quote:Originally posted by JonHecht: The interpretations: Juno is about keeping babies. Groundhog day is about being in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. Ghostbusters has the guy from Groundhog day, which gives it an advantage already. Also, it's about fighting demons! I've never seen A Simple Plan, but they like simple things.
God I love this crap. It's such pure crap- it's impossible not to enjoy.
I especially liked the one about Forest Gump. It's conservative because he avoided the "dangerous values of the 60's." Not stopping to mention that he avoided *all* political values, because the movie was about purity of spirit.
And let's not even dare to suggest that Forest Gump, as a political statement regarding the 60's, is really a deconstruction of the messages of peace and tolerance and love coming from intolerant, violent, and hateful people, and is really just a commentary on the selfishness of people who believed themselves to be doing the righteous good. That's not a very political message at all.
According to this asshat, "Mad Men," is apparently a conservative TV show because it does the same thing with the same period. Because *no-one* who was truly a liberal would *ever* deconstruct the 60's, even 50 years later when it is ripe for analysis and *gasp* reflection.
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quote:The Pursuit of Happyness (2006): 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. After his wife leaves him, Gardner can barely pay the rent. He accepts an unpaid internship at a San Francisco brokerage, with the promise of a real job if he outperforms the other interns and passes his exams. Gardner never succumbs to self-pity, even when he and his young son take refuge in a homeless shelter. They’re black, but there’s no racial undertone or subtext. Gardner is just an incredibly hard-working, ambitious, and smart man who wants to do better for himself and his son.
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: I know that not all conservatives are stupid. The ones responsible for this list are. Coming up with Team America: World Police as one of the top 25 listings in a list called "The Best Conservative Movies" (not 'The Movies That Resonate The Most With Conservatives,' to remind you), then you're in trouble.
There are also a significant number of conservatives who don't get Colbert's satire and think he really means what he says. I suspect the person who selected Team America for that list is one of them.
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Some of these are obvious (I love that some guy had the balls to include Red Dawn)
Why is that ballsy? The movie was denounced as a right wing wet dream when it first came out. High schoolers going to the hills and killing commie bastards. Of course it's a conservative movie.
It's ballsy because it's a classic bad movie. The guy had the balls to admit liking Red Dawn non-ironically.
I'm not sure how to say this. I don't mean this in a bad way, but the idea of liking a movie ironically smacks of...let's say aspects of American liberal culture that many in American conservative culture look down on. And, I believe that there is probably a correlation between looking down on those aspects and liking Red Dawn.
Incidentally, I think Red Dawn kicks ass and not ironically. I also know it's not a good movie. But, come on, "Wolverines!"
Fabulous movie. I loved it when it came out, and I rewatched it recently and still loved it.
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I laughed my way through half the list. This whole thing could have been written by the Onion and it would not be much different.
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quote:There are also a significant number of conservatives who don't get Colbert's satire and think he really means what he says.
Baloney.
Not baloney. All you need is enough conservative family friended on FB and you find this out soon enough.
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I think he might have been taking issue with the qualifier 'significant'. A casual survey of family members of Facebook is hardly reliable, Parkour, for two extremely good reasons I can think of without breaking a mental sweat that I'm absolutely certain are valid when discussing representative samples, and at least one other one that I'd be willing to place a small wager on.
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This is the same group that has significant numbers who think Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. It is not hard to find significant numbers of the same group who have quoted or even watched colbert without realizing that he was not a genuine conservative pundit.
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Is there some reason that should be readily apparent to me but isn't ... any reason at all why these people would have Juno, Brazil, TA:WP, and TPoH in the list but I'm not seeing Saving Private Ryan? Is there some sort of right-wing objection to that movie I'm unaware of?
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Total guess: Both Spielberg and Tom Hanks have been pretty vocal about their democratic politics. That said, one would think that would knock-off Braveheart too for the anti-Semite thing, but the list is a combination of suggestions from different people so we don't really need consistency.
