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La vita è bella (1997)
Fantastic movie, Guido sees through fascists and defeats them with humour and humanity.
In this marvellous movie, the main character Guido uses his marvellous humanity, vitality and humour to first of all win his wife from underneath the nose of a fascist roboton in local Government and then to enable his son to survive the Nazi camps. Your first thoughts when you come out of this movie (and you walk down the road from the camp with the survivors and the liberating American soldiers) is that the Nazis were b****rds and thank God the allies won the war. The Nazis were the perpetrators of the greatest crime in the history of humanity. Words like Auschwitz and Dachau will retain a power to haunt and disturb millennia hence. But Guido shows that they will never win because they, like the doctor in the story, lack humanity. In the camp the son only ever half believes Guido about his extravagant game to win a tank but like all kids he loves to play and enjoys the game. The Guido character would have known the facists from of old, growing up with Mussolini in Italy but he also knew from of old how to defeat them - by being everything they were not. This is a great movie and by contrasting humanity with inhumanity puts the crimes of the Nazis and facists in starker relief then ever before but also shows us that a spirit of love and hope will always triumph come what may.
The Mission (1986)
Will be watched for all time
The Mission is amoung the top ten or twenty films ever made. At this point it is my favourite film. It is an eloquent essay in faith and redemption. The two most moving scenes are the one in which the Brother enters the Jungle above the waterfall, from which the Indians have cast the previous Brother that went up to them, and knowing that the Indians are all about him unseen in the jungle with their poison tipped arrows, he sits down in a clearing and plays the hauntingly beautiful "Gabriel's obo" tune on his own obo. The Indian's are mesmirised and emerge and befriend him. The Brother thinks: "If I had an orchestra, I could have subdued the whole continent." The other scene is where the former Slave driver, who repents after killing his brother, whom he loved above all else, goes with the Brothers up to the settlement of the Indians whom he was taking away to slavery on sugar plantations. The former slave driver has been forgiven his sins but he nevertheless feels the need to do a private penance of dragging the battle armour of his previous life with him through the jungle. When the brothers come upon the Indians, the slave driver fully expects them to kill him for his deeds but instead they cut away the bundle of armour he is dragging and welcome him to them. This echoing of divine Love by the Indians enables the former slave driver to believe in his redemption and to be born again at one with God. The mission is a film that you won't forget. See it today. (Watch out for Liam Neeson in it too by the way.)