| 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: 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. |
| Writer: Noel Coward | Design for Living |
Life can be giddy and bright. Facing up to one's anti-conventional values is important. Conventional morality must be questioned if it causes suffering and conflict. |
You should follow your deepest values and accept them no matter how unconventional the outcome. A rare combination of the wittiest, lightest of Noel Coward's style, along with deeper themes of romantic love, proper morality and how should one live. |
| Sculptor: Michelangelo Buonarotti | David |
Man is a strong, indomitable creature who has the intelligence to overcome terrible odds. |
[requires assumption of some context of this work -- not a "cold" introduction to it]: A man able to face a daunting task, with tremulous calm and determination. This is the depiction of the David/Goliath story of the Bible in which David takes on the much more formidable Goliath and wins. |
| 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. |
|
| Playwright: Edmond Rostand | Cyrano de Bergerac |
Life can be exciting. Life can be grand, literally. There is also some great sadness about consummated love, since it is portrayed as unreachable. |
The importance of independence and independent thought. Compromise is deadly to one's soul. Sub-themes: a) Doubt of one's goodness because of an incidental fact (physical feature) is terribly damaging and tragic. b) Helping someone by faking reality is damaging and can come to no good. |
| Painter: Thomas Wilmer Dewing | Comedia |
Life is sumptuous and beautiful and alive. |
Feminine vivacity and gaiety |
| De Felitta, Raymond: | City Island |
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. |
| Director: Lasse Hallstrom | Chocolat |
Pleasure is good; religion and conventional thinking is bad. |
Follow your dream and disregard convention. |
| Director: Hugh Hudson | Chariots of Fire |
A complete feeling of openness of the world to greatness of your own choosing. |
Life is achievement. |
| Sculptor: Jean Baptiste (1630-1700) Tuby | Chariot of Apollo |
The world has thrilling powerful men of action. There are no limits to what can be achieved. |
Elegant, physical power. The fantasy ability to fly through water and air with grace and ease. |
| Composer: Lerner and Loewe | Camelot |
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. |
| Architect: Unknown | Burgos Cathedral Crossing |
God is order and reason and light. |
The spirit of god is rational, uplifting and rich in detail |
| Screenwriter: Noel Coward | Brief Encounter |
Passionate love. Tragic choices. |
High romance is possible. Such love is unlikely to survive. This film manages to embrace two contradictory themes, leading to a major bittersweet outcome. |
| Vance, Louis Joseph: | Brass Bowl, The |
The world is a delightful place. Good things happen to the deserving. |
Life as a gay, lighthearted adventure. |
| Composer: Warren and Dubin | Boulevard of Broken Dreams |
Weariness & Sadness |
Life is loss of dreams and sadness |
| Dancers: Torvill and Dean | Bolero |
Harmony, grace exist. |
Two people as one. |
| Landscape Designer: Fletcher Steele | Blue Steps of Naumkeag |
elegance and grace |
The man-made enhances nature -- it is what makes nature beautiful |
| 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: Stephen Daldry | Billy Elliot |
Life is dirty but one can clean up. |
Go after what you love. |
| Composer: Giuseppe Verdi | Attila (live performance) |
Life is a mix of strength, heroism, romantic passion. The work is a long complex opera, so it has many other lyrical emotions as part of it, but this covers the basic sense of life. |
Loving a heroic woman leads to death |
| Author: Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged |
Life can be good; Men are competent to live happily; The world can be a shining, happy place to exist, if one is free. But novel also presents a dark, dystopian world to help make real that positive view. |
The crucial value of the human mind. |
| Composer: Lou Handman | Are You Lonesome Tonight? |
Sensuality and bitterness |
The remembrance of past love. |
| Rand, Ayn: | Anthem |
The book starts out psychologically dark and disorienting because of the protagonist struggling with the radically collectivist world he was born into. But what shows even in the early pages, and grows to the climax is the triumphant struggle of a rare few who break free of the yoke of total mind control and become free to live a life as a conceptual human and rediscover what it means to be an individual. Thrilling and emotionally satisfying (unless the reader is a committed determinist.) |
Ego and using one's individual mind is the core of being human. |
| 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. |