10 Best Conservative Movies

National Review, which did such a wonderful job identifying hidden conservative messages in rock songs a few years ago, has now come up with a list of the Best Conservative Movies. Although their list for the most part sticks to derrièrist principles by not including too many difficult movies, for some reason they named The Lives of Others, a boring foreign film I've never heard of, as their number one movie and even included a tedious talky independent film like Metropolitan. They did include The Dark Knight, however, which should head off angry emails from fans and derrièrist critics who think it was the greatest movie ever made. Of course, I would have included The Dark Knight on my list, too, as well as such conservative classics as Brazil and Red Dawn, but there are so many great conservative movies, I decided not to duplicate anything that appeared on their list. And while their list only included films of the last 25 years (probably because the editors of National Review haven't seen any movies older than that), I also included a few older movies; but don't worry, none of them are in black and white (except for one, but give it a chance; it gets better).

Neither of our lists is definitive. I'm sure you can think of a lot of other great conservative movies. Feel free to mention them in the comments. Some of the other great conservative movies I might have included that didn't quite make the cut include The Grapes of Wrath, Birth of a Nation, Norma Rae, Easy Rider, Slumdog Millionaire, and Showgirls, just to name a few. But these lists are not meant to identify every great conservative movie. The real purpose of these lists is to show that conservatives are actually normal people, who love movies and rock music and video games, who talk a lot about hot women and what we would like to do to them if we were able to get any of them in bed and who use a lot of baseball and basketball metaphors just like regular guys. Hopefully, lists like this, and sites like Big Hollywood, will help change the unfair image of conservatives in the media so that one day we'll be able to say, "You like me! You like me!"

1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Dan Quayle's favorite movie, featuring the film debut of former Nixon aide Ben Stein (who discusses the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the Laffer Curve in one of the film's most moving scenes), Ferris Bueller's Day Off is perhaps the greatest conservative film ever to come out of Hollywood. Matthew Broderick plays Ferris Bueller, who decides he has had enough of liberal indoctrination and skips school on the day of a test about European socialism in protest. "I'm not European," he says. "I don't plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism." Although liberal Hollywood often tries to caricature conservatives as dorks or villains, someone like Ferris Bueller is who conservatives actually see when we look in the mirror. Someone who is handsome and adored by all the "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads." Someone who is really, really cool. And, sure, we might total your father's Ferrrari or invade your country without enough troops or trigger a temporary economic meltdown, but we're actually really lovable, the kind of guy you want to have a beer with. And really, really cool.

2. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Why aren't there more films for children that celebrate free-market capitalism? Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a Horatio Alger story about Charlie Bucket, a poor kid who learns that in the free-enterprise system everybody has a randomly equal chance to find a golden ticket (though some special people, like Veruca Salt, have more randomly equal chances than others because a level playing field would be socialism). After finding a golden ticket in his chocolate bar, Charlie meets Willy Wonka, an entrepreneur who has built his candy empire through constant innovation, corporate espionage and cheap labor. Wonka takes Charlie and some other lucky kids on a tour of his factory and gives them a quick lesson in basic economics. His factory is a consumerist paradise, where everything is consumable, although as one unfortunate child learns, consuming beyond your means can get you sucked up into a giant tube. In a free market economy, the kids learn, some will succeed and others will end up as giant blueberries. "Don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted," Wonka instructs Charlie, imparting the film's most important moral lesson. "He lived happily ever after."

3. Home Alone (1990)
Like some of the other films on this list, Home Alone works on several levels. On the one hand it's a family-friendly comedy about an adorable little boy, played by Macaulay Culkin (before he grew up and got weird), fighting off home invaders. But on a deeper level it is a parable about what would happen if we didn't have a Second Amendment. Luckily, Culkin is able to fend off the incompetent criminals who try to break into his home by using ingenious homemade weaponry, but not every little boy in America is as clever as Culkin's screenwriter, John Hughes. If you went on vacation and accidentally left your child at home, wouldn't you feel a lot better if you knew there was a loaded gun in the house that your child could easily access? I know I would. Unfortunately, gun control extremists want to take away our Second Amendment rights by passing all kinds of laws mandating child safety locks and banning assault weapons, rendering our nation's pre-adolescents defenseless. I think the NRA should remake this movie but this time give the little boy a gun. It would be a very short film.

4. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Although a number of liberal critics with their minds in the gutter slandered it as a "gay cowboy movie," Brokeback Mountain is actually a wonderful paen to the virtues of American masculinity. Ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are no metrosexuals. They are men's men who love nothing better than engaging in such manly pursuits as camping and fishing and rounding up sheep in the great outdoors. Although both are married and have kids, is it so surprising that they feel more comfortable in the company of other men, resisting the feminizing influences that have polluted our culture since the women's movement? Unfortunately, liberals aren't able to accept that two men can be really good friends without adolescently snickering and insinuating behind their backs that they are gay. They certainly don't act gay. If going fishing with your buddy makes you gay, then a lot of men in America must be gay.