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quote:Tom Hanks is a liberal, big time. Seeing the world through the atheistic eyes of a "retard", with sermonizing about civil rights, was a liberal distortion and fantasy. I'm sure we all know people of low IQs, and they don't think and act like Forrest Gump. For starters, often they have strong religious faith. As I recall from the first half, Gump's perspective was without any genuine expression of faith.--Aschlafly 01:34, 20 July 2007 (EDT) ... Based on the discussion above, it appears that the Saving Private Ryan hero (Hanks) never conveys the --Aschlafly 15:23, 20 July 2007 (EDT)faith of the person he portrays. So my expectation was correct. Faith is relegated to a little window-dressing, something to give the movie an appearance of depth, but not fit for the hero himself. Did Hanks and Spielberg, two liberals probably lacking in any experience with the military or genuine interest in it, convey the soldiers' true feelings and attitudes? Not in the clip I saw from the movie. Instead, they conveyed a mostly purposeless, atheistic view of war, with overemphasis on the casualties. It's a liberal message.--Aschlafly 15:23, 20 July 2007 (EDT)
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Still, the entire combination of people each individually not opting to place that movie anywhere in there? I mean, Juno. It's a list that stretches to fit Juno in there, inexplicably.
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It's hard to say without being privy to their voting scheme. It could be entirely possible that they had a voting scheme that favours unique first choices versus shared lower ranked choices.
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quote:There are also a significant number of conservatives who don't get Colbert's satire and think he really means what he says.
Baloney.
Not baloney. All you need is enough conservative family friended on FB and you find this out soon enough.
There are also some conservatives who recognize that Colbert is being satirical but think that Colbert's tongue-in-cheek mock-conservative arguments still frequently outclass totally sincere liberal ones. A friend of mine is like that. He quotes Colbert all the time, and if one was not paying close attention they might easily think that he didn't realize it was satire.
Also, what Rakeesh said.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: There are also some conservatives who recognize that Colbert is being satirical but think that Colbert's tongue-in-cheek mock-conservative arguments still frequently outclass totally sincere liberal ones.
::raises hand:: That'd be my view.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I think he might have been taking issue with the qualifier 'significant'. A casual survey of family members of Facebook is hardly reliable, Parkour, for two extremely good reasons I can think of without breaking a mental sweat that I'm absolutely certain are valid when discussing representative samples, and at least one other one that I'd be willing to place a small wager on.
I should have written significant minority instead. When I said significant I meant less than half but more than negligible, couldn't make my brain produce the correct wording at the time.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: There are also some conservatives who recognize that Colbert is being satirical but think that Colbert's tongue-in-cheek mock-conservative arguments still frequently outclass totally sincere liberal ones.
I've seen this. It's utterly adorable. It's practically an admission of how impressionable they are to the very culture of propagandizing and polarizing punditry that Colbert gets so much mileage out of satirizing.
The link to the colbert study on conservatives is true, and (to me) unsurprising. There have been many times that hard righties who stew in the environment of political talk media get into Colbert with absolutely no impression or comprehension that Colbert is satirizing the conservative punditry that they absorb with earnest.
Tom Delay once even cluelessly cited Colbert as a defender and a foe of the liberal media establishment, for putting the hot irons to his foe Greenwald in an interview with hard hitting questions like "Who hates America more, you or Michael Moore?"
Later, when someone clued them in, I guess, the accolades were quietly taken down.
quote:Originally posted by Flying Fish: Saving Private Ryan is a good-enough war movie, but is it a movie which is particularly "conservative"?
By all the metrics that the article uses to promote a movie as providing, promoting, championing, or resonating with conservative causes, SPR is an excellent candidate. Given how well it actually DID resonate in those ways, and its memorable exposure, its lack of placement on a list which has multiple poor entries (that the authors make an incredulous stretch to conceptualize as having a conservative message) is telling!
