The Straight Story

How many movies are actually perfect? I mean you wouldn't change a single minute detail...perfect. Well, Casablanca, certainly. 84 Charing Cross Road. I think Moonstruck, Tootsie and Some Like It Hot are perfect comedies. Sabrina is a perfect chick flick. Ikiru is, to me, what film is for. But it's a short list. I love a lot of films but most of them are far from perfect...which is fine.

The Straight Story is a perfect movie.

With the unlikely coming together of David Lynch (Twin Peaks) and Disney (Cinderella II -Dreams Come True) the forces of good and evil seem to have come to a temporary truce to create one of the purest films ever put into major release.

Everyone with a beating heart will enjoy this movie...if you don't I genuinely fear for your eternal soul...but the film focuses on the experiences of a WWII veteran on a journey (by riding mower) to visit his ailing and estranged brother, and I've always felt this to be an effectively masculine story (meaning I can recommend it to my most meat headed "masculine" friends and they will enjoy it despite it being G rated). The journey is the thing here though, and it is here where Lynch conjures his particular brand of magic. The characters are so real and immediate that it's difficult to believe you're watching a movie, it makes more than 99% of all movies made look very much like movies, with actors and sets and made up stories. This film also contains the most moving discussion of the war experience ever put to celluloid.

I just love this film. Please see it.

And don't rent it. Buy it.