Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

House of Sand is a spectacular movie entirely shot in Lençóis Maranhenses, Brazil, between the sky and the sand, and a bunch of actors. Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, mother and daughter in real life and in the movie, acted astoundingly in this story that captures one of the most crucial aspects of life: circumstances.

In an endless sea of sand, he two Fernandas, and soon after the granddaughter for Fernanda Torres is pregnant, are stuck. There is no television (it hadn’t been invented yet) no telephone, no books, no music, radio or instrument. Nothing, only the white sand on the three directions, and the blue sea oh the fourth. The daughter, Fernanda Torres, tries to escape in whatever way she has available until surrendering to the inevitable. Her daughter will be able, after three decades, to get rid of the sand and to return to “civilization”. Read the rest of this entry »

Uncle Nino, a 2003 movie, springs from a good idea, the encounter between the ancient and the modern culture in order to produce a chain reaction that leads to a final balance. Unfortunately, the film steps on some trite common sense when it tries to brings tenderness and sentiment into the daily life of a dysfunctional family.

After decades, uncle Nino reappears to visit the gravestone of his brother to whom funeral he couldn’t be present. Landing in amazing “America”, uncle Nino is enchanted by this country so different from his home village, presumably someplace in Tuscany, with stone house, garden, sunshine, flowers and dogs. The original peace is substituted by the cold and distant ways of his nephew and family. Familiar life is there extinct, the husband works only, the wife, like as a patient Penelope, waits for things get better, the children seek solace each in his and her own way, the girl longing for a dog, the boy playing hard music in a band (just for a change).

The family has lost its center. They don’t eat together, don’t talk, don’t relate. In this typical advanced society scenario uncle Nino enters full of the Italian feeling that governs hospitality and Read the rest of this entry »

“The winner takes it all
The loser has to fall”

One of the most difficult things in a relationship is accepting to lose the loved one. It’s not simple for anyone, and it may require years to digest the experience. It’s persistent and varied the range of pretexts that we can make up and that costs us time and energy, while life goes on. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been always intrigued by a scene from the movie “What Dreams May Come”  (1998) with Robin Williams. In this touching story, a couple loses their sons in a car accident. Grieve is excruciating for the mother who, after the sudden lost of her husband, can’t stand it anymore and commits suicide.

The situation changes, and we are in paradise. The husband, joyful as Robin Williams can be, investigates the surroundings, the dimensions and possibilities of his new world. His wife, however, is not around, for having taken her own life she belongs to another reality, something that in the Christian imaginary would be called “hell”, a shadowy, abandoned and gray place. Forgotten and loose, this seems to be the worst of the punishments: to give up one’s consciousness, living without knowing it, being at the mercy of emptiness. The man, who loves her, decides to rescue her, although the enterprise is risky. The chances to end up like her are high; being dragged into unconsciousness is easy.

When finding his wife, he watches astounded to her decadence. She wander dully in a time without time of that place without meaning. He tries to wake her up, to remind her of who she is, but she doesn’t even recognize him. Everything seems to have been wiped out from her mind as she dropped the reins of herself. The man becomes aware that there is no hope, however, he chooses not to leave her. He hands himself in and starts to lose memory and forget about himself.

Then, unexpectedly, she realizes what’s happening. Love seems to wake her up, as if she couldn’t accept that he also would abandon himself in the sea of unconsciousness and lack of meaning. She rescues herself and thus him too.

My feeling before this scene has been divided between the beauty of the miracle happening right before my eyes and a perturbed doubt: is that possible? Really?

As a psychotherapist I must be realist. Because we want results not fantasies, we need to be objective. Miracles do happen: sudden and surprising solutions coming from where we less expect, do exist. But how many times reducing oneself to another person’s life style, drowning the consciousness that makes us different (and uncomfortable), giving ourselves up to try to wake somebody else up works? How many times the click, which we wait for to finally enlighten our life, happens?

The movie nurture a wrong idea. It’s not being cheek to cheek with who we love, sharing the same big mess, accompanying the person in their confused journey, that we will help them.

On the contrary, it’s standing up in an individual and heroic effort to get out of the hole we fell in that we can stretch our hand out to help the other do the same, or at least to let them know that there is a “beyond”. Amazing events may happen, however because they are what they are, they can’t be the norm. The rule is that being conscious is like swimming upstream, while letting oneself go to inertia is easy like flowing with the current towards the big sea and disappear in it.

