Been awhile since we’ve done this thread, and it’s always fun. Here are some of my picks:

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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)

post more.

  • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    Man of the Year

    Basically, Robin Williams plays charismatic host of the unDaily Shown’t – a presidential candidate agrees to go on his show and he wipes the floor with them. After that, people start pressuring him to run. He’s a late entry candidate and is only on the ballot in like 15 states - just enough to get enough points for the Electoral Collage – everyone expects him to be a spoiler candidate. An expression of disappointment with the establishment. But! On that second Wednesday in November, turns out he won enough states and took the EC victory. The movie looks like it’s going to be President Robin Williams antics as he thumbs his nose at congress, business, and the power players of american empire…

    …but it turns out he only won because the new computerized polling booths did a computer oopsy and awarded victory to candidates by the alphabetical order of their names rather than by vote totals. The rest of the film is now a shadowy business thriller following the intrepid investigator trying to figure out what happened, dodging attempts on their life from the company that made the booths. It ends with Robin Williams resigning after he learns of the error, with Time magazine giving him the titular title Man of the Year

    Apparently it’s written by the same guy who wrote Wag the Dog which was a good movie I actually liked.