Hey folks, Harry here... I've been looking forward to LIONS FOR LAMBS ever since I read the fantastic script back about 9 months ago - and before that when I heard it was the first film greenlit by the Cruise led United Artist - and at the first mention of Redford's name. Capone recently sat down with Redford and I can't wait for that interview to come in, Al was quite fond of the chat he had - and I'm quite jealous. Redford is quite a person to share words with. Anyway - Peter Gibbons is here with a look at the film - fresh off of leaving CNN after 10 years. Here ya go...
Hey there, I've written a couple reviews for you guys in the past... but it's been a while. Yesterday I quit my job with CNN after 10 years, so I'm in a very good mood. I'll mention a nasty little secret about the once-proud network later in this review, since it's applicable to the film. And since I just got hypnotized and quit my job, I guess you can call me Peter Gibbons. I just got out of a screening for Robert Redford's new movie - Lions for Lambs - here in Atlanta. Michael Pena was on hand and took questions for half an hour after the film. I'll get to that in a minute. Some of you just want to know if it's good or not. Yes, it's good. Movie of the year good? I don't know... but it makes you think, so if thinking pisses you off, go see something with Dane Cook. If you like to think and care about the future of the world, see it. Then, after you see it, take a break from watching movies and read "War is a Racket" by General Smedley Butler, do a Google search for Operation: Northwoods, or read a few sections from the Patriot Acts, which make "The Shining" seem like a children's book. You may now give me the finger for preaching, and continue... First off, this is a political film and I have strong political views, so you can either deal with that or just stop reading. If you've seen the trailers for this film, you know it's loaded with politically-charged lines like Tom Cruise spouting "Do you want to win the war on terror!? Yes or no?" (to which I always want to shout "When will terror be defeated and how much will it cost?") and Robert Redford saying "They bank on your apathy! They plan strategies around it!" So if you're looking for a bland and neutral film, look elsewhere. The film is divided into three very distinct story lines, all of which take place concurrently, over the length of about an hour: one is basically an extended discussion between Redford's political science professor and his promising, yet apathetic student (I was a political science major, so this connected with me pretty quickly). Another story line is an interview between Cruise's pro-war, right wing senator and Streep's reporter (you'll get a chuckle from the photoshopped portraits on his office wall of Cruise with "W" and the other criminals, er... officials in the Bush Administration, like Condi & Cheney). The third story line includes the aforementioned Michael Pena - a soldier who is thrust into a bad situation in Afghanistan with his buddy Derek Luke. This actually ties in with Redford's character, as the two buddies turn out to be his former students. This is the weakest segment in my opinion, as it mostly consists of the classic war movie situation where the good guys bond together against all odds. It has plenty of shocking explosions and gunfire, and I have to admit liking Pena & Luke here, but all in all the other two segments are filled with excellent dialog and are thus infinitely more interesting. Streep is perfect as usual as an aging reporter with experience and a conscience. Cruise is Cruise... which is just about perfect for this role. He is the Cruise that his haters love to hate. Here, he plays a warmongering, ambitious senator who invites Streep in for an exclusive story about the "new strategy" being implemented in the Middle East (for those of you who've been playing World of Warcraft for the past several years, the Middle East is where people have been getting slaughtered since the dawn of man... and lately, thanks to our U.S. tax dollars). The "new strategy" he's talking about is the botched mission involving Pena & Luke, so I guess these all intertwine... but it's done fairly well... unlike in Crash, in which the coincidences were absurd. That's all I have to say about plot points. I was actually pretty surprised at the depth of the arguments being put forth and the pointed nature of the questions being asked by Streep, because it's pretty tough in this day and age to get a major studio to put out a film that has the balls to point out how fucked up our country is and how corrupt our leaders have become. Since Redford directed, you can bet your ass the words his character is speaking come from his gut. His student has an attitude that I'd expect to see in AICN talkbacks... except what he says, while immature and naive, is mostly intelligent. These two head-to-head segments of the film are basically a forum to have a political debate on the movie screen... and thankfully, they're pretty interesting. When Streep asked some damn good questions, like "Why did we attack a country that didn't attack us?" you could see people in the audience nodding and hear them saying "mm-hmm." All the wannabe neocons out there will no doubt be saying "THEY attacked us on 9/11," but actually none of the terrorists were from Iraq, and most were from Saudi Arabia. Oh, and Saddam hated Al Qaeda. Hmm.... [Sorry, I had to launch a preemptive strike at talkbackers... I'm sure they can at least understand the inherent genius and morality of that strategy.] All the main actors were engaging... even the kid, who I'd never seen before. The military segment was more unoriginal. I get pretty tired of seeing the portrayal of our military as always being well-intentioned, yet misguided. I understand it, because if Redford tried to insinuate that the U.S. military was doing bad things on purpose... or that the military-industrial complex is actually motivated to continue engaging in wars, because its profits skyrocket when we're at war... then he'd be branded as "unpatriotic" and all the good Americans who support the war would have to burn their copies of "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid" while buying slapping "Support our troops" stickers on their SUV's. But the Taliban in this film are a faceless enemy that is literally never seen, except when they're getting shot. They're just the baddies coming to kill our stranded heroes. That said, Redford was pretty dead-on with his assessment of the lapdog media... and he took some nice potshots at NILF's (if you don't know what a NILF is, watch the Daily Show report about it on youtube). I worked for CNN for 10 years, and there's a line in there by Streep's character about how her network was bought by a giant corporation in a merger back in 1991, and how the focus of the organization shifted from "reporting news" to "selling advertising time." Well, I attended a meeting at CNN earlier this year in which the president of the entire news division actually said, while boasting about their steady increase in profits over the past several years, that " Good journalism is good business." Think about that. I was so stunned that I actually wrote it down. Redford illustrates the media's complicity in this mess with striking clarity. The big mistake to make from watching the trailer to this film would be to think "Wow, this is a liberal, anti-war film," and start throwing your stuffed elephants and donkeys at each other. The ending is deliberately left open-ended... and is not at all preachy. Actually, it ends so abruptly that one of the first people to ask Michael Pena a question wanted to know why the hell it ended the way it did. His answer was that they didn't want to be preachy. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to ask him why Paul Haggis didn't take that advice while making Crash. Pena was cool, but several dumbasses asked him lame questions about acting (I kept looking around for James Lipton). He was asked a few political questions, like did the cast ever have debates while munching on shrimp cocktail about the validity of the "War on Terror" or why so many Hollywood actors are supporting Hillary Clinton when she's voted for the war, too... but he danced around those and made jokes about how he's been able to have success in spite of not looking like a "Mexican Brad Pitt." That was actually pretty funny, because I tried to picture what such a man would look like. Anyway, I really liked Redford in the film, and I think Streep gave my favorite performance. I wish Redford had taken things further... I could really sense that he wanted to... but this is about as much as the average apathetic, uninformed, public school indoctrinated, celebrity culture infatuated, reality TV watching public can handle at this point. The film definitely isn't an endorsement of Hillary or the Democratic party... it's more of an indictment of our whole society and a call for action and personal responsibility. I have to go to bed, so I'll leave you with a quote: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the decision." Benjamin Franklin
