Love love love The Best Years of Our Lives and hadn’t known about I Know Where I’m Going (Wendy Hiller! oh boy!). Just put it in my Netflix Queue as well. Thanks, Jed!

Andie MacDowell didn’t quite ruin it. I feel bad for her; every movie she’s been in, would be better with someone else in her role, and it isn’t her fault because she’s always put in these situations in which the central character, a male, is willing to sacrifice everything to be with her.

Why did they keep doing that to us?

I’d kick her out. I wouldn’t even wait for the crackers. GD would have been m-u-c-h better with Meg Ryan, or even Shelly Long. As it is, when he’s pursuing her it just looks to me like another sign of how desperate and warped he’s becoming as the years roll by in that time loop. So it goes without saying the ending is ruined.

P.S. Hint: if you’re going to recommend a movie put it up on your I Recommend thing so you can collect a commission from Amazon. You can bet El Instanto Maximo gets a spiff from them for all the books and movies he touts.

Which is why the film works. It doesn’t beat you over the head with the philosophy, it just makes it a part of the story. If it had been more effortless with the philosophy, it would have been preachy and probably boring. (That, by the way, was one of the problems with The Matrix sequels, Gray — the first one, the philosophy was there but not central. The sequels, it was central and not “just there”)

Good film (good anything, actually) doesn’t beat you over the head with its concepts, but fits them into a narrative where they just flow naturally.

For some people, the flow may be too fast, or too slow, but most people can adapt to the speed if it’s done right.

LOL — “duh, the final zero didn’t make it from my fingers to the comment”.

Ummm, the first part is obviously, true, but the second is an overstatement at best.

It ranks #160 on the IMDB top 25.

Too low? Of obvious comedies, these precede it:
================================
Forrest Gump
Amelie
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
City Lights
Back to the Future
Some Like It Hot
The Great Dictator
The Apartment
The Sting
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Annie Hall
The General
The Big Lebowski
It Happened One Night
Life of Brian
==============
So it ranks #16 on IMDB’s list of the best film comedies, in essence — five of which were the AABP for their year… or #40 if you use the IMDB list of anything vaguely “comical”, including a number of other pics where comedy isn’t the film’s raison d’etre, like “Snatch” (very comic but an action pic, by my lights)

Most of those pics above it at least have good reason to be considered *possibly* to be better.

So claiming it’s “very underrated” is sort of like saying The Empire State Building is “very understated”, or a cross-country trip in the USA is a “bit of a jog”

I grant people don’t think about it as a comedy quite as readily as some films, because it’s not a big LOL comedy, unlike, say, “Ghostbusters” or The Holy Grail — it depends on wit and charm (like Amelie) rather than gut-busting — but that doesn’t make it “underrated”.

It’s so good even Andie MacDowell couldn’t screw it up.

And remember, folks:

“Don’t Drive Angry”.