It is clear that Corliss is not a fan of this flick, for sure. And he mixes metaphors and abuses sayings to beat the band to show his disdain. But it is his second, non-sequitur-filled paragraph that goes for Perry’s and W’s throats. Corliss features this attack prominently in the second paragraph of the review so that no one will miss it.

Portrait of George W. Bush?

Corliss describes how at the beginning of the movie a young Conan watches his entire family slaughtered in front of him. To Corliss, this seems somehow “kind of like” the way Saddam Hussein plotted to kill George W. Bush’s father, H.W. Bush.

As a boy (played by Leo Howard), he watches in horror while the ruthless warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) humiliates and murders Conan’s father (Ron Perlman); it’s kind of like Saddam Hussein’s plot to assassinate George H.W. Bush, which supposedly led son W. to invade Iraq and chase down Saddam. Conan, though, grows up to be less like 43, the smiling tiger, and more like current Texas governor Rick Perry, with a compulsive appetite for red-meat rivalries. This barbarian has compiled an endless list of enemies and vows, as Perry did with Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, to make life pretty ugly for all of them.

Uh, sorry, Richie, it is not “kind of like” anything of the kind. In fact, it is just a left-wing trope that W. Bush invaded Iraq because he was trying to get even with Saddam for plotting to kill his daddy. There is no evidence at all of this nonsensical claim. W. laid out his reasons for going into Iraq pretty clearly through his discussions with the U.N. and the presentation that he had Secretary Colin Powell give. Revenge was nowhere in the mix.

Secondly, Governor Rick Perry did not “vow” to do anything to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. He may have issued a veiled slap at Bernanke as exhibiting un-American behavior, behavior that wouldn’t be looked on kindly by Texans, but he made no “vow” to do anything physical to Obama’s disastrous Fed Chairman.

But, what is this doing in a movie review, anyway? Conan the Barbarian has nothing whatever to do with politics. In fact, it is a storyline from so far back into pre-history that democracy and politics had yet to even become the sort of concepts that put a glimmer in mankind’s eye!

So, why is this non-sequitur paragraph added to the movie review? Why else but to show disdain for Republicans. Corliss is like a guy with Tourette’s syndrome, screaming out inappropriate things always at the wrong time. But he doesn’t have a disease to excuse his foolishness, unless you are one of those that believe leftism a mental disease.

Now, we might recall Richard Corliss was one of those that cried a river when the extremist, left-wing radio network Air America finally went down to utter defeat in the face of conservative talk radio. (“Air America Will Be Missed,” Time Magazine Jan 21, 2010)

As I said, Corliss’ review employed some pretty tortured metaphors and comparisons. In one strange line Corliss said that one of the antagonists in the film was the “king of the ugly prom,” whatever that is supposed to mean. Maybe Corliss thinks Conan went on his rampages because he never got a date for the prom?

Another badly penned line follows a segment where Corliss describes the blood of innocent women as being the “nectar” of the film’s mean girl character played by Rose McGowan. Corliss followed that with, “And bloodshed is this Conan’s plasma.” Blood basically IS plasma… isn’t it?  Worse, he started his paragraph with the word “and,” generally thought to be a literary faux pas.

One odd attempt at levity has, “Zym cracking one rival’s skull into crimson pulp, like an Easter egg with the red dye on the inside.” Who goes about smashing their Easter eggs to a bloody “pulp”? That would be one crazy Easter morning.

Further, Conan, “uses his sword to give a warrior from an enemy clan an instant nose job — he cuts off the man’s nose to spite his race…” We all know the old saw of cutting one’s nose off to spite one’s face, but isn’t that something one does to one’s own self? Doing it to someone else is just mayhem! And if this was a racial thing in the movie, Corliss didn’t fill in his reader to that little bit of important info to make his quip make sense.

Anyway, a literary giant Corliss does not seem to be. But did he give a sensible review to the movie? Well, he was snide, dismissive, and silly in his tone, so it is obvious he didn’t take the film very seriously – and maybe rightfully so as the thing seems to be bombing at the box office. That is no crime against journalism, to be sure. But one gets the feeling that he only reviewed the movie to unleash his badly formed puns and as an excuse to attack Republicans. The ulterior motive makes his “review” seem somewhat empty.

Despite their insistence that Americans “get over” 9/11 even though we’re still at war with Islamic fundamentalists, the Left refuses to get over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq that we’ve already won. The Hollywood Left, with their “Bush lied, people died,” bumper-sticker brain capacity, are especially determined to keep flogging that dead horse long after American audiences have proven that they reject such defeatist, morally inverted propaganda.

And so if you think a new movie about the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln might make a gripping historical thriller and be refreshingly free of Hollywood lectures about the ill-named War on Terror, you’d be wrong on both counts.

