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.
W -- Wise, Centered Elegance
The shadow side
Being shocked and (sexually) abused, being outside of the body, not being able to feel, loving one's own image, being in the gap between two worlds, looking for something to hold onto, finding an anchor in in one's own body, being vain, memory loss, inventing stories, escaping in another world, in a spiritual world, keeping a secret, creating difficulties in one's life to recreate the original shock
The light side
Being centered in crisis, comprehending life in all its depth and difficulties, being anchored in oneself, having distance and yet being totally in this world, being orgiastic, being graceful because you are being supported by spiritual connection, being wise
Movies with these themes
Away From Her
Grant (Pinsent) and Fiona (Christie) are a retired married couple living in rural Brant County, Ontario. Fiona begins to lose her memory, and it becomes apparent she suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
When she feels she is becoming a risk to herself, Fiona decides to check into a nursing home, where one of the rules is that a patient can not have any visitors for 30 days, in order to "adjust". Unsure of this policy, Grant agrees anyway, at the insistence of his wife whom he loves...
The Party
The minimal plot involves Sellers playing a well-meaning, but hapless, Indian actor who is accidentally invited to a lavish Hollywood party, causing havoc.
Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers) is a seemingly nameless and faceless actor from India brought to Hollywood for a role in a film similar to Gunga Din. Unfortunately, he manages to blow up the set before the cameras are rolling, ruining the entire film. The director (Herbert Ellis) is beside himself, fires Bakshi immediately and wants him blacklisted. However, instead of being blacklisted, Bakshi's name is accidentally written on the guest list of the studio boss's party.
Upon arrival, he loses his shoe in the stream that flows through the house and spends a significant amount of time attempting to retrieve it (a scene copied by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie Namak Halaal). As he offers to engage in banter, guests and host look on in puzzled confusion. The only ones at the party to pay him much notice, at first, are Michèle (Claudine Longet) and a macaw to whom Bakshi talks gibberish and overfeeds "birdie num nums."...
Mulholland Drive
The story may not be linear and exhibits several instances of temporal disruption. A dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring) escapes her own murder when she is the sole survivor of a car accident on Mulholland Drive. Injured, she descends into Los Angeles and sneaks into an apartment which has just been vacated by an older woman with red hair. An aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) arrives from Deep River, Ontario and takes a taxi to the apartment, where she finds the dark-haired woman confused, not knowing her own name. The dark-haired woman assumes the name "Rita" when she sees a poster for the film Gilda (1946), starring Rita Hayworth. Betty decides to assist her in discovering her identity, and they look in Rita's purse where they find a large amount of money and an unusual blue key.
A man in a diner called "Winkies" tells his companion about a nightmare in which he dreamt there was a horrible figure behind the diner. When they go to investigate, the figure appears, causing the man with the nightmare to collapse in fright. Later, a bungling hit man attempts to steal a book full of phone numbers and leaves three people dead. A Hollywood director named Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) has his film commandeered by apparent mobsters, who insist he cast an unknown actress named Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) as the lead in his film. After he resists, he returns home to find his wife having an affair and is thrown out of his house. He later learns that his bank has closed his line of credit and he is broke. He agrees to meet a mysterious figure called The Cowboy, who urges him to cast Camilla Rhodes for his own good...
The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden is adapted from the 1909 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
The recently-orphaned Mary Lennox travels from her home in India to her uncle Archibald Craven's hundred-room house, Misselthwaite Manor, in Yorkshire, England. Mary, materially spoiled but emotionally neglected by her late parents, is rather unpleasant and unhappy in her new surroundings. Martha, a Yorkshire girl working as a maid, and her brother Dickon Sowerby, a boy who can talk to animals, befriend and help her to heal and grow. She discovers her deceased aunt's secret garden, which has been locked for ten years and enlists Dickon to help her bring it to life...
Cruel Intentions
Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the image of social perfection, takes the sheltered and naive Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair) under her wing, promising to turn Cecile into a model student like herself. Kathryn's real intention, however, is to take revenge on her ex-lover, who had dumped her for the "innocent little twit" Cecile. She intends to corrupt Cecile by getting her to sleep with as many men as possible, thereby destroying her reputation and teaching her ex-lover a lesson.
She asks for the help of her womanizing step-brother, Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe). Though Kathryn and Sebastian have collaborated in schemes of manipulation before, he initially refuses. He is busy planning another "conquest"—Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon), the woman who has written a manifesto saying she plans to keep her virginity intact and wait for marriage. Fortunately for Sebastian, she is temporarily staying at his aunt's estate. Kathryn does not think he has a chance with Annette, so they make a wager. If Kathryn wins, she gets Sebastian's vintage Jaguar, a 1956 XK140 Roadster; if Sebastian wins, she offers him sex, stating, "I'm the only one you can't have and it kills you."...
Mysterious Skin
In 1981 Kansas, eight-year-olds Neil McCormick (Chase Ellison) and Brian Lackey (George Webster) are sexually abused by their baseball coach (Bill Sage). Brian reacts to what happens by developing amnesia and blocking out the event, for many years suffering from violent nose bleeds. As Brian grows up he becomes a rather asexual, geekish boy, and glimpses of memories in recurring dreams make him believe he has been abducted by aliens. Neil, who had began developing feelings for older men as a child (after reading his mother's adult magazines and watching his mother perform fellatio on an older boyfriend of hers), goes on to become a prostitute.
When Brian (Brady Corbet) turns 19 years old, he meets Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) for the first time since childhood and they uncover the secrets they share as well as beginning to heal one another.
The Invisible
High school senior Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin) plans to skip his graduation and fly to London for a writing program, despite the plans his controlling mother (Marcia Gay Harden) has for him. While he is a top performer in school and cares deeply for creative writing, his mother often pressures him to succeed past his abilities and remains emotionally distant. A few years prior, Nick's father died unexpectedly and the two have maintained a strained relationship in silence.
His best friend, Pete (Chris Marquette), is bullied by Annie (Margarita Levieva), a troubled teen. Coming from a troubled home, Annie looks after her younger brother, Victor, since her father and step-mother are violent and unpredictable. Having lost her biological mother several years earlier because of domestic violence, Annie's tough exterior and rebelliousness has largely been devoted to building up defenses against getting hurt. Victor is largely naive of the tempestuous nature of the house's dynamics, mainly because Annie takes great pains to put herself in between her younger brother and trouble. Even so, Annie's closest friends are a few violent thieves, and her boyfriend, Marcus (Alex O'Loughlin), is on parole for similar violations...
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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