Movies Saving the Day

There are so many occasions when movies did save my day, and so you know there is another reason for falling in love with them. Movies are also a source of knowledge, and you don’t know when you can use them, especially when studying something like Literature or History for graduation and post-graduation. Movies are like superheroes – when they are not saving somebody else by moving away from your memories, you can always trust them to save you from different types of villainy; may the movies keep having their superpowers forever and ever 😀 Here are the list of those movies which saved my day:

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994): I would consider this movie as something that changed my movie watching world, but other than that, this also served as the primary text for my thesis during my post graduation in English Language and Literature; the study called “Vampire as a Cultural Construct”. People have so many doubts about what to take for their MA thesis, and I knew I had to choose this – even as I had taken the book, the influence on the movie was more in my ideas and how I went on with the project. It is expected when a movie has cast like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and Kirsten Dunst.

Claudia the child vampire: the most haunting image of Interview with the Vampire

Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead (2008): The first ever quiz competition’s first round can keep one nervous, and even as I have continued to be nervous throughout, this horror slasher movie helped me to get past the preliminary stage. We all know the story of three bears, but I had not known the name of the girl in the fairy tale. In the movie, the serial killer phones and calls the potential victim who came into his abandoned house as Goldilocks because she is blonde. But to make her feel that he is not watching her, he tells her that the name was given as a comparison to the story Goldilocks and the three bears as she and her friends came into his house like that and rests there. Yes, slasher horror saves and Nicki Aycox is a beauty.

Ghost Rider (2007): Johny Blaze a.k.a. Ghost Rider is my Doctor Faustus, and yes, those things which I had felt while watching this movie could be used with my study of The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. That’s right, my ideas about Faustus has derived from my earlier watching of this movie, which has helped me a lot in working something for those seminars and assignments, rightly combining this with that world and making the necessary changes. Well, a movie with the same Mephistopheles, and a gorgeous Eva Mendes as extra with soul being sold in a contract – you can’t stop yourself from drawing a parallel here, no matter it is of Renaissance Era or the Modern Age.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002): This is my favourite Harry Potter movie, and that is not where my appreciation for this movie ends. There was a question in one of those exams about who Mrs Norris is, in Harry Potter. Yes, she is the lovely pet cat of Argus Filch, the caretaker of Hogwarts, and I seemed to be the only person knowing it. Every question paper has the last few questions, which are not directly from the text books. But this was completely unrelated to anything that we had studied, and I could gladly answer this and pray for more out of syllabus questions – a prayer which is sure to make me enemies among the usual students. This was Harry Potter saving the day in Kerala.

The English Patient: One of the best movie adaptations ever, and proven by the Oscars

The English Patient (1996): Well, this is a secret, as I had told everyone that I was going to read this one, but I never really tried until I was an MA graduate. Yes, I read books which are in the syllabus after I complete the course – then it will not feel like a text book. Then how did I answer those questions for exams? The credit for the same goes to this movie with Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche and Kristin Scott Thomas. This was one awesome movie, and my addiction to it made me watch it again and again, getting me prepared for the exams rather than the book or the guide. I had those things I had found out about the movie and used them effectively for the exams, which I am sure, should have worked very nicely.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): This is the first Dracula movie that I have ever watched and the second vampire movie after John Carpenter’s Vampires. Yes, it is a fact that is recorded in golden letters in my vampire admiration history, approved by my fellow vampire lovers. Even as I have known Dracula and his minions since childhood, this one surely made the difference, and every time some Gothic stuff needs clarification, this is the memory that flashes into my mind. Yes, this one has saved my world on multiple occasions, even as I have now watched too many Dracula and vampire movies and so many of such books to need this one for reference.

*Keep calm and let movies save the day 😀 All the images used in this blog post are from the Official Facebook Pages of these movies.

TeNy

Advertisement

In Search of a Soul

Based on the graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux, the movie I, Frankenstein continues the journey of the monster which was created in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. It does tell something about the background story which can be seen as a small introduction. The book has been among my favourite horror stories of all time, having an opportunity to read it during my childhood. Along with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there was something about this novel which came second in my list at that time. So, a continuation of the tale of this monster was going to be intriguing.

The question about how good the movie is, might bring some discussions, but the major question about this work is not about its quality, but about one thing – the soul. It has Aaron Eckhart as the Frankenstein’s monster which wanders around the world we know without a soul. He has survived all the changes that the world had undergone and spends his time in loneliness. But he gets caught in a battle between the gargoyles appointed by the Archangels and the demons who are hoping to take over Earth.

✠ Know the Frankenstein Monster, the man in search of a soul in the land of vainglory. He is Adam Frankenstein, the first monster created on Earth, the demonic paradise.

The soulless monster, Adam Frankenstein (Photo from movie’s FB page)

The soulless creature becomes the centre of attraction because the demon Naberius, one of the original fallen angels, plan to use the procedure which was used to create this monster to re-animate a number of corpses without souls and use them as containers for the souls of millions in hell, unleashing an army of demons which will finally be able to walk on Earth and cause chaos. You remember the plan which was brought by Mammon and Balthazar in the movie Constantine and by Blackheart and his minions in the movie Ghost Rider.

It was quite easy to identify that the creature made my re-animating a dead body had no soul. But the interesting thing is that by his good deeds, he finally does grow a soul. Still, the question remains about the people of our present world. Do they have a soul? A conscience which makes them do good unconditionally in a world dominated by money where only the winners have honour and approval forcing one to shed goodness? The fact that a monster gained the same in a movie might not be consoling for many, as most of the current world lacks the abilitiy to be the container of a good soul.

Our monster does kill the wife of his creator in a few moments of anger and frustration, but the new generation does much worse. Their brutality to the people around them is not just related to some murder, but in their daily words and action as part of a long procedure which they consistently force upon their own species without any remorse. It is more like a river of anger and hatred flowing without restrictions on a monsoon. The anger at Maria Sharapova has subsided, but we do see a lot more every day, and the reality is much worse outside.

The creature was closer to the dead than the living, caught between two dimensions, of life and death, and yet manages to find life and the humanity worth his time and care. It was a creature without identity, and no conscience at all, until it became the “he”, changing his ideas about himself to more of a common hope for salvation, becoming part of all that he has known, from gargoyles to humans. He is still the equivalent of what we would call a zombie, but like in the movie Warm Bodies, he has something in him, and here it is more than just a heartbeat and a brain.

The beauty & the beast one step closer to the soul (Photo from movie’s FB page)

Our creature understands his higher purpose and elevates himself to something beyond the selfishness that he had earlier gathered. He understands that despite what he has gone through, it is not in his power to deny God’s will or to deny himself his own right to do good, as he himself was created by a creation of God, thus becoming God’s own, in an indirect manner. He is thus Adam, the first of his kind, and unique, yet part of the universe and its plans. As they say in the movie “You’re only a monster if you behave like one” – so do most of the humans of our time deserve a soul more than a monster?

TeNy