Wow, these past few weeks sure have been a real long year.
And we have the strangest suspicion that a few people out there could use
a pick me up.
So if you coincidentally find yourself with time on the couch to spare, we've got
a list for you here of what we think are the ten most uplifting movies of all time.
(Music)
So, first things first.
We've got to look at those movies that lift us up by reaffirming the power of
the human spirit,
that speak to the unseen forces that hold us together as a community of humans.
Movies that reassure us that things can get better like Mrs.
Doubtfire and Mary Poppins.
Movies that make us feel like we'll never give up like Shawshank Redemption and
Secondhand Lions.
Movies that show us how worth living life can be like Cinema Paradiso,
It's a Wonderful Life, and Forrest Gump.
Movies like The Untouchables, The Wizard of Oz, and especially To Be and To Have.
But if there's one man and
one movie that makes us sleep easy at night knowing things are going to be okay,
it's got to be Mr. Rogers and Won't You be my Neighbor?
>> I think you've turned out nicely and I like you as you are.
And children need to hear that.
I don't think that anybody can grow unless he really is accepted exactly as he is.
>> 2018's documentary is the perfect warm cardigan hug
to remind you that there was one someone out there who saw the best in all of us.
We've heard about the power of positivity enough times to roll our eyes and
cynicism at the mention of it.
But Mr. Rogers was the real deal.
The guy practiced what he preached,
really honest to God cared about everyone whose path he crossed, and
his message was actually quite a bit more sophisticated than is given credit for it.
Watching the film trace out his life's work, a picture begins to
form of a man who made it his mission to treat the children around him as if
all their feelings, even the silly ones, were worth taking seriously.
And when he turns this radical empathy onto unsuspecting adults and
us in the audience, the effect really is astonishing.
(Music)
Of course when it comes to human spirit, maybe you're looking for
a little less warm hug, a little more hard fought victory.
A display of triumph over insurmountable odds, David beating Goliath,
your underdog tale.
We're talking Babe, The Martian, The Karate Kid, classics like Rudy and Rocky.
Oddballs like Galaxy Quest and My Cousin Vinny, and Eddie the Eagle, and
The Bad News Bears, Billy Elliot.
A writer has only begrudgingly agreed to eschew his personal darling,
A Knight's Tale, in favor of 2000's feel-good favorite Remember the Titans.
>> What are you?
(Inaudible) >> What is pain?
>> Pain is pain.
>> What is fatigue?
(Inaudible) >> Will you ever quit?
>> No, we want some more, we want some more, we want some more.
>> Disney spent the 90s and early 2000s perfecting a formula of live action
underdog films that gave us Remember the Titans, alongside the Mighty Ducks,
Cool Runnings, The Rookie, Miracle, Cinderella Man, and Invincible.
Which would make a hell of a movie marathon if this is your jam.
In Remember the Titans, they struggle, they suffer loss, they learn.
And under the exacting tutelage of peak PG Denzel,
they come together against all odds.
It's delightful, full of smiles, any real sense of accomplishment at its end.
And if PD, Rev, Sunshine,
Louis and mini Ryan Gosling can put aside their differences to come together,
left side and strong side both, then maybe we can too.
But maybe snatching victory from the jaws of defeat just doesn't get you where you
need to be.
Don't worry, there are other ways to lift the spirit.
Sometimes the best medicine really is laughter, and when things look extra dire,
it's only in silliest films that will do.
Something like Blazing Saddles, or Spaceballs, or The Jerk, or
21 Jump Street, or Elf, or School of Rock, or Despicable Me, or Crazy Rich Asians, or
Airplane, or especially Duck Soup.
But as far as we're concerned, there is no movie ever made filled with quite as
much nonsense as the absolutely timeless Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
>> Where did you get the coconut?
>> We found them.
>> Found them, in Mercia?
The coconut's tropical!
>> What do you mean?
>> Well, this is a temperate zone.
>> The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may
seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
>> Relentlessly unceasingly absurd, we're not quite sure why the loonie hijinks of
these oversized British men in ill fitting costumes works quite as well as it does.
Maybe it's their unusual combination of stupidity and brilliance.
Or maybe it's just their accents, a loose collection of Arthurian sketches tied
together by a sort of plot to find the Holy Grail.
The look was dated before it was even shot, but the comedy is
quite literally timeless, somehow more hysterical every time you watch it.
It also doesn't really spend much time punching down or getting in its kicks.
They're just goofballs.
And whether it's your first time or your 50th, we promise you'll have a blast.
(Music)
Adjacent to utter silliness are the films that make you grin with delight,
gleeful high energy stories about characters you immediately love treating
each other shockingly well even as they struggle.
This is Paddington 2 and City Lights.
And Ernest and Celestine, and His Girl Friday, and Bells Are Ringing, and
Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Isle of Dogs.
And hell, most Wes Anderson movies play in this particular key.
Here, we especially love Singing in the Rain.
But my God, it's almost like this category was literally made for
Amelie, which it was, because we did.
(Foreign)
>> Jean-Pierre Jeunet's hyper-colored
modern Parisian fairy tale flits along at the speed of whimsy.
