#9 Dream

Sandra Bullock was born in Washington DC on July 26, 1966. She graduated from Arlington High School in 1982. (I was born in 1964 and graduated in 1983- this of course means, she is some type of genius!) Her mother was an internationally known opera singer, while her father was an equally famous vocal coach.

Rene Magritte was born on November 21, 1898 in Lessines Belgium. He was the oldest of three brothers, later declaring, "I detest my past, and anyone else's. " Not much is known about his childhood.

Bullock's first major motion picture role came in the movie Love Potion #9 (written, produced, and directed by Dale Launer). Bullock plays a nerdy scientist who studies the behavior patterns of monkeys. She later through a series of bizarre events, ends up with a vile full of love potion that makes her irresistible to men. By the end of the movie a balance is reached. Her nerdiness disappears as does the false beauty the potion creates, leaving a self blossomed beauty.

In 1925, Magritte painted what he considered his first "realized" picture, The Lost Jockey. In it, the jockey is situated in a forest of trees whose trunks resemble giant balusters, similar to those used to support a stair rail or a parapet coping. Or, equally, they could be said to resemble turned wooden table legs or magnified chess pieces.

Bullock's next movie, Thing Called Love, costarred River Phenix, and Bullock's close friend, Samantha Mathis. Here, we get to hear her musical debut as she plays an aspiring country singer who auditions material down in a Nashville bar/restaurant. Like most of her roles, Bullock is portrayed as an uncommon beauty, one more quirky than conventional.

"In short," Magritte once said, "When I paint, and as far as possible when I am not painting, I try to remain outside the conventions. But there is no doubt that, although my pictures are conventional in their appearance, they in fact resemble pictures without, I believe, corresponding to what the aesthetic treaties designate as such."

Bullock's big break came when she landed the female lead in Sylvester Stallone's futuristic thriller, Demolition Man. Instead of playing a drop dead knock 'em out babe, Bullock created an aggressive, positively curious woman of the future, giving us all hope that in the future all things will be as beautiful.

"I don't believe that man decides anything, " Magritte said. "The future or the present of humanity? A world made of chance? I don't know. I detest that kind of talk, it is meaningless. I think that we are responsible for the Universe, but that does not mean that we decide anything."

Bullock truly hit the big time last summer, with the runaway hit, Speed. Once again rather than play the expected damsel in distress to Keanu Reeves' strong silent type, Bullock created a charismatic, spunky, out of the norm, caught in the fire, but refuse to be a victim, woman.

Magritte died on August 15, 1967. His life had been a solitary posture of immense effort: to overthrow our sense of the familiar, to sabotage our habits, to put the real world on trial. "My painting implies no supremacy of the invisible over the visible. The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."

Bullock has a couple of movies due out over the next year. In While You Were Sleeping, she plays a lonely subway token collector, who worships a man from afar, witnesses an attempt on his life and nurtures him back to well being. In The Net she plays a computer systems analyst who plummets head first into danger after tapping into an off limits database. Also in the works is a sequel to Speed which both Bullock and Reeves have agreed in concept to do.