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Magical Movies

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12:45 / 20.11.01

I know a fellow who developed a phobia of midgets from Willy Wonka. "Be good, or the Umpa Lumpa will get you!"

14:08 / 21.11.01

I'd heard there was a film adaptation of Naked Lunch by David Cronenberg (here), but that it was a mix between William Burroughs life story (which don't get me wrong, would've been good as another film) and parts of the novel, and that got me worried...

15:45 / 21.11.01

The Naked Lunch film is well worth seeing, I seem to remember -with Pete Weller (Robocop) as the Burroughs character. It is indeed a mixture of his life and the book, and there's lots of great visual effects and deeply unpleasant sexual things being done with bugs. It whisks along pretty quickly but there's loads of subtle things. The view out the apartment window changes imperceptibly between Tangier and New York from shot-to-shot, for instance- you don't really notice unless you're watching closely.
DO: get completely stoned before going into the cinema
DON't: take girlfriend who's squeamish about bugs

19:39 / 23.11.01

Krull

23:11 / 23.11.01

Krull rules! The hero went onto play Eddington in DS9 (on which subject I could start a deeply self-indulgent thread about magical TV shows, only I won't cos' I'll get into a fight with all the B5 fans). Mark from Eastenders was in it! It's amazing.

I've always wanted the Glave...

02:38 / 24.11.01

PI --- this movie scared the hell out of me. Never mind the surreal black and white visuals and intense creep factor. PI made me start seeing the world as nothing but numbers, with God as the Mathematician and myself as a lowly integer waiting to be subtracted from the Equation. Bad nightmares for a guy who passed trig and calc on sheer charm and wit (not my own, borrowed from a friend).
And Unbreakable. This movie made me feel like a kid again, living in a world of everyday magic and friendly neighborhood superpals. Superb. I highly recommend it.

Temple Goddess

12:08 / 24.11.01

Has any one mentioned "What Dreams May Come", with Robin Williams(the actor not the pop singer!)? This movie really impacted on me the profound laws of cause and effect!

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

01:18 / 26.11.01

Everything David Lynch has done has changed the way I look at the world.

It's fun to go back and watch his stuff years later, because things that were so strange now seem perfectly normal. I was once even able to explain how Lost Highway WAS the conclusion to Twin Peaks, but would have to watch them both now....

08:07 / 26.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Silver Surfer:
Krull

heh- during a bout of the '5-steps-to-Kevin-Bacon' game with a friend, I jokingly gave him Michelle from Eastenders and he somehow still managed to get to Bacon in 5 steps by going through Todd Carty (Mark from Eastenders, as you rightfullly recall, exp) and then this bloody film, which I'd totally forgotten about.

I just watched Lost Highway about three nights ago for the 2nd time. I actually felt I'd got within a few inches of understanding the thrust of it.

19:15 / 26.11.01

Waking Life--just saw this one. Rants from a range of viewpoints only exceded by those on Barbelith, wrapped in a lucid dream.

Wings of Desire--everything you ever wanted to know about the magic that happens behind everyday life.

20:22 / 26.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Meme Buggerer:
'5-steps-to-Kevin-Bacon'

This was ruined for me by one friend who insisted on making the Burton/Schufucker Batman franchise the centre of all his links back to Bacon. The same guy plays Alfred in all of them.

Anyone here seen any of the Ring cycle? We need some Sadako on this thread! I keep meaning to get the wife to dress up as her - I don't think I'll be able to convince her...

20:24 / 26.11.01

"She's sitting in between you.... and she's laughing"

Madman in the ruins.

14:20 / 04.01.06

Ok time for a update.

Orange County-Colin Hanks role as the what-you-want-isnt-what-you-need-character. Jack Black as a force of Chaos.

I Robot-Will Smith as a shaman/cassandra character, the man/machine argument.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

14:47 / 04.01.06

American Beauty is definitely a shamanic parable.

solid~liquid onwards

16:46 / 04.01.06

All the studio Ghibli films are highly magical, possibly because they fill you (well me at least) with childlike wonder . extra recomendations go to Nausica of the valley of the wind.

I saw that Neon Genesis Evangelion popped up. lovely. but from the same production company (i think) youve got Trigun and flcl, although id say flcl (furi kuri) is more psychologicaly based.

Nobodies mentioned I heart Huckabees which is all about the quest for understanding everything.

I suppose a lot depends on you definition of magic.

