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*****Yes, yes there will be spoilers, but only to the beginning of Lamia's story, SVP **********
I'm reading Hyperion for the first time, and in reading Weintraub's story, I was struck by the similarity to the family dilemma in 50 First Dates. Does anyone know of a connection between the two? The heartbreak described by Eddings I saw on the face of Drew Barrymore's father in the movie.
Which, by the way, was a fantastic movie with curious interpolations from a gross-out movie that was filmed on the next set over.
[ January 24, 2005, 05:20 PM: Message edited by: Lady Jane ]
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That is the weirdest thing! I said the EXACT same thing when I saw that movie on HBO a few weeks ago. I read Hyperion late last year and loved it. I'm now moving on to Endymion.
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David Eddings wrote Hyperion, and one man's story is about his daugter, and she (I did warn of spoilers) is aging backwards. Every day, she wakes up one day younger and with memories she would have of only that day. In other words, she's the same, but everything's changed, and the father starts to...stop disillusioning her every day and let her think that. Since it's told from the father's perspective, it reminded me of Drew Barrymore's father and his attempt to protect every day from that heartbreak.
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I enjoyed both the book and the movie, but I didn't think about any connection until you mentioned it. I don't think there's any intentional association between the two. Weintraub's story was my favorite in Hyperion, though.
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I made the connection too, and when I read Hyperion, I had trouble with that story. It was engaging, it drew me in, but it also distressed me to no end.
I couldn't get myself out of the emotional pain Weintraub and it made reading his story uncomfortable. In other words, Simmons did such a good job I wasn't sure I even wanted to read any more because it was so painful!
Like in one of his writing books, Card talks about how you can go too far and make the reader want to turn away. Weintraub's story did that for me.
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Simmons series is fantastic! Loved every bit of it.
Shrike!
I think your analysis of 50 First Dates is spot on. It was a fantastic and heart-warming, even important, romantic comedy with spurious stupidity thrown in for no good reason. The jokes at the expense of the assistant at the aquarium were, to me, the worst of it. Perhaps because the rest of the movie was so good, those sophmoric interludes just seemed worse, but I count those scenes as among the worst I've ever seen in any movie, at any time.
Ditto the character of the steroid-abusing brother.
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I love Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion - but the synopsis I read of Endymion didn't intrigue me - the whole Messiah-child bit looked icky. Does Simmons end the series there? Or does he leave the ending open for even more?
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OK, I was confused about David Eddings writing Hyperion.
Shrike! Wow, I read it pretty long ago, but I remember the shrike. As a matter of fact, the first Star trek The Next Gen episode i saw, which hooked me on the show, had a shrike-like monster. it was the episode where Picard goes down and talks in "myth" with another commander, and they fight this shrike-thing together. It was my first, and remains my favorite, episode. Any show that mentions Gilgamesh and Enkidu is a show of mine.
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Was 50 first dates a profound film ruined by silliness or a silly film ruined by profundity? It's hard to tell sometimes, like with HULK.
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I've read and enjoyed Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, and was planning to read Endymion after I finish re-reading Shadow Puppets. I hear it's not as good as the first two books though. What do those who have read it think?
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Endymion is also an excellent book, but I think the messiah's message is going to be somewhat hard to swallow for some people.
Also, I think that some people are going to want to read it as having an anti-religious slant when it emphatically does not.
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Thanks for the input. Neither of those issues should be a problem for me. I like Frank Herbert's Dune novels, so I'm used to the whole cryptic messiah thing. And I usually give the author the benefit of the doubt and don't seek for ulterior motives in the work.
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Simmons is one of those SF authors that I think is legitimately brilliant, although there's something in the story that throws me off a bit. I can't quite put my finger on it, although I suspect that it relates to the fact that the story weaves together so many disparate elements.
Still, he has some entracing ideas. The labrinthine worlds, the time tombs, the cruciform people . . . all that, and poetry.
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Wow, didn't know so many of you guys had read Hyperion. When there was a Hyperion thread, it was always just me, Anne Kate, and Perelandra. Of course, I was the reason that Valentine read it...
Now, go read Endymion! I seperate the series into two seperate parts. The first being the Hyperion-Fall of Hyperion part, and the next being the Endymion-Rise of Endymion part. I think the seperate part is just as good as the first one.
Its very different though. Instead of 8-10 central characters, theres just three. This trade-off lets you get to know those three characters a lot better. The Shrike is very important again, but there's a twist this time. I don't want to ruin too much, but you'll see most of the characters from Hyperion make an appearance, in one form or another.
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Whoa, more references to my old name. Yeah, I'll just say that anything Dan Simmons writes is genius, not just Hyperion (though it's very good).
I've not seen 50 First Dates, but if I were to draw a comparison to any other book/movie/whatever, it would be Chaucer's Cantebury Tales.
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