Each character is introduced with the ultra specific delights that make them
happiest.
And Audrey Tautou,
the shyley smiling incarnation of chaotic good is the center of it all.
Running around town performing random acts of kindness with the kind of
calculated planning usually reserved for Superville.
The joie de vivre is contagious and
we can pretty much guarantee you will leave the movie grinning ear to ear.
(Sound) One thing that movies are so
very good at is returning us to a feeling associated with a bygone time and place.
And in so doing transporting us with them.
And that can be unbelievably comforting, especially when the time and place is
something familiar and universal and safe like an idealized version of childhood.
So we'd like to recommend movies that make you feel like a kid again,
where adventures were around every corner and life wasn't playing so much for keeps.
Try ET, or The Princess Bride, or The Goonies, or
The Sandlot, or Hook, or Hook, or Home Alone, or Jumanji.
But of all the filmmakers re-invoking what it was like to be small,
Hayao Miyazaki, maybe the very best.
Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Howl's Moving Castle are all a blast.
But right now we think the whole world could use a little bit more of
My Neighbor Totoro.
(Foreign) >> Two girls and their father move to
the countryside because it's closer to their mother who is in the hospital.
Uncertain at first, they eventually explore their new home, and in doing so
they meet Totoro.
And while the gentle story sees a sister's skepticism, a turn in treatment,
a lost girl, and a desperate search.
It is in the little moments with little bearing on the plot that one finds
the depth of the movie's heart.
The small curiosities and imaginings, discoveries, and moments
of play that the film chooses to linger on will be intimately familiar to any viewer,
who ever themselves got to be a kid.
(Music)
Movies can also transport us into a wonderful feeling of falling in love,
the excitement and optimism and utter elation.
And who among us couldn't use a fat dose of oxytocin to combat all the social
distancing we've been doing these days?
So if you're looking for romance or just a rom-com, you should try The Apartment,
Breakfast at Tiffany's, When Harry Met Sally, Roman Holiday, Charade, The Artist,
Love Actually, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Sleepless in Seattle, and
Shakespeare in Love.
But if there were a set of movies practically designed for people like us in
a time like this, they would be the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers decalogue.
Good in Shall We Dance, great in Swing Time, but
never better than our sixth fifth Top Hat.
(Music)
Depression era America saw Hollywood quickly pivot almost exclusively towards
sunny escapism designed to offer the millions of unemployed and
impoverished Americans a warm popcorny refuge and vicarious hopeful fantasy.
Which is to say pretty much exactly what we're looking for right now.
the formula that emerged was simple, quippy comedies, a little caper,
some crackling romance, song and dance, and a goddamn happy ending.
And Top Hat was the pinnacle of the form.
Its magic hinging on Fred and Ginger's phenomenal chemistry,
which is never on better display than when they share the dance floor and
nobody could dance quite like Fred and Ginger.
And while I wouldn't exactly want either of them as upstairs neighbors,
if you let them tap their way into your chambers, you might just fall in love too.
(Music)
But maybe all of that is still a little much for you.
And what you really need is to mellow out, kick back, spend some time just hanging
out away from the will they won't they stress of a typical plot.
Maybe you need a carefree movie.
American Graffiti is really the prototype here, paving the way for
most everything else in this category.
But you could also try The Big Lebowski's laid back style.
Or Ferris Bueller's immunity to concern.
Or Bill Murray's unflappable,
Bill Murrayness In the face of literal supernatural invasion in Ghostbusters.
Other greats here include Clerks, Francis Ha, My Dinner with Andre, Friday,
The Way Way Back, and Hard Day's Night.
But there's no one that pulls off this sub sub genre quite like Richard Linklater,
who gave a Slacker and Boyhood, and both the movies in our next pick,
a double feature screening of Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some.
(Music)
>> Hey men, you got a joint?
>> No, not on me, man.
(Music)
>> It'd be a lot cooler if you did.
(Noise) >> I knew we'd find you drunks here!
>> What miserable updraft wafts you three here?
(Inaudible).
>> Low on stakes, high on sense of time and place and togetherness,
both these films, Dazed and Confused and High School in the 70s, and
Everybody Wants Some in college in the 80s, sets you in an ultra specific world
with the kind of beautifully flawed people you would love to hang out with.
And then that's what they do for a couple hours.
They hang out.
And as they bond and relate and marvel at the world and
experiment with who they are and who they might be,
Linklater's camera and storytelling invites you to hang out with them.
With very little at stake, but an evening well spent,
which if you're holed up at home in a couple of weeks into some
serious quarantine, might be just what you need.
(Music)
One step further past carefree movies and we find our way to these small but
beautiful cul de sac of peaceful films.
Those without hardly any conflict or
plot at all, more like guided meditations than stories much of the time.
These are movies like the Samsara,
Baraka Chronos trilogy that just meditate on nature.
Or Spring,
Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring that quietly watches the wheels of life turn.
Maybe it's a Kore-eda film like Shoplifters, or Our Little Sister, or
something beautiful and slice of lifey like The Scent of Green Papaya, or
any of the adventures of the ancient Taoist poet Winnie the Pooh.
