The political implications of box-office receipts (or the lack thereof)

“but this excessive gloating over a movie having a bad opening weekend seems terribly misplaced.”

Well how would you feel if you went to bed every night and ot up every morning depressed. These sad assholes are grasping for anything no matter how irrational.

“Americans are tired of limousine liberals making their moral judgments for them….”

…as well as the private jet setters with carbon footprints that are many times the typical American’s!

“How do they explain the success of “Sicko”? Of “Good Night and Good Luck”? “Syriana”? “An Inconvenient Truth”? One miss doesn’t prove the rule.”

Ah, but you see, if you ignore the success of those movies, or if you just casually dismiss them as ‘in the past’ and so irrelevant, because you really, really don’t want to have to think about how it makes your entire theory look patently silly, then it’s easy.

If you’re a wingnut.

Maybe just sitting through 2 hours of how conservatives screwed out country up depresses people.

If it was something empowering that got you ready to do something, like a Michael Moore movie, people would go. If it’s a morose movie with Tom Cruise depicting one of you smarmy right-wing assholse with his face all over the screen for two hours, people don’t want to go to it.

I personally would rather see Bee Movie, American Gangster, or Fred Claus. I already know plenty about what the conservatives have done, but it’s not like I want my every waking hour to be about thinking about it.

“Perhaps, given Americas’ anxiety over the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recent news coverage of Bush administration torture policies, movie-goers just aren’t emotionally prepared for films like these.”

I find this statement fits my personal opinion most accurately. When I watched Sicko and An Inconvenient Truth, I felt like I learned a lot about the issues discussed that I didn’t know before. Concerning the “War on Terror”, however, I sit at this damn computer every day and read the latest bad news, and read detailed analyses of how bad it really is. I can’t imagine a movie on these topics teaching me anything new.

JRS Jr wrote: “…as well as the private jet setters with carbon footprints that are many times the typical American’s!”

You know, if you’re just going to cut and paste your tired, overused observations from your previous blog comments, we’re going to just cut and paste our old responses to you in the same way.

“This is particularly true since the limousine liberals in question don’t seem to have any morals themselves; ”

We’re so used to this kind of bashing that we don’t even react anymore. We are called traitors, unAmerican, godless commies, socialists, elitists, immoral, cowards, hippies, murderers (re: abortions), unpatriotic, and slackers every single day on hate radio, and in the right wing blogs and press. And nobody bats an eye. But if Moveon.org has the temerity to make a disparaging remark about a certain general, all hell breaks loose and even the Senate has to get into the action to condemn the perpetrator.

God these people jump at anything to justify their flawed positions. Being that a majority of Americans are against the occupation and against torture etc. then movies that cater to that position would be more popular not less. Note to wingnuts: It’s just not that good of a movie according to reviewers and others opening at the same time were more popular. It has nothing to do with your unpopular and unsupported world views. 9/11,9/11,9/11,9/11,9/11…satisfied?

I’m guessing that none of the rightie blogs bothered to note that the movie just plain sucks, right?

Also, Metacritic is another great site that compiles reviews on movies, TV, books, games, music and DVDs, on a 1 – 100 scale, as well user ratings.

It’s listed as a terrible movie there as well.

Where’s Tom when you need him ??

Can someone explain to my why a forth is considered a flop ?? It brought in $6.7M and it’s still considered a flop, WTF ?? Are the salaries so bloated that this number is bad ?? Tom ??

Next point. Does this idiot, “Americans are tired of limousine liberals making their moral judgments for them….” not get that the ‘limousine liberals’ already make those choices. Seriously, if the town is run by liberals, how can any movie not have liberal approval ?? They can’t have it both ways.

I saw “Lions for Lambs” and thought it sucked. It just wasn’t a good movie. It didn’t seem to be “progressive”. The TC character made his neocon points without effective counter.

Scott W – it is considered a flop because Cruise, Redford and Streep usually each can open a movie at double that. More important, it cost $35 MM to make, and openingat $6.7 with bad reviews means its going to have trouble breaking even.

Mr Cleaver,

I’m sure they feel the same way about you.

I still miss tolerance and wisdom.

Gee, that’s kinda fun. Can I be Prez’dent next? — Zeitgeist, @9

No, but you can have some ice cream, if you say the magic word (hint: it’s “please”) 🙂

I have to admit that I wanted to see this movie about as much as I wanted to see the Dallas Cowboys win yesterday–which is about as much as I’d like to see a third Bush term. It just looked predictable, dull and utterly swollen with self-righteousness.

The Angelina Jolie movie about Daniel Pearl seemed like a much better film–and I didn’t want to see that either. Too depressing. Ditto “In the Valley of Elah,” though that’s one I think I’ll Netflix eventually. The common thread is that “real life,” as seen in the news and filtered through our horrendous media, is plenty depressing enough; I want my entertainment intelligent-escapist, thank you very much.

