Robin Hood and the Tea Party Haters

[mrjarrell]

Apparently the new Robin Hood movie is a libertarian flick with a political message. Who knew? This movie has also served to bring out the big government loving film critics who are lambasting the film in print. Gotta love it when government lovers get their panties all twisted up. Guess this movies not gonna win an Oscar this year.

via Cato

What is it with modern American liberals and taxes? Apparently they don’t just see taxes as a necessary evil, they actually like ‘em; they think, as Gail Collins puts it in the New York Times, that in a better world “little kids would dream of growing up to be really big taxpayers.” But you really see liberals’ taxophilia coming out when you read the reviews of the new movie Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe. If liberals don’t love taxes, they sure do hate tax protesters. Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College, writes in the Boston Globe that this Robin Hood is “A big angry baby [who] fights back against taxes” and that the movie is “hamstrung by a shrill political agenda — endless fake-populist harping on the evils of taxation.” You wonder what Professor Rotella teaches his students about America, a country whose fundamental ideology has been described as “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.”
At the Village Voice, Karina Longworth dismisses the movie as “a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement” in which “Instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual as he wanders a countryside populated chiefly by Englishpersons bled dry by government greed.” Gotta love those scare quotes around “liberty.” Uptown at the New York Times, A. O. Scott is sadly disappointed that “this Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don’t tread on him!” The movie, she laments, is “one big medieval tea party.”

More at the source.

 

[YukYuPhat]

So Liberals don't want Libertarians and Conservatives to crowd their media utopia they have going?

 

[rockhopper46038]

Huh, a Hollywood flick I might actually go see. Imagine that!

 

[Ironsights]

Huh, a Hollywood flick I might actually go see. Imagine that!

Wife and kids are out of town. Haven't seen a good movie in a while. I guess I know what I'm doing tonight.

 

[jaramia20]

IronSights and I saw this tonight , I liked it very much !!!! The left can have Avatar , I'll take this one !!!!

 

[RacineDKringle]

IronSights and I saw this tonight , I liked it very much !!!! The left can have Avatar , I'll take this one !!!!

Well, hm. It has been awhile since we've seen a movie....

 

[Pami]

That's insane. Those reviewers need to do more research into Robin Hood than watch the Disney version. Heaven forbid they pick up a book and read something that's even semi-accurate like Hood or either of its sequels by Stephen Lawhead, who is an excellent historical fiction writer. Lawhead took some creative liberty with that, but he gives a detailed explanation of why he made the choices he did.

ETA: in fact, Lawhead writes in his epilogue/explanation:

The first written references to the character we now know as Robin Hood can be traced back as far as the early 1260s....
In the earliest stories, Robin was no honorable Errol Flynn-esque hero. He was a coarse and vulgar oaf much given to crudeness and violence. He was a thief from the beginning, to be sure, but the now-famous creed of "robbing from the rich to give to the poor" was a few hundred years removed from his rough highwayman origins. The early Robin robbed from the rich, to be sure--and kept every silver English penny for himself."

 

[Lex Concord]

Libertarian ethos? This is why I like the Disney version, as it does play this up.

Another surprise from Disney was Scrooge McDuck lecturing the nephews on inflation...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_LWQQrpSc4

 

[T-rav]

I saw Robin Hood and its a excellent message, I wish I had another set of hands so I could give that movie 4 thumbs up!

 

[Garb]

A former friend of mine who supports socialism insists that Robin Hood is a socialist because he redistributed wealth.

 

[5.56'aholic]

The original Robin Hood was about going against corrupt government and undue taxation, the liberals then turned him into the pied piper for big government and taxes and stealing from the "rich." I find it ironic that they are pissed off the true story is being told again.

 

[barricade]

is it so wrong for people to want to be able to fend for themselves and there families, i want to work and to be payed a "decent" living, whatever label you attribute to that mind frame i will gladly accept, they {leaders, politicians and pharises} called christ a servant of the devil.