Movie stuff

My dear old dad gave me this list of movies last week to look at. It's the top ten conservative movies of 2005 courtesy of FrontPage magazine, a conservative website. I haven't seen any of the movies listed but I wasn't particularly impressed with the description of a 'conservative movie' or with the individual movie descriptions. For instance, 'King Kong' may be a great movie, but it'll take quite a bit to convince me that it's particularly conservative.
The author, Don Feder, describes a conservative movie like this:

Let’s start with what it isn’t. It’s not about men with bulging biceps and even bigger guns. It’s not cartoonish action heroes. It isn’t revenge tales masquerading as heroism.

Conservative cinema does more than entertain; movies that do no more are visual candy. It instructs and inspires.

Conservative films celebrate virtue. They tell timeless tales of individuals overcoming all manner of adversity to achieve true greatness. They’re about honesty, loyalty, courage and patriotism. They’re concerned with conservatism’s cardinal values – faith, family and freedom.

Now all of that is probably true of movies that appeal to conservatives, but as a description, it falls a bit flat. It's just too wide open. (And I have trouble believing that King Kong really instructs and inspires more than it's 'visual candy'.) And 'virtue' is in the eye of the beholder. 'Erin Brokovich' is about an individual overcoming adversity but it's hardly a conservative film. (Though if it had stuck to complete accuracy it might have been.) As a list of movies conservatives would enjoy it seems fine. And maybe useful. 2005's movies largely fall into three categories: book adaptations, remakes/sequels and serious movies for liberal audiences.
Then I ran across this article in the Chicago Sun Times. The author, Jim Emerson, employs some useful misunderstanding.

Now, I'm not so sure these movies are "conservative," per se, or that honesty, loyalty, courage and patriotism are in any way exclusive to the right side of the political spectrum. I don't believe these particular films are even so much different from the movies openly conservative pundits have been attacking as insufficiently conservative. What you see in movies is largely determined by what you bring to them yourself, and perhaps your perception of a film has less to do with the movie's ideology than with the filter through which you interpret it.

Nowhere in the first article does Feder suggest that these virtues are exclusive to the right. And 'insufficiently conservative'? When the left attacked 'Passion of the Christ' was it because it was insufficiently liberal? And the idea of your personal filter being more important than a movie's purported message seems to be willful ignorance.
To be fair, I think that most movies are not particularly conservative or liberal. Most are meant for pure entartainment. Even the more thought provoking ones often employ a mix of right and left. 'Shawshank Redemption' was loved on both sides of the aisle for that precise reason.
Emerson follows that article with another nominee for most conservative movie, Revenge of the Sith. Not because it embodies conservative values, but because it warns neoconservatives of the dangers of 'unconstitionalitly'. What follows is a tenditious and pained comparison of the Jedi council and Republican foreign policy. A stronger argument would be that national (galactic?) healthcare with anonymous treatment for potentially embarassed mothers would have saved us all from Darth Vader. Kind of sad that a major newspaper would publish something this silly.
The lesson here should be fairly simple. Most political people want to classify things that they like/dislike to bring them in line with their viewpoints.