Tom C wrote:

Further proof if proof was necessary that being a good guy is hard. No wonder the Righties never win and we struggle with our consciences. Definitely “food for thought.”

An important reminder of a hard political truth. We progressives sometimes castigate ourselves and/or are blasted by the MSM for our seeming inability to articulate a simple message. The problem, of course, is that this is not a simple world–and the disaster of the last seven years should be indication enough of what ensues when a government tries to proceed as if it is.

I appreciated the challenge for each of us to live more consciously, and agreed with most of the opinions in the film, but the method Redford used to get these points across was so offensive, I found the movie unwatchable. For a my description of this dangerous film (though not politically), check out my review HERE

The TC character made his neocon points without effective counter.

Too many movies that try to be critical of evil or have a good message are like that. They present a real dilemma in which the evil choice looks good to a lot of people, but they don’t spell out for those people why that choice was wrong. They let the good guy win, and then leave it for us to figure out for ourselves.

A Few Good Men is a great example. I could think up at least a few other off the top of my head.

Maybe it’s militaristic propaganda, and maybe in the background of the Cold War it tends more to be Republican propaganda than liberal propaganda, but Top Gun is really light on the ideology, and I think you’ll find it’s a movie for everybody. A lot of people like Top Gun and I think if you ask most people (except for Republican fanatics) they won’t think they’re getting a conservative lesson from the movie. It’s more about the Navy and about Maverick’s personal struggle than it is about fighting the Russians.

I’m not saying Top Gun doesn’t glamorize the military a little bit, but if you think it has to make people feel guilty for being in the military to not be a conservative movie, you’re going too far.

Goose’s death, too, is one of those big emotional moments from American pop culture. The list of things from TV and movies that even kinda get to me is very short, and I think for many other people, Goose’s death is one of those scenes that kinda get to them. There’s no “but he was doing it in the service of his country and an incredinly noble, anti-communist cause” propagandistic punchline after that, and including such a real death and a death that we’re set up to have really get to us isn’t exactly rah-rah let’s-go-to-war Cold War cheerleading. If anything, the message from Goose’s death is just that sometimes life isn’t what we want it to be, and that the necessity of war has unfortunate costs. I bet if you learned about the people who wrote/directed/produced the movie, too, what you’d find out would support this– you’d find out they were just trying to make an exciting movie that would sell tickets, and that none of their careers have been about conservative propaganda.

The problem with A Few Good Men is that there are soliloquies in that movie about how noble Marines are for “standing on a wall” to protect us, and how we can count on them to do so, and about how military necessity justifies terrible things. The lawyers are introduced to us as cynical lawyer types who, true to the movie formula, shed those feelings to win the case only slowly and grudgingly throughout the film. No one answers Colonel Jessup with a clear, “Military necessity doesn’t require doing reckless, unnecessary things. It doesn’t require you to stupidly, violently haze someone and thereby accidentally cause his death.” The Marines and the Army can be plenty tough in training their soldiers without doing things like stuffing rags in their mouths, which two brains cells will tell you might suffocate someone. Somebody could have said that military leaders, despite military necessity, do not need to be unreviewable, and events like this show why. There are plenty of other guys out there who can command troops, and who will have the judgment to not do stupid things. But nobody- not even the lawyers- say all this. Jessup gets to scream his justification about how he’s the only one standing on a wall to face the badguys, how toughness requires extreme things, and how he thinks you have to be a pussy to be criticizing him. If all the kids who saw that movie got to hear a retort to that, it was only from their parents on the car ride home- it wasn’t in the movie.

I don’t think the people who made the movie were right-wing, I think they were just careless. Also I thinnk some demographics of really idealistic people may expect- more than the times justify- that other people can be counted on to see things their way as easily as they can, and will figure everything you’ve figured out about X just by seeing X like you did. Well, that’s ignoring a lot- it’s ignoring that your educations and upbringing and experiences may have been very different, so your audience may bring almost a whole different set of tools to viewing the work of art you’re showing them.

2 Manchu wrote:

Swan, I was in the Army, and was neither cool nor a Republican.

Well, I definitely wasn’t accusing you of being cool, but a few people think that being a Republican has to do with being cool (which is why I wrote the sentence I did about ‘cool’ in my Top Gun comment- funny you should respond to that the way you did, though, isn’t it?). But to more directly respond to your statement, ‘Yeah, right.’

Jesus H. Christ, Swan … if no one responds to your comment, there’s a reason.

But please–feel free to continue to have conversations with yourself all over this blog. After all, you seem to be the only one interested in replying to your posts.

Sheesh.