Film / Do Not Do This Cool Thing

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Films — War

As these examples should demonstrate, Truffaut's assertion that there are no anti-war films seems to be right.

Afghan Breakdown — Афганский Излом (Afganskij Izlom) is called by veterans possibly the most realistic and accurate film about the Soviet War in Afghanistan. The film manages to gets its message across by not trying to play up anything for propaganda purposes, rather focusing heavily on the reality of what went on in the closing days of the Afghan War. It makes the point quite well, but audiences are prone to liking the sergeant, who is a bully, but also handsome and badass, and deals swiftly with insurgents. Major Bandura is also too cool and too competent of a leader to be unlikable. Still the final battle with the aerial bombardment of a village is one of the most brutal sequences in war cinema. No soundtrack plays. It's just showing a village get pounded continuously time and again by helicopters as everything is being destroyed and everyone therein killed. And, yes, it makes sure to demonstrate that many of the people killed in the village are just unlucky noncombatants.
Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola tried to make an anti-war movie, but the best-remembered scenes of the film are Colonel Kilgore's cavalry carpet bombing a village to the rousing tunes of "Ride of the Valkyries," then strutting around and giving a badass speech about loving the smell of napalm. Kick ass! The scenes are often quoted and imitated without irony by soldiers.
Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One was apparently an aversion according to the director. He boasted that during an army screening, generals complained that the movie had "no recruiting potential". Fuller, a real-life war veteran, was quite skeptical of people joining the army thinking it looks cool in the movies.
Das Boot: The author of the novel complained that the movie, grim as it was, undermined his anti-war perspective by being too engaging (probably because of the Klaus Doldinger soundtrack and expressive acting). This is one of the tiny handful of examples where the fans disagree with the author, as Das Boot is generally considered to be one of the more horrific depictions of naval warfare ever committed to film.
The Dirty Dozen is an even more extreme example than The Guns of Navarone. Casual viewers treat it as a straightforward tough guy action flick with rowdy but lovable prisoners killing loads of Nazis. Never mind that the criminals are mostly violent offenders (including murderers and rapists), or that they're mass murdering vacationing German generals, along with women, which point up a much more subversive intent.
Downfall depicts Hitler as a broken, delusional madman. Other top Nazis are just as bad. The war effort is denounced as a pointless waste, as untrained conscripts are being sent to die in a clearly hopeless struggle. Nevertheless, many neo-Nazis praised the film for depicting Hitler in a positive light, and for showing the tenacity and loyalty of the German people. This is counter-acted by the Memetic Mutation of gag-subtitling the "Hitler Breaks Down" scene, turning him once again into a figure of mockery by making it seem like he's losing his mind over the price of the PlayStation 3 or the latest Game of Thrones episode.
- Actor Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in the film, mentions in an interview that when a German kid asked Ganz for his autograph as Hitler, the kid went up and down the street waving the autograph in his hands, and shouting that he had finally gotten "Hitler's" autograph.
Dr. Strangelove has a strong anti-war, anti-military message... but the scenes of Major Kong and his bomber crew are pure awesome. SAC crews (that is, people who fly bombers) were some of the biggest fans of the movie. The way you're sort-of rooting for Kong and his crew, even though the completion of their mission would mean the end of the world, is actually neatly summed up by the film itself in this scene.
Dunkirk seems like a deliberate effort to avert this trope by avoiding the cliches of most war movies in every way possible: unlike most WWII films (and war films in general), we never even see a single German outside of the faceless airplanes bombing the beach until a single shot at the very end, and except for Farrier, not a single character manages to land a shot on any enemy unit whatsoever. In fact, of the two major character deaths in the film, neither actually gets directly killed by the enemy, both dying in intentionally undramatic fashion, one suffering a Death by Falling Over and the other drowning in a sinking ship. Adding to this is the fact that the film centers around a military defeat for the Allies, and most of the soldiers don't care about anything except getting away alive - the most traditionally "heroic" characters are the civilian boatmen coming to the soldiers' aid. The result is less of a traditional war movie and more of a nerve-shredding exercise in tension that reviewers have compared to a suspense thriller or even a horror film.
- That being said, the movie does have some very exhilarating sequences, especially during the Old-School Dogfight , and ends in a rather rousing note as the characters read Churchill’s famous speech calling the British population (and the world) to join the fight against Nazi Germany, making this film to fall more in line with the trope.
Fahrenheit 9/11 manages to actually deconstruct this, if only in passing. In the short clip of US soldiers talking about the music they invade Iraq to, they mention "Fire Water Burn" which then becomes the background music played over clips of rioting people and politicians speaking that they will not surrender. There is also a brief interview with another soldier who says that real war is much less exciting than video games. In this film, War Is Hell in general - it is portrayed mostly by clips of injured civilians and soldiers, street riots and news reports, ironically contrasted with politicians' speeches.
Full Metal Jacket drove director Stanley Kubrick crazy because of this trope. He wanted to make his idea of an objective anti-war film. He got viewers enjoying things like the helicopter door gunner shooting civilians. However, unlike the other war films on this page, the film's battle scenes don't get too elaborate, but rather, this trope comes into play because of the attitudes of the characters; they're quite positive for a war movie, especially for a Vietnam one. The door gunner is shown shooting civilians and clearly enjoying it, which is supposed to be horrible, yet because he's enjoying it and making funny comments about it^note"How can you shoot women and children?" "Easy. You just don't lead 'em so much.", the audience ends up enjoying it as well. Additionally, none of the Marines in the film are ever really shown lamenting the fact that they're at war or in Vietnam. Even when characters are killed, not too much drama is made of their deaths, such as when Cowboy's squad is shown standing over the body of two killed Marines, and Cowboy just comments on how one of them was a chronic masturbator. Joker responds to being informed about the severity of the Tet Offensive with a humorous comment. Rafterman laments being stuck in the rear and wants to see combat and is incredibly happy when he gets his first kill.
- This trope also applies to the boot camp segment of the film as well as the Vietnam segment. It's intended to show how people have to become dehumanized in order to be effectively trained for war, and in the case of Leonard, is so bad he ends up going insane and committing a Murder-Suicide. Despite this, the film is hugely popular among the US military largely because of the badass Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
- For that matter, the popularity of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is an example of this - he's become such an iconic character that pretty much every single Drill Sergeant Nasty in fiction since has been based on him (95% of them even being played by the original actor), despite the fact that getting shot and killed by one of his own recruits, who he continued verbally abusing despite the loaded rifle in said recruit's hands, means he's a demonstrable failure of a drill instructor.
