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Announcing: Big Hollywood’s Countdown of the Top 25 Greatest Left-Wing Films

Posted By John Nolte On December 7, 2010 @ 9:36 am In Classic Hollywood, Culture, Film, Politics | 519 Comments

***ADDED: There are already some great suggestions in the comments, but let me add one more qualifier. “The American President” is a great choice, Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” or “The Godfather” not so much, at least for what we’re trying to do here. The film’s leftist politics should not be obvious, spoken even, not hidden in the subtext. We’re looking for blatantly political films.

Though it’s not completely my fault, even I get tired of all my negativity on this site. Again, it’s not completely my fault (damn you, Liam Neeson [1]). After all, Hollywood hasn’t done anything right since handing the Superman franchise over to Zack Snyder. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still aspire to something better, can’t try to rise above my ongoing frustration with a medium I’m in love with but that can’t stop breaking my devoted heart. Yes, I’m Frank to Hollywood’s Ava. So in order to lighten things up some, here we go with a Christmas holiday gift to our Hollywood friends on the left: an utterly sincere list of what they’ve done right.

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No tongue-in-cheek, no sarcasm, no irony; we will present 25 bona fide left-wing films so well crafted, acted, written, and directed that they rise above their obnoxious politics and still manage to entertain, provoke, and enlighten – and by enlighten I’m not referencing their individual agendas, but rather enlighten about but about something bigger than message: the human condition, our place in the world, what it means to be who we are. Or maybe the story is just too much fun, too entertaining, and too cinematically awesome to be brought down by all the speechifying and stupidity.

One key distinction here — and this is important — is the difference between “liberal” and “left-wing.” Liberals champion free speech, left-wingers champion a bit of fascism we call political correctness. Liberals believe in a colorblind society, left-wingers believe in multiculturalism. Liberals oppose anti-Semitism, leftists either practice or tolerate it. You get the point. So you’re not going to see “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Gentleman’s Agreement,” or the work of the great Stanley Kramer [3] on this list. This is an accounting of “left-wing” films; rabidly anti-American, anti-military, anti-human, anti-religious, anti-capitalism, anti-progress, anti-liberty or pro-some obnoxious backwards agenda, such as the benefits of extreme environmentalism or the benevolent beauty of a bigger federal government.

As with all countdowns we will eventually make our way up to The Greatest Left-Wing Film Ever Made! Which might sound like a contradiction in terms, but can assure you it’s not.

Frequently I rage against cinematic junk such as Sean Penn’s “Fair Game” or marginal stuff like Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” not so much for the politics but rather the lousy storytelling. Left-wing critics embrace these films for the same reason I embrace “Death Wish V,” and therefore I don’t blame them. Cinematic quality be damned, they want to see America trashed and I want to see bad guys blown up with remote-controlled soccer balls. But this is an opportunity to make my point that a well-crafted left-wing film can get a fair hearing here. And it’s also a chance to talk about something other than politics. So…

Help a Brother Out:

Taking weekends and holidays off, we’ll start the series this coming Monday and this is your chance to jog my lousy memory and remind me of a film (narrative or documentary) I might have overlooked and/or to plead your case for one I might have already dismissed. In the comments, please include your reasoning for why you think your entry qualifies as a leftist film and why you believe it transcends politics. In the spirit of the season, I’ve already made my list and even checked it twice, but that doesn’t mean it’s written in stone. And the only hint I’ll give is that a vast majority of the films on my list are post-Golden Age, post 1967.

And in the spirit of this particular post let me close by wishing our leftist Hollywood friends a Merr– a Happy Winter Solstice.

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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #25 – ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ (2004)
by John Nolte

“Mankind survived the last ice age. We’re certainly capable of surviving this one. All depends on whether or not we’re able to learn from our mistakes.”

