The Pursuit of Happyness 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.
Even the Batman films were basically whitewashing of Bush-era policies. Kidnapping people in order for them to be within your jurisdiction to imprison. Creating tools for mass surveillance, but it’s okay because we put it in the hands of the good guys. Bane was originally written to have much more sympathetic class conscious motivations. But they removed the part where Commissioner Gordon revealed that the crime crackdowns justified with the lie surrounding Harvey Dent’s death didn’t even work. They were just padding numbers to fit a narrative around crime like politicians always do. They made this giant symbolic sacrifice and if wasn’t worth it and that’s why Bane had the sway that he did.
as a huge batman fan and leftist i’ll always hate the dark trilogy (dark knight is solid though mainly due to heath ledger but still flawed). the original quadrilogy (yes even batman & robin) and the new batman are far superior to nolan’s
One thing I appreciate about The Dark Knight is the climax with the two ferries with bombs on them. It was an explicit repudiation of the dark premise of the Batman series, where some people are just violent sickos at heart who need to be beaten up by vigilantes.