Last night I forced my girlfriend to watch The Secret Garden with me. Not the Hallmark Hall of Fame version; the American Zoetrope one with Kate Maberly and Maggie Smith. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. Even though it's considered a family feature, she condescended to watch it with me and agreed that she enjoyed it during and afterward.
I remembered a little bit of the Law of Attraction connection with it--Colin fixing his mind on his father's return, specifically--but I'd forgotten a lot of other Abraham-compatible themes.
Kids throwing tantrums, for example, when coerced away from their higher selves. Well-meaning grown-ups getting it all wrong. Doing and thinking what you can to feel better, like growing a garden or making friends with a robin. Moving from despair to anger to hope to joy. Realizing that if you're miserable, you can choose to feel better, and action taken in the vortex is disproportionately productive.
Once Colin accepted the possibility that he could walk, the path to becoming a healthy boy was quick. Colin's father did nothing more than listen to the call of his heart and travel home to find joy. And Mary, god bless her, refused to be coerced by Mrs. Metlock and found her own path to redemption.
Martha's just a fucking saint. Though I gotta admit I still wouldn't let her tickle me if I were Mary. I hate tickling.
Strong-willed children. They're a pain in the ass, but you gotta love 'em. Reminds me of myself a bit, though these 3 far outshine anything I managed to achieve at their age.
A Room with a View is probably my favorite movie of all time. It's funny; I don't see myself as a period piece kinda girl, but . . . here it is.
I discovered this movie when I was in college--at the Christian college--and immediately fell in love . . . with Helena Bonham-Carter. I was more than a little wigged out by my feelings for her, my first real movie-star crush. Sure, I tried to manufacture feelings for Luke Duke (Bo was too blond) and later Jamison Parker's character in Simon and Simon (despite his blondness) . . . oh, and Pierce Brosnan in Remington Steele. This, though, was different. This was an actual, uncalled-for crush, not an attempt to feel what other people felt when they watched their screen idols. Disconcerting at best. I thought I should have a crush on Julian Sands; instead, I wanted to be him.
I got a VHS copy before I even owned a VCR.
The movie, though, spoke to me even more than my crush on its star. Her character, Lucy Bartlett, is a fiercely independent girl who still feels compelled to conform to what she thinks her family, friends and society at large expected from her. This theme--what's proper versus what's good and true--is repeated throughout the movie: in the contrast between her fiance (prim and proper Cecil, played by Daniel Day-Lewis) and her true love (sincere and wild George, played by Julian Sands); between George's unconventional father and society at large; and best of all between Lucy's expectations of everyone's opinions and their actual thoughts once she finds them out. Being true to yourself, Abraham-style, is always a good thing.
So this is next on the show-to-the-girlfriend list. At least this one has some full frontal nudity, though no sex scenes.
These movies reaffirm a couple of beliefs of mine:
For one, a film that preserves the themes of the literature it's based upon is a much better show than anything Hollywood-ized. I've read both books, and while the books are much more in depth in their treatment of the themes, the basics are still there and tangible.
For another, really good movies have an increased chance of casting Maggie Smith. She's in both.
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