Only when we leave the abyss in which the other is, we can actually try to help them. I stress the word “try”. Who said that we will succeed? What if the person doesn’t clutch our hand? What if they got used to the life they run? We keep trying one, two, thousands of times, but at last we need to realize our limits.

It comes the time to say “goodbye”. Unfortunate moment that we never wanted it to happen, but it happened.

Good-bye in the sense of giving in to fate. Turning our back with a heavy heart, not guilty though, for we know we did all it was possible to do. Distancing us with the anguished but rightful conscience that we do not have control on the other, neither when it’s about they own good. Moving ahead aware that “love” is an ambiguous word, full of aspects and surprises, one being that the level of consciousness makes love flourish or castrates it.

It only remains to assume the burden of this knowledge and without grudge return to the universe what doesn’t belong to us: the other and their destiny. Goodbye and God be with you.

Among the many special effects and the acrobatics of the handsome and uncontrollable Prince of Persia, whose heart is worth a throne, the movie sheds light over an intrinsic feminine dream.

This time, the princess is not just a beautiful young woman in need of being rescued. She has to be believed, respected, and paid homage to. As a kind of priestess, she guards the destiny of the entire world. The gift of life she holds in her hands doesn’t come from her womb, as a modern Eve, but from the vow she made in favor of the potential goodness of humanity. Like a goddess herself, she mediated with the gods begging for mercy and offered her life as a token of trust in the human kind.

(Who knows the many emotional and logical acrobatics women do to keep a family unite, a community of people that works, lives that move on? Has any one idea of the many secrets a woman must hold in to have relations flowing?)

The film starts with the barbaric invasion of a sacred space and ends with the return of justice, but on a superior level: conscious justice. The middle of the story tells the turning point that make possible the reintroduction of order and heart in life. The greed of power, which ultimately is nothing more the a huge voracious Ego who wants to take it all, stays at the opposite side of the one whose personal life is a pledge to Life itself.

The treatment the feminine receives under the government of the greedy masculine is disrespect and disbelieve. The new beginning that ends the movie shows the relationship with the feminine brought to another level. The last look the hero gives to the princess condensates an entire new world. Because he’s had lived twice, because he had face death, injustice, treachery, doubt, pain, love and lost, the masculine is finally ready to understand. He’s conscious and able to appreciate what the feminine is. He trusts her, therefore, gives her back the power that belongs to her.

(Shall this mean that men have to live twice for each woman’s life in order to open their minds and hearts?)

The eyes that close the film state the new man that the Prince has become. The Princess wonders, skeptical, about his changing of awareness. However, no suspicion can resist the sincerity in those eyes, which is not the sincerity of the naive big boy who renders to the charming big lady mom-like. It’s the genuineness of a man who grew to the knowledge of what it’s at stake, who sees now the world from within and therefore is worthy to be at her side.

This delicious and funny Italian movie tells the story of a housewife who is forgotten by her family during a group vacation. The bus stops at a gas station on the road, everybody goes to the cafeteria and she goes to the restroom. By her surprise, her wedding band slips out of her finger and falls into the toilet. She takes the tweezers and tries to rescue the ring, the tweezers also fall into the toilet. Finally, she’s able to recuperate the precious object, but at this point, husband and the adolescent sons are far away. She waits, wonders how could they not realize that she wasn’t in the bus. From the speakerphone she hears her name, the husband called and is yelling, “Were you sleeping on the toilet?? Don’t move, we are coming back.”

Sitting on the steps at the entrance of the café, she holds on… An interesting woman passes by, the two exchange a few funny words and the next scene shows the housewife taking a ride with her new acquaintance, with the intention to go back home. Hitchhiking on, she passes to the car of a young man. She finds out that he is going to Venice (quite far from home). “Oh boy, I’ve never been in Venice…” she says with dreaming eyes… And there she is, arriving in the buoying city.

From now on, the movie displays a sequence of random and pleasant events that have as a protagonist this simple and amiable woman who flavors freedom for the first time in her life. Following her feelings she slowly traces a new direction to her life, softly and lightly, without minding about her husband yells. She tells him that she wants to take some vacation, everybody does it now and then… And she finds to herself a job and… I won’t tell the rest. It’s worth it to watch.

This is a movie that harmoniously weaves profound truths with a gracious and joyful storytelling. The actress, Licia Maglietta is fantastic. She is able to beautifully personify the naivety of a housewife, with practical sense and generosity, with a sophisticated femininity, which as a magic light gives life to the lives she meets in her journey and, at last, to her own.