Why it’s a left-wing film: Not long after the 1996 release of his mega-blockbuster “Independence Day,” you could hear director Roland Emmerich gulp. Whatever his intentions, he had made one the most patriotic tent-pole films of the ’90s and the liberal entertainment media was letting him have it with the usual comments about jingoism and just how “dumb” it all was. Soon after came the widely and somewhat unfairly lambasted “Godzilla,” followed by another patriotic actioner, Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot.”

Then something happened, probably George W. Bush becoming president, because in 2004 Emmerich let loose with “The Day After Tomorrow,” a Leftist snuff fantasy and environmental wet dream where all of Western Civilization, most especially the United States, reaps what they’ve sewn when Mother Nature strikes back for our polluting ways with a can of CGI Whup-Ass that contains super-tornadoes, tidal waves, and insta-freeze hurricanes that all lead up to another Ice Age.

The film’s Vice President of the United States intentionally looks like then-Vice President Cheney, the unsure President who helplessly asks his VP ‘What do we do?”, intentionally looks like Bush, and both are eventually taught a Hollywood-fantasy-lesson about getting what you deserve when you don’t listen to the modern-day environmental movement. To wit, Bush’s counterpart is killed in the whirlwind he enabled and Cheney’s is humbled after everyone above the Mason-Dixon line is wiped out and everyone below gets a taste of poetic justice when they’re forced to illegally cross into Mexico and ask for sanctuary.

“I was wrong,” Mr. Movie-Cheney says of fossil fuels.

The film then ends on a “high” note with the news media informing us that those nations we once referred to as “the third world” have now generously offered to take us in. This is followed by a heartwarming outer space shot of an America destroyed by ice and an astronaut proclaiming, “I’ve never seen the air so clean.”

And with enviro-nonsense validated, greedy America wiped out, the Third World in charge, and tens of millions of those Westerners who hurt Gaia’s feelings all dead, the music soars, liberals wipe away tears of affirmation, and we fade to black.

Why it’s a great film: No one, not even Steven Spielberg, directs big action sequences as well as Roland Emmerich. It’s easy to write him off as the Irwin Allen of our time, but this is the rare director who knows precisely where to set his camera and how and when to move it. Even better, he knows how to stage a big set-piece in a way that’s always a feast for the eyes and stages his visual reveals with an uncanny intelligence that never fails to make perfectly clear the scope and size of what’s happening, and most importantly, the geography of it all.

In the area of spectacle, Roland Emmerich is the director Michael Bay can be, the director Spielberg used to be, and so from a purely story-telling point of view — though “ID4″ is more rousingly satisfying and therefore memorable — “The Day After Tomorrow” is far and away his best film and one of the best disaster films of all time.

The characters and actors, especially Dennis Quaid, Ian Holm, and the underappreciated Sela Ward, are all sympathetic and likable; the relationships, though simple, all make sense; the dialogue is much better than a film like this deserves; the pacing is perfect, and the film’s structure — that cuts effortlessly between all the different storylines — could be used as a model in screenwriting courses. I especially like the subtlety at work in the Jake Gyllenhaal subplot, how his crush on a pretty schoolmate brings out the hero in him and the unexpected humanity of some of those around him.

For those of us who walked into the theatre with a chip on our shoulder — as I did — this is a potent combination that’s completely disarming. It’s impossible to not get wrapped up in this story and these characters, to not be impressed by the great ideas that help to elevate every big scene, to not be dazzled by the gorgeous destruction that never stops coming.

Outside of Emmerich’s world, the enviro-propaganda is complete and laughable nonsense. But within the film, the theories not only sound intelligent, but plausible — which is exactly what a disaster film needs in order to allow us to sit back and soak in all the glorious chaos. Best of all, the actors don’t sound like propagandists, they sound like professionals putting the pieces together, solving problems, and eager to take action.

What’s not on the list:
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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #24 – ‘The English Patient’ (1996)
by John Nolte

“We are the real countries. Not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.”