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quote:I should have written significant minority instead. When I said significant I meant less than half but more than negligible, couldn't make my brain produce the correct wording at the time.
No you shouldn't have, because - again - the tool used to measure, the group being measured, and the person doing the measuring are all dubiously objective or representative to say the least for the conclusion you'd be trying to draw in this case.
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Even if it can be clearly shown that there's a non-negligible percentage of people who thought colbert is genuine? That's a lil' strange.
Aaanyway.
All this list actually proves (because it sure doesn't hold its own as a list of The Great Conservative Movies that Resonate with Conservatives) is that people have no trouble placing their own biases and viewpoints into art. This happens on both sides, and it is important when interpreting art to realize your own potential bias. Otherwise you get some pretty poor readings of things. See: Most of this list.
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If for no other reason, Saving Private Ryan misses the list because of Barry Pepper's character. Conservatives don't like seeing a devout christian unapologetically killing people contrasted against a main character that is so deeply conflicted about it.
As to Colbert, the same was true for Archie Bunker. He had a following of people who believed he was a font of wisdom, and liked seeing him put Michael Stivic in his place.
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quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: Conservatives don't like seeing a devout christian unapologetically killing people contrasted against a main character that is so deeply conflicted about it.
I'm not a Christian, so take what I say with that relative grain of salt.
But man, I really don't have any problem seeing someone unapologetically killing Nazis. I have no difficulty accepting that someone as a protagonist, and a good person.
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I've got no problem with your general sentiment, but realize that the average German soldier was not evil any more than the average American soldier was. Lots of good people died on both sides of WWII, just like any war.
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I don't know Xavier. The German army at the time very actively sought and employed sociopathic murderers to a number of units. On average, I don't know if it balances out. You could say the "typical" German soldier was not any more evil. Particularly since the typical German soldier was probably a little relieved when they lost the war, and hoped to surrender, if necessary, to western allied forces.
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Here's a trivia question for you -- who said this: ................................... "I like shooting, and I love hunting. But I never did enjoy killing anybody. It's my job. If I don't get those bastards, then they're gonna kill a lot of these kids dressed up like Marines. That's the way I look at it."* ...................................... And for the record, the Barry Pepper character in SPR didn't bother me. At one point in the movie he even says something to the effect that if they could go on a mission to get him and his rifle within 500 yards of Hitler, the war would be over and that would save a lot of lives.
quote:Even if it can be clearly shown that there's a non-negligible percentage of people who thought colbert is genuine? That's a lil' strange.
It's not remotely strange when you remember what I said twice, which was to call into question this specific situation: the person doing the measuring, the means they're using to measure, etc.
Put more directly, I'm disinclined to lend much weight to anecdotes that start or involve, "Lots of my conservative family members on Facebook..." It's a frankly silly standard, one that doesn't deserve to be accorded respect for use in anything but discovering what that particular person's family put on their Facebook pages. I frankly wonder if your lust for the zing hasn't made what seems to me a pretty basic point - 'watch out for bias!' - get fogged up a bit.
I only say that because you won't find me anywhere saying, "There are no significant numbers of conservatives who think Colbert is genuine," only my suggesting that this particular way of backing that thought up is pretty flimsy.
Hell, doesn't Dan_Frank (or am I thinking of someone else?) get taken out to the rhetorical woodshed, so to speak, for conflating 'liberals' with 'liberals in my family'?
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quote:Originally posted by Xavier: I've got no problem with your general sentiment, but realize that the average German soldier was not evil any more than the average American soldier was. Lots of good people died on both sides of WWII, just like any war.
You don't think fighting for the Nazi regime made them morally worse than the Americans, regardless of their personal character traits?
Fighting on the side of the aggressors in an unjust war is wrong. I suppose it was more forgivable by the time D-Day rolled around, since they were on the defensive at that point. But still, they were defending land they'd unjustly invaded.