The Guns of Navarone, written by leftist screenwriter Carl Foreman, is clearly intended (in its film incarnation anyway) as an anti-war movie. Hence David Niven's many speeches about the futility of war and Gregory Peck's callous actions as team leader, or the scenes of Navarone's civilians being subjected to brutal reprisals. Balance that however with lots of exciting action, a cast of near-indestructible heroes overcoming impossible odds, villainous Nazis and the message gets lost.
Inglourious Basterds lampshades this in a subtle, creepy way: there is a scene where Germans are watching a Nazi propaganda movie about a German sniper who killed massive numbers of Allied troops while behind enemy lines. They are laughing and enjoying themselves watching people from our side get slaughtered, while you're laughing and enjoying yourself watching people from their side get slaughtered. Similar to the helicopter door gunner example above, some audiences even laughed and hooted while the allies were being slaughtered. Laughter, she is an infectious drug, is she not? And the funniest part is that both reactions were probably predicted and intended.
Jarhead also lampshades this trope. It's largely about that and the mindset of the Marines (such as author Anthony Swofford) stoked up and eager to lose their battlefield virginity with a kill. When they hear that they're about to be sent to the Persian Gulf, they rent a load of war movies to watch the cool battle scenes, including Apocalypse Now, where the irony of liking anti-war movies for the violence is explicitly pointed out and reveled in. In a Double Subversion, this was misinterpreted by audiences, who cheered along with the Marines. Additionally, the film ends with none of the main characters killing any enemies in the war, which they are extremely disappointed about. In the book Swofford points out how "It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are anti-war. The actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not."
At the time Platoon came out, Roger Ebert opened his print review by mentioning the Truffaut quote and adding that "If Truffaut had lived to see Platoon, the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion." Since this film has encouraged people to recruit, apparently not.
Saving Private Ryan falls victim to this trope, partly because of Misaimed Fandom who have no personal war experience watching the visceral first 30 minutes for the violence, but also because of the increasingly melodramatic last half of the film, where the Naïve Newcomer Desk Jockey temporarily freezes up, only to kill the assailant later, and the main characters sacrifice themselves one after another in Rambo-like fashion to rescue one man. In this case, while the film is clearly anti-war, it does also try to encourage the viewer to understand and respect the soldiers who died during the war, but it goes a bit too far and falls into this instead.
Small Soldiers is supposed to be anti-war and anti-violence, and a satire of the normalization of marketing both to kids. But the Commando Elite, who are supposed to be the villains, are by far the most remembered part of the movie for the sheer Evil Is Cool factor, and they got a real-life toyline marketed towards kids. It's a strange case of life imitating art, as in the film itself the Commando Elite are marketed towards kids as the good guys.
Starship Troopers: An intentional example on director Paul Verhoeven's part. He wanted to make it seem awesome, badass and alluring on first glance, but to be horrible when one starts to actually thinks about it. The film is anti-war/anti-militarist, intended to be a parody of the fascist elements in our society, but many viewers couldn't see past all the cool bug killing scenes (or the co-ed shower scene). Even for the viewers who are paying attention, the message is further hampered by Poe's Law. There are obvious spoofs of the Federation propaganda, but the rest of the movie is easy to take seriously because it suggests that the Show Within a Show is understating the Federation's case. And ultimately, the implications that the government of the film is Fascist, but Inefficient are left to implication and Fridge Logic, the protagonists never question or fight against the system, and they're presented as achieving victory at the end.

Considering the book's portrayal of the Federation, it's unsurprising. Heinlein intended the book to portray the positives of civic duty, necessities of war and capital punishment, etc. This led Heinlein to be accused of fascism, among other things. The movie's creators decided to remake it as a Take That! against militarism and fascism, but by even superficially sticking to the book, they made the 'evil, fascist government' look awesome. Even at the end of the sequel, when a recruiter jokes about a newborn male infant as being "new meat for the grinder." Most sequels and followups to the film just play the whole thing straight.

There are at least two war films (both, so far, thankfully Speculative Fiction as well) that have managed to avert the trope to some extent. The Day After and Threads, both films about nuclear war, having managed to severely avert the trope to the extent that they actually encouraged Real Life nuclear policymakers to rethink whether a nuclear war was survivable. Come and See is a likely third example, being about the horrors of war as opposed to the glory of it, featuring little in the way of dramatic battle scenes. Paths of Glory is another contender for averting this trope, focusing on the injustice and dehumanization intrinsic to the institution of military command.

Films — Gangster

History has demonstrated time and time again that this trope could easily be called "Mobsters Love Mob Movies". Interestingly, attempts at averting this trope were actually enforced in Hollywood cinema for a long time due to The Hays Code, which stipulated that films could not depict criminals profiting from their crimes. Hence the "rise-and-fall" narrative in gangster cinema, which is such a fundamental trope of the genre that it persisted long after the Hays Code was abolished. Not that it stopped this trope from coming into play.

Angels with Dirty Faces has this happen In-Universe. The lead gangster and one of the two main characters, Rocky Sullivan, steals the show and makes being a 1930s-era gangster look awesome, and the other main character is trying to get him to stop making impressionable kids look up to him. But even during Rocky's few (mostly halfhearted) attempts at this, the kids all still think he's cool and want to be like him.
Colors: While it was meant to show the ugly reality of gang life and hopefully discourage people from emulating it, the movie had the exact opposite effect on some viewers who were intrigued and fascinated by the gangsters and their unique aesthetic and bravado.
Contraband (2012): Some critics complained that this Mark Wahlberg film promoted this message as the protagonist and his family end up with a better life at the end as a result of his criminal activities, even though he was trying to resist going back to crime in the beginning.
The Godfather, as stylized and operatic as it was, was meant to be about the horrors of the mob. Instead, it kicked off a new generation of fascination with organized crime and even inspired actual mobsters to model themselves after it. It doesn't help that the movies set up a contrast between Michael Corleone, who attempts to be a Family-Values Villain but tears his family apart in the process, with his father who pulled off the same thing relatively successfully; while this is probably intended to show the temporary and unstable nature of success earned through criminal means, a lot of viewers come away interpreting the message instead as "if you're going to become a mafia don, make sure you're really good at it first".
Goodfellas portrays the thrill of being a gangster through the first half, but the thrill turns sour over the course of the second half, as Henry Hill becomes a strung-out junkie with a wrecked marriage and friends who are either murdered or want to kill him. The trope is pretty much lampshaded at the end, where in spite of it all, Hill still pines for his glory days as a gangster. The film was based on Hill's memoirs.
- Martin Scorsese has caught flak for this on a few different films, including Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street (discussed below) — the ultimate moral of these films is "crime doesn't pay," or something similar, but mostly what people remember is the cool long take of Henry and Karen entering The Copacabana. It's a criticism he rejects, because he doesn't agree with the concept of things being too cool or not, since he feels that Viewers Are Geniuses and that having a movie tell the audience what's good or wrong is the worst idea of getting a point across. He notes that human beings are complex enough to do things without having to see it in a movie.
