BOOK REVIEW
	The Force is with You: mystical movie messages that inspire our lives

There is such a yearning for meaning and hope in the world, for stories that challenge us to be our best, to lift up our hearts to the skies and encourage us to become the people we were born and have evolved to be.

- Stephen Simon

While some traditionalists mourn the fact that the art and tradition of storytelling seems to be disappearing, Stephen Simon wakes us up to the obvious in The Force is with You.

Storytelling hasn’t faded into obscurity – it has been transformed and is no further away than your local movie theater.

Filmmakers are today’s storytellers. And, as Simon points out, film’s enormous power to emotionally affect and psychologically impress audiences makes it a storytelling tool that should be handled with responsibility and discernment. With the meticulousness of a man who knows and deeply honors the trade of filmmaking, he outlines the industries’ shortcomings and potentials as a storytelling medium. With the equal certainty of a man of spirit, he details the gradual birth of a new genre in film: Spiritual Cinema.

“I believe that spirituality is in and of itself a genre of film that has been around for decades but has never been recognized as such,” writes Simon. “This book is my attempt to share my belief in both the existence and viability of this genre; moreover, it is my belief that these films hold the key to the next century of entertainment.”

In its 80 plus year history, film has tended to focus more on outside reality than internal reality. The ever increasing tide of mindless, visually impressive blockbusters is proof of that. And yet an impressive number of films over the years have delved deep into unknown territory, asking what Simon believes is the most important question humans can ever ask: why are we here?

Reviewing the themes of over 65 movies, he makes an excellent case for recognizing spiritual cinema as a force that has been around for a long time and that deserves to be reckoned with. From It’s a Wonderful Life to Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within; from the 1956 film 1984 to the Matrix series, Simon explores time and reality, futurism and fate, life after death, heaven and hell, psychic phenomenon, and the power of love. The movies that concern themselves with these themes, he says, are the movies that carry the torch of real storytelling because these are the stories that matter. These are the stories of our selves. Not only do they map our inner landscapes, they map our future.

Well written in an engaging manner, The Force is with You provides more than an insightful journey through cinema. It also tells stories. Delightful, behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the various films and their production are scattered throughout. Most poignant are the stories of the filmmakers and writers who often struggled against great odds to bring their visions to the screen. Foremost of these are Simon’s personal sagas as he worked for decades to bring two of author Richard Matheson’s novels, Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come, into movie form.

If you love the movies this is a must-read. If you are looking for a talisman that the world’s paradigm is truly shifting, The Force is with You will give you heart.

Honorable book mention of the month

Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart advice for difficult times

An open-minded, but above all, open-hearted book by an American Buddhist nun, this little gem provides candid, gentle, lived advice from a Buddhist point of view. Practical and uplifting information flows from every unpretentious page. Enjoy.

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PAVEL'S PICK
	The Real Dirt on Farmer John

In the 60’s and 70’s, quite a number of East Coast preppies migrated to liberal arts colleges across the country. I was one of them and ended up at Beloit College, a beautiful ivy-encrusted gem sitting atop a hill in an industrial town surrounded by the endless panoply of Midwestern cornfields. The farm culture was almost unknown to me and many of the other city and suburbanites at Beloit College, which was a stronghold for 60’s radicalism and progressive intellectual pursuits. And yet the train to the college passed though farm after farm on the flat Midwestern landscape which stretched out to the horizon with nary a hill in sight.

Some of the children of these farmers ended up at Beloit and one of those was John Peterson, who as a freshman in 1968 ran a dairy and vegetable farm while taking a full course load at Beloit . John was blessed with an extensive archive of home movies, thanks to his mother’s gift of a camera and a love for filming her family that was to become a documentation of the Midwestern farm culture from the 50’s onward and right up to the farm crisis of the early 80’s. Beloit opened John’s eyes to his own creative nature and he now had two great loves: farming and a life long devotion to the power of art and free expression.

Although I never attended one of the many parties at John’s farm while at Beloit, I do remember students saying that the neighboring farmers whispered that the goings on at John’s farm were those of some kind of a ritualistic cult. I laughed when I heard this, since the prep school I had attended which was based on character development (now quite standard in many schools) was also labeled a cult. It wasn’t a laughing matter, however. This hulking, corn-fed Midwesterner received threats, his farm was vandalized, and later, an artist’s studio he had built under a patch of oak trees was burnt to the ground. The artist-in-residence lost years of her work.

I got to the college in 1976, a good four years after John graduated and a year before Taggart Siegel showed up on the scene. Taggart, also from the East Coast, had spent time at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, studying film with Donald Spoto, one of the world’s top film teachers, critics, and historians. Taggart pieced together a film major at Beloit, a college that didn’t have even have a film department. I acted in two of Taggart’s first attempts at film, one of them a tragedy in black and white about a love triangle involving two dancers and an artist living in an industrial town among the cornfields.