They are blue and from another planet, but besides that they live the same story that the natives American suffered in the last 500 years. The same attack, the same injustice, the same massacre perpetrated by the colonial delirium for supremacy and greed. And without a happy ending.

Nothing first-hand. Beyond the special effects, the movie doesn’t bring news in terms of vision, ideas and perspectives. Zero. All the fascination that make it receive three nominations (best Cinematography, best Visual Effects, and best Artistic Direction) are explained by the skilled used of technology: that is, good computers and good applied art, plus the essential ingredient, millions of dollars.

Certainly pleasant for the eyes, the movie Avatar, however, doesn’t offer fortunate intuitions about a serious subject. This cinematographic production reflects the concept that movies are products of the collective unconscious and, while I was watching it, I thought that the American collective unconscious must has been ruminating the butchery perpetrated against its indigenous peoples. Its collective consciousness might be heavy, also considering that these same people suffer today exclusion and social bias.

The Na’vi, the natives of the moon Pandora, resemble a copy of the native Americans, but are blue, big and good! Share with them the same bond with Nature, the same sense of respect and dignity, an identical relation with life as an inclusive energy existing everywhere in living and non living beings. Even the language reminded me the natives’. Naturally, the Na’vi of Pandora also use bow and arrows and, curiously, they carry their wounded ones in the same way natives American used to do. What’s the difference between them? Only the worn out and improbable happy ending, when a bunch of people at the mercy of powerful weapons surprisingly wins. That’s because the public expects so. That’s to distract the public consciousness from the rivers of blood that had been poured, from the families and communities exterminated, and the lies and the broken treaties that lay at the basis of the dawning of the country that produces a movie about the good and sensitive natives able to send away the invaders.

In this movie, the visual effects seduction acts upon the sight and the astonished emotions of the audience, and it puts in second place the dramatic content of the story. A story that was created because of a enormous amount of available capital built in the centuries not only of work and sweat but also of violation of human rights. Entire tribes were slaughtered in order to free a territory for the exploration of its soil. The “savages” were kicked away as one kicks off a trash found on one’s grass. The same situation told in the movie, but realistically ended, is at the genesis of the nation that today makes a movie that projects onto another galaxy the “humanoids” that here were exterminated. The history told from the natives point of view, Sioux, Navajo and many others, would say that from greed and cruelty the America arouse.

While we watch drooling a movie whose expansive special effects (which translated into money could save an African country from starvation – possibly one of those Europe or the USA explored) give us thrills of joy with its images and impressive scenes, this same story the movie shows continues alive in reality. The same people of always, names and addresses may change but not the essence, keep destroying the earth, the tress and life in the name of money, possession and power. The idea by which nature has to be dominated and abused continues being the ideological flag of the capital. The perception of life as a web of energies that throb in unison in organic and intelligent entirety is ridiculed in the actions of those who held the power.

James Cameron, besides not giving the credits to the ones who inspired him, lost an opportunity to use the millions of dollars he got and the technology and human resource he had available to make a movie that not only would surprise the eyes but also the mind, contributing to stimulate that human consciousness we need to transform the terrestrial Pandora’s jar into a happier enterprise.

In a world suffocated by sameness, the last version of Sherlock Holmes by Guy Richie, starring the great Robert Downey Jr. (the one who did Shakespeare in Love) comes like fresh water in the desert.

The fascination our friend evokes is based on the Homos Sapiens Sapiens’ natural admiration feels before the excellence of his or her higher function: thinking.

Sherlock Holmes possesses an enormous amount of knowledge, but what makes him different, what turns him fantastic is not how much he knows but his ability to relate information, cross them one to another to build up the puzzle, which solves the case. He differs from the traditional scholar because Sherlock Holmes’ knowledge is alive – for his neurons are alive.

Neurons themselves don’t mean much if they are not interrelated. These relations are called synapses. And Sherlock Holmes has a lot of them; paths, highways, streets and avenues everywhere compose the brain of the most famous detective in history.

Ideally any of us can do the same, if we make the effort of THINKING. Thinking, like any exercise, is a work out, it requires a willingness to do it. But once the cerebral roads are opened, life acquires a magic unthinkable to the ones who never experienced it.

The secret consists on breaking, destroying, burning down all stereotypes. As the movie shows it, Sherlock Holmes is not a “normal” person. His life isn’t normal, without a case to solve he gets depressed, for he can’t stand banality.

