The two most persistent raps by conservatives these days is that the mainstream media and higher education are being ruined by lefties and their biases. Lefty media types and lefty academics spend a lot of time denying this, which makes it all the more baffling that a bunch of Hollywood lefties would undermine their arguments.
I don’t plan to see “Lions for Lambs,” Robert Redford’s new anti-war propaganda film. In fact, I don’t think many people are going to see it if the reviews, even from lefty publications, are right about it. The Village Voice‘s reviewer says: “What can I tell you? The movie is awful.” Which makes it the best of all the recent anti-war flicks.
My favorite Redford movies are “Barefoot in the Park” (yes, even with Jane Fonda; I’ll watch that over and over just to enjoy Mildred Natwick and Charles Boyer), “Jeremiah Johnson,” “Three Days of the Condor” (lefty conspiracy flick but a good one), and “The Sting” (totally apolitical), but he hasn’t done anything memorable since those. I guess “Horse Whisperer” was worth the price of admission simply for the scenery, but, really, other than that…
In “Lions for Lambs” he unaccountably makes his main reporter character as left-wing, anti-war and biased as one can imagine. For Meryl Streep this is type-casting. And his own character, a college professor, is as left-wing, anti-war and corrupt as Ward Churchill, trading grades for anti-war activism. A Republican senator is played by Tom Cruise, I’m sure with the same gusto and over-acting that another noted liberal (Alec Baldwin) plays conservative bad guys.
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: 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.
How does this help the liberal cause, one wonders.
UPDATE: Agence France Presse spins the bad box office for anti-war films this way: Americans are shunning grim war news. Dream on, Frenchies. They’re shunning America-hating director and actors.
