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.

  • QueerCommie [she/her, fae/faer]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Lol, my first thought was Pursuit Happyness too. I was subjected to it in school. This dude who is fulfilling the “American Dream” just got incredibly lucky despite stupid decisions. “Meritocracy” amiright? He was the top in all his classes and invested a huge amount in stupid machines. He ends up homeless because a bunch of terrible stuff happens but he’s able to pretend to be rich and try hard and solve a Rubik’s cube. Yay this one dude gets to be rich while the masses of poors he was briefly amongst continue to suffer. When I saw them in the streets my first thought was how they should be organizing, not begging for a bed. What an inspirational movie.