Watching Movies of Life - the Movie Meditation
These descriptions of certain emotional states of mind are intended to encourage us to watch specific aspects of our life as if they were a movie. A five star movie in this list is not rated necessarily as a highly entertaining, mainstream movie. Instead, a good movie suggested here may more accurately reflect the drama of life in all its facets -- the shadow of an emotion as well as its positive side. Find out what moves you and learn to simply let it be. Meditation is watching, unidentified and non-judging.
V -- The Friendly Dreamer
The shadow side
Being obeisant and begging for friendship, not feeling good enough, not being nourished. Filling the inner hole that an absent or cold mother created with food, sex and friends. Being compulsive "you must, you urgently have to..." Being daddy's darling, feeling obliged to the expectations of others, anorexia, looking like your friends like you to look, wanting to be everybody's friend, clinging to others, avoiding aloneness, aggressively getting nourishment, dreaming of big things
The light side
In friendship with everything - human beings, animals, plants. Perceiving a big togetherness. Helping each other where it is necessary. Being sensitive and feeling delicate vibrations. Enjoying all kinds of nourishment, cooking and being sensitive. Celebrating, having fun, being ordinary and yet unique. Sharing what you have with friends. Being simple, returning to the source, being natural, easy and exactly as one is. Suchness
Movies with these themes
Millions
It?s holiday season and seven-year-old Damian believes he?s received a divine gift from above when a suitcase filled with cash literally falls out of the sky. Damian is anxious to share the wealth with those less fortunate while his fun-loving brother Anthony would rather spend it like there?s no tomorrow! But when the loot turns out to be stolen, both the boys? plans are put to the test?with heartwarming and hilarious results.
I am Sam
Sam Dawson (Sean Penn), a mentally challenged man with a mind of a child, is living in San Francisco and is single-handedly raising his daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning), whom he fathered from a homeless woman who wanted nothing to do with Lucy and left him the day of her birth. Although Sam provides a loving and caring environment for the 7-year-old Lucy, she soon surpasses her father's mental capacity. Questions arise about Sam’s ability to care for Lucy and a custody case is brought to court.
Sam is a man with a mental age of seven who is well adjusted and has a great support system consisting of four similarly developmentally disabled men. His neighbor Annie (Wiest), a piano-player and agoraphobe, befriends Sam and takes care of Lucy when Sam can't....
Juno
Sixteen-year-old Minnesotan high-schooler Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) discovers she is pregnant with a child fathered by her friend and longtime admirer, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). While at first she intends to have an abortion, she changes her mind and decides to make a plan for the child's adoption. With the help of her friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), Juno searches the ads in the Pennysaver and finds a couple she feels will provide a suitable home. Along with her father, Mac (J. K. Simmons), Juno meets the couple, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), in their expensive home and expresses a desire for a closed adoption.
Vanessa is extremely anxious around Juno and their initial interactions are uneasy. However, Juno and Leah happen to see Vanessa in a shopping mall being completely at ease with a child, and Juno encourages Vanessa to talk to Juno's baby in the womb, where it obligingly kicks for her. On the other hand, Juno more easily forms a friendship with Mark, with whom she shares tastes in punk rock and horror films. Mark, who has set aside his rock band youth (now confined to memorabilia displayed in the one room of the house allowed him by Vanessa), works at home composing commercial jingles. Juno hangs out with Mark a few times, ignoring a warning from her stepmother Bren (Allison Janney) that she should not spend time alone with a married man...
Babel
In a remote desert location in southern Morocco, Abdullah, a goatherder, buys a high-powered .270 Winchester M70 rifle and a box of ammunition from his countryman Hassan Ibrahim to shoot the jackals that have been preying on his goats. Abdullah gives the rifle to his two teenage sons, Yussef and Ahmed (played by local non-professional actors Boubker Ait El Caid and Said Tarchini), and sends them out to tend the herd. Competing gently between themselves and doubtful of the rifle's purported three-kilometer range, they decide to test it out, aiming first for rocks and then for a bus carrying Western tourists on the highway below. Yussef's bullet hits the bus, critically wounding Susan Jones (Cate Blanchett), an American woman from San Diego[3][4] who is traveling with her husband Richard Jones (Brad Pitt) on vacation. The two boys realize what has happened and flee the scene, hiding the rifle in the hills that night...
Little Miss Sunshine
Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette) is an overworked mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her brother, Frank (Steve Carell), is a scholar of French author Proust and a homosexual, temporarily living at home with the family after having attempted suicide. Sheryl's husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a Type A personality striving to build a career as a motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne (Paul Dano), Sheryl's son from a previous marriage, is a Nietzsche-reading teenager who has taken a vow of silence until he can accomplish his dream of becoming a test pilot. Richard's foulmouthed father, Edwin (Alan Arkin), recently evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin, lives with the family; he is close to his seven-year-old granddaughter Olive (Abigail Breslin).
Empire Records
Empire Records is a small record shop managed by the cynical Joe (Anthony LaPaglia). His workers are local teenagers who are dramatically different, but all share the love of their job. One night, Joe selects Lucas (Rory Cochranee), a prophesizing young employee, to close down the store unsupervised. Lucas discovers that Empire Records is on the brink of being converted to a franchise called Music Town. In a valiant attempt to save the store, Lucas takes the day's cash receipts from Joe's office to Atlantic City, where he promptly loses it all.
The following morning, the young employees arrive for work. A washed-up pop star named Rex Manning (possibly a parody of T. Rex lead singer Marc Bolan, portrayed by Maxwell Caulfield) is due to arrive to sign autographs, and no one is looking forward to it except Corey (Liv Tyler), a beautiful cashier who is obsessed with Rex and is planning to lose her virginity to him. When good-natured stoner Mark (Ethan Embry) and drop-dead gorgeous artist AJ (Johnny Whitworth) show up at the store, they discover what Lucas has done, and decide not to tell Joe...
Like Water for Chocolate
Emotional Oppression It is evident, especially in the first few chapters, that Tita has been emotionally oppressed by her dictator-like mother. She is forced to hold in her emotions, thus creating a "dampness" within her that does not allow the matches within her soul to light. Tita has hot, earth-shaking sex with Pedro at the end of the story and, in reference to the story of inner matches Dr.Brown told her earlier, their lust and sexual needs were so strong that she lighted all of Pedro's "inner matches"; he died from the raw emotion of it all. In her agony, she swallowed some "matches" and lit them with memories of him. She sparked, causing the bed they were having sex on to be set on fire. In the end, everything on the ranch (except for the animals because they had all run away when they sensed what was coming, and Tita's recipe book) burned down, but the souls of Pedro and Tita were transported to a special place, a place before birth. There they could finally be together without anyone judging or stopping them...
Remark
Although the movie list is inspired by Tibetan Pulsing typologies on the human mind, it does not claim to be completely accurate in its assessment.
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