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?

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I've always disliked Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Honestly most John Hughes movies are extremely liberal. They're all about upper-middle class white kids who have emotional problems, but it's ok because they do wacky things. Ferris Bueller and his friends at one point steal a Ferrari and recklessly drive through Chicago, just causing a mess for average people, but they're just background NPCs so who cares. The movie also shows the kids get away with all their antics because of their own ingenuity, but in reality it would be because they're all privileged white kids.

    The Breakfast Club is bad too. The kids are shown to be from a variety of different economic backgrounds and experiences, but it hardly matters. Like Bender's from a single-father working class family, Claire's from some kind of wealthy family. But ultimately it doesn't matter, because it's an idealized situation where they're all shown to have their own individual problems. The division and conflict in the beginning of the film, which in reality is because of things like class, race, being neutotypical or neurodivergent, etc, all of those conflicts are smoothed over because the kids come together to smoke weed and talk it over. It presents the divisions as possible to overcome if you just do some self-discovery and make the correct individual choices. Bender makes an individual choice to see Claire as sympathetic because her parents are undergoing a divorce. Andrew makes an individual choice to see Allison as an individual rather than a basket case, except that's gross because she just ends up becoming a more idealized feminine stereotype for him. I mean it's a normal impulse to make art about shared humanity, but this could have been done better

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Oh hey, I remember this guy and this review. Also I forgive Weird Science for being a John Hughes movie because I dig the Oingo Boingo song.

        • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Long ago, when I was a kid, I bought an Oingo Boingo tape. There was a song with a line about how they love little girls because they make them feel so good. Maybe I was missing something, but I never listened to them again.

          • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Yeah, that song is supposed to be satire of pedophile rock stars and Hollywood executives, but Oingo Boingo would sometimes really got close to the edge of what could be considered parody or not. That whole album is a mixed bag lyrically. The title track seems to be about how society shouldn't be at any blame for kids turning into thieves and murderers, even if the kids were abused or unfortunate, which is a really weird stance to have. There's another song that complains about "middle class socialist brats" so yeah, they were a supremely talented band and made a mark on culture and everything, but I can't blame you for feeling weird about them.