Posted on 11/04/2023 7:09:28 PM PDT by DallasBiff
Add the latest “Left Behind” (Rise of the Anti-Christ) movie I just watched on Amazon.
Has Kevin Sorbo as a main character and ties what we’re seeing now into what the Bible says will happen...
“Keeper of the Flame” presaged JFK, as well as exposing the power elites using racism and anti-semitism to divide the country and seize power.
Thanks. It’s a pretty good list as such things go. I count 19 that I’ve seen. I might debate whether a couple of them should be on a “conservative movie” list but I’m usually willing to spread a broad tent: a morally coherent universe; real dilemmas and hard choices; understandable motivations; real costs. The good guys don’t have to win, and virtue in the face of adversity — sometimes abject failure, defeat and death — is a noble theme. And the bad guys don’t have to end up dead, in jail, or transformed through a redemption arc, as long as the spiritual costs of evil are acknowledged.
The Godfather is a great example: Michael Corleone gains the world but loses his own soul in the process. The scene in which Michael settles accounts is perfect: his gunmen are carrying out simultaneous hits on those who had betrayed him while Michael is in church, standing as the godfather at the baptism of the infant son of a man he has just had murdered, swearing to renounce Satan and all his ways and to renounce the glamor of evil. That is our story, not the moral relativists’ story. It is also the core of the Hays Code. People today, especially the porn hounds, tend to conflate the Hays Code with sexual modesty on screen, and the porn hounds mock it for that reason. But while the rules on sexual behavior were certainly a part of it — largely as a reaction to the flagrant public debauchery of the bad actors in Hollywood in the earlies — the Hays Code was much broader. It was about renouncing the glamor of evil and showing that evil has spiritual consequences even if the bad guys don’t get their comeuppance within the frame of the film.
Oscar Wilde would not win many popularity contests on FR, but we can acknowledge that The Picture of Dorian Gray is a profoundly conservative parable. So is Faust, both the original and in its many adaptations. It is an archetypal story. I don’t know at what to point as “the original” literary expression of the story — something in the Bible? something in the great myth cycles? parallels in other cultures? — but it’s a theme to which filmmakers have returned many times. The story expresses a universal truth. And reality is conservative.
Sin and redemption, often with a lot of penance mixed in. The wages of sin are in one silo. Redemption arcs are in the adjoining silo, and filmmakers have visited that many times as well. When I started my movie ping list a couple of years ago — always looking for recent films, the newer the better, that fall on our side of the great divide — I think the very first movie I recommended was The Professor and the Madman. And of all the movies I’ve recommended since then, I think that probably the most widely watched (by freepers) and one of the best liked was Old Henry (which among new movies is possibly second only to The Death of Stalin in freeper popularity).
Same story.
Since reality is conservative, writers and filmmakers who want to tell honest stories, whatever their personal politics (which may be very confused) will at least let conservative themes breathe. Otherwise they are producing hackwork that doesn’t ring true. Since the archetypal stories have been revisited many times, writers often try to camouflage the sermon. Audiences don’t want to be preached at, and people who invest a couple of hours in a movie usually don’t want a story that is totally predictable from the opening scene. It becomes a matter of framing, subtext, and implications that become clear even if they are not explicitly stated.
Re: The Godfather. See my #83:
“The Godfather is a great example: Michael Corleone gains the world but loses his own soul in the process. The scene in which Michael settles accounts is perfect: his gunmen are carrying out simultaneous hits on those who had betrayed him while Michael is in church, standing as the godfather at the baptism of the infant son of a man he has just had murdered, swearing to renounce Satan and all his ways and to renounce the glamor of evil.”
Michael doesn’t get away with anything in the end. And at the end of three movies, he dies alone.
The pre-Colombian America's what?
Regards,
Volksgeist.
You're welcome.
My take is that the story of Michael's search for redemption was the author's purpose in Godfather 3. I loved that film, in spite of its many naysayers. Too much time elapsed between II and III for clear comprehension by many viewers; and I found many of the criticisms purely ignorant of Italian-American culture, Italians, southern Italian standards of art and physical beauty, Catholicism, the place of opera in Italian life, and most certainly the Vatican and its workings. The movie actually presaged a scandal in the Vatican bank before it happened; and it quietly presented even to a serial murderer like Michael the forgiveness offered by Christ through the utility of repentance. Most of all, it showed Michael's life, despite his insulation of dirty money, crumbling from his moral destitution.
Too heavy for average, secular American, thug-movie thrill seekers. Rather like comparing the works and context of Michelangelo to those of Andy Warhol. But to me, the trilogy taken as a whole was one of the best works of American literature of the last century.
PS
I'm also a fan of Oscar Wilde. Check my screen name: in tribute. His letters from prison showed his grappling with it all. His early life was chaotic, with parents both famous in different ways, a well-known poetess and a research physician who themselves stirred up scandals. Oscar grew up cheapening his prodigious intellect by trying to entertain people. His last words were reputed to be, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.”
Oh. That was before my time.
Somebody finally mentioned the Atlas Shrugged trilogy, which sure belongs on there, disappointingly as it was done. Also there was Harry’s War in the early 80s , a terrific anti- IRS movie that got pulled from many theaters fast, and is near impossible to find. I have a bootleg VHS copy I’m trying to preserve.
Nothing by John Wayne?
Pacino also made Revolution, an unsuccessful and controversial movie about the American Revolution, that might be worth another look now. It's not an unblemished picture of the Founding era, but it may have some merits.
If you think of Robert DeNiro's character as the villain in The Irishman and you remember that the character DeNiro played helped give Joe Biden his start maybe that becomes a conservative film as well. Ditto for The Departed when you bear in mind that Massachusetts politicians and the FBI are not the good guys.
Better times.
Ghostbusters.
I didn’t like the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird” when I saw it in the theater in 1963 (I haven’t seen it since). When I read the book for the first time in 2015, I thought it was a good story despite its occasional historical inaccuracies. However, I loved the book’s takedown of “progressive” education, which conservative readers will enjoy.
I plead spell check. I know how to use an apostrophe.
Great choice. “Apocalypto” is a clear metaphor for the modern abortion and euthanasia culture. Culture of life versus the culture of death.
Old Dad’s is a movie I recently watched on Netflix.
It is a comedy staring Bill Burr.
I would recommend it
Okay. Was simply puzzled by that apostrophe - making "Dad" into a Possessive - in the title.
I realize now that the movie is about dads (Plural) - not about, say, one old dad’s story, or his death, or his adventures.
Regards,
Naziism was a movement of the left largely supported by the left right up until the time Hitler attacked their better buddy Stalin.
It’s about three guys in their late forties who own a business together. The story revolves around their dealings with the woke younger people and parenting issues. It was actually funny.
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