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Movies for Courses on Good and Evil |
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| Posted by: | Stacey L. Nairn |
| Title/Position: | Assistant Professor |
| School/Organization: | University of Prince Edward Island |
| Sent to listserv of: | SPSP |
| Date posted: | September 27th, 2006 |
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Hello everyone,
Below is the list of movies and books that members suggested may be useful for portraying and stimulating discussion on the topic of good and evil.
Many thanks to those who responded!
Stacey Nairn
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Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion
Stephen King’s "The Stand"
South Park Episode "I'm a Little Bit Country" from season 7
Pulp Fiction
Star Wars (take your pick, also for a spoof -- Spaceballs)
Any of the Matrix movies
Austin Powers (Austin vs. Dr. Evil)
Sleeping Beauty
Lion King
101 Dalmations
The Grinch who Stole Christmas
Chronicals of Narnia
Legend (Tom Cruise vs. Satan)
9 to 5 (if you want to use good vs evil liberally)
V for Vendetta (interesting in that the hero (the one representing good) kills his opponents (he's really more of an anti-hero).
Lord of the Rings
The Gentlemen's Agreement (an often overlooked classic about anti-semitism)
All of Disney
All fairy tales
Harry Potter movies
The Wizard of Oz.
Lord of War (about an illegal gun-runner)
Black Hawk Down
Hotel Rwanda
Sometimes in April (HBO treatment of the Rwanda genocide)
Tears of the Sun
Welcome to Sarajevo (on reporters who wish they could intervene in the former Yugoslavia genocides -- I guess the question is do we have the right to intervene? etc.- -- is it just as evil to step in as to do nothing?)
Savior (starring Dennis Quaid -- not a great film, in my opinion, but an interesting representation of the subtleties of good/evil)
The Constant Gardener
Judgment at Nuremberg
Schindler's List (obviously)
The Godfather
Runaway Jury (is it okay to "fix" a jury for a good cause? where is the line between doing "good" and doing "bad"?)
Lifeboat (what happens when you're trapped on a lifeboat with a Nazi during WW2? should you save him, or is he inherently evil? and if you don't save him, does that make you evil?)
Unforgiven (Eastwood: fuzzy areas btw good and evil)
The Statement (Michael Caine as an old-fogey Nazi war criminal on the run -- more fuzzy areas)
Panic (normal guy seeks therapy to help with anxiety due to participation in family business -- assassinations ... more fuzzy areas again)
House of Cards (all people should watch this -- BBC series about a crooked politician/politics -- also one of the best things I've ever watched)
The Mission (DeNiro starts out as a "bad" guy, becomes a "good" guy -- if you consider missionaries good guys -- and then contemplates doing something "bad" for the greater good)
The Confession (Ben Kingsley murders hospital workers who let his son die, and then doesn't want to avoid punishment for his crime -- won't let his lawyer defend him)
Either Three Kings or The Man Who Would Be King (or both -- slightly different takes on the same idea)
Empire of the Sun (interned boy in Japanese camp admires Japanese, etc etc)
Ghosts of Rwanda (Frontline -- best Rwanda documentary I've seen -- discusses the US and UN non-intervention, and all of the other stuff that the US/UN do to avoid intervening in genocide -- Samantha Power's book Problem From Hell is wonderful for this reason, by the way -- I use it each time I teach my good/evil seminar).
Shake Hands With the Devil (both the documentary and the book are really good -- Dallaire is my hero, though, so I'm biased)
Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State (a long, BBC documentary -- lots of surprises here about the Jewish Holocaust)
Fog of War (Robert MacNamara on his role in modern US wars)
Paper Clips (explaining the Holocaust to Midwestern kids -- they collect 6 million paperclips to get an idea of what 6 million means)
John le Carre and Graham Greene books both deal with the grey areas btw good and evil.
Dostoevsky of course writes about good and evil in all of his novels (what can be more "grey" than a murderer who kills just to prove he can, and then torture himself psychologically because of it, finds love and faith in God, and is thus redeemed?).
Timothy Findlay for Canadian Content (and also because he was a genius -- I think I'd go with Famous Last Words if it were me, but anything by him is essentially a study of the good/evil question).
Frankenstein, because it's exactly the opposite of what everyone thinks it will be (to what extent is the creature evil personified, as popular culture seems to want to characterize him?).
Unbreakable examines the typical comic book script of the development of a superhero who runs into an archnemesis.
Europa, Europa
Good Morning Vietnam
Scarface (specifically, the scene in which Al Pacino gets drunk at a fancy restaurant and berates the other diners for seeing him as a "bad guy")
Lone Star
Falling Down
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," an excellent PBS Frontline special on the reactions of the faithful and the faithless to the attacks on 9/11.
"Capturing the Friedmans"
Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of "Cape Fear"
"Fargo" ends with an amazing scene of two characters in the same (police) car: one, a brutal murderer, the other, an unpretentious, genuinely caring policewoman... I suddenly realized that the directors were finalizing a contrast between characters revealed by the film's earlier events as embodiments of pure evil and pure good, respectively.
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