You’ve Got Mail: When a man stalks you online while driving your business into the ground, it’s cute.
Sleepless In Seattle: When a woman stalks a heart-broken widower and misleads her generous and caring fiance because he has allergies, it’s cute.
When Harry Met Sally: When a demanding, obsessive woman and a hyper-critical man who compulsively engages in casual sex with random women enter into a passive-aggressive relationship, it’s cute.
Pretty Woman: If you’re a whore, you should get offended when someone calls you a whore. Also, a rich businessman while drive up in a Lotus Esprit Turbo one day, if you know how to drive a manual shift and how to get back to his hotel, he’ll make you his princess.
Cocktail: If you are a young, hot-headed punk with no education or skills, you should get a girl pregnant and open a bar.
Top Gun: If you are a young, hot-headed pilot you should strip down to your underwear and play volleyball with a bunch of sweaty men.
Pretty In Pink: You should cut up your friend’s vintage dress and make a sack out of it in order to attract the rich kid with no backbone and a bunch of snotty friends that don’t like you.
Sixteen Candles: You should trade your passed-out girlfriend to another guy to do with as he will so you can get the previously mentioned girl.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: The way to make friends and be held in high esteem is to schmooze people and help them cheat at their classes.
Batman - If tragedy strikes you in childhood, don’t attempt to heal or seek any kind of therapy. Hang onto the pain for the rest of your life and become an obsessed vigilante.
Maltese Falcon - By slapping people around and lying to everyone you meet, you can get to the bottom of a ridiculously-convoluted mystery
A Time to Kill: “Black people (but not white people) have a right to commit vigilante-style murder and get away scot-free, because The System is so hopelessly racist that a black man can’t get justice any other way… even though the town has a black sheriff… and the all-white jury acquits the black vigilante… which means that a black man CAN get justice, which means he ahd no business committing murder… man, this is confusing.”
Tinkerbell: Don’t try to change who you are, always go with what you are labeled as.
Honestly, Tinkerbell comes to this land as a regular fairy. She has to choose what her power will be. Actually, the choices are put in front of her, and they chose her. She is labeled a Tinker fairy. She doesn’t want to be a tinker, she strives for more throughout the whole movie, each time she fails she’s told not to try and change, she’s a tinker, it’s who she is. At the end, she accepts her role as a tinker.
This, to me, is worse then not trying to change who you are. She was arbitrarily labeled as a tinker and was told not to try and change it. That’s a great way to teach kids to grow up as…snob, trailer trash, jock, geek, moron, ‘wigger’ and never try to break out of the mold.
If you’re a man and have an affair, you’re a complete asshole. But if you’re a woman, and your husband is a good, yet boring man, who is off taking the rest of the family to a wholesome state fair, it’s acceptable, no, romantic and heartwarming, to screw the hell out of some out of town dude and contemplate running off on your kids and husband.
I just read the wiki plot summary. yeesh, remind me never to watch it. I think the movie had a good message, though: If you’re not an abusive asshole you shouldn’t be friends with one :-P.
I was going to say Love Actually, which is a collection of extreme romance stories. Perhaps the reason actors and actresses have such drama filled romances is the bad example set by their own movies.
Seriously! THIS!!! I HATE this movie because this is ultimately the message and I don’t understand why it’s so acclaimed. Sure it’s kinda cute and funny but C’MON!
I haven’t seen it but it doesn’t look like her daughter’s argument is that it’s about owing anything to feminism. More that having a baby at Maude’s stage of life probably isn’t a great idea. I’m sure she’d have said the same thing to a guy of that age who was considering having a child.
Given the ten thousand movies and television shows in which nobody even brings up the possibility of abortion in a bad situation - talk about worst lessons and wrong messages - Carol’s advice is some of the best stuff ever.
Or the situations where the person clearly wants to not be pregnant, but instead of abortion, a miscarriage is conveniently written in. Because women who miscarry are unfortunate paragons of virtue but women who choose to abort are evil harpies.
Forrest Gump sends a clear message – and a very, very pernicious message when you think about it – that virtue is more important than intelligence, not on any abstract scale of values but in terms of achieving material success. Forrest Gump gets rich just because he always does the right thing and does what he’s told and works hard and deserves it and has God on his side (which obviously is why his is the only shrimping boat spared by the hurricane), while all around him more intelligent persons destroy their own lives and others’ by running after kicks and causes. The latter part of that is plausible, but not the former. Real-life Forrest Gumps never get rich save through connections or inheritance.
Shrek seems more like “Even persons who are not conventionally beautiful can find love, and they needn’t pretend to be other than what they are to do so.”
