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?
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.
'Member when libs were cool and guillotining royals instead of romanticizing them?
Iron Man 2 is pretty bad even by Marvel standards, since it portrays Tony Stark, the weapons manufacturer, as the good guy who ”has privatized world peace” (actual quote). The bad guy is a stereotypical Russian who's (rightfully iirc) pissed off at Tony because his dad denied him credit for his inventions.
At the end of the movie, genius Tony figures out how to repower the arc reactor by recreating a brand new element because of course the guy is charge of the company is super smart and therefore deserves to be rich. Did I mention that there's a :melon-musk: cameo?
The King's Speech: can the unelected monarch who has the title thrust upon him after his brother gives up on the whole song and dance to marry an American divorcee (oldtimey gasp) get over his stutter in time to deliver the speech needed to give the Brits the pluck they need to win WWII?
after his brother gives up on the whole song and dance to marry an American divorcee
he was ousted as it was feared his intense nazi sympathies might extend so far as leaking critical info to them to help them win the war. The American divorcee also a massive nazi
it's largely swept under the rug the extent to which the British aristocracy loved Hitler. Remains the day is a pretty good film about it
a shocking number of British aristocrats have strong family ties to high ranking SS figures
how the fuck are you analysing the aristocracies love of fascism through a lens other than class
Idk about this one. The monarchy/ww2 backdrop definitely makes it sus, but at its core it's a character drama about a man struggling with a (minor) disability and the insecurity that comes with it.
Maybe I'm being too generous, but I haven't watched it in a while.
The Interview (2014) a "comedy" about DPRK with Seth Rogen. I remembred when there was some hack going on that was blamed on DPRK and people were literally praising and giving the movie high ratings before it actually came out and then the tune went into "maybe kim jong un was just trying to save us from this atrocity of a movie".
At the time, I was too much of a :LIB: to care, but in retrospect, it's funny that the DPRK is apparently both a technological backwater and also competent enough to hack Sony Pictures.
Same. I watched it when it came out on YouTube, thought it was strictly okay, but looking back it's a pretty telling peek into the liberal conception of the DPRK: literally every happy person in the country is revealed to be an actor, the entire city of Pyongyang is revealed to be an elaborate ruse to trick foreigners, etc.
Idi-fucking-ocracy.
I hate my teenage self for ever thinking that it's genius.
I do like the critique of it that has come up. In idocracy the US government realizes there are problems and then just find experts, and do the solutions science suggests. In that way that world is infinitely better than ours.
Right, like if the premise was that the current American "culture" rewards stupidity, and promotes the idea that thinking about issues is for losers. That would be good and would have aged immensely well especially with the rise of chan culture. Perhaps that kind of film is what I was looking for in idiocracy? Regardless, the eugenics implications were unforgivable.
Sorry to bother you is a much better movie.
If they'd just cut out the eugenics bit at the beginning, it would've been a good movie.
Fuddrucker's in their reality also has a much better branding evolution arc than in ours
And the poison pill of American ideology doesn't get in the way of it, either. The government asks people to do X for a collective goal, and no one goes "but muh freedoms!"
Its a pretty good litmus test of where you are in your political education.
Young and a silly liberal? Well then the world is just full of uneducated layabouts with no culture.
Older and sliding farther into leftist liberatory theory? Shit, all of these uneducated people seem to just be chill and having a good time. Also, somebody has the actual answer to a national crises and .. they like... just do the right thing. Fuck yeah!
That is very relatable. I re-watched it a couple months ago for the first time in years, and what struck me the most was that the people were portrayed as stupid but caring, with an actual sense of community and duty to others. If anything, it makes solidarity look easy.
The Dark Knight Rises.
Was literally made just a year after Occupy and had Bane's revolutionary movement clearly modeled after it. Also, the very premise of a revolutionary leader manipulating the foolish masses in a bid for power (while planning to betray them later down the line for some convoluted conspiracy involving some vaguely Chinese-Middle Eastern cult) and it's up to some billionaire with a messiah complex to save them is... um...
I saw the movie's fictional Rapid City football stadium get blown up while I watched this movie in a movie theater in Rapid City, SD. Say what you will about the movie, but I enjoyed the moment.
