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The wonders of a pitiful, dreadful life

By Jim Chen et al.

a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html" target=_blankimg src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/19/arts/19wonderful.xlarge1x.jpg" style="display:block; margin: 0px auto 0px; text-align:center; width:479px" alt="It's a Wonderful Life" title="It's a Wonderful Life"/abr /Almost precisely a year to the day after the publication of a href="http://www.law.louisville.edu/cardinallawyer/node/55" target=_blank style="font-style:italic"Other People's Children/a and a href="http://money-law.blogspot.com/2007/12/its-wonderful-life.html" target=_blankMarie Reilly's meditations on the Bailey Building Loan Association/a comes Wendell Jamieson's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html" target=_blankfantastically insightful reexamination/a of a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038650" target=_blank style="font-style:italic"It's a Wonderful Life/a:blockquoteimg src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/19/arts/19wonderful.large1.jpg" style="float:right; margin: 0px 0px 2px 10px; height:260px" alt="It's a Wonderful Life" title="It's a Wonderful Life"?It?s a Wonderful Life? is anything but a cheery holiday tale.nbsp;.nbsp;.nbsp;. ?It?s a Wonderful Life? is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation./blockquoteI wholeheartedly agree. This year's obligatory viewing of a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4867975537967299162" target=_blank style="font-style:italic"It's a Wonderful Life/a reminds me that any wise man would swiftly trade all the places, geographic and metaphysical, that he can reach through planes, trains, automobiles, and a href="http://money-law.blogspot.com/2006/09/billy-beane-hates-mets-and-so-do-i.html"an Ivy League degree/a mdash; fifteen countries, four continents, and three languages, if you insist on counting mdash; for devotion worthy of Mary Hatch Bailey and a child's belief that he really can fix everything complex as well as a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeoIblXRnls" target=_blankhe can build a rose/a.br /br /fieldset style="width:424px; display:block; margin:0px auto 0px; text-align:center; background:#eeeeaa"legend style="background:#eeeeaa"Multimedia bonus: a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4867975537967299162" target=_blank style="font-style:italic"It's a Wonderful Life/a/legendembed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-4867975537967299162hl=en" flashvars="subtitle=on"/embed/fieldsetdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?a=MgZvO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?i=MgZvO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?a=fn7cO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?i=fn7cO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Moneylaw/~4/490140296" height="1" width="1"/

Full post as published by MoneyLaw on December 19, 2008 (boomark / email).