titles (though you just know he's a Democrat).
Posted on 06/05/2004 10:11:35 AM PDT by Osage Orange
Goofy Movie Is No Concern For Conservatives
2004-06-04
By Mark Green
WASHINGTON --
Conservatives are a nervous bunch. When they get together to talk issues, often there's a sky-is-falling quality to the discussion. That's the way it was a couple of weeks ago at a gathering of red-meat, grass-roots types. Along with discussion of the goings-on in Congress and United States policy in Iraq, there was alarm over the summer blockbuster disaster film, "The Day After Tomorrow."
The movie stars Dennis Quaid as an eccentric scientist whose global warming warnings get blown off by government officials -- most notably the vice president, who looks a lot like Dick Cheney. The result is crazy weather and the onset of a new ice age that buries North America and Europe in snow.
The environmental left is pretty excited about the movie. Former Vice President Al Gore, a global warming authority (it's on his resume, right below the part about inventing the Internet) gives "The Day After Tomorrow" five stars. MoveOn.org, the Bush-bashing group bankrolled by billionaire George Soros, reportedly is sending its people to theaters to hand out leaflets.
My conservative friends didn't need an engraved invitation to get going. "We've got to counter the movie's obvious political agenda," one said. There were lots of nods and concerned looks around the room. A show of hands was taken. Counter strategies were discussed. E-mails went out that day, no doubt.
Well, I saw "The Day After Tomorrow" over the Memorial Day weekend, and my advice to my button-downed brethren is simple: Don't sweat it. I don't think SUV-loving, carpool- shunning folks have a thing to worry about. The film is that bad.
In fact, we should be out there with the MoveOn.org geeks, urging Americans to see the movie. It's so silly, so lame, that it actually cools the froth of the global warming cause. "More sober environmentalists worry that the very ridiculousness of the film will discredit their cause," writes the National Review's Rich Lowry.
He's right. "The Day After Tomorrow" might be the worst thing to happen to tree huggers since chain saws.
Real climatologists, like the University of Virginia's Patrick Michaels, were widely quoted before the movie's release, saying the film was a bunch of bunk. They used words like "impossible" to describe its story line -- global warming melts the polar ice caps, causing rapid desalinization of the oceans, screwing up the warm Atlantic current, suddenly cooling the atmosphere and launching continent-sized storms that drop the earth's surface temperature 100 degrees below zero. All in one two- hour flick!
First New York City gets hit by a wall of water and then floods -- an oil tanker ends up floating through Manhattan's concrete canyons -- and then Gotham gets frosted. Some college kids hole up in the public library, burning books to stay warm. A little love sidebar breaks out around the makeshift campfire, but the dialogue is so stupid the people in my theater just busted out laughing. Not exactly the reaction Brother Gore would want.
If the instant ice age wasn't ridiculous enough, the film's subplots are a succession of one improbable, if not impossible, event after another.
American refugees stream over the Mexican border -- Gringo wetbacks! -- while wolves escaped from the Bronx Zoo terrorize the kids at the library, who've boarded the runaway tanker looking for medicine. Later, Quaid and another guy on snowshoes cover the 100-mile hike from Philadelphia to New York in a day or two. Mush!
Look, no one disputes the fact the earth's atmosphere has warmed. The argument is over how much and why. Michaels and other reputable experts say the causes are part of the planet's natural warming/cooling cycle. (Certainly, no one would argue the last great ice age, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, was caused by SUVs.)
What's more, Michaels and others say draconian measures advocated by Gore and his ilk would only reduce warming by seven hundredths of a degree Celsius over the next 50 years. For that we're going to wreck the economy and throw millions out of their jobs, creating a different kind of disaster? I don't think so.
"The Day After Tomorrow" sets back the global warming cause. It makes a serious issue look goofy and its disastrous outcome utterly implausible.
Conservatives? They should look for bigger game this election year -- or, as the characters do in "The Day After Tomorrow," just chill.
Green is national editorial writer for The Oklahoman.
