 | |
List Price: $14.98 | | Label: United Artists
Salesrank: 20837
Released: April 8, 2008 |
| Our Price: $2.95 |
| Used Price: $0.96 |
|
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep deliver "three knockout performances" (Vue Weekly) in this powerful story about how the decision makers at the top affect American soldiers on the ground half a world away.
An idealistic professor (Redford), a charismatic U.S. Senator (Cruise) and a probing TV journalist (Streep) have opposing viewpoints about the actions of our nation and the attitudes of its citizens. But the human consequences of war become chillingly clear for two of the professor's former students, who find themselves trapped behind enemy lines, fighting for freedom... and their very lives.
Description of Lions For Lambs (Full Screen Edition):
The considerable authority of Robert Redford pulls some heavyweight talent into Lions for Lambs, a rare Hollywood foray into flat-out political filmmaking. Three dramas, all connected, play out simultaneously during the same hour: On a mountainside in Afghanistan, two U.S. soldiers (Michael Pena and Derek Luke) find themselves stranded during a new military surge; on Capitol Hill, a Republican senator (Tom Cruise) tries to sell the new strategy to a seasoned reporter (Meryl Streep); and in California, a professor (Redford) tries to light the fire of commitment in an increasingly apathetic college student (Andrew Garfield). Director Redford cuts back and forth amongst these arenas, a gambit which thankfully obscures how weak the one non-talkfest (the Afghanistan segment) really is. You can tell Redford and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan put their juice in the debate between Cruise and Streep, which summarizes Right and Left views on the Middle Eastern wars, and does so reasonably lucidly--although there is little here that would surprise anyone who has looked into the subject. The college section suggests Redford's belief that there are lots of people, distracted by tabloid culture and self-centeredness, who haven't looked into the subject. So he lectures us about it, sounding suspiciously like an old geezer remembering the good old days. If this film had been released in 2004, it might at least have bucked majority opinion, but coming out in fall of 2007, it already felt like old news. --Robert Horton
Lions For Lambs (Full Screen Edition) Reviews:
Fantastic movie! 
2009-09-09 - This is an awesome movie that really makes you think about what is really happening with the war, politics and the media behind it all.
Rent it. Buy it. 
2009-07-20 - This film asks the question, "What do you stand for?" with such eloquence, you don't even realize your fundamental values are being challenged. This film, directed by Robert Redford, draws you into many of the central issues of America's war on terror. You will find yourself rooting for everyone to do the right thing. What is that? How is "the right thing" defined? Watch the film and think about what you stand for. It's a brilliant piece of work and I recommend it.
Lions For Lambs (Widescreen Edition)
Lions For Lambs (Full Screen Edition)
Lions for Lambs [Blu-ray]
This filmhas become a Prophecy
2009-07-12 - This is one of the strangest film we can imagine about the end of Dubya's war on terror, alas not the end of the war per se. It is all centered on Afghanistan but it is essentially conveyed in the paranoid fear of human beings. Like the Christian God, this story is based on three characters, three story tellers, three episodes that overlap and crisscross from one to the other constantly. On one side a university professor who was drafted into the Vietnam war and has not yet really understood what happened then. He has negotiated a hypocritical peace with life that makes him take his anger and frustration onto the students themselves in order to confront them to decision making at any time in their life as students when this life has become boring and senseless. They know it is not going to be better than their parent's though the latter have promised them it would. And anyway, and that is what these students have forgotten, it cannot be the same, let alone better because they are just starting in life and nothing in life is given ready made and ready to eat. You have to fight for it, like it or not, and that the dear professor has forgotten it in his own mind, even if the students have forgotten it in their real life. The professor makes the students fight but for the sake of it not for any commitment, even purely selfish. The professor does not do his job since he does not teach them how to start from zero, as life requires it for 95% of people, and then have an objective other than satisfying the wants, desires or phantasms of the professor. He is not even a signpost along the road that never follows the road it is indicating, but he is a signpost in the middle of the desert pointing in any erratic direction according to the moment and the professor's impulses. The journalist in a big newspaper is confronted with the necessity, or even the duty, to tell the public that everyone is lying to them and they believe them. But she runs out of steam to convince other people, out of steam to really corner the senator who receives her, out of steam to convince her own boss about that necessity instead of treating everything as news when it is only propaganda. She too is sort of out of phase and she will either yield or retire. She is incapable of doing her job for her boss who takes the assignment away, her job being to bring news to the public. But she is also incapable to do what she thinks her job is, that is to say bring people to reflecting and having a wider vision on things, a vision that could integrate the past into the future and vice versa, in other words be responsible and visionary. The senator is a young wolf who is ready to win the war whatever the cost it may take because that's what politicians need, a win. Instead of drawing the conclusion from the failure that the mistakes are too heavy for life to forgive and forget them and that politicians have to stop these mistakes, they want more war and they look for the person who is going to be able to carry the message to the people and make people swallow the hard medicine instead of changing it altogether. In that trilogy - or should I say trinity? - of lost grown-ups, the film shows a few young students and how they react to this fake life, and it is not at all encouraging. These students are lost. Whether they want to commit themselves and their life to the big battle against terrorism but they are betrayed by a bunch of incompetent officers and politicians who will announce their death as a victory. Or they want to stay out of it and enjoy life and that makes them drop-outs for one and flunkies for two. No hope there, hence a deep sense of despair. The dice have been cast and no one can decipher the message written among the dots and figures. Two years later what can we think about it? It will take a lot of energy - and hope - on the side of politicians to change their ways. It will take a lot of energy for the people to understand enjoying life cannot be the objective of life itself. It will take a lot of energy for the media to understand that their job is not to transmit the press releases of politicians but to educate and enlighten the public into thinking with their own heads. It will take a lot of energy, though I am afraid this battle is far from even having begun, for professors and teachers, educators and intellectuals to get down into the world and commit themselves to real life, which would mean more work and less ease for them, the poor darlings, my heart is bleeding for them. To defend their privileges, these professors and company are ready to break the life of their students as students and then as grown-ups and even as citizens, and they will argue that the students agree. There is always one rotten apple in a barrel of apples, as old seafarers well know.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
Playing a politician Tom Cruise 
2009-07-09 - At different levels of participation, movie provides story of decision-makers and executers of US solutions in Afghanistan, assembling technical and moral issues.
Personally, a reviewer is not convinced much in this story presented quite boringly with Tom Cruise playing politician.
The only plot is propaganda 
2009-06-21 - The only way I'd ever recommend watching this movie is for a study on modern propaganda. It's like the Soviet era meets Hollywood. Don't waste your money on this mindless we'll-do-the-thinking-for-you stinker.
