http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdQUAsZaCoI

On the homefront, my vote goes to Shane and the more recent offering of Clint Eastwood’s, The Unforgiven. I was glad to see that The Searchers was included on the list. They all prove that westerns can be serious cinema.

Another that deserves a mention: Drums Along the Mohawk.

There are many others that are more deserving than most on the list.

If you belong to the faithful, and believe that stirring and shaking of the primordial slime could bring about such an entity like a single cell, with it’s high complexity in (engineers, please listen closely!) in sophisticated diversity, if you have this faith in a Godless miracle, then keep your logic in flow:
Mother Theresa can’t be your hero anymore. She didn’t spread her genes, just loved people. She was an evolutionary failure. Now, here comes your hero:
Your role model will be rather Genghis Khan who knelt over the wives and daughters of the defeated, while the fat of the vaquished would nourish the fires of their perishing cities ( see Genghis Khan’s bragging about his destruction of Peking). It is estimated that his progeny is about 17 million people: quite a player in the gene-pool of mankind.

The ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ fundamentalists among you should really get rid of the impediments of their unconsciously ingrained Judeo-Christian values; it’s not just in respect of sex: you need comprehensive liberation – while we others have to understand: THIS is the truely dangerous fundamentalism.
„The Lives of Others“ will show you, where bad fundamentals can lead. Our future is won or lost in the philosophical realm, politics is just ‘getting things done’.
Was this Orwellian vision only temporary or will it return, will it also enter the shores of Northamerica? You decide.

Zulu (1964) — The defense of Rorke’s Drift by a company of the British Army against 4000 Zulus in 1879. 11 of the defenders win the Victoria Cross (still the most for one battle in history). Lots of liberties taken with the historical characters, but the battle scenes are very gripping (although nowhere near as graphic as they are these days), the South African landscapes add an element of authenticity, and the film also featured Michael Caine in his first major role.

The Enemy Below (1957) — Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens square off as the WW2 captains of an American destroyer escort and a German U-boat, respectively. Watch them match wits and gain respect for each other as the movie goes on. One of the few war movies of that era that doesn’t treat the Germans one-dimensionally as either bloodthirsty Nazi brutes or Sgt. Schulz-type dolts.

Becket (1964) — Peter O’Toole as King Henry II and Richard Burton as Thomas Becket illustrate that old saying about bureaucracies, “where you stand depends on where you sit”. King Henry appoints his confidante and carousing buddy Becket to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, expecting thus to be able to control the Church in 12th Century England. Surprise! Becket fiercely defends the Church’s prerogatives and ends up getting murdered by some of Henry’s nobles. Trivia: O’Toole a few years ago admitted that he and Burton were in fact stinking drunk during most of the filming. They could still act, though.

on the way in this morning i realized this point too..

that if you had a Judeo/Christian upbringing the outcome of your thoughts would be different than if you were truly secular.

in other words, all those with religious backgrounds, at least in knowing if not believing, would associate things with lessons that would then expand to a more postive outcome.

but for a secular person, they would sit there, and they will be in their own lives. whining and unhappy about almost everything… and in front of them is this man who finds meaning with what they have that gives them no meaning (because they dont understand what meaning is).

what made me think of this was how it parallelled some of the great theologians in explaining why god didnt make the earth a heaven or utopia..

like Antz this then makes for a double wump, where those in the know, or with culture, walk away renewed in some ways… but those who dont have that, see it as in your face sugar coated bs….

of course not everyone, and many will desire to put a positive spin.

and i will point out that the VAST matjority will not even think in these terms till you ask them the question! in other words the question begs SOME answer, so we spit one out… the range of our ablity to just spit out answers confidently from literally nowhere is legend.. and it takes practice to actully realize what one knows and where one knows it from.

dont get me wrong, i can see the positive story too, i can also see other lesser angles, but for the most part i see that movies are not a singular message that we globally collectively itnerpret.

but they are a synergystic thing that vastly depends on what you know or think you know as well as whats being presented.

so with antz the kids have no knowlege of the defunct and bankrupt system called communism and socialism, as do the parents. so one cant say that a movie means X, unless one wants to assert we are all equal and not individuals, and that other interpretations are wrong. if i am orange and you are blue, adding red will be different for both of us.

though in case you ahvent noticed the majority of our adventure excitment movies do not actually portray an american theme!!!!!

the lone man and woman struggling against the machine is a soviet realism thing… not the american origins thing… (just as apple pie and chevrolete which is now an americanism was originally a joke which humored nazi war posters!)

go here http://www.sovietstory.com and note the graphic of the man and woman with the hammer. thats a very famous statue… (no the bodies below it are not part of it). the statue embodies the immortal struggle of man and woman against… yada yada..

better place to look is here..
http://www.stanford.edu/%7Egfreidin/images/architecture/paris-fair37.jpg
its Vera Mukhina’s – Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937) also called ‘Rabochy i Kolhoznitsa’

viewed in this way, movies like terminator become man against progress… they make us desire the revolution that will tear everythint apart… it becomes something inside us that we yearn for, since all our representations seem so cool as we are all the key players. and given that women are the core of a revolution cause men do what women want ultimately, even the terminator series courts them!!!

apply this definitino of film and let me know how many of our films are really just great works of this type?

Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life’s struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic.

the formulea is easy… the avereage working joe, maybe a cop, maybe an office worker, gets caught up in the wheels of greater things… and through rising to the struggle, achieves success and even gets the girl.

the childrens themese are scarier today.. anyone besides me notice that all the characters parents are dead or gone? that in order to have a great wonderful life and adventure, you shouldnt have parents. while such was traditionally a horror put in in old stories (when children would starve to death without parents), today its interesting to note how many of these include it even if the original stories didnt.

Aladdin (Aladdin)
Lilo (Lilo and Stitch)
Snow White and all seven of the Dwarves (who adopt her as a mother-figure) (Snow White and the Seven Dwarves)
Cinderella (Cinderella)
Quasimodo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
Esmerelda (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
Mowgli (The Jungle Book)
Peter Pan and the Lost Boys (who adopt Wendy as a mother-figure) (Peter Pan)
Tarzan (Tarzan)
Arthur (The Sword in the Stone)
Tod (The Fox and the Hound)
Jasmine (Aladdin)
Ariel (The Little Mermaid)
Belle (Beauty and the Beast)
Pocahontas (Pocahontas)
Pinocchio (counting Geppetto as a ‘father’) (Pinocchio)
Jane (Tarzan)
Bambi (Bambi)
Simba (The Lion King)

and thats just disney… and to show how thsi subtly changes..

the boy andy in toy story has no dad… nemo has no mom, linguini in ratatouille is an orphan.

if the revoltuoin admonishes you to kill your parents, what does a constant fair ofs tories like this with one common theme do? what if its reinforced by idiocy? so now the dad is an idiot and we dont care if the idiot is dead?

Pollyanna, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Harry Potter, the wizard of Oz, Heidi, Eight Cousins (and Rose in Bloom), Chronicles of Narnia, and as one can tell i can go on.

the number of movies with a healthy family is so minimal its akin to the number of movies truthfully portraying soviet history.

I would go for the original Terminator rather than terminator two – better story.

More comedy would have been better. If you were looking for something incredibly funny that dripped with satire of the times there was a movie called “Serial’ back in the 70s.