The Mystical Movie Guide: News
News: January 6, 2007 - Another Happy New Year!
Everywhere I see the same old themes but also new hope as people realize how serious things have become. Life has to change, we can’t continue business as usual. This applies to global issues like changing politics and climate, and personal issues like distractions and responsibilities.
For me and the Mystical Movie Guide, it’s ditto last year’s resolution, but more clear than ever why. I have a life mission of writing that is focussing on my own fiction, after years of learning to analyze myths and stories via these movie reviews. So while it has definitely been my soul’s path to make the mystical movie guide, it has been an ego distraction to try to collect, watch, and thoroughly critique all the thousands of obscure films I’ve researched. I understand now that I need to write only the occasional long review as serves my personal responsibilities and writing projects. A good example can be seen in the end of 2007 reviews that touched upon dimensional theories: Flatland, The Mist, Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, Imagining the Tenth Dimension. A lot of the ideas that arose went into my 7,000 word story “How to Catch a Fairy” which I finished on New Year’s Eve and am showing to publishers.
The rest of the movie guide needs to fill up with brief listings for oodles of interesting films, offering just enough information to help you decide if you’re interested. Directors who send me screeners are still encouraged to do so, and I promise to get better at posting good and timely medium-length reviews for these. Comprehensiveness keeps the movie guide relevant for its mission to be a great general spiritual resource as well as a window on one mystic’s course of film appreciation.
An exercise in reality checking came in 2007 when I was invited to be the resident film critic for a new agey environmental online magazine called globalintelligencer.com. I wrote 7 time-consuming reviews, most but not all of which got incorporated into the movie guide: Paprika, Sicko, An Arctic Tale, 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama, Across the Universe, Flatland, and The Man from Earth. I got appreciating feedback and was prepared to continue but the magazine has already folded, having overextended itself without enough advertising (back issues still online, check it out). The experience was great and satisfied my dream to be an official film critic. Now I’m more ready to be my own author (in addition to the happy demands of new parenting!)
So, for 2008, you can look forward to a lot more movie titles mentioned on the guide, with intermittent deep reviews. I also would still like to get a forum feature going so readers can comment. I would have done it long ago except that spammers tend to ruin forums for everyone, so until it’s official, please be assured that you can always email me your comments on a particular film and I will put them on the site appropriately in a forum style under each film.
News: January 14, 2007 - Happy New Year! My resolution for the MysticalMovieGuide is, after having worked harder on long reviews for some months, to go through a period of entering a lot more basic listings with briefer notes. You deserve to learn more titles and decide for yourself what you want to see. Since I started researching films in 2002, the site has gone through cycles of many short entries alternating with fewer detailed analyses. As impressive as the online database may be, my knowledge of movies is actually thousands of films ahead of what is listed, so the site needs to catch up in quantity over quality. You can always get the drift of spiritual deconstruction from the longer reviews I have written over the years, and there are plenty of repeating themes.
News: December 17, 2006 - This week was the debut of a TV mini-series so fantastic and seemingly guided by higher powers, that I spent many hours watching, contemplating, and writing up my impressions. I recommend to everyone "The Lost Room".
News: November 18, 2006 - I've added a genre called "ViewOnline" which means just that! The film is a short that has a direct link to where you can watch it online. This is a great way to see rare visionary works, and most common sites for online viewing include ifilm.com, atomfilms.com, youtube.com, medialab.ifc.com, and undergroundfilm.org - If the link becomes obsolete over time, you can always try an internet search for the film by name such as at google.com
News: September 9, 2006 - This year I started including photos for detailed reviews! As I was writing longer reviews for movies I saw and liked, then I was getting behind in the vast number of films I want to mention including new releases. So now I'm mixing long seen reviews and shorter not seen reviews. Then to help navigate all this, one line excerpts of plots and notes are shown in most listings, either something I wrote or the start of the first sentence. The full notes of new unseen reviews will start off saying "(background information)" to distinguish from opinions about movies I've seen.