Why it’s a left-wing film

It was at the beginning of the 1990s when I started to understand how Hollywood was using film as a propaganda device, and not just to undermine conservative ideals and make noble all things liberal, but to attack and undermine the very ideals of both our country and liberty. The difference between today and 20 years ago is that today (thankfully) Hollywood truly sucks at it. But in 1996 there was still some mojo out here and the winner for that year’s Best Picture, writer/director Anthony Minghella’s” English Patient,” is what you might call one of Hollywood’s last creative leftist gasps but also a slyly effective argument of moral equivalence that says the West is no less responsible for the world’s suffering than the likes of Hitler. The problem isn’t evil men and regimes, the film tells us, the problem is ownership and that countries exist at all.

For anyone paying attention to Hollywood back then, you knew it was only a matter of time before they turned against WWII and attempted to deconstruct and undermine the legions of films that had come before, films that ennobled a cause that represents those values most anathema to the left; the cause of self-determination, democracy, and that which is bigger and more important than one’s self. And so through this WWII-era story of a map maker (Ralph Fiennes’ Laszlo), who flies his plane high above the North African desert (above it all) mapping the Sahara, and his torrid sexual affair with the very married Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas), “The English Patient” attempts to sell and make noble a litany of disastrous anti-values by audaciously presenting them during a historical era when such morally diseased detachment and self-involvement would’ve surely plunged the world into dark times, the likes of which we can’t imagine.

This film’s appalling philosophy all comes together in the final act after Laszlo and Katharine’s wicked ways come home to roost and they find themselves stranded deep in the desert. He can walk the three days out but her ankle is broken. Having to leave her behind with only a few days’ supply of water and food, her mortality clock is ticking and after a series of complications back in civilization, our “hero” deliberately sells out the British — the West — to the Germans in order to secure the plane necessary to save Katharine. He gives the Nazis (the Nazis!) crucial maps. Afterwards, when he’s informed that this act likely caused the death of thousands of Allied soldiers and civilians, Laszlo’s reply is like something you would normally hear from a James Bond villain…

“Thousands of people die. They were just different people.”

….except that rather than be chilled and repulsed by this response, we’re supposed to put finger to chin and bask in the poetic profundity of it all.

And it gets worse.

Laszlo doesn’t make it in time and Katharine’s found dead but not before writing out the film’s theme in her journal, this bon mot of leftist narcissism and nihilism:

“We are the real countries. Not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.”

Then, to help we crazed nationalists — who probably wouldn’t sell out to the Nazis, even for a crippled adulteress — swallow this intellectual drivel and become enlightened to the New Morality, the film’s most devious but ingenious masterstroke is Willem Dafoe’s character, David Caravaggio, a double-agent captured and brutally tortured by the Germans; a scoundrel, thief and sometimes patriot who knows who Laszlo is, knows what he’s done and intends to kill him for his crime. After hearing Laszlo’s story, though, Caravaggio comes to understand and sympathize.

And if this man can, who are we to judge?

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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #23 – ‘Salvador’ (1986)
by John Nolte

“Is that why you’re here, Colonel? Some kind of post-Vietnam experience like you need a rerun or something? You pour a hundred twenty million bucks into this place, you turn it into a military zone, so what, so you can have chopper parades in the sky?”

Why it’s a left-wing film

Although he had directed the middling horror film “The Hand” in 1981 and a couple of short films, “Salvador” was Oliver Stone’s first Oliver Stone Film, a political-themed drama based on a true story and yet still skewed in unmentionable ways to condemn what would become the two-time Oscar-winning director’s usual targets: America, Reagan, the military, the CIA, and conservatives in general.

The film’s narrative covers the tumultuous 1980-81 Civil War period in El Salvador with a story that starts just prior to Ronald Reagan taking office in January of ‘81, but through a lot of exposition (masterfully delivered by star James Woods) Stone still manages to blame much of the country’s chaos on Reagan, the “right wing” and, of course, the CIA for supposedly supporting and training and enabling the military death squads that roamed the country murdering supporters of the leftist uprising.

