The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia 2006)

Special thanks to AOW for this suggestion.

Well, I'm back for another year of conservative movies, and this is a great one to kick the whole thing off! The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith and his son Jaden Smith would make a great movie to rent this weekend if you haven't seen it yet! Here is the review from IMDb...

In 1981, in San Francisco, the smart salesman and family man Chris Gardner invested the family savings in Ostelo National bone-density scanners, an apparatus twice more expensive than x-ray with practically the same resolution. The white elephant financially breaks the family, bringing troubles to the relationship with his wife that leaves him and moves to New York. Without money and wife, but totally committed with his son Christopher, Chris sees the chance to fight for a stockbroker internship position at Dean Witter, disputing for one career in the end of six months training period without any salary with other twenty candidates. Meanwhile, homeless, he has all sorts of difficulties with his son.

When you're watching this movie, put yourself in Chris Gardner's shoes. What would you do? Would you call it quits and take the government check? Pretty tempting, right? Be another victim of those waskilly rich people? Or would you hunker down and be a great example to a loved one and show them that hard work, not government, leads to HAPPYNESS :O) .

Here is the trailer...



"You want something, go get it. Period."

Invincible (Walt Disney 2006)

I was really hoping that my team would prove to be "invincible" last Saturday, but of course that was not the case. I guess Cinderella will have to go back to mopping the floors while her ugly red stepsister gets to go to the prom, or dance...ball...whatever!

Too bad these days people are looking to be Cinderella first and mop the floors later...or never! As you will see in this film, Vince Papale was not one of those kind of guys and his inspirational true story Invincible is the Edge Conservative Movie of the Week!

Here is the plot summary from IMDb...

In the sumer of 1976, 30-year old Vince Papale is having a tough run of luck. He's been working as a supply teacher for two days a week but has just found out that his job has been eliminated because of budget cuts. His wife gives up on him saying he'll never amount to anything and asks for a divorce. He works as a bartender and plays football with his friends. When the the new coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, Dick Vermeil, announces that he will hold open tryouts for the team, Vince reluctantly decides to give a try. In an almost unheard of feat, he manages to make the team and enjoyed a three year career as a professional football player. Based on a true story.

Here is the trailer...



Now Papale is a motivational speaker...

Facing the Giants (Destination Films 2006)

Even if you are not a big football fan (as I am), this film will be entertaining to all! When you consider that the budget of this film was $100,000 and that most of the actors in the movie had never acted a day in their life...hey...they made a pretty good flick! Bucking the Hollywood system. How could Facing the Giants not be on ECM?

Here is the synopsis from IMDb...

From the award winning producers of FLYWHEEL, comes an action-packed drama about a Christian high school football coach who uses his undying faith to battle the giants of fear and failure. In six years of coaching, Grant Taylor has never led his Shiloh Eagles to a winning season. After learning that he and his wife Brooke face infertility, Grant discovers that a group of fathers are secretly organizing to have him dismissed as head coach. Devastated by his circumstances, he cries out to God in desperation. When Grant receives a message from an unexpected visitor, he searches for a stronger purpose for his football team. He dares to challenge his players to believe God for the impossible on and off the field. When faced with unbelievable odds, the Eagles must step up to their greatest test of strength and courage. What transpires is a dynamic story of the fight between faith and fear. Facing the Giants is a powerful experience for the whole family inspiring viewers to live with faith, hope, and love!

Here is the trailer for the film!



After I'd get through barfing, I'd have a long talk with coach.

We Are Marshall (Warner Bros. 2006)

What happens when you don't cut and run? What happens if you fight like all hell instead? Marshall University found out and their story is the ECM Movie of the Week.

We Are Marshall begins on a serious note with tragedy interspersed with sport. A plane returning from Greenville, North Carolina crashed into a mountain near Huntington, West Virginia. Everyone aboard perished...players, coaches and fans of the Marshall University Football team. The entire town is absolutely devastated. The school's board of directors decide to put an end to the program before one of the players (who remained in Huntington) intervenes. He finds support in the entire town and also Marshall's President Donald Dedmon.

