I Want to Play C.O.R.N.Y.!

Via B&P, if the new Red Dawn doesn't have a plot substantially similar to this, I'm going to cry:

Americans, thoroughly disgusted with the socialistic programs that have been thrust upon them over the last few years, vote out seventeen of the nineteen Democrats in the Senate and 178 in Congress that were up for reelection. When asked for his opinion on this monumental power shift in favor of liberty-minded Republicans during the November elections, President Obama is quoted as saying the elections were "ultimately inconsequential;" he allowed the cryptic statement to stand alone and said nothing more on the subject until January's swearing-in ceremony.
In January 2011, two days prior to the swearing-in of the new Senators and Congressmen, President Obama holds an emergency conference that interrupts the regular broadcasting of every station in the United States, and is replayed on major news networks throughout the day. The news is horrifying, and the ramifications of what the president has said have a numbing effect on the public.

The swearing-in ceremonies are suspended indefinitely, and the current Congress is to remain in place until this "historic transition" is completed. The United States is a creation of "racists and warmongers," Obama says to a stunned America, and is to be replaced by the North American Union. In the course of this very broadcast, Obama, with two simple pen strokes, signs the "treaties" into law. One dissolves the United States and its Constitution, and the other disarms what is left of the gun-owning United States citizenry, as part and parcel of a United Nations Treaty to ban all firearms, which had already been signed into law by over 40 nations...

Chaos ensues throughout the nation! The Second American Revolution is in full swing by February of 2011, with lists posted by patriots, county by county, naming dozens of government employees and the bounties that can be fetched by their capture. After 7 weeks of fighting in every state, and with the refusal of most United States military branches to obey orders to fire upon American citizens, Obama's forces are slowly whittled away. The remnants of the Obama loyalists retreat to Virginia. After tens of thousands of their troops are killed, The International Service Union Empire (I.S.U.E.) has just 40,000 left, but still controls three full counties in the name of former President Barack Hussein Obama... Or so they think. The Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth (C.O.R.N.Y.) controls three counties near Washington D.C., with reports of having at least 60,000 loyalists for Obama.

Read more...

Rebuilding Your Reputation

I just have one thing to say about the Red Dawn remake: I will not complain that it is "too wingnutty." In fact, I'll complain if it's not wingnutty enough. If Barack Obama isn't depicted as the agent of Communist domination, and ACORN his Fifth Column, then I'm walking out of the theater.

Read more...

Eeeeewoks!

Call me a godless, gunless, pussified liberal, but I'll never be able to comprehend the lingering appeal of a film based in part on the notion that scores of Soviet armored divisions might somehow invade North America via the ALCAN Highway. On second thought, that's likely among the more plausible details from Red Dawn. At any rate, here's Lance Mannion, in the midst of a wider meditation on the implausibility of seeing the film as vital either to the era or to Patrick Swayze's career:

Red Dawn may have been an enjoyable popcorn movie . . . but taking it seriously either as a work of art or a political cautionary tale or even as a shoot-em-up on par with the best westerns or war movies is like saying that your favorite Star Wars movie was Return of the Jedi because of the Ewoks.

Brilliant. Though to make use of a cliched formulation, this is a bit unfair to the Ewoks, since it's hard to imagine that their supporters -- whom I'm sure exist somewhere -- would be so unselfconscious as to name Iraq War missions after them. Then again, the film itself is a fabulously shitty expression of unselfconscious appropriation; as Devid Denby noted in his great and fittingly brutal review at the time, the film borrows from the actual legends and history of partisan -- and frequently communist -- resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. I won't speculate on how a film like that could have evolved into a cult classic within a military as dominant as that of the post-cold war US, but Red Dawn has always seemed more relevant as a prosthetic device for -- you know -- morons who have convinced themselves of late that by protesting Keynesian economics, they've approached moral equivalence with the Committees of Correspondence.

Read more...