| Title |
Creator |
Date | Era | City | Country | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Etudes | Choreographer: Harold Lander | 1948 | Pre-1950 Ballet/Dance | New York | United States |
Thrilling pleasure at beautiful movement and great success at developing the best within you. |
Hard work results in great achievement in life -- and that results in beauty and excitement in life. |
|
| Camelot | Composer: Lerner and Loewe | 1960 | 1951-2000 | New York | United States |
One must attempt to live by values, even though virtue is powerless and hopeless. |
Camelot: a medieval place of goodness and justice, and its inevitable failure. |
|
| Bolero | Dancers: Torvill and Dean | 1994 | 1990-2009 | United States |
Harmony, grace exist. |
Two people as one. |
||
| Flying Fish | Dancers: Torvill and Dean | c.1995 (verify) | 1990-2009 | NY NY | United States |
A heightened sense that Life is fantastically unbounded by daily cares. Life is imbued with unlimited potential and ease of movement. |
Life is light and fluid. |
|
| City Island | De Felitta, Raymond: | 2009 | 1991-2010 | New York | United States |
Anxiety and pain from all the lies and mistaken motives. Catharsis from the climax, leading to feelings of wanting to be truthful in life! |
Lying is not the way to live. |
|
| Love Actually | Director and Screenwriter: Richard Curtis | 2003 | 1991-2010 | United Kingdom |
Romantic love, family love, filial love, and the love of friendship are of central importance to human existence, and are possible to achieve. |
Wonderful experiences of love are found in many forms and places. |
||
| Dirty Dancing | Director: Emile Ardolino | 1987 |
Life is passionate and meaningful. |
The joy and passion of love and life and dancing, while learning integrity and independence. |
||||
| Black Stallion | Director: Carroll Ballard | 1979 | Sardinia | Italy |
Everything is possible between boy and beast, between an innocent human and mother nature. |
Man and nature in harmony. At least this is the theme of the first half of the movie. See "Description" and "Context" info below for more on this comment. |
||
| Rob Roy | Director: Michael Caton-Jones | 1995 | 1991-2010 | United Kingdom |
Life is a struggle. The life you make for yourself can be difficult, but living it with strength and morality is the way to live. Happiness is possible in romance. |
Heroism in everyday life leads to heroism writ large. A man works hard to lead his life and those of his extended clan in an honorable, productive, honest way. This is the everyday heroism. But dishonorable, evil men seek to steal from him and ruin him. This leads to a life of larger-than-life heroism to vanquish his mortal, and stronger enemies. |
||
| Godfather | Director: Coppola Francis Ford | 1972 | 1971-1990 | United States |
Life demands death; life is a horror of killing and retribution. Life is tragedy and malevolence |
Behind beauty and success lies corruption and death. |
||
| Billy Elliot | Director: Stephen Daldry | 2000 | 1991-2010 | United Kingdom |
Life is dirty but one can clean up. |
Go after what you love. |
||
| Two Family House | Director: Raymond De Felitta | 2000 | 1991-2010 | New York | United States |
Feelings of benevolence and optimism about life. Happiness comes from making choices for your own good. |
Going after what you want in life; Don't be stopped by conventional standards of the people around you. It takes courage to be selfish. |
|
| Owl and the Sparrow | Director: Stephane Gauger | 2007 | 1991-2010 | Saigon | Vietnam |
A child shows sweetness and strength and determination. |
Searching for family, for soulmates. |
|
| Chocolat | Director: Lasse Hallstrom | 2000 | United Kingdom |
Pleasure is good; religion and conventional thinking is bad. |
Follow your dream and disregard convention. |
|||
| Dangerous Beauty | Director: Marshall Herskovitz | 1998 | United States |
The world is a horrible split of conventional marital morality vs. honest but promiscuous morality. The way to live requires one sacrifice one's body for one's soul. |
|
|||
| Chariots of Fire | Director: Hugh Hudson | 1981 | 1971-1990 | United Kingdom |
A complete feeling of openness of the world to greatness of your own choosing. |
Life is achievement. |
||
| Greystoke | Director: Hugh Hudson | 1984 | 1971-1990 | United Kingdom |
Life is Loss -- life is grim and culture is grim and the jungle is grim. All is grim. The other important feature of the film emotionally is that Tarzan has been crippled by his circumstances of being brought up in the jungle -- he cannot live as a man, so the great tragedy of the story is that he has to return to the jungle, which is below primitive -- it is an isolated hell in which death is at every corner, and at best the companionship of apes. Given that the story partly portrays civilized men as brutes who relish killing animals, perhaps the emotional intent is to make the choice to return to the jungle as positive, but for this reviewer it is unutterably tragic and ugly. |
Loss, Loss, Loss. Man as metaphysically alien from human culture. |
||
| Rashomon | Director: Akira Kurosawa | 1950 | 1931-1950 | Japan |
The world is terrible and full of disasters and mankind is awful and pathetic. |
Objectivity is a myth -- everyone sees a different reality, a different "story". |
||
| Romeo + Juliet | Director: Baz Luhrmann | 1996 | 1991-2010 | United States |
Tragedy is central to life. |
Romantic Love is doomed and we don't control our own lives. |
||
| Ruggles of Red Gap | Director: Leo McCarey | 1935 | 1931-1950 | United States |
Happiness and fulfillment is in yourself. |
Personal declaration of independence from servitude |
||
| Die Hard | Director: John McTiernan | 1988 July 15 | United States |
The way to beat evil is to give no quarter, no compromise. Life is hard, but fighting for the right is rewarded. |
Giving up in life is not an option. |
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| Vitus | Director: Fredi Murer | 2006 |
If you have the will, you can find the way to live the way you want. |
Living your life your own way is the only right way. |
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| Fame | Director: Alan Parker | 1980 | 1971-1990 | New York | United States |
Life is hard, but you can succeed, and it is worth it and exhilarating. |
Go after your heart's desire. |
|
| A Few Good Men | Director: Rob Reiner | 1992 | 1991-2010 | United States |
Justice should be fought for, needs to be fought for and can be fragile. |
Commitment to a moral code is central to a good man's life. |
||
| Wall-E | Director: Andrew Stanton | 2008 | 1991-2010 | Hollywood | United States |
The world is garbage, and more garbage and humans have destroyed the earth, because of their wanton consumerism. |
Mankind is a blight on the universe, and only cute robots (as opposed to evil robots) can save the earth from human degradation. |
