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.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Michael Clayton is a very enjoyable movie but the ending is very liberal. Let me know if I'm misreading it

    spoiler

    The only way NY prosecutes those execs is if they have hard evidence like the hitmen turned state's evidence, what she said recorded by Clayton's phone isn't going to hold up without some other documentation that they ordered the murder. Are we to believe that the hitman called 911 on Clayton's break-in from their personal cell phone in their own name, not a burner? The movie leaves the evidence part out (the whole "convince my cop brother there is a case here") with a jump cut of unspecified length. The movie acknowledges the systemic evil of capitalism (Arthur's opening speech is amazing) but stops at the perfect moment where you can pretend that "the system works if you know how to play it right". Both of those execs are out on bail within hours and the charges will probably get dropped by a paid-off DA even if the hitmen somehow were that dumb.