“It’s A Wonderful Life” Review Parody
A very good personal friend of mine (the famous PPP) has posted at a popular Christian forum a parody of a movie review of “It’s A Wonderful Life” as if it was done by those Christian Movie Review people.
It was so funny that I had to post it here:
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
starring James “Jimmy” Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, and Thomas MitchellThis “beloved holiday classic” opens innocently enough with supplications heading heavenward on behalf of a desperate man (main character George Bailey) who has lost the sum of $8,000.00, and who contemplates suicide one snowy night at the railing of Bedford Falls’ local river bridge.
The movie plot is based upon the concept of what would happen if someone were to be shown the world as it it had been if he were never born.
The motion picture’s first and foremost error, and ultimately, its fatal flaw, is its subtle, clever, and subliminal literary plagiarism of the concept found in another literary classic, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” [where main character Ebenezer Scrooge is shown by three demonic apparitions what Scrooge's world is like in the past, present, and future].
Clarence, George’s guardian angel, is shown the man’s life from his childhood, on into its present form, which, of course, the audience is also made privy to.
One scene of violence occurs early on, where druggist Mr. Gower [supervisor to George in the man's drugstore] berates and vehemently slaps a young George multitudinous times about the head, but for a mistake that Gower himself made, namely, that the older man accidentally put poison in a prescription. Mr. Gower “just happens” to pound a sensitive part of the boy’s anatomy, as George begins to scream, “you’re hurting my sore ear”, and, “don’t hurt my sore ear again”.
Younger viewers could quite possibly be permanently traumatized by this display of violence toward children, and the exposure of young George to the elder man’s drunkenness.
The movie proceeds to a scene where George is in his early twenties, and is about to go to his brother Harry’s high school dance. George calls the movie’s villain, Mr. Potter, an “old money-grubbing buzzard” [and later insults the man by calling him "a warped, frustrated old man“].
He then goes on, at the dinner table to tell his father that his father was basically a fool for staying cooped up in the little town of Bedford Falls [tending to the family business of a Building & Loan], and that George selfishly wants to achieve his own personal plans rather than support his father’s vision and take over the family business. The scene also features brother Harry on an emotional high, since he is graduating high school, who runs after the African-American maid Annie [derogatorily portrayed as the southern plantation "Aunt Jemima" archetype], and with his left hand, he slaps her on the rear.
These latent portrayals of disrespect to elders and racial stereotyping give the audience even less respect for director Frank Capra’s vision of a happy America.
Then, following the high school dance, under the moonlight, in what is interpreted as a romantic moment, George rips a bathrobe off of his future wife Mary when he accidentally steps on it, as she pulls away. He refuses to give it to her, while she squats nude in nearby hydrangea bushes, his eyes lighting up as he describes it as “a very interesting situation”. Only when the family car pulls up, and the family tells George that his father has had a heart attack, does George snap out of this mode of sexual harrassment and hand the robe back to Mary.
Other example of George’s belittling and objectification of the fairer sex are shown all throughout the feature, through Bailey’s “innocent flirtations” with Mary’s rival [in the conquest of George], Violet Bick. We see the foreshadowing of the complicated George-Mary-Violet love triangle in the beginning of the film, when George is laboring at Gower’s drugstore. Violet cooingly asks George to help her off her seat at the bar, and George replies “Help you down?”, gaining experience as a cunning “player” in the world of romance and relationships.
We see this connection between George and Violet progress throughout the film. George stares at Violet very deeply as she walks down the street. Fast forward to the high school dance, where George turns down a dance with Violet to dance with Mary, further playing hard to get.
Next between the two is a torrid exchange where Violet takes George by the arm, stares him deep in the eyes, and seductively queries, “Don’t you just get tired of reading about things?”, to which George replies, “yes”. He tells her that he is doing nothing that night, and then suggests a plan where they spend the night together in the woods, swimming in a pool up on the top of a mountain, then, in George’s words, “everybody’ll be talking, and there’ll be a terrific scandal”.
Later, now the husband of Mary, George privately takes Violet into his office at the Building & Loan, closes the door, and secretly gives her money, to which she replies by kissing him on the cheek - and he says nothing to stop her. Lipstick is left on his cheek, which is noticed by two bank employees and the bank examiner. George sheepishly attempts to continue in his duties while trying to avoid explaining what happened behind closed doors with Violet. When George is shown what happens what life is like without him, he nearly gets into an altercation with a police officer trying to save Violet from arrest.
Finally, at the end, when George discovers that Violet has decided to stay in Bedford Falls, his eyes light up, as the camera does an extreme close-up on his face, and he silently mouths “Violet Bick”. She is a poor catch for a man, but we see George coddling and subconsciously pursuing her as the sexual conquest, a stark contrast to the grounding influence of his devoted wife and homemaker Mary. Examining her name, we see how close “Violet Bick” is to “Violent B—-”, further confirming the misogeny replete throughout this movie.
This “hero” George Bailey has been held up for generations as a model of manhood and fatherhood, but reviewing this movie, it is apparent that quite the opposite is true.
At one point of George’s vision of life without him, he punches a police officer [disrespect of authority]. He also yells, drunken, at his children:
* at son Pete, for asking to be excused for burping
* at son Tommy, for asking George how to spell the word “frankincense”
* at daughter Janie, for practicing “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” on the pianoHe also destroys his foyer area in front of them [domestic harassment], grabs Mary tightly by the shoulder and shakes her [yelling at her about his plans for life], screams at his Uncle Billy [shaking him] and performs many other value-questionable acts.
A special note about the yelling at the children: Mr. Gower yelled at George while Gower himself was drunk, and was verbally abusive to George. It appears that George passed this characteristic on to his own children, and most likely, they themselves became angry, alcoholic, abusive parents.
While Christian Movie Reviews acknowledges that “It’s A Wonderful Life” is loved by many generations of movie viewers, we cannot [with wholehearted and unreserved confidence] recommend the movie for the preceding mentioned factors.
We give it a D+
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