Creator |
Title | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Director: Emile Ardolino | Dirty Dancing |
Life is passionate and meaningful. |
The joy and passion of love and life and dancing, while learning integrity and independence. |
| Director: Carroll Ballard | Black Stallion |
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. |
| Director: Michael Caton-Jones | Rob Roy |
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. |
| Director: Coppola Francis Ford | Godfather |
Life demands death; life is a horror of killing and retribution. Life is tragedy and malevolence |
Behind beauty and success lies corruption and death. |
| Director: Stephen Daldry | Billy Elliot |
Life is dirty but one can clean up. |
Go after what you love. |
| Director: Raymond De Felitta | Two Family House |
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. |
| Director: Stephane Gauger | Owl and the Sparrow |
A child shows sweetness and strength and determination. |
Searching for family, for soulmates. |
| Director: Lasse Hallstrom | Chocolat |
Pleasure is good; religion and conventional thinking is bad. |
Follow your dream and disregard convention. |
| Director: Marshall Herskovitz | Dangerous Beauty |
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. |
The importance of accepting your own rules for living, your own morality. |
| Director: Hugh Hudson | Chariots of Fire |
A complete feeling of openness of the world to greatness of your own choosing. |
Life is achievement. |
| Director: Hugh Hudson | Greystoke |
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. |
| Director: Akira Kurosawa | Rashomon |
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". |
| Director: Baz Luhrmann | Romeo + Juliet |
Tragedy is central to life. |
Romantic Love is doomed and we don't control our own lives. |
| Director: Leo McCarey | Ruggles of Red Gap |
Happiness and fulfillment is in yourself. |
Personal declaration of independence from servitude |
| Director: John McTiernan | Die Hard |
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. |
| Director: Fredi Murer | Vitus |
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. |
| Director: Alan Parker | Fame |
Life is hard, but you can succeed, and it is worth it and exhilarating. |
Go after your heart's desire. |
| Director: Rob Reiner | A Few Good Men |
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. |
| Director: Andrew Stanton | Wall-E |
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. |
| Director: Oliver Stone | Wall Street |
There are bad people in power who use ordinary people as pawns in their endless pursuit of money. Those who are not ruthless are sheep to be slaughtered by the rich and powerful. Greed is bad. |
Financiers are amoral money-grubbing backstabbers, i.e., desire for money corrupts |
| Director: Fred Zinnemann | High Noon |
There is palpable evil in the world. There is heroism in the face of evil in the world. The movie is full of fear and foreboding and betrayal. |
Civil Society is the ideal, and worth fighting for. Doing what is right is the right way to live. Don't let the evil bastards win. The theme is expressed repeatedly in the movie via the contrast of the Marshall who grimly faces the need to do what he lives for, despite the death facing him, vs. the mealy mouthed town folk, many of which who won't fight for their civil society, and vs. the deputy marshall who portrays the sellout who will give into evil force in order to "get along". |
| Domenichino: | Head of a Bearded Man |
Pensive, worried, detached qualities of humanity |
Worry is the way of the world. |
| Landscape Designer: Fletcher Steele | Blue Steps of Naumkeag |
elegance and grace |
The man-made enhances nature -- it is what makes nature beautiful |
| Loysel, Jacques: | La Grande Nevrose |
The dynamic female body is beautiful and exciting. Although it may not explicitly suggest it, the nude and its tense position could be felt as erotic. |
An animated female body is a vessel of perfection. |
| Maugham, W. Somerset: | Of Human Bondage |
Life is a fearful gray spread of actions and in-actions without genuine values. We are all deformed in mind or spirit and should accept convention as demanded by those around us. |
Man's life is outside his control. Conventionality is the final ideal. |