Holiday Netflix Recommendations

Okay, so it's probably too late to throw these in your queue and get them for this weekend, but there's always the old fashioned video rental store you can stop at on the way home (ehem...unless you're already home - Robbo).

But my favorite Conservative movie site, Libertas, posted the "Top Five Conservative Thanksgiving films" and I had to repost his comments regarding Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" (yes, that Ang Lee).

So how can the guy who brought you the controversial "Brokeback Mountain" make a conservative-themed film? Hey, he also made the 1995 version of "Sense and Sensibility" (which I also recommend).

But back to "The Ice Storm". Set in Southwestern CT in the early 1970's, the film is actually a pretty damning look at the irresponsibility of the "free love" hippies who eventually sold out and became the establishment. Starring such well-known actors as Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Katie Holmes and Frodo Baggins Elijah Wood, "The Ice Storm" takes place over Thanksgiving weekend and during a literal ice storm.

It's a well-acted story about the hypocrisy exhibited by many of the "boomer" generation whose self-indulgences led to an erosion of American culture that is all too recognizable today in modern Liberalism. And its message is a hopeful one. For in the end, many of the characters must come to grips with the consequences - sometimes tragic - of their actions. The final scene that shows father Ben Hood (Kline) hugging his son Paul (Maguire) and breaking down with emotion was particularly moving.

But this post is all really just an excuse to reprint what Dirty Harry at Libertas has to say about the movie:

(Deep breath…) Okay, this is how it worked: In the 1960’s the best fed, best housed, most ungrateful and spoiled generation ever didn’t want a bunch of non-white non-Christians in Vietnam to share the freedoms they enjoyed… So, they turned on their parents, turned on their country, ignored the noble civil rights movement, and became the hippie generation whose legacy is AIDS, drug abuse, and unwed mothers. The hippies told us they were protesting the war on moral grounds and yet the protests stopped when the draft did. Hmm? So, as the war raged on, the hippies became yuppies, embraced materialism in excess of anything their bourgeois parents ever imagined, moved to the suburbs, and clung to their self-destructive free-love-entitlement lifestyle at the expense of their kids. (Exhale.) And The Ice Storm is a damning indictment of that generation, that thankfully uses Thanksgiving somewhere along the way allowing me the pretense to get the above off my chest.

"LET'S MAKE THAT REVIEW NICE AND SUCCINCT" YIPS from Steve-O: "Couldn't make it any better myself?"

I could: Sigourney Weaver.

With a bullwhip.

Any questions?