The two best books I ever read were The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway and Ask the Dust by John Fante. My favorite is Ask the Dust. And I will never watch that POS movie they made of it.
Lol I thought you had confused that with From Dusk Till Dawn until I looked that movie up. It's on my NetFlix queue. _
I've got nothing against Robert Towne. Chinatown is probably the greatest script ever written next to Casablanca. But when Colin Farrell plays your literary hero, you're a LITTLE dissapointed!
Colin Farrell was in one of the top movies of the last decade IMHO and In Bruges should have won the Oscar that year. Loved Chinatown, but LA Confidential is a top 5 movie all time for me. _
Guess your right. I guess it could have been worse. He could have been played by a complete tool like James Franco. Thanks for cheering me up.
I'm reading Bulfinch's Mythology I almost bought starship troopers but wanted to get something more classical. Didn't even know it was a book until I saw it in the store.
I really liked it. I had heard it was nothing like the movie, but they were fairly similar. Some differences, but it followed mostly the same plot. It is a little rah-rah, everyone should join the military, but I didn't think it was too bad. I think that bothers other people. For reference, I've never even considered joining the military.
Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers as a deliberate attempt to work out what, if any, role there would be in a future military for marines. They actually use powered armour jump suits in the book, which has been seen in a number of films since , but not Starship Troopers ironically. There really isn't any requirement to join the military in the book, though you do have to do an indentured term of public service to vote and hold public office. Because the book was about marines there was a perception that it was a militaristic society, verging of fascism, which was reflected in the film. If you go in with this preconception from the film you will find it in the book too. Edit: should add he wrote it in a deliberate attempt to be controversial as he was moving away from adolescent fiction to more serious sci-fi. His follow up novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, was probably even more controversial and as wildly different in terms of content and subject as you could get. I'm a fan, in case you couldn't tell!
I haven't read Stranger in a Strange Land yet, but will be sometime soonish. I thought it was interesting that Heinlein was actually in the Navy IRL. He wrote very favorably about the marines and was negative (at least from the characters perspective) about the navy. I was also interested to learn that it was one of the first (if not THE first) to put soldiers in the armored suits, which is basically a staple of sci-fi now. Reading All You Need is Kill shortly afterwards, you could see a lot of similarities and how heavily Heinlein (directly or indirectly) influenced the book.
