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?
Idi-fucking-ocracy.
I hate my teenage self for ever thinking that it's genius.
I do like the critique of it that has come up. In idocracy the US government realizes there are problems and then just find experts, and do the solutions science suggests. In that way that world is infinitely better than ours.
Right, like if the premise was that the current American "culture" rewards stupidity, and promotes the idea that thinking about issues is for losers. That would be good and would have aged immensely well especially with the rise of chan culture. Perhaps that kind of film is what I was looking for in idiocracy? Regardless, the eugenics implications were unforgivable.
Sorry to bother you is a much better movie.
If they'd just cut out the eugenics bit at the beginning, it would've been a good movie.
Fuddrucker's in their reality also has a much better branding evolution arc than in ours
And the poison pill of American ideology doesn't get in the way of it, either. The government asks people to do X for a collective goal, and no one goes "but muh freedoms!"
Its a pretty good litmus test of where you are in your political education.
Young and a silly liberal? Well then the world is just full of uneducated layabouts with no culture.
Older and sliding farther into leftist liberatory theory? Shit, all of these uneducated people seem to just be chill and having a good time. Also, somebody has the actual answer to a national crises and .. they like... just do the right thing. Fuck yeah!
That is very relatable. I re-watched it a couple months ago for the first time in years, and what struck me the most was that the people were portrayed as stupid but caring, with an actual sense of community and duty to others. If anything, it makes solidarity look easy.
Why does Mike Judge hate poor people so much?
He's a conservative