Listing uplift

Started watching near the end American Film Institute's list of the Most Inspiring Movie of All Time. Kind of a weird topic, they're really running out of excuses for prime-time specials. Juggling with the Stanley Cup finals, currently 3-3 in the 3rd period, home team Carolina could win the Cup over Edmonton tonight.

14-Bridge Over the River Kwai, a great film with big themes that looks at why the little things matter. Marred a bit by knee-jerk national stereotypes--the Japanese are vicious and honor-bound, the Brits are plucky and effectively industrious.

13-Hoosiers, what?! This high? They have to be crazy; it's a nice little movie, but it's too easy and predictable.

12 -Apollo 13, what?! Is this why Ron Howard's all over this special? Another interesting film, but it's not nearly as good as the story it was based on. Tellingly, Walter Cronkite talks about the event, not the film.

11-The Best Years of Our Lives, totally deserving of being on the list. I saw it a while ago, will always remember the surprising bitterness of Fredric March's disabled chacter. People who have this image of today's Hollywood as being gritty and realistic compared to the studio era have never seen all the movies like this that once upon a time made up mainstream film-going.

10-Saving Private Ryan, this is getting ridiculous. Yes, a good film with realistic special effects, but like all of Spielberg's film there's too much triteness in it. If it were made 50 years ago by a no-name it wouldn't be anywhere near the top. And it could've been.

9-Miracle on 34th Street, I think this is a decent film, but never was gaga over it. One of those films I think adults like because they think it captures the magic of childhood. Not really.... Much better is It's a Wonderful Life, which should be #1. With Chariots of Fire and Rocky right there too. [Only American films, so no Chariots, else I'd put it #2].

8-Breaking Away, hmmm, have never seen this or even heard of it before. I guess it's about a bicyclist who's dedicated to his sport.

7-Grapes of Wrath, which I saw in high school and don't remember that well at all. Maybe it's too high up just based on that.... It's hard to judge films like this, they were so influential they lose some of their magic when we watch them now.

Stanley Cup game is approaching unbelievable tension, nothing like playoff sports.

6-E.T., ugh. Are you kidding me? The 6th most inspirational movie ever made? Has anyone ever stood up and cheered at that film? Just a poor choice, I wouldn't put it anywhere on this list. It's not a bad movie, but who's inspired to do what by it?

5-Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Funny how many of these films you can identify based on 1 second of footage. Have actually never watched this the whole way through, bits and pieces here and there. But I think Jimmmy Stewart is in the top 5 of American actors; also tend to like Frank Capra films.

4-Rocky, a good choice for 4th, glad they didn't give in to cheap sentiment and make it #1. It's actually an underrated movie by intellectuals, I think--it's very well made, despite the easy rah-rahness it's truly emotionally affecting, such a classic film in many ways. Would've been amazing to have seen it in 1976.

Cup game is going to OT... ah, sudden-death, how great is this. I think sports films definitely have a leg up in the most inspirational contest... they have a natural story arc to them, plus we're all familiar with the challenges of sports, either via experience or years of exposure.

War films also tend to be inspirational, nothing better than watching men in the worst of times find their best sides.

I have a bad feeling Braveheart is gonna be near the top of this list, which would be a huge mistake.

3-Schindler's List. My gosh, is Spielberg producing this show? The third most inspirational (American) film of all time? It's the easy 'serious' favorite film for people to put down, but having seen it twice--and having worked at the Holocaust Museum when it came out--I gotta say it's a good film, but with some serious flaws. For one thing, it's always so conscious of its seriousness, always so aware that it's a BIG FILM with a MESSAGE. I think it's also swallowed up by its subject matter. Watching these film clips out of context, it's almost maudlin. This is a great film for a generation raised on MTV, more beloved in memory blinded by easy tears than rewatched for revealing any truths about humanity (takeaway: don't participate in mass murder!)

2-To Kill a Mockingbird, ah, I forgot about this one. Good choice, though; Gregory Peck is of course great in it, so too though is a young Robert Duvall as Boo. I do think, however, that a lot of people like the film not for its complex truths and acting, but because it makes them feel good and right... a film about racism that ends with a white man being paid homage to by the black people up in the balcony.

