There is a remake of Red Dawn playing in the theaters now. The original must have been made in the 1980’s as I remember the bad guys being Nicaraguans, the country we were attacking at that time. [Note: 1984.]
I haven’t seen the remake, and won’t. The premise is that The U.S. is invaded, and I will guess that Iran, Islam and some Arab countries are subtly implicated. Our young people take to the hills and become guerrilla fighters.
It’s an interesting contrast to the way that young people in other countries behave when we invade them. They are terrorists. Ours are patriots.
Piece of Mindful 
Great thought in your last paragraph. Sad but true.
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My daughter has a job at a movie theater, so we were just talking about this movie yesterday.
The original was a “what if” Soviet Invasion. The current remake is a “what if” North Korean invasion.
I didn’t see the original and I’m not planning on seeing the remake.
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North Korea? You’re kidding! Why not Tuvalu?
[Oh, and I did see the original, and Nicaraguans were featured as puppets, but you are right. It was a Soviet invasion.]
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They are terrorists. Ours are patriots.
Kind of how the world works. There is a basic antagonism in human relations, and it is often one group prevailing over another. Good luck with your belief that we can all sit around happily sharing a crack pipe.
As far as movies go, I thought you would be happy with the direction of modern cinema: almost every villain is a hetero-sexual White businessman, and the heroes are various people of color cum kick-ass babe. (I bet the floors in the local Boulder cineplex are pure protein with all the orgasmic effluence during Django Unchained when the oppressed Person of Color kills Whitey.) Patriotism is out of style. Even recent military movies are of individuals/small groups prevailing in spite of the evil/incompetent traditional establishment.
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You had to correct your next-to-last sentence with your last sentence, I see. You’re probalby referring to Zero Dark Thirty, on which I have $5 riding as best picture.
Good luck with your belief that we can all sit around happily sharing a crack pipe.
Strawman much?
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What passes for approved Hollywood opinion doesn’t rah-rah much for patriotism. We get a few movies, the way smokers have a few places remaining.
Are strawmen necessarily false? You pretty reliably push the Universalism line, where earthlings can all live happily in peace if we just get rid of the psychopaths and give everyone health care. You give off the vibe that the military encourages war as a way to keep their careers.
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We’ll be taking to the hills but it won’t be Norks in our rifle scopes.
http://www.bob-owens.com/2012/12/what-youll-see-in-the-rebellion/
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I am not deaf and blind to this stuff, Swede, but fail to see the point in disarming citizens when citizens are so sound asleep that they represent no threat to power. At best your gun-toters might pose a threat to Dennis Kucinich or Planned Parenthood, but the idea that even an assault rifle can threaten and Apache helicopter is lunacy.
One aspect that might have a but of interest to you: Totalitarians are known to outlaw activities that they know most everyone engages in, like smoking pot. This gives them the power of selective enforcement. If indeed some onerous gun law passes, perhaps it would be used to put certain annoying people away, but not other annoying people.
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I recently read that pro gunners where contemplating their effectiveness against tanks or any other armament.
To which a patriot responded, “We don’t intend to kill tanks, we’re going to kill the ones that sent them”.
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Ha! You’ll be even less effective than me! Remember that 1.7 billion messages are intercepted each day by our surveillance state, just renewed. They are not read, but are mined. your statement could be read as seditious.
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Commie sympathizers like POM are off the watch list.
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it is 2013, not 1963! I am a terrorist sympathizer.
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Terrorist/commie/collectivist. All the same.
http://saberpoint.blogspot.com/2012/12/communist-revolution-i-never-thought-it.html
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Right winger, fascist, state terrorist. All the same.
Conservative – no.
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Happy New Year Mark.
Leave you with a passage from Solzhentisyn’s book.
“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? –Part I The Prison Industry, Ch. 1 “Arrest” (p13, The Gulag Archipelago, Collins 1974)
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I hope your New Year’s resolution has something in it about putting a little black paint in the white to make a gray or two. The Soviets were not so evil, the US not nearly so good as you imagine. But I was brought up to think as you do. You need a breakthrough, a “fitful dream of some greater awakening.” (Jackson Browne, commie-symp)
Happy New Year
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They were mainly Cubans, although Nicaragua is mentioned the Latin protagonists are supposed to be Cuban. The Cuban officer actually is shown to be wise and ahumanitarian in the grand scheme. He remarks that he was always on the side of “the insurgents” before the war and laments the position of occupyer/invader he has taken on. 4 stars all the way. The original was a classic film, you should watch it again sometime it even has your favorite actor Charlie Sheen. Im sure the new one is truly awful although at some point I will watch it and regret doing so.
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