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.
I always get irked by the liberal compromise fetishism of Lincoln (2012). It is such a product of the respectability politics of the Obama era.
I know that movie was a few years before Hamilton, but they definitely were part of the same ”look how great our nation's diverse history is” Obama-era liberalism where the end goal was a ”we may disagree on some things, but we can agree on how great our nation is” statement
If I could erase someone from ever having existed, it wouldn’t be Hitler or Columbus, it would be Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Erasing Columbus would probably erase the other two as freebies
Not good enough. Lin needs to be personally erased.
everyone in that movie talks as if they are reciting from a middle-school history textbook.
came here to say this one, especially when Thaddeus Stevens' "heroic moment" in that movie is him NOT saying black people are equal with white people to roaring applause and triumphant music. Like what the fuck were they thinking? It's literally celebrating compromising scientific fact and your personal beliefs in the name of civility.
I agree. I was cheering for Stevens confronting Lincoln on land reform when they argued in that scene about Reconstruction and then in the climax they brush aside his convictions with the same disdain that they had in 2012 whenever even people as lib as Bernie questioned the old orthodoxy. Just baffling.