Been awhile since we’ve done this thread, and it’s always fun. Here are some of my picks:
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
Birth of a Nation.
The Patriot.
Man The Patriot pisses me off. I’m not out here to defend the British but the way they movie inverts the historical reality of which side was better for slaves is truly demonic.
I’ve honestly watched The Patriot more times that I care to remember (there’s something hilarious about Smel Bigsom to me). Honestly ridiculous. Not only because it fits into the general theory (like Braveheart) that Gibson despises the English and likes to be in movies that portray them as unambiguously depraved (critical support) but also because how fucked up the depiction of slavery and race-relations is.
Honestly at the end of the day I just watched it for the vibes of war crimes against British colonial troops.