Fox News 20 Best War Films

The ones added by the readers are the moronic ones, the actual list is not that bad. Heck, Das Boot is an ANTI war movie. Not sure if Fox understood that, but whatever

BTW, Downfall is incredible. I made a special trip to NYC to see in in theaters. One of my favorite movies of all time

All war movies are anti war.

No, that's pretty obviously not true

The Green Berets, for example

Yeah so is Braddock: Missing in action III.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one..

It's a pretty good list. I do wonder how they square the Fox News ideological line with movies like MASH, The Dirty Dozen, Full Metal Jacket and Paths Of Glory, but the feature doesn't seem to want to tackle politics. Which is unfortunate, both for discussion and roffles.

These people need to watch COME & SEE.

Now THAT is a film about the effects of war.

moronic ones?

Casablanca is moronic?

They don't have to. Fox News puts on a face and definitely has a conservative slant. But I don't see how that has to color their taste in movies to suit their political tastes. Now, sure, I've seen that happen-I know a radio show host who hated Flags of Our Fathers because he thought it was anti-American, though I could never figure out why he thought that.

Sure they don't. But people come to Fox News for the politics, and so you'd expect them to give that sort of slant to whatever they cover. I mean I'm aware that Fox News also does a lot of apolitical celebrity gossip coverage, but is anyone really tuning in for their sharp movie reviews?

We should expect the list to contain mainly (except Das Boot) American war movies since its from Fox News. Good list though, I love Paths of Glory.

Come and See is the best war movie I've ever seen. The sound guy/gal in that one was a true genius.

Actually, Godard once made a very salient point about the impossibility of making a true anti-war film, since war was inherently exciting on the screen, no matter what the message behind the film. Not saying I necessarily agree with that, but it is one legit way of looking at it.

Also: It's Fox News, and no Red Dawn? Color me surprised...and a little dissapointed.

I think that was Truffaut, not Godard?

Yeah, I think your right. Eh, their both Frenchmen, so what do they know about war anyway.

For those of you disappointed that they don't get into how these films fit with the Fox News pre-conceived narrative of the world, allow me to try to illustrate how the films I am familiar with could be interpreted to fit that worldview.

SPR: This, like all Spielberg and Hanks WWII projects, is pretty much patriotic in the way Veteran's Day is patriotic: America is the good guy and the good guy is punching a fucking Nazi. Nothing really goes against the Fox News grain there.

Tora! Tora! Tora!: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." This line is pretty much the mantrum of every geriatric xenophobe and young paranoid nationalist in the country, i.e. the key Fox News demographics.

Full Metal Jacket: Kubrick is consciously trying to neutrally examine the phenomenon of war. In the Fox News mindset, if you aren't against something, then you necessarily must be for it.

M*A*S*H: This one is sort of the only one that I can see being genuinely confused about. I sort of suspect the person or persons who compiled the list never actually watched the film and just assumed it was like the television show.

Letters From Iwo Jima: Notice Flags of our Fathers isn't the one they chose. I agree with that choice, but only because this film is the only one of the two that is actually relevant to our times via the examination of the Japanese. To the Fox News viewer, I can honestly see them viewing this film as a black and white study of suicidal, animalistic Japs mercilessly opposing the forces of good and dragging poor Ken Watanabe along for the ride.

Glory: For the non-neo-Confederate Fox News viewers, Glory simply reaffirms their nationalism. For the neo-Confederate viewers, they can take the film's framing of the conflict as a national tragedy as an indictment of the Yankees.

A Bridge Too Far: This film fits in perfectly with the right-wingers take on every single conflict we have ever lost: they were lost by the "elites." If those fags had kept to themselfs with thar buchlernin' in them ivery towars, we'd be just fine, thank ya very much.

Platoon: Oliver Stone's view of the Vietnam War is surprisingly close to the right-wingers view of that war, i.e. the elites betrayed the soldiers and veterans. They just disagree over what that betrayal consists in and a viewer determined to read his version of that betrayal into the film can.

Black Hawk Down: You read our failure in Somalia as a failure of the test of the Clinton presidency's resolve.

The Deer Hunter: A right-winger could read the film as an indictment of weakness and take the singing at the end at face value.

Paths of Glory: There are two easy ways a Fox News viewer likes this film: 1) You read it as an indictment of the French military and nothing more. 2) You interpret the film as taking the side of the superior officer, not Dax, in the final exchange of the film.

Apocalypse Now!: I love that we actually studied this film in my hometown's college prep courses because I can present exactly how Red State Americans view this film, or at least the ones that read, anyway. They view this film as a study of Hugo Grotius' view of the virtuous warrior, with the Colonel Kurtz character as the paragon of virtue. Seriously.

Schindler's List: A film that deals with the Holocaust head-on allows right-wingers to bask in the mythologized past of a time when you could tell the good guys from the bad by the uniform we wore and we were the unerring good guys.

The Bridge on the River Kwai: This is yet another WWII film that focuses on the barbarism of the Axis, virtue of the Allies, and insanity of the elites on both sides. Again, that fits in perfectly with the anti-intellectual, jingoistic worldview of Fox News.
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Spike, I don't know if the Fox News rage against elitism extends to the military - it's about politicians and scientists and academics.

