And the countdown continues in my quest to watch and find something inspiring in every single one of Yahoo’s 100 Movies to See Before You Die.
(Link is broken, that’s how long I’ve been working on these 100 Movies.)
Unlike the other day, I looove these two films. Commencing my lovefest:
Indiana: Meet me at Omar’s. Be ready for me. I’m going after that truck.
Sallah: How?
Indiana: I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go!
I would go as far to say that I love every single Indiana Jones movie, even the latest one about aliens. But of course my heart belongs to the first three. A good portion of my childhood can be traced back to memories of watching “The Temple of Doom” (coincidentally some of my nightmares included eating chilled monkey brains). But the original. Now, this is where you can say they just don’t make them like this anymore. Action-adventure without any real sense of danger. You know Harrison Ford will make it out of any situation, no matter how impossible, no matter how many snakes. If that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what.
Howard Beale: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad — worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot — I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
I think every writer wants to come up with something that will stand the test of time, a message that will resonate with people long after it is first written. I find it inspiring — and telling — that “Network” still makes sense today. How many of us can read the speech above and find truth in it? You can replace the Russian reference with “terrorists” or “health care system” or “whatever it is that’s pissing us off at any given moment,” and it still works. Powerful stuff. Now don’t you want to stick your head out the window and yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”?