Banal is everything is repetitively known and thus obvious. Unfortunately, triviality is also comfortable, for it takes away the strain of reflection, rethinking and understanding of reality. However, on the other side, banality numbs the brain. Stereotypes work as a cerebral anesthesia. There is no need of thinking when one follows a model. When relationships are given, the interpretation of life is given (nice or not it doesn’t really matter), when finally we are conformed and adapted everything becomes banal.

Many people like not to think, because thinking makes them discover nasty truths or face situations they don’t want or can’t give the deserved attention. Many people pretend they don’t think, and others are not really able to.

Whatever is the case, I believe that life is worth in the measure that we go through it dealing with each and everything it has to offer. As we move on we decipher and solve cases. This is living. We don’t need to like our cases. It’s not Sherlock Holmes who chooses his cases, they come to him. What is up to him and he does is getting his bottom up from the chair and following what life presents him.

Closing your eyes (and keeping your bottom on the couch in front of the TV) means shutting down several internal highways and lowering your neuronal connections. Choosing to avoid a clear sight of your situation leads to a mental injury. A shame for the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Evolution that goes down the toilet.

In the movie The Monster House (2006) an obese woman is exhibited　in a circus as a monster. The disrespectful public abuses her, totally insensitive to her suffering. One day a　slim man falls in love with her. He wants to take her away from the circus to live with him. He invites her to be free. She happily accepts.They move to a land where they’ll build their house. However, children come to harass her, they continuously make fun of her, treating her as ridiculous.

The woman yells and sends them away. She hates them all. Overwhelmed by the pain, she happens　to fall in the basement where she is buried alive　under the cement.

The woman becomes the house. The building is now alive. Her heart is the fireplace, which magically lightens up. The faithful man lives with and in his wife-house for 45 years.

The movie tells us about Hestia, the Greek goddess of the domestic fireplace. The heart of the house has always been the fireplace (today‘s modern kitchens). It used to be a protecting fire around whom the members of the house gathered. The safe blaze turned a house into a home, which means community, belonging and welcoming. In the Ancient Greek times anybody who entered the sacred soil of Hestia was safe. To the strangers hospitality was guaranteed.

Many modern kitchens are nowadays shining elegant but empty, or messy with stocked canned and junk food. There’s no time to cook, no way to eat together to reassure the family sacred space where everybody can feel safe, that is “at home“. No job or school issues, no pending questions should avoid community bonding. Despite all the trouble that are part of life, they should be off the door at least one time a day, when we sit together and enjoy each other’s company reaffirming that our relationship is stronger than any distress.

Hestia is the feminine who makes home. The “home sweet home” sprouts from the feminine inner ability to create it. It’s the web that interconnects each member of the house. Her thread comes from her own inner life. Hestia turns a space into a warm, friendly and quiet home. The place we live in is sacred, that meaning it carries symbolic aspects. A home is the cocoon where we daily recharge our batteries, renew, rethink, get ready to go, as well as the kitchen is the place where we feed and nurture our body without which we’ll be dead. Those things are sacred for they preserve existence. Therefore, cooking and housekeeping should be an expression of dedicated love. The love for our life.

This feminine aspect is vanishing from the actual culture. Women correctly don’t want to be held at home and nobody took their place. Once they are out of the house they mingled into the male society reproducing the same values. When they stay at home, the Hestia spirit is hardly found, for this psychological trait is missing from the collective consciousness and at a cultural level it is mock.

Identified with the material house, Hestia is imprisoned, and as all the archetypes rejected (see James Hillman), it’s desperately mad. What we refuse and repress come back as a disease. Identified with the mass culture, women and men who have a strong Hestia aspect must feel quite uncomfortable and their self esteem is underground.

The Hestia way of being is substituted by junk food, by the crazy non-stop of “modern life”, by drugs and by all sort of things that sends people out: out of themselves, our of their home, out of their life path… just out. True home (the physical as well as the inner one) is lost. In the internal emptiness that remains are projected the existential desperation of the house residents, even when they live between fancy walls.

The man is thin as the good intentions of who wants to restore Hestia is feeble and predetermined to fail. The Goddess is obese as her energy of warmth and peace is turned into material possessions, thus turning into a huge fat useless matter. Childish voracious stereotyped minds easily subdue anyone, unless there is a strong conscious trained individuality to face them.

Congratulations to the film director, Tim Burton. The new Alice in Wonderland has all we need to jump to the next step in woman’s psychology of liberation. With fine visual effects and proper tweaks to the original story, it summarizes the heroin journey to the land of wonders.

Let’s then analyze the movie in order to have a grip on the pattern of women’s inner journey.

