In their ongoing effort to strike a balance between being a newspaper and being a GOP campaign ad, WashingtonPost.com (which is to some extent a seperate entity than the newspaper) has hired Ben Domenich - a professional Republican activist - apparently to act as a counterweight to Dan Froomkin - a journalist who reports stories in ways that professional Republican activists don’t like. Now, there’s a bit of interesting Abramoff/nepotism scuttlebutt here, too, but that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is what home-schooled prodigy Domenich writes in his first fucking column:
Any red-blooded American conservative, even those who hold a dim view of Patrick Swayze’s acting “talent,” knows a Red Dawn reference. For all the talk of left wing cultural political correctness, the right has such things, too (DO shop at Wal-Mart, DON’T buy gas from Citgo). But in the progressive halls of the mainstream media, such things prompt little or no recognition. For the MSM, Dan Rather is just another TV anchor, France is just another country and Red Dawn is just another cheesy throwaway Sunday afternoon movie.
Really, you can’t make this shit up.
But I don’t want to talk about that, either. What I want to talk about is Digby’s indefensible slam on ten-year-old kids:
Back here on planet earth, it’s what 10 year olds call “cool,” and everybody else calls “camp.” It would be the equivalent of Left Wingers revering “Wild In The Streets” for its serious political message.
Hey, buddy: I saw Red Dawn (1984) when I was ten. And it sucked nads.
The mid-eighties was, to my mind, a cinematic Golden Age. This was the age when the gratuitous shower scene was truly perfected as an artistic device. It was the age that created three Porky’s, a half-dozen Friday the 13ths, and over three hundred thousand Police Academys. And, more than anything, it was the age when Arnie was Arnie.
Commando (1985) - now that’s a cool movie. One of the first movies I ever saw on a VCR (first ever: Peter Yates’ seminal Krull), and one I watched over and over and over again, drinking in every brilliant detail. Once, I watched it just to keep track of the total number of people Arnie killed (answer: you always lose count in the sixties) - just so I would know. If you are ten, and you want to see a cool movie, go see Commando. You will not be disappointed.
[If you have not seen Commando, here is a brief synopsis of the plot: foreign-looking people do something to Arnie’s family - I don’t remember what, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Arnie must kill people. Arnie kills like twenty people. Then, he holds this guy upside down over a cliff, and says “remember when I said I’d kill you last? I lied.” Awesome. Blood spurts in every direction as Arnie kills fifty more people. He throws a circular saw blade like a frisbee and cuts the top of some guy’s head off. Rad. It becomes mathematically impossible to calculate how many people Arnie kills. Arnie chases the head bad guy down into a basement, and throws this huge metal pipe which goes right though him, and sticks into this big industrial water heater thing. Steam pours out of the foot-wide pipe sticking through the bad guy’s corpse. “Let off some steam,” quips Arnie. Sweet. The End. Also, Arnie’s name in the movie is “John Matrix.” Believe it.]
Red Dawn was probably the first movie I ever saw on cable. Cable had probably been around for some time, but we never had it because my parents hated me. So I was sleeping over at a friend’s house, and we stayed up late to see what kind of masterpieces they were saving up for when the kids were asleep. Red Dawn came on.
Part of Red Dawn’s profound nad-sucking comes from the fact that it starts with such promise. The US has been invaded by Russia, and everybody has been put into big cages. Evil Russian soldiers are all over the US, thousands and thousands of them, just waiting to be killed and one-liner’ed. On such a canvas, Arnie would have painted his masterpiece … IN COMMIE BLOOD!!!!!
But it was not to be. First of all, the invasion of the US? We don’t see it. We are just told it happened, and then we get to watch everybody cry when they see their dad in a cage. Daddy, I loves you! Oh son, I loves you! Boo-hoo-hoo! My daddy’s in a big cage! And I loves him! Dude: NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR BORING MOVIE DAD. Also, you suck at acting. Please kill Russians. If memory serves, this “character development” crap goes on for approximately the entire history of time, before somebody finally kills a Russian. They shoot him with a bow and arrow or a hunting rifle or something, and that’s pretty much it. And then, it’s back to the cry-a-thon.
Maybe there’s more killing I’m forgetting about - I’ve tried to erase all the shitty cry-acting from my memory, and I may have wiped out a few dead Ruskies, too. But once scene I will never forget - the last scene I could stand to watch - involves some shitty character development dialogue shit where the incomparable Powers Boothe (the Colonel) asks C. Thomas Howell why he hasn’t bawled his eyes out for three or four seconds. From memory:
Powers Boothe: Kid, all that hate’s gonna burn you up inside.
C. Thomas Howell: It just keeps me warm.
And … scene! At a certain point, enough = enough, and that was this point. It was agreed that rather than continue watching this rather strange episode of Little House on the Prairie, we should just go to bed. Maybe we could dream of dead commies.
… Actually, if I recall correctly, the comment that immediately preceded the decision to go to sleep was “dude, this movie’s gay.” In fifth grade patois, all my thoughts about Red Dawn were expressed precisely, completely, and compactly; however, these days, it isn’t polite to use that word to describe things you don’t like. Considering the etymology of the word, it is probably better this way, but until an adequate substitute word is found, I will be unable to give Red Dawn the review it deserves. Or, indeed, to really do justice to the Post’s decision to - once again! - take editorial direction from professional Republican activists.
… I would be remiss if I didn’t remind everyone of Sasha Volokh long history of Red Dawn fandom. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Except that it’s a shitty movie for losers.