News: December 17, 2005 - The great news is that after on-again off-again attention to this site, I'm now committed to posting daily movie reviews! And this is already seeing a response, with two directors this week emailing appreciations for what I wrote. For details, and to get to know me better, check out my new blog!
News: February, 2005 - Automatic cross-referencing! People's names and suggested movie titles are clickable. The system isn't perfect and they don't always get new information, but it helps researchers a lot. The focus of the guide is now on basic Film Entries from the All Films List, which I continue to develop. I recommend following the explicit blue Analysis links if you want to read in-depth reviews, some of which are really great for decontruction methods but I don't have time to write anymore. If you want to email someone a link to a Film Entry, click on the title in the pop-up to get a new window that you can get the full url from.
News: March, 2004 - Consider having a Mystical Movie Party! That's what my friends and I do, and I've posted our history and notes to inspire you.
News: February, 2004 - I'm very excited to report on the Spiritual Cinema Circle, a new home subscription DVD service for Spiritual Cinema, from our champion in the industry Stephen Simon (What Dreams May Come, Somewhere in Time). There are some very good people working now to license great obscure mystical movies for this monthly service, and the first DVDs will be shipping in May. First subscribers get a discount, so sign-up now! If you are a filmmaker, you can submit your works for consideration, and even if you don't get picked there may be cross-over opportunities to other festivals, venues, and getting listed and/or reviewed on the MysticalMovieGuide (I'm honored to be in touch with the staff at this time). All of this work is toward Stephen's greater dream of a spiritual cinema cable/satelllite channel, and the project is part of his new production company Moving Messages Media which recently finished filming "Indigo", about psychic children starring Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations with God). So yes, this is the time to show your support for soul-stirring film! -- best wishes, Carl
News: January, 2004 - Happy New Year! Ok, here's the scoop. This website's goal is to be one of the world's greatest references on mysticism and spirituality in film. In the past year and a half, we've accomplished a body of work that includes a few hundred in-depth reviews to illustrate a spiritual deconstructionist approach to film appreciation, and a rough master listing of over 2000 films with the barest of plot descriptions. Now, for the next few months we'll be fleshing out that master list for better synopses including thematic categories and director names. By Spring or Summer of 2004, we'll get back to writing in-depth reviews, as well as continuing to discover more interesting and rare movies (including shorts) and helping people to locate viewing copies. Plus, I like to network and sponsor local artist shows, and eventually I'll have some of my own short films to share. So here's wishing us all a happy and prosperous New Year! -- best wishes, Carl
News: Christmas, 2003 - Yet another improved version! There's just one button to "Show Matches", and everything else is combined into neat menus. The so-called master reference list is being upgraded to be compatible with the reviews list, so all the choices can match for themes, genres, goodness ratings, etc. The default will be to Show Matches from the "All Films List", which is that master reference that I'm working on, now with over 2200 titles! When I finally write a review and a movie gets into the "Reviewed Films List", it gets more cast/credits information, and this is why the "Search in:" menu says "(more in reviewed list)" for some options.
In other news, my friends and I had a great time meeting Thoth at his first Boston performance this month! Thoth is an amazing and unique shamanic operatic performer from NYC whose documentary about him won the Oscar last year. Check out his website at skthoth.com
News: November, 2003 - This summer I revised the search feature to include a checkbox for a Master Reference List of over 2000 films and plot summaries! This makes the Quick Lists page even handier for people who find the search functions confusing. The WhatsNew selection is defaulting to showing everything because I haven't been writing many reviews lately. That's because I've been researching the Master Ref of so many titles for all future reference, and also because I've been developing my own ideas for short films. Yes, I've got some great movie ideas, some straight from lucid dreams where I was the first test audience, so to speak (which begs the question, who made the film?) In October I met with Antero Alli in San Francisco; he is one of America's foremost underground spiritual filmmakers ("The Drivetime" and much more). He's a great guy and was very encouraging to my own projects - I'll soon be posting a favorable review of his latest film "Under a Shipwrecked Moon".