Johnny Dangerously a gangster movie parody, pokes fun at this with a deliberate Broken Aesop. The title character uses his life story to convince a young thief that "crime doesn't pay"... and then has him hop in his expensive car with his beautiful gangster's moll wife and confess to the audience "OK, maybe it pays a little."
New Jack City: Being a drug lord is clearly not an admirable goal to attain, but damn it do Nino and his CMB gang make it look cool with all of the money, power, and respect they possess.
The trope goes back to the trio of films from The '30s that launched the genre.
- Little Caesar attempts to show that hard, honest work will lead to success whilst crime does not pay. It makes the gangster cooler, more interesting, and more important than his strait-laced best friend.
- The Public Enemy (1931), which helped establish the gangster film genre, opens with a title card explicitly stating that the studio did not seek to "glorify the hoodlum or criminal". It makes the gangster cooler, more interesting, and more important than his strait-laced brother.
- Scarface (1932) didn't give Tony Camonte any strait-laced companions (well, his mom); but the studio changed its title to "Scarface: the Shame of a Nation" and added dull scenes of bankers — not exactly heroes during the Depression — and a token Italian-American denouncing the Mob. All three films utterly failed to deglamorize their heroes, even in their fall, in part because all three showed them getting their comeuppance in shootouts where they faced off alone against more and better armed opponents. Scarface failed so badly at this trope, in fact, that it resulted fifty years later in...
Scarface (1983). Even though the entire film is set up to show that Tony's destruction is inevitable, even though he ends up losing or killing everyone and everything he cares about, and even though he ends up floating in his own fountain, it's hard to watch the movie and not want to be him. Especially during the Good-Times Montage, set to Paul Engemann's "Push It to the Limit" showing all the material wealth Tony is acquiring, which pretty much gives the audience a picture to give to their own If I Were a Rich Man fantasy. The movie is also very popular in the hip hop community due to this appeal and had a huge following among crack dealers in the 80's. (Hence the What If? video game in which you get to be him, and you get to survive, learn your lesson, and win by rebuilding an even bigger and better criminal empire.) An episode of Breaking Bad has Walt, a criminal drug dealer himself, watching the movie gleefully with his son and cheering at the final action scene of Montana gunning down his enemies en masse and shouting "Say hello to my little friend!" Unfortunately, it cuts off before we see his reaction to what happens right after.
Ironically, media-savvy FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried to counter this trend with movies such as G-Man and The FBI Story which portrayed law enforcement as good, decent, hard-working Americans who loved their families, God, and country. Then and now, critics just denounced these films as blatant propaganda from Hoover and the government.

Films — Other

American Beauty is a scathing indictment of suburbia with such gorgeous cinematography that it makes suburbs look, well, beautiful. Someone forgot that Beauty Equals Goodness to many.
American History X: The film's message is "racism is bad," but it portrays the opposite in some ways. Derek is portrayed as physically dominant over his adversaries, fiercely proud, and (relatively) articulate about his beliefs. Derek and some of the other Nazis make arguments about race issues, which are never refuted despite ample opportunity to do so. With the exception of Fat Idiot Seth, the Neo-Nazis are never shown to be weak, stupid, or foolish. The Aryan Brotherhood in prison are villains, but they split with Derek over not being racist enough. Ultimately the film ends with Derek's younger brother murdered in cold blood by a black youth. It's not hard to imagine neo-Nazis and other racists enjoying this film for unintended reasons.
American Psycho's message on the banality and meaninglessness of mindless consumerism and dedicated following of fashion was undercut somewhat by how glamorous and stylish the characters looked strutting about their swanky penthouse apartments in designer suits. This is an interesting case as this trope only emerged in adaptation: in the source novel, the clothes the characters were wearing were described in exhaustive detail, but any reader who knew anything about contemporary fashion would realize that their outfits were clownishly mismatched. Its related point about the dark side of modern masculinity was also not aided by members of the audience cheering Patrick Bateman on while he gleefully murders another prostitute.
Anti-drug Aesop films.
- Christiane F. is a sad case. It's a rather depressing film about a 14-year-old girl who becomes a prostitute after getting addicted to heroin (with several other drugs along the way). But it has a performance and soundtrack by David Bowie! Many youngsters got curious about drugs—including heroin, the one drug about which the film is unambiguously negative—due to the movie.
- Reefer Madness is a classic example of this backfiring, as the film is considered better to watch when high due to its goofy ineptitude. Its modern popularity is directly attributable to Keith Stroup, the founder of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (a pro-marijuana advocacy group). It's so popular for unintentional reasons that it even spawned an Affectionate Parody, Reefer Madness: The Musical.
- Trainspotting. Renton and his friends have quite a lot of fun and hijinks in the early parts of the film. The villain of the film is the only one who doesn't use drugs. However, the depressing squalor of the junkies' lives is definitely lingered upon, mostly in the middle to late parts of the story. Ultimately the hero's ability to turn his back on the lifestyle is fittingly triumphant.
- Limitless. The wonder-drug Eddie takes immediately makes him a high-functioning genius, but is shown to have awful side-effects that include blackouts and debilitating dependency. However, audiences probably latched on to just how awesome a magic pill like that would be. Nor is the message helped by the shiny ending for Eddie, where he weans himself off the drug in controlled doses and still retains the intelligence and special abilities gained by taking it in the first place.
- Black Dynamite: In-universe parody example. a children's show song warns kids that drugs (shown in explicit detail that averts the usual Clueless Aesop) often have harmless-sounding slang names, and it's because the dealers are "trying to make it look like..." (musical pause, followed by ensemble singing) "... DRUGS ARE FUN!"
- Not directly a "Drugs Are Bad" movie (even if the MacGuffin is a drug shipment being smuggled out of Mexico), but Evel Knievel uses his Viva Knievel! vehicle to make a speech about performance enhancing drugs. He compares their use to that of nitro in car racing ("yes, you go faster and harder for a while"). The problem with the analogy is made clear by the RiffTrax commentary. Kevin is going "Yeah? Cool!" at all the exciting bits; Mike just comments "This man is single-handedly losing the war on drugs".
- The Trip (1967) was not originally intended to be an anti-drug film, but American International Pictures insisted on an Opening Scroll warning audiences of the potentially fatal consequences of taking LSD, as well as a Freeze-Frame Ending of Paul's face shattering, symbolizing his broken and traumatized mind. This completely conflicts with the rest of the movie, which makes tripping on LSD look incredibly fun, and has nothing to suggest that Paul was harmed by his trip.
