Wednesday Mind Hump 10/08/08

Today's Wednesday Mind Hump:

Name your favorite movie, your favorite character from that movie, and why you like that character so much.

This is a toughie, as I have soooo many favorite movies, and it's tought to pick one favorite character from any of them! I'm going to go with Guido Orefice from Life is Beautiful.

The movie is set in Italy in the 1940s. Guido is an Italian waiter, who happens to be Jewish. He falls in love with a gentile woman, Dora, and works very hard at capturing her attention by making her laugh. She eventually falls in love with him, and they get married and have a son, Joshua.

When Joshua is five, he and Guido are taken to a concentration camp. When Dora finds out what has happened, she demands to be taken to the camp as well, although she is held in the women's section and doesn't have contact with Guido and Joshua.

Guido doesn't want his son to be afraid, so he tells Joshua that what's happening is a game, and that if Joshua plays along and follows the rules, he will win a tank. Even when things are terrible in the camp, he is able to keep Joshua's spirits up by reminding him that they are in the lead and will win the tank when they leave.

I love Guido's character because of his love for life and his incredible ability to maintain a positive outlook even in the worst circumstances a person could find themselves in, for the sake of his family. And of course, at the beginning of the film I see parallels to my own life, because Matt used his own silly sense of humor to grab my attention back when we were kids.

The movie is, at times, side-splittingly hilarious, and at others, gut-wrenchingly sad. I saw it when I was almost at the end of my pregnancy with Jacob, and I remember Matt and I holding on to each other, weeping, as we left the theater. It won the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor in 1999.