Avatar, aka Flight of the Blue People

         First of all, the story isn't greatest thing in this movie. It's basically Pocahontas, but with blue aliens. Not to say that I didn't like it or anything, it's just a really simple story where girl falls for explorer, they have to make peace between both of their people. The effects were where it was super boss, I'd never seem motion capture like that before. It just looked so damn real!

I think Neytiri was basically our usual cyberpunk heroine. She's the princess, she's badass, and can fight well as any man. Sully is a good character to follow because he is new to everything going on. He's as new to everything as we are. So because he's outside of the system he's able to make his own decisions and he can make his own path throughout the course of the story. I think his constant recordings of what was going on gave it a sort of documentary sort of feel which I think was a good way of tying what they were doing in the movie to what modern scientists do today. I think Sully's legs were the perfect bargaining chip when it came to which side he was going to be on. Who wouldn't want legs so they can walk again? It's one thing when you're doing something for money or power, but this is something more than that. It's how he physically operates and moves. Sully has to make a choice, stay with the girl/people he loves or sell them out and get his legs.

          I really loved the world that James Cameron where everything was linked together, except I think the part with the hair braids was really overdone. I've seen some many odd spin off os Avatar people syncing with all kinds of weird things. 

       But the world itself was really believable. I mean the culture behind the story was really what moved the story along, without the system of unity throughout the planet via their life force, all would be lost. This always reminded me of the little crystals the people had in Atlantis as well. Without this life force, the people and the world dies. There was a lot of teamwork as well. Sully worked with the scientists to retaliate against the Colonel's force. The people of Pandora team up with their tribes as well as the creatures of Pandora itself.    

Blade Runner Movie Review

 I think the best thing going for this movie is the feeling you get from it. It looks the part, which is probably why this is my favorite movie ever. It's got the dystopia going on, as well as a very dark noir kind of tone to it. We've got flying cars and advertisements everywhere. In this future, we've done it. We can make robots as intelligent as humans, but her inlays the problem. Robots on the lose.

      Deckard is an interesting guy to be following. We're never told if he's a human. I know it was left open for us to decide but I mean it does seem plausible. He has photos just like the replicants. Deckard doesn't have a family or anything alluded to. There's also the hinted illusion with the unicorn which suggests Deckard might be like Rachel, a special replicant. Unicorns are the purest things, they are all good and no evil. Deckard seems to be a lone wolf actually. It never occurred to me when I was younger that he was a replicant too. But now, I think it's possible. Deckard is a reflection of his surroundings. He's very dark, closed off. He drinks heavily and he seems very negative and basically just gets pushed into the job to begin with. He's the reluctant hero. But you love him all the same because he's carrying out his job, he's like a cowboy sheriff or a bounty hunter, he's rounding up the hoodlums. I always thought it was kind of weird the way the ending was so blatantly different from the tone of the movie. Rachel and Deckard are driving away to some grassy place that almost looked unreal without the dark aspect from the rest of the movie.

      Tyrell has become a god. He's created these people and towers over them in his huge pyramid-like tower. Tyrell can make these people who think of themselves of humans. He thinks of them like his chess game, like pawns. Roy wants the unattainable, immortality. When this is denied, Roy strives against his maker and kills him, stabbing his all seeing eyes. The main question raised in this movie is “Do replicants have souls?” That rooftop scene where Roy saves Deckard gets me every time. The white dove shows him dying in peace, flying to some sort of heaven. An

The Man Who Fell to Earth. With the Fabulous David Bowie

         This movie is one of those cautionary tales. Newton starts out as a pure character. And he has a plan. He is going to use the technology he's learned on his planet to finish build what he needs here on Earth. He's a good guy trying to get water back to his home planet so people don't die. Along the way, time as well as his friends drain and poison him. His sexual driven relationship with Mary Lou, Bryce, as well as the lies around him corrupts him. There's a lot of pointed problems revolving around the times as well: excess, fear of television, alcoholism, and the government. He ends up a disillusioned wreck, still depressed and drunk.

       Mary Lou's character really drove me insane. I really hated her because she just seemed so vapid. She's whiny and needy, the whole time she's all over Newton and he never seems to notice her for what she truly is. I think we were supposed to feel sorry for her but I'm much more liable to punch her in the face. All she does is feed off of Newton like the white trash she is. And not to mention she's willing to except anything even if it does involve her peeing on the floor. I kept waiting for her to leave but she kept coming back like clockwork. She, like Newton, did not end up that well in the end. It was literally the downfall of everything.

        I do think this movie is kind of over the top. For one, it's really drawn out. I remember, when I watched it, the movie seemed really long, almost never ending. I mean, it was a good reason to watch David Bowie for two hours. But it seemed like the director didn't want to edit anything out, so we were stuck watching Newton be stuck in that house for ages. We're constantly shown lots of wild sex scenes. There was lots of testing by the government that leaves his eyes stuck as human eyes. After seeing this movie it's like you've seen everything: wild sex, woman peeing on the floor, and people torturing David Bowie. It's like a merciless tragedy, watching this honest guy bite the big one. I think it's very much a good description of the 70's rockstar image, and who better play the part than David Bowie himself.  