5. Weekend at Bernie's (1989)
Although some might dismiss Weekend at Bernie's as a wacky comedy about young insurance executives who drag the corpse of their wealthy boss around and pretend he is alive, it is actually a penetrating allegory about the evils of the death tax (which liberals euphemistically refer to as the "estate tax"). Is there really that much difference between defiling the dead by taxing their wealth after they die and propping up someone's dead body, putting sunglasses on him and dragging him around the beach pretending he's drunk? Can't liberal vultures just let deceased millionaires pass their estates on to their pampered progeny without government tax collectors extracting their pound of putrefying flesh? Although Weekend at Bernie's is certainly a delightful comedy on one level, it just makes me so mad sometimes when I think of the policy implications that I want to yell at the screen, "Leave Bernie's heirs' trust funds and tax shelters alone!"

6. Wizard of Oz (1939)
Long before homosexuals waved rainbow flags and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition fomented racial hatred, Dorothy (played by Judy Garland, who later devolved into a pill-popping gay icon) took a nightmarish, drug-fueled trip over the rainbow to a hellish, multicultural dystopia called Oz. Throughout the Wizard of Oz Dorothy is desperate to flee the perversions of Munchkinland, Afghanistan-like poppy fields and urban ghettos of the Emerald City and return home to safe Republican Kansas, where morality is clearly delineated in black and white. At the end of the film when a big government wizard fails to get her back home, she discovers that all she has to do is pull herself up by her own ruby slipper straps. At a time when the great imperial Obama tells us that we need government to help us solve our problems, we should remember what Glinda the Good Witch of the North, tells Dorothy -- that she doesn't need government handouts to help her when she can just get what she needs by clicking her very own pair of ruby slippers and wishing really hard.

7. Starship Troopers (1997)
One of the problems with a lot of liberal Hollywood war movies since Vietnam is that they get all caught up with trying to see the enemy as human beings and depicting war as morally questionable. But Starship Troopers brilliantly spares us all the distracting moralism by stripping war down to its essential elements. It accomplishes this by reducing the enemy to nasty alien insects who look really cool when they blow up so that we can see war in its purest form as the glorious adventure it actually is. Although President Bush accomplished some of the same goals by banning photography of flag-draped coffins and limiting the press's coverage in the battlefield, the war in Iraq would probably have been even more popular if he had been able to convince the American people that the Iraqis were actually giant bugs. Maybe with all the CGI technology we have now a future President waging a future war will be able to do just that.

8. Patch Adams (1998)
It's too bad advocates of socialized medicine don't subscribe to Reader's Digest, which for years has taught us that "Laughter is the Best Medicine." Based on a real-life doctor, Patch Adams, starring Robin Williams in one of his most delightful roles (Williams is so much better in films where he has a director who restrains him), is about a doctor who did have a subscription to Reader's Digest, and realized that all the cheap pharmaceuticals illegally imported from Canada in the world are no match for comedy hijinks. Unfortunately, government bureaucrats try to shut down his comedy clinic just because he is practicing medicine without a license. Although Patch Adams eventually wins his case, imagine if we had socialized medicine and a lot of humorless bureaucrats were given the power to require doctors to have medical degrees and ban them from wearing big red noses and funny glasses or replacing bed pans with whoopee cushions. That's not the kind of America I want. So the next time some liberal complains about the 45 million Americans who are uninsured, spray him with water from the flower in your lapel and send him to see this movie.

9. Planet of the Apes (1968)
Planet of the Apes is based on an intriguing premise: What if evolution were true instead of just an unlikely theory? In this film apes have "evolved" to the point where they talk, wear clothes and walk upright. Evolutionists would have you believe that monkeys are our uncles so if you evolved them a little, then it would stand to reason that they would be just like us. And the apes on this planet sure seem human at first but as the film unfolds we see that there is nothing very human about these animals at all. No matter how you dress them up or how many words of English you teach them in the end they're still just "damned dirty apes," as Charlton Heston discovers. I don't think I've ever seen a better refutation of Darwin's theories.

10. Jaws (1975)
The next time your annoying animal rights activist friend cries and moans about bunnies and puppies and kitties being tortured and murdered in medical labs, pop Jaws in the DVD player and show him what animals are really like. Animals are not really cute and loveable little creatures, living together in harmony in the forest, as animal rights activists would have you believe. Many of them are vicious, amoral killing machines like the shark in Jaws, who would like nothing better than to bite PETA members in half given the chance. Jaws dares to tell the truth about animals. That's why we call them animals. By the end of the film your fauna-hugging friend will be cheering as loudly as you are when the nasty shark is finally blown to smithereens. Then you can take them out for nice hot bowl of shark-fin soup.

Crossposted at Jon Swift