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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Ghostbusters. A group of academic frauds are finally jettisoned by their university when they can no longer hide their fraud. When they go into private business they’re angered that they actually have to follow safety and pollution rules. The older I get the more I hate that movie.
Also idk if it’s just me but I watched it recently with my wife who hadn’t seen it before and she found it very sexist and creepy which of course I completely missed as a kid. Especially Bill Murrays character.
that’s how a lot of these raunchy 80s comedies were with Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and the like. I remember liking Spies Like Us as a kid, and upon re-watching it’s basically 2 hours of Chevy Chase sexually harassing every woman he comes in contact with and getting rewarded for it.
The overall plot is pretty good though, American CIA psychos launching a nuke on themselves to test Star Wars and start a war with the Soviets is a pretty redpilled plotline. Very weird ending though where the Soviets and the American spies divert the missile after Star Wars fails and the CIA/military guys get arrested for their treasonous plot and the Soviets and Americans become friends and play games together. Very optimistic but not very realistic I’m afraid, nobody would arrest the perpetrators and nobody would be friendly to the Soviets
Hell, 90’s too
I forgot how bad it was in The Mask, and that came out in 94
Definitely true and it annoys the shit out of me that if you point any of this out to people who like these movies and view them through a very nostalgic lense, they get so defensive and angry. Like you can still enjoy something and critique it or realise it has problematic elements without it questioning your entire moral fabric. Like talking to toddlers I swear.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve watched them
Can you explain your bit about sexual harassment?
Absolutely agreed, the three white main characters are all awful. The only decent characters are the “villain” who’s trying to make sure these three psychopathic sex-pest frauds aren’t going to lay ecological waste to the city, and some hirees who are down on their luck and only work for those three frauds to pay the bills.
I honestly can’t think of a single Bill Murray role that’s aged well. Maybe his role in Ed Wood but even that’s a stretch.
Yeah, I’ve never understood the love for Bill Murray. Feel like I was always been gaslit about how funny he was so I just thought I didn’t get it.
Life Aquatic still rules
Forrest Gump pisses me off
Iron Man, with the DoD contractor CEO hero and the product placement.
The Iron Man 1&2 movies were funded by the USDoD after all. Most Hollywood movies that have military equipment or military bases in them are funded by the USDoD. The USDoD gives studios access to military equipment and military bases in exchange for allowing the USDoD to have creative control over the film.
In this short video the role of the DOD in making Iron Man more visually spectacular is referred to by the Air Force Entertainment Liaison Project Officer Capt. Bryon McGarry, who talks of their aircraft as ‘production value’. One of the producers Jeremy Latcham spoke of how impressed he was by the sheer amount of military hardware in some shots, estimating it was worth ‘a billion and a half dollars’. These comments suggest that the DOD knows that it has the ability to add extra production value to movies that no one else can provide, and thus it places them in a position not just to influence scripts, but to influence which movies become the biggest blockbuster hits. Thus they have some control not just over individual films but over the shape of the entire Hollywood industry.
https://www.spyculture.com/pentagon-production-assistance-agreements-iron-man-12/
Their totalitarian militarist propaganda, our production assistance agreements
It makes sense if you think about it.
Tony Stark decides to stop being a weapons manufacturer only to develop a murder suit and blow up a bunch of primitive brown people a few scenes later.
Scary Talibamas using human shields
Forest Gump for sure. I say it every time this topic comes up.
It’s weird how everyone seems to like this movie even though it is so bad
I like Matt Christman’s theory: Forrest was lying folks, he was literally just making shit up on that dumb bench to fuck with people. (this theory will also get people very angry for some reason)
Criticizing liberals’ soothing thought-terminating treats is a cardinal sin
Thought that was Stavs theory.
Does make everything that happens after he leaves the bench kinda weird though.
Stav was more just confused that he ran across the country without stopping.
Yeah but he was specifically asking if forest was an unreliable narrator or not, cuz Stav can’t buy that a person could run a lot.
He thought that the film must be magic for that to happen. Which ngl I don’t disagree with his all or nothing stance with magic in film.
