Lamb chops
Nov 11, 2007 Ars Longa, Politics and Poker
All the big bloggers are all over the politics of why the “what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding” moving pictures are bleeding money. But for me, it’s about the art, see?
No, not the art of movies. I haven’t been in a movie theater in over a decade. No, I mean the art of murderous movie reviewing! For example, Dana Stevens reviewed “Lions for Lambs,” the latest anti-Iraq-war agitprop from Hollywood in Slate. Well of course I’m rooting against it — but
I root against just about every movie, not just because I think Hollywood is destroying this country and has become America’s calling card of moral decline around the globe. Nope — it’s because I love well written bomb reviews (yet another reason to mourn the unexplainable shift of Frank Rich, once known as the “Butcher of Broadway,” to the New York Times‘s opinionatin’ pages). Well, I wasn’t disappointed! Here are some greasy, tasty excerpts from Stevens’s review:
As you sit through the film’s 88 eternal minutes, you have to keep reminding yourself that Redford has been directing films, some of them pretty good, for nearly 30 years now. Yet Lions for Lambs appears to have been created by someone who’s never seen one of these newfangled contraptions called “movies,” or for that matter, witnessed that phenomenon known as “speech.”…
The net effect for the viewer is that of being trapped in an airless room, then escaping it to find yourself in another, and yet another….
Redford keeps cutting away to clocks as the professor’s office hour, the senator’s interview, and the soldiers’ hour of peril chug toward their respective ends. The unintended consequence is that you find yourself trying to match the real-time proceedings onscreen with the real time ticking away on your watch, and counting the seconds till you can go home.
Pass the mint jelly!
Cross-posted on Right Wing News.
November 11th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
I think the real secret of most modern art is to always remain true to your own vision, no matter how severely myopic you might be.
November 11th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Jack, that’s still an overstatement. Where’s the vision in this pap?
November 12th, 2007 at 7:32 am
I knew this film was going to be a stinker just by watching the “choice clips” they played in promoting the thing on Conan and Leno. When those look bad, you’re in for one lame ass ride!
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:25 am
Mr. Coleman, you see , we can agree on something: I too consider Hollywood,”big budget”,”arthouse”(espessially) to be the biggest national security threat for the USA.(And Tom Cruise,imah shmoi,(what’s his father thinks about Jews?)is worthless poseur, clown, faggot(yea) and disgrace of an actor
Was there something we disagreed on, at some point, that I have forgotten, Lev? — RDC