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'll take this moment to complain about how Tangled (a Disney Rapunzel film, basically) just assumes that pillaging native lands is the moral thing to do.
An old woman is using a magical flower out in the wilderness to retain her youth and health. It's quite literally the only thing keeping her alive. When the Queen of the kingdom falls ill, soldiers of the kingdom go out and just rip up the flower. The old woman, deprived of her only means to stay alive, rushes to the castle, only to find that the flower's properties are now stuck inside the Queen's baby. Reasonably assuming that the selfish-ass King and Queen who just gave her a death sentence were obviously never going to let her use those powers, she takes the baby and raises it in a loving (if very sheltered) environment, using her hair to live instead, again, this is the only way the woman can stay alive.
Somehow, the woman is the bad guy, and the King and Queen who raided the native lands for their own selfish-ass purposes are the good guys. It was perfectly moral to take the flower because old woman didn't enclose her land or have a fucking deed to say "THIS FLOWER BELONGS TO ME". The old woman's native knowledge of the land meant it could keep her (and who knows how many others) alive and healthy on an indefinite basis, while the monarchy just grab it, destroy it, and get a one-time use out of it because the lives of the royal family are more important than everyone else's!!!! Babysnatching isn't moral, but what choice did the woman have?
Yeah I may be overthinking a kid's fairy tale in movie form. But FUCK EM. I genuinely think it teaches children that there's no need to respect the environment or other cultures' understanding of ownership, nor the concept of public sharing.
Gothel also looks Jewish/Moroccan, adding to her being a witch is something.
The way pop culture handles immortality generally skeeves me out. Like okay, if you're immortality relies on drinking the blood of poor people then you're evil, but for some reason tons and tons of stories will have a person be immortal for totally innocuous reasons and then make them out to be bad because of it.
It must be judeochristian trappings where immortality is a feature of God and to achieve or seek it is an affront to his divinity. Our place as mortals is to live and die according to the grand design.
Versus adventure stories with roots in eastern religion where if you train and meditate really hard you can just gain superhuman powers and immortality and it's actually based