Stone also uses a sleight of hand to make you think it was Reagan who was in office and who continued military and financial assistance after the brutal assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero (during a Catholic mass and just after a blistering anti-government speech) and the horrific rape and murder of four Catholic nuns. Both of these tragedies occurred in late 1980 while Carter was still in office, but Stone seems incapable of dealing with the fact that running the American government and continuing all that aid — though it was briefly suspended after the bodies of the nuns were found — in the face of the worst kind of human rights abuses was a Democrat president and Congress.

When Reagan did take office, he merely took over a policy his liberal predecessor had long supported.

As expected, Stone’s look at El Salvador is also childishly simplistic. On one side, an American-backed right-wing government that denies civil rights, murders the innocent, and holds on to power through dishonest elections and terror. On the other side, the noble peasantry rising up only for their rights, some of them outright Communists. To Stone’s credit he does include a scene with Communists indiscriminately shooting prisoners, but he also has Woods scream, “You’re just like them! You’re just like them!”

America’s reasons for being involved in El Salvador were completely valid. Having another communist country and the Cuba/Soviet influence that came with it in Central America was fraught with peril when it came to our own national security and it takes a special kind of fool to believe the leftist uprising would result in any kind of Worker’s Paradise for the people of El Salvador, most especially for the well-intentioned but naive Catholic clergy who tended to side with the rebels.

Well, God love him, but I think we all know that Stone is one of those special kinds of fools and one sly enough to put the political arguments he disagrees with in the mouth of an unlikable, over-bearing, macho, but not very bright military officer. This allows Woods to swat down the other side’s case with ease and leave the viewer with the impression that America was indifferent to the suffering of the people of El Salvador, we didn’t really believe there was any kind of legitimate Communist threat there and that we knowingly used that ruse as an excuse to strut our stuff throughout Central America, fill the pockets of military contractors and shake off the ghost of Vietnam.

Why it’s a great film

Four words: The Mighty James Woods.
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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #22 – ‘Sneakers’ (1992)
by John Nolte

In a surprise announcement, the Republican National Committee has revealed it is bankrupt. A spokesman for the party said they had plenty of money in their accounts last week, but today they just don’t know where the money has gone. But not everybody is going begging. Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the United Negro College Fund announced record earnings this week, due mostly to large, anonymous donations.

Why it’s a left-wing film

Because I am both cursed and blessed with the kind of bad memory where after 20 visits I still need GPS to find my doctor’s office (no joke), director, co-writer Phil Alden Robinson’s “Sneakers” almost didn’t make this list, which would’ve been a regrettable oversight. But when it comes to films my memory curse is that while I’m lucky enough to make a living writing about them, regardless of how many times I might have seen a particular title, I remember very little outside the story’s general concept and always have to go back and give them a close look while taking meticulous notes. The blessing of my big balding airhead is that movies never grow old. My hundredth screening of “The Searchers” or “Deuce Bigalow” is just as landmark as the first.

So when this delightfully entertaining and under-appreciated Robert Redford caper film showed up as a suggested entry in the article introducing this series, I was surprised anyone considered it left-wing but more than happy to take another look. And here we are…

“Sneakers” opens on a snowy December night in 1969 with two college students (Cosmo and Bishop) in front of a computer screen using their spectacular programming skills to community organize in the form of criminal wealth redistribution. Via hacked bank accounts they rob from causes they see as undeserving — the Republican National Committee, President Nixon’s personal bank account — and give that money to such noble causes as the Black Panthers and a campaign to legalize marijuana. The police raid the place and purely by chance Bishop manages to evade capture. Cosmo, however, is caught and imprisoned.

Flash-forward 20-odd years and Bishop is now Robert Redford, a middle-aged 60’s radical still wanted by the Feds, living under a false name and making an interesting living as a security analyst who will use all the skills he and his talented team can summon to break into your whatever in order to find its weaknesses before the real bad guys do. It’s a living but not much of one and so when a couple of hard-nosed spies pretending to be National Security Agency Feds offer Bishop $175,000 and the clearing of his name if he’ll steal a computer chip for Uncle Sam, he reluctantly agrees… But not for God and country.