Robert Redford recently unveiled his period piece The Conspirator at the Toronto International Film Festival. It begins with the assassination of Lincoln and centers on one apparent conspirator, Mary Surratt, on trial for providing gunman John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices (including her son) with a location to plot their conspiracy (her boardinghouse) and with other assistance. Mary, who “kept the nest that hatched the egg,” as Andrew Johnson put it, ended up being the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government.

But strangely – or maybe predictably, if you’re as cynical about Hollywood as I am – one figure looms as a more insistent presence in Redford’s courtroom drama than Surratt, Booth or Lincoln: President George W. Bush.

Time’s Richard Corliss gleefully latched onto “the most troubling and satisfying aspect of The Conspirator”: the comparison it draws between the government’s actions immediately after the Lincoln shooting “and the Bush Administration’s actions in the months and years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.”

(In case you’re confused by the bland, generic term “events,” Corliss is referring to the act of war against America by Muslim terrorists; he and the Left, however, want you to get over those attacks and think of them as “events”; and while you’re at it, don’t be an insensitive, racist Islamophobe by mentioning the “Muslim terrorists.”)

Corliss helpfully explains the historical parallel:

In this movie, [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton is the stand-in for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld; he proposes lurid theories of revolution and, when challenged, replies, “Who’s to say these things couldn’t happen?” In a direct parallel to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq as a crowd-pleasing alternative to the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden, one Surratt sympathizer says that Stanton & Co. are trying Mary “because they can’t find John [her son, who temporarily escaped].”

Apart from the fact that our toppling of Saddam Hussein was in no way a mere “crowd-pleasing alternative to the fruitless search” for bin Laden, Corliss is otherwise correct about the post-9/11 parallels. In the immediate aftermath of both the Lincoln assassination and 9/11, the world was changed, no one knew what would happen next, and our leaders had to take swift, decisive – the Left says excessive – actions to seize conspirators, prevent further potentially imminent acts of terrorism, and punish the perpetrators. Redford himself half-hinted, half-confessed that the story “relates very much to the present, but it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves how.”

In the script, novice defense attorney Frederick Aiken (played in the film by James MacAvoy) is assigned to defend Mary (Robin Wright Penn) before a corrupt, closed-door military tribunal bent more on impassioned revenge than dispassionate justice. One soldier, described pointedly as “PATRIOTISM personified,” even commits perjury on the stand to help convict her. Aiken himself initially believes her guilty, but quickly finds the truth to be complicated and the Constitution itself in jeopardy from a military that has taken advantage of the post-assassination panic to exceed the limits of its power. “When the wicked are in authority,” Aiken quotes from the Bible, “transgressions increase.”

And those transgressions include the trampling of our individual rights. The prison cells in The Conspirator are swiftly loaded with hooded innocents swept up in “STANTON’S REIGN OF TERROR” – his roundup of anyone even tangentially connected to the shooting (the caps and underlining are there in the script to make sure you grasp that reestablishing security and order in the hours after Lincoln’s shocking murder constitutes a REIGN OF TERROR; I half-expected the prison to be described as “STANTON’S GUANTANAMO”).

For the Left, the real threat is not avowed American enemies like Islamic fundamentalists, but conservatives playing the “politics of fear” card to seize power and abuse it. As national security expert Woody Harrelson put it: “The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just bullshit.” Sadly, this quote can’t be chalked up entirely to his strict marijuana-and-vegan diet. Harrelson’s comment reflects a willful blindness that consumes most of Hollywood: “There is no terrorist threat,” says noted defense analyst Michael Moore.

And so the heavy handed moralizing about our endangered civil liberties begins early in The Conspirator and is hammered home more loudly and steadily than the nails in Mary Surratt’s gallows:

“None of us is safe when a citizen can be dragged from her home, held without charge and denied access to counsel – merely on a suspicion.”

“Had our founding fathers desired tyranny to prevail, I’m sure they’d have intended for the President and his War Secretary to have such indiscriminate powers.”

“Don’t be so eager to throw away Mary’s rights. One day you may need them.”

“By abandoning our laws we become just like [the enemy].”

“If we’re to be destroyed it will be from within. By failing to protect our Constitution and its laws.”

The Left love to circle the wagons ‘round the Constitution when it suits them to paint conservatives as totalitarian oppressors - and yet no President has ever been a greater threat to our Constitution than radical leftist Barack Obama. In any case, presenting the supposed railroading of Mary Surratt as a metaphor for the Bush administration’s supposed post-9/11 shredding of the Constitution makes for both a thin comparison and a poor story.

