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.
Right? My question is which films aren’t, so I can watch all six of them.
Soviet cinema is good and its impacts on the artform are largely ignored and unknown to most people who don't study film.
Decent number of Marxist or adjacent directors in Europe: Godard and Bertolucci off the top of my head. The degree of Marxism and quality of the films varies.
Oh I recently watched the 2008 Che movie which was surprisingly accurate considering it was directed by an (as far as I can tell from the Wikipedia page) apolitical statesian. Same source says cuban audiences liked it.
TY, comrade. I mean to watch some Warsaw Pact-era scifi, like Solaris and Stalker.
I just stumbled upon this Warsaw Pact Films compilation on IMDB, but have no idea how well-compiled it is.
Stalker is very good, kind of a slow burn. Most of my appreciation for it came after stewing on it then rewatching a week later
I haven't seen many of the films on that list so thanks for the share!