Reviews

"Bee Season" is a multi-dimensional cinematic masterpiece with subtle streams of subtext swirling just below the surface, sweeping us into a deep and gentle journey of emotional and spiritual transformation. This little film is filled with deeply penetrating multi-layered representations of familial archetypal roles of spouse, father, mother, son, daughter, and sibling, mystical and metaphysical wisdom, and haunting reflections on the deep human psyche, shadow, and the powerful undercurrents of buried memory. Slowly, these subtextual streams rise and become the text in this beautiful cinematic work. This is a gentle, haunting, sacred, mystifying, and subtly profound motion picture. In the final moments, there is revelation that is beyond what can be spoken. For some this is a difficult movie to watch because of its transmodern approach to story, shifting the ground underneath what we normally experience as text and subtext, but if you can open yourself to this wondrous little film it will feed your heart and soul.

There have been many wonderful television shows dealing with transpersonal themes over the years, including "The Twilight Zone" (Alternate Realities), "Quantum Leap" (Time Travel), "The X-Files" (Alien Encounters), "Touched by an Angel" (Angels), and "Joan of Arcadia" (Divine Guidance). These types of shows also appear to be growing in number recently with several superb transpersonal television shows showering the television airways within the past few years, including: "Lost" (Metaphysical Realities), "Life" (Zen), "Life on Mars" (Time Travel), "The Event" and "V" (Alien Encounters), "Heroes," "Kyle- XY," "Chuck," "No Ordinary Family," and "Fringe" (Exceptional Human Capacities), "Legend of the Seeker," "Merlin" and "Camelot" (Magic and Alchemy), and "Eli Stone" (Divine Guidance).

While all of these shows are excellent transpersonal television journeys, I believe "Eli Stone" must be singled out as one of televisions transpersonal masterpieces. The reason I believe "Eli Stone" deserves this mantle, is that it not only explores a transpersonal topic with great depth, grace, wit, and integrity, it also has the capacity to give the viewing audience a powerful experience of higher and illusive states of being. How often does a TV show induce a deep sense of grace, hope and faith in the face of life's haunting mysteries? This is very rare...so I say, BRAVO to the creators of "Eli Stone!" But I also have to give a big BOO to the network (ABC) who never gave the show the chance it deserved and canceled this gem of television enlightentainment. Luckily we have the first and second season of this gem on DVD.

"The Seashell and the Clergyman" is the cinematic masterpiece of Germaine Dulac, mother of the first French Avant-Gard. Dulac is also believed to be one of the very first feminist filmmakers and this work is considered by many to be the very first Surrealistic film ever made (coming out one year before "Un Chien Andalou"). Many have tried to interpret this film from various perspectives but it has remained an enigma. Dulac called her work "integral cinema" and amazingly the constructs of this film hauntingly reflect patterns of what is now called Integral Theory (Ken Wilber, 1995). Looking back on this film through the lens of Integral Theory, everything makes sense and we see that this work and Dulac were just many years ahead of their time.