If she looks like Donna Reed, that's a damn good start for a Wonderful Life. :~))
Never heard of it.....
I started to read this with trepidation but as I got further along I fully enjoyed this piece. A truly good analysis of It’s a Wonderful Life.
If she looks like Donna Reed, that's a damn good start for a Wonderful Life. :~))
Then he tells his kids to shut up.
Best part of movie is the end, the town that would have been.
And while I'm sure (at least I've been told) that Europe is a marvelous place, where I live is also marvelous and the people here are as rich and deep and loving as anywhere else on the planet.
I sometimes wish that I had traveled more when I was young but in retrospect I wouldn't trade any of my actual experiences in this small, uncelebrated corner of the world.
I haven't missed a thing.
Always liked the SNL alternate ending where they kicked Potter’s a$$ and took the money back.
I own this movie in HD!
In the town next-door a new store with a big street-facing window just opened up, selling naughty nighties and sex toys. Just in time for Christmas.
My first thought upon driving by was “I am in Pottersville”.
The first time I saw it, I was running over a 102 fever. It was the best thing ever... that night.
Excellent film that I could never tire of watching - but definitely not the colorized version, eeek!
Having been up on that bridge once or twice in my life, the film really speaks to me - and I think a lot of people who will watch it with an open heart. It is not a Christian film, but there is definitely a Christian message of love, and the value of every life.
No man is a failure who has friends. This could just as easily have been written - No man is a failure who has Love. Or as I once saw on a handmade sign in the back of an old truck - No man is a failure who loves God.
If I may, three brief points:
1. Don’t go jumpin’ bad ‘bout NO Frank Capra film, EVER, sucker.
2. George came to realize how small worldly experiences were compared to the riches of real living. Too bad some folks only end up as a ‘American Studies’ professors.
3. Donna Reid is the hottest female to ever grace the silver screen. George struck it rich in wa-a-a-ay more ways than idiots like the professor will ever know.
Pottersville Forever!!
George Bailey had a nice wife and kids, integrity, and people sure liked him. But the message of the movie is a scathing indictment of everything that built America. It says loud and clear that you can’t have all those things and still follow your “selfish” economic self-interest.
My issue is with this false dichotomy at the heart of the film. Bedford Falls (and America) weren’t built by nice, beloved frustrated do-gooders. They were built by people with brains and ambition, working for their own economic self-interest. Why did that work in America and nowhere else? Because only here, a lack of money or land or a noble title was no barrier to entry.
Without naked economic self-interest, rocket engines and transistors and the Salk vaccine do not get invented.
Nobody is well-served when incompetents “want to help people.” George Bailey was wildly unsuited to the profession his family guilted him into. The whole town — America — is much better off when people who like to build houses and know how to build houses build them — NOT the George Baileys of the world. That’s how you get the best possible product at the best possible price.
It’s telling that Bailey couldn’t even fix his own stair bannister after years and years — what the hell was he doing building houses? Would you want to buy one of his crap houses?
The free market can do better than the government in nearly everything. People like George Bailey go into “government service” all the time, but just look at the results. Squalid public housing. Failing public schools. Obamacare! But hey — I WANT TO HELP PEOPLE!
And it’s interesting that Frank Capra didn’t stay put in his podunk town and do “public service” in some job he hated — he got the hell out of Dodge and went to Hollywood to be a big-shot movie director. Think he did it for free?