New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

We're a list society. From Casey Kasem and the American Top 40 to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die to BOP's very own Best Horror Films (one of our most popular features ever), people love to talk about lists. They love to debate the merits of the "winners" and bemoan the exclusions, and start the whole process again when a new list captures pop culture fancy.

Perhaps one of the best-known, most widely discussed lists is the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies. A non-profit organization known for its efforts at film restoration and screen education, the AFI list of the 100 best American movies was chosen by 1,500 leaders in the movie industry and announced in its first version in 1998. Since then, the 100 Years... 100 Movies list has proven to be so popular that the AFI came forth with a 10th anniversary edition in 2007, along with other series such as 100 Heroes and Villains, 100 Musicals, 100 Laughs and 100 Thrills.

In addition to talking about which films are deserving of being on the list and bitterly shaking our fists because a beloved film was left out, we also love to brag about the number of movies we've seen. As I was looking over the 100 Years... 100 Movies list recently, I realized that I've seen 47 - less than half. As a lover of film and writer/editor for a movie site, this seemed like a wrong that needed to remedied. And so an idea was born. I would watch all 100 movies on the 2007 10th Anniversary list - some of them for the first time in as much as 20 or more years - and ponder their relevance, worthiness and influence on today's film industry. With luck, I'll even discover a few new favorites along the way.

#20: It's a Wonderful Life

If I told you that I've never seen It's a Wonderful Life before, would it blow your mind? Well, that would be a lie, but I haven't seen the film in 20 years or more, so to say that Frank Capra's well-known opus felt new to me would not be an understatement. Naturally, there are pieces and elements that I've seen in clip format over the years - so much so that they feel exceptionally familiar to me - but there were many things about It's a Wonderful Life that surprised me as I watched it with fresh eyes.

Back when I watched the film the first time, It's a Wonderful Life had become a Christmas tradition on television. During the 1970s, '80s and '90s, it was something you could count on as surely as A Charlie Brown Christmas or Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer. And during that era, people became a little bit disenchanted with the movie, to the point that it got poked fun at a bit. It had a reputation for being so relentlessly buoyant and saccharine that people simply rejected it out of hand. I'm a little embarrassed to admit I did the same. I really only watched it under protest, and from that day on I remembered the movie as a little silly and not really worth a couple of my hours.

Watching it in 2009, I'm feeling a little differently.

Continued:       1       2       3