10:09 / 05.01.06

Dante's Peak.
There's a whole elemental initiation near the end, starting at the acid lake. Then it turns into a typical Hollywood ending, so you could argue that it is in fact a subversion of magical symbolism into capitalist consumerism. Or something.

14:45 / 05.01.06

I dream about Aliens, of the Giger variety, on a semi-regular basis.

Yeah, me too

As for Brazil, the Movie, it is magick in its dream-sequences, but it is also, I reckon, an alegory about Brazil, the Country, in the mid-70s

15:20 / 05.01.06

Waking Life.

21:32 / 05.01.06

There's a thread kicking around here somewhere that deals specifically with the portrayal of magic in Hayao Miyazaki films.

21:41 / 05.01.06

Memento also did it for me: total disconstruction of the self

There was an "embrace the darkness to beat the darkness" aspect in Pitch Black that's worth checking

If we keep looking fot them, we'll find them

16:32 / 06.01.06

Raising Arizona, totally.

18:44 / 09.01.06

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues-Wasted cranes and a shaman with a bullwhip. What more could you ask for? Oh yes, and Uma Thurman with a magickal thumb self-pleasuring at the side of the road....'nuf said.....

The Neverending Story-Classic initiation story,an allegory about how our minds create reality.

Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within- Nothing like the game, but a hell of a lot better. Full of elemental symbolism.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas- A reminder that things can get a lot weirder than we can ever imagine.

Anything by Hayao Miyazaki

21:06 / 09.01.06

The most magickal movie of them all has to be

THELEMA AND LOUISE

Ewwww. Sorry.

21:11 / 09.01.06

My choices would be Jacob's Ladder, Primer, Fight Club, Requiem for a Dream and Apocalypse Now.

They all have a slightly unreal element to them, and their stories are based around a form of transformation. Jacob's Ladder and Fight Club are positive, in that they involve the liberation of the protagonists into a deep understanding of themselves, while the other three involve a downwards spiral into a chaotic mess, eventually out of the control of those involved.

Gendudehashadenough

01:06 / 10.01.06

it's been mentioned already I'm sure, but Brazil is one of those flicks.

it's mind bending to think that most of the characters and departments portrayed could all be busy cracking away as they are fed information from the outside world and being forced to file, retrieve, and process said information when it's needed. and in all my life i've never seen so many forms...

01:19 / 10.01.06

George Romero's Season of the Witch... portrays a ordinary house wife getting into magick in the 70's...has a wicked scene that mirrors creating a servitor almost exact...almost.
Good though. cool score
and pi...also saw for the first just as I was becoming interested in all this several years ago.

Goodness Gracious Meme

02:38 / 10.01.06

Id add some surrealist-accented/post-surrealist directors in here;

Maya Deren in particular. Meshes of the Afternoon, Ritual in Transfigured Time, Meditation on Violence are all profoundly concerned with ritual, time and the structuring of 'reality', as well as attempting to intervene directly in the viewer's experience of time, space and their surroundings (for example, the use of sudden/surprising juxtpoistions/transformations to draw attention to and fiddle with our processes of location, associate and context)

Also Alejandro Jodorowksy - Sante Sangre, The Holy Mountain and El Topo would seem to me to purposively *and* implicitly magical films. There's a wealth of occult imagery/narrative and he has talked in interview about how much of the structure and iconography of his films is driven by/connected to his Tarot work.

Madman in the ruins.

20:06 / 26.08.06

VelvetVandal wrote about the Theory of the Pin In Velvet Goldmine
"Right, the VG/faeries theory - well, in a nutshell (help, what am I doing in this nutshell, etc): the first character actually named in the movie is Jack Fairy - Ewan McGregor appears at one point dressed as Puck - there are several UFO/changeling references, there's that weird emerald brooch/pin thing which appears to be some kind of one ring-style magical power source, which finds its way from character to character throughout the film."

I'd like to expand on this.
Watching the film Plunkett and Maclean the other day. Alan Cummings Lord Rochester (A prototype Jack Fairy) owns a pin, which is stolen and then returned.
This is the Pin which turns up in Velvet Goldmine.

33

20:17 / 26.08.06

Heres some more

Powder
Pleasantville
Trauman Show
Eternal sunshine of spotless mind
Alive

I think Trauman show still rates as one of my fav movies of all time ..

Carrey is IMO underrated when hes actually not trying to be funny

33

20:18 / 26.08.06

Oh ground hog day !!!

