For my second top 100 movie review I chose to watch “It's a Wonderful Life”. This movie is about this guy named George Bailey whose living a pretty simple life who gave up his dreams of traveling the world to stand by his family business of banking. Before George is about to jump off a bridge he runs into his “guardian angel” Clarence who then takes him on a journey of flashbacks showing him what town and life would be like with George and the good things he’s done in the past years.

 

I found this movie was very easy to connect to because this guy isn’t living this crazy life that’s unrealistic, George goes through everyday problems just like everyone else. Something that I started to notice throughout this film was that they use the same settings for most of the clips. These settings were: The two banks, a couple different houses, a small portion of the town, and then there were an occasional different places. But for the most part a lot of the scenes were filmed in a small variety of locations. Also this film is in black and white and also for almost all the time the weather is snowing, and everyone knows snow is white, so in order for that to work the had to make the background pretty black so you could see that it was snowing. The plot to this film was also a very cliché one I think, this is a man vs self conflict. George's conflict was against himself and the decisions he made. I think that many movies do this but people overlook them because the ones that are “most interesting” are when there's intense fighting or problems going on that need to be fixed. Personally I believe that conflicts like the one in “It's a Wonderful Life” can be just as interesting as any other, but only if it’s done right. And the director of this film Frank Capra did just that and that’s why this movie is as popular as it is.

 

Many of the shots in this film along with being taken in the same place most of the time were fairly simple. Normally there wasn’t too much crazy action going on and the actions of people were very normal so using the rule of thirds didn’t seem like too big of a deal. If I were going to suggest this movie to anyone I would probably suggest it to someone that's in the 9th grade or older. I would do this because the plot is a more deep one then they might understand if they were younger and I’m not saying that they won’t like the movie even though the plot might not be as clear it's just I think they would appreciate it a lot more if they did understand it. Additionally I suggest people watch it around the holiday season even more so than any other time only because it is based around Christmas time so it will seem more relevant compared to if it were being watched in the middle of the summer.