At any rate, there coincidentally was a great NYTimes book review by Garrison Keillor about a new book that looks at the life of Harper Lee.

If you were going to draw a movie from this book, you'd start on York Avenue in Manhattan on a cold winter night in the late 1950's. Pages of manuscript fluttering out of an apartment window and then a young woman, weeping, picking them up out of the snow. She is an airline ticket clerk and she has been working at her typewriter late at night ever since she came to the city over her parents' objections in 1949. She is on her own. Her childhood pal, Truman, an effeminate boy befriended by the boyish girl, is nearby but out of range, flying high, a heralded young novelist ("Other Voices, Other Rooms") with a Broadway musical in the works. In his wake, she strikes people as dumpy and distant. She perseveres. In November 1956, she walks into an agent's office at 18 East 41st Street with five short stories in hand, and is encouraged. On Christmas Day, at her friends Michael and Joy Brown's town house on East 50th, they present her with a gift, a note — "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." She is bowled over by their generosity. A year later, she has the beginnings of a novel, "Go Set a Watchman," which becomes "Atticus," which, under the tutelage of a patient editor at Lippincott named Tay Hohoff ("dressed in a business suit with her steel gray hair pulled tightly behind her, . . . short and rail-thin with an aristocratic profile and a voice raspy from cigarettes"), after the cold winter night breakdown, she finishes in the summer of 1959.

One evening in mid-December, she meets Truman at Grand Central and they board the 20th Century Limited for Chicago. He has reserved a pair of roomettes. He's on his way to Garden City, Kan., on assignment for The New Yorker, to write about the murders of four members of a prominent farm family, the Clutters, and he's asked her to help him do the research. They spend a month in Kansas, an odd couple. A short man in a sheepskin coat and moccasins and a long scarf, a rather pushy self-centered New York queer, and a tall gracious Southern woman with a knack for saying the right thing. Their big breakthrough comes on Christmas Day. They're invited for dinner at the home of Cliff Hope, the attorney of the murdered farmer, Herb Clutter. Also present are the detective Alvin Dewey and his wife, Marie. Dewey is coordinating the murder investigation and he had been put off by Truman at first, but he and his wife and the Hopes are literate people with a high regard for writers and there is a bottle of J&B Scotch and Harper Lee is a steady woman in whose presence Truman shines. And thus Dewey becomes their key source, the man who makes "In Cold Blood" possible.

It's the beginning of the time of her life. Her book is done, a big relief, and she is getting intimations of the success to come. A lawyer's daughter, she is on a big murder case. She works hard, takes 150 typewritten pages of careful notes, puts her writerly intelligence at the service of her friend (who will never acknowledge the extent of her help), gets engrossed in the story, feels the thrill of collaboration. She goes back to New York to correct her own galleys, returns to Kansas with Truman for the trial of the killers, then back to New York for the publication of the book on July 11, 1960. She is 34 and in six months she has had her hands on two American classics.

Yeah, she doesn't have the publicity skills of her old friend Truman, but as Garrison notes, my gosh, what a run.

1-It's a Wonderful Life, which I really like. Hey, where's the Sound of Music on this list?! Anyway, this is one of those films that you might think hopelessly hokey, until you sit down and watch it. My favorite scene is Stewart and Donna Reed singing 'Buffalo Gals' late one night in a scene that's a definition of true love.

Buffalo Gals, won't you come out tonight,
Come out tonight, come out tonight.
Buffalo Gals, won't you come out tonight
And dance by the light of the moon.

It is in some ways overly-sentimental, but that's okay; like Bollywood films and indeed most great Hollywood films of the 50s and 60s, before all the knowing irony of the spoiled baby boomers swept in in the 70s, once you suspend your snarkiness and enter the film's world you not only get caught up in it but you also learn and internalize great lessons about humanity.

'Moments of such great blinding truth in that film' says William Macy, and that's exactly it.

Uncredited frame grab of Stewart and Reed in various places online.