Barbie (2023): The film condemns patriarchial values, but the hyper-masculine attitudes Beach Ken embraces in the real world are what finally give him and the other Kens the confidence to stand up for themselves in a society where they're treated as second-class citizens, even if Beach Ken still has insecurities about his self-worth. The Kendom also has a strong aesthetic with its horse Mount Rushmore, frat-bro parties, and Ken's very fun to say "Mojo Dojo Casa House". Not to mention that given how haughty and unlikeable the Barbie Land matriarchs came off to some viewers, the fact that the Kens flipped their discrimination can be seen as somewhat cathartic. It also helps that Kendom is the Kens' childish understanding of what patriarchy is, coming across more like a family friendly frat house rather than anything more insidious, divorcing it from real-life misogyny (of course, some real-life frat houses have their own accusations of misogyny, so this may have been intentional).
Invoked In-Universe in Batman Forever. Bruce Wayne takes in Dick Grayson, an orphan who saw his parents die in front of him (due to the machinations of Two-Face) during a crowded circus event, and attempts to teach him that going down a quest for vengeance is the wrong path to take. However, this is spoken by an individual (and a rich playboy billionaire) who has a sprawling underground complex underneath his home, utilize the latest tech and gadgets, is fawned over by (most of) the public and attracts women like flies to honey via his work as Batman. Even after Dick assumes the mantle of Robin, Bruce tries to dissuade him, though by this point, Dick is kitted out with high-tech armor and gets to pilot an advanced Batski in his quest to take down Two-Face. Later highlighted when Dick steals the Batmobile for a night of joyriding and rescues a Damsel in Distress while fending off a gang of hoodlums, only to be railed at by Bruce for his actions.
Tim Robbins, the director, writer, and star of Bob Roberts, anticipated this trope and went out of his way to avoid it. The film is a political satire whose Villain Protagonist is a right-wing folk singer who rejects his hippie upbringing but embraces the music, and runs for Senate and performs several songs throughout the film expressing his views. This is why Robbins, a staunch liberal, chose not to release a soundtrack album, even though there would be a lot of demand for one, because he feared that the songs would be used out of context as genuine right-wing propaganda if he did. (As seen with Far Cry 5, he was probably right.)
Robbins: I didn’t want to be riding in my car and hear some right-wing shock jock playing my music and hearing my voice.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: Upon playing the tapes in reverse, it reveals that the protagonists themselves were possessed or went mad and proceeded to kill five people. This is preceded by a wild orgy scene that looks a hell of a lot of fun.
Bruce Almighty and Click try to make it clear that you shouldn't want fantastic solutions to your life's problems like God's powers or a magical remote control because you're selfish and you'll end up screwing up your life (and everyone else's) even more. But let's face it, people walked out of those films thinking "I Wish It Were Real", due to the fact that both films show how much fun the protagonists' powers are, and the fact that Adam Sandler's problems in Click are caused by the remote being intentionally designed to screw him over, while Bruce's problems are caused entirely by God's rules and Bruce's sheer idiocy, since they should be pretty easy to get around. So really, all these movies taught is what NOT to do if it did happen to you.
Caged is about a bright-eyed young woman who becomes corrupted after spending time in prison. The film ends with her a jaded woman, smoking more than before and going off in a car with criminals to either become a pickpocket or a prostitute depending on your interpretation. It's supposed to be sad to see Marie losing her innocence, but with the Film Noir tone of the film it looks more like Marie just became cooler after spending time in the prison system.
Cannibal Holocaust is known for criticizing sensationalism while being highly sensationalistic.
Carrie (1976) much more than the Stephen King book it was adapted from. There, the book establishes Carrie as the Villain Protagonist who has revenge-filled thoughts and the reader already knows she's going to snap. The film softens the character greatly, portraying her more as a Shrinking Violet who just wants to be accepted by everyone. The villainy of her classmates is ratcheted up, so that numerous bullies were involved in the prank to humiliate her at the prom. Therefore, Carrie snapping and using her telekinesis to murder her classmates looks very cathartic. Plus she doesn't destroy the town like she does in the book.
A Clockwork Orange features scenes of violence and rape intended to be morally repulsive, but actually inspired some real-life copycat crimes. Director Stanley Kubrick and the original author of the novel Anthony Burgess both renounced the film for its sensationalized violence, being banned in the UK until Kubrick's death in 1999.
The Condemned (2007), the "Stone Cold" Steve Austin star vehicle, revolves around a shady producer who arranges for death row inmates from around the world to be dropped on an island and forced to fight to the death while the "show" is broadcast onto the Net under the name "The Condemned", hence the movie's title. However, WWE Films made the bizarre decision to turn this into a moralist tale by having several characters berate the brutality and senseless violence of the show... all the while showering the audience with scene after scene of brutality and senseless violence. To top it all off, it culminates with this quote: "All of us who watch... are we The Condemned?"
Confessions of a Shopaholic spends so much time lovingly showing off gorgeous, high end fashion that it's a bit hard to take seriously its moral against irresponsible Conspicuous Consumption. A TV promo on TBS said over the end credits of Sex and the City says something like "Can't decide what to wear? Go see Confessions of a Shopaholic, now in theaters!"
Cool Hand Luke: Some critics thought the film made working on a chain gang seem quite appealing.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). In the final scene Edmond professes that his revenge was not worth the steep moral and physical price he paid to achieve it. On the other hand, we just spent two hours watching him enjoy every minute of his bloody revenge and it was awesome.
Cuties was supposed to be a criticism of the over-sexualization of underage girls in the internet age, with the proliferation of suggestive, sexualized clothing marketed to young girls as well as sexualized Memetic Mutation fads like twerking. However, the film depicts girls twerking and engaging in sexually suggestive behavior so blatantly (and fails to show them suffering any real consequences for it) that it's all any viewer actually remembers the film for.
Death Sentence pulls this off, and rather clunkily at that. The film is a beautifully shot ode to violent vigilante justice, that tries to speak against violent vigilante justice. It was made by the director of Saw. It doesn't come off right.
Death Wish, which glorified vigilante killing to the point of making several sequels, and turning actor Charles Bronson into a cinema action hero icon for decades to come. For better or worse, Brian Garfield, the author of the original Death Wish novel, absolutely loathed the movie adaptation for this reason, while being relatively satisfied with how Death Sentence turned out.
- In fact, this trope is, in many ways, what ended up killing gritty "Men's Action" pulp movies like Death Wish and Dirty Harry; one of the genre's key scriptwriters, Dardano Sacchetti, grew to hate his own work and its imitators, feeling they had started to cross the line between depicting vigilantism and encouraging it. He saw the Unfortunate Implications ("the law won't help, so get a gun and kill anybody who wrongs you!") coming from a mile away, so he began to actively undermine and sabotage the genre from within, steering it into self-parody until it had been Condemned by History.
