Dune

The story of Dune is very hard to adjust to. The writer throws all the characters at you right at the beginning and doesn't even try to fill in any blanks that you are missing. Throughout a good portion of the first third of the book I felt like I was missing aspect of the book. As if I wasn't understanding or comprehending plot. Toward the end of the book everything does try back together and I noticed this is just the writing style. This type of fantasy style does not just deliver you answers on a silver platter, you have to involve yourself to speculate. Like from the beginning when the Reverend Mother tests Paul and thinks that he is going to be the supreme ruler; I knew that Paul would end up being so. I love the reality of Dune's universe; that Melange gives certain groups the power to fold space or to give the Bene Gesserits their power. Even on the concept f the Water of Life and how so many have died trying to drink the water. The universe constructed by Frank Herbert is very stable and well thought out to not be broken like so many universes that explain odd happenings as "its just magic". Every strong force has an opposing negative.

Oh when I originally picked this book I chose it because of my interest in sand dunes. What I find most ironic is that the author was influenced by the Florence Dunes; the same dunes I go ATV riding during the summer with my father. I have lived for several weeks in the dunes that the author was influenced by. I have been stuck alone with a broken-down ATV having to walk over a mile to get help and have experienced firsthand the brutality of the hot desert during the summer. Possibly a biased reason why I enjoyed the book as much as I did. Haha.

Blade Runner

An interesting concept for a movie of it's time. Although the director is Ridley Scott haha. The entire movie questions and keeps bringing forth questions about artificial intelligence and what conscious thought is. They are to bring these machines who turn bad offline but some of them even start to develop emotion. They are forced to evaluate many humans to find the replicants, this is how real the machines are made. This poses many moral questions on us today about making machines with artificial intelligence and just how dangerous of an act that would be. Artificial intelligence scares me on a deep level and this movie kept me in this creepy realm of dystopia where we lose sight of the 'worth' of machines as they integrate with it. What is truly scary is that machines could become so powerful, in intelligence mostly, that they could start to eliminate the human population without us even knowing. Just some things to think about ;)

Serenity

Serenity is an overall enjoyable movie. Although there are times when I found myself confused as if there are parts of the story missing that I am not aware of. It wasn't until a good friend of mine, who watches Firefly, informed me that Serenity was actually a movie adaption to fill in the gaps of Firefly did it all make sense. My personal experience contained a lot of ADD and I didn't really understand all too much what was happening other than them saving the girl. I do believe that I would be most interested in watching the Firefly series and coming back to Serenity at a later point and that everything would then come together.

The Color of Magic

Part one went up and down for me. It started out strong but had my intrest dip toward the ending. Several elements of their reality weren't defined, namely the 'summoned dragon', that raised many questions. The fact that they never even answered this question really bothered me but they ended up recovering for this by not being able to get anywhere with the dragon. The dragon merely provided a means of escape for them. The element of 'summoning' wasn't broken. The concept of the disk-world on top of a giant elephants and a turtle was ingenious. Me and my friend joked about how bored the elephants must be. Just a very humorous concept. Part two really started to answer the questions I had a problem with in part one. Why the Octovo was acting strange, what it did and why the turtle changed direction. This movie is very audience engaging and is definitely going in my movie collection because I most likely missed a lot. Oh but I could not get over thinking of "Samwise Gamgey" every time Twoflower spoke. Haha.

Anansi Boys

I must say that this book has some very odd names for the charactors. I am not sure why the author decided to call the main charactor 'Fat Charlie' or the incarnation of anansi 'spider' as if this wasn't cliche' enough. I got as far through the book as I could which is after Spider's visit to Fat Charlie and his disbeleife in the whole thing. The problems I had with the book are narrowed down to the writing style. I tend to get lost in books that neander from the stroyline for seemingly non-sensical thoughts or observations. It's not that I don't enjoy an good scene setup or anything but I have a problem with over visualization or overanalisis of Fat Charlie's thoughts. It's as if the author went too fast introducing who Fat Charlie is instead of letting the audience decide for themselves who this bloke is.

I felt the premise of a African Spider God to be off the wall. I am a little girl when it comes to spiders. I'll rangle snakes, wrestle bears and even ride a puma but if there is a spider on my desk I will freak out. So the premise of having a spider god and it's incarnations within humans just seemed not interesting to me. Although this factor is most likely my prejudice against spiders and this alone. All-in-all if the writing style was more engaging for me I would have been able to finish more of the book.

Being John Malkovich

Wow talk about a movie that makes you think. Going in, one of the first thoughts I had was "what would happen if John Malkovich went through his own portal?" and the movie answered just that. Of course the movie itself wasn't surrounding JM but rather the people involved and man's desire to live forever; to see how far mankind will go to be immortal and how far love really drives us. The move really drives the question "What is consciousness" and the questions around it. If we were to join others in living inside someone else and that person joins the next generation of people are we really living forever? Do we slowly lose conscious control over our 'puppet'? In the end JM didn't seem to understand anything about the process of 'living forever' leading the audience to believe that this was truly JM back in his old self again. If this were the case then the process of living forever is flawed and the only true reality is that you get to skip death.

The nature of the movie has a 'warped reality' from the get-go. Starting out with the weird speech impediments, inability to understand others and the 7 1/2 floor. The distorted reality really set up the movie for the odd nature of the movie, giving it a strong foundation and a believable story. There was absolutely no need or desire to figure out inner workings on the mechanics of anything, which makes for a rather well thought out and amusing movie.

Labyrinth 1986

This is a standard 80's movie. There is something about it that just emanates cheesiness. Although this may simply be my generation of CG and special effects that made me take a step back while watching this movie. The movie is about a girl, Sara, who out of anger wishes her brother to the goblin king. She thinks this is only a myth but soon finds it to be true when greeted by the goblin king. The entire story is about her journey to solve puzzles and outwit the obstacles and creatures along the way. I am a big fan of Mortal Combat and other great movies of the time period, with bad special effects and such, but the plot did not captivate me all that much so forgive me if my reflection on the movie is poor. The problem that I found with the movie was the fact that it had to be a "labyrinth" and had to be a puzzle to be solved to gain back her brother. As if the goblin kind would say "Oh you completed my puzzles. Have your brother back". There wasn't any kind of magical entrapment requiring the completion of the maze or any kind of strong plot-line like such.