Films with a really shoddy Agenda

I recently had the misfortune to watch Big Jim McLean of late - McCarthy / Unamerican Activities era John Wayne getting the boot into commies in Hawaii ( of all places ) to defend the US against the creeping red menace

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Jim_McLain

Proper rubbish, but maybe a bit LOL at the OTT rhetoric nowadays

yours ?

ACAB - pro-fascist crap as family drama.

Anti-science stuff in Independence Day

Fatal Attraction: Misogynistic pro-family values propaganda.

A good antidode was the low budget thriller The Stepfather from the same year, which satirised the Reagnite pro-family values propaganda which Fatal Attraction endorsed.

Hero - Dictators are great, if we didn't have them there would just be chaos.

I guess there's all the obvious ones like Birth of a Nation, Triumph of Will etc

I remember that, or rather the beginning, when his family are massacred in the living room, while he calmly gets ready for work.

Bruce Almighty went uncomfortably preachy at the end. Didn't sit well with the rest of the film, being a silly, fun comedy.

Juno : pregnant? in high school? by a lanky child not ready for adult responsibility in any way?
Clearly, what you need to do is carry the foetus to term and then give it up for adoption. Your loving parents and quickfire witticisms will make it all pass in a flash.

Is that definitely the theme of Hero? I thought it was a bit more complicated than that.

As well as Hero:

Gladiator - fascist propaganda
300 - fascist propaganda
I have my suspicions about The Dark Knight Rises, too...

Twilight

Virtually any cowboy film.

What Rubbish

I can think off the top of my head a good number of westerns which have the opposite.

Green Berets, another John Wayne number

Indeed, in amongst the huge number that don't.

Forrest Gump,sorry Tom but life isn't like a fucking box of chocolates

If there's such large number you on't have any problems naming some then.

I'll admit that there are plenty of westerns which are very much of there time when it comes to things like racism or sexism etc but I can't actually think of many (none off the top of my head) that have a dodgy agenda.

EDIT: I suppose you could call the agenda behind Rio Bravo shoddy but I'd argue that the end film actually has quite a "socialist" (in the widest sense of the word) theme to it with the whole town joining forces to defeat the bad guys.

You generally agree that the indigenous american indian population should have their land stolen from them and should be pushed into reservations, and shot when they resist then?

Re the OP On The Waterfront is another obvious example.

Sorry that was the agenda behind which western? Anyway your claim wasn't that there was some western that have a shoddy agenda but that virtually all of them do.

And for examples of westerns which attempted (however flawed) to try and give a sympathetic portrayal to Native Americans
Dances With Wolves
The Searchers
Broken Lance
Devil's Doorway
Dakota Incident

A lot of famous Westerns don't even feature Native American characters or a conflict with them and by the 1950s Westerns featured sympathetic Native American characters and were more likely to have a liberal agenda which was critical of the treatment of Native Americans.

Sucker Punch didn't sit comfortably with me although I am not sure why. Apart from it being pretty awful that is...

@ Reno. Fair play - against those I'll set the huge number of 1940s/50s films with the cavalry as saviours and indians as beasts to be civilized or preferably shot.

Aren't the 'liberal' films still mostly taken from the white man's point of view? That they have the right to be there, to have taken the land in the way they did.

What happened was genocide and theft of native american land by force and by treaties that the americans went back on. Brushing what actually happened under the carpet - I'd say that was a shoddy agenda.

I'll dig out a few if you like but surely you must admit that there were loads of them, greatly outnumbering the 'liberal agenda' ones.

Not when you take into account the entirety of film history. From the 50s onwards there were a lot of Westerns with slant that was very critical of the US, something that peaked in the 70s when there were a lot of westerns with a counter culture attitude. Sure there were dodgy Westerns, especially in the 30s and 40s, but then there is more than 6 decades of Westerns after that. To say that almost all had a "shoddy agenda" just makes me think that you haven't actually watched that many Westerns.

Shitloads of them, ta. And yes, I was mainly thinking of the b&w ones of the 30s/40s/50s which I've thought of as the heydays when they churned them out in their dozens.

I still doubt that many of the later ones put the native american side. Most I'd say had the assumption if nothing else that the indians as a whole should be on the reservations, and glossed over the genocide and wholescale theft of land.

Sounds about right.It pays to be a winner after all.All those natural resources and didn't come up with a decent gun.

The Matrix

Vanguardist nonsense with religious overtones.

Just because a Western isn't high minded enough to put across the Native American side, doesn't in itself make it a dodgy film. How are famous westerns like High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma or McCabe and Mrs Miller dodgy ? Just because they aren't told from the POV of Native Americans ? The stories of those films have nothing to do with them.

I just gave you a bunch of examples (four from the 50s) who's agenda is sympathetic to the native americans (even if some of the content is pretty terrible from todays POV - i.e. white actors "redding up")

American Beauty: There's more to life than money, maaaaan. Look at the plastic bag carefully. It's symbolic meaning is that the scriptwriter has robbed you and is metaphorically tossing himself off in your face while laughing hysterically. To the bank.