Oh! “Falling Down” is a most excellent choice.

For a Western, I’d suggest “Young Guns” as the most accurate portrayal of Big Government in league with Capital destroying the small freeholder-agrarian way.

Falling Down
Gettysburg along with Gods & Generals (as one since they were part I and II of a trilogy that never saw completion)
Bright Young Things
Shadowlands

You jest, but if you read my essay, you’ll see that you aren’t that far from the truth.

taxman:

Paleocons actually could make a list of films that that had artistic merit and thematic depth. George McCartney at Chronicles is fine film critic.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

They’ll say something like,

“That Ambassador Davies was clear sighted enough to understand the threat implied by wreckers and counter-revolutionary saboteurs shows that Walter Huston would have been with us in this our War on Terror! Also, Davies’ refusal to buy into the apologies for Finland remind us of the importance of holding seemingly non-involved regimes like Iraq equally responsible for their involvement with Al Qaeda.”

The change in the postwar American right’s attitude towards the Spanish Civil War would be worth an essay all in itself.

Actually, it still seems to be holding – remember, the small-government rehetoric only applies to the government doing certain things for certain non-elites. When the government helps out the elites, the base doesn’t object too strongly (compare Wall St hundreds of billions with a few dozen billions for the auto industry); when the government helps out the core non-elites, they love it.

I hammered those NRO philistines for their last such list, here:

They Blew it: The Secret of Easy Rider

That’s yet another example of pro-war Republicans conflating militarism and respect for the military: they don’t acknowledge that it’s possible to hold American servicemen in high regard while strongly disagreeing with US foreign policy. If the stereotypical liberal condescends to soldiers by assuming that they joined up because they had no other options, the stereotypical pro-war “conservative” tends to forget (or, worse, to romanticize) the moral, emotional and psychological strains that even well-adjusted and honorable men undergo during and after combat.

The inevitable problem with something like The Lord of the Rings movies (and even a lot of non-fantasy war movies) is that they allow the audience to experience as “an adventure” what the characters would be experiencing as a horror. People who spend months or years of their lives butchering other sentient creatures, watching their friends die in front of them, etc., aren’t going to live happily ever after, even if they fought honorably and won a just war. Even adventure movies that nod toward that reality (like Return of the King) inevitably don’t give that side of things as much weight as the excitement and exhilaration of the battle sequences.

As for stuff like We Were Soldiers, my problem with it is similar to my problem with the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. In World War II and Vietnam the United States enjoyed massive advantages in air power, artillery, etc. And yet these film dramatize rare instances in which the Americans ended up as the out-gunned underdogs. Fair enough–these are real battles in which American soldiers fought honorably and bravely in very difficult circumstances. But the relative scarcity of American films that accurately portray the US’s overwhelming military superiority throughout most of the 20th century feeds the myth, exploited by pro-war types like the people at NRO, that the United States is some sort of perpetual underdog.