Punk Rock Movies 2018
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NRO’s Kyle Smith has compiled a list of movies he says advance “conservative concepts.” Here are some highlights.
10. Mary Poppins Returns (in theaters). Yes, like the original, the movie features a (brief) nod to liberal social-justice movements in England. But the film’s aesthetics are proudly conservative; there’s no attempt whatsoever to make this long-aborning sequel contemporary, hip, or in touch with the (alleged) fixations of today’s youth. It’s a children’s movie for old people, as is only right: Children should learn from the old rather than the other way around. And as Sonny Bunch points out, it also defends the old British class system by portraying the working-class lamplighters and nannies as loyal allies to the upper-class layabouts who employ them.
I don’t know about you all but I can’t wait to see this movie for people with advanced cases of degenerative FOXbrain that glamorizes the idea of lower-class people working themselves into an early grave while wealthy people lie around fingering their ascots. That’s wholesome fun for the whole family!
8. Black Panther (on Netflix). The new Black Panther is a rebuke to the old Black Panthers: As played by Chadwick Boseman in Ryan Coogler’s terrifically entertaining and smart blockbuster, the titular superhero personifies a vision in which black people work peacefully alongside others to achieve mutual goals. It’s the villain of the piece, Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, who advocates a sinister combination of African separatism and burn-it-down, Year One utopianism with chilling echoes of Pol Pot.
It takes guts to take an almost wholly-positive, barrier-breaking, record-breaking accomplishment by a cast and crew of talented black artists and make it into whites-centered rebuke of Black Panthers, but I do admire Kyle for trying. I’m sure he’s right that “Black Panther” is about 32-year-old Ryan Coogler wagging his finger at Black Panthers and not, say, creating a fantasy vision of what black greatness could achieve were it not for the institutions of colonialism and slavery.
4. Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer. The initial media blackout on the story of the abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia abattoir, which major news organizations practically ignored until conservative media shamed them into taking minimal notice, was predictably followed up by a near-total refusal to cover Nick Searcy’s film about the case, which starred Dean Cain and Janine Turner.
I, too, am shocked that an anti-choice movie starring extremely currently-popular Dean Cain and Janine Turner didn’t garner more attention.
3. Little Pink House (for rent via video-on-demand, also on Hoopla and Kanopy). If high-school students were required to see this film in classrooms, libertarianism would become as popular as Barack Obama. Catherine Keener creates a screen version of Susette Kelo, the New London, Conn., citizen who didn’t want to relinquish her lovingly painted house to the grasping hands of a government that had decided a property developer should get to bulldoze it. As Antonin Scalia memorably put it when Kelo’s case reached the Supreme Court, the government’s absurd position was that “you can take from A to give to B if B pays more taxes.” It would be hard to name a better cinematic illustration of the importance of property rights.
Whoa! A movie that apparently you can only get by traveling back in time to a VCR-only Blockbuster that’s also about the sexy sexy subject of property rights? Conservative art has a deep bench.
2. Halloween(for rent via video-on-demand). Judy Greer’s character expertly and hilariously trolls the Left when she says her mom, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), is wrong to arm herself and prepare for the worst because, “The world is not a dark and evil place. It’s full of love and understanding!” The importance of armed individual self-defense, the fallen nature of man, the incompetence of state authorities, the necessity of capital punishment for evildoers, and even the vapidity of liberal true-crime podcasters all get ingeniously dramatized as Michael Myers goes on yet another rampage.
Ah yes, this one line makes “Halloween” into a Second Amendment rallying cry. Also…is he saying cops are incompetent?
1. Chappaquiddick (on Netflix). The facts about what happened when Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and left Mary Jo Kopechne to die in 1969 are so shocking, gruesome, and devastating to the Kennedy image that simply presenting them in a sober, methodical fashion makes for one of the year’s best films. Ted Kennedy is gone but his reputation as a noble crusader lives on. Destroying that utterly unearned eminence will be the work of years if not decades, but this film, in which the Australian actor Jason Clarke nails Kennedy’s combination of entitlement, narcissism, cowardice, and cluelessness, is an important step in the right direction.
Well, Kyle has taken on us a wild ride back in time– from Kermit Gosnell to Black Panthers, to B-list TV stars of the 90’s to Chappaquiddick to a reboot of “Mary Poppins” (the original was filmed in ’64). It’s almost as if conservatism has nothing new to say except things like “Ha ha! This movie made the Kennedys look like a bunch of poopy-pants!” It’s so old. It’s all so old.