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I'm not sure. Most of the time when it comes to something like that you're brainwashed for ages. Some of the soldiers might have been Hitler youth trained from boyhood to believe they were in the right. Some of them might not have been aware of just how evil the Nazis were. Especially if you're been trained to believe your way is right no matter what. I'm not condoning it. Nazis suck, but, there were bond to be a great deal of soldiers who were not evil and didn't think of themselves as the aggressor.
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quote: Fighting on the side of the aggressors in an unjust war is wrong. I suppose it was more forgivable by the time D-Day rolled around, since they were on the defensive at that point. But still, they were defending land they'd unjustly invaded.
Comes the question why were they fighting, though. I mean, we can all get on board with the idea that it was an unjust war, check. But exactly what did they know about why they were fighting versus what they could have known, particularly down at the private soldier level? How can you say on a case-by-case basis? You can't, especially at this remove. You don't know what they were told, what they believed, what pressures they felt, if they were conscripted, etc.
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Consider the fact that about 18,000,000 German men fought in World War II. Then ask yourself how many of those 18 million you'd consider "evil" if you knew them personally.
By the end of the war, just about every single able bodied German male had fought. People are generally good, and Germans are no exception, despite the atrocities committed by the Nazi's.
Of those 18M, almost 4.5M died. Four and a half million. Any way you slice it, millions of good men lost their lives on the other side of that war.
I don't have any problem with a protagonist giving little thought to the killing of his enemies. I was fine with the sniper in Saving Private Ryan much like I was fine with William Wallace killing his English enemies in Braveheart or countless other examples in movies. To be an effective combatant you pretty much have to dehumanize the enemy. I just don't think we should dehumanize them 60 years after the war is over. We don't gain anything by doing so.
War sucks, and even in your cause is just (like the Americans in WWII), you're still killing human beings.
Added: Yes Orincoro, I do think "typical" better expresses my sentiment than "average" does.
quote:I'm not sure. Most of the time when it comes to something like that you're brainwashed for ages. Some of the soldiers might have been Hitler youth trained from boyhood to believe they were in the right.
This is an interesting point, but I don't think it contradicts what I've said. Being indoctrinated gives you a certain sort of excuse for being a bad or flawed person. Maybe we shouldn't blame you for your moral flaws. But that doesn't mean you don't have them. You're still morally worse than a person who doesn't have those flaws.
quote:Comes the question why were they fighting, though. I mean, we can all get on board with the idea that it was an unjust war, check. But exactly what did they know about why they were fighting versus what they could have known, particularly down at the private soldier level? How can you say on a case-by-case basis? You can't, especially at this remove. You don't know what they were told, what they believed, what pressures they felt, if they were conscripted, etc.
Yeah, for sure, in individual cases I'm sure a substantial portion were ignorant of many of the facts that made their fighting wrong. But still, I don't think these considerations automatically excuse people 100%. Conscription, for example. I think dodging the draft in Vietnam was a morally better thing to do than fighting in that war, although I don't blame people who fought. (There's so much cultural pressure against "cowardly" behavior.)
quote:Consider the fact that about 18,000,000 German men fought in World War II. Then ask yourself how many of those 18 million you'd consider "evil" if you knew them personally.
Well, this isn't really the question. I'm sure I wouldn't have called most 19th-Century slaveholders "evil" if I knew them personally. But they made the wrong choice when they decided to own slaves, and that made them worse people than they would've been if they didn't own slaves.
quote:War sucks, and even in your cause is just (like the Americans in WWII), you're still killing human beings.
Absolutely. I don't think morally compromised people "deserve" to die in wars. I think the Barry Pepper character was too callous about it, myself. But I do think the Allied soldiers had a moral "leg up" on their opponents because more of them were fighting for good reasons.
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quote:Absolutely. I don't think morally compromised people "deserve" to die in wars. I think the Barry Pepper character was too callous about it, myself. But I do think the Allied soldiers had a moral "leg up" on their opponents because more of them were fighting for good reasons.
