The Most Kick-Ass Goddamn American Movies of All Time

Happy Birthday, USA!

Occasionally its somewhat annoying to live in a super liberal out-of-touch Pinko-Commie welfare state.  On the one hand, I love New Jersey and wouldn't give up living here for anywhere*, but on the other hand, living in this state also means that there are tons of stupid restrictions on every bit of your life.  If the government finds that something is "un-safe" they'll ban it.  So guns are impossible to buy here, kids need to sit in booster seats until the age of ten in cars, and smoking is banned everywhere except for a single corner in West Orange - and its taxed so heavily that you need to put a second mortgage on your house in order to get a single pack of Newports.  However, none of this means anything to me, except for one tiny little ban:  no fireworks.  You cannot buy, sell, use, own, or transport any kind of fireworks in the Garden State except for public demonstrations after filling out approximately six miles of official forms.  So I can't have real fireworks on the Fourth of July**.  Yes, it is against the law in this state for me to do my civic duty and blow some shit up on our nation's greatest patriotic holiday.

So the only fireworks that I can legally enjoy this year will be those in my own living room.  Luckily America is also the home of kick-ass good old fashioned high-explosive action movies.  New York has been destroyed more times on film than Jerusalem has been destroyed in the real world.  We don't just love explosions:  we worship explosions.  It becomes something deeply engraved into our subconscious.  For example, I cannot enjoy a movie where at least one sentient being's life is not ended in some spectacular fashion (note that not a single movie I've recommended is lacking in this feature).  Its reached the point that the sight of the White House being destroyed is almost as sacred of a patriotic image as Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" - which by the way could be greatly improved if at least one of those canoes were on fire.

So for all you suffering under fireworks bans, I now give you, with tongue only half in cheek, the Grand List of the Most Kick-Ass Goddamn American Movies of All Time, as a fictional replacement for real-life destruction and mayhem.  These are the movies that manage to take all fifty states, with all our arrogance, ignorance, and free spirit into a five beautiful star-spangled rolls of films.  Enjoy.

5. Pearl Harbor (2001):  Once upon a time, America knew exactly what it was, what its purpose was, and knew that its purpose was righteous.  God created a nation spanning North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific specifically for the purpose of destroying Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  There was a time when Manifest Destiny was laughed-off as basic 19th century jingoist self-serving dogma, but when 1941 rolled around, we knew that God specifically came down to Earth and created America to save the world from evil.  To this very day we've been trying to find ourselves again.  What does a nation do once its divine purpose is complete?  Fight communists?  Terrorists?  The Chinese?  Well, yes, but we also make sure to make silly popcorn blockbusters to celebrate our all-too-brief moment of national certainty.  And if the real story or the complex political situation of the time gets in the way of our beloved Heroic Myth, than we make sure to ignore as much of it as possible to paint our heroes as glorious Hollywood leading men and our villains as strange single-mindedly sinister aliens.  America is the only country on Earth where we would include a ridiculous plot-eating love story a la "Titanic" even when supposedly the movie is trying to celebrate America's tenacity in the face of an attack by the Evil Empire.  That's America for you:  when history is inconvenient, we make sure to ignore it.

Also, you gotta love a character shouting "I think World War II just started" in the third year of said conflict.  Beautiful.

But in all honestly, this movie is too damn long, and has too much Ben Affleck to be worth anybody's time.  This is the kind of movie you'd only watch out of automatic motions born from mindless loyalty.  The battle scenes are beautiful works of disaster, and visually stunning, but the rest of this movie is junk.  This is a movie you need to watch with a fast-forward button.  I had to include it because no Goddamn American Movie List would be completely without some WWII flick - but every decent WWII movie was too stifled with antiwar messages and realism to be a true patriotic movie.

4. Armageddon (1998):  Say what you want about Michael Bay:  "he's a terrible director", "has a repulsive visual style only good for clichéd music videos", "can't write a screenplay worth a butt plug", "stop making all those terrible horror remakes, Michael Bay".  However, despite all that, you cannot help but admit:  Michael Bay is the most Goddamn American director ever.  He's so Goddamn American that he included the US military in his movies about alien robots -  for no reason other than to include the US military.  Yes, that completely ruined his alien robot movies, but it doesn't detract from his purity.  So he gets two movies on this countdown, a feat no other man would even dare attempt.