Thankfully for us, through the character of Donald Crease (the wonderful Sidney Poitier), an ex-CIA agent, friend of Bishop’s and member of his team, the film never approaches anything approaching outright anti-Americanism. Yes, government agencies such as the FBI, NSA, and CIA are each portrayed as sneaky, dishonest and manipulative, but when Bishop discovers what the chip he stole is truly capable of and says “any government would kill for it,” Crease informs him, “Not our government,” which does turn out to be the case.

Keep in mind, that’s the kind of line you wouldn’t have paid much attention to in 1992. It’s only within the context of Hollywood’s rabid anti-Americanism today that you can appreciate a film taking the time to make that kind of a moral distinction — a distinction backed up by no less than Wikileaks, by the way. However…

Our hero Bishop is still a man who refuses to take the side of America and is ultimately proven wise in not doing so. Before the film ends we’re informed that this wonder chip is wanted by the NSA but not to spy on our enemies, to spy on Americans; specifically other agencies like the FBI and CIA. Finally there’s that closing moment quoted above. Though Bishop appears to have matured beyond the college kid who confused stealing money with social justice, the film’s closing joke, while a good one, is still a partisan one and not the only partisan one. Early in the film there’s a gratuitous sucker shot aimed at then-President George H.W. Bush — and during an election year, no less!

Why it’s a great film
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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #21 – ‘Coming Home’ (1978)
by John Nolte

“I wanted to be a war hero, man, I wanted to go out and kill for my country. And now, I’m here to tell you that I have killed for my country or whatever. And I don’t feel good about it. Because there’s not enough reason, man, to feel a person die in your hands or to see your best buddy get blown away. I’m here to tell you, it’s a lousy thing, man. I don’t see any reason for it. And there’s a lot of shit that I did over there that I find fucking hard to live with.”

Why it’s a left-wing film

“Coming Home” was the first film produced under Jane Fonda’s terribly important-sounding production shingle, IPC Films or, Indochina Peace Campaign. She was inspired in part by her friend Ron Kovic, a Vietnam Veteran turned anti-war activist who would later be the subject of his own biopic, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the 4th of July.” Set in 1968 and focusing primarily on three veterans and their personal and emotional struggles after returning home from the war, this well-produced, well-directed and brilliantly acted drama nonetheless aids and abets the left’s monstrous view of the American fighting man and does its part in cementing the unfair stereotype of the Vietnam Vet as victim, dupe, war criminal, crazy and any or all of the above.

Director Hal Ashby immediately sets his theme in place during the opening scene where a half dozen or so wounded vets sit around a pool table in a Veteran’s hospital drinking beer and debating the war. Quite deliberately, the lone man defending America’s decision to defend our South Vietnamese allies from brutal communist aggressors in the North, is thoroughly drowned out by the “moral authority” of the others (as Jon Voight’s Luke silently listens on). In the end, all voices are quieted by the Veteran who speaks film’s real message, how Vietnam Vets must learn to live with what they did over there.

Luke is a Marine who returned from the war a paraplegic and a bitterly angry one at that. Like Ron Kovic, he went to war for God and country and came back disillusioned and haunted by what he saw and did. Eventually he’s able to reenter the world thanks mainly to a tender love affair he engages in with Sally (Fonda), a conservative militarywife married to the chauvinistic Bob (Bruce Dern), a Marine officer who’s just left for his own tour in Vietnam. Luke’s anger over his war experience soon turns into activism. He vows to stop as many young men as he can from making the same mistake he did, going so far as to chain himself to the front gate of a Marine base.

