Oh, that's awesome! I actually had great difficulty watching it when I was bottoming out in my worst bouts of depression; there are moments in it that were just too blackly true and raw and bleeding with despair.
Even now I can hardly bear to watch the scenes with the kids. When he's coming totally unglued, kissing Zuzu and petting her head and making sure she's facing away from him so she can't see him unraveling -- that tiny gesture of a hand on the head and turning his face away so she won't be terrified of her daddy's bleak bugfuck face, that one small protective gesture is all he's got left in him. And the looks on Mary's and the older children's faces when he's just smashed his architectural model to bits: even her totally hackneyed, "Oh George, how
could
you, in front of the children!" is perfect, because when you've seen the partner of your heart and bed and life disintegrate and you're frightened to death, of
him,
what's left but the smallest plainest words?
And yet, also, small rich radiant moments too. I so deeply love the scene where she tells him she's expecting their first child, drowsing in their narrow little bed (I still want to know how Capra managed to sneak in this scene of them sharing a bed; I thought the Hayes Office frowned on that, even for married couples?). How he drapes his long body across hers, how they melt into a dreamy half-asleep kiss. You totally believe in the marriage, in that bed, that their bodies know each other; it's homely and familiar and one of the first images that made me think that marriage and domesticity could have their own deep eros, just as much as discovery and newness.
Mmmm. Love that movie.
I'm tired of it.(Although it seems I haven't watched it closely in some while...I've never noticed the scenes JZ mentions.)
But it's invaded me anyway...my biggest fear is that Clarence would show up and find nothing.
George Bailey Lassos Stork is one of my favorite scenes, too, JZ.
I love the movie along with you.
erika, if you've seen it on broadcast TV you may never have seen the in-bed scene -- it's sometimes cut to make room for commercials, since the fact that she's having a baby is revealed in the very next scene and this one is therefore clearly unnecessary. Sure, it's all warm and rich and character-revelatory, but what's that compared to an extra 100K in ad revenue?
I may have, or possibly a Ted Turner cable station...it's one of those things I've seen so much I quit seeing it, if that makes any sense.Like I couldn't tell you when the first time was.
I saw that this morning, Hec, and I meant to come in and post about it! I'm really excited to see it now.
A rave review by someone who seems to believe that blockbuster summer movies are an early 90s innovation, and that evil hackers are a new development in movie villainy.
Odd.
OMG, Strega is not even kidding about that.
an invigorating return to the style of blockbuster that dominated summers back in the early 1990s. In those days, when the blockbuster was new, there was an excitement about it as a popular new form.
!!!
Related: I watched some of Catch and Release last night (partly because I am an idiot and was trying to get my mind off my fiance being gone...by watching a movie about a woman whose fiance dies) and Tim Olyphant is the kind of greasy-yet-sexy that Colin Farrell never mastered.
Glad to see the good review of LFoDH. Yeah, the reviewer sounds like he's about 25 years old, making ridiculous assertions about how long the summer blockbuster has been around, and other silly statements like that.
But I'm excited.
