Pennsylvania boy checking in. Deer Hunter way before Groundhog Day.
How about 1776?
I’ve never seen Meet Me In St. Louis, so I don’t know if it would be more appropriate Missouri film than Waiting For Guffman.
My immediate preference would be for Winter’s Bone over Guffman, since it’s a better film. I’m not sure if Winter’s Bone specifies Missouri, rather than just “The Ozarks”, but most reviewers who mention a state say Missouri.
Of course neither film shows Missourians in a good light, but that doesn’t matter to me.
In my experience, Oklahoma! is a realistic representation of life in the state. Seriously, lots of singing, corn as high as an elephant’s eye, barnyard ballet, etc…
Iowa should be* The Music Man*.
I support your choice with two thumbs up! For the same reason I like Walking Tall and Sling Blade and others in the same vein: real life. Not the Hollywood version of “let’s make everybody want to sing and dance.”
Winter’s Bone is why I believe ** Jennifer Lawrence** has the potential to be her generation’s Meryl Streep if she keeps her eye on the prize.
ETA: That’s not a dig at you, AH, because I just now saw your thing about Oklahoma!
I can’t think of Michigan movies without first considering ‘Roger and Me’
All this talk about Chicago Suburbs…Aurora, for example…is really just a big suburb.
The real second city of Illinois is my birthplace, Peoria.
No one ever wrote a song about Aurora.
CHORUS 1: Oh, how I wish I was in Peoria, Peoria tonight!
Oh, how I miss the goils in Peoria, Peoria tonight!
Oh, you can pick a morning Gloria (Yes, yes!)
Right off the sidewalks of Peoria.
Oh, how I wish I was in Peoria, Peoria tonight!
full lyrics…http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=29894
I’m not going to disagree with you.
I just want to say that “The Town” (not “Our Town”) has become one of my most favorite movies. The female lead was played by Rebecca Hall and she was very memorable. Very beautiful.
If anyone else appreciated her performance, I’d like to suggest you try
A Bag of Hammers (2011)
She has a large part and does a good job. There is one scene where she plays a wait staff in a pancake restaurant where they force the wait staff to greet patrons by doing a silly dance where they have to wiggle their hips and smile.
If you like Rebecca Hall, I think you will remember that scene for many years to come.
It’s not exactly a great film. But it was plenty entertaining and she did a fine job.
None of those films are contestable. If you thought of Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie or Mary Richards, she has a gigantic “fuck you” waiting in Ordinary People. And she wasn’t even the best performer. Ordinary People should be a film school study, at every institution. It outclasses every movie you’ve listed here collectively, except, maybe, Meet the Parents. Correction, including Meet the Parents.
They would’ve had to change the name to Brainerd.
California: I’m okay with American Graffiti. The love/hate relationship between San Francisco and everywhere else in the state (which everywhere else in the state doesn’t seem to be aware of…) makes any movie hard to pin down as being definitively California. At least American Graffiti is innocuous enough that it could be about any town just a short trip from the city, whatever the local city is.
I’m also glad they didn’t pick Kalifornia.
“Put your titty up, Adele.”
Wisconsin should have been the documentary. “American Movie” and I’ll fight anybody that says otherwise.
“IT’S ALRIGHT! IT’S OK! YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR!”
How about Major League?
Not for nothing, I always thought The Fugitive worked well as something of a microcosm of Illinois. In the beginning of the movie, in scenes dealing with the train crash and its aftermath, you really get a sense of what some of the more unsavory portions of downstate Illinois can be like, particularly in the winter. Yes, I know that the “downstate” scenes were filmed in North Carolina, but parts of downstate Illinois, particularly way down south, do actually look like that.
Then you get to the Chicago portion of the movie, which shows Chicago’s grandiosity and also its underbelly.
Related: The site of the train wreck scene is still there, and you can walk right up to it and look around if you want. In North Carolina.
