Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

I heard about this and checked it for myself. My conclusion is that either critics suck or they were watching the 1987 version with Scott Glenn while the audience rating is for the 2004 Denzel version... "How much has [Tom] Brady earned relative to his peers? It's a trick question. Brady has no peers, as any Patriots fan will tell you." - Mike Sando in The Athletic on Brady's new contract extension. The line just made me chuckle... Cool video. But the video I really want to see is of any attempted copycats... New Coke and Billy Beer (from Jimmy Carter's brother) were famous flops as products but I wonder what a couple cases of either would be worth on ebay right about now... YouTube is the world's top grossing video app with $138 mil in revenue in Q1. Trying to wrap my head around this. I watch YouTube all the time (via my Roku box) but I don't spend a dime on YouTube. Where is all the revenue coming from? Surely not the YouTube TV subscription service... This is cool and for the record I want one. The next step is to have competitive hoverboard cross channel races. I'd watch that in a heartbeat...

Man on Fire

I loved the movie Man on Fire starring Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning. It spurred me to buy and read the book by AJ Quinnell. I thought the movie was great but that the book was 10-times better (a great summer read by the way). That helps explain why I was so curious when I saw that there was an earlier (1987) version of the movie.

I happened to see that the 1987 version of Man on Fire was on cable so I tuned in to watch. Let me just say that the movie was awful. You would think that a movie that starred Scott Glenn and Joe Pesci and featured Jonathan Pryce and Danny Aiello couldn't be that bad - but you would be wrong. The movie was awful, awful, awful. It was so bad that film students should be made to watch this version to see how a director can ruin a great book by trying to be too artsy and writing a convoluted screenplay instead of just using the plot from the book.

A couple of interesting things that I did not know are 1) AJ Quinnell is the pen name for Philip Nicholson (who died in 2005), 2) the Marcus Creasy character was in a series of books (kind of like a Travis McGee character - whereas I thought the Man on Fire book was a one-time deal for the character) and 3) AJ Quinnell (Nicholson) had the same agent as JK Rowling.

Now that I know that there are other Creasy novels - I'm going to have to go out and get a couple. I'll probably start with The Blue Ring or Message From Hell (or whatever Quinnell book is easiest to find).