Though Bob was eager to fight for his county, upon this dedicated and career military officer’s return, he too is haunted, not only from watching his men commit heinous war crimes, but also that a military more interested in creating heroes than actually being heroic pins a medal on him for accidentally shooting himself — the humiliating reason he was sent home. Military Intelligence finally pushes Bob over the edge by informing him of the affair his wife had with Luke. The military’s insidious rationale for dropping this grenade into Bob’s life is Luke’s anti-war stance. As if shooting himself and Sally’s infidelity weren’t bad enough, the military is now questioning Bob’s patriotism because of his wife’s association with a radical. Stripped of everything he once thought he was — husband, patriot, warrior — Bob suffers flashbacks and becomes violent. But before he can hurt anyone, he drowns himself in the Pacific Ocean.

Bill Munson (Robert Carradine) was in Vietnam for only two weeks, but for reasons that don’t need explaining he came back completely out of his mind and also ends up committing suicide.
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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #20 – ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ (2004)
by John Nolte

While Bush was busy taking care of his base and professing his love for our troops, he proposed cutting combat soldiers’ pay by 33% and assistance to their families by 60%.

Why it’s a left-wing film

Writer/director Michael Moore’s paranoid pack of audaciously demagogic lies dropped on the world in the heat of an American presidential election and an ongoing war in Iraq. Just for starters, the film says outright or insinuates that Iraq under Saddam was some sort of paradise, George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 after thousands of black people weren’t allowed to vote, Bush covered up for the bin Laden family after the 9/11 attacks, and the Bush family’s friendship and business ties in the Middle East were a large part of the motivation behind waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that, fill in your own blanks using the left’s greatest crazy hits: Diebold, Halliburton, WMD, Mission Accomplished, “My Pet Goat,” and then wrap it all in the hard candy shell of a whole lot of troop-bashing through the insidious use of anecdotal evidence.

No wonder Moore received a 20 minute standing ovation at Cannes.

It was the summer of 2004 and for argument’s sake let’s say that Moore attacking a sitting president with provable lies is the price of an open democracy. However… Let us never forget that in 2004 Iraq was a country where the civilian population had already turned out to vote (under a very real threat of violence and at a percentage higher than our own presidential election) for the American plan of self-governance. Therefore, and I don’t say this lightly, Moore’s calculated use of the awesome power of cinematic sound and fury to undermine the war was an act of outright evil. In fact, I have no doubt that Moore is so morally twisted that when Osama bin Laden seemed to quote “Fahrenheit 9/11″ in a video dropped just days before the 2004 presidential election, the Oscar-winner took some pride in the recognition.

For those of you who haven’t seen today’s pick, imagine a film widely released next year into 868 theatres that receives overwhelming critical praise, grosses an astonishing $222 million, receives all kinds of awards love (Moore’s unquenchable ego screwed his own Oscar chances),and all kinds of mainstream political support, but… Puts forth the theory that President Obama is a Manchurian candidate — a foreign-born Muslim terrorist-sympathizer in league with the likes of Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan to bring down the United States from within.

That’s what a “Fahrenheit 9/11″ equivalent would look like today.

Except that the same vermin who gushed over Moore’s stridently obvious anti-American/anti-Bush lies, the same elites who found thoughtful an unforgivable piece of propaganda and character assassination based on what barely qualifies as innuendo, would scream bloody murder today. Furthermore, there’s simply no way any kind of documentary attacking Obama in the same scurrilous way would make even a tenth of the “Fahrenheit 9/11″ box office. Unlike Leftists, most conservatives don’t have some barren hole in their humanity impossible to fill and that forces them reach out to the likes of a Michael Moore for comfort and affirmation.

Thankfully, while a landmark piece of documentary filmmaking, like everything else touched by the diseased soul of Mrs. Moore’s baby boy, “Fahrenheit 9/11″ was an abject failure in the arena where it most wanted to succeed: in bringing down George W. Bush, embarrassing the United States, and ushering in a holocaust upon 25 million innocent Iraqis.

