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Really uplifting films

Started by Custard, February 05, 2011, 02:33:48 PM

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HappyTree

I liked Love, Actually. Three Colours: Blue is incredibly powerful. Then there's It's a Wonderful Life. And The Fountain. Luc Besson's Angel-A is up there as inspiring too. And I tip my hat to The Hairdresser's Husband, and offer Tandem by Leconte too. Also Un Héros Très Discret, Toto Le Héros and The Eighth Day which blew me away.

Jean Rochefort has been in a surprising number of very uplifting films.

Petey Pate

It's A Wonderful Life and Wild Strawberries are the first that come to mind.

ThickAndCreamy

Harold and Maude.

It's a film that just puts a smile on my face nearly the whole way through and makes me delighted to just be alive.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: NoSleep on February 05, 2011, 10:01:11 PM
The film that leaves me with a warm feeling in my heart and a smile (not to mention punching the air and several shouts of "YES!"), is the documentary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" because, for once, the good guys win in real life.
Abso-bloody-lutely.

Quote from: Petey Pate on February 07, 2011, 11:38:21 PM
It's A Wonderful Life and Wild Strawberries are the first that come to mind.
I think Wild Strawberries is maybe my favourite film ever; from films like "The Silence" to this, which is so uplifting at the end it's enough to make this hard-hearted reviewer shed a tear or two. It can't compete with It's A Wonderful Life, though, which as soon as George starts running down the street near the end has me in floods of tears.

The Duck Man

Quote from: The Boston Crab on February 05, 2011, 02:48:17 PMAlso, Bugsy Malone has the most life-affirming ending of any film I've seen.
Except that it defies all the rules previously set up in the film! Hit by custard = dead. But at the end they're all covered in custard, but all they do is inexplicably break into song despite none of the issues between the characters being resolved.

It should be a bloodbath, godammit! A custardy bloodbath of children.

You despicable oaf.

The film is about sexual enlightenment. The early 'deaths' are representative of hollow sexual 'conquests' and man's facile obsession with personal gratification. It's one joyless facial cumshot after another, psychological powerplay, devoid of connection. Bugsy, the charming loner, is the worst of them all, hovering outside of any committed human interaction until he meets his 'Lenny', Leeroy Smith. Through this encounter, he embraces the value of shared experience and determines not to just toss Blousey away like a used tissue. With loving resolve, he discovers the fundamental essence of the 'splurge' and nurtures this understanding in his fellow men and women. The final line of the movie, 'you give a little love and it all comes back to you', as the entire cast are coated in the physical manifestation of shared joy is self-explanatory.


phantom_power

don't all the people who have been "killed" come back at the end as well? highlighting that the whole thing is just a bit of fun. that and the fucking awesome song make it pretty darned uplifting


Captain Crunch

Quote from: Serge on February 05, 2011, 04:02:35 PM
'Amelie' can rot in hell though - in fact Jeunet's entire back catalogue makes me want to claw my eyes out.

I gave myself a nasty injury trying to do that spaniel face she does which just made me hate the film even more. 

Famous Mortimer

I think Amelie is lovely, but it's been an age since I saw it.

I think "Land And Freedom" is an uplifting film. I know, they lose, but there's the sense that those ideas and beliefs can't be suppressed, that it's makes people stronger. I absolutely love it.

sirhenry

Quote from: The Boston Crab on February 05, 2011, 02:48:17 PM
Also, Bugsy Malone has the most life-affirming ending of any film I've seen.
I think you'll find that T&C was right. Harold and Maude is undoubtedly the most uplifting film yet made. It has everything you need: suicide, death, drugs, sex, teen angst, grand theft auto, police chase, a banjo and the most desirable car ever to grace celluloid.

Gulftastic

The end of 'Boogie Nights' has been the source of much debate amongst my circle. I think it's really uplifting, with Buck opening his stereo store, Amber directing his commercial, Rollergirl back in school, Reed doing his magic, etc...but others think that Eddie(Brock) being unable to escape porn films is downbeat.

Lord Mandrake

Wes Anderson movies always lift me. I'm recalling the walk at the end of Aquatic and just rewatching Rushmore the Max Fischer players take on Serpico.

CaledonianGonzo

Anything featuring this amphibian impresario:



Particularly if set at the yuletide season.


SavageHedgehog

Back in the old days of Video2000, my mum kept a log of the stuff she and my grandparents recorded with cuttings from the good ol' Radio Times. One of these was The Cheap Detective, and it was accompanied by a smaller verion of the above picture. For years I thought  The Cheap Detective was a Muppets movie.

That has nothing to do with anything, just sharing.

Pepotamo1985

The Royal Tenenbaums.

I'm with my man Kermode when he says 'life affirming movies generally make me lose the will to live'...maybe it's the cynic cunt in me, but most sentimentality strikes me as mawkish and vomit inducing, but TRT? In addition to being exceptionally funny and charming, which is always uplifting in itself, it manages to pull off the crime of the century and have a happy ending which doesn't feel tacked on, or twee in the slightest.


Neomod

I'd add Gregory's Girl and Local Hero to the list. Amazing considering Bill F's apparent grumpiness.

Dark Poet

Both already mentioned I believe.

Good Will Hunting's another for me.

Chutney

Being lazy, i.e. picking the last film I watched that did give me that feeling, Kick Ass.

Harry Badger

I love Bill Forsyth's work, and Local Hero is one of my favourite films, but I'm not sure I'd put it in the uplifting category.  It's still an extraordinarily beautiful film and quite profound in a sly sort of way.

Spoiler alert
But the ending (which according to Forsyth was a last-minute addition and not in the script), especially that final shot of the empty phone box, I always find extraordinarily bleak and has moved me to tears. It seems so cruel on Mac, who over the course of the film has learned that materialism is bullshit, is right at the end snatched away from his idyllic new home and sent back to the big city.
[close]

My mum's family come from that area and my uncle lives a couple of miles from where the village scenes were filmed, so I am planning a little pilgrimage when the weather picks up. The phonebox was a prop apparently but so many people went to look for it, the council were forced to install one for real.

SteveDave

Napoleon Dynamite

The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang

Rushmore