The Top 12 transcendental movies, ever
CAST AWAY: Tom Hanks
No. 9
Given its deficit of dialogue and, like, characters, it’s amazing that this 2000 millennial flick did more than $230 million in U.S. domestic box office. Cast Away translates that famous critique of philosopher Blaise Pascal’s into a modern scenario: the misery sewn by western man derives from his inability to sit quietly in an empty room alone.
In Act I of Cast Away, Tom Hanks is that man. A Fedex supply-chain guru, Hanks lives his life in hyper-drive — and drives the lives of others into hyper-tension — with a merciless digital stopwatch. Accidentally marooned on a deserted tropical island, his only company is the most terrifying kind: his own thoughts, and in the words of the author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the torments of his own memory. Hanks faces down a cacophony of past events, people, paragraphs, fantasies, fears and phantasmagoria that bubble up from the depths of his psyche.
First swept away by the sea, and then back to civilization by the same swells, Hanks ends Act III standing in the middle of a cross formed by two rural roads in one of the plains-states. Transformed — indeed, resurrected — he takes in his lack of identity and place with a deep-seated peace, and gives himself up to going with the flow. Natch’, going-with-the-flow is made super easy in the Hollywood version because a red-headed beauty played by Lari White sits at the end of the road to which all signs point.
Karma points: The angel-wings icon that accompanies Hanks from beginning to end. At Soul's Code, we’re suckers for angels
See Cast Away
NEXT: Peaceful Warrior
I can’t believe that you guys ranked Last Year at Marienbad so high, or have even heard of it. The first time I saw it I was in university, and it changed my life.
You have all these characters trying to make a connection, and not connecting. All the same, I wanted to be there with them in that timeless dream-state where everyone was so relaxed about it. You rock!
Hey,
Check out “The White Masi” WOW what a movie!!!!!
Where is “The Man From Earth”, a story about a professor who reveals to his colleagues that he is actually 14,000 years old. My favorite line: “Piety is not what the lessons bring to people, it’s the mistakes people bring to lessons.”
1. Razor’s Edge (Tyrone Powers version)
2. The Fountain
3. Somewhere in Time
4. The Matrix
5. What dreams may Come
6. Siddharta
7. Meetings with Remarkable Men
8. Phenomenon
9. Contact
10. Cocoon
11. Under the Tuscan Sun
12. The Passion of the Christ
Others
Celestine Prophecy
The Preacher
The Preacher’s Wife
and many more….
“You admire the man who pushes his way to the top in any walk of life, while we admire the man who abandons his ego”
~~~
Have you ever seen the movie “Groundhog day”? I did. Sometimes I feel as if I am in that movie. I feel as if all my life spins around events that carry the same essence. The situations that I find myself in have been repeatedly recovering through out my life and would be most well defined as fear and frustration. I can find similarities in the type of the causations that lead to that outcome and I know the signs of it coming. It has its own climax, called depression. Thinking about the reasons and understanding them, however, does not help me much in preventing the consequences. I feel as if I am trapped in it and I will never find the way out of it. I feel as if this “It” – something inside me and will always control me. This is the It that let’s me go when I feel to close to end and let me rebuild myself, so that It can take me back again with the new even stronger force. It is not the suicide that can solve the problem but it definitely occasionally comes as a solution of the last reserve in my mind. What is it that stops me? Maybe that this last reserve would not leave me any last chance?
Its been a year now, but if your still in that movie, I recommend you reading Echkart Tolle’s “The Power Of Now” and “New Earth”. You will find all your answers in there. It is the Ego and its endless “Pursuit of happiness” that gives us that feeling. We will never find peace outside of us, its within.
May you find peace.
Great list, just great! I discovered a few new one’s to check out (Fur, Marienbad) and have a few to add.
I agree with The Matrix above, hollywood sure, but impactful? Definitely.
Also Into The Wild, the true story of a man searching for himself.
Rock on!
I haven’t checked the full list, other than the first page…But I’m wondering if the really transcendental/transpersonal movie The Big Blue by Luc Besson is in this..According to the consciousness calibration work of David Hawkins, it registers in the high transcendent/awareness state..Besides, really good acting by Jean Reno, Rosanna Arquette and Jean-Marc Barr.
I prefer considering films that inspire a transcendent response, than poorly made films that take on a transcendent theme/subject. So, to feel the transcendent power of film try: Blue (Kieslowski), Before Night Falls, Mulholland Drive, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Shame (Bergman), Andrei Rublev, The Thin Red Line, Come and See, A Clockwork Orange, 400 Blows, Band of Outsiders, etc…