Paging Obama supporters: What's your favorite liberal movie?

Call me crazy, call me irresponsible, call me just darned contrarian, but I'm a lefty who loves to read right-wing blogs. One of my favorites, Dirty Harry's Place, which is run by the screenwriter John Nolte, is the place to go if you want to read the strict conservative constructionist take on why Hollywood liberals are such dim bulbs and phonies. Hardly a week goes by without Dirty Harry taking a nasty shot at what he views as the American-hating excesses of Paul Haggis, Tim Robbins, Barack Obama, anyone involved with Steven Soderbergh's "Che" and -- did I already mention Paul Haggis? I rarely agree with DH's politics, but he writes with such verve and has such an unabashed love of movies that I'm willing to let most of his Sean Hannity-style rants pass.

But today Dirty Harry has something more fun going on. He's asking his readers to vote for their favorite liberal Hollywood film. When I visited the site this morning, "Dr. Strangelove" was winning, with 55 votes; "Apocalypse Now" was in 2nd place with 42 votes; "Planet of the Apes" (I'm assuming since DH is such a traditionalist that we're talking about the 1968 Charleton Heston version) was in 3rd place with 36 votes; "Full Metal Jacket" was 4th with 28 votes and "RoboCop" was 5th with 25 votes (I guess you have to be a real conservative to see "RoboCop" as a liberal movie).

But why should all of Dirty Harry's conservative readers have all the fun? Or unfairly ignore some worthy die-hard liberal entries? I think everyone should head over to Dirty Harry's Place and put some free-thinking cinematic energy into the voting. There are plenty of worthy candidates on his list, including (hint, hint) "MASH," "Three Days of the Condor" and "Thelma & Louise," a movie you'd never expect to see screened in the Alaska governor's mansion. There are also a host of liberal do-gooder films that are faring badly, with hardly any of Dirty Harry's fans voting for "Norma Rae" (no one likes a pushy union activist), "A Civil Action" (big corporations never knowingly poison the populace) and "Missing" (foreign dictators shouldn't be punished for any totalitarian excess). Needless to say, "Reds," Warren Beatty's admiring portrait of John Reed's involvement in the Russian Revolution, isn't faring so well either.

So get over there and vote. It's good practice for that "other" election coming up soon.   

Photo of Paul Haggis by Claudio Onorati/EPA.

Comments

[Big Jim Slade]

This is political garbage and the writer should be fired immediately. Editorials belong elsewhere in the paper.

[Ethan Stanislawski]

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, A Few Good Men, 12 Angry Men to name a few.

But I agree Hollywood is deceptively more conservative than the right wing would have you believe

[BabsJohnson]

Hum? Is there a link to the website? No. What crap reporting or should I say babbling.

[vegasgirl]

Can we please skip the favorite "what's your favorite conservative/liberal" topic for the Entertainment section, please?

[Carol]

Big Jim Slade at 11:53--All these blogs are lazy reporting. Are they fact checked like regular articles? They seem to me to be compilations of links to other articles, nothing investigative or critical about them.

That said, I love the movie Norma Rae! Sally Field made one more okay movie after that, Places in the Heart, and now she's doing Big Pharma commercials. I wouldn't see another of her movies after that.

[Gordon Winslow]

Robocop is a liberal movie because, in the world of Robocop, eeeeevil corporations and commercialization are the root of all that's wrong with the universe. Conservatives find plenty to like in the protagonist, but it's definitely set in a liberal-nightmare world where capitalism has gone out of control. I could probably get a "B" on a first-year film class paper by claiming that Robocop represents the government, which has to step in and clean things up. (Yes, I think that's a bridge too far, but so were a lot of things I wrote in first-year film class.)

This conservative voted for Robocop and Apocalypse Now, and was sorry The Iron Giant didn't make the top thirty.

I'm glad that you called attention to Dirty Harry's Place, but I sorta wanted to see how his largely conservative audience would vote without liberal interference. Maybe there should be two separate polls so the results could be compared. Could be interesting.

Maybe you should pursue the same concept and see how your (I assume) largely liberal readership would vote on movies that we consider conservative.

[Randolph Man]

It's interesting that only one of the movies on his list wasmad before 1960, namely Inherit the Wind. One of your more historically-minded commentators addd Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. How about Gentleman's Agreement? Or Wilson? Or The Best Years of Our Lives?

How about Intolerance? Was Griffith a conservative or a liberal or, like John Ford, both at different times? How many movies of the Progressive Era (circa 1912-1920) are attacks on liberal do-gooders? I would list Intolerance as one, and also Traffic in Souls. Or Damaged Lives.

[Steve]

I saw a bit of Robocop 2 again last night and I thought it was showing how ridiculous the liberals were when they made Robocop a kinder genteler guy rather than one that sees the problem and deals with it appropriately. This is how I see Obama when he says that America has been acting too much like the tough guy and we need to disarm and get rid of our nukes. Kiss it goodbye if this BLT gets elected and actually takes office.