Five Movies to WATCH

I tend to like most movies I see. If they look terrible, I don’t watch them in the first place. We watched a movie Sunday night, though, that we had no clue about. Neither of us had even heard of it before. We happened to have the movie on a collection DVD we borrowed from a friend, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. And it was good! So here’s that movie and a few other gems we’ve discovered in the past five or six years, in no particular order.

• Reign Over Me (2007, R). Before I say anything else, let me say that this movie is rated R for language and some sexual references. There is foul language, but the main character actively points out that the language is rude, and he doesn’t want to hear it. Score! The sexual reference is also true but quite mild. And again, the main character scores points for his fidelity to his wife. Yay! Still, not a movie to show your kids, but for other reasons, too. This is an intense, thought-provoking movie about a middle-aged man reaching out to his college roommate who has gone a little…odd…since his wife and three daughters were killed in the attacks of September 11^th. It’s powerful and touching. Just watch it and thank me later.
• Waterproof (1999, PG-13). We thought this would be an action movie, although I’m not sure why. (We obviously didn’t read the jacket.) It is SO not. Very simply, it’s about a young, African American single mom who returns to her parents’ home in rural Mississippi for awhile. But there’s so much more to it than that! This is a touching and funny story that addresses past pain and renewal, exposed secrets, and finding forgiveness from loved ones and from God. Great movie!
• Elizabethtown (2005, PG-13). I’m not an Orlando-Bloom-is-divinely-gorgeous kind of person, but I do like a lot of his films, and this is one of them. I wasn’t sure I’d like it at first. Drew Baylor is a shoe designer who just put to market the most disastrous shoe ever to exist. So? Is this movie about shoes, or what? No!! It’s about how he takes his own professional grief to his father’s funeral, where it's mixed with his personal grief over his dad’s death. It’s about his dealing with his family members in teeny tiny Elizabethtown, Kentucky. And it’s about the quirky girl he meets along the way who helps him survive the whole ordeal. Cute, funny, dramatic, unexpected. (It’s really too bad that there is that “sexual reference”…) Worth watching, for sure.
• The Spitfire Grill (1996, PG-13). I was introduced to this film in college, so although it’s not exactly new, it’s reasonably new to my family. It touched me deeply. I liked it so much I forced my family to watch it, and they loved it, too. Percy is a young woman convict whose prison sentence is up, and she relocates to a tiny town in Vermont to start afresh…at least until her secret leaks out. I laughed. I cried. You must see this movie.
• The Incredibles (2004, PG). Okay, so yes, I do like Disney/Pixar movies most of the time. (Another great one is The Emperor’s New Groove. Talk about hysterical!) This movie is clean (yes, it’s a cartoon, but these days, that doesn’t mean much), funny, adventurous, and just all-around a great family movie. If you haven’t seen it because you think you’re too grown up, you’re missing out!