In the end, “Fahrenheit 9/11″ only appealed to those who already hated the President and might have actually helped Bush by stirring up voters on his side. By the time the dust settled, Bush not only won a second term that allowed him to double down in Iraq and win the day, but what sweet irony that we now have the most liberal President ever carrying on in Iraq and Afghanistan as though Bush never left.

Why it’s a great film
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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #19 – ‘Soylent Green’ (1973)
by John Nolte

Ah, people were always lousy… But there was a world, once.

Why it’s a left-wing film

The opening montage says it all. Various photographs reveal when the world’s downfall began, with the early days of American industrialization, and then take us straight through to present day (1972) with cluttered, claustrophobic shots of pollution, traffic, and over-population. In the year 2022, the end result of all this unbridled capitalism, technological advancement and baby-making is not a higher standard of living, an end to poverty, or the longer life expectancy we were promised. Quite the opposite. In Manhattan alone, there are 40 million people, half of them unemployed. The lucky ones barely sustain themselves on rationed food and water in small cramped apartments. The unlucky ones are homeless and sleep wherever they’re able to cram indoors to escape the smog and never-ending swelter of a year-round summer known as the Greenhouse Effect, another byproduct of that sinister free market.

But capitalism still isn’t dead. In fact, it’s more powerful than ever. Like African warlords, in this world if you control the food you control everything, and the big fat Soylent Corporation controls half the world’s food supply and seemingly all the political power. Naturally, the gap between rich and poor is now a canyon where a very elite few live the good life in swank high-rise luxury apartments complete with air conditioning, running water, real food, and “furniture,” or live-in prostitutes; accessories that come with the place.

This only makes sense. After all, capitalism run amok is almost certain to bring us a patriarchal society run by selfish men.

At its core, director Richard Fleischer’s “Soylent Green” is anti-human. We know this because the film’s conscience is Sol Roth (a warm, wonderful Edward G. Robinson in his final role) and he tells us so with the above quote. People are the problem, the scourge of the world. There’s just too damn many of us and we are now paying the price for destroying everything.

Of course this is all a left-wing fantasy come true, a cautionary tale that validates the environmental, socialist, and abortion movements. This is especially maddening because the complete opposite is true. As we advance as a free society, life only gets better and it’s been proven once and for all that the cure for poverty is a free and capitalistic society. Furthermore, not only do people live better under a free market system than under oppressive governments, the environment is far cleaner. Free people want clean air and water, they want parks and forests and the natural beauty of our world preserved, all within reason, of course. But our current environmental movement (which is nothing more than socialism in disguise) would lead us to the kind of totalitarian government that always leads to environmental degradation and a world that looks very much like “Soylent Green,” where the masses suffer under a very few elites who think they know best.

But unlike “1984″, the moral here is not that a few can control everything by controlling truth (the left in a nutshell), it’s that everything the left warned us about came true.

Why it’s a great film
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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #18 – ‘Running On Empty’ (1988)
by John Nolte

“What I did was an act of conscience to stop the war.”

Why it’s a left-wing film

Loosely based on the life of Barack Obama’s pals, domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn; a couple of privileged kids who grew up to co-found the Weather Underground and wage war on their own country (including the bombing of the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol), director Sidney Lumet’s “Running on Empty” tells the story of the Popes, a family always one step ahead of the Feds due to the fact that 14 years ago Mom and Dad — Arthur (Judd Hirsch) and Annie (Christine Lahti) — permanently blinded and paralyzed a janitor they didn’t know was in the military lab that they themselves bombed as members of their own domestic terrorist group. The year was 1971, the lab was making napalm, the Vietnam War had to be stopped, who can blame them?

Certainly not the film. According to the film, their sin wasn’t waging war against their own country, their sin was not making sure the building was empty before detonating the bomb. And the price of that sin is not the act of turning themselves in and paying for their crime, the price is living the oh-so burdensome life of fugitives always on the run and who deserve our sympathy for their desperate and noble act of trying to keep their family together.