The Haunted Vagina

        This book was a really interesting change of pace. The story itself was kind of the most ridiculous combination of things ever imaginable. You'd have to be drunk and high and hallucinating to think of the plot: a man taking a literal journey into a woman's vagina. And I just had to read it because I'd never read anything like that before, it sounded like fun. I tend to write highly imaginative stories, not usually about such a subject matter, so this was right up my alley.

       I didn't really take this book that seriously. It seems more to be something written for fun than as something to be taken literally. The book itself was driven mostly by lust and sex, so I think it was more of a physical drive that led the plot rather than any kind of psychological or deep messages about humankind. Well, I mean some people are just driven by sex. It was more of the obsessive love. I sort of felt like Steve would fall in love with anything cute or anything that was of the opposite sex if he was left around them too long. The character development on Stacey and Steve was well done. You only have about 100 pages in this book, but I felt like I really knew them. Mellick used really precise details to describe them like the way Stacey ate her food and “calls water pouring from faucets waterfalls”. You could tell their relationship was a bit lopsided, Steve would do anything for her. I mean this guy went into this woman's vagina even after a skeleton came out of it, that is dedication, man. Dedication. I felt like Stacey was just using him for sex and to be her man pillow.

        I think it could be a little better if Mellick gave it a few more pages, it sort of ended really quickly. After Stacey got pregnant there were about five pages that basically summed up that Steve fell in love with Fig and got her pregnant and they lived happily ever after. I thought it was a little quick considering the bulk of the story was situated in the real world surrounding Stacey and Steve's relationship. And when that skeleton came out of Steve's back, I was freaking out. If my skeleton came out of my body, I would've flipped out. I felt like he didn't really have a reaction other then, well there goes my skeleton. He seemed to be quite zen with having to stay there forever and never once had a huge emotional reaction other than figuring he was stuck there.

        It wouldn't have hurt to put some more detail into the backstory of Stacey's vagina world. I know Steve hinted that it was possibly part of some genetic disease or some sort of defect that was handed down, but I kind of wished we found out some sort of nailed down truth about it since that was kind of what the whole story was pivoting on. We were left guessing what the real reason was.

Oryx and Crake, No Zombies.

        First of all, I seriously thought this book was about a zombie apocalypse when I first started reading it. I kept waiting for those zombies and I was kind of glad the book didn't involve zombies at all, it was a good change of pace from a lot of movies I've seen lately. I wish they delved into Crake's reason for deciding to wipe of almost all of mankind. I feel like it was really slow moving up till then and suddenly there was this red death, Jimmy was locked in with the Crakes, Crake went shot Oryx, Oryx was dead, and then Jimmy shot Crake. It was a lot to take in after a really building plot. Without delving into Jimmy's past we wouldn't really have much of a story, we would've just had man going on a journey to get food so I liked the way it was laid out with the past interwoven throughout it.

        The relationship between Crake and Jimmy was really deep if you looked at it. It was sort of the joining of two paths: the right and left side of the brain. You have Crake, an analytical calculating genius who is rational and logical. Jimmy on the other hand, is everything he lacks, he's driven by his emotions, lust, as well as what he believes is right. I was surprised they hit it off so well. They almost matched each other. And since they sort of depended on their dual friendship, it was basically the building blocks of everything that followed.

        Jimmy's character really reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Jimmy's constantly at war with himself. He's over the top, he wants to go back to the way things were. He is a prisoner of his past and he's disillusioned. Jimmy is constantly thinking back on what he's done, trying to figure out what went wrong and if he could've fixed it. He's longing for the parental love he never had. I mean his mother was a depressed mess and his father was never really the emotional one. Crake's family life too, is void of love. Throughout this book, Jimmy's trying to find love and he goes through women like toothpicks because he's broken. He doesn't know how to really love some one. Jimmy's basically left wandering around with nothing left in his life. His girl is dead and he's killed his best friend. The human race is almost wiped out and he's stuck dealing with getting food and wild pigoons. His pointless existence is a reflection of man's pointless existence. He's stuck taking care of the Crake people who have basically kind of followed his lead like a God or Moses. And it's up to him to basically make up all this history and information for them.

        The ending really caught my attention as well. He's taken care of the Crakes because of what Oryx and Crake asked of him, even if he was unsure of their motives at the time. So what now? I kind of get the feeling it doesn't make sense for him to go back to the other humans, he's become a sort of loner but he was looking for others in the beginning. But if he does go back, what happens to the Crakes? Can they fend for themselves? And besides, it seems like the people that he runs into at the camp are like a reflection of himself. There's two men and one woman, like there was Jimmy and Crake—and later Oryx. It's kind of like Jimmy's become the man of two worlds and he has to decide where to go from there. Is he going to go back even though his best friend betrayed him and he betrayed his best friend? Is all man flawed?