Shrek II beat the environmental movie at the box office. I thought this was a positive indication of where parents are putting their money.
Funny, I hadn't noticed that around here. I guess we were too busy laughing at it to have been nervous.
My favorite part of the movie is where Quaid's character chastises the Vice President for not doing something sooner. The something being evacuating the entire northern hemisphere.
We're not nervous at all about this. But some of us rightly believe that Conservatives should not be supporting the producers and distributors of Leftist propaganda (no matter how inane it might be).
De-fund the Left!
The Right might be "nervous," but the Left is positively LOOPY for believing this tripe.
Sort of like the democRATs blaming Bush for not taking action years before 9/11.
Well, I must say there's a lot of type-casting. In my experience rich liberals are just as apt to drive SUVs as conservatives, and I never thought of button-down shirts as reliable political markers either.
What gets me, however, is the assumption, even by a reporter for the conservative Daily Oklahoman, that conservatives are some sort of "alien" they, whom we liberal reporters can laugh at. I don't think so.
Zackly. My second most favorite part of the movie is when Quaid's character sets out to rescue his son and he does so by packing all his gear into a great big truck instead of that solar-powered piece of crap he crams himself into when he takes his son to the airport.
There has been something of a movement to turn the motion picture "The Day after Tomorrow" into a version of "Thr Rocky Horror Micture Show", in which the audience, knowing how really awful the movie was, would shout at the screen, in unison, as certain scenes were coming up, either the actors would not do what they were about to do, or a warning "Watch out!" as something highly disasterous was about to happen on the screen. And of course, the plot continued just as it always had, grinding on to its inevitable conclusion. Somehow, nobody could develop much sympathy with the characters (which were only cartoons anyway), and the movie would be viewed again and again, to be discussed endlessly for its technical glitches and really bad dialogue.
What is the term? Kitchy? Camp? An object of ridicule and scorn every time it appears on screen. "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" went on for years and years. It still plays for a certain segment of the public from time to time.
If the propaganda hurts them and helps us, I'm all for it!
The Bush 1988 campaign ran the video of Dukakis in the tank.
So which is the greener movie, Day After Tomorrow, or Shrek? ;-)
Shrek is more Green.... but more conservative.....
Sometimes even I believe all DemoMarxistSocialistLyingLibs...drive Yugos, wear Birkenstocks, eat tofu, and listen to Babs, and Neil Diamond. (vbg) Maybe that explains his comments??? I dunno......
FRegards,
Error - error - error! The last ice age began about 70,000 years ago, was at its maximum about 18,000 years ago, and ended about 10,000 years ago. At its maximum extent about 97% of Canada was covered in ice. The ice was at its thickest (estimated) over the Hudson Bay and was almost 11,000 feet thick.
It's somewhat warmer now than it was then, but nothing to do with SUVs that's for sure...
Of course, the dinosaurs died a little earlier - about 65,000,000 years ago. The big ones who couldn't hide were probably broiled to death due to overheating of the global atmosphere due to the energy transfer from the impact in the Yucatan. The carnivores who survived the first few hours to days after the impact mostly starved to death after all the dead dinosaur bodies were eaten. The herbivores mostly died after the following "asteroidal-impact winter" caused global "crop failure." No land animal larger than 50 lbs. is known to have survived, and most that did were were much smaller.
Makes SUVs seem a little less threatening, doesn't it...
IMHO, of course...
"It's somewhat warmer now than it was then, but nothing to do with SUVs that's for sure... "
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It was probably all those roaming Euro-trash cave dweller's burning their peat bogs......
Fwiw-
I've heard it was one of the best comedies of the season.
I thought the same thing. When I saw the title, I thought this was going to be another thread about Michael Moore.
I hang out on a local message board infested with liberals. Movies get a thread topic every weekend. I saw this flick at sneak preview the day before it opened and wrote a review and posted it on the message board telling everyone there to save their money and skip it.
No one has replied back that they've seen it. Mission Accomplished.
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