23:47 / 26.08.06

Nightmare Castle (1965), with Barbara Steele and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. It is now a public domain movie, I guess.

The Ghost of Tom Winter

12:16 / 28.08.06

I’ve been having Alien dreams for ages. Also aliens as Greys. Something about these strange things must click with me too.

Okay I got a few movies on my list:

Star Wars – The tie to mythology and the incredible symbols used in this universe never ceases to excite my imagination and bring me into the worlds of the strange and unknown. May the Force be with you.
Mad Max – I always clicked with the portrayal of the post-apocalyptic tribes of Road Warrior. The Struggle and the search for survival always played wondrous parts in my feeling of this movie.
Mulholland Dr. – fucked with the head of my friends and I for days on end. I didn’t even enjoy it all that much, it just fucked with me. I guess the whole thing with the movie being a dream or something. But damn it we were paranoid for awhile.
Event Horizon –The idea of a spaceship going into hell and back is just awesome and loaded with allegory.
The Wicker Man – This is a great one, I haven’t done a full-on analysis of this one yet but I do know it made me feel different a few days after.
Lord of the Rings Trilogy –Myth and awesomeness all tied in. Also enjoyable in an altered state.
Adaptation –I’ve analyzed this movie more than is healthy. Charlie Kaufman totally has a fiction-suit type of thing going on throughout the movie and when you get into the idea that his brother never existed in this first place and is really just his unused desires being freed into the world it gets crazy from then on out.

And for the newest edition:

Snakes on a Plane –Laugh go ahead, but I watched this and was overloaded with the mythological imagery and allegory. Sam Jackson was the epitome of a hero, the plane was the ascension of human into the divine, and the serpents prevented us or proposed a challenge to overcome in order to reach the divine. I could continue but I don’t want to ruin it. Just watch it.

Oh, and I think Walt Disney was a closet magician. I recently went Epcot and was just bombarded with symbols and double meanings for countless things. And his movies seem to hid and underlying magical-ness to them “all you have to do is believe” etc.

13:53 / 28.08.06

A Streetcar Named Desire

Its an adaptation of an a equally great play by Tennessee Williams, but little of the original intensity is lost. Williams himself wrote the screenplay, it was directed by Elia Kazan, who directed it on Broadway, and starred three members of the original cast. As only two sets were required, it was able to be shot in continuity; something unheard of in Hollywood at the time (1947), or in present day cinema.

The film’s magic is a little too personal for me to expand on in detail, but easy for the viewer to perceive if they happen to have a relationship with the prime Lwa manifest within it. Watch for Her symbols and mysteries: the Lantern, the Fan and the Mirror. Finery and adornment. The themes of illusion, its creation and sustenance. The struggle for beauty and delicacy to survive in a hostile and harsh universe; one that is eventually futile. The beautiful dream (Belle Reve) lost forever. Sorrow and madness, yet retainment of the Pure Heart.

"A woman's charm is fifty percent illusion..."

"I don't want realism, I want magic".

"The cathedral bells are the only clean thing in the quarter."

It’s especially powerful when read with certain chapters of Maya Deren’s The Divine Horsemen, or when viewed in conjunction of some of her own films, especially Meshes of the Afternoon.

19:40 / 28.08.06

I think Revolver tries to deal with a very simple issue in a very laboured, over-complicated and, well, silly way; as far as I followed, the entire concept appeared to be "Stop believing that you are ruled by your fear and you will no longer be afraid of anything", a phrase just as laboured as the film.

Miller's Crossing, however, feels somehow more genuinely 'Magical' to me; mostly it's the cinematography and use of sound, but on a plot level also - Gabriel Byrne as 'Tom Regan'gets caught up in webs of machination and just keeps going until he comes out the other side, essentially unchanged.(Maybe.)

21:39 / 28.08.06

Star Wars has been mentioned already, but I'll just say it again, as it was in a way my gate to the actual doing of magic and not just the sitting and thinking. It's also fascinating how intensely it bleeds over into reality - there's a worldwide organization called the 501st Legion, named after Vader's personal stormtrooper contingent. They show up at all sorts of places, in full Imperial regalia. While they're not about executing all Jedi just yet, who knows what the future may hold.

It's also, in my opinion, the most lasting and powerful shamanistic journey in the exoteric culture. I was reading a conversation on another forum about what things will remain in 1000 years, and I strongly suspect that in 1000 years, people will look back at the 20th century and talk about the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Internet, and Star Wars.

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