To not even put It's a Wonderful Life in your top 10 is laughable at best.

It's not only a top 10 Christmas movie, it's a top 10 of any genre movie.

Clarence Oddbody is disappointed in your list

1 ...

Report Post

Posted by Mr. Misanthrope

Cloud 8

Member since Nov 2012

5521 posts

Posted on 12/12/19 at 12:05 pm to East Coast Band

quote:
To not even put It's a Wonderful Life in your top 10 is laughable at best.

It's not only a top 10 Christmas movie, it's a top 10 of any genre movie.

Clarence Oddbody is disappointed in your list

Although I applaud TulaneLSU's efforts to rejuvenate our culture's dying sensibilities, I have to agree with your assessment.

Perhaps It's A Wonderful Life suffers from its familiarity, popularity, and perfection and is disregarded as a contender for those reasons. We've grown cold and hard of heart indeed when George Bailey's story leaves us indifferent.

When Violet, the whole town, and even the bank examiner give of their own money to save George from ruin, with Hark, The Herald Angels being sung reverently, fervently, with great gusto by the gathered community-who cannot remember the words of our Savior?

quote:
Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.

I include two others on my top ten.

One, not really a movie, but an animated feature and a staple at Casa Misanthrope where Christmas is not Christmas until it plays for gathered friends and family. Who cannot empathize with the frustrations of an overcommercialized, spiritually bereft season where its meaning and reason are obscured by time pressures and frenzied activities?

Linus comes to point the way to the Charlie Brown in all of us in A Charlie Brown Christmas with his recitation of St. Luke's incomparable account of Christ's birth.

Christmas is not complete without a viewing of A Christmas Carol , my preference being George C. Scott cast as Ebenezer Scrooge.

A good ghost story in its own right, it also points the way to a Christmas, although more subtly so than Linus Van Pelt's gospel lesson, in which Christ is preeminent. Sadly, some of my more Fundamentalist brothers and sisters in Christ have unfairly, I believe, labeled the film "A Christ-less Christmas".

From the mouths of babes as they say, Tiny Tim reminds us of the Savior in a most poignant way through his father telling Tim's mother of her dying child's thoughts on being at Church at Christmastide.

quote:
"Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see."

These are submitted not to minimize or denigrate TulaneLSU's list or efforts but to support and enhance them.