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?

  • Goblinmancer [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The Interview (2014) a "comedy" about DPRK with Seth Rogen. I remembred when there was some hack going on that was blamed on DPRK and people were literally praising and giving the movie high ratings before it actually came out and then the tune went into "maybe kim jong un was just trying to save us from this atrocity of a movie".

    • BelieveRevolt [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      At the time, I was too much of a :LIB: to care, but in retrospect, it's funny that the DPRK is apparently both a technological backwater and also competent enough to hack Sony Pictures.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Same. I watched it when it came out on YouTube, thought it was strictly okay, but looking back it's a pretty telling peek into the liberal conception of the DPRK: literally every happy person in the country is revealed to be an actor, the entire city of Pyongyang is revealed to be an elaborate ruse to trick foreigners, etc.