Saturday, February 21, 2004
SOME KINDA FUN
this evening i entertained myself by a.) seeing Mystic River, and b.) finishing Absolute Friends. to top off the evening maybe i'll go out and lie down in traffic for a while. man, neither of these was light entertainment. as a serious Dennis Lehane fan i'd read Mystic River when it came out, which was long enough ago that i'd forgotten what a bummer story it is. as for the le Carré novel, i'll be writing about it tomorrow. too mentally and spiritually worn out right now. wow. like being dragged across Texas behind a Buick, tell you what.
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8 comments:
I'm curious to know how you felt the movie "Mystic River" compared to the book. I personally thought the movie was very poorly done. Very choppy and very slow in the beginning. However, it did convey enough to spur me to want to read the book. :-) ---Robbie
I just read Mystic River & want to see the film. My question is: would a guy like it, or would my husband torture me for months for making him watch it? PS: Totally off topic, but--you recently speculated that Jesus may have picked you up in a VW bus in France in the early 70's--are you sure it wasn't Jim Morrison???:)
Amy - i think it's actually more of a guy movie than not. although it's pretty slow and moody, it's really a gritty violent guys-who-were-friends-when-they-were-kids, now grown up to live on different sides of the law, story. since one of Lehane's constant subjects is the abuse/mistreatment of children, that's in there too, from the boys' pasts. kevin bacon and lawrence fishburne make a great cop team, too.
robbie - as i said, it's been a while since i read this book, so my memory's a little fuzzy. and because we saw a really crappy print of the film - with messed up soundtrack - i don't know if the actors were uniformly mumbling or not. that annoyed me a lot. i thought the movie captured well the dark gritty spirit of the book. having worked in bluecollar Boston, i found these characters totally believeable. but Lehane's a terrific writer, so bottom line? the book's better.
I haven't read the book, but saw the movie. My husband complained about it right after but later decided he liked it. He ALWAYS does that with movies that end on a downer. He seems to think every movie should have a happy ending. You all should have heard the "disagreement" we had about the ending of Somersby (not one of my favs, but "I" didn't see how it could possibly end happily!)
I also read "Mystic River" years ago.I like LeHane a lot..I picked up "Absolute Friends" in hardback yesterday at Sam`s. Le Carre is one of my 3 favorite writers of fiction,yet I deny myself Hardbacks [Price!} Can`t deny I really wanted to buy!Looking forward to your review...[last hardback I bought was Saul Bellow,for me the greatest living writer in English..
Vince
so, vince: saul bellow, john le carré, and who's the third?
I haven't read Mystic River yet. I'm wondering if I should read the book first before seeing the movie, what do you think?
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