Worst political movies evah
Bookworm on Jan 19 2009 at 12:16 pm | Filed under: Hollywood
Check out Ed Morrissey’s suggested list of worst political movies and see what you think. I agree with him. Indeed, I was savvy enough even in my pre-neocon days to recognize how awful some of them were, especially Oliver Stone’s JFK, which I thought was one of the stupidist, most paranoid, ill-informed movies I’d ever seen.
I would add one more to the list, a movie called The Contender, which came out before my neocon enlightenment, but whch I still recognized as an insanely stupid, partisan self-involved movie. In it, Joan Allen plays a contender for the Vice Presidency who is being maligned by an evil Republican. It was so bad, it made my teeth hurt to watch it. What are your choices?
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_A Handmaid’s Tale_
It was based on a Margaret Atwood novel that I could never finish. I think I got through five minutes of the movie. It was supposed to be a searing indictment of the intolerant religiosity that took over American culture during the Reagan years.
I was in grad school those years–I remember clearly how girls wore long skirts and walked with their gaze modestly down, and anyone who dared roll their eyes and say “Ronnie *Ray*gun” in that certain tone of voice was taken out and summarily shot. (oh, how I wish . . .)
kali…IIRC, Atwood was inspired to write “Handmaid’s Tale” after visiting Afghanistan and observing how women were treated by Islamic extremists. She transposed the situation to American Christians.
Would have been nice if she’d mentioned, in an endnote or something, that the book was inspired by real behavior in a real place…
Headslap. Mea culpa. Mutter to self to do research before posting. It was on my mind because a friend just last Friday explained how much the book had meant to him during the Reagan years. But (cheering up) now I can tell him the book was about Islam, not Christian fundamentalists. That should be fun.
The remake of The Manchurian Candidate scraped bottom, even though it employed fine actors like Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright. Meryl Streep’s do-over of Angela Lansbury’s wicked mother role was modeled, I believe, on Peggy Noonan and Barbara Bush. And the movie followed the Pursuit of Corporate War Profits Feed the War on Terror plotline so closely Noam Chomsky should have been a consultant to the production. An awful movie. Even Al Franken turned up in a bit part as a cable news journo.
Most of you probably haven’t seen Frost/Nixon – don’t bother. Purest distilled essence of crap.
(For your edification, BW – still on Maui, working all day, but at night we slog our way through the Academy dvds “for your consideration.” We – even the liberal co-writer – consider that one to be beyond horrid.)
The problem is, without something to contradict it an entire generation will watch this crap, and come away believing, as I’m sure Opie in his pure and innocent little heart does, that this is the way it was. Once again, idiocy trumps history.
Re your last paragraph, Tiresias, regarding a generation of suckers: “It’s a Barnum & Bailey world, just as phony as it can be….”
>>The problem is, without something to contradict it an entire generation will watch this crap, and come away believing, as I’m sure Opie in his pure and innocent little heart does, that this is the way it was. Once again, idiocy trumps history.>>
Breaks my heart that Opie did that movie…I had such high hopes for the boy!!
I don’t know about worst political movies, but some of the best ones were Serenity and Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Link
A lot of time spent pondering the imponderables there.