Movie, Book, or TV Show that will change people...


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WeDesignOurLives is offline WeDesignOurLives Post #1  November 25,2009, 10:05pm
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This is not 'what is your favorite show, book, film' topic... this is "you have the opportunity to make everyone in the world see one film, read one book, or see one tv show (series) ... which would hopefully make the most positive difference in the world if everyone saw it (and assume they'd understand it, even if it required Cliff Notes or such if it's some heavy duty philosophy book).

My choices of the top of my head to get things started are:

- The Prisoner (TV series)
- A Serious Man (movie)
- don't know on the book... haven't read enough...
 
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ming_on_mongo is offline ming_on_mongo Post #2  November 27,2009, 3:50pm
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WeDesignOurLives wrote :
This is not 'what is your favorite show, book, film' topic... this is "you have the opportunity to make everyone in the world see one film, read one book, or see one tv show (series) ... which would hopefully make the most positive difference in the world if everyone saw it (and assume they'd understand it, even if it required Cliff Notes or such if it's some heavy duty philosophy book).

My choices of the top of my head to get things started are:

- The Prisoner (TV series)
- A Serious Man (movie)
- don't know on the book... haven't read enough...
 
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chawks64 is offline chawks64 Post #3  November 27,2009, 4:20pm
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I know it's not a classic or anything, but I really believe seeing the film The Pursuit of Happyness can give a person a huge attitude change. It's especially relevent to those of us who did not have a "privileged" life.

TV shows? I think their influence is more along the lines of the slow change, making things more "normal" by putting them in front of the public on a weekly or daily basis. TV probably had a lot to do with America becoming more racially accepting.

Books. Hmm, so many. For me, I think it was CS Lewis's Mere Christianity that changed my thinking the most, and I've heard the same from others.
 
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meri75 is offline meri75 Post #4  November 27,2009, 5:17pm
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TV Show: True Crime
~ Truly despicable how some humans are capable of treating animals and people.

Movie: Schlindler's List.
~ I know it happened for real - all those people locked up and killed - but I can't process it at all. It is too big.

Book: Hmm, actually, I think we have a world full of books which have changed people and our history. The top 3 I'd list would be:
~ The Bible (obviously, since I'm Christian! lol)
~ The complete works of Charles Darwin.
~ Shakespeare.
All of these works are quite old, yet they are all still in print and readily available - at least, in the western world. I don't know about other parts of the globe. I think that would mean they changed people, the world?
 
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WeDesignOurLives is offline WeDesignOurLives Post #5  November 27,2009, 6:52pm
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meri75 wrote :
~ The complete works of Charles Darwin.
~ Shakespeare
I'm actually asking what book, show, you would give to someone that might change them.
 
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WeDesignOurLives is offline WeDesignOurLives Post #6  November 27,2009, 6:59pm
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chawks64 wrote :
I know it's not a classic or anything, but I really believe seeing the film The Pursuit of Happyness can give a person a huge attitude change.
I actually don't like this choice because it falls into the 'if you're not extremely talented, resourceful, tenatious, and in the right place at the right time you're probably not gonna make it.'

This film actually angered me (and so does the Ayn Rand books because they send the same message that the only way to get what you really want is to be indispensable ... effort isn't enough).

Should I re-see it? Am I missing it?
 
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chawks64 is offline chawks64 Post #7  November 27,2009, 7:15pm
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WeDesignOurLives wrote :
I actually don't like this choice because it falls into the 'if you're not extremely talented, resourceful, tenatious, and in the right place at the right time you're probably not gonna make it.'

This film actually angered me (and so does the Ayn Rand books because they send the same message that the only way to get what you really want is to be indispensable ... effort isn't enough).

Should I re-see it? Am I missing it?
It's got one of my favorite quotes in it. When I was growing up, I always got really good grades with almost no effort. I scored well on the SAT and went to college like everyone assumed I would. But I was totally distracted and didn't realize I had to work harder to focus than many people (I didn't know I had ADHD until I was 42). I ended up dropping out a year away from an accounting degree because my dad was diagnosed with a terminal illness, my mom had major surgery and I found out my boyfriend was going to be homeless due to a cocaine addiction. Just a little stress...

After I quit school, I got a different job and stuck with the boyfriend (emotionally) for a month, but eventually left him. He hadn't gotten the wakeup call, even after living in his car, so I moved on with my life. I dated, eventually marrying and having kids. One day I looked around and saw that, other than making everyone else's life easier, I had accomplished nothing for myself. Hence my favorite quote:

"Because when I was young and would get an A on a history test or whatever, I'd get this feeling about all the things that I could be, and then I never became any of them."
 
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ming_on_mongo is offline ming_on_mongo Post #8  November 27,2009, 8:50pm
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"Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America" by James Webb

With over 40% of the population tracing their ancestry back to the the Scots-Irish, more commonly Scotch-Irish, they've become a part of the fabric of the nation in terms of fundamental values, that unless described and pointed out, are easy to overlook. Much of the American military backbone in all wars is attributable to this culture, partly due to natural tendency and partly the only opportunity available in which to contribute to the greater good and to thrive by warrior lights.

They are the South, and the Okies and Arkies who moved west during the Dust Bowl and the Depression to populate Southern California and the Central Valley, and the Americans John Steinbeck portrayed in Grapes of Wrath. Webb traces their (and his own) roots going all the way back to the ancient warrior cultures who fought the Romans along Hadrian's Wall, to their values that persist today, still shaping contemporary American culture and politics.

"The Spell of the Sensuous - Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World" by David Abram. About the way in which our ancestors regarded the world, that may have a lot to teach us about where, and why, our thinking went wrong and how it can be corrected. There's a good interview with Abram here that should give a sense of what he's about: The Ecology of Magic - An Interview with David Abram

"London: And yet in The Spell of the Sensuous you point out that language has gone a long way toward severing our sensuous relationship with the natural world.

Abram: Yes, because so many of the ways we speak in our culture continually deny the reciprocity between our senses and the rest of the sensuous world, between our bodies and the vast body of the earth. When we speak of the earth as an object, we are denying our relationship with the earth. When we speak of nature as a set of objects, rather than a community of subjects, we basically close our senses to all of the other voices that surround us."

Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!

As soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It's an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it's animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.

In fact, it's such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage — with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic."
 
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chawks64 is offline chawks64 Post #9  November 27,2009, 8:56pm
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ming_on_mongo wrote :
"Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America" by James Webb

That sounds like one I'll be looking into.
 
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JerryC is offline JerryC Post #10  November 28,2009, 6:05pm
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Interesting.

Movie- Modern Times

TV Show/Series- Band of Brothers

Book- I haven't read anything intellectual/educational since grad school. Nice speculative fiction. Dies The Fire
 
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