What Lumet and his screenwriter Naome Foner fail to recognize, though, is that Arthur and Annie’s act of “holding the family together” is just another act of baby boomer narcissism. While portrayed as loving and selfless, these are parents who unforgivably committed an act terrorism when their now 17 year-old son Danny (River Phoenix) was only a toddler and then later went ahead and brought another child into their lives as wanted criminals (10 year-old Harry).

Parents don’t get much worse than that.

And thanks to the unconscionable actions of their parents, rather than live anything resembling a normal life, both boys are programmed to keep the world at arm’s length and to avoid any and all emotional attachments and friendships outside the family unit. As a consequence and because they’ve been through it so many times before, the boys think nothing of lying to everyone they know until the inevitable day arrives when it’s time to run the familiar drill of dropping everything (including the family dog) and taking only what’s on their back to another town and another dilapidated rental house and another school where they’ll be known by another name.

Ultimately, according to the film, Arthur and Annie didn’t commit a crime, they made a “mistake,” and while they’re living with the consequences of that “mistake,” their politics, “ideals,” opposition to the war, and militant activism remain pure and right on. When we meet Arthur he’s in the middle of doing a little community organizing in a small Florida town to stop those evil capitalists from creating a nuclear waste dump. So you see, he’s a good guy at heart. He also abhors violence. When a fellow traveler in the hippie underground asks Arthur to rob a bank with him, Arthur’s appalled! Yes, the Mad Bomber is appalled at the very idea of guns on his property!

“Running on Empty” is a leftist love letter to truly wicked people, the privileged, narcissist terrorists of the 60s and 70s and the privileged, narcissist Boomers who love them — a film that says your heart was in the right place, the janitor wasn’t.

Through some skillful cinematic manipulation, we’re also supposed to come to understand that Arthur and Annie have suffered enough for their “mistake” and to admire their selfless act of letting Danny go to pursue his own dreams (as though every parent doesn’t eventually go through this at some level). But as the two terrorists drive away from Danny with poor 10 year-old Harry in tow — who faces another eight or so years of the psychological scarring that must come with living with parents high on the FBI’s most wanted list, you’re left to wonder about one small thing…

When will Hollywood grow up enough to tell the story of the janitor blinded and paralyzed by these two monsters?

Why it’s a great film
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Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #17 – ‘The American President’ (1995)
by John Nolte

“Ten years from now the combustion engine will be a thing of the past.”

Why it’s a left-wing film

Before we get to it, let’s point out one of the sweet ironies of “The American President.” What an amazing experience it is to watch a film written by Aaron Sorkin that relies heavily on the theme of condemning personal character attacks in the world of politics. You know, the very same Aaron Sorkin responsible for some of the most sexist and vicious personal character attacks on Sarah Palin we’ve seen in a while. Not only has the “West Wing” creator publicly ridiculed the Governor’s hair, makeup, intelligence, and hobbies, he’s gone so far as to label her as “deranged.”

But here’s where it gets interesting. According to Wikipedia, Sorkin admits to writing the warm, witty and charming “American President” screenplay “while often high on crack cocaine.” However, according to Sorkin, he’s now sober and was therefore sober when he viciously trashed Palin in the most personal ways imaginable. The only conclusion one is left to make then, is that Sorkin’s such a degenerate of a human being that the crack pipe had nowhere to go with his personality other than up.

Back to business…

“The American President” is a left-wing fairytale in which Global Warming exists, law-abiding citizens owning handguns is the cause of crime, the left-wing media (but I repeat myself) would aid and abet a damaging character attack against a sitting Democratic president during an election year, flag burning is a virtue, Republicans actually do sit around in smoke-filled rooms plotting diabolically, the American sheeple can be manipulated into turning against a widowed president who goes out on a date, and liberalism’s problem is not liberalism — not all the provably failed ideas that make up liberalism, but rather a lack of fight for those ideas.

Why it’s a great film
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