Think this was more of a fascist movie. A lot of Nolan's movies have a really sus vibe to them. People like to bring up the mass-surveillance stuff Batman uses. He also really has a thing for extra-judicial murder squads with cool uniforms (can't really blame him though, he shares that affinity with Hideo Kojima).
Forest Gump is probably the worst one I can think of
"If only Jenny weren't such a pinko leftie d*generate and had just been like Forrest smh"
saw that movie as a kid and thought the black panthers were a violent black supremacist fascist group for too fucking long
Moscow on the Hudson (1984), in which Robin Williams plays a Russian saxophonist who defects to the US after going into a department store, is full of plenty of lib shit - He befriends a friendly gusano Lawyer and a peak '80s "magical black guy" walking trope who defends him from evil Communist thugs trying to recapture him, all the scenes in Russia have a blue/grey filter over them and the Soviet Union is portrayed as an oppressive hell where you have queue for toilet paper and all apartments are occupied by a dozen people. Much like Pursuit of Happyness Williamski is forced to take on a series of low paid jobs in which he is humiliated (including being a limo driver) which suck but that's portrayed as a good and character building thing. The film also ends with the bad guy - Williams' character's KGB nemesis - also having to defect because he was going to be killed for his incompetence, said bad guy becomes a hot dog vender and admits that Capitalism is awesome actually, Williamski gets a job as a saxophonist in a night club that looks like a place Patrick Bateman would murder someone in and everyone lived Reaganly ever after.
Tenet. It's a love-letter to intelligence agencies. There are threats beyond our comprehension and it's up to the actions of a few people in secret paramilitary groups to save us from them.
The Big Short. A motley crew of outsiders (investment bankers at major world banks) stumble upon the lack of regulation that leads to the world financial collapse of 2007. A scathing indictment of
capitalistscrony capitalists who didn't play by the rules and hurt immigrants trying to own a home. A snappy, witty jaunt along side the millionaires who got big sad after they shorted the housing market and made millions more. And one of them is really big sad because he offered money to his suicidal brother and it didn't work. But he made millions of shorting the market anyways so money isn't the answer except when it's not.A Few Good men because Sorkin wrote the watcher on the wall monologue as a good thing. All Sorkin movies. All of them. TV too.
The Big Short might be lib, but I still think it’s a good movie and worth watching. It takes a real life complex topic (2008 financial crises) and relatively accurately explains what happened using humor and a compelling story. It shows how such a fragile system was exploited and clearly states that it will happen again because nothing was done about it.
Oh hey look, there’s yet another bank failure in the news today
i found the big short to be radicalizing personally, but i was maybe the rare person primed to read into the whole thing.
100% agree. You can show it to people who have no interest in leftism and have them walk away with a better understanding of way capitalism sucks.
It’s literally that meme, “Margot Robbie and Ryan gosling are hot” going over the guys head and “capitalism sucks” going into his eyes lol
Tenet
Come to think of it, Inception is also lib as hell. The heroes are committing corporate espionage, mindjacking a mega-CEO to convince him to break up the monopoly that he inherited from his father (as though investors and other executives wouldn't all act in unison to prevent him from doing this).
A Few Good men because Sorkin wrote the watcher on the wall monologue as a good thing
The thing about Jessups orders must be obeyed at all times is Jessup didn't obey the order to end code reds
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
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
A dark, bleak story about the ultimate triumph of evil over reason and decency! (CW: Former Channel Awesome contributor)
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.
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.
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.
Literally the exact same with the exact same wording, about a year ago I think yeah
I remember being the first one to say Forest Gump on that thread lol, seems to be the popular answer in this one.
I think "Falling Down", as a movie, is pretty much the embodiment of scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds, so that will be my answer for this thread.
He is also extremely racist to the Korean shopkeepers if I remember correctly. The movie was even cancelled in South Korea.
Releasing a movie the year after the LA riots, and two years after the gulf war, where a disgruntled defence contractor in LA goes full on racist and smashes the store owned by a Korean shopkeeper is definitely something
It comes up every couple weeks. The answers are generally the same
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!
Worshipped Michael Jordan so much that Jordan in the movie never spoke once and was only shown in his back like they down want to affect his image?
