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Pro-Liberty, Pro-Market Movies: Your Recommendations
On Tuesday, the Foundation for Economic Education posted a column about the Bollywood movie Guru. Interested by their claim that it was “The Best Pro-Market Film You’ve Never Seen,” I decided to give it a viewing. I was very pleased. Guru has some hurdles to clear, but its story is right out of a Rand novel.
After viewing the movie, I started to compile in my head a list of other pro-market, pro-liberty movies. I’m interested in what yours are as well. Maybe the list we compile can be used as a “Ricochet Recommended Viewing” list.
Here are the movies on my list (so far):
- The Atlas Shrugged Trilogy: Pt1, Pt2, Pt3
- Chuck Norris vs. Communism
- 1776
- The Lost City
- To Live
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
- Harry Potter: Pt5, Pt6, P7.1, P7.2
- Guru
- Comes a Bright Day
So, what are yours?
Published in Entertainment
Terry Gilliams Brazil. When I watched it I was worried he was making an unfounded attack on Thatcherism.
Turns out the movie is a scathing criticism of the Hollywood system and how its designed to drive filmmakers insane.
Pirate Radio. Rock and roll entreprenuers vs State Owned radio.
Last years the Giver. A society chooses stasis over freedom. I always wondered what happened to those people that they chose such a drastic step.
I noticed that too and was very pleased. It was like they were playing with the trope.
The best part of Big Hero 6, of course, was the Stan Lee cameo.
I wonder, has Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” been made into a movie yet?
This one looks interesting. Waylon Jennings did the music as well.
Moneyball.
The Verdict. Paul Newman.
Deals with one of the glories of English common law, the long suppressed and almost forgotten linchpin of freedom: “jury nullification” or “jury rights”.
You beat me to it. “This is the private sector. They expect results!”
“Downton Abbey” in some ways resembled “Fiddler on the Roof.” It presented the decline of tradition, and the youngest daughter ran off with a radical.
Of course, in “Downton Abbey” the radical became more conservative with time. Julian Fellowes is no liberal.
I have seen this film recommended numerous times. But it’s not available anywhere I can find. Help!
In the anti-Communist, pro-freedom category, I like Andy Garcia’s film about the Cuban revolution “The Lost City.” It manages sympathetically to portray why the revolution happened, as well as the damage it did.
surprised no one has mentioned Dallas Buyers Club
“Tongues Untied” and “Bitter Sugar” are in the same arena.
And now, someone has.
They run it occasionally on TCM.
I was looking for it on Amazon Prime and Netflix. Nix. But Kylez is right, TCM runs it several times a year.
When the Wall came down, the painfully obvious differences in living standards, housing, cars, etc. caused its own set of secondary collisions. “Wege im der Nacht” (Ways in the Night) was a spooky, interesting story about a former east German big shot who’s now a nobody, dreaming of being a street avenger of sorts.
“Hotel Rwanda”
Not only is the hero, Paul Rusesebagina, a successful businessman who uses his position, skills, and access to goods in order to save innocent people, but Sabena, an international corporation, does more to rescue people than the Un.
Hail Caesar, an allegory that uses the Hollywood system of the 1950s as a stand in for communism.
Exactly. And Joseph Stein was at least a fellow traveler, if not an open Communist.
That’s right. I remember that Hotel Rwanda made the UN out to be the bunch of louts that they actually are.
How about unintentionally conservative films? I would include in this every film that depects a collectivist set of villains- the Empire, the Alliance, the varations of the “artificial persons replacing living human beings” theme. Collectivism is always, always evil in film, with few exceptions.
I’m sure many would agree with you there, and I’m sure if Ricochet compiles a list from our suggestions, many such films would make it to that list.
For my own personal list, I shun the big franchise with the Empire theme simply because the story telling is so bad that I refuse to watch them. If forced to watch them, I would check to see if there was a “chew on this piece of tinfoil instead” opt-out.
It’s also one of the best movies ever made about government bureaucracy.
The Bicycle Thief (or as it is often styled now The Bicycle Thieves) is set in post-war Italy. It’s one of the most powerful films ever made and is at its heart, a story of a man trying to achieve freedom for himself and his family. It addresses issues of property rights and of the gathering storm of post-war Italian communism. A single individual, with his son beside him struggles against nameless, faceless collectivists to build a life of simple dignity. It won an Academy Award and you should watch it.
I’m always highly skeptical of biopics, and go out of my way to research the real story before seeing one. There isn’t much original reporting on Woodruff online, but I did find a few Dallas Morning News articles from when Woodruff was still alive.
That movie is ridiculously historically inaccurate.
He was never arrested. He was never sued. Rather than cracking down on him, FDA agents actually gave him advice. A huge majority of his customers were the children of Dallas’ wealthiest and most influential families, not street trash. They protected him.
Yes, he was “nervous” when crossing the border, but he was never actually ever STOPPED at the border. He was always waived right through because, at the time, it was not illegal to import these drugs into the United States.
Meanwhile, quite a lot of the “medicine” he was importing was dangerous-as-heck snake-oil. Like, for example, one of his “drugs the government won’t approve” was simply concentrated hydrogen peroxide. People should not drink bottles of concentrated hydrogen peroxide. At least one kid died from consuming Woodruff’s snake-oil.
I’m no apologist for the FDA, but Ron Woodruff was no Randian hero. He wasn’t even The Music Man. At least the Music Man’s instruments worked.
People have tried to put this information on the movie’s Wikipedia page. It keeps getting scrubbed by the activists.
I dunno ’bout that. Both the Empire and the Rebel Alliance seem pretty darned collectivist. The difference between them is that The Sith are Evil and The Jedi are Good.
The Emperor is like a leftist’s caricature of Pinochet or Batista, rather than a Lenin or Castro. The Rebel Alliance is like the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War.
Also, the jury’s still out on the governance structure of the New Republic. I’m not holding much hope they’ll be principled libertarians. I fear it’ll be more like the Communist utopia version of the UFP from Star Trek: TNG.
If you want sci-fi with conservative political themes, methinks you’ll have to stick with Demolition Man and Firefly/Serenity.
Ackshully, they’re very often good guys, either serving humanity happily (Star Wars, Aliens) or simply fighting for their rights to self-determination (Blade Runner. I, Robot. A.I. The Animatrix. Star Trek.)
Skynet and HAL are anomalies.
a) The United Federation of Planets is a huge and glaring exception.
b) Free market individualism is also almost always evil in film, with few exceptions. e.g. Blade Runner, Alien, Avatar, etc, demonize capitalism.
The Jedi aren’t even good, really. They’re their version of good, which includes both arrogance and hippy nonsense. Every time Yoda busted into another neo-hippy lecture, I’d go “someone slap the frog”. The Sith may have been evil, but truly, the Jedi deserved to get their rears kicked. They were stupid, incompetent, and vacuous. And they mirrored the old republic perfectly. Better the Klingons beat them both up.
Roddenberry’s Sweden in Space shtick is why I simply couldn’t enjoy it anymore.
Yep. Corporations are a stock sci-fi villain. Even when they’re doing something that seems good at first, like inventing new food sources to fight starvation, there’s always an evil angle (see: Soilent Green).
a) Even Swedes are allowed to own their own stuff. Privately-owned spacecraft are virtually non-existent in the TNG-era UFP. If you wanna go somewhere, you’d better have good contacts within Starfleet.
b) Surely you started watching again after he passed away? The politics became way more nuanced after that, especially once Ron Moore joined the writing staff.