Hollywood stumbles; Robert Redford blames "unfortunate" choices of Americans...

In today's New York Post, Kyle Smith takes aim at Hollywood's string of anti-war, anti-American box office failures:

This fall Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron are going belly up at the box office after gobbling up too much reality about the Iraq War.
"Rendition" and "In the Valley of Elah" are already dead in the water, while surveys show that "Lions for Lambs," which opens Friday, is arousing about the same level of interest as you'd expect from "Charles in Charge: The Imax Experience." Meryl Streep stars in two of these movies, in an act of uncontrolled cinematic gorging unseen since "Super Size Me." .

He's got a great review of "Rendition" as well:

Compare it [The Deer Hunter] to "Rendition," which contains all the surprise and excitement of a sixth-grade filmstrip from an Iranian school ("Straight Talk About the Great Satan and You").
A few minutes into the movie, Reese Witherspoon starts asking people, "Where's my husband?" Forty-five minutes later, she's demanding, "Where's my HUSBAND?" An hour after that, she's screaming, "WHEEERE'S MY HUSBAAAAND?"

I used to think that in Hollywood, The Great God of Profits would undoubtably persevere; and overcome all this worthless self-indulgent tripe being vomited out by its perpetually clueless thespian population.

But alas, even as they dangle on the precipice, they see not the great chasm yawning beneath them...watch Robert Redford, in an interview in today's Daily News, question the American public for refusing to take their moral lead from his and his crony's insipid anti-war movies:

"Lions for Lambs" is a movie that raises a lot of issues without offering easy answers. What questions do you hope audiences will be asking when they come out of the theater?

It's absolutely an attempt to provoke, and the issues are not new. But they're used as food for thought to look at the broader, deeper picture of what's happened to us in the past six years. What's happened to the media, to politics, to education? My hope is that people come out of the film thinking about what we've done and what we haven't done about those things.

It's been said that if Hollywood ignores the war, it's got its head in the sand. But none of the movies that deal with Iraq and Afghanistan so far have been successful with moviegoers. Why is that?

If that's true, it would be unfortunate, and it makes its own statement about where the country is. But that speaks to what this film is trying to get us to look at, questions like: Where are we? Are we awake to what's going on at different levels of our society? But if it's a fact that those films haven't been successful, it will make it more difficult to make more of [that kind of] film.

Can any work of art or entertainment awaken people's consciences today?

Some part of me doubts it....

There is no doubt that Redford throws aroud these ugly remarks as his own way to insult the intelligence of the "unenlightened" American people, and solidify his position as an elite...we who know better wear his derision as a mark of honor...