Explain America In Ten Movies

From Lance Mannion

Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 movies to watch.

The idea is not to give them a history lesson, so you don't have to start with The New World and end with Jarhead.

What you're trying to do is give them a sense of who we are---your take on our dreams, our attitudes, our idioms, what we think we are, what we are afraid we are, what we really might be.

My list:

1. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
This movie explores better than any in film history our misplaced faith in technological/systemic solutions to human problems.

2. Goodfellas
An excellent portrayal of not only organized crime in America, but also our drive for status and first-class treatment.

3. Superman: The Movie
We've always wanted to believe a man can fly.

4. Inherit the Wind
Don't mistake it for a documentary on the Scopes trial, but it gets the feelings right.

5. Full Metal Jacket
Because we still want to see exotic lands, meet strange and wonderful people, and kill them.

6. JFK
If you want to understand why Americans are cynical about their government, this is as good a place as any to start. Again, it is not to be confused with a documentary.

7. In The Heat of the Night
A genre film that nonetheless confronts racial issues in an intelligent way.

8. Network
So others can understand what our TV diet is doing to us, and what it might someday do to them.

9. Glengarry Glen Ross
So that other countries can know that this is the way we keep score, buhbie.

10. Pearl Harbor
Not that I'd actually wish this movie on anyone, but it does show how some of us, desperate for cash and certain that the audience is stupid, are willing to turn a terrible national nightmare that plunged our country into four bloody years of war into the backdrop for a badly written love triangle.

I invite LADblog and Bitterspice to play.