Celestial:
If you haven't really read him much, try C.S.Lewis....
...his blending of fantasy,sci-fi, spirituality together, can be found in his trilogy, Out of The Silent Planet, Perelandra, and The Hideous Strength.
Alas, he is one of the very few writers of such material, who is considered a Christian writer, and has his stories accepted as Christian literature.

(click on, or type into finder): http://www.beliefnet.com/story/74/story_7428_1.html

[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 05-20-2003).]

Nard,
You know from my previous rave how much I dig the Cohens. Quentin Tarantino is not everyone's style. Although I sometimes like what he does and watch his movies once in a while, he's not my favorite. He does, however, have a particularly uniquely nasty sense of humor which is all his own. I'd recommend sitting through all of Pulp Fiction, if you're going to sit through any- there are some interesting non-sequential plot devices, which only come together in the last scene.
My friends and I had a discussion once that boiled down to the following: almost everyone I hang out with, when we were little kids, wanted to be either A)a Jedi, B)James Bond, or C)Indiana Jones. I was an Indiana Jones kid.
Contact really didn't do anything for me. The story somehow felt... interjected... like a Carl Sagan speech with a story built around it, rather than the other way around.

minn,
2001 at the age of 10? Wow. I imagine a wierd blend of being scared silly, being bored out of your skull, and having your mind prematurely blown.

I fail to see how Star Wars portrays any hostile takeover by the far right. I'm trying Ralph, seriously, I am, but that idea doesn't even register.

Dan

Oh, yeah. This too.
I read Out of the Silent Planet, but never read the other two books in that series. I read the entire Narnia series when I was a kid, though. C.S.Lewis and T.S.Eliot always held special interest for me because they are two writers that completely lost their faith and then somehow rebuilt it from scratch. That, to me, is profoundly admirable.

DanB:

You got me thinking of...
...years ago, 3 great writers knew each other. They were, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville.
Recently, the greats that knew each other were, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, and Charles Williams. (see: http://www.geocities.com/charles_wms_soc/
Well, let's see now...today we have...
Ray Bradbury, and............?

What would the other 2 be?
Ray and William F.Nolan have known each other...!
Rod Serling and Ray have known each other, but wasn't it....short lived?

The question is, who has Ray "hung-out with" most of his writer's life, that was great and can be compared to the other two literary trios listed above?



[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 05-21-2003).]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DanB:
minn,
2001 at the age of 10? Wow. I imagine a wierd blend of being scared silly, being bored out of your skull, and having your mind prematurely blown.

DanB,

Mostly it was wonderment, having never seen special effects of such scale. The other feeling was very cerebral, trying to fathom and keep up with the storyline/plot. I grew up a huge fan of the space program, having watched all the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launches prior to having seen "2001". My conception of space travel to that point, was one of the "All American Boys" flying these "neat" rockets around the Earth. In watching "2001", I was transfixed by the sleek spacecraft (Pan Am spaceliner, the earth orbiting space station, the moon base lander, and the Jupiter spacecraft). I was puzzled by the meaning of the monoliths. I was uneasy over the cold malevolence of Hal. And puzzled/amazed/transfixed over Dave's dazzling journey into the monolith and subsequent rebirth as the "Star Child" at the end. I honestly don't think I left my seat the whole time. And all of this took place at a non-descript, old, small town theater where, up to this point, I had seen movies like "Robinson Cruesoe on Mars", "Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang", "A Crack in the Earth","Journey to the Beginning of Time", tons of Disney movies, and so on. It was like having a switch turned on and was one of those life moments that changes you "just a little" (along the lines of reading the Martian Chronicles for the first time in 8th grade).

I don't think I was scared, freaked out, or mind blown, but I did walk out of there thinking "Wow, I've never seen anything like that before." It's one of those times I can call up in my memory 34 years later and it's still crystal clear. The weird thing is that, when I think of it, I see myself in the theater and feel kind of like Dave in the scenes where he sees himself in subsequent life stages.

This post...since a few odd topics have been here. First time tried getting into my website from a LIbrary, and can't seem to access much of it.. Hmm. This calls for a drastic change of some things that I am doing.Since I am adding a couple Bradbury pictures first of June, I'll try to remedy the problem.

minn,

that's... really, really great.
I love hearing people's stories about the movie or the book that had this kind of huge impact. There are a lot of such stories on this site, and I love reading every one of them...
You made me wish that I had seen 2001 when I was ten, instead of... i think... fourteen.
And, you made me want to watch it tonight, so I think that trip to the good old Potsdam Public Library is in order.

So long,
Dan