Holy crap, what an awesome movie. It was just on NBC, so with all the ads, it got stretched into three hours. Hooray for writer’s strike! Take off all the crappy sitcoms and just play Christmas specials every evening! :cute:
In a strange sense, it’s kind of pro-youth. You’ve got this young George Bailey guy always determined and always willing to do the right thing, even at his own expense. Even when just 12 years old, saved his brother from drowning which made him half deaf, he yelled at that old Potter guy defending his father, and stopped his boss from poisoning a kid by mistake even though he doesn’t point out the error before he gets the shit slapped out of him. Everyone around him is screwing up, so it’s up to him to be the solid one, the responsible one, the rock.
The evil one is the greedy vindictive old man Potter who doesn’t care at all about anyone. With all the other old people around him who are just as greedy and selfish. And even the other old people, like Uncle Billy, keep screwing up. Sure enough, it’s up to young George to carry everyone’s weight. He could just drop them at any time and do all the traveling he wanted to do but, you know, it just wouldn’t have been right.
And like the ONE time he finally decided “fuck it, I’m ending this shit!”, some gay angel shows up talking about wings and bells and like “dude, you’ve got to see what life is like if you never were born!”
I like the movie, but the whole what-if scenes always irked me. It’s such a Premise Contrary to Fact fallacy. Like if one event did not occur, namely the birth and thus existence of George Bailey, then all this other stuff would definitely have happened. Well, any number of different things could have happened! Then again, I suppose it was a heavenly vision, so all that would have been accounted for.
And how come Clarence the angel says Harry was nine when he drowned when on his tombstone, the years are 1911 to 1919, which made him eight? That annoys me! :doitnow:
Well, maybe the pro-youth message is a bit of a stretch, but it’s nonetheless a nice movie.
