My coworker was telling me how well Jerry Maguire stands up today and I forced myself to remember the major beats of that piece of shit:
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Big company bad and evil; small start up good and pure.
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Being principled always pays off in the end.
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Everyone can make it if they try hard, believe in themselves, and believe in each other.
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We can have perfect interpersonal relations if we just learn to balance work and life appropriately, and it's up to us to accept that challenge.
Fuck this movie. More importantly fuck people who like this movie. Jerry would have turned out just like his old firm buddies (even if the major plot points largely stay the same). Everyone in this movie is actively trying to exploit each other in the beginning. And even though it's totally inconsequential to how bad these people are in their shitty lives, if you ask me the most unbelievable part is when Jerry and Bridget Jones get back together at the end.
Not buying it.
Tell me about the shitty liberal movies that are renting space in your head.
The Pursuit of Happyness and any other rags to riches movie tends to have bad moral takeaways. Poor down on his luck door to door salesman keeps trying hard and one day succeeds, can't move his shitty bone density scanners, has to sleep in a subway bathroom with his kid, takes an unpaid (!!!) internship despite his clear impoverishment and against his wife's wishes, and through gumption and the power of a relatively decent rate of profit in the 80s, he makes it because he wore a suit to his last interview and solved a rubix cube I think. Awful, very liberal boomer brained.
the framing ignores the fact that there are still many poor down on their luck people
Those poors need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get an unpaid internship by making a snappy joke about pants in the job interview
Isn’t it based on a real guy though? I mean I know they’ll have a shitty message regardless but the real guy seems to be a pro bootstrapper so I’m not sure how you’d frame a biographical movie that’s opposite of what the person believes in
You could emphasize the role of racism prior to his getting lucky as a stockbroker, emphasize the role his wife played while he wasn't getting paid (providing free childcare, show how the private medical system influenced him to drop his previous interest in training as a physician to trying to sell medical equipment before meeting a guy driving a Ferrari who convinced him to pursue being a stock broker, etc.
A lot of bootstraps type stories are about how am individual rose above their circumstances by their own ability- but none of us are really able to do that, it's up to the community as a whole and/or random fate. And there's plenty of this guy who tried and tried and screwed their family over and in the end, they have nothing to show for it. It's a choice to pick the 1 who succeeded over the 100s that don't.
I heard an interview on the radio with a famous singer who advised that if you want to be a singer you should commit fully and have no backup plan. Which is alright for him he made it but what about all the people who tried that and failed they don't get radio interviews
survivorship bias is a fuck
Sure, but just like other forms of propaganda it's less about what's fact, and more about what facts are reported in/emphasized/made into movies.
The editorial process starts with choosing what to make a story out of. Its very existence as a multi-million dollar film is capitalist propaganda.
the movie skipped the part of the real guy's life where he worked as a drug dealer
wolf of wall street did an ok job of that although mainly because Jordan Belfort doen't believe hold any convictions or principals so strongly they interfere with his greed
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well it's just a movie about being a terrible person who has a massive substance abuse problem. You could make the same movie about pirates operating out of Nasau and no major plot beats would need to change
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well the Nasau pirates did trade in slaves
I actually saw this turd with some friends and I was the only one who absolutely hated it in our group.