In the 90s, America had no enemy to fight as we had defeated all the other threats of the 20th century.  So we had to look away, to the heavens looking to see if the universe in all its endless infinity wanted a fight.  "Come on, cosmos.  Show us your worst."  Thus "Armageddon" was born.  With a meteor the size of America's most overblown and arrogant state barreling towards Earth, who else to go up to space and save the world but good-old fashioned American drillers?  These are men:  blue collar, covered in greasy oil, and deadbeat dads.  The hero of this movie finds his daughter in bed with Ben Affleck, he goes on a shotgun rampage.  Those who don't understand the quasi-incestuous emotion that drives men to murder their daughters' lovers, will not understand this movie.  But its those very quasi-incestuous emotions that save the world... Michael Bay's world, which consists mostly of America... Michael Bay's America, which is filled with boxcar races, kids with toys, and endless sunsets filled with helicopters.

Plus Steve Buscemi singlehandedly saved this movie.  He deserved a Medal of Honor for his work in making this awful, awful movie to be slightly entertaining.  Somehow he defeated the worst Aerosmith song ever on endless loop throughout the whole film to create something at least semi-watchable.

3. The Patriot (2000):  As mentioned before, America often finds its history to be more than a little inconvenient.  So, for every history epic we make, we're obliged to thrown in scenes of White and Black characters working together in racial harmony years before any such thing would ever begin to exist (if it even exists today).  When it came to our Revolutionary War epic, we needed to shift the history so that the Colonies were unambiguously and firmly on the side of righteousness, freedom, and apple pie.  Thus the only actor the movie could have picked to symbolize pure individualism, self-sufficiency, and badassary was a man named Mel Gibson who had made a career of fighting the English and LA crime lords.  Mel Gibson's character looks a bit like Francis Marion, the legendary "swamp fox" and a founding father of guerrilla warfare.  But since even that legendary character was simply too modest for the grandiose needs of this movie, the character's name is changed and his actions are expanded to a simply silly degree.  Mel Gibson didn't just fight in the Revolution, he won the Revolution.  If this movie were honest with itself, it would have ended with Gibson and his freedom fighters sneaking into London and killing King George III, who just so happened to be a Robot Spider.

But the true message of this movie is that America is too righteous to need to follow the accepted rules of war.  We don't need to stand around in "Final Fantasy" rows and exchange fire.  We're American, we don't follow chivalry.  Cornwallis takes the field?  Does that mean he won?  Heck no.  We rush right out of the trees and stab Jason Isaacs right in the throat in what is one of the most awesome one-on-one battles in the history of cinema.  These aren't just the British we're fighting here, even though the majority of the English characters are mincing, tea-sucking, effeminate stereotypes.  They're Nazis:  they burn down a church with the entire population of a town stuck inside, killing everybody.  Did that happen during the war?  Oh God no.  But it did happen in Oradour-san-Glane, France in 1944 as performed by the 2nd SS Panzer Division.  Our history is just too tame for our modern tastes.  If only every one of America's enemies were wretchedly evil, huh?

Even so, this is the last great Mel Gibson movie, so on that level at least, its worth a view.  After this would come "Signs" the biggest cock-tease of a movie ever.  That movie was billed as "Mel Gibson vs. aliens", and we got nothing of the sort.  Instead Mel Gibson is an ex-pastor and the aliens are weak to water.  Come on!  Jason Isaacs should have played the alien...

2. Air Force One (1997):  As mentioned before, in the 90s, America had no real villain to fear.  So in politics, we spent the decade doing nothing in particular, causing our President to get so bored in office that he slept with Monica Lewinsky.  Our movies were filled with a desperate search for some kind of evil force to fight:  either aliens, asteroids, Columbian-drug peddlers, or we could go back and bring the Commies back.  Here Soviet paramilitaries capture Air Force One and kidnap the President's family and staff.  And what does our President do in return?  Well, the answer to that question must first be answered with another question:  who is our President in this movie?  None other than Harrison Ford himself.  And not young cocky Harrison Ford, this is middle-aged grumpy Harrison Ford.  So America doesn't negotiate with terrorists:  we kick those terrorists' asses!  Who better to represent the American people than Han Solo taking a machine gun and mowing down Ruskies to get his family back?  I think the Constitution should be a amended so that no man or woman could be made President without the ability to kick fifteen asses and throw in at least one incredibly awesome line.  He's so badass that the 25th Admendment of the Constitution is ignored (this despite the efforts of the Cylon in the Cabinet).

Come on, this movie has the President kicking ass.  How could I not include this one?  That's all I really need to say.

When Harrison Ford kills Gary Oldman and growls "Get off my plane!" you're given clear proof that our republican system works.  Its a little known fact that the margins of the Constitution are decorated with little sketches of Presidents kicking people in the face.  In times of national disaster, the Presidency is given over to Harrison Ford, so that he can get the beat down started.  Osama Bin Ladin isn't hiding from the military, he's hiding from Harrison Ford, who is hunting him down, terrorist by terrorist.  And Indiana Jones will get his man.  (By the way, I think I just inadvertently thought of the perfect plot for "Indiana Jones 5".)


