'What? I'm not guaranteed box office any more? You're fired.' Tom Cruise in Lions for Lambs.
God knows, you must have to take any vindications of your judgement where you can find them when you're still cheerleading for the Iraq war, and so it's proved after the less-than-tepid reception for Lions for Lambs. As you may know, Robert Redford's drab indictment of US foreign policy has taken a severe critical beatdown while going largely unwatched in cinemas - a tanking apparently not only forecast, but actually brought about by the power of rightwing film blogs.
Or that, at least, is the story according to, um, rightwing film blog Libertas: a name that's cropped up around these parts before on account of their paranoid and bellicose take on movie culture, but whose recent grab for glory was first picked up by Spout Blog. Revelling in the downfall of Redford and producer/star Tom Cruise was simply business as usual - what caught the eye was a post claiming that they (alongside the likes of grisly American radio personality Rush Limbaugh and various "alternative media") had helped save the innocent movie lover from having their consciences molested by this mob of liberal fiends: "Anti-War Films Flop for One More Reason: The Blog," goes the headline, with the post rhapsodising over the way in which "the public's lost faith with Hollywood and no longer trusts them [but] with a few clicks from the comfort of their own home people can visit people they do trust and read what they're saying about the film."
As Spout Blog points out, all pretty disingenuous given how often this translates as "[spreading] negative buzz sight unseen from the moment the logline appears in Variety." Beyond that, though, the blog's self-congratulation draws on a series of assumptions ranging from the dubious to the flat-out ridiculous. For a start, the idea that a blog's hostility might break a mass-marketed studio movie's chances is a stretch at best - a hundred Libertases (Liberti?) could direct every ounce of bile they had at a film and, if the PRs had managed to get the same project written about persuasively in the right corners of the mainstream media, it would be like playing a ukelele on the runway at Heathrow. For any number of smaller-scale pictures, the embrace of blogs can be central to finding an audience - for a Tom Cruise vehicle with a national debt-sized advertising budget, everything below the cover of Vanity Fair is, favourable or otherwise, just more white noise.
Braving the specific, Libertas makes great play of having saved its readers from "dishonest" TV ads for the film booked in the midst of "heartland-watched" American football matches - but surely they can't be saying those readers are so dimly suggestible as to take that as meaning Redford and Cruise were going to make a movie rabidly pro-war enough to satisfy them? And if, as they appear to, Libertas would like to claim the failure of Lions for Lambs as an implicit sign of a "silent majority" regarding the war itself, then, aside from pointing out that the majority isn't actually silent, suffice it to say the same logic would mean anyone who didn't go and see 28 Weeks Later being actively in favour of zombies conquering the planet.
The problem is that Redford's film is simply no more and no less than a bad movie: a dull, shapeless fudge that was never going to appeal to either side of the issue. But as it tries to claim credit for why the project didn't even get a foothold with audiences, Libertas blunderingly gives the game away with the aside that "10 years ago, the star power of Redford, Cruise and Streep [...] would've at least guaranteed Lambs a strong opening weekend." In fact, even that timeframe seems generous to me - but it certainly reflects the current commercial profile of a trio who, for all their past success, are a marginally more surefire box office proposition in 2007 than Macauley Culkin. Yet, while you might normally find Libertas making merry portraying all three as sagging has-beens, now when they briefly nod to that idea, it capsizes their own argument - the truth being that, rather than having been warned away from an otherwise tempting Friday night at the movies by "people they trust," no-one wanted to see Lions for Lambs because they took one look at it last weekend and decided life was too short. Though not, of course, as short as it tends to be in Fallujah and Baghdad. I wonder if the keyboard-toting boys of Libertas will claim their share of the responsibility for that too?
