Watch America's Heart and Soul For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It was a pleasure seeing a movie that makes me proud to be an American....The LOVE OF AMERICA came through LOUD and CLEAR.It covered a good cross section of American experiences.It was worth seeing.You will leave the theater will a feel good flutter in your heart.It is the Antithesis of Fahrenheit 9-11.My friends loved it.Another Disney classic.You will want to see it again and again.The 20 or so stories criss cross our great land....

"America's Heart and Soul" is the movie Hollywood does not want you to see. 'What? A film that is openly patriotic and optimistic? Quiet! Someone might hear you and buy a ticket.' This movie should be viewed not only by all Americans but by all people who want to be free. In an amazing series of vignettes we see the people who make our country a continuous celebration of the human spirit. Here we lift the man crippled with cerebral palsy and put him in a wheel chair, and with the aide of his father, he speeds past his fellow citizens waving flags and yelling 'you can do it!' Together they finish the Boston Marathon. Here we decorate cars with bobble head dolls or make dinosaur statues from scrap metal or we hurl a flaming bowling ball into a stack of broken televisions. Here we don't just climb mountains we toss a rope to the blind man so he can 'see' the view from the top. Here a man can go from prisoner to captain of the Olympic Boxing Team after twelve months of training and exercise resulting in a well defined dream. Here a clarinet reverberates through a synagogue in Brooklyn and a choir shakes the beams of an old church building in Mississippi. Here a woman dares to enter the male dominated sport of acrobatic flying and wins two years in a row.We are a nation that represents true cultural diversity in which free enterprise and the free mind are as essential to the human soul as oxygen and water are to the human body. We don't just get lemons and make lemonade, we plant the seeds our Maker put in the lemon's heart and get a whole forest of trees whose branches provide homes for the birds and shade for the weary land."America's Heart and Soul" proclaims the beauty of freedom without resounding political jibes. It reminds us of Providence without being preachy. It makes you weep tears of joy.For me the only melancholy tear I shed was when the camera soared across Manhattan's mighty skyline, and I couldn't help but notice what was missing.Such is the price of liberty, when you want to be a shinning city on a hill there are always those with greedy hands and contaminated minds who want to blow out your candle. This Independence Day weekend while you are enjoying the barbeques and rocket's red glare, be sure to tell that grand Lady Liberty holding her torch in Hudson Bay that she's as beautiful as ever because millions of people out there want to fly a passenger plane into her pedestal. In conclusion, take the time to say 'thank you' by supporting your local movie house with your patronage. Buy a big bag of popcorn and a Coke. In a small way you will be remembering the real life heroes, our friends who daily risk their lives to keep this land safe and self determined. Honor our values and buy a ticket for 'America's Heart and Soul.'

Tired of Michael Moore's crybaby `Fahrenheit 9/11'? Longing for some good old American hooray? Then Walt Disney Pictures, who refused to distribute Moore's film, coincidentally brings you `America's Heart and Soul,' several vignettes about Americans who live freedom by doing extraordinary things from mountain climbing to making ice cream. The theme seems to be that our great country provides us with the opportunity to do what we want if we have the passion to do it.The photography is glorious: Cowboy Roudy roams the range amid mountains only lucky people like my daughter Gabrielle can see daily (She recently moved to Wyoming with her family). Director Louis Schwartzberg (founder of stock footage firm `Energy' and additional cinematographer for `Koyaanisqatsi') has an eye for the sweeping aerial shot as well as the intimate close-up. The characters are eccentric but often daring and graceful: Mountain-dangling dancers defy gravity to gavotte with it; a Coloradoan bowls incendiary balls into old TV sets in front of admiring, obviously otherwise bored fellow sufferers of the dreaded winter. A Vermont farmer tells you how to avoid the Monday morning blues: Work seven days a week!The freedom theme is aided by the subjects' passion to do what they choose: A gospel singer rears her six siblings after her mother's death, and those adults now call her Mom (Just listen to them sing in the choir, and you might rethink your agnosticism). Her rewards are more than six fold. If you approach `America's Heart and Soul' as a love song to the best that America can be, you should be able to balance it with Moore's diatribe against the neocons. In either case, there is no balance: Schwartzberg neglects the poverty or, say, lack of health insurance many of the participants experience; Moore refuses to acknowledge any of President Bush's accomplishments. Both visions are free to be expressed, and we are free to debate about them. But Oscar Wilde warns, `To be entirely free and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realize at every moment.' The distribution of both films is a tribute to the freedom they wish to protect and the difficulty of achieving it in any lifetime.

In step with today's documentary fad, Disney presents an inspirational, slightly goofy documentary featuring real-life story slices from Americana – people like Appalachian mountain folk and famous musician wannabes. For example, you'll meet a blind mountain-climber, an Indian elder and a rug weaver. After being fired from cooking-related jobs, Ben Cohen realized he mainly liked to eat, and developed Ben & Jerry's fabulous ice cream. Heart and Soul spotlights everyone from unique mothers, bike messengers, artists and marathon runners (one of whom has Cerebral Palsy) to more eccentric cliff-dancers and outright lunatic fringe. One guy specialized in blowing up junk. This collection of creative dreamers who love life plucks on the heartstrings without being schmaltzy. Definitely worth a look.