May 4, 2003 - PLEASE HELP THE GUIDE GROW BY CHECKING OUR WANTS LIST. Thanks, you never know what someone may have.
April 4, 2003 - Special! Now Read "A New Context for Peace through Film Appreciation"
Feb 26, 2003 - The Mystical Movie Guide is getting closer to 400 reviews, and there are more links than ever on the Links page for vendors and further research. To help with the readability of the longer mature film reviews that I'm now in the habit of writing (my goal is 5 per week), the Exact Match page (linked to each title) has been reformatted with margins and paragraph breaks. The reformatting is within frames so it should not interfere with printer friendliness.
Everyone I know is praying for peace, as too many in the world consider war as the solution to problems of international distrust. May the Spirit of more understanding protect and guide all.
Jan 8, 2003 - Happy New Year! Hope your holidays were full of love (and you felt the love too!)
The Guide has surpassed 350 reviews, with more interesting comments and research in each one than ever. Also, we've got more generalized date range filtering with fill-in boxes (don't forget the date sorting option), and now a Country of origin filter in a drop-down menu. There are more links than ever to follow for finding rare films (I'll be happy to give advice by email if you get stuck), so enjoy the movies!
Oct 23, 2002 - Halloween approaches, a time for reflection and balance between worlds. So let's look at how the Mystical Movie Guide has grown.
In the summer of 2002 I was greatly inspired by the appearance of some new spiritual movie resources on the internet, so I wanted to make my own. I envisioned a list of a couple hundred titles, collected from my memories of movies that I'd seen and liked, plus some more that I'd heard about but had not yet seen. I'm good at web design so I quickly made a kind of script-driven database.
Soon I was haunting all the best Boston area video stores (City Video, Hollywood Express, Photographics) as well as online movie databases (searching for good keywords), and my list of potential movies to recommend was growing into the hundreds. I figured that I would make many very short reviews, mostly for films I'd never see, and have 700 titles online by the end of the year.
Then I got better at locating movies as well as writing more intriguing reviews. I now have hundreds of movies stored up to watch at home, taped from libraries and rental stores (I get them in quantity on the cheap days to save money and time), plus many rare discontinued videos purchased cheap on ebay, etc. So now my goal is to write good reviews soon after watching each film, at the rate of a few per week. This means that the website is growing more slowly but with the best possible quality, and I'm having great fun. This week the Guide is surpassing 300 reviews, searching has been improved to find titles more automatically, and I've just added date sorting!
If you have a movie to recommend for the site, send me an email. There's a good chance I've already heard of it, but with a nudge I'll review it sooner. I would estimate there are about 1000 really interesting feature films in cinematic history that show important appreciations for metaphysics, afterlife, dreams, psychic states, higher beings, soulmates, and God, and most will be online eventually at www.MysticalMovieGuide.com. Future plans for a chat room and director/actor cross-index are also in store, but for now I'd recommend the forum at MysticalMovies.com and going to imdb.com for further research.
So happy movie hunting and enjoy!
Carl
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BOSTON EVENT ALERT! A Mystical Movie Evening with Hollywood Film Producer, Stephen Simon Stephen Simon, producer of spiritual Hollywood films including "What Dreams May Come", hosts an inspiring evening of film clips and discussion on the dynamic between movies and spirituality. Attendees will discuss and receive an autographed copy of Stephen's new book "The Force Is With You: Mystical Movie Messages That Inspire Our Lives" on Friday, November, 15, 2002 from 7:00PM-10:00PM at John Hancock Conference Center, 40 Trinity Place, Boston. Advance tickets are $45($55 at door) includes Stephen's autographed new book. Call: 888-774-7478 or visit www.InspiredEvents.com note from Carl - I'm helping friends of mine sponsor this event and I will be there, so if you're attending please do say hello! |
Copyright 2002 Carl J. Schroeder