After much hard work, Dedmon finds Jack Lengyel to be the new Thundering Herd coach. But winning isn't easy...and the cut and run option looks very VERY inviting...sound familiar?

Even if you're not a football fan you'll love this movie! Here is the trailer!



Good video I found.

The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures 2006)

When William F. Buckley tells you to watch a film...folks you just plain do it! Here is Buck's review of the 2006 German Film The Lives of Others from National Review. Go see it! You will enjoy it!

I return from one week’s leave from my column, grateful for my old roost and in the mood to repay a favor by granting one, or attempting to do so. You must have the narrative of what happened one day last week.

I was at work, with an assistant, on a long project, a book about the Goldwater campaign and the events leading up to it. At noon I had an e-mail from my oldest friend, a historian-belletrist, a knighted Englishman, whose message was that I must interrupt whatever I was wasting time on in order to catch a particular movie. The title he gave me was The Lives of Others. My companion hadn’t heard of it either. Still, so urgent was my friend’s recommendation that we instructed Google to advise us where, within reasonable reach, we could find it.

We were given one theater 15 miles east of my study, at an odd hour of the evening. But west about the same distance was a matinee at 4:15. So we threw duty to the winds and arrived at the theater in Mamaroneck, New York, which like most modern theaters husbands five different movies, requiring you to specify which it is you are there to see.

We were ushered into a dark chamber entirely empty. The ticket seller told us that if we had arrived two minutes later, the theater would have been shut. “If there’s no one here, we don’t show the film.”

Two hours and twenty minutes later we came away. The house was still empty. I turned to my companion and said, “I think that is the best movie I ever saw.” He is only 23 years old, but he nodded his agreement.

The movie is German, and in German. There is a prejudice, perhaps understandable, against going to see a movie made in a foreign language. But good subtitle writers capture your mind and heart early in the engagement, and after ten minutes you are as if tuned into your native language. This is so of this German film, which depicts life in Berlin in 1984 under the famous Stasi, who were ten times as numerous as their brother Gestapo had been.

The watchword of the Stasi was information. They would use all their powers, which were plenary, to press their totalitarian thumb down on any expression of life in East Germany. In this case, they had their eye on a playwright who sought to write about the way he and his fellow East Germans lived. To effect their surveillance the Stasi used the most rudimentary tool of social highwaymanry, the listening device. The writer is away from his lair for a day, and no fewer than eight technicians swoop down on his apartment, from which moment there is not a private swallow in the life of the author and his lady and his friends.

Omnipresent in the film is the Stasi officer who is listening to it all, turning the device over to a coadjutor every eight hours, together with notes about the conversations he has overheard during his watch. And then, and then, there is a trickle of humanity, which quickly turns the drama into three parts, Stasi vs. German humankind vs. Stasi. The tension mounts to heart-stopping pitch and I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.

The principal players are captivating, especially the main Stasi officer, who, without a change in aspect of his dour countenance, undergoes this convulsion of the soul, which permits the author life, though without his martyred lady. There is then the sublime vengeance of a published book’s dedication to the redemptive German functionary who briefly interrupted hell in East Germany, pending, finally, the eradication of the terrible Berlin Wall.

I looked at the record and was gratified to find, in the critics’ files, encomiums absolutely unconfined in their admiration of this movie, which in fact won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. And I was unsurprised to find that what seems the whole of East Germany is riven by its impact. Since so many East Germans were complicit in the postwar reign of the German Democratic Republic, there is a corporate national shame at the betrayal of life, as so brazenly done by so many millions, but whose country, at least, has given the world this holy vessel of expiation.

Can you imagine Jesse Jackson having a face to face debate with Buckley? Folks, I'd spend hundreds of dollars to just listen to that on a small cruddy radio.

