30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 5

            I decided to do the 30 day movie challenge as a blog series as it ties into my blog activities rather easily and I am once again not blogging my usual series with regularity in spite of saying that I would.

            Today is "A Movie that reminds me of Someone", and today I have a movie that everyone and their mother has seen, commented on, and quite frankly gotten a little tired of, but I generally regard as comfort food viewing.  The movie is "It's a Wonderful Life".

            Who does this remind me of?  My Mom and Dad, though chiefly my dad.  Prior to DVD's allowing him access to the slews of movies he watched as a child and allowing him to rediscover various westerns and war films that I am not really attracted to, "It's a Wonderful Life" was my Dad's favorite movie.

A Trailer you've probably never seen.

            And really that isn't the only thing.  It is a holiday movie and I am home from college during the holidays, so I get a connection between this and seeing my parents in person.  And I guess there is one other big reason I associate this: my Dad practically is George Bailey, the protagonist of "It's a Wonderful Life".

My father circa 1946-ish

            He comes from a small town and has through a lot of willpower managed to rise up both academically and professionally beyond what the world would have labeled an easy path.  He also works in an environment that exposes him to the worst weaknesses in people, but has managed to come out the other side of it short of certifiable lunacy.
            Dad's never been brought to the brink, but I think that is because he has a job that allows him to yell really loud at whomever is causing the worst of the problems.  And when I say yell, I mean loud enough that your heart will beat irregularly.  The man has developed an ability to attack with just the power of his anger, it's like telekinesis.  Which puts him in a different category than George.

Closer to whatever category this is.

            And that brings me to another thing that I only found out in the last couple years.  At one point my dad was also Clarence, the guardian angel.  I found out that my father talked a man out of killing himself.  Being that my father hadn't met the guy and knew nothing about him, nor did he have the power to create some fanciful parallel earth in which the man had never existed to show the guy how he'd be missed, instead Dad did it the old fashioned way, and told the guy he shouldn't do that to his poor mother.

Another key difference between my father and this man: Eyebrows, this guy has too much of them.

            This is why I often compare my father to a combination of John McClain and Andy Griffith, because I can hear a story of him talking a guy down from a suicide right after hearing how he broke his arm fighting a violent thug.  Or the times he has helped host bike rallies for kids in Sarasota, but also hear about how he nearly killed a man with his fingers.  None of those stories encapsulates him.  Much like how Jimmy Stewart (who was the everyman Tom Hanks of his era) was a hero in World War II, a guy who could make a movie about Christmas and angels is also a bomber pilot of extreme repute.  So yeah.  "It's a Wonderful Life" reminds me of my Dad in varying shades.

Plus he's paying a good chunk of my tuition so I occasionally need to remind him that he is in fact a really cool Dad.