The funny thing is I think his question was totally reasonable, he just worded it in the dumbest way possible
90s nostalgia is a powerful thing. The movie should be dunked on based on them creating an awful seafood chain alone.
That existed prior to the movie
Bubba Gump Shrimp Co did not exist prior to Forrest Gump lmao
I mean it can a well made movie even if the message is bad and encased in liberalism. Same with the Will Smith flim mentioned in the original post.
Though it’s been a long time since I watched either, so I can’t give an accurate judgement on why these movies are well liked despite the end messages being bad. Maybe people are just trapped in liberalism and therefore relate to it? That’s all I’ve got for now.
idk i’m not even talking about the message of it, it’s just so fucking lazy. 2.5 hours of “member this” and referencing historical events with Forrest inserted on the sideline, with nothing really connecting each dot. Like they didn’t even try to come up with a plot or an antagonist or any type of stakes to care about the meandering random unconnected bullshit
there is absolutely a plot. the emotional core of the movie is Forrest’s unconditional, unfaltering love for Jenny in the face of her pain and self destruction. Not that that plot is without its problems, but more than the nostalgia bait, it’s what makes the movie watchable.
Jenny isn’t in 90% of the movie, only the opening and ending. She’s barely even a character
That’s also not true she is sprinkled in through the movie. That being said she’s basically used as a prop to demonize the entire counter culture of the era and she ends up dying because of it. She’s like the boomer cautionary tale personified.
Forest Gump wasn’t the least enjoyable thing to watch. Pursuit of Happiness had way too many brain worms to ignore though.
My Jr High principle sent out a newsletter to parents telling them to watch it
The only bad guy was the anti-war protestor.
Someone should make a movie about the Ukrainian nazi that was celebrated in the Canadian parliament, but he should be presented as a Forest Gump character that just happens to be at all of the worst events of the holocaust and has absolutely no understanding of what’s happening.
I think its fair to say that it has a lot of impressive technical work and good acting (I’m a sucker for movies that blend practical and computer generated effects well), but I always found the message to be liberalism.
I take it as, you can succeed at anything no matter how difficult if you’re just a good person and simply being an American gives you the opportunities to do this. If you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and didn’t deserve it or didnt work hard enough. Pretty terrible message if you ask me
This was the first movie i thought of too.
The National Treasure movies spend all their runtime mythologizing slave-owning libertarians who stole treasure from various groups of non-white people.
Take me to the gulag for loving those stupid movies. I accept my fate.
AirBud. “There’s nothing in the rules that says a dog can’t play basketball” has to be the total summation of liberal ideology.
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.
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
Not good enough. Lin needs to be personally erased.
everyone in that movie talks as if they are reciting from a middle-school history textbook.
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.
Anastasia is such a a piece of shit propaganda movie but Once Upon a December is a good song.
In the Dark of the Night goes pretty hard as well
i’m surprised nobody wanted to score cheap points by beating the dead horse and say harry potter.
I’m gonna say zombieland
shaun of the dead is so much better than zombieland, it’s much funnier and also much scarier. they took zombies seriously at least, they are basically a punchline in zombieland
British people are just funnier than Americans.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) as an example of ur-liberalism. A literal boy scout troop leader becomes a Senator basically through random chance and then overcomes corruption in Washington by sheer individual grit and goodness.
The Iron Man movies, especially Iron Man 2.
The new Obama-produced movie (Leave the World Behind).
The new Obama-produced movie (Leave the World Behind).
Oh shit haven’t heard of this.There is no way that title plus Obama as producer does not equal pure ideology
It’s so bad, but after suffering through it for my family I gotta say that the ending is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen (not intentionally).
It tries so hard to be a “slow burn horror that’s scary because it’s a plausible future”, but it’s literally just suburban invasion fantasy #2,000, except the evil other is completely faceless and vague so the audience can easily interject whatever boogyman is currently in the news, be it Russia or China or dprk or Hamas (or aliens!?!). Entirely blind to class relations, in fact there’s not a single real working class person in the movie, they’re all PMC or landlords. Unexamined bourgeois realism
Ethan Hawk’s character getting mocked for being an old hwhite guy is funny tho
I think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington would have been a way better movie if it ended with nothing happening. Imagine if Smith just collapsed and that was the end of the film.
