Justin Howard Query

“Believing in everything at the same time is the same as not believing in anything at all,” a father tells his son in Ang Lee’s 2012 film Life of Pi, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. Raised in a Hindu family, 12-year-old Pi (Ayush Tandon) becomes fascinated with Christianity and Islam, saying that he simply wants to love God, in whatever form He may take, but Pi’s father (Adil Hussain) tries to secularize him, assuring Pi that there is only one way to show one’s faith in God.

It’s Halloween season once more, and soon neighborhoods will be flooded with children and adults hiding their faces behind masks, thereby reinventing themselves for a single evening, all in service of a good scare, of a moment of transformation. On this spirited evening, tradition dictates that people will inadvertently encounter vengeful spirits over the course of the night – so disguising behind a mask would fool the ghoul into seeing living people as one of their own.

In 1986, one of the finest cinematic coming of age films — director Rob Reiner’s adaptation of a Stephen King novella, entitled for the big screen, Stand By Me — was released. It’s the story of four young boys (Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, and the inimitable River Phoenix) about to begin the next chapter of their lives: middle school.