Posted on 11/12/2007 2:18:36 PM PST by blam
Hollywood misreads response to war on terror
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 12/11/2007
Hollywood has misjudged the public's appetite for films about Iraq and the war on terror, Cathering Elsworth says, as a slew of new movies have flopped at the box office.
The latest casualty, Robert Redford's "verbose" Lions for Lambs, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, took just over 2 million dollars when it debuted on Friday, lagging far behind the animated adventure Bee Movie, which opened the week before.
Cruise, Redford and Streep in Lions for Lambs
Despite its a-list cast - Redford not only directs but stars in the film - the release has been savaged by critics as a ponderous, worthy sermon on American foreign policy.
Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker, said Lions for Lambs is "most charitably described as Ibsen with helicopters" while online magazine Slate claimed the film "ought to have been called Slugs for Snails, so leisurely does it creep toward its predictably bombastic conclusion".
The film's poor opening - which puts it on course to be Cruise's lowest-grossing movie of all time - follows the lacklustre performances of similarly themed releases such as Rendition, In the Valley of Elah and A Mighty Heart.
Jolie as Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart (left) and Witherspoon in Rendition
All three boasted Oscar-winning stars - Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep in Rendition, Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah, and Angelina Jolie as murdered reporter Daniel Pearl's widow in A Mighty Heart - yet bombed spectacularly.
Rendition, about the CIA's outsourcing of interrogation of terror suspects, was beaten on its opening weekend by a re-release of the 14-year-old A Nightmare Before Christmas and has so far taken just under 10 million dollars.
The slim takings bode ill for other upcoming releases including Brian De Palma's Redacted, based on the real-life rape and murder of an Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers, Grace Is Gone, in which John Cusack plays a man whose wife is killed in Iraq, and Stop Loss, with Ryan Philippe as a soldier who refuses to fight.
Critics say the films' failure shows just how badly Hollywood has misread Americans' response to the war on terror, confusing "the public's war-weariness with their own carefully cultivated rage", as Jonah Goldberg, in the Houston Chronicle, put it.
"Hollywood and the left generally have misread this political discontent thinking there's a mandate for their trite Vietnam-era nostalgia for mass protest and Joan Baez specifying," he wrote.
"But few Americans are eager to spend their money to listen to the Jane Fonda set say, 'I told you so!' for two hours."
There was a time and a place in this country where these idiots would have been thrown in jail or worse
“Hollywood Misreads Response To War On Terror”
As far as I’m concerned, IT’S CHRISTMAS IN NOVEMBER!!!!!
When Hollyweird Agit-Prop tanks at the box office.
As I posted a while ago, if someone in Hollywood wants to make a billion dollars, release a movie showing handsome American soldiers killing lots of Muslim terrorists.
It can’t miss.
Hollyweird won’t do that though, they are incredibly dense IMO.
For example, Rambo four is being filmed, a perfect set up for John Rambo to kill jihaddies right?
Err, that would be “no”, try...wait for it....White Supremecists...IMO, Rambo will make money, they would make boatloads of money if the producers had actual real type villians that are killing Americans even today.
Dan in Real Life
My wife got me to go. I enjoyed it. Funny and tender. You’ll like it if you are a dad.
It was much better than I had expected..my wife too wanted to go and I was not really wanting to go (like Carrell and didnt’ want to have a bad movie push me toward not liking him as much) but it was a good movie all in all...
Here's just a partial list of the hundreds of wonderful films that Hollywood produced during WW2.
Waterloo Bridge (The first Hollywood film set in WW2), A Yank in the RAF, Casablanca, Captains of the Clouds, Eagle Squadron, Flying Tigers, Wake Island, Gung Ho!, Bataan, Crash Dive, The Cross of Lorraine, Cry 'Havoc', Destination Tokyo, Guadalcanal Diary, So Proudly We Hail!, The Fighting Seabees, Four Jills in a Jeep, Rosie the Riveter, Song of Russia, The Sullivans, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Wing and a Prayer, Back to Bataan, Blood on the Sun, God is My Co-Pilot, The Story of G.I. Joe, They Were Expendable, A Walk in the Sun.
In addition, there were hundreds of excellent documentary films produced over the course of the war. And let us not forget the numerous cartoons that came out, like Any Bonds Today, which I have pictured above. Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Porky, Donald, Mickey, and even Pistol Pete all joined up for the war effort.
It’s not just the fact that films about Iraq are not yielding good box office. I believe that if Hollywood produced a film say extolling the heroism of either the 1st infantry division or the Marines in Fallujah, they would see pretty decent box office. Since their hatred of George Bush and the war has deranged them, they will not be able to see the positive box office right in front of their faces. They will continue this litany of films depicting American soldiers as victims or villains so has to indulge their leftist ideological bent.
They are, but just like most everything else in ho-wood, they are irrelevant.
Too bad for Hollywood. The reason they misread what Americans think about the war is because the RATS in DC and the liberal media led them astray. The RAT party and the liberal media keeps putting out phony poll statistics and because of their hatred for George Bush, Hollywood believed them. I hope every last one of them takes a bath. Of course they’ll blame that on George Bush too. It’s a good lesson to that bunch of fools in Hollywood.
Marcus Luttrell, the SEAL team's lone survivor and author of this wonderful book, has approved of Universal's selection of Berg, but he has reserved the rights to oversee the production of the movie.
bump
It isn’t bad at all. No things blowing up and the car chase is lame, but it rings true. I enjoyed it.
Are a lot of people "war weary" maybe so , heck no one wants war, but no one needs a lecture on the lefts point of view either. Why would you waste 30 to 50 bucks and 3 hours of your life to see cruise, redford and streep pontificate, what you see 24 hours a day on tv?
More importantly, no one doesn't know someone in Iraq or whos kid is in Iraq.
When the news media screams hadifa or attrocities by this or that unit, those kids hear it and they EMAIL home.
They say mom and dad it didn't happen that way and mom and dad go to work, clubs and churchs and TELL the truth of what those kids are doing.
This time they don't have to come home and defend themselves after the fact, they can respond almost in the moment.
Thanks for the heads up. That is good to know.
Right now the film is being held up by the screenwriter strike, but it is supposed to begin filming sometime next year and will be released during the summer of 2009.
vaudine
As does the anonymous author who wrote the article. What is very encouraging, however is that an overwhelming majority of the now over 500 comments are from people who took the time to take both the article and hollywood to task for their anti-Americanism. Well worth the read.
I think that would be a (or could be) an excellent film made about fallujah, pre BDS striking Hollwierd, Black Hawk Down and WE were Soldiers Once were great films that did well at the Box Office.
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