1. Independence Day (1996):  What is a better movie to watch on a holiday than a movie named after that holiday***?  On Halloween you watch "Halloween" - the real Halloween, not that Rob Zombie crap.  On Christmas you watch "A Christmas Story". And on Independence Day, you watch "ID4", the Greatest Movie Ever Made.  When the aliens come to Earth and destroy all of our major cities, only one organization has the strength, the knowledge, and the pure heroic spirit that can possibly defeat this intergalactic menace - and that organization is the United States of America.  If ever there was a movie that was an American summer blockbuster, its this movie.  "Blockbuster" itself is a term that derived from a particularly large aerial explosive used in WWII by the Royal Air Force that was said to be able to level an entire city block.  Well, "ID4" doesn't just level a whole city block - it levels three whole cities simultaneously in the span of ten minutes.

What other movie out there dares deal with such issues as the difficulty of dragging a smelly alien across the Arizona desert?  What other movie shows how important it is to "must go faster" while flying out of an alien space station that you just blew up?  What other movie has the President personally flying out in an F-18 to go take down an alien space ship in order to save the last bastion of American refugees, Area 51?  This is that movie that dares to go further, blow up more, and be more awesome than any other movie before or since. The aliens came to Earth, but America sent them home:  in body bags.  Oh wait.  There weren't body bags.  We blew them up so completely that there wasn't enough ash left to even fill a plastic supermarket bag.  USA!  USA!

On the verge of the final battle, President Bill Pullman walks out to his men and gives the greatest speech in the history of cinema.  "We will not go quietly into the night!  We will not vanish without a fight!  We're going to live on!  We're going to survive!  TODAY.  WE CELEBRATE.  OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!!"  This speech so inspired Americans that when 9/11 happened, the nation as a whole looked to George W. Bush to make this very speech.  (And I am not joking here, I was there.  We wanted the "Independence Day" speech.)  Yes, the speech seems to imply that President Pullman has declared a One World Nation, with America most likely in control, but does that matter?  When the aliens come, the world will look to America with open arms.  And we'll win.

Some critics have called "ID4" an incredibly stupid movie with a brainless plot filled with plot holes and jingoistic rhetoric.  But they don't understand.  "Independence Day" isn't just that most Goddamn American movie ever, this movie is America.  Right here.  Everything this movie is or represents is exactly what our country stands for.  This movie, right or wrong.  Take it or leave it.  Love "Independence Day" or move to Canada.  Those are you're only options.

So tomorrow while the hot dogs and burgers are on the grill, and the Macy's Fireworks are setting the Hudson River ablaze, put "ID4" in your DVD player, and make sure you watch it with tears of pure patriotic joy.  Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum are now as much our Founding Fathers as Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.  God Bless "Independence Day" and God Bless America, Land that I Love.

USA!  USA!  USA!

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* Except for southern Florida, southern California, Hawaii, New York City, London, most of Australia, all of New Zealand, Singapore, Chicago, Taiwan, Greece, Boston, Washington DC, Japan, Bermuda, South Korea, bits and pieces of China, Polynesia, and the trunk of Miley Cyrus's car.

** Fireworks are also banned in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.  However, Pennsylvania proved itself to be the most ingenious state in the Union by legalizing the sale of fireworks.  So there exist strange stores in Pennsylvania that exist only to sell fireworks to New Jersey and New York patrons who cannot own such products legally.  A Pennsylvania resident cannot enter these stores at all, but a New Jersey and New York patron could enter... but only after giving out a ton of ID details.  Whether or not I've ever actually been to one of these stores, have used fireworks in past, and plan to use fireworks on this Fourth of July is something that I'll leave to your imagination.  I'll also leave it to your imagination if I ever tried to blow up a Furby by shoving a firecracker inside its beak.

*** This year's "Valentine's Day" attempted to be the St. Valentine's Day movie.  However, since it was just a subpar American rip-off of "Love Actually" with far less talented actors, it failed.  What were they thinking when they made this movie?  I can see the scene:  Screenwriter A says "let's make an ensemble cast romantic comedy for Valentine's Day".  Screenwriter B responds, "they already did that, its called 'Love Actually' and a lot of people liked it, even that awesome blogger, Blue Highwind liked it and he hates romantic comedies."  But then Screenwriter A waves his hand and says "Oh, but they didn't do it in... America."  Screenwriter B looks at him like he's an idiot for a moment, and then sighs and says "...Will I get paid for this?"  (Most actors in the film asked the same question after reading the script.)

And so "Valentine's Day" was born.