Been awhile since we’ve done this thread, and it’s always fun. Here are some of my picks:
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The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) is really bad. Will Smith’s inspirational moment is going to the New York Stock Exchange and seeing all the happy rich guys in suits walking around, and wanting to be like them. Having to do stuff like brown-nose executives, sleep in train station bathrooms and pull his son out of daycare due to lack of money are presented not as flaws of the system but evidence of Smith’s smart bootstraps-oriented thinking. This movie is the Mein Kampf of liberalism.
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Air (2023) is really bad too. Literally a feature-length Nike commercial coupled with a fuckton of Michael Jordan worship, the message being that a bunch of rich guys deserved to get even richer because they signed a sneaker deal. The closing 5 minutes of the movie are a “where are they now” montage showing how much money all the Nike executives made, yay!
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Anastasia (1997), which portrays the Russian Revolution as the result of a wizard’s curse and communism as bad because it got in the way of the Romanovs living in big palaces and wearing fancy dresses.
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The Post (2017), about a wealthy, heroic girlboss newspaper executive who makes the heroic decision to…uhh…not block the publication of a story that would expose the lies of a corrupt president threatening our democracy (take THAT drumpf)
post more.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) as an example of ur-liberalism. A literal boy scout troop leader becomes a Senator basically through random chance and then overcomes corruption in Washington by sheer individual grit and goodness.
The Iron Man movies, especially Iron Man 2.
The new Obama-produced movie (Leave the World Behind).
Oh shit haven’t heard of this.There is no way that title plus Obama as producer does not equal pure ideology
It’s so bad, but after suffering through it for my family I gotta say that the ending is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen (not intentionally).
It tries so hard to be a “slow burn horror that’s scary because it’s a plausible future”, but it’s literally just suburban invasion fantasy #2,000, except the evil other is completely faceless and vague so the audience can easily interject whatever boogyman is currently in the news, be it Russia or China or dprk or Hamas (or aliens!?!). Entirely blind to class relations, in fact there’s not a single real working class person in the movie, they’re all PMC or landlords. Unexamined bourgeois realism
Ethan Hawk’s character getting mocked for being an old hwhite guy is funny tho
I think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington would have been a way better movie if it ended with nothing happening. Imagine if Smith just collapsed and that was the end of the film.
It’s funny. With Iron Man 2, I was rooting for the villain, Vanko. But he had to get personal, so his character got dumb near the end, when all he had to do was just
especially after he gave the “blood in the water” monologue to the Irony Mang.
Of course, I also hate IM2 for that damn
cameo (altho he did get roasted supposedly).