Here is the trailer from the film.



Knock! Knock! It's just you're friendly, all-caring, all-knowing guvment!!!

World Trade Center (Paramount 2006)

When I first heard that Oliver Stone was making a film about 9/11 my first reaction, like so many other conservative movie goers, was Great, that should be a George Bush Bash Fest! A friend of mine assured me that Stone was not making the film to attack Bush but to tell a true story from that horrible day.

World Trade Center is the third film about 9/11 on ECM (United 93, Path to 9/11 being the other two) . I highly recommend anyone to watch all three! You won't regret it, I promise you! Below is a summary from the film I found on Internet Movie Database. I think this guy summed up the movie better than I could!

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, hope is still alive. Refusing to bow down to terrorism, rescuers and family of the victims press forward. Their mission of rescue and recovery is driven by the faith that under each piece of rubble, a co-worker, a friend a family member may be found. This is the true story of John McLoughlin and William J. Jimeno, two of the last survivors extracted from Ground Zero and the rescuers who never gave up. It's a story of the true heroes of that fateful time in the history of the United States when buildings would fall and heroes would rise, literally from the ashes to inspire the entire human race.

Rent it folks! Again, you won't be sorry you did!



Nicholas Cage does a great job in this film...he even speaks Spanish!

Cinderella Man (Universal 2005)

Usually when I see a movie advertised that stars Hollywood libs like a Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, or a George Clooney I tend to shy away from the box office to hand over my dinero.

Cinderella Man, starring Russell Crowe, was no different. My best friend who saw it in the theatre told me to go see the film and I said I would wait for it on DVD. I wish I hadn't waited and I learned a very valuable lesson.

Even a phone throwing liberal idiot can make a movie with a conservative theme.

Crowe is James Braddock, a 1930's era boxer struggling to make ends meet. With the Great Depression in full force, Braddock's fortunes take a turn for the worse when he breaks his hand in a bout. With little income to support his family, he reluctantly turns to the government for welfare. His struggles to find work continue for years when he finally decides to get back in the ring to earn money. Surprisingly to all he's almost twice the fighter he was and faces the Heavyweight Champion Max Baer in the film's conclusion.

Oh and that welfare check he received? He paid it back. Every last penny. A lot different than today, huh?

This clip puts Rocky music to the Cinderella Man fight scenes. Pretty cool.

United 93 (Universal 2006)

I'm 32 years old and I can say quite frankly that United 93 is the greatest American story ever told to my generation. It belongs with the classics we all learned in our history books...Valley Forge, The Alamo, Gettysburg, D-Day, Iwo Jima, United 93...period.

What makes this story more remarkable than any other story in our country's history is that these were common citizens that rose up together to fight evil. They weren't at war with anyone, they didn't train together, hell they didn't even know each other...but they recorded a significant first victory against terror that day.

I remember when this film was released and some people said it will just make people mad all over again. If this you, do your country a favor...

Get mad all over again.

Path to 9/11 (ABC 2006)

We conservatives have an old saying.

If you want to piss us off, lie to us.

If you want to piss off a
liberal, tell him the truth.

That's exactly what the Path to 9/11 did in 2006...it told the truth and pissed off a lot of Dems. In my own personal opinion, it didn't paint a great picture of either the Bush or Clinton administrations. What this motion picture did have to say is we basically failed to act, and over 3000 of our own died because of it.

I'm not sure if this movie is available yet on DVD, but if it is I strongly advise for you to rent it.

This scene takes place at the Northern Alliance Base Camp where US ally Ahmad Shāh Mas'ūd is requesting more help from the Americans to attack Osama Bin-Laden and the Al-Qaeda training camp.

Ahmad Shāh Mas'ūd was assassinated by Al-Qaeda 2 days before 9/11.




The 9/11 hijackers arrive at the Al-Qaeda camp.