Weekly series. Do please send suggestions via email, twitter etc. You can send a theme and/or specific movies. Each week we feature three movies with meaning, so send in a movie with a sentence or two on the core meaning you take from it and a clip from the movie that speaks to that meaning.
Of late I have been musing and writing on focussing on the present and on what matters.
This week three movies on these themes.
A River Runs Through It (1992)
An exquisite film quietly examining the lives of a family over decades.
Here I post the closing scene (note, not a plot spoiler), and the closing words of the book this movie is from :
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
When I watched the movie and this scene closed it, it moved me to tears.
I take from the closing scene that life has twists, turns, ups, downs. At the end, though, life is a flow, and we will always both be shaped by and remember the people and event that matter, that shaped us and our lives.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it
The Mission (1986)
A movie of boundless beauty in the scenes and the soundtrack, I watch this often and am reminded at multiple levels of what matters most. The movie is not the most coherently themed, yet within it are multiple themes on what matters to us as humans.
This particular scene is wordless and expresses the importance of human connection and building trust, two things that truly matter.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
“Life moves pretty fast.
If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”.
One of my favourite comedies, and at the same time full of lessons on the importance o being present, of being mindful to each moment.
Fun to watch, and fun to watch with that lens,
Bonus clip… (plot spoiler alert if somehow you haven’t watched Ferris Bueller), features brilliant comic timing and one of my favourite comic lines of all time to close this clip.