UPDATE: 300 is number five. Apparently, the racial purity concerns of Gattaca fly out the window when the pure culture left over kicks Middle Eastern ass.
National Review is counting down the top 25 conservative movies of the past 25 years, which would be a rather fascinating exercise in the defining cinematic exercise of a major political ideology, except that it’s the National Review, so all they did was take movies you’ve heard of and call them conservative.
They’ve only done six through twenty-five so far, so let’s review them.
6.) Groundhog Day
Theologians and philosophers across the ideological spectrum have embraced it. For the conservative, the moral of the tale is that redemption and meaning are derived not from indulging your “authentic” instincts and drives, but from striving to live up to external and timeless ideals. Murray begins the film as an irony-soaked narcissist, contemptuous of beauty, art, and commitment. His journey of self-discovery leads him to understand that the fads of modernity are no substitute for the permanent things.
I was under the impression that “conservative movie” meant “movie that is actually conservative in message and goals,” not “movie where good things happen, so it’s conservative”. I have no doubt that one could find a relatively conservative message in a movie that’s about self-betterment, but that no more makes it a “conservative movie” than The Goonies is a pedophile movie.
Based on the life of self-made millionaire Chris Gardner (Will Smith), this film provides the perfect antidote to Wall Street and other Hollywood diatribes depicting the world of finance as filled with nothing but greed.
And if the movie had been even the slightest bit negative about the market, this movie would instead be a fantastical diatribe about the virtues of the plague of single black parenting that liberals have promoted through abortion and welfare. Sell them stocks!
8.) Juno
Juno was a critical and commercial success. It didn’t set out to deliver a message on abortion, but much of its audience discovered one anyway.
Namely, that if you have sex at 16 and get knocked up, you’ll find an awesome lady to adopt your baby and you’ll pretty much deal with it. As long as everyone involved is white. And you’re too stupid to take twenty seconds and put on a condom.
A decade ago, Hugh Wilson’s Blast from the Past defied the party line, seeing the values, customs, manners, and even music of the period with nostalgic longing. Brendan Fraser plays an innocent who has grown up in a fallout shelter and doesn’t know the era of Sputnik and Perry Como is over. Alicia Silverstone is a post-feminist woman who learns from him that pre-feminist women had some things going for them. Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek as Fraser’s parents are comic gems.
Can you even name one thing that happened in Blast From The Past that isn’t in the above four sentences? Anyone? I tried remembering this movie and woke up seven minutes later with a nosebleed.
10.) Ghostbusters
This comedy might not get Russell Kirk’s endorsement as a worthy treatment of the supernatural, but you have to like a movie in which the bad guy (William Atherton at his loathsome best) is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector.
This selection points out one of the major problems with labeling movies “conservative” - Ghostbusters quite obviously embraces and accepts the occult, which in the eyes of many conservative fundamentalists, is a giant no-no. Also, I was under the impression that the bad guy in Ghostbusters was the giant fucking malevolent Ghost which said Busters, you know, Bust.