The Devil Wears Prada far more so than the book. It's a parable about the evils of the fashion industry, and how Andy gets corrupted by the politics and back stabbing. Except as film is a visual medium, The Makeover Anne Hathaway gets merely makes her look like a functioning adult compared to the laughable attempts at dressing her down beforehand. Andy's friends are also quite insufferable, making the staff at Runway look better by comparison. Andy also suffers no bad consequences from her time at Runway, since she gets to keep her designer clothes, gets a glowing reference from Miranda when she leaves the job and the experience separates her from her unlikable friends. Plus there's the endless Costume Porn and the other employees being dressed to the nines in designer brands (which actual fashion journalists disputed, citing that most of them were on minimum wage).

Enough seems to deliberately invoke this, as it seems the entire movie is sold on the premise of an abused wife giving her husband a taste of his own medicine. It's fairly obvious considering the fact that there is no buildup whatsoever in the main characters and their marriage, as it skips right to the abuse and tries to demonize the possessive husband as much as possible by making him look arrogantly evil to the point of having little depth. Unsurprisingly, women are known to praise it endlessly while some men have criticized it for focusing too much emphasis on female empowerment. Then again, it's lampshaded when Slim realizes she doesn't have the heart to kill him while he is defenseless and only when he attacks her.

Fahrenheit 451: François Truffaut himself directed a film adaptation of the novel which is about an anti-book dystopia. The film makes a world without written words look attractive even as our protagonist rebels against it. In fact, the book also does this to some extent, aided by an intelligent, charismatic Well-Intentioned Extremist villain.
Falling Down: Who hasn't fantasized about taking revenge on all the jerkasses in a cruel and feckless world? The fantasy is heavily deconstructed in how anyone who tries embarking on doing this are portrayed as dangerous and mentally unstable people who pose a threat to society, as shown with Foster at the end.
Fatherland shows a Europe where Germany won World War II. It is prosperous, clean and green, with posters advertising a concert with "Die Beatles" on the walls. Europe seems to be doing quite well, now without half of its economy ruined by communism. While German rule eventually falls because the American president refuses to sign a peace agreement, so that the strain from the continued war against the remnants of the Soviet Union brings down the whole empire, it certainly doesn't look like a doom-and-gloom world to live in.
FernGully: The Last Rainforest is a rather infamous example for many a '90s kid. An animated film that shoves its message of "save the rain forest" down your throat without a trace of subtlety has, as its main antagonist, a charismatic incarnation of pollution, who has the best musical number in the movie. He makes pollution seem more "fun," and when he turns into a black skeleton wearing a cloak of tar, who cares about the faeries and their forest anymore?
Fight Club: Tyler Durden is presented as an articulate counter-culture rock star. He even lampshades the fact in the end. In spite of being the villain, many viewers took his message as the aesop of the film. In fact, the film is not recommending terrorist cults against consumerism, no matter how cool or fun it might be. There's also the fact that, soon after the film, several Real Life fight clubs started springing up.
Five Easy Pieces: The diner scene where Robert upbraids the waitress is supposed to show how difficult he is and how much trouble he has functioning in normal social situations. Instead it's largely seen as a Moment of Awesome for getting violent at a woman just trying to do her job.^note
Flight with Denzel Washington, about a pilot named Whip's struggle with alcoholism is... odd. Firstly, because despite/because of the subject matter, there is conspicuous product placement for various alcohol brands making a film about abusing liquor be filled with liquor ads. "Watch this man's horrifying descent into addiction... assisted by Budweiser and ABSOLUT (please drink responsibility!)" But while alcohol use is portrayed negatively, cocaine on the other hand (in a manner like a certain scene in The Wolf of Wall Street) is made out to a be an insta-sobering wonderdrug that not only allows Whip to fly competently while blackout drunk but be lucid enough to save his damaged, crashing plane and everyone onboard. On finding him shitfaced on the morning when he is supposed to testify about the crash, his friend and his lawyer call his drug dealer and get Whip high on coke to hide his state from the investigators (and it works!) and the whole thing, in contrast to darker scenes of him drinking, is presented comically. The film seems to say alcoholism is deadly serious but drug abuse is a light-hearted matter and the latter actually improves the former.
The film adaptation of Going Postal wants to beat you over the head with An Aesop about smoking: Moist feels bad when he finds out his cons drove a man to suicide and caused the deaths of several others, but he feels really bad when he discovers that this set the man's daughter to smoking. But damn if she doesn't look good with that long-drag cigarette. Particularly with the melodramatic flashback, it's possible this one is something of a parody. But it could be of either genuine anti-smoking campaigns or of Stealth Cigarette Commercials thanks, at least in part, to Poe's Law.
The Great Gatsby (2013) was criticized for lingering too long on Gatsby's wild parties and failing to show how Gatsby himself is a lonely and desperately unhappy man at the center of them. Thus, the parties seem fun, when they are supposed to feel rather empty and pathetic.
Heartpower: The entire point of the Villain Song "Tobacco Man", where the eponymous smoker raps about how smoking is cool and the kids refuse to fall for his temptations.
Heat. The go-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory actions of the criminals in the movie have been suggested as one of the reasons why, in the real-life 1997 North Hollywood Bank Shootout, the robbers caused unnecessary mayhem and provocation with the police, rather than making a swift getaway.
Hot Girls Wanted, a documentary about the amateur porn industry in Florida and the women involved in it, portrays it as a deeply exploitative industry that chews up talent and spits it out. Riley Reynolds, a porn creator who was profiled in the film, has said that, even though he was afraid that the film would make him look bad, in the end at least one young woman wound up working for him specifically because she saw him in that film.
I Am Cuba: The first section of this Soviet propaganda Anthology Film was meant to condemn the excesses, debauchery and economic exploitation of capitalism on Cuba. Instead, with its Epic Tracking Shots of pool parties and stylishly-shot jazz clubs, it made capitalism look awesome. The film was not a success and was virtually forgotten in the Soviet world, while many years later, Hollywood filmmakers rediscovered it and honored its filmmaking techniques.
Incredibles 2: When Bob tells Dash that it's dangerous to play around with the Incredibile's remote control, since it has a rocket launcher, Dash enthusiastically tries to launch the rockets.
I Spit on Your Grave. All those extended rape sequences, just to say that rape is bad? Roger Ebert noted to his horror that some of the audience members at the screening he attended actually cheered on the rapists.
The Iron Giant: The movie's intended message of "guns kill" is muddled somewhat by the spectacular Curb-Stomp Battle the Giant has with the military. It's hard not to be impressed by the awesomeness of the Giant's weaponry.
