Monday, November 5, 2007
Lions for Lambs
What if you took Blackhawk Down, only, instead of the whole Josh Hartnett part and 1/3 of the fighting, you replaced it with a leathery school-teacher lecturing a student? Okay okay, now what if you take ANOTHER 1/3 of the fighting (let's say Tom Sizemore's role), and replaced it with a psychotic senator (hmmm, maybe we can leave Sizemore in this role) talking to a reporter? And they're all talking about the same war! Brilliant, right? I mean, imagine the complexity...three DIFFERENT storylines, but they're also CONNECTED! It's like Crash, except instead of having interesting plots and worrying about messy things like moral ambiguity, we have it all spelled out:
GOOD GUY:
GOOD GIRL:
BAD GUY!!!! 
Hooray! Don't you hate all those "thrillers" that don't let you know who the bad guys are until the end? I mean, who are you supposed to cheer for, right? Luckily, they cast our favorite crazy Scientologist anti-psychology Katie Holmes-brainwashing machine in the proper role, so that we remember that the senator, at any moment, could turn into this guy (from Magnolia).
Okay, I know not all of you get e-mails directly from Howard Dean (as I do), so you might forget about a little thing I like to call politics, but Redford helps bring it to the forefront and bestows us with his wisdom. Did you know that in addition to his (losing a sports scholarship from the) University of Colorado (for drunkenness) education, he also holds six PhDs in political science, and one PhD in nation building? Imagine what a sucker you'd be to buy Locke's Two Treatises on Government for $7.99, when for a mere $11 you could watch Redford's Three Storylines on Government! $4 a unit for Locke, compared to $3.67 a unit for Rob.Now, I want you to take a close look at the following kid:
He's just some punk, apathetic, too-cool-for-school kid, right?
WRONG! It's YOU! It's ME! Don't you see it, it's US! We're the ones too apathetic!!!! In case you couldn't gather this in the first fifteen seconds of the preview, Redford hammers it home at the end: "The problem is not with the people who started this war. The problem is with us, who do nothing". Truly, it's a shame that these pearls of wisdom (Redford's lecture) constitute a mere 60% of the words in the trailer.
In case the trailer wasn't enough to get you excited about CSPAN2 (err, I mean Lions for Lambs), we have the official synopsis: "a powerful and gripping story that digs behind the news, the politics and a nation divided to explore the human consequences of a complicated war."
Granted, I haven't seen the movie, but even the preview has let me in on a few facts that dig BEHIND the news and politics. For instance, did you know that politicians...
1) Sometimes talk in sound-bytes and discourage open and honest debate?
2)Sometimes put their political career ahead of the general well-being of the people?
If you answered “No” to either of those questions, then boy are you in for a WHOPPER. Without giving too much of this movie away (***spoiler alert***) the answer might be “Yes” to one, or BOTH, of those questions (***end spoiler alert). If I can learn this much in a mere two minutes and thirty seconds, imagine how much I can learn in the whole two hours! Especially without trivial things getting in the way like, I don't know, suspense and entertainment. Rob, you've done it again!
: November 5, 2007 at 3:46 PM Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
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