Yeah, I don't think we disagree by very much here, if at all. Interesting discussion though.
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quote:But man, I really don't have any problem seeing someone unapologetically killing Nazis. I have no difficulty accepting that someone as a protagonist, and a good person.
Bear in mind, we aren't talking about whether the movie is christian, but about whether it would be seen by conservatives as being in line with their views.
My point is not that a christian character was a soldier. No doubt the other members of the platoon were christian as well (aside from Adam Goldberg's character), but this guy was portrayed as a capital "C" Christian. A negative stereotype. It was the way the movie dealt with the character, showing him to be a fundamentalist, preachy Christian, who was unconflicted about his role as a killer.
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quote:Bear in mind, we aren't talking about whether the movie is christian, but about whether it would be seen by conservatives as being in line with their views.
Going to war to kill the badguys and liberate people.
The answer is 'very yes.'
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Hurm. You could do a check list of liberal and conservative things for pretty much any movie. Just like at Incredibles. Doesn't it seem kind of liberal to help old ladies dodge the red tape to get the money they need? Or at least kind of nice. And liberals and conservatives value family and families working together. And it could be considered feminist for Helen to want to help Bob instead of him doing it all on his own. And he was the one who wanted to settle down and she wanted to keep kicking booty. I don't think these folks understand movies very well.
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This discussion kinda reminds me of The Big Red One.
Griff (Mark Hammill) has lost all desire to kill the enemy. He discusses this with his immediate superior (Lee Marvin). Lee Marvin gives him his best arguments in favor of continuing to kill the nazis.
In an analogic scene later in the movie, an unnamed nazi soldier has lost all desire to kill the allies. He discusses this with his immediate superior. His superior officer shoots him dead.
And as the movie ends, Griff and his unit liberate a concentration camp, and what he sees there helps Griff regain his stomach for killing nazis.
The writer-director, Sam Fuller, was (to my eyes) quite the liberal, in the sense a lot of that generation (George McGovern, JFK, Scoop Jackson) were also liberal.
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Just read that the Red Dawn remake will feature Chinese invaders, and will be set in Michigan.
No word yet on whether Patrick Swayze will do a cameo -- his ghost could tip over some lump of c4 which Jennifer Grey is shaping on a potter's wheel or something.....
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What I get from this list, is that conservatives like militaristic movies that glorify war and warriors? Is that an unfair assessment?
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quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: [QUOTE] My point is not that a christian character was a soldier. No doubt the other members of the platoon were christian as well (aside from Adam Goldberg's character), but this guy was portrayed as a capital "C" Christian. A negative stereotype. It was the way the movie dealt with the character, showing him to be a fundamentalist, preachy Christian, who was unconflicted about his role as a killer.
Look at the cast though. Most of them are negative stereotypes. A mouthy Brooklyn boy, a mousy corporal pansy intellectual, a hotheaded sergeant, a grinning smarmy Jew, a big dumb Italian, a hayseed bible thumper, a coward cracking under the pressure of command. The only ones that aren't fairly negatively portrayed at some point or another are Ryan and Wade, the medic, one of whom is set up to be loved so that he can die, and the other who has to be basically the ideal citizen soldier from Iowa who shows up at the end. The point of the movie is that these flaws don't seem to matter because they all manage to find their human feelings and deal with each other through times of great stress and uncertainty. If they had all been perfect, nobody would have cared. So, the fact that everybody is portrayed in positive and in negative lights is just the message of the movie. Everybody has the private war inside them, not just on the outside.
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All true, but my comment was about what element of the movie would prevent a self proclaimed conservative from including the movie in their list.
Schafly's explanation is that "Faith is relegated to a little window-dressing, something to give the movie an appearance of depth, but not fit for the hero himself." That fits, but in and of itself a lack of depiction of faith doesn't discredit the movie. It's the way faith is depicted that is a turn off.
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