The Iron Man movies, especially Iron Man 2
It’s funny. With Iron Man 2, I was rooting for the villain, Vanko. But he had to get personal, so his character got dumb near the end, when all he had to do was just
especially after he gave the “blood in the water” monologue to the Irony Mang.Of course, I also hate IM2 for that damn
cameo (altho he did get roasted supposedly).
That one you really liked when you where younger
Jokes on you, I watched small soldiers until the tape wore out and that movie’s whole message is centered around how the military industrial complex brings fascism home to roost
I also had the CD and listened to it on repeat.Thank you for reminding me. I can’t believe I was listening to bone thugs 'n harmony when I was like 5.
My brother was given a wreckx-n-effect tape for his 6th birthday by a family friend and I attribute this as a key event in the radicalization of me and my siblings, rap brings the truth to the people
Lmao, nice! Welcome!
Small soldiers was so good. It’s probably bad now since I haven’t seen it since I was young, but I remember it being sick as fuck.
No its still good. Give it a watch, you won’t regret it.
Also the cast is great. This movie and Howls moving castle were almost made at the same time with Phil Hartman and Kirsten Dunst and they were the last things Phil Hartman did before his death IIRC.
Plus you have David Cross as one of the toy designers and Denis Leary as the mega-capitalist.
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.
Gothel also looks Jewish/Moroccan, adding to her being a witch is something.
The way pop culture handles immortality generally skeeves me out. Like okay, if you’re immortality relies on drinking the blood of poor people then you’re evil, but for some reason tons and tons of stories will have a person be immortal for totally innocuous reasons and then make them out to be bad because of it.
It must be judeochristian trappings where immortality is a feature of God and to achieve or seek it is an affront to his divinity. Our place as mortals is to live and die according to the grand design.
Versus adventure stories with roots in eastern religion where if you train and meditate really hard you can just gain superhuman powers and immortality and it’s actually based
Les Miserables (2012) was pretty damn bad and pissed me off for being lib before I even knew why, but upon reflection its because it fetishizes defeat and idealism and made the revolutionaries really unsympathetic and naive. It’s actually a really good encapsulation of Western Radlib ideology and underdog fetishization
Victor Hugo could never escape that mindset himself. He could only bothsides the Commune when it came about
Transformers by Michael Bay was just a giant US military advertisement
That’s a factual statement considering the US Department of Defence is involved in the funding of many Hollywood movies.
The first 3 transformers movies were partly funded by the USDoD.
https://www.spyculture.com/pentagon-production-assistance-agreements-transformers/
I love this reading of the Michael Bay transformers where the Decepticons are unironically the good guys trying to snuff out the fascist autobots who destroyed their home and wish to do the same to the whole galaxy, its a fairly compelling argument as presented by this video, which is hilarious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVVSl9wtToc
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
lol, i love that video. i like that i can’t tell if it’s a credible take (i.e., that Bay’s intentions align with the videos conclusions). i remember loving the first two transformers movies when i was younger. i maybe saw the third one, but i definitely haven’t seen the fourth and fifth(?) - i don’t even know how many there are.
when the big combo robot had testicles and the racist robots showed up that was the one where young me was like, what the fuck am I looking at
If I remember right the DoD censored a line from the first Transformers about a troop committing suicide
read National Security Cinema by Alford & Secker
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 haven’t read the book, but I can’t imagine that’s what Atwood came up with
Season 1 is pretty much the book. But the book is more a warning of what could be and a character piece about a woman surviving those horrors
The show unfortunately became the rallying cry for the pussyhats. Atwood was involved in the writing, so just because she’s an accurate prognosticator of human culture, without a material understanding of the world, she has no satisfactory answers
accurate prognosticator of human culture, without a material understanding of the world
That’s the Canadian literary scene in a nutshell.
God, I knew that show was going to suck.
So glad I bailed on it early. People would give you shit for not liking it.
