who does he think he's calling a has been?

Calling Senator Cruise
Robert Redford descends from the mountain to make us think.
by John Podhoretz
11/10/2007 12:06:00 AM, Volume 013, Issue 10

Lions for Lambs
Directed by Robert Redford

Lions for Lambs, the new movie directed by and starring Robert Redford, is designed to move us away from the "black-and-white" rhetoric of the war on terror and instead draw our focus to the "gray areas." This is necessary so that there can be a debate on issues--a debate we have been "denied" over the past six years.

I know this because I heard Robert Redford say it before a screening of Lions for Lambs at the Museum of Modern Art, where the moviewas met with rapturous applause by an audience studded with has-beens, including a Mohawk-sporting Randy Quaid, Andrew (Pretty in Pink) McCarthy, Adam (Counting Crows) Duritz, and Janine (Northern Exposure) Turner. Redford's main hope, he said just before his film unspooled itself over the course of 88 of the most barren minutes anyone has ever spent at MOMA, is that his new film will make us think. That is, indeed, a noble purpose. So let me say on behalf of the American filmgoing public that we collectively owe an inexpressible debt to Redford for deigning to slalom down from his pristine Utah mountaintop to compel us to make unaccustomed use of our underutilized gray matter.

Redford did not have to bestir himself, God knows. What more has he to prove? What more must he give to the nation and the world to whom he has given so much, particularly by jumping off a cliff shouting "S--t" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Well, ...