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)
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The writer of Anastasia works on Handmaid’s Tale if that tells you anything…
I watched the first series of that, eventually noped out because it got weirdly torture pornish, then caught a more recent episode a year or two ago and the protagonist is working alongside the US Military (that have materialised completely out of nowhere I guess) as they fight the theocratic regime, one of the most lib things I’ve seen on TV.
Absolutely lib brained show. Women must suffer and then eventually (after 5 seasons) the government will rescue them of course!
I’ll take this moment to complain about how Tangled (a Disney Rapunzel film, basically) just assumes that pillaging native lands is the moral thing to do.
An old woman is using a magical flower out in the wilderness to retain her youth and health. It’s quite literally the only thing keeping her alive. When the Queen of the kingdom falls ill, soldiers of the kingdom go out and just rip up the flower. The old woman, deprived of her only means to stay alive, rushes to the castle, only to find that the flower’s properties are now stuck inside the Queen’s baby. Reasonably assuming that the selfish-ass King and Queen who just gave her a death sentence were obviously never going to let her use those powers, she takes the baby and raises it in a loving (if very sheltered) environment, using her hair to live instead, again, this is the only way the woman can stay alive.
Somehow, the woman is the bad guy, and the King and Queen who raided the native lands for their own selfish-ass purposes are the good guys. It was perfectly moral to take the flower because old woman didn’t enclose her land or have a fucking deed to say “THIS FLOWER BELONGS TO ME”. The old woman’s native knowledge of the land meant it could keep her (and who knows how many others) alive and healthy on an indefinite basis, while the monarchy just grab it, destroy it, and get a one-time use out of it because the lives of the royal family are more important than everyone else’s!!! Babysnatching isn’t moral, but what choice did the woman have?
Yeah I may be overthinking a kid’s fairy tale in movie form. But FUCK EM. I genuinely think it teaches children that there’s no need to respect the environment or other cultures’ understanding of ownership, nor the concept of public sharing.
Forrest Gump pisses me off
Forest Gump for sure. I say it every time this topic comes up.
I always get irked by the liberal compromise fetishism of Lincoln (2012). It is such a product of the respectability politics of the Obama era.
came here to say this one, especially when Thaddeus Stevens’ “heroic moment” in that movie is him NOT saying black people are equal with white people to roaring applause and triumphant music. Like what the fuck were they thinking? It’s literally celebrating compromising scientific fact and your personal beliefs in the name of civility.
I agree. I was cheering for Stevens confronting Lincoln on land reform when they argued in that scene about Reconstruction and then in the climax they brush aside his convictions with the same disdain that they had in 2012 whenever even people as lib as Bernie questioned the old orthodoxy. Just baffling.
I know that movie was a few years before Hamilton, but they definitely were part of the same ”look how great our nation’s diverse history is” Obama-era liberalism where the end goal was a ”we may disagree on some things, but we can agree on how great our nation is” statement
If I could erase someone from ever having existed, it wouldn’t be Hitler or Columbus, it would be Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Erasing Columbus would probably erase the other two as freebies
everyone in that movie talks as if they are reciting from a middle-school history textbook.
