LIONS FOR LAMBS

There is no way I would not watch Lions for Lambs. Didnt go much to the movies last year. With Manos living in Tokyo, there are not many people left that would like to go to the movies with me. Unless they go to a ridiculous blockbuster that I avoid. So, I rented the DVD last night. With this cast, there was no way I would miss it. And Redford directing it, was another must see film for me. Ever since his 'ordinary people' he made my list of top 5 favorite directors.

The movie is not great in the sense that you want to watch it over and over again. It has a strong Redford influence in the character building. The entire movie was 6 scenes, or acts, as it reminded me more of a theatrical play than a movie.

Redford dealt less with the actual war in Iraq - thank God - and more with profiling America's pshychogram. In his six acts, the identity of an entire nation was revealed. Tom Cruise was an ambitious republican senator trying to sell himself and his new plan to invade afganistan to the press. The press was good to them, they sold the war on terror to the voters. Meryl Streep is the press who realizes what they have done and is completely devastated when she realises that for 40 years she was in fact part of the system that made america a fear factory and death sentense for young underpriviledged minorities (as they are the only ones that go to battle hoping that one day america will be kind to them). Redford is the university professor who is trying to convince his star poli sci student not to stop caring. If everyone stops caring nothing will be done to improve the country. The student argues that politicians are all becoming clowns caring about elections and not about the polis. He was interested when the old philosophers, the Greeks were studied. Redford's response is really one of the best lines that I have ever heard in a movie: 'Have you ever been to Greece? No, of course not, because you would know that their government makes ours look like a streamlined vision of the future'. Yet, I think what did it for the student and started caring again - at least as it is implied - was his fraternity mate who was so intrigued watching the news about a pop-nobody-starlet's divorce, when the real news where on a strip at the bottom of the screen. Redford's other two star students, an african american and a spaniard raised in the ghetto, went to war and died on their first assignment. So in a six-act movie Redford showed the six profiles of american pshycic: ambitious, powerful, guilty, intelligent, patriotic and moron.