Pity party held for Robert Redford…

Updated on November 8, 2007 By Ken Begg 7 Comments

With the help of a typically gushing interviewer from the Chicago Tribune (“[You have] a beautiful name,” he says to me, mid-interview, as I swoon.” she writes), Robert Redford manfully reveals his “cynicism” over whether how Art can overcome Ignorance.  “I don’t really believe films change public policy or even public opinion.  I’ve become cynical about that over time,” the Great Man opines.  That’s funny, because I would think a public growing less reliant on getting their political views from movie stars and the like would be a good thing.  Here’s an idea, Redford; just make some freakin’ decent movies.

By the way, you guys have been saying all along that movies don’t affect society.  Everytime somebody says they make society more coarse, or more sexualized, or more violent, the entire show biz community just laughs and says “they’re only movies.”  So why are you suddenly ‘cynical’ now that movies don’t have an effect on society?

As for his upcoming anti-war screed Lions for Lambs, the article dutifully informs us, “conserative bloggers have taken swipes at the film” (Horrors!  The First Amendent doing its evil work!).  Yes, those conservative blogger swipes no doubt explain why the film has a totally awesome 31% positive rating on Rottentomatoes.com.  Moreover, Redford inevitably, and yet still hilariously, claims the film is “careful to show all sides of the war debate.”  You know, I think Hollywood honestly believes that to be the case, when they say that about about a political ‘debate’ as presented on The West Wing or whatever.  However, they never really seem to get the nuances of the conservative views quite right.  Let’s say they made a movie about the immigration debate:

Liberal Character (Brad Pitt):  “What about justice?  And Family?  And The Children? And Liberty?  And the Statue of Liberty?  And Everything that is Good about America?”
Conservative Character (Jeremy Irons):  “There are too many Mexicans in this country!  And don’t even get me started about the blacks!”

Probably the funniest line in the piece is when it says “the film casts a disparaging eye on celebrity-obsessed culture…”  Uhm….

Anyway, the whole article is here, if you want to take a look.  There’s a lot more where that came from.

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  • Blake Matthews

    I *love* media-related hypocrisy; it’s quite amusing. Down here, we have soap operas that show characters committing adultery on a daily basis but when one soap opera showed a woman answering the door in her lingerie, there were so many complaints that the producers personally apologized for said scene. This is also a culture that eats up Harry Potter with a spoon, but complained bitterly when one of their soap operas was about good and bad witches.

    Admittedly, the examples are more reflections of the people than the people in the media, but hypocrisy is hypocrisy.

  • Well, there is plenty of that, but in the second example, it’s only hypocrisy if a) the people complaining about the witches in the soap operas are themselves Harry Potter fans, and b) if they aren’t just arguing that witches in fantasy fiction is one thing, but in a ‘realistic’ soap is another.

  • Blake Matthews

    Soap Operas down here are rarely “realistic”. We’ve had faux-Westerns, ones about reincarnation (which wasn’t controversial due to the growing popularity of Spiritualism), clones walking around the Middle East, spirits of dead antagonists trying to possess people, vampire stories, and there was even a “realistic” one called “Pages of Life” that had the ghost of a protagonist visiting her children. All these came before the witchcraft one.

  • Well, in that case it is a little weird.

  • Blake Matthews

    I always find it amusing when the channel that puts on all these soap operas shows commercials that shows clips from various soap operas and going on about how close they are to reality, but then all the characters are upper-class and rich and there are few (if any) black characters and most of them are comic relief.

  • Ericb

    Wow, interesting soaps you have. In the US all the soaps are about ostensibly beautiful, upper middle class people playing head games with each other … and that’s about it.

  • BeckoningChasm

    I absolutely love the whole “they help society/they’re just movies” hypocrisy; Hollywood “thinking” at its best. They go on and on about positive role models for gays, blacks or latinos (unless they’re middle class, like Bill Cosby) but dismiss Murphy Brown solipsism as “oh come on, it’s fictional people on TV.”