The bad news?  They’re doing a remake of Red Dawn.  The movie – one of the guiltiest pleasures in all of guilty pleasuredom – was both a terrible movie and the original “America!  F**k Yeah!” for a generation of people who, frankly, needed it. 

The good news?  They’re doing a remake of Red Dawn.  Which will make the leftymedia a richer target than a convoy of Nicaraguan trucks spread out in the draw below the Wolverines’ machine guns.

The perfectly-named David Plotz sniffs, phumphers, and finally waterboards the context of the story and its times to the point where even John Milius would gag.  The conclusion?

It’s really a metaphor for Iraq!

The insurgents are at first merely scared, angry kids, but they’re hardened by the viciousness of the Soviets. Seeing nothing to lose, they become suicidal terrorists who assassinate, bomb civilian targets, gleefully murder wounded and captive Russians, and eventually martyr themselves in theatrical, insane ways. Howell faces down a helicopter gunship with nothing but a rifle, screaming, “Wolverines,” as its machine gun cuts him to confetti; Swayze and Sheen make their inexplicable suicide assault on a base with hundreds of soldiers and heavy weapons; Jennifer Grey, mortally wounded and afraid of being tortured by the occupiers, booby-traps her own body so when a Soviet soldier touches her, it sets off a grenade that kills both of them. Ultimately, the insurgency and the anxiety of occupying a hostile land take their toll on the invaders. By the end, the Cuban commander is submitting his resignation, demoralized by his job of brutalizing the Americans.

After which Jennifer Gray and C. Thomas Howell baked the Cuban’s children in an oven as the mother watched in mute horror before being fed into a plastic shredder?

Maybe?

No?

Sorry.

Red Dawn is not an exact parallel to our situation, of course. The Iraq we invaded was no functioning democracy; our Army does not execute civilians; many Iraqis favor the American occupation. But Red Dawn certainly didn’t stir the mad, patriotic fervor I felt when I heard Howell shout, “Wolverines” 24 years ago. MGM is so far tight-lipped about the plot of its Red Dawn remake, but I wonder: Will the new Wolverines be us—or fighting us?

Read the whole thing and count the “conservatives are nuts because of this 24 year old B movie” references.

And ponder the question – if David Plotz sproings wood over Quentin Tarantino movies, is it a symptom of “liberal nutterdom?”

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 8:17 am and is filed under A 'n E. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.