I can’t remember who it was that declared: if you’re a liberal, your favorite Christmas movie is ‘Miracle on 34th St.’; if you’re a conservative, your favorite Christmas movie is ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’; and if you’re *really *conservative, your favorite Christmas movie is ‘Die Hard’.
Taking non-political movies and calling them “Liberal” or “Conservative” strikes me as profoundly silly.
Two of the Conservative lists have Master and Commander in it, and seem to include the Patrick O’Brian-inspired film because it features Good Old Fashioned discipline and tradition, and everyone Knew His Place. Those features are pretty much dictated by the time and setting. Cecil Forester’s Hornblower novels featured the same settings and could arguably be used to suppport the same thesis. But when you read Forester, it’s clear that Hornblower is a surprisingly liberal man. He loves his role and what he does, but he rankles against the mindless customs and traditions, but doesn’t want to be penalized by his compatriots in the more Conservative British Navy. Are the Hornblower movie and TV episodes examples of Liberal or Conservative filmmaking?
The criteria seems to be to find a couple lines you adore and use them to pigeon-hole the entire movie.
300 is obviously a liberal movie. I mean, the whole lesson was that lack of compassion for minorities such as the handicapped and allowing them a full role in your society whether you feel they “deserve” it or not means your army will ultimately be destroyed by foreigners no matter how much you scream about freedom not being free. The whole “greatest army on earth” of a monoculture of strong white guys was taken down because they were a dick to one minority guy who just wanted to be included out of love for his country. Equal Opportunity laws could have saved the entire force!
See how easy that was? Quick, someone call DailyKOS! 
I figured Team America spoofed gung-ho conservatives right up until the Panama Canal scene (which was by far the most grim and serious scene in the movie), after which it shifted targets to stereotypical Hollywood liberals.
And as a side note, what was the deal with Baxter? The puppets in that movie were distinguished by gender, with male characters having broader jaws, but the Baxter character looked like a female puppet with a mustache. I was waiting for some big reveal, but then Baxter disappeared after the cocktail party scene.
I take that as a typical conservative viewpoint to that sort of movie.
They never watched it.
Its very much what the reviewer was mumbling to themselves while watching the movies. The national review one had a bunch of ones which were tenuous at least, the incredibles because it portrays a strong marriage? Only conservatives have strong marriages? No. No. No conservatives ever got divorced.
The fact that Saving Private Ryan and Killing Fields made both lists, makes a mockery of the fact that liberals and conservatives are different 
The National Review list is pretty weird, I gotta say. Gattaca is listed, recommended by a prominent pro-Intelligent-Design website, apparently because it warns of the perils of a transhumanist future. While I do think it and the Incredibles have a certain gentle Randian sensibility (rather call it a Hegelian sensibility), taking away a message of “genetic science=bad” seems a poor misreading of the movie.
That’s sort of my point. It’s an equal-opportunity potshot taker. But because it happens to take potshots at the other side of the fence, the previous mockeries and “this is why *you *suck” scenes don’t count, somehow ?
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The criteria seems to be to find a couple lines you adore and use them to pigeon-hole the entire movie.
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Precisely. It seems that the methodology was to take a popular movie, then squint right until they found one narrow angle to stamp it conservative, and called it a day. *Ghostbusters *is conservative because one minor antagonist is from the EPA. Wha…?
I must admit though, I had a chuckle from the guy who had the gall to equate W. Bush with the goddamn Batman. And apparently think it a compliment, too ! No but seriously, they have to be taking the piss. I refuse to believe otherwise.
Counterpoint to The Incredibles:
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Dash will always run faster than any of the other kids. No amount of bootstrap pulling or practice or hard work will ever allow any of those kids to run 1/100th as fast as Dash. Is the conservative lesson here that some [“almost all”] people will always be permanently disadvantaged to a significant degree because they lost the genetic lottery [against the genetically “wealthy”]?
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Both Dash and his mother have super powers. Dash, the child, petulantly wants to be praised and show off. His mother, the adult who is just as genetically blessed as Dash and has every reason to share his immature viewpoint, still uses the wisdom of her years to find value in all people. Is the conservative lesson to have Dash’s immature and child-like view of the world?
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Syndrome doesn’t want to make everyone the same despite his claims. He actually wants to make everyone else just enough of “the same” to make the other heroes obsolete and profit off the technology in doing so. He also admits that he’ll keep the best technology for himself so he’s always better than the rest and initially set off waves of disasters so he can be the hero and “rescue” everyone. His first such disaster leads to massive property damage and potential loss of human life. Is the conservative lesson here that capitalism is born from such selfishness & false claims of goodness and capitalists care not for the public good or welfare so long as they can make a dollar?
Or maybe it’s just a movie.
Oh shit, I’d better change my voter registration then.
Yeah, this is something that bothers me about these movies. In order for what Dash does to be ethical (i.e., run track, but lose occasionally to satisfy the normals, IIRC), you’d have to be totally okay with a guy dressing as a girl and running in the girl’s track meets, as long as he loses occasionally.
We already have a system in which one group of people on average outperforms another group of people: top male track racers typically outrun to female track racers. Rather than let men win all the races, we have two different races. And men aren’t allowed to enter women’s races.
How is that different from Dash’s situation? Sure, he may not have another league to race in, inasmuch as he’d literally be in a league of his own; but that’s not the problem of the people against whom he’d otherwise race. Surely it’s not fair to them to compete against folks who are deliberately throwing the race.
One could question why he runs track anyway. He can run across water and he wants to “compete” against 5th graders? That’s like me getting my jollies by boxing toddlers. “Yay, I won again! I’m so special!” 
Well, as long as you lose occasionally. Maybe try boxing 20 toddlers at once?
I gather Dash doesn’t care so much about the victories as the cheers from the crowd. In some ways, it’s kind of like the villain’s plan, wanting to put on a heroic public show of defeating the robot despite his (he thought) overwhelming advantage.
I call it Syndrome syndrome.
To be fair, it’s not as if he’ll be awarded for helping to stop Syndrome and save the city. Give the kid a break - let him get his applause where he can find it.
Given the average highth difference, boxing toddlers can be more risky than you think. They tend to ignore things like “low blow” rules. 
You see, that’s an example of why these rankings are stupid.
You could make a case that the movie is conservative – it spreads the virtues of saving and how capitalist bankers create jobs. It specifically states how banking works and portrays it in the most positive light. And, of course, Frank Capra was a dyed-in-the-wool Goldwater conservative.
However, it’s also liberal – communities altruistically help one another out in times of need, and Mr. Potter is the type of predatory capitalist that would be perfectly at home in a communist propaganda film.* George’s business practices are specifically criticized because he gives loans to people to help them instead of making a bigger profit. And much of the plot (especially the kindly banker who gives loans to help people rather than making a bigger profit, and who gets out of a financial jam due to the donations of his friends) is taken directly from Capra’s earlier American Madness, which was written by liberal screenwriter Robert Riskin.
(Note that the entire plot of George losing the money and facing ruin was not in the original story.)
So for many of these, you can pick or choose elements as you wish, and can probably make a case for both “conservative” and “liberal” for most of them.
*It could be that Capra, for all his conservatism, just didn’t like bankers. Walt Disney clearly felt the same way – he was a conservative, but he always portrayed bankers (up until Mary Poppins, though in that case, they were bad until Mary Poppins changed their attitudes) as the bad guys.
Here’s what the FBI had to say about the picture when it first came out:
That’s fine for a pre-teen kid. Not so great as a reflection of conservative ideology. “Feeling underappreciated? Crush some little people for kicks like a child would!”
I don’t know about Capra, but I think we all know why Disney thought that way.