Paterson is a beautiful appreciation of these small poems of life.
But for our pick here we want to highlight the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or
Joe, as he mercifully agreed to be nicknamed.
He's a master of entrancing softness, from Syndromes and a Century to
the first half of Tropical Malady to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives.
And to our bronze medal pick, Cemetery of Splendor.
(Foreign)
>> Cemetery of Splendor is a gentle tale of a Thai woman, Jenjira,
who has volunteered to watch over a platoon of soldiers that have developed
a peculiar and unexplained malady, where they have fallen asleep and can't wake up.
It is decidedly slow cinema.
Nothing really happens and it doesn't happen fast.
The camera rarely moves and the density of actual plot is probably about
one tenth of what most modern cinema viewers would normally expect.
But much like most of Joe's work if you settle into it and
allow it to wash over you there is an almost trance-like experience of calm and
beauty, that is impossible to describe or explain.
And there is a sequence towards the film's end where Jen's medium friend offers to
channel one of the sleeping soldiers from the dream plane and
walks her through a tour of a palace she cannot see.
That culminates in one of the most unexpected moments
we maybe have ever seen in a film.
And if you were to describe it to us in advance,
we probably would have scrunched up our nose in confusion and doubt.
But watching it, it is one of the most quietly beautiful examples of the breadth
of human compassion.
So, you'll just have to see it for yourself.
(Music)
Of course you don't have to feel calm if you're not ready.
And if you ask Mr Rogers, he'd tell you it's okay to feel sad at a time like this.
And sometimes when you're sad the best thing for
you is to let it out with a real good cry.
We're not talking about depressing the hell out of you with a gut-wrenching film.
But the kind of bitter-sweet movies that reminds us that sadness is a part of life
and that the beauty of our world is inextricably linked with loss.
So, if you want a tear jerker with a silver lining, try Big Fish or
Little Women, Little Miss Sunshine, or Eternity and A Day, Stand by Me, or
The Green Mile.
Try Harold and Maude, or The Dead Poets Society, Beginners, or
Call Me By Your Name.
But if you ask us what we think the best bitter sweet movie for a global pandemic
quarantine is, we got to say you can do a whole lot worse than Life is Beautiful.
(Foreign) >> Writer-director
star Roberto Benigni once told a reporter when asked how dare he make a comedy about
the Holocaust, that for him laughter and tears come from the same part of the soul.
And to be very clear, watching Life is Beautiful,
you will emit buckets full of both.
It is the story of a Jewish man in Italy who uses his playfulness and
humor as a shield in the face of fascism and eventually imprisonment.
First for himself and then for his five year old son for whom he creates a game
to insulate him from the terrible reality that they both face.
It is a monument to the courage required to laugh when facing the gallows.
Guido cannot take on the whole world for his son, but
he refuses to shrink in the face of it.
And that is a heroism on its own.
(Music)
And finally, closing on our list maybe what you really need right now is to just
kill a lot of time, and we got movies for that too.
And obviously the best way to do that is a nonstop back to back to back Lord of
the Rings extended edition movie marathon, or Harry Potter, or Star Wars, or
James Bond, if that's more your speed.
But why keep picking up the remote to change films or, God forbid,
get off the couch and put a new disk in,
when instead you could knock it all out at once with one very long flick?
This is the perfect time to watch gorgeous films with run times you might normally
balk at like A Brighter Summer Day, or Satin Tango, or Out 1, or War and Peace.
You could watch Once Upon a Time in America or the beautifully simple As I was
Moving Ahead Occasionally I caught Brief Bunches of Beauty, or
finally get around to The Irishman.
(Music)
Or our last movie list about The Irishman, which was also pretty long.
But we gotta say, we have never spent five hours more cinematically worthwhile than
the ones that flew by during a screening of Fanny and Alexander.
>> Aah!
>> If there's any one masterpiece of must
see cinema in the ultra heavyweight category,
it's Ingmar Bergman's final film.
If it isn't his best,
which we strongly suspect it is, it's certainly one of his friendliest.
Don't worry, we wouldn't stick The Seventh Seal on you at a time like this.
No, it balances its struggles with mirth and joy, and
one of the finest portraits of a complex family dynamic ever found on screen that
manages to find the beautiful humanity in literally everyone.
We follow the Ekdahl family from the perspective of the titular two children.
From imperfectly happy togetherness to painful separation, and then through great
struggles to reunite over the course of this intimate emotional epic.
Over 312 minutes you will see Bergman at the maturest point in his career
revealing an unbelievable sensitivity to what it was like to be small.
And what it was like to have been small and look back on.
And what it was like to face loss and keep moving forward.
It is occasionally surreal, always honest,
splendidly acted, and even in normal circumstances, worth the time,
which is why we think it's one of the best films you could watch at a time like this.
So what do you think?
Any more recommendations for
your fellow global citizens at a time when we're all in this together?
Let us know in the comments below.
Subscribe for more Cinefix movie list.
Take care of yourselves out there, stay home, and stay healthy.
(Music)