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.
The American President. I didn’t even realize until recently that this was written by Aaron Sorkin, but it makes sense, it’s an early example of exactly his brand of hokey bullshit.
Whatever that movie was about Scooter Libby and the revealing of the CIA agent’s name that was all ”How dare Bush and Cheney treat one of our CIA heroes like that!”, they mentioned it on the first season of Blowback.
I do love Redford for this though. He had shopped his script about a widower president around for a decade. Man just wanted to see that dumb idea on screen
For most of my life I thought that movie was an episode of The West Wing. I saw them close to each other as a kid and just assumed they were the same thing.
“In later interviews, writer Aaron Sorkin told TV Guide he wrote the screenplay while high on crack cocaine while he was living at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, which is why it took him three years to complete it.[10]”