It's a Wonderful Life. Every year around Christmas, the website Salon runs an article by Gary Kamiya about how the film's portrayal of Pottersville, the corrupt, morally bankrupt Alternate Universe version of Bedford Falls that the villainous Henry Potter presides over, makes it look downright glamorous with its abundant nightlife and entertainment options, while life in the 'real' Bedford Falls can seem stultifying and even outright toxic, especially to modern viewers.
Jurassic Park: The novel was intended as a warning about the dangers of playing God and tampering with nature. But let's face it: When it was adapted to film, thanks to improved special effects of the time and an epic score from John Williams, most people walked out of the theater after seeing it thinking, "Awesome! I wish we could bring dinosaurs back to life! Get cracking, scientists! Increase dinosaur DNA research!" Changing the disaster from the result of a series of oversights based on the scientists not knowing what the dinosaurs were capable of with Nedry's betrayal setting off the Disaster Dominoes to it being entirely the result of human sabotage didn't help.
Kidulthood: the scene where Trife and his friends get revenge on school bully Sam is a favorite with fans of the film who often comment how cool what they do is despite their actions leading to Trife's death.
Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure: Much ado is made about the harsh and miserable life Scamp is leaving his family for, but apart from the threat of the dog catcher, the strays don't seem to have it too difficult. Tramp led an absolutely charmed existence of handouts and romantic flings before meeting Lady. Indeed, if Buster hadn't been such a colossal dirtbag, Scamp probably would have had the time of his life out there — and maybe even gone on to see that "big hunk of world" Tramp spoke so glowingly of in the first movie.
Lolita: The story is intended to be a condemnation of pedophilia with Dolores being 12 years old in the novel. However, in both of the film versions her age is raised to 14, which was to lessen the potential heat from the censors and the Moral Guardians, a move supported by the novel's author, Vladimir Nabokov, who said "To make a real 12-year-old play such a part in public would be sinful and immoral". While the age difference may seem small, it can end up making a huge difference in the minds of the audience. It doesn't help that the actress in the first movie looks about 16 (and indeed the actress was chosen in part because of her large cup-size), and that the second Dolores was 16, which isn't an uncommon age to start having sexual relationships (sexual relationships with much older men, not so much, but still)^note. Also, the films play up Dolores as a Fille Fatale while playing down Humbert's role as a self-centered abusive sexual predator, in order to create a more sympathetic protagonist, when much of the point of the original book is that Dolores honestly wants nothing to do with Humbert.
The Lorax certainly has a Green Aesop. However:
- It depicts deforestation through an upbeat Disney Acid Sequence musical number where the villain wears a nice suit, rocks out on an electric guitar, and sits at a desk covered in piles of cash. Possibly intentional: we're seeing this bit from the Once-ler's point of view, and he isn't aware that he's doing anything wrong. (The song is titled "How Bad Can I Be?") Also, considering how he's been treated up until this point in the movie makes it pretty darn hard to not sympathize with his situation. And his rather seductive dance moves don't help either.
- Thneedville was meant to be a dystopian town due to its lack of nature, however while there were some bad things (such as the water being polluted and the need to buy air), other things — such as the robot tree that played music and the artificial snowboarding area — looked really cool.
Teased and flipped by Nighy's character in Love Actually: "Hey kids, it's your Uncle Billy. Don't buy drugs. Become a rock star, they'll give them to you for free!" Spoken while closing a radio interview where he admitted his latest song was a blatant rip-off and cash grab which will likely do very well.
The Lovely Bones: Susie and Holly clearly have a lot of fun inside their heaven. Even when the movie shows that it's all shallow escapism, the scenes and special effects still look spectacular.
The first Mad Max film was meant to depict the dangers of reckless driving. The hoons and rev-heads who saw it left feeling that their lifestyle had been legitimised.
Marie Antoinette (2006) arguably incorporates this into the story. The titular queen is remembered in history as frivolous and extravagant in a time when France was in extreme poverty - but the film depicts her as a lonely teenager with an indifferent husband and a lot of boring duties. Therefore the Good-Times Montage showing her at balls, gambling, drinking, guzzling cake (which never seems to make her or her friends gain weight, mind you) and indulging in excess looks very appealing. The film also doesn't show the poverty outside Versailles, since Marie wouldn't have seen much of it either.
In Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas, the "Christmas: Impossible" short has this both in and out of universe. In-universe, Scrooge tries to tell Huey, Dewey and Louie to be nice. When they point out that Scrooge became rich, and he says it was because he was selfish, HD&L's reaction? "We want to be rich and selfish, too!", followed by talking about some cool stuff they want to buy. Out of universe, it's easy for a viewer to be left with the same feeling as HD&L, as the only drawback to Scrooge's greed was that Santa never got him a bagpipe, which (1) is a weird thing to be sad about (Couldn't he just buy a bagpipe from a store? And why care about a bagpipe when he can buy any expensive toy he wants?), and (2) is rendered moot when Scrooge does get the bagpipe in the end anyway.
In Napoleon Dynamite, Napoleon rides a ten-speed bicycle and pulls his brother, who is wearing roller skates. This unconventional mode of transportation is Played for Laughs, with the joke being that Napoleon is only conscripted into pulling his brother around because he is such a loser. However, it still looks pretty cool, even though towing a person wearing roller skates is dangerous and is illegal in some jurisdictions
Natural Born Killers, which has been accused of having inspired enough copycats to have an entire Wikipedia page devoted to the subject. It isn't entirely a straight example though, since the aim of the movie was to point out that the media is fascinated with serial killers. That it ended up contributing to said media isn't unexpected.
Much like the Count of Monte Cristo example listed above on this page (from which it drew probable inspiration), Oldboy (2003) is an absolutely savage deconstruction of the blind pursuit of revenge and the horrible consequences it has not only on its victims but also on its perpetrators. It also has one of the absolute best "one guy versus many guys" brawls in the history of cinema, wherein a scruffy, overweight middle-aged man beats the absolute shit out of an entire hallway of dudes with nothing more than a claw hammer and doing so with a kitchen knife sticking out of his back half the time. And it's done with no cuts to boot. Draw your own conclusions.
The Pagemaster: The other kids mock Richard for being too cowardly as they perform bike stunts over construction roadworks. At the end of his adventure, Richard has to courage to bike jump across the ramp. Though no one else sees, he's proud of his accomplishment. It's supposed to show his triumph over fear is real and not a dream, but there are better places to do stunts, like the local park, than on construction sites.
The Parent Trap (1998): Although the last prank on Annie's cabin results in both twins getting punished severely, one can't deny that the booby traps are extremely cool, and the Disaster Dominoes are hilarious.
