Let’s be clear; Red Dawn<\/em> is a crap movie.\u00a0 It’s so crappy, only Quentin Tarantino should direct the remake.<\/p>\n And yet I love it.<\/p>\n It had everything a teenage guy (or in my case, a twenty year old, which in college is just about the same thing) could want.<\/p>\n It had all your best buds, out on a really serious adventure!<\/p>\n It had blatant cold-war emotional manipulation!<\/p>\n It had you…er, Patrick Swayze and all your buds kicking righteous ass!<\/p>\n It had Ferris Buehler’s sister and that Caroline In The City <\/em>chick whose name eludes me, with guns!<\/p>\n Jennifer Gray and Lea Thompson!\u00a0 I didn’t even have to look it up!<\/p>\n I noted long ago that I’ve only walked out of two movies in my life; Tom Hanks’ wretched The Burbs, <\/em>in 1988, and Little Nicky <\/em>in 2000.\u00a0 Red Dawn <\/em>was nearly the first; during the scene where the student council president (who later betrays the group) calls for the vote on going back to town after the invasion?\u00a0 I started getting my things together to get up and go – but since it was a cold night and only homework at college awaited me, I stayed put.\u00a0<\/p>\n And there were more justifications for getting up and going; any scenery that Lea Thompson doesn’t shoot or blow up, she chews; you can see Powers Boothe silently cursing his agent in every scene; the ending is mawkish and awful.<\/p>\n But it’s a John Milius movie.\u00a0 And Milius has a way of making “marinading in testosterone” fun, and even thrilling.\u00a0 Dirty Harry <\/em>was only a few steps above Tarantino-level dreck – but there’s not a person in the film-going world that doesn’t love it; there are people in Sri Lanka whose only English is “Go Ahead, Make My Day”, and they all get <\/em>it.<\/p>\n And as bad as the movie is, Milius is in fine form, pushing all the same buttons that get otherwise-sophisticated Americans to get a little verklempt <\/em>at “God Bless the USA”, or sing along “we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” with Toby Keith.\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s manipulation.\u00a0 It’s crap.\u00a0 It’s glorious.\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s almost a rite of passage, these days.\u00a0 I watch it with my kids, partly to point out the crap, and partly to pass on the great two-generations-from-white-trash folklore of the whole thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wolverines!\u00a0 F**k Yeah!<\/p>\n Now, I’m going to go listen to “This American Life” to rebalance my chi.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As noted in the previous article, I hate crap. Unless it’s good crap. Or, if it’s bad crap, at least let it be bad crap that does something good. Let’s be clear; Red Dawn is a crap movie.\u00a0 It’s so crappy, only Quentin Tarantino should direct the remake. And yet I love it. It had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/scottweaver.files.wordpress.com\/2008\/10\/reddawn_l.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/filmfanatic.org\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/red-dawn-captivity.png\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.traeblain.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/red_dawn.jpg\")
<\/p>\n