Redford’s condemnation isn’t reserved only for the Bush administration. Aiken is defending Mary and America not only from a power-mad military junta, but from a citizen rabble lusting for revenge.“What kind of nation are we, one ruled by laws? Or by the fury of our people?” According to this script, it’s dangerously close to being the latter. Mary is at the mercy of a vengeful mob mentality; Aiken is the lone voice of conscience against a vengeful mob mentality; the generals are driven by their vengeful mob mentality, etc. The parallel being, apparently, that Americans were a vengeful mob after 9/11.

But in fact America did not lust blindly for revenge after the 9/11 attacks; Americans rightly wanted justice but were not, and still are not, out to indiscriminately round up Muslims to hang ‘em high, despite insupportable charges of a tidal wave of Islamophobia made by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR and Obama’s masters at the Organization of the Islamic Conference. And to suggest that we are is further evidence of the Left’s condescension toward, and contempt for, decent Americans.

Though I respect billionaire Joe Ricketts’ patriotic desire – through his new production shingle, the American Film Company – to “make incredible true stories from America’s past,” The Conspirator is an odd and obscure choice for a first film. James Solomon’s screenplay seems notably faithful to the historical facts, as much as a docudrama can be. But it’s a story of very marginal significance in American history, apart from its potential as an emblematic sledgehammer with which to bash the Bush administration. Maybe the AFC was simply overexcited to score Redford as a director, thinking he would deliver another excellent film like Quiz Show; instead, activist Redford couldn’t stop himself from turning out another preachy anti-war bore like his 2007 preachy anti-war bore, Lions for Lambs.

Was the real Mary Surratt guilty of aiding and abetting the conspirators? Almost certainly. That is the historical consensus, and at least one historian, Kate Clifford Larson, was led to that conclusion even though she began her book The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln intending to prove Mary innocent. Mary’s guilt is less a question of debate today than is the severity of her sentence – today she surely would not be put to death. And I think it would make a more interesting mystery if Redford had drawn her as guilty or at least made her role in the conspiracy ambiguous, instead of painting her as such an uninteresting, sanctimonious martyr.

But ultimately, this movie is not about Mary Surratt’s guilt or innocence anyway. The one who’s on trial is George W. Bush.

Every year for about 15 years now, Harris Interactive has conducted a nationwide poll and asked a very simple question: “Who is your favorite movie star?” And every year since the taking of the poll one particular individual has placed in the top ten — 13 of those years in the top 3.

This year, 2,388 U.S. adults were surveyed and this star rose three places to tie Will Smith for third. Only Denzel Washington and Clint Eastwood rank as more popular.

One last hint before the reveal: This star is the only actor in the history of the poll to rank posthumously:

John Wayne

Here’s the 2009 rundown:

Denzel Washington
Clint Eastwood
John Wayne
Will Smith
Harrison Ford
Julia Roberts
Tom Hanks
Johnny Depp
Angelina Jolie
Morgan Freeman

In 2007, Time Magazine’s Richard Corliss (a film writer I respect) got it kinda wrong when Wayne ranked #3 back in 2007:

Nothing radical there, except that Pitt, Jolie and, oh, Tom Cruise were among the missing. …

Forget the youthquake. What America really loves is… old. Whatever Wayne represents – the Old Testament God, a Mount Rushmore face with a permanent scowl, the craggy soul of Frontier or Sunbelt America[.] …

Will Hollywood take any lessons from this poll – say, to make movies with, and for, older people. Nah. The moguls have read the small print in the Harris poll, and noted that it was weighted for many variables, but not to mirror the average age of moviegoers.

Maybe Hollywood has taken a lesson, or at least might now that two guys over 55, Liam Neeson and Clint Eastwood are headlining two of the biggest smashes of 2009, “Taken” and “Gran Torino.”

Corliss seems to dismiss Wayne as representing God, the Old Testament, etc… You know, all that cornball stuff the rubes go for. The truth is, and this kills his critics to no end, what John Wayne represents is a canon of marvelous films, a half-dozen of which are outright masterpieces, followed by a dozen classics and a slew of wildly entertaining crowd pleasers that have already lived on in reruns and home video long past “Syriana” and… What films were nominated last year?

Wayne was the most popular and enduring star while alive and remains so today because he also represents honesty, justice, truth, liberty, America, fighting for what you believe in, integrity, chivalry, and most importantly in this awful era of the metrosexual, Wayne represents good ole’ give-a-punch/take-a-punch/have-a-drink-and-laugh-about-it-later masculinity.

And while those who didn’t make the list this year, those oh-so nuanced, so-called stars who boy-face their way across the screen emoting Chomsky-loving, Zinn-worshipping recipes for war, poverty, famine, slavery and genocide, let’s remember that the Duke kept it simple and direct with a code best summed up in his final film, “The Shootist” (1976):

I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.

That, my friends, is what you call a recipe for World Peace.

And don’t let anyone ever let you forget that John Wayne happened to be one of the finest actors to ever grace the big screen.