The end of the weekend...

Getting up yesterday morning, I reviewed the 40% of the translation that I'd done up to then and decided - subconsciously, I suppose - that I could spend the day vegetating and finish it off today.

I did exactly that.

I'd been finding ways, during the past week or so, of taking "time off," which in my case consists of lolling around, reading books and watching videos. I'd found a small cache of paperbacks in the house and read Keith Laumer's Galactic Odyssey and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker Man in small chunks here and there. Yesterday, I finished the Saberhagen book in an hour-long session.

I also polished off a book titled Shooting Script, by Gavin Lyall. It's not a particularly noteworthy book, but I did buy it at the Copenhagen airport in 1976 on my way to Moscow to get married. It's funny, but generally, whenever I reread paperback mysteries that I'd first read long ago, somewhere along the line something will "click" and I'll remember most, if not all, of the plot. Not so with this story, which isn't bad, but is not exactly Mickey Spillane, either.

I watched three episodes of the original The Avengers series, and was struck by the inventive writing, the el cheapo sets, and the performances of Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, and Linda Thorson. Seen from a perspective of nearly 40 years later, some of the goings-on seem awfully corny, but at the time the show was considered "cool" and cutting edge (the same can be said, approximately, for Patrick McGoohan's post-Secret Agent series, The Prisoner, famous for lines such as "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own!").

Then I watched Hannibal once more, after an interval of just over a year.

I liked it a lot more this time around, but not having the book fresh in my mind may have had a hand in that change of heart. I noticed more things, too, especially the little plugs for various brands, such as the NetZero home page on Barney's computer, the Gucci shoes in the photo booth, and a number of other brand names that mean little or nothing to me, such as of the cookware that Lecter puts to such gruesome use at the climax of the film.

While I still think Jodie Foster was an excellent Clarice Starling, I cannot fault Julianne Moore's performance; if anything, having to follow Foster was a heck of an obstacle to overcome. If there is to be a third (fourth, actually) movie touching upon the life and times of Hannibal Lecter, she would make a fine Starling.

By the way, this time through, I noticed that Ray Liotta, playing the character of Paul Krendler, really does an excellent job of depicting a scummy Beltway bureaucrat who's out to get Starling, but is not averse to "getting some" from his seemingly powerless victim. In the end, it's hard to feel sorry for the guy.

* * *The first pass through the translation is done. I need to review the text and make sure all the formatting issues are taken care of, but I estimate that will not take more than an hour or so.... I may take care of it before I go to bed tonight, or I may do it first thing tomorrow morning. Then I have to make sure I take care of a bunch of eBay-related stuff... we apparently "won" a fairly large item that's going to be a pip to ship.

Afterward, I may go up to the Katy area and visit my "other" Houston client, the one that owes me a bunch of money (I think). I say "I think" because, unfortunately, despite the fact that I have received checks in my absence, nobody seems willing to tell me for how much or from whom. Thus, behaving as an aggrieved creditor will not seem very credible, since normally a creditor is supposed to be able to pinpoint things such as amounts owed and dates. If I go, it will be merely to wave the flag.

Talking about waving the flag, I have a lunch "date" on Tuesday with a couple of managers from my NASA client. Hopefully, nothing will crop up to prevent us from breaking bread together. One of the managers has already indicated that my next work opportunity down here will likely occur near the end of April. Still, it promises to be a pleasant lunch.

Cheers...

Hannibal redux...

I just went back to reread my first impression of Hannibal, which I deliberately did not read prior to jotting down my impressions of a second viewing, one year later.

Wow. What a difference a year makes, eh?

To be sure, the book is tons better than the movie, but I'm getting tired of saying that, about any movie. In the end, the book and the movie are two different entities that answer to separate criteria. I'm coming to the realization that bitching about the gap between the big screen and the small page doesn't change the basic premise that the Gap is There, and Will Remain.

In my memory, only one movie I've seen ever appeared to follow the print version of the story, and that was Inherit the Wind starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. I suppose it's not hard to imagine a play transferring directly to a film format, but still...

I guess I still would go along with my assessment that the climax of the film would leave some viewers confused, especially those who hadn't seen (or read) Silence of the Lambs. Sure, there'd been hints dropped along the way in this story that there was "something" between Lecter and Starling, but unless you'd seen that "something" in Silence, you pretty much had only the word of people in the plot as to what it might be. Then again, that might explain the slinky dress Starling wears at the end of the film: a way of showing the really clueless rubes in the audience that there's some kind of love interest brewing.

Those in the audience who had read and seen Silence might have wished, as I did, for a different direction for the development of the climax, but as the man says: "You can't always get what you want."

Time to get to sleep. Obviously, I did nothing to finalize the translation since my last post; I'll have to get to it tomorrow.

Cheers...