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.

  • pudcollarEnglish
    68·
    9 months ago

    Iron Man, with the DoD contractor CEO hero and the product placement.

    • dead [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      44·
      9 months ago

      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/