A Walk to Remember
(2002, 100 minutes, PG)

Do take A Walk to Remember, a most rewarding and inspiring stroll through issues of faith, love, and individuality. Based on the Nicholas Sparks novel, this film is a teen romance with true heart and soul, a touching story for adults as well as teens. It communicates the essential goodness of humankind and makes one feel positive about life, even in the midst of unfairness and sadness.

The story follows the growing relationship between Jamie Sullivan (Mandy Moore), an unpretentious, quiet, intelligent misfit at school, and Landon Carter (Shane West), a handsome, popular, somewhat wild member of the "in" crowd. Much to Landon's surprise, Jamie changes him and his world.

"Jamie has faith in me," Landon says. "She makes me want to be different, better." How does Jamie exert such an influence over Landon? She does so first through example and earns Landon's respect. While she is ridiculed at school because of the way she dresses and because of her interests, Jamie obviously is her own person and doesn't give in to any kind of peer pressure, unlike Landon.

"You don't care what people think about you?" asks the incredulous Landon.

"No," Jamie replies.

The daughter of a minister, Jamie is secure in her spiritual beliefs and her faith, another example for the wayward Landon.

"How can you not believe?" Jamie asks Landon. About her faith, she says, "It's like the wind. I can't see it, but I believe."

Even toward her father (Peter Coyote), Jamie exhibits complete confidence in herself and her beliefs. Upset about Jamie's involvement with Landon, her father says, "You should care what God thinks." Jamie confidently replies, "I think He wants me to be happy." Her self-confidence, individuality, and positive outlook help Landon begin to see life differently and to find purpose for himself. "You can do anything," Jamie tells him, and he is inspired to better his life and, for the first time, to think about his goals and dreams.

Because of Jamie, Landon learns not only to help himself but to reach out to other people, such as visiting a classmate in the hospital. Landon also shows signs of a growing faith of his own. When Jamie's father is forbidding him to date Jamie, Landon replies that he is only asking for the minister to have the faith in him that he preaches about on Sundays.

Jamie inspires Landon to look at the Big Picture of life, to see beyond concerns and details. Jamie acknowledges, and knows from experience, that there is suffering in life, but she says that without suffering there would be no compassion.

Concerning her own challenges and again relying on her faith and ability to see beyond the moment, Jamie says, "Maybe God has a bigger plan for me than I had for myself."

What a tremendous example Jamie is of the powerful, positive influence one person can have on another. Landon credits Jamie with teaching him about life, love, and hope, and calls her his angel.

Director Adam Shankman and writer Karen Janszen have indeed fashioned an inspiring, moving, haunting film about an angel and the soul she takes under her wings.

I Am Sam
(2002, 133 minutes, PG-13)

Dr. Seuss had a wonderful way with words, and many parents, children, and grown-up children will recognize the cadence of the words "I am Sam, Sam I am" from his ever-popular book, Green Eggs and Ham.

In the film I Am Sam, the mentally challenged Sam Dawson (Sean Penn), who has a 7-year-old's IQ, likes to read the book to his young daughter, Lucy (Dakota Fanning). The book's story, cadence and alliteration no doubt appeal to Sam, although Lucy is ready to move to more involved reading. Therein lie the central plot questions of the movie: Is Sam really competent enough to raise Lucy? What does it take to raise a child?

The Sam of the movie may also be connecting with the words "I am Sam, Sam I am" at a deeper level. The "I am" structure may be resonating with Sam's soul, with that spark of God within himself that some spiritual paths refer to as the "I am" presence.

When the "I am" is associated with an individual's God center, the series of "I Am" statements that Jesus uses in The Gospel According to John takes on whole new meanings. They become guides to help people understand the essence of God within themselves. Statements such as "I am the light of the world" (Jn. 8:12) direct our attention inward so that we can experience God as an always present and accessible presence.

What then is the nature of God, of the "I am" presence? It is, according to many enlightened traditions, love. "God is love," the Bible clearly states. Therefore, when we are connected to our true Self, to our spiritual nature, we are love and we respond out of pure love. In other words, when the self (the human personality, the "Sam") is responding from the Self (the spiritual component, the "I am") we are fully engaged in being expressions of love in the world.

In the film, Sam responds out of that pure love, from his "I am" presence. To him, love is the main thing needed to properly raise Lucy, and that love can overcome any limitations, difficulties, or dangers that might be encountered because of his own mental challenges.

There are those in the legal profession and the Department of Children and Family Services who question such an assumption, and Sam finds a pro bono attorney, Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer), to argue his reliance on love.

Lucy agrees with her father. When asked if it isn't true that she needs more than Sam can give her, Lucy replies, "All I need is love." There is never any doubt that Sam loves Lucy.

Rita argues in court: "One's intellectual capacity has no bearing on their ability to love." She successfully makes the points that even intelligent, educated, professional parents can at times make big mistakes in their child-rearing decisions and sometimes may forsake patience and compassion in dealing with their children.

