Independence Day

It is coming up in 22 days.

Not just the name of a great movie, but it has to be up there with the best holidays of the year, along with Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If not in merchandise, in substance.

What better a reason to celebrate than the day your country gained independence? All the sacrifices made, the battles waged, the lives lost, and we wave the flag proudly and stuff ourselves like Thanksgiving Turkeys and Christmas Geese.

And watch Independence Day.

I swell with pride every time I see the American Flag.

Still.

With all her faults, I would not want to live anywhere else (although southern England is a close second). Maybe it is being raised for half of my life in a military family that makes me swell with pride when I hear the national anthem (live or on TV), or maybe it was all the war movies I watched as a kid (who can forget Audie Murphy getting every last bullet out of the machine gun atop the tank in To Hell and Back?

Or how about the surprisingly good (I’ll say, he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor!) performance of Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity?

The beach scene with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr stole all the publicity, but for me, the most poignant part of that entire movie (which won eight Oscars, btw), was the haunting rendition of Taps performed by Montgomery Clift’s character after the death of his friend Angelo Maggio (Sinatra).

I can still hear it today.

As far as color war movies, how about Platoon for starters?

Deer Hunter.

Full Metal Jacket.

I am sure everyone has their favorites, but those are my top three and I am going by how many times I have watched the movie in my life.

I am not counting alien movies as war movies, so that rules out Independence Day and I am ruling out domestic assaults, which eliminates BOTH Red Dawn movies, which has Karen threatening a boycott if I don’t at least mention Chris Hemsworth in the blog.

There I did it. Believe me, it will save me a lot of grief later.

Shame on her.

I am leaving out comedies, but if I were to include them, what qualifies?

M*A*S*H is the only one that comes to mind and that is a classic. But I am sure there were some great comedic classics with Abbott and Costello, or Jerry Lewis for examples.

Just as there are great serious movies about space exploration like Apollo 11 starring Tom Hanks and several made years earlier such as The Reluctant Astronaut starring Don Knotts.

That is the beauty of movies and why there are so many different ways of interpreting them.

We are seeing the “world” of the movie through the director’s eyes. Who is to say that, through the entire course of film history, there hasn’t been one crazy bastard that directed a movie that we have seen, maybe even an award-winning film, a winner of numerous awards?

It could happen.

Stay well.