I don't think Kubrick suceeds at this, at all, though. The training scenes are alienated and unsettling; the actual war part ends with the protagonist shooting a woman and that whole Mickey Mouse chant thing. "WAR IS HELL" serves right-wing interests, too, of course, in a "Support Our Troops" kinda fashion, and the increasing demands for realism make it obvious that you couldn't have shot a Green Berets type scenario; but I still think Fox News types would feel offended at the way the movie portrays the military.

You forget that movement conservatives don't actually respect the military, they just pretend to in order to co-opt traditional American patriotism as part of their brand of batshit crazy nationalism. Remember, the over the last ten years, movement conservatives have impugned the character and service of Vietnam veterans running for office three times. And in every single instance, the vet was running against a guy who never served. Hell, in McCain's case they actually argued that his service rendered him unfit to be President because he might go crazy and finally get even with "the gooks" by nuking them.

Oh c'mon, you're really reaching there.

It's funny to see people struggling with the fact that the list doesn't conform to their stereotypes of Fox News and its viewers.

It certainly is.

This would only be valid if a) FN had actually included political commentary on the movies they chose or b) done the time tested (and true) thing of pointing out that a good movie does not have to fall in line with one's ideological compass. As it is, people being puzzled by a right-wing site listing a buncha left-wing movies is only "funny" in the same way it would be if Rachel Maddow made a "top20 cop flicks" list and populated it with Dirty Harry type movies.

But that's just realpolitik, your normal mud slinging against the other candidate. There is nothing in the FN rhetoric, its ideology, that encourages distrust of the upper reaches of the military.

The list is shit. There are dozens of films that should be on that list well before THE PATRIOT, SGT YORK, SCHINDLER'S LIST or even HURT LOCKER. That list was dictated by what people would expect to see on the list. The pandering is what makes it fit the FOX mold.

None of which, of course, changes anything about FOX and it's viewers. We're stuck with that for good.

Yeah, that's a really good one, more people need to see it.

I'd take it more as a nice eclectic list. It has some older films, some newer films, some popular films ... mostly it's mainstream. These are the films that are in constant rotation on AMC at this point.

I don't know if you've ever seen it, but a good one that should have been on the list (if nothing else the reader's list) is "Seven Days in May", great film.

Notable misses:
WOODEN CROSSES
BIG RED ONE (I mean seriously. What.the.hell.)
ROME, OPEN CITY
GUNS OF NAVARONE
AFRICAN QUEEN
WINGS

Also missing: Stalingrad.

I can't speak for right-wingers, but I didn't get that from the film at all. Operation "Market Garden" was ambitious, but not impossible.

The plan failed not through the meddling of "elites". It failed through a mixture of bad weather, bad luck and the unexpected appearance of the German 10th SS Panzer division.

Come on. Zulu should have been there.

My favourite sequence (and there are many) is the one in which Florya and Glasha return to Florya's village. Klimov expertly ratchets up the tension (mainly through the use of sound - silence interspersed with buzzing flies etc.) for a good ten minutes before the truly horrific payoff when Florya turns to look over his shoulder.

It's interesting that he taps into a similar vein of surrealism to the one Coppola found with AN. I read a piece by the author J.G. Ballard in which he said that war truly is the ultimate surrealist environment. Where else can you find an aeroplane stuck in the side of a building, or a tank squashed flat?

The curious thing is "Come & See" is an obvious propaganda piece. Throughout the film you’re thinking “Klimov and the Soviet state apparatus are pushing my buttons here”. And then you remember that a) Klimov witnessed these atrocities first hand and b) the SS Einsatzgruppen REALLY WERE bloodthirsty monsters and what we see in this movie must only be a fraction of the horror.

Whether "Come & See" makes it into some top somenumber list doesn’t bother me. But I do find it strange when self-described war-movie nuts appear completely ignorant of it.

When I was a kid, GoN was one of my favourite movies. I can enjoy it in parts today (the cinematography across the Mediterranean and Crete is visually stunning and I can watch Peck, Niven, Quinn, Quayle, Baker or Justice in almost anything). But it has also dated horribly. Once you've been exposed to the earthy realism of "Saving Private Ryan", "Band of Brothers" & "Das Boot" it becomes impossible to believe GoN inhabits the same world war.

Alastair MacLean was always a "boys own" pulp writer. He churned out a ton of enjoyable yet superficial Men-on-a-Mission tales with GoN being one of the better ones. For me, the best bit is the confrontation between Mallory and Miller when the latter forces the former into a moral maze over the discovery of the female spy played by Gia Scala. But apart from that there's really fuck all to the thing. And there's the fact that the director - J. Lee. Thompson (who I've never really rated) - was less the leader of the film than a middleman between the screenplay writer, Carl Foreman, and the studio.

I've just realised - there's no mention of "The Thin Red Line". You can't go wrong with a Terrence Malick movie.

Geoff, I was just about to mention the lack of Thin Red Line. It's a shame that movie got lost in the shuffle.