So, I read the book Under the Dome from Stephen King. Stephen King is a well known novelist and he has always been my favorite author thanks to his unique way of capturing the moment, and this is how I knew I could finish this 1074 page monster in time. Under the Dome was published in 2009, so it’s a relatively new book from Mr. King.
The book tells a story of a small town, Chester’s Mill, getting isolated from the rest of the world by an invisible dome. Nothing seems to be able to destroy the dome, not missiles nor speeding trucks. The residents of Chester’s Mill are stuck inside with some tourists, trying to deal with having no electricity and no way of getting more food supplies. Town’s Second Selectman (Jim Rennie) is spreading chaos by doing pretty much everything a responsible human being wouldn’t do from murdering innocent people to manufacturing drugs. These irresponsible actions cause conflicts between Rennie and the protagonist (Dale Barbara) to the point where Barbara ends up getting himself on Rennie’s hit list.
Barbara has his own storyline going along the main plot. This includes a somewhat romantic relationship with the town reporter Julia Shumway. I enjoy a good love story as much as a cockroach enjoys getting stepped on, but I’m not sure how to feel about this one. I’m not even sure if we’re talking about love here. The conflicts between Rennie and Barbara however were excellent, I could almost feel how Rennie’s slight discomfort with Barbara turned into pure hatred.
The language of the book is actually one of the main reasons I enjoyed reading it so much, it was filled with inspirational little sentences such as “Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.” and “If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.”, such beautiful words, I just felt like writing them down somewhere. The narrator was omniscient, occasionally letting us know who’d die in the next 30 minutes, it was written well so I enjoyed it a lot.
I really liked this book, the character development was believable and nice, the relationships between the characters were really human like. The ending however left me unimpressed, it felt like King would have just thought to himself ”Well, I’m done. I don’t feel like writing this anymore… I’ll make it end with a huge boom and aliens”. I also really enjoyed reading a book in English, been a while since I last did that, it was a lot easier than I remembered. The book was huge and hard to carry with me, but it was definitely worth it, I’d recommend it to anyone who appreciates a good storyline more than a satisfying ending.
Author Archives: giggle
Under the Dome
Meet Joe Black
Meet Joe Black tells the story of death, the actual life ending death, falling in love with a mortal woman. Death (played by Brad Pitt) pretends to be an average Joe, more precisely Joe Black. Death wants to explore the human world before taking the life of a millionaire named Bill Parrish (played by Anthony Hopkins). However everything starts to get complicated when Black falls in love with the millionaires daughter, Susan (Claire Forlani).
The story was fluent and I wasn’t left confused at any point of the movie. It had a clear plot and it knew how to follow it without neither being boring nor having too much stuff going on all the time. Character development was made really well too, you could see Black slowly starting to understand things about the human world and old Parrish coming to terms with his death.
This of course is just my personal opinion but I absolutely love the casting of this movie. I had my doubts when I noticed Pitt playing death, as it might be a tricky character to get into, however he pulled it off wonderfully making death seem just like an innocent and curious human like creature. His co-star, Forlani, I had never seen before, that might make me uncultured or just plain ignorant, but I’ll have to accept my faith. Forlani however did her job really well and I’ll be definitely watching more movies from her. Hopkins was just as great as he always is, really great. Just seeing his name appear on the screen got my hopes up and I didn’t get disappointed. The side roles were cast well too, I can’t remember even once having to think ”They aren’t quite fit for the role”.
I consider every movie that lasts over three hours a long movie, this was one of them. However they might have had to cut important parts out in the attempt to make it shorter, and I appreciate how they didn’t do that. I don’t know much about directing a movie, so I don’t really know what to say about that. Again, that might make me even more uncultured and ignorant, but I cannot judge something I don’t know anything about. The same goes for many aspects of the movie.
Even though I might not be able to provide a perfectly insightful review on the directing, dressing, producing or things like that, I can recommend it to anyone who likes romantic movies. However if you want to see death as a hardcore emotionless killer, this is not the movie for you.
Filed under Films / theatre