It’s not enough to feel otherwise the social pattern of a due historical moment. When a woman leaves childhood and enters the adult world where she has to make her decision and define her life, having had a propitious backdrop gives her the strong feeling of uneasiness in the so called “proper” world–which is any moldy traditional way of being that goes on by inertia. It comes a time when a girl needs to speak up for herself and stand for who she is.

Let’s face the truth. This is the time to face one’s inner world, not dreams and fantasy, but the real, actual and powerful inner world, which claims its existence and its own logic. Without that, the only choice a woman has is to fit in pre-established roles and give up her uniqueness.

Alice, who is weird enough to follow the rabbit/her imagination, takes the journey. The process consists in two intertwined aspects: discovering who she is and becoming courageous. Who she is means what she has always been but lost or forgot in the occurrence of growing in a social setting where children are told how they must think, behave and feel. Thus, in traditional education (both in family and school), developing coincides with being shaped into a predetermined mold with little care about what the child is within herself. Roles are slow cold blood killers.

The movie shows the doubt about Alice: is she the real Alice or is she just an impostor? That’s the main motif as this is our chiefly question in life: are we real? Or just clowns pretending to be what we show off around? Are we true and trustworthy? Are we going to make it?

To help Alice find herself the story unfolds between fear and compassion. More and more, Alice realizes that it depends on her the safety of her dear ones, first of all the Mad Hatter–the representation of the crazy ideas she has been hatching in herself all her life. The Mad Hatter is her Animus, which could exist so colorful and unpredictable thanks to Alice’s father’s endorsement. Alice must save him.

This reminds me of a dream I had in the first years of my personal psychoanalysis. I was about 18 in that time. The dream starts with me talking with a boy next to a car. I then follow the boy into a building. I find myself in a high floor apartment. A regular family lives there. I discover that a mad man is locked in the bathroom. He has been held there for a long time. The bathroom is the place where we get clean and flush away the non wanted parts of us. I free the man. He goes to the next open window. We stand there and I look at him. He stares the distance, then grabs a telescope and watches what is beyond the near land, far beyond. That was his madness: he could see past the superficial interpretations and understanding of life. His sight was deep and unconventional. As we know, this vision is highly uncomfortable for the ones who prefer to “keep things quiet”, being afraid of questions.

Rescuing the Mad Hatter means, to Alice, committing herself to what she is and to the task she has ahead: releasing her life from any judgmental thought. And here comes the difference between the Red and the White Queen. The first one is the negative mother archetype, the patriarchal woman who inflates her head with repetitive ideas. She imposes dogmas, non-questioned beliefs to her children and anyone around her. Fake and coward people are the result. Because of her, the Hatter is Mad and all the Creative Animus are locked in the bathrooms of respectable family houses. The Red Queen represents the collective consciousness, as shrunk in intelligence as bloated in manipulative thoughts. She also beautifully shows the ambiguity of love. In the name of love, blood ran in wars and in tears of desperation.

The White Queen, on the other hand, is simply a Witch and defies the patriarchal historical idea of witches wearing black and being evil. She’s the Feminine not subdued to the patriarchal logic. She was set apart, not destroyed, but lives in a separate world. Here is were Alice finds her right size – not too reduced, not to inflated -, and support. Here is the land that give roots to the New Woman.

Getting to the White Queen it’s not enough. It remains to fight the monster. This is the real fight any woman who wants to follow her soul must undertake. As a real act in the world it demands courage. In order to defeat the monster Alice needs the sword. Swords are the symbol of discriminative thinking, one of the most precious things. Without it, courage is vain and blind.

A girl may instinctively reject a situation as harmful to her personality. However, a woman has to go beyond that, she needs to knows why she doesn’t like in order to take the proper decision. That’s the sword at work: it distinguishes and separates. It turns strong but unclear feelings into sharp ideas and a limpid vision about life. In doing so, Alice find her identity and philosophy to live her existence.

With this sword Alice fights the monster. The ugly face of collective consciousness that imposes roles and values, that tries to shape and to judge, to diminish and bargain, to manipulate and destroy creativeness. The sword fight is different from the club fight, like the ones Hercules did hitting in all direction like a crazy (it’s not a coincidence that he actually went crazy one time). The sword represent a sophisticated conscious fight, one intelligence-based that also requires courage and determination.

The final stroke, “Off with you head,” Alice says, cutting the long monster’s neck. The battle is won. Now she is free. To what? Precisely, free to say no to conventional roles and free to depart for her life journey. Unique, precious, totally individualized. And here, the metamorphosis is completed.