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For my next video I'm getting into the holiday spirits by looking at Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life! It's one of my favorite Christmas films and one of the most beautiful stories in general. I want to explore both the context of the time in which it was made as well as the value it holds today; for this, I'm probably going to dive a little deeper in some themes and ideas I talked about in my video on Paterson, but I'm still figuring out how exactly I'm going to structure it. 

I am also working on some ideas for more written content specifically for the Patreon page (short film reviews and/or recommendations), just because there's so many great films to talk about and not enough time to make video essays for each and every one of them. 

Comments

Magnus Galåen

I always found the story hard to relate to. The basic premise is "Saint-like man puts other people before him, and is treated unfairly. After suffering a life-time, he is rewarded by god (in form of an angel) who shows him what good his deeds have done". But this guy has everything. He has a loving family, loving friends, but he doesn't get his one dream, which is to travel. It would have been much more interesting if the story was about a real person. Somebody who is not perfect. Somebody without loving friends and family. Somebody who didn't do everything right in their life, and maybe is haunted about it. Is the reason so many people like this movie a religious thing? Reward in the after-life is a central theme in Christianity (or in this case, he gets rewarded before he kills himself). I've grown up in a non-christian family, with a "be to others how you want others to be to you" mentality, as opposed to "be good, and you'll be rewarded in the future or in the after-life". Would love to hear some other views on this.

Like Stories of Old

I never really interpreted the film as a religious story, I always saw the divine intervention as a storytelling device to reveal a message that is pretty pragmatic and humanistic (will obviously go more deeper into this in the video).