The Top 25 Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years


 


National Review doesn't really have much going on these days, do they? Now, the NRO is counting them down, old school style, but the lovely peeps at Free Republic have taken it upon themselves to leak the entire list:

1. The Lives of Others (2007)
2. The Incredibles (2004)
3. Metropolitan (1990)
4. Forrest Gump (1994)
5. 300 (2007)
6. Groundhog Day (1993)
7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
8. Juno (2007)
9. Blast from the Past (1999)
10. Ghostbusters (1984)
11. Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003)
12. The Dark Knight (2008)
13. Braveheart (1995)
14. A Simple Plan (1998)
15. Red Dawn (1984)
16. Master and Commander (2003)
17. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005)
18. The Edge (1997)
19. We Were Soldiers (2002)
20. Gattaca (1997)
21. Heartbreak Ridge (1986)
22. Brazil (1985)
23. United 93 (2006)
24. Team American: World Police (2004)
25. Gran Torino (2008)

Having not watched all these movies, I cannot say with certainty that each and every choice is crappy. But I'd say it's predominantly bullshit.

First of all, their #1 movie is about a WIRETAPPER who changes his mind and decides not to report his final surveillance. I didn't think that coming out against domestic spying was particularly conservative these days.

Forrest Gump is about the currents of history, and I'd say that his decision to love and forgive Jenny after she got aids and didn't tell him about his son was pretty liberal at the time.

Even better, Juno, written by a former stripper, is about a girl who has unprotected sex with the guy and gives the baby to a single mother. No abortion apparently equals conservative, regardless of the fact that Juno made a choice.

And don't get me started with Gattaca. You can see where I'm going with this. Here's a great comment from a diary over at Daily Kos about this same topic:

Since there is no great conservative art...
...conservatives are left with these pathetic efforts at a) pretending that movies which simply are not conservative are in fact conservative (Juno) (LOTR), b) declaring any movie postively depicting moments in American history as conservative because of course liberals hate America (the Patriot, United 93 -- though the absense of Glory is quite telling), or c) elevating mediocre movies to greatness simply because of their allegedly conservative themes (300 and again the Patriot, which no serious person seriously considers a great film or even a great Mel Gibson film).

In the end, right-wingers cannot excape from the fundamental fact that great art challenges assumptions and received wisdom and calls on us to look at the world with new eyes -- and therefore is inherently progressive.

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