Anti-Communist Film Festival!
A Mark Judge production
A friend once said to me, “If it’s not two degrees from an Ewok, you don’t know from it.” This was his nice way of saying that I have seen very, very few films. If it’s not Star Wars, Casablanca, The Sound of Music, and a few others, I haven’t seen it. This is so extreme that when someone starts off with, “Did you see…” I just say, “No.” It is rude to cut someone off, and for that I apologize, but in this case it saves everyone time.
My friend Mark Judge has set out to remedy that: The Anti-Communist Film Festival!
Mark says:
I love to go to film festivals. I got to the Film Noir Festival every year at the AFI. Also the Irish Film Festival and the Fabulous Fifties and Iranian Film Festival. Some of these films are considered corny or goofy, I’m speaking about the ones from the 50s. Critics are especially harsh on the anti-communist films. Yet when I saw My Son John and I Was a Communist for the FBI and others I thought they were great. Done even won awards. I thought instead of spending millions to try and make a pro-freedom film why not just show these great old movies together? Night People starring Gregory Peck is a great movie set in Berlin. The Nazis and the communists are working together and both depicted as evil. It’s filmed in CinemaScope and still looks great.
I worked in a movie theater when I was in college in the 1980s, a beautiful restored art deco place in Maryland. It had been converted into a kind of movie house and beer hall. I saw all the great movies at the time, Top Gun, Blood Simple, Back to School. It was a fun atmosphere and I’d like to capture that with the Anti-Communist Film Festival. We want to show Back to School and have it be a big party.
Top Gun!!!! I saw that!
But back to the festival.
At a time when we are all in early recovery from the Woke era, pro-freedom films seem appropriate.
Some of you know that my first career was as a union organizer. We were not communists, but the idea that the communists in America were unjustly persecuted was just something everyone believed. Now I am interested to see another perspective.
On the eve of 9/11 (please tell me you know what I’m talking about), it’s particularly important to look at competing narratives. I lived in New Jersey on the 9/11, and many of my friends lost family on that horrific day. To see it glorified now on TikTok and other places upsets me, but I defend others’ freedom of speech. Let’s just remember how quickly narratives can be constructed, spread, and used to ruin people’s lives, a topic with which Mark is very familiar.
Please support this historic effort here.
Thanks Mark, for all you do to defend freedom. Here’s a flower for you.
Haha. It’s red. This hibiscus is not and never was a member of the Communist Party.