Lilith and Her Tentacle Beard Friends

         For me, this Lilith's Brood was very alien. The opening confused the hell out of me at first. I wasn't sure of anything and for a minute I felt like I was stuck in a dryer on spin cycle. I mean yes, it took place in a future where aliens exist and want us to have their children, but it just seemed very sort of detached from what I'd view aliens as normally, or what I'm used to. It was very clean, too. There wasn't really a lot of details spared about the surroundings except an occasional tree, but the place seemed really sort of creepy hospital white to me. I'm not gonna lie, beard tentacles would probably cause me to go screaming into the night.  Unless they were like Davy Jones' beard from Pirates of the Caribbean. Those are allowed.

          It was hard for me to like the Oankali as far as their customs go. You've got a wife with sexual and a regular wife. And it seemed to me that everyone hated the sexual wife. I wasn't able to understand the Oankali they were as far removed from humans as sea monkeys or something. It was just hard to picture. I guess it was just a matter of putting myself in Lilith's shoes. It's hard to imagine suddenly waking up in a future where everything is gone that you know.

        Usually, in science fiction the aliens are either bad or good guys. If they're bad guys well we better do something because they're organized and we need to figure out how to fight back. But in this case, the aliens were sort of higher beings per-say. I mean, they can heal each other and they seem to be peaceful. And the chemical powers weren't too shabby. Nikanj's weird transformation really made me laugh, though. I kept thinking of the Star Trek episode where Spock has basically his Vulcan period and suddenly almost marries this lady. That was just really ridiculous. I see no point in that at all. It was supposed to make Lilith important and then it didn't.

        I only got half way or so in this book because I really wasn't into it. It seemed to me Lilith gave in a bit too easy to succumbing to doing the Oankali's bidding. I know she was considering an uprising possibility in the future but it just seemed too easy. Let's do exactly what the aliens what to do that want to kidnap our children and do experiments on them. That's a great idea.

        Another thing which kind of got to me was the pacing. I mean, it starts off slow she's stuck in a box and I really wanted her to get the hell out and when she did I was kind of disappointed.  It was more about here fitting in and getting used to it than freaking out because of the new alien ship.  I think I was expecting crazy Blade Runner cities and flying cars and the Star Wars bar scene and I got a bunch of trees and a moving platform. Kind of a bummer. If aliens like this come to earth I'm not going to be impressed. Especially if they stick me in one of those creepy aloe plants.   

Mona Lisa Overdrive

         This book kind of really got me hooked on sci fi. I was really interested in the idea of sort of the integration of man and computers and I am an avid Matrix/Blade Runner fan. I love the dark noir sort of setting of the future, it just seems so mysterious and appealing to me. It was a little hard reading this book and not the two other books before, but for the most part it was pretty easy once I got ahold of the backstory. I think the pacing was a little off though, we kept cutting back to Kumiko who did nothing of interest for the longest time. Half the time I just wanted to skip her chapters and go onto Angie's or Mona's. I think the other characters overshadowed her a little too much. I mean a prostitute on doing crystal methe of the future, a Korsakov-induced Slick Henry, and a Loa-ridden pop star against a boring girl with Yazuka father. I really liked what Gibson did as far as voices, almost immediately I could tell which character I was following throughout these switches because they were so distinct.

         The loa themselves greatly added to the story. This is a very futuristic story, we have all kinds of cybertronics going on: headsets, drugs, and all kinds of double dealing. And all of a sudden we add in something very primitive in comparison, the loa. It kind of ties all this new futurism to something very old school. And loa themselves are almost bordering the dark arts. This is voodoo culture we are talking about. I think the loa were a perfect way of sort of voicing the integration of man with the matrix. They are neither man nor machine, I mean they are the closest anyone gets to religion. The people mentioned talking about “Rapture” don't even get close to this.

This book was very heavy in terms of plot building. It seemed to take a long time for the events to unfold, but I did like how they all tied together. What did confuse me time to time was when characters met one another from other chapters and from the scarce description of what they looked like I really wasn't sure who was who. Also, it seemed like all the characters were escaping from something. Mona was doing all kinds of crystals, Angie wanted to find Bobby and leave her glamorous life, Sally wanted to stop being pressured, and Kumiko wanted to find out what the hell was going on. I'd have to say Mona's character stood out the most to me. Compared to the rest of the characters who seemed to move sort of in a linear movement, she was all over the place doing drugs and getting surgery. I agree with what Angie commented about her, Mona was very akin to a child, even more so than Kumiko. She has blinders on and only sees Angie's glamorous life and nothing else, she has total nostalgia about her best friend who is probably dead, and she's just sort of being pushed through life. And plus, the chapter on her doing drugs during the highly intensive battle was a very nice change of pace.