Today is a hell of a day. We have the Fourth of July, America's 250th, and late-round World Cup action rolled all in one—and I hope you're celebrating somehow. After fireworks tonight, I'll parse through Eric Francisco's roundup of the best movies to watch on the Fourth of July, looking for the perfect film to kick off the next 250 years. Don't ask me why, but I'm between Nashville and Team America: World Police. You can find the rest below. —Brady Langmann, senior entertainment editor
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Baseball games, alien invasions, and youthful restlessness. Welcome to summer in America.
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We cozy up for Christmas and let our freak flags fly for Halloween. But on the Fourth of July, we let freedom ring baby. Smack in the middle of summer comes Independence Day, when we Americans spend three days reveling the day-long sunshine in the only way we know how. Barbecues, pool parties, cold drinks, and yes, damn fine movies. Suck it, rest of the world. You may have socialized medicine and federally mandated paid time off, but we’ve got fireworks.
While you should totally get outside and breathe in the fresh summer air, it’s also not a bad idea to crack open a cold one and fire up an old favorite. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of movies where “America!” is the predominant theme—some reverent, some scathing, all of it worth watching.
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These presidents managed the country through its birth pangs, which, by design, continue to this day. They helped get us through a civil war, world wars, and a cold war. They respected the Constitution, but they pushed it until the parchment seemed ready to burst. (Hi, Abe!) So here is one man’s completely subjective list of the ten best people to hold this impossible job.
One thing to keep in mind: None of these guys was great, or even adequate, on either minority rights or on the rights of Indigenous peoples. At best, they were dilatory and more than a little cowardly. At worst, they were actively hostile to them. Two of the top five owned slaves. That was an unforgivable sin against the country’s ideals, a “cruel war against human nature itself,” as slaveholder Thomas Jefferson wanted to say in the Declaration of Independence. But he folded due to political expedience and kept his slaves, including Sally Hemings.
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So what is America? Do you know? Do any of us know anymore? We’re hermetically sealed in our information bubbles, sorted by our social-media feeds, feverishly working alone in our home offices, picking up essentials with a swipe and a tap rather than a trip to the store. You’ve heard a million times that we’re polarized, but this is something else: We’re atomized. Absent from one another. Us, here in this place that puts a lot of stock in a very important idea about collectivism: “Out of many, one.” (Perhaps you know the Latin: E pluribus unum.)
If you haven’t heard, America’s got kind of a big birthday coming up. The lady turns 250 this year, and that means it’s high time to consider how she’s doing. To consider what she is. To consider who we are.
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