Fail: National Review's list of the 25 Best Conservative Movies

[samedietc]

FAIL? I think this list of the 25 Best Conservative Movies might even achieve EPIC FAIL levels. If you can't bear to click on the link, here's a quick rundown of what 25 people think the top 25 conservative movies are (in my rundown, I don't bother to mark the names of most of these ersatz critics, thinking it charitable to let them distance

Comments

[charlequin]

The top 50 conservative rock songs is similarly lollerific. Cult of Personality? Godzilla? Janie's Got A Gun? Rock the Fucking Casbah? And "Won't Get Fooled Again" as #1 is just insulting.

[samedietc]

They really do a good job of ignoring everything except one small lyric in that list. Here's my hope: people like this will be too busy deciding whether their toast has the same ideology as them, they won't get in the way of real politics.

[drenormous]

Man, the Night They Dove Old Dixie Down is just about my favorite song ever, and is all about the suffering and abuse of the common man during war time. And it was written by Canadians. Who can I cockpunch to get it off that stupid effing list?

[samedietc]

it's like a post-mortem conversion--they can pretend they're rocking out to a fiscally-responsible song, but it doesn't necessarily change the song.

[elahadrun]

The Incredibles is conservative propaganda in the Randian tradition, though. I will rent it for my kids, but I don't want them to own it.

[elahadrun]

Also, Gattaca is absolutely conservative.

Both of these movies portray protagonists who have certain innate privileges--superpowers in the one case, a societal and biological advantage in the other--who are threatened by people who seek to CREATE the same advantage in others. That is called affirmative action; in other words, "unfair."

The father in the Incredibles complains about all the children in kindergarten getting an award; the villain says "when everyone is special...no one is," which is somehow supposed to be a nefarious plot? Because the inferior seek success only so that no one can be better than them? I do, however, like the Kierkegaardian ending, in which Dash is challenged to be always third, because being always first is too easy

[samedietc]

I don't know, sister, I feel like arguments could be made to cast both films in light of liberal traditions--as long as you focus on only one aspect of a film and attach that aspect unequivocally to one or another wing. E.g., the Incredibles is really about community and team-work, which runs counter to the conservative American tradition of the rugged individual: sure, the speedster can beat people at being fast, but he needs the invisible girl's forcefields, etc

[drenormous]

The difficulty with GATTICA, I think, is that the right has decided that both the evil scientists and the evil hippie anti-science types are liberals (which, in all fairness, is pretty true, other than the evil portion. Mad scientists all vote Republican). So within their framework, it would seem to make the movie a story about the internal power struggle of liberalism? I guess?

[hermionemulzer]

Brazil?

[hermionemulzer]

Really?

[hermionemulzer]

No, REALLY?

[samedietc]

well, that one got some attention, and it turned out that the author of the mini-critique does not identify as a conservative but as a "liberal of the right" or sometimes a "classical liberal" (which means: Ron Paul supporter).

I can only guess the editors at NRO either were stupid enough to miss how clearly Brazil was a blueprint for Bush/Cheney (Gilliam has joked about suing for copyright infringement) or that they thought airing a not-quite-conservative viewpoint showed the breadth of their thought and tolerance.