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A quiet day...
Feb. 4th, 2003 09:20 pmNothing to do but rest, so I did.
I watched the latest Netflix arrival, a flick shot in 1963 starring Mickey Spillane as Mike Hammer in something called The Girl Hunters, and I'm glad I did.
For one thing, it's helped me forget the face of Stacy Keach in the role (not that I have anything against Keach, but he just wasn't Hammer, in my mind). For another, despite the wooden acting at times, it was interesting to see what the author of a popular detective hero sees in the character when playing that character. Of course, Spillane was also instrumental in writing the screenplay, so one could expect it to hew pretty closely to the original story.
The only weakness I ever found in the early Spillane work was his tendency to give Hammer a weak spot in terms of his eye for the ladies, who were thus in an excellent position to simply listen to his plans and thwart them (as it was the ladies who were the "bad guys"), at least until the last few pages. The plot twist worked in I, the Jury, but got a little old after a while. It got to the point where, as you read a Spillane thriller, you'd start figuring that any beautiful "dame" who (a) turned up as a a major character, and (b) was not Velda, was going to be the villain.
Nonetheless, Spillane wrote a bunch of detective novels that sold enough copies to make their author rich. Ayn Rand singled Spillane out as a writer in what she called the Romantic tradition, an assessment with which I agree, by the way (assuming I understand what she wrote in her Romantic Manifesto).
* * * The rest of the day was spent shuffling paper and resting. The highlight was another call from another client asking me about "that job" that a bunch of people are apparently going to bid on, and which is going to try to require a bunch of experienced translators to kiss off their existing client base and relocate somewhere, but just for a year, you understand... just until all the documents are translated.
Ye gods.
Well, one thing is for sure: I'm not drastically disrupting my life again for a one-year contract.
OTOH, this is a win-win-win no matter how you slice it.
Cheers...
I watched the latest Netflix arrival, a flick shot in 1963 starring Mickey Spillane as Mike Hammer in something called The Girl Hunters, and I'm glad I did.
For one thing, it's helped me forget the face of Stacy Keach in the role (not that I have anything against Keach, but he just wasn't Hammer, in my mind). For another, despite the wooden acting at times, it was interesting to see what the author of a popular detective hero sees in the character when playing that character. Of course, Spillane was also instrumental in writing the screenplay, so one could expect it to hew pretty closely to the original story.
The only weakness I ever found in the early Spillane work was his tendency to give Hammer a weak spot in terms of his eye for the ladies, who were thus in an excellent position to simply listen to his plans and thwart them (as it was the ladies who were the "bad guys"), at least until the last few pages. The plot twist worked in I, the Jury, but got a little old after a while. It got to the point where, as you read a Spillane thriller, you'd start figuring that any beautiful "dame" who (a) turned up as a a major character, and (b) was not Velda, was going to be the villain.
Nonetheless, Spillane wrote a bunch of detective novels that sold enough copies to make their author rich. Ayn Rand singled Spillane out as a writer in what she called the Romantic tradition, an assessment with which I agree, by the way (assuming I understand what she wrote in her Romantic Manifesto).
Ye gods.
Well, one thing is for sure: I'm not drastically disrupting my life again for a one-year contract.
OTOH, this is a win-win-win no matter how you slice it.
Cheers...
