This Michael Fleming description of Matthew Carnahan‘s Lions for Lambs, which Robert Redford will direct and co-star in for Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner‘s revived United Artists, is more intriguing that the one I read in his Variety column in mid-October.

It’s basically three intertwining, almost Babel-like storylines: Cruise as “a congressman who interacts with a journalist (Meryl Streep); Redford as an idealistic professor who attempts to inspire a privileged student in his class; and a third storyline about a pair of American soldiers wounded in enemy territory, one of whom is Redford’s former student.” I can see this…it sounds good.
The third storyline takes place, if I recall Fleming’s earlier summation correctly, in Afghanistan. I think now is the time for everyone to remember that in The Hot Rock, the 1971 caper flick which Redford co-starred, the words that trigger a state of instant reactivated hypnosis in a safe-deposit-box manager are “Afghanistan banana-stan.” Think about that.