Vote For Your Blogoscar Film

Rhiel World View has an Oscar competition that matters -- unlike the one tonight. No bare-backin' cowboys here! It's for the best war movie of the right wing blogosphere, and the nominees are stellar: The Longest Day, The Sands of Iwo Jima, Patton, A Bridge Too Far, The Great Escape, and many more.

I was tempted to vote for The Dirty Dozen because I'm a big fan of Kirosawa's Seven Samurai, the story of seven unemployed, dishonored samurai who are hired by a village of farmers to protect them from bandits. Its storyline was lifted pretty much lock, stock and katana by the screenwriters of The Dirty Dozen, and it's fun to watch the two back-to-back.

I voted for The Longest Day, though, because as a kid, that movie moved me more than any other WWII movie. Not even Steve McQueen on his motorcycle in The Great Escape (and I loved McQueen's characters!) could displace the heros of D Day as they stormed Europe to defeat the dreaded Nazis.

How commendable of Rhiel to do this. We are engaged in a war just as pivotal to our survival as a free nation as WWII, yet there are no great films being produced to honor the war effort.

Instead, we get George Looney's Syriana, in which the CIA opposes democracy in the Middle East; Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now, with its hero worship of suicide-bombing terrorists, and the moral relativism of Steven Spielberg's Munich. Oh, for a little John Wayne and Robert Mitchum!

hat-tip: Betsy