The 1965 Perversion for Profit, supposedly intended as a "diatribe against pornography" meant to discourage its consumption, instead shows barely-censored, beautiful erotica and simply tells them "this is right on your street corner!" without explaining why exactly its existence "weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the Communist masters of deceit". And, of course, no mention on any ways in which it harms the women who take part in the production of it, since it's 1965 and therefore nobody really cares.
Predator: The first films, at least, attempt the Aesop that "sport hunting is bad". But the Predators specifically go after victims that can fight back, making the hunt a true test of skill against skill, and (nuclear self-destruct options aside) are rather graceful losers. No shame in testing your skill against, and being bested by, a truly challenging opponent. All in all, Predator hunting is rather different than the typical deer or duck hunting humans engage in... and when humans did engage in sport hunting against things that could hunt them back, they drove several of those species to near-extinction.
The Prince of Egypt is like this with regards to the Ancient Egyptians and their culture. Yes, they're the bad guys in the movie, but those pyramids and statues look so cool. It doesn't really help that Ramses II is depicted as a genuinely relatable Anti-Villain, to the point that the writers were actually concerned he came off as too nice!
Rififi is one of the most influential heist films ever, and even upon its initial release some worried that its very detailed depiction of planning and executing a jewel robbery (techniques that actually worked, because they were based on a real robbery case) would inspire copycats. The Los Angeles Times reviewer called the scene a "master class in breaking and entering as well as filmmaking". Other critics felt the film dipped in quality in the final act, where the fallout from several bad decisions results in none of the jewel thieves getting to enjoy their ill-gotten gains—for example, Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called this finale "moralistic and sour". Director Jules Dassin nevertheless argued that his film was supposed to discourage crime by showing how hard it is to pull off such a heist. Viewers apparently didn't catch that part, because a string of copycat robberies actually did happen in Mexico, which led to the Mexican government banning the film.
RoboCop (1987), another film of Paul Verhoeven, suffers from this, much like his film, Starship Troopers (listed above under Films-War), and like the latter, also on account of Poe's Law. Verhoeven intended the film as a spoof of 80's action films and the factors frequently found in them: gore, violence, fascist tendencies, mindless consumerism, and shameless pandering. However, he ended up creating a film considered one of the best action movies ever.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Kids, don't have lots of sex, or you might end up in a fabulous musical. It's ultimately left up to the audience if Brad and Janet embracing their desires has left them broken. (This is less ambiguous if one accepts Shock Treatment as canon, as they definitely start that film as broken, and it is only over the course of that film that they relearn how to be functional people.)
Rollerball: The film is a protest against violence. However, director Norman Jewison said that, to his horror, a group was interested in financing a real-life version of the game, but the studio said no.
The novel The Running Man was intended as a warning as to what happens when society goes too far in thinking that violence is entertainment. The nation's most popular show is one where contestants compete for their lives and can be killed legally, live on television nationwide. Yet, in the film version, it ends up making this evil show look pretty damn cool and entertaining. A show where Arnold Schwarzenegger takes on gladiators trying to kill him? Sounds awesome. It's also hurt by how, in the novel, all the contestants are volunteers who willingly choose to be on the show, whereas in the movie, the "contestants" are criminals who are forced to be on the show, and the show is advertised as giving them "exactly what they deserve". While in the movie the audience knows they aren't deserving, the idea of this show being real and using criminals who actually do deserve it can certainly come off as appealing. Not to mention how hard the film works to get you cheering to see the villains who operate the show get violently and spectacularly offed ... because they, of course, do deserved to get murdered live on television.
- The German movie, Das Millionenspiel, based on the similar novel The Prize of Peril by Robert Sheckley (which probably also inspired Stephen King to write The Running Man), plays this straight. The movie is made with a known TV moderator of the time as moderator of the show and simple camera positions, creating an extremely convincing illusion of watching an actual show. The protagonist looks just like an average guy and so do the killers hired to stop him. In fact, when the movie aired, people phoned the channel and asked if they could be "hunters" or "hunted" in the next show. Sadly because of filming rights problems between this movie and The Running Man, it's forbidden from being aired, having only been shown 4 times on German TV. So don't go looking for an illegal copy of this tantalizingly interesting forbidden show.
  - Further evidence suggests it outright inspired the Japanese show Run For Money: Tousouchuu and the British Show Wanted.
Saturday Night Fever portrays the protagonist's disco lifestyle as shallow, violent and ultimately pointless. It didn't stop millions of new fans from being drawn into disco culture after watching the movie.
Discussed in the 1934 film Search For Beauty, in which the publishers of a health magazine, realizing that Sex Sells, starts publishing steamy romance stories with "just enough morals to sneak them through the mails." Their female readers see right through the tacked-on "paying the price" endings.
Seven Psychopaths: Parodied, where Sam Rockwell's character, trying to come up with an ending for the screenplay Colin Farrell's character is writing, pitches a cool slow-motion gun fight set to beautiful music in a graveyard, claiming that it will show how terrible violence is.
Sex and the City ostensibly had a message about how we shouldn't let labels (both in the designer sense and for relationships) determine how to live life — Carrie gets married in a label-less vintage dress in the end. But the rest of the movie is a love letter to designer labels and fashions, with a practically orgiastic scene of Carrie trying on designer wedding dresses. U.K. Film critic Mark Kermode backed up this sentiment in his podcast review of this movie.
"The film has the gall to shove handbags down your throat for 120 minutes and then turn around and say "Hey, we aren't just handbags, you know."
Shark Tale: Oscar learns not to lie, but it's apparent he got all this awesome stuff out of it. He even gets to keep his penthouse in the video game.
Shish O Besh is about two con men who are being played like fiddles by The Chessmaster and end up in jail. Davood is lovable, if not too bright, and Sami, while a thorough Jerkass, is also The Charmer. The film makes a life of crime look pretty exciting.
Shoot 'Em Up a 2007 action film, could be easily be the Trope Codifier, since it is possibly the most egregious example of this. The film is both a parody of the genre it takes its name from, and by Word of God, an anti-gun movie; an extremely anvilicious one, that stops just short of pulling a Family Guy and saying that everyone with a gun has a tiny, tiny penis. Except, like the Broken Aesop page quote, the hero, Smith, solves every single problem he's faced with using guns; saving the baby? Guns. Beating the bad guys? Guns. Defending his new family? Guns. By itself this wouldn't be too bad. After all, someone can be extremely anti-gun but still believe a gun can be used for good if in the right hands or that using one in self defense is still justified. However, the movie takes it up a notch in several ways, and if it's meant to turn its viewers off of guns, it fails in levels equivalent to trying to put an abstinence message into a porn movie.