From a practical standpoint, objections can be made, and are in the film, that Lucy certainly does need more than love to insure her proper development, education, and safety. From emotional, psychological and spiritual standpoints, however, the importance of love is well known and documented. Love draws unto itself what is needed to accomplish its divine objectives, but those objectives don't always make sense to humans, who so often don't see the Big Picture.

Sam has a lot of faith in love and love's abilities to make things right. He tells Lucy, "Always set your dreams high."

Both Sam and Rita show that you can't always judge by appearances as to how in tune people are with their "I am' presence. Sam may not look like the epitome of love, but he is. Rita may look like she is all together, but she isn't. She is full of anxieties, anger, guilt over ill treatment of her son, and frustrations being in a loveless marriage; her "I am" presence is lost in neuroses. Sam can teach her a thing or two about love and living from the "I am."

While I Am Sam does offer some worthwhile Reel Spirit considerations about the importance of love, viewers should know also that it suffers from unrealistic scenarios, predictability, tediousness, and an extremely high amount of blatant product advertising—all of which tried this viewer's "I am" perspective.

Dragonfly
(2002, 105 minutes, PG-13)

Maybe I'm too accepting or too believing; maybe I'm not as skeptical or cynical as I should be. But I have absolutely no doubt that there is life beyond what we call death, that the souls who have gone on can communicate with us, and that we have the ability to know their presence.

There have been too many occurrences of the supernatural in my life and in the lives of people—honest, sincere, ordinary people--that I know, and too many well-documented studies and case histories for me to not accept and believe.

One of the most seminal books in my awareness is The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, in which we read, "In fact, it appears that this reality and the next are different in degree, but not in kind. Both are hologram constructs, realities that are established ... only by the interaction of consciousness with its environment. Put another way, our reality appears to be a more frozen version of the afterlife dimension."

Experiences with the supernatural are actually very natural in our world, and there are many who regard them simply as facts that cannot be ignored any more than can physical sensations.

That's why I'm always surprised when people in the media (who I know from my years as a journalist tend to be skeptical and somewhat jaded) and characters in the movies still continue to react with such abject disbelief about spirits and life after this life.

The film Dragonfly is a dramatic thriller that again plays with the questions: Is there life after death? Can the dead communicate with us? And again, we mostly have people who continue to close their minds to the possibilities. From the start, I want to shake them and say, "Wake up!" and I'm amazed that we are even having this repetitious cinematic debate.

Leading the list of doubters in the film are the stereotypical intellectuals, the educated, those who value the mind over the heart. Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) is a doctor whose wife Emily, a loving, much admired fellow doctor, has been killed. A friend refers to Emily as "the heart" and Joe as "the mind" in the marriage.

Joe believes that this plane of existence is all there is, and his rational mind goes into a tailspin when Emily's spirit apparently starts communicating with him directly and through patients in the Chicago hospital where Joe and she have worked.

Joe's neighbor is a disbelieving attorney (Kathy Bates), who says, "Nothing is real without evidence." A hospital administrator and a doctor friend of Joe's round out the main Doubting Thomases.

The believer, also stereotypically, is a nun, Sister Madeline (Linda Hunt), who believes in Near Death Experiences (NDE's), miracles and different "ladders of consciousness" on which life is created and experienced.

"What we're experiencing right now," Sister Madeline tells Joe, "could be just in our mind. If we can create this world with what we imagine, why not the next?"

Believing in such possibilities is no more "nuts" than Christopher Columbus exploring the physical world, she asserts.

One young patient through whom Emily seems to be communicating is Jeffrey, who has a history of NDE's. Jeffrey relates to Joe a puzzling portion of his most recent NDE: "I saw her (Emily) yesterday too. She was there, all around me ... She flew me out so I could come back and tell somebody something."

As is typically done in "real life," the film establishes that those who do believe in or who are experiencing the supernatural are suspect and not to be trusted for various reasons: Joe is going insane with grief and is overworking himself; Sister Madeline is controversial because of her beliefs; Jeffrey is a trickster.

As the story, directed by Tom Shadyac, unfolds and Joe follows Emily's callings, Joe's heart opens, and the evidence that the attorney wants before she can believe starts to stack up.

Once more, enlightenment comes to the once stubbornly unenlightened. Hallelujah!

Joe praises Emily: "What she taught me in life, she taught me in death--to trust, to have faith."

'Its belief that gets us there," Joe says.

The evidence is all around us. Perhaps the real question of the film is: What's taking so many people so long to get there?

Raymond Teague is the author of Reel Spirit: A Guide to Movies That Inspire, Explore and Empower, from Unity House. He is an award-winning journalist, an editor of spiritual publications, a popular New Thought speaker, and a lifelong movie buff. His book is available at bookstores; on-line at amazon.com, bn.com, borders.com, and by phone at
1 (800) 669-0282.