I replied to your points so as not to hijack this thread.
But even if you grant the movie is a good one (I don’t), for the purposes of this thread, it still hammers its point home with all the subtlety of a ten-ton brick.
Traffic (2000) - I think Topher Grace actually said something very like, “Don’t worry! We won’t get addicted. We’re better than them!” at some point. That entire movie was a complete piece of unsubtle shit.
The Life of David Gale = the death penalty’s bad, m’kay.
Given your misunderstanding of the movie’s point, I think it’s plenty subtle :).
I watched that once. The lesson I took away was that even when deliberately withholding evidence that might exonerate him, it is damn difficult to be sentenced to death, much less have the penalty imposed.
I found it to be an uplifting endorsement of our legal system.
I was just coming out of my Quaker/pacifist phase when I saw The Trial of Billy Jack, which remains the high-water mark–hell, the Hurricane Katrina–of mawkish “Message” movies.
Also, any Lifetime Network production–special mention to one called Cyber Seduction, which is like a modern Reefer Madness for Internet pornography.
Didn’t Kirk at some point say during this conversation something like: [alien home solar system]… isn’t that on the southern side of the galaxy?"
I’m willing to cut Star Trek: TOS a lot of slack considering the constraints of the time. Heck, even doing an unsubtle show about racism was pretty bold in the 1960s, and I’ve a special respect for A Private Little War, which analogized Vietnam (without specifically naming it) and rather than go for an easy cod-liver-oil “war is bad” message (as I’m sure TNG would have done) they frankly admitted that supporting a proxy war was better than letting genocide happen, which struck me as a bravely messy ending instead of a pat “good guys win”.
Atlas Shrugged. If Ayn Rand were still alive today, she’d be the quintessential Internet Arguer, building up her massive fortress of strawmen, happily knocking them over and setting them back up again and again, oblivious to arguments or information from outside.
Yeah, but I don’t think Rand was trying to be subtle, ya know?
One that got me thinking about starting a thread like this was Robert Sawyer’s Hominid/Neanderthal series of books. He should have saved a bunch of trees and just sent out a mass email saying:
… Men are bad, m’kay? Not women… men.
… So are cars.
… Oh, and religion is idiotic and likely caused by a defect in Homo Sapiens’ brain.
That last was literally the climax of the series. And when I say “literally” I mean “literally” - because of some Improbable Astronomical Event everybody in the world started having religious visions because of a defect in HS’s brains allowed for such a thing. This defect (and these visions) are apparently what started every major religion in the history of mankind.
Fortunately, the much-better-than-us Neanderthal society had developed a medical procedure to get rid of this anomaly. Yippee!