1. The whole reason the movie is anti-gun is because of who its villains are; they're the hired muscle (led by a wonderfully hammy Paul Giamatti) for a gun manufacturing corporation that wants to stop gun control laws from getting passed. Again, not too bad by itself. After all, that's what corporations do; use politics to protect their interests. Except they cross the Moral Event Horizon including killing pregnant women and babies and making statements that are anything but subtle in regards to guns such "Guns don't kill people, but they sure help".
2. Don't think saying "Smith solves every single problem he's face with using guns" is an exaggeration. It means just that; Smith solves every. single. problem he's faced with using guns; not just for self defense and beating the bad guys; he also uses guns for common everyday activities like opening beer cans and spinning a merry-go-round. Oh, and not just guns; lots and lots of guns. Lots and lots of extremely powerful guns. For an anti-gun movie, Smith and everyone he cares about sure would be dead a lot of times over if he didn't have enough guns to arm an entire military.
  - Well, he does use carrots a couple of times...
Played for laughs in Spider-Man: Homecoming, where high school students are required to watch public service announcement videos presented by Captain America. The gym teacher makes the remark that, despite his clean-looking image, Cap is likely a war criminal (due to previous events). Peter Parker also watches another PSA during detention, but breaks the rules by leaving the classroom.
"Take it from a guy who's been frozen for 65 years...the only way to really be cool is to follow the rules."
All of the Star Wars baddies radiate this. The 501st Legion is the world's largest costuming fan club. The stories were originally entitled "The Adventures of Luke Skywalker" and changed to "The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Anakin Skywalker" when the prequels were released.
The Stepford Wives remake was obviously aiming for the message that the men were in the wrong for replacing their wives with robots. Joanna is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who couldn't care less about the welfare of her own family as well as created shows that explicitly promote the ideas of Women Are Wiser and Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male is a good thing, Bobbie is a moody Deadpan Snarker who can't speak a civil word to anyone and demeans her husband all the time, and Roger is an over the top Camp Gay stereotype who embarrasses his partner in public constantly. So with three unlikable characters, the movie seems to be saying "hey, we replaced three bad people with nicer robots". Plus add in the ATM wife and the adjustable boobs, and the movie seems to be suggesting how cool it would be to have robot spouses.
Super Size Me. Morgan Spurlock's documentary exposing the evils of junk food. The film tries to make it look unappealing, but some viewers will inevitably get a craving for some burgers. Spurlock was likely aware of this as he described his experiment as "every 10-year-old's dream".
Trick 'r Treat: The werewolves massacre their victims in an orgy that is terrifying and yet gratuitously awesome, complete with sexy dancing babes before they peel off their skin and a fun riff of "Sweet Dreams" playing over it.
Unfaithful illustrates the negative consequences of female infidelity. But Diane Lane reports that several women have thanked her for her role as Connie Sumner in the film, because Connie sleeps around because she can, and not because she's miserable. Lane elaborates further by saying "I mean she was cheating and lying. Then I realized it was because she wasn't a victim. She made a choice to have an affair. It's not something you often see.".
Some critics believe there's one thing worse than a Torture Porn film—a film that tries to make a point about torture porn by focusing on long, drawn-out, salacious shots of human suffering, such as Untraceable. "Oh, Jesus, look upon the sensationalization of violence and despair, HERE HAVE A MAN BEING BOILED TO DEATH IN BATTERY ACID."
Vivo: One of the clips released makes it a point to mention that kinkajous are wild animals and should not be kept as pets.^note
Parodied in regards to various drugs in Walk Hard. Dewey frequently opens a door to find Sam behind it, indulging in some illicit narcotics in the company of some beautiful women. Sam always insists that Dewey wants no part of it, only to then insistently list all the benefits of doing that particular drug. Dewey inevitably ends up hooked on it.
- But he really doesn't want none of that stuff that gives you a boner.
- "It's marijuana, Dewey. You don't want no part of this shit." "It's cocaine, Dewey. You don't want no part of this shit." "We're doing pills— uppers and downers. It's the logical next step for you." "I want me some of that shit!"
Pink Floyd's Rock Opera The Wall, both in movie and in music form, depicts an unstable rock star named "Pink" who builds a metaphorical wall around himself to defend himself against things that emotionally hurt him. He then becomes insane, delusional, "comfortably numb" and consumed with anger and fear as he gradually cuts himself from society. Onstage, he turns his concert into an almost Neo-Nazi rally, leading his "Hammers" to destroy the city and terrorize all those that Pink mistrusts. Although this is meant to show the horrors of shutting yourself off from the world and becoming antisocial and paranoid, many true Neo-Nazi groups were formed around the "Hammers", based on the film The Wall and Gerald Scarfe's Deranged Animation depicting literal marching hammers smashing things and people to pieces.
- Further Misaimed Fandom involves interpretations of Pink's frustrations with women, particularly Pink's unfaithful wife, who is depicted in the animations as shrewish and snake-like.
Wall Street has had this happen: although Gordon Gekko is clearly portrayed as the villain in the movie as a ruthless corporate raider who leaves companies gutted and many unemployed in his path, his "Greed is Good" speech is popular among many (often young) finance professionals. The speech itself - criticizing the management running their own company into the ground - almost leads to Strawman Has a Point. It doesn't help either that Michael Douglas carries the role with characteristic swagger and panache and leads Charlie Sheen into a world of cool. In Boiler Room, the leads (who basically go around conning little old ladies out of their money with stock scams) spend one scene quoting Wall Street from memory, basically living this trope on screen - although that movie, which has its share of bling, might fall into this trope as well. It turns out it's almost as hard to keep from Do Not Do This Cool Thing in finance movies as war movies.
- When Michael Douglas went to the UN to lend his support for nuclear non-proliferation, the press asked him if Gordon Gekko was there to give his support for corporate bailouts.
The Wolf of Wall Street has been accused of this, with supporting evidence from Business Insider, while the daughter of one of Belfort's business associates accused the filmmakers of glamorizing his crimes and inspiring others to do the same. As of mid-2014, Belfort is doing the lecture circuit in Australia and Asia, billing the sessions as "an afternoon with the real Wolf of Wall Street". Director Martin Scorsese, for his part, believes that Viewers Are Geniuses and can sort out their moral compass for themselves.
- There's an in-universe example as well. Shortly after Belfort starts his own company, a magazine article is published which is intended by its author to be strongly negative and to denounce the immoral ways in which the company makes its money. The day after its publication, Belfort's office is overrun by eager job applicants who clearly got the point about "make lots of money" and don't seem to care about the immorality.
xXx: Even though it ultimately portrays the anarchists as evil and wrong, their hedonistic lifestyle is pretty damn awesome. Show of hands, who wouldn't want to party all night in a castle, doing whatever you want and not having to worry about being in the office in the morning?

Do Not Do This Cool Thing / Film

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