Some thoughts on Red Dawn

AVENGE ME!!!!

Harry Dean Stanton. Dirty, tired, beaten down by his soviet captors, imprisoned in a drive in movie theater turned makeshift reeducation camp- shouts into the night. Is there any better scene in film? There is not.

That scene makes the scene in Goodfellas where Henry comes home from prison to learn that Karen flushed the drugs down the toilet ("Karen!? I needed that, Karen!") look like a middle school play rehearsal. Alec Baldwin's speech in Glengarry Glen Ross? Might as well be a local furniture store commercial.

If I know one thing about Red Dawn it is this: Red Dawn is less a cinematic escapade than it is video instruction tool. It asks the question "What would you do if you were sitting in history class, listening to a boring ass lecture on the Mongol horde, and a nightmare team of Russians, Cubans and Nicaraguans parachuted onto the football field and took over the town?" I'll tell you what I'd do: escape into the mountains and kill me some commies. If a foreign nation attacks, everything at the army/navy store is immediately free, so go nuts. It's like when you were a kid, and you had that fantasy that you would win a 5 minute shopping spree to Toys R Us. You can just run through the store and throw anything you want into the cart- you don't even think, you just take. I know that I could be a successful insurgent* for these reasons:

1. I have been camping.
2. I can hunt deer. (I have never been hunting, but neither had C. Thomas Howell, and he bagged a deer his first time out- so how hard can it be? C. Thomas Howell is a pussy.)
3. Russians, Cubans and Nicaraguans have apparently never had any formal military or firearms training.

Red Dawn teaches us that no military force, not even the combined military of 3 nations, can defeat midwestern americans**. Not even fully aged americans either, high school age americans- one of whom is C. Thomas Howell. It also teaches us that is is extremely important to ensure that all of our nations high schools have cool sounding team names. Calumet, Colorado had the Wolverines, which was fortunate, because Arturo "Aardvark" Mondragon decided to use the school mascot as a battle cry. It would have been pretty lame if the commies had attacked Montgomery, Alabama- home of the Sidney Lanier High School Poets. Even holding an AK-47 over your head, shouting "POETS!" is no way to celebrate victory.

The knowledge gained from Red Dawn is invaluable and it should be shown in middle schools monthly.

*obviously, when I use the term "insurgent", I don't mean dirty, brown, freedom hating terrorists, I mean corn-fed, all american heroes.

**obviously, by "midwestern americans", I mean "real americans". If McCain/Palin taught us anything, it's that if the bad guys had attacked either of the liberal coasts they would've been greeted with borscht and some kind of cuban food.