Been awhile since we've done this thread, and it's always fun. Here are some of my picks:

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • notthenameiwant [he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    All the President's Men is a celebration of liberal institutions. Especially now that we know "Deep Throat" was literally just the assistant director of the FBI who got snubbed for a job. Three Days of the Condor is a much better Redford conspiracy movie.

    • Vncredleader
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      9 months ago

      All the President's Men genuinely helped create the environment of modern US journalism. And for that it can burn in hell

      • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
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        9 months ago

        MIC stenographers? There's no such thing as modern US journalism in the institutional "fifth estate" sense, just people who print the CIA memos handed to them

        • Vncredleader
          ·
          9 months ago

          Which gets very literal with Woodward being naval intelligence

          • notthenameiwant [he/him]
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            9 months ago

            Haven't heard of this. I figured he was just a hack riding the coattails of the one "cool" thing he did in the 70's. Source?

            • Vncredleader
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              9 months ago

              Good article on how the book "all the president's men" is sensationalized and their "new journalism" being dubious and full of inconsistencies with their reporting. https://www.newsweek.com/myth-bob-woodward-why-man-american-icon-62801

              Russ Baker's book on the Bush family "family of secrets" goes in depth on all this but long story short as put by Spartacus Education

              Here’s the deal: Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They then give what they stole to columnist Jack Anderson and others in the press.

              That’s not the iconic Woodward of legend, of course - so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more - and it’s even more troubling. Did you know there was really no Deep Throat, that the Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get Nixon out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? That a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections, from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean - wormed their way into key White House posts, and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s office door?

              Believe me, I understand. It sounds like the “conspiracy theory” stuff that we have been trained to dismiss. But I’ve just spent five years on a heavily documented forensic dig into this missing strata of American history, and I myself have had to come to terms with the enormous gap between reality and the “reality” presented by the media and various establishment gatekeepers who tell us what’s what.

              Given this complicity, it’s no surprise that when it comes to Woodward’s latest work, the myth-making machine is on auto pilot. The public, of course, will end up as confused and manipulated as ever. And so things will continue, same as they ever were. Endless war, no substantive reforms. Unless we wake up to our own victimhood.

              https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdeepthroat.htm

              The Baker summary in this article is solid as well

              • notthenameiwant [he/him]
                ·
                9 months ago

                Thanks, it's pretty odd to see Newsweek put out articles like this, considering their reputation. I'm about to finish my current book, so I may check out Bush Family of Secrets next.

        • notthenameiwant [he/him]
          ·
          9 months ago

          I'm currently reading through "A People's History of the United States", and none of the major papers would report on The Pike Committee (the uncensored, House version of the Church Committee). This is of course a few years removed from Watergate. "Journalism" in this country is shameful.