Slow week on the blog, so I thought I'd just run down a few more things I've been spending my entertainment dollars on lately. Last weekend, in part for a birthday present for my brother, we went and saw Star Wars in Concert. We had great seats, eye level with the orchestra. It was a fun experience, although I often had to remind myself I was listening to a live orchestra and not just watching a hugely over priced trailer for Star Wars. I think the only thing that would have made the experience better for me was to actually listen to it in a normal orchestra house type place that didn't have to enhance the sound with microphones and speakers.
Movie wise, I actually caught two movies this week! That's totally not normal for me. First up, I saw Predators, which originally I had no plans to see. But it was getting good reviews and I got an invite out to see it, so I thought what the heck? I wasn't that impressed. It was mostly meh, with nothing overly cool. *SPOILER ALERT* The samurai fight scene was kinda lame, and the ending with the guy covered in mud just like Arnold was too much for me. I don't care how buff he was, he looked like a stupid scrawny version of Arnold. And then when he starts yelling "Kill me, I'm here, kill me" just like Arnold, I sorta ignored the rest of the movie. *END SPOILER*
To clean out the memory of that movie, Andrea and I saw Inception today, and that movie was down right awesome (and not just because I have a thing for Ellen Page). It was 2.5 hours of enjoyment, leading up to an ending that sorta left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because it was bad, but because it required me to leave the theater having to decide for myself how it ended. Obviously that is the whole damn point of the movie, so that's why it was so awesome from beginning to end.
The other reason I liked the movie so much, is because I have personally experienced some of the aspects of dreaming they explore in the movie. On more than one occasion, I have "woke up" from a dream, only to realize I'm still dreaming. I also have my own set of "reality tests" that I use when dreaming to become Lucid. Sadly, some aspects they explored in the movie are completely contradictory to known facts about dreaming and even some scientifically proven aspects of dreaming. Examples: in dreaming, text or words on paper are rarely meaningful or constant, often containing strange letters and characters. Also, mirrors often do not work or project a distorted or incorrect reflection. This all has to do with the part of the brain that actually does the dreaming.
The other aspect of dreaming that was way off from real life studies, is the concept of the passage of time in dreams. The movie tried to sell us that dreaming takes place "faster" then real world, the deeper you go into the sub conscious, to the point where if you go deep enough, you can dream out years of time in a matter of a few "real" hours. Sadly, this is all false, as time has been proven to move at pretty much the same rate as real life in dreams, and that some aspects of doing things in dreams actually takes LONGER in the dream, then in real life. This study here basically explains it all, which is information I already knew going into this movie.
Still, just the raw fact that I love the various aspects of dreaming and my own personal experiences with dreaming so much, this movie was a huge hit for me, and I really enjoyed it.
1 comment:
Oh, Shawn, I really hope you weren't sitting there thinking about dream studies whilst you were watching the movie, because then you probably missed out on some of the awesome. Christopher Nolan is a genius.
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