Superman: The Movie, To Me, Remains One Of The Supreme Comic Book To Film Adaptations Of All Time.

La Belle et la Bête: journal d'un film (Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film) by Jean Cocteau.

A superb book about the making of a masterpiece.

Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese.

Saw this on Netflix, and I say it's pure art.

A study of masculinity, existentialism, isolation, and delusion.

Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods by Harlan Ellison.

Ellison is a controversial figure, for sure. Despite this, I think he's a fine, one-two punch wordsmith.

Girlhood (French: Bande de filles, lit. "Group of Girls") by Céline Sciamma.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore.

A story originally created to serve as a warning of what could possibly arise from the Thatcherite government of the 1980s, V for Vendetta has stood the test of time as one of the premier works of the comic book medium. A story that tells a tale of tyranny and the valiant effort made to thwart it that's as timeless as it is harrowing.

"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Unable to discern the form of You,

I see Your presence all around.

Filling my eyes with the love of You,

my heart is humbled,

for You are everywhere."

- Sana'i Ghaznavi, The Book of Everything: Journey of the Heart’s Desire: Hakim Sanai’s Walled Garden of the Truth

Hercules: Meg...? I would never... EVER... hurt you.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that Herc. Don't make promises you can't keep.

While Disney's Hercules would never hurt the girl of his dreams, the guy he was based on certainly would. In the original myth, Hera was hell-bent on making Heracles rue the day his father cheated on her (because somehow, that was his fault). And to get revenge, she cursed the hero with such insane rage that he actually killed his wife Megara and their children.

The poet Seneca said that Hercules grabbed one son by the arm and swung him about like a ball and chain, smashing him to a bloody pulp. Then he shot his other son with an arrow and crushed Megara's head with his club. Apollodorus claims that he threw Megara, their two sons and his nephews into a burning fire. But the darkest and saddest one has to be by Euripides who wrote a passage where Hercules' son begs for his life before being pierced by one of his father's arrows.

As grizzly as this is though, I've gotta admit, after learning about what happened in the original Greek myth, it's a wee bit funny to me that in the Disney movie he literally says that he would never hurt Meg...

Mythic stories fall into several categories. There are sagas, epics, and fantasy stories called "märchen." These stories depend on something difficult for us to conceive these days: Simplicity or the "Logic of the Fairy Tale." In other words: things are just what they are, because that’s just the way they are.

These stories frequently examine or teach a moral lesson, exalting it or exposing a particular flaw. If the story is a parable or doctrinal, one of its goals is to delineate the characters as "types" in order to illustrate this basic lesson, characters which make the story whole and who are also contained by it. The lives of these "types" can and must have links with the past and the future but their role ends with the story.

In a magic story, the flow is more important than the logic. Man invented monsters to explain the entire universe (Norse and Greek mythology, for example). Once man began to live in an organized way, with a "social contract," an abyss was opened up between his instincts and his thoughts, and monsters started to REPRESENT another universe altogether: man's inner universe. The pagan prefigures the social and offers us a glimpse of the deepest reaches of man's soul, articulating a primordial, savage universe, populated by elves, fauns, ogres, faeries, trolls, and demons.