The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) has to be up there. The inciting incident is Will Smith going to Wall Street and seeing all the happy, smiling rich people walking out of the New York Stock Exchange, and deciding he wants to be like them. There is no irony in this or in any other scene; pursuing a finance-bro internship at all costs is portrayed literally and uncritically as the "happyness" in the title. The entire rest of the movie is a masturbatory hustle-culture fantasy in which Will Smith having to do things like being homeless, sleeping in subway bathrooms, kissing the asses of as many banking executives as possible, and foregoing feeding or clothe his kindergarten-age son are portrayed not as indictments of the system but as evidence of Smith's smart, bootstraps-oriented thinking. The rich people throughout the movie are jovial and well-adjusted, always willing to give a smart guy like Smith a shot (but only when they see his plucky bootstrappiness firsthand, which they only do once he insistently fellates them first); meanwhile, all poor people are miserable, underhanded slimeballs who are nothing but trouble for Smith. This movie is the Mein Kampf of liberalism.
What else?
Tenet. It's a love-letter to intelligence agencies. There are threats beyond our comprehension and it's up to the actions of a few people in secret paramilitary groups to save us from them.
The Big Short. A motley crew of outsiders (investment bankers at major world banks) stumble upon the lack of regulation that leads to the world financial collapse of 2007. A scathing indictment of
capitalistscrony capitalists who didn't play by the rules and hurt immigrants trying to own a home. A snappy, witty jaunt along side the millionaires who got big sad after they shorted the housing market and made millions more. And one of them is really big sad because he offered money to his suicidal brother and it didn't work. But he made millions of shorting the market anyways so money isn't the answer except when it's not.A Few Good men because Sorkin wrote the watcher on the wall monologue as a good thing. All Sorkin movies. All of them. TV too.
The Big Short might be lib, but I still think it’s a good movie and worth watching. It takes a real life complex topic (2008 financial crises) and relatively accurately explains what happened using humor and a compelling story. It shows how such a fragile system was exploited and clearly states that it will happen again because nothing was done about it.
Oh hey look, there’s yet another bank failure in the news today
i found the big short to be radicalizing personally, but i was maybe the rare person primed to read into the whole thing.
100% agree. You can show it to people who have no interest in leftism and have them walk away with a better understanding of way capitalism sucks.
It’s literally that meme, “Margot Robbie and Ryan gosling are hot” going over the guys head and “capitalism sucks” going into his eyes lol
Come to think of it, Inception is also lib as hell. The heroes are committing corporate espionage, mindjacking a mega-CEO to convince him to break up the monopoly that he inherited from his father (as though investors and other executives wouldn't all act in unison to prevent him from doing this).
The thing about Jessups orders must be obeyed at all times is Jessup didn't obey the order to end code reds