Hollywood's KoolAid Fest Continues: Wimps For Lambs

UPDATED
I just went to the Lions for Lambs Web site to find out how bad it really was but it was so bad I couldn't even get into it without posting first.

The home page presents a bunch of phrases that fly at you before fading away like NanPo's leadership -- world peace, alternate energy, healthcare, no more wars. (I'm not sure how "no more wars" is different from "world peace," but perhaps I'm not nuanced enough.)

The phrases stopped flying and a little window opened, saying "What do you stand for? Type your answer here."

So I did: Free market capitalism and defeating jihadists.

Happily I clicked "enter," only to be confronted by the ugliness of liberal censorship (a.k.a. "tolerance"):

THANK YOU for your submission!
Check back to see if it is approved.
Approved submissions may be posted on the site.

"THANK YOU for our submission?" They must have something dreadfully wrong. I'm not submitting to this crap, not ever!

Just in case you're still curious, I offer you this review, from the Daily Kostic:

It has taken some time, but Hollywood is finally taking the gloves off and punching hard at the administration with unveiled force. Buoyed by artists, actors and producers passionately committed to promoting a serious political message of desperate straits and a need for public activism, this newfound courage has resulted in at least one film that deserves highest praise both for artistry of cinema, depth of emotion, and complexity of message.

Oh Mia Madre! I can't wait ... until it, too, bombs at the boxoffice. And here I thought the Hollywood elite were against bombing.

The Token Dem from our office is excited about this movie, however, as I learned the other day while we were waiting for a plane in San Francisco when Robert Redford came onto Larry King Live.

“That’s going to be a good movie,” he said.

“I’m not going to see it,” was my immediate and utterly unthought reply.

When did this happen? When did Hollywood become so divisive that such see/don't see decisions are made at such a visceral level?

Token Dem pointed out that the shoe used to be on the other foot, with a conservative Hollywood blacklisting Leftists and churning out movies that supported the American status quo. The Left, I assume, reacted just as viscerally to certain stars and certain movie genres, staying away in droves. Mini-droves, perhaps, but droves nonetheless.

But now, put Alec Baldwin, Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, George Clooney or Sean Penn in a movie and half of America will instantly decide not to see it. Perhaps we conservatives are too extreme; perhaps Hollywood is too extreme – which is it?

Neither, entirely, because you can't answer this question in Hollywood. To answer it, you have to go to Boston. I believe the divisiveness stems back to the alliance of Hollywood and the Dems we saw during the 2004 Democratic campaign, and specifically on the reception Michael Moore received at the Democratic convention.

Acceptance of Moore equated with acceptance of Bush complicity in 9/11 and an America too dreadful for most of us to imagine. Yet there he was, given the blue ribbon treatment, seated in the best seats – next to an ex-president, for crying out loud – and gushed over by the Dem political, policy and fundraising elite.

Already, most conservatives had stayed away from Fahrenheit 911, unwilling to fatten Moore’s portly bank accounts; then the convention served to tie that emotion to the Democratic platform. In the campaign that followed, we saw liberal Hollywood at its worst, reaching its nadir when Cameron Diaz, snot and tears aplenty, blubbered to a national television audience that the re-election of Bush would lead to a big, legalized gang bang.

With the war, the Left in Hollywood built on Moore’s paranoid, nasty vision of America and began churning out movies like Jarhead, Rendition and In the Valley of Elah that were to feature films what Fahrenheit was to documentaries: agenda-heavy, intolerant and wholly unenjoyable for a significant percentage of Americans.

How unenjoyable? Here's Joshua Goldberg in USA Today:

So far, these movies are tanking. Rendition opened on 2,250 screens, with three Oscar winners in the cast, and it was beaten its opening weekend by a re-release of the 14-year-old A Nightmare Before Christmas. Elah was a bigger bomb than those used in the "shock and awe" campaign. The Kingdom earned less than $50 million, and surely only did that well because it was marketed as an action movie rather than an anti-war one.

Hollywood is drinking its own KoolAid. Even though none of these movies fared well, they satisfied a hungry need shared by the producers, directors, writers and actors to be part of the anti-Bush, anti-war movement, in a blind faith that they would finally be the anointed one who would open the eyes of an America to stupid to see the light.

Now we’ve come to the point when a pointless piece of fluff like The Game Plan makes more at the boxoffice than the last crop of antiwar movies combined, and Lions for Lambs is greeted not with anticipation, but with speculation that perhaps Tom Cruise has ruined his career by signing on.

I believe all this is attributable in part to a dumbing down that has swept Hollywood. It takes intelligence and finesse to be subtle and nuanced but any buffoon can crank out a heavy-handed diatribe. We have had no Dr. Strangelove for the Iraq war; we have not even had an Apocalypse Now.

Finally, it is also attributable to the lemming mentality of Leftist Hollywood, where no one dares to write or fund or shoot or distribute a patriotic, pro-American, pro-military film, even though there is an untapped market.

In Hollywood, it is better to miss the market the approved way than to achieve success outside Hollywood's prescribed bounds, and that's turned so many of us off we won't give our $8 to their cause, we won't give our time to their messages, and we won't support anything about their effort to dishonor our cause.