LFL LOL
Hollywood anti-war Bush-bash surge tanks at the box office. UK Guardian: Lions for Lambs turns out to be a turkey. Spanked by a B, I mean Bee Movie, a gangster’s flick and some holiday schlock.
The American box office spelled cold comfort for Tom Cruise last weekend as his labour-of-love production Lions for Lambs struggled to find a mainstream audience. Poor reviews and negative word of mouth were thought to have harmed the political thriller, which opened in fourth place with a disappointing $6.7m (£3.2m).
Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld’s family cartoon, leapfrogged Ridley Scott’s American Gangster to claim the top spot on its second week of release. The film’s weekend haul of $26m (£12.4m) carried its total earnings to $72.2m (£34.5m). The highest new entry on the chart was the Yuletide comedy Fred Claus, starring Vince Vaughn and Paul Giamatti, which debuted in third place.
As predicted by Agence France Presse:
LOS ANGELES (AFP) — The wave of recent films set against the backdrop of war in Iraq and post-9/11 security has failed to win over film-goers keen to escape grim news headlines when they go to the movies, analysts say.
In a break with past convention, when films based on real conflicts were made only years after the last shots were fired, several politically-charged films have gone on release while America remains embroiled in Iraq.
Almost without exception, however, the crop of movies have struggled to turn a profit at the box-office and in many cases have received a mauling from unimpressed critics as well.
“Rendition,” a drama starring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal about the CIA’s policy of outsourcing interrogation of terror suspects, has taken just under 10 million dollars at the box office, a disastrous return.
Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis’s latest film “In the Valley of Elah,” about a father investigating the death of his son in Iraq, earned favorable reviews but less than seven million dollars following its release in September.
Even the action-packed “The Kingdom,” starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, fell well below its 70 million budget with around 47 million dollars in ticket sales.
The poor returns do not augur well for more war films due for release in North America later this month, notably the Robert Redford-directed drama “Lions for Lambs” and Brian De Palma’s hard-hitting “Redacted,” based on the real-life rape and murder of an Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers.
The French pegged it.
Newsbusters: People go to the movies to be entertained, not preached at … anyway, the American public is not nearly as angry and delirious about Iraq as the far left, and polling shows it since things turned around.
Ace: Memo to Hollywood … Want to make some money? Make a movie where Americans are the good guys and terrorists are the bad guys.
Crit scribbles at the end of Ace’s memo, “Hey Hollywood, when even the French know anti-Americanism is passe, it’s time to wake up and smell the shark jump.”
Hold on, there may be a gold lining to this ray of sunshine. Maybe it’s not just the anti-war message that no one cares about:
Directed by Robert Redford, Lions for Lambs is a thriller about America’s ongoing “war on terror”. Cruise nurtured the project via his new studio division United Artists and its poor performance will inevitably be read as a sign that his A-list career is on the wane.
Meanwhile, I’d like to thank Mr. Redford and Mr. Cruise for advertising here and supporting the (frothing right-wing American imperialist warmonger) site, even if they did take one of the cheap slots. Hey readers, what’s the matter … didn’t even one of you plonk down $8 for some warmed-over Bush lied people died? Damn, that’s some ironic pancakes.
Topics: Hollywood
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:12 am on Monday, November 12, 2007
8 Responses to “LFL LOL”
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November 12th, 2007 at 9:06 am
The real movies about the WOT, however, continue to do well.
Lord of the Rings, with its theme that evil exists and we cannot hide in our comfy little hole and avoid it, was a huge international hit.
Batman Begins, with a superb performance by Liam Neeson as a charismatic fanatic who plans a purifying genocide, will soon have a sequel.
The Spiderman series, which stresses that “with great power comes great responsibility,” has made over $2 billion worldwide.
And the remake of War of the Worlds, in which a feckless baby boomer seeks to run to save himself from alien attack, but his GenX son insists on fighting, was also a hit.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:47 am
The movie of the year — really — is Gone Baby Gone. Go see it. Ben Affleck needs to ditch trying to act (and leave that to his brother, who’s remarkably good in this film), and move to directing and writing.
Intensely moral — and morally conflicted.
November 12th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
They say that fire purifies. Perhaps the flames produced by the crash of these films will help cleanse the misguided souls making them.
Nah. It will just re-enforce their ideas about the knuckle-dragging proles, giving proof to their preconceptions and a subject for cocktail-party discussions.
November 12th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Redford is a wrinkled old scold, and Cruise has been on the way out for years. If Hollywood wants to save itself (and I’m not at all confident they have a clue how to do that), they need to start dumping the highly overpaid top talent and start bringing in new blood and a fresh, new philosophy, i.e. give the people what they actually want instead of what Hollywood thinks they should want.
November 12th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
has failed to win over film-goers keen to escape grim news headlines when they go to the movies, analysts say.
Keen to escape grim news? I’ve been keen to escape grim news since they day I knew what “news” was.
How about — has failed to win over film-goers keen to be entertained and get the outrageous 10 dollar’s worth when they go to the movies, analysts say.
November 12th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
consider the people who dominate “Hollywood’: Tom Cruise is in his 40s, and so is Brad Pitt. Steven Spielberg has been around doing Big Movies since the early 70s (3 decades). And they are all RICH. They have been RICH, and surrounded by sychophants for DECADES (I mean, some of these guys can make 30 million dollars in movies that lose money!). They are their own little in-group, they have their own table in the high school cafeteria. Plus, face it, they always had a poor education.
And I include here the younger guys, like Affleck and Damon, the ones from the Ivy League colleges… they simply are not ‘worldly’, or maybe we can describe them as ‘hot house flowers.”
It is no wonder they have lost touch with their public.
November 12th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
For a real good laugh - Just check out rottentomatoes.com, which aggregates movie reviews from just about everywhere, for the reviews of “Lions for Lambs.”
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lions_for_lambs/
Although the movie ranks only a 26% on the “tomatometer” - a truly awful score - it is very clear that nearly ALL movie reviewers anywhere are libs (I know, big surprise), and not just “center-left” but full blown “Bush Lied, People Died” kind of libs. these folks are just agonizing that Redford couldn’t have made a better movie to get the “message” out (it’s just HI-lar-i-ous to read the angst on display here).
Is there anyone out there in the MSM that realizes that just because a military policy is presented as “flawed” in a movie, that - HELLO - this has more to do with the stupidity of the screenwriters and the movie makers, and not the ACTUAL US military? It’s maddening to read supposedly educated people confuse a movie plot with actual reality. But of course they don’t because “fake but accurate” is A-OK when you’ve got a message to get out; when you’re speaking “Truth to Power, MAN!”
And the other thing I can’t figure out - If this movie is supposed to be about Iraq (BLPD), why all the sturm und drang about Afghanistan? Are they saying that “Bush Lied People Died” here, too (I guess that’s why we have a NATO commitment, puny as it is). Is Redford a Troofer? Or is it the drugs?
Finally, the idiotic lib view of Americans who volunteer for American military service is really repugnant. I do question their patriotism.
November 13th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Ah, no wonder I don’t want to see LFL (LOL!). As per the AP, courtesy of MSNBC, LFL is for a “thinking person.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21739540/
“Lions for Lambs” was aimed at an older, thinking-person’s audience compared to the crowds that turn out for Cruise’s action movies.
Of course, this doesn’t answer the question, “What were they thinking?.”