IN GLORIOUS BLACK AND WHITE: So much movie madness… First, here’s Orrin Judd’s list, with links to various reviews. Then Murtaugh returns to the field (calling me “obsessive,” she noted obsessively), and notes that there’s not much overlap in any of these lists. That raises the interesting question of what the heck it means to call a movie “conservative.” Judd came up with a working definition: “Loosely defined, conservative films would be those which vindicate traditional morality and values, espouse the cause of freedom, particularly from government, or a great movie based on a book by a conservative author.” I was definitely using a more impressionistic understanding of “conservative”–pro-trad vals and pro-freedom movies are obvious, but I also included a lot of movies that shaped my worldview, on the navel-gazing grounds that my worldview is conservative. I hope lefty/liberal readers won’t be offended when I say that any movie that strongly emphasized honor, or the fact that morality requires self-sacrifice, got on my list. I don’t mean that there’s no honor in the Left, liberalism, or liberals; I just mean that I became conservative in part through investigating what honor is, why it’s important, and what’s necessary for it to make sense. But that would be a much longer blog-post… Anyway, I hope to have more on what it means to call a movie “conservative” in future posts. Watch the skies!