My Top Feel Good Movies

If I want to improve my mood with a movie, there are many I could choose from. Here are my criteria for putting a movie on this list:

1. Positive message and very little violence: This is why I would leave Shawshank Redemption, Hotel Rwanda and Braveheart off this list.

2. Believability and Accessibility: Would these things happen to real people? Therefore, though I love the Princess Bride, it isn’t on this list.

3. I could watch this with my family: I want to invite my wife and kids to watch a feel-good movie with me.  I really like The Green Mile, but my wife would walk out on the execution scene.

4. Happy Endings: I am a sucker for happy endings. I want a movie to leave me feeling better than I felt when I started watching.

So, here are my top twenty movies to lift my soul…in this order:

20. Up (okay, so houses can’t really fly with balloons…but it still fits the other criteria).

19. Erin Brockovitch

18. August Rush

17. Temple Grandin

16. Remember the  Titans

15. Rudy

14. Stand and Deliver

13. The King’s Speech

12. We Are Marshall

11. Field of Dreams

10. Secondhand Lions

9. That Thing You Do

8. A Beautiful Mind

7. Chariots of Fire

6. The Blind Side

5. The Pursuit of Happyness – When he gets the job after all that work, our hearts glow with his

4. October Sky – I am so moved when dad sets off that rocket.

3. Freedom Writers – The best teacher in America

2. Mr. Holland’s Opus – I could watch him walk up and take that baton a hundred times and still be moved

1. Hoosiers. When Jimmy Chitwood sinks that final shot, I cry and cheer. I know it’s coming and it still gets me where I live.

Quietness

Every movement needs a “poster child”. For those not aware of the concept, a “poster child” is someone who fits as a perfect example of a bad example. For instance, the poster child for bad parenting is Brittney Spears. Or the poster child for bad moviemaking would be “Heaven’s Gate” (watch it sometime…I dare you to stay awake for the whole four hours). The poster child for fiscal irresponsibility is this current Congress.

But I have a new movement to proclaim. The “Quietness” Movement. This is a movement I want to start where every person seeks some moment of quiet in each day. I believe it would transform society in a week. The poster child for this movement would be Mark Broder. He was picked up two years ago for driving on a Minneapolis freeway while he was practicing his violin. He was steering with his knees and had placed the car on cruise control. Amazingly, he was not able to manipulate his knees quickly enough to miss

Hammocks are from Heaven

Where else could hammocks come from? My kids bought me this freestanding hammock for my birthday yesterday. It can be brought anywhere and you are suspended above the earth in free-floating ecstacy. Even the dog leaves me alone up there. This is the exact hammock they got me (minus the woman in it of course) and I have already logged my first two hours of reading time in it. Actually, I was asleep in about five minutes, but the book stayed with me, so it still counts as reading time.

There are few inventions that combine peace, comfort, portability, sunshine and godliness into one package. This might be the perfect invention of man. We have reached the pinnacle.