, sparkly molars, and oodles of blind ambition the war zone "Over There" is peanuts.
We find the senator in his office, hectoring a tough old broad of a journalist in comfy '60s-liberal tweeds (Meryl Streep) about the need for a surge to end all surges in the Middle East. She lectures him right back on the folly of United States warmongering, and to drive the point home, we head west to "a California university," where a world-weary professor and Vietnam vet (Redford) cuts a deal that only a celluloid academic could make without losing his job [sic. unless he's a leftist]. He promises straight B's to a disaffected failing student (Andrew Garfield) on the condition that he cast sloth aside to become all that he can be against the war.
For a movie so relentlessly bent on realism, Lions for Lambs is riddled with implausibilities [because that's the way Hollywood libs view history]. Would a rising young Republican with an acquisitive eye on the presidency choose a liberal reporter with the stubborn intractability of a Christiane Amanpour to push his latest war on terror? Are today's college youth really as politically lethargic as this privileged white boy [note how she easily resorts to this label but is oh-so-politically correct in describing the next two characters]? Would his star classmates, an African-American (Derek Luke) and a Latino (Michael Pelic), having boot-strapped themselves out of East L.A., chuck it all away and blithely join the Army in order to become the movie's conscience? [sic. or gone to college in the first place]
Known for making stately, linear films with lovely sunsets, Redford has none of the piss and vinegar, the technical bravura, or the hip irony of younger directors making political films, like Stephen Gaghan or Paul Greengrass. His editing is artless [re: talentless], the action scenes listless [re: sedate], the characters almost entirely representational of the political attitudes they strike [gee, what a surprise]. Researched, data-crunched and op-eded to the hilt, Lions for Lambs [sort of like a Hillary sound byte] talks and talks and TALKS your head off as it lumbers toward complete coverage of the state of our nation.
What can I tell you? The movie is awful and also oddly touching [re: pathetic], even adorable in its dogged [puppies are getting the best of this lib writer now] sense of responsibility, its stubborn refusal of style. There's something refreshing about a movie as earnest [i.e.,, only if you're a lib] and well-briefed as this one. Redford is no intellectual, [an understatement if there was one] but I found myself unaccountably charmed by his lack of cynicism [or perhaps his baby blues], his old-fangled desire to plead the case of ordinary people caught up in the reckless aggression of the powerful. |
Lack of cynicism? I'd say he's so steeped in cynicism about the war in Iraq and the US military as a whole that he can't muster the artistic discipline to avoid propaganda in celluloid.
Look's like it's back to the woods, Jeremiah Johnson. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 7:01 pm Post subject: |
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CNN reviewer recently gave it a pretty good-bad review.
Suggested the world simply catch in on DVD.
Runs a mere 90 minutes, most of it shot in Cruise's office, inter-woven with another story thread involving
Redford's character & his son 
Not much of a war "action" flick, said to be more for reflection & thought.
Claimed the real heroes were the two US soldiers profiled at the start?
Sacrificed, caught up, maybe even wounded or killed, in a web of lucrative corruption & lies.
Lambs for Lions. |
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