Thursday, June 07, 2007

Sahara - Clive Cussler

I recently saw Sahara. I thought it was an ok movie. Had potential to be much more. But it was a little disjointed, a little implausible. Not as bad as Spiderman 3, but it had its issues. But I could see the "Dirk Pitt(tm)" character having a run of movies.

I enjoyed it enough to read the novel. The novel is about 500 pages of text (with words in English using Arabic lettering) printed on paper for you to read with your eyes which is how most people read when 300 would have been better. That is to say it's very verbose.

The book was so amazingly different from the movie that I think that someone read the book, said "This would make a great movie, if..." and then gave a 5-minute synopsis to someone else who tried their best to make a workable script out of it. In the end, I have more admiration from the film, considering where the movie came from.
"I'm very glad to hear it," sighed Massarde, letting out a deep sigh.
You know how John McClane seems to be so lucky at his inability to get seriously hurt when shot, set on fire, walking across broken glass and falling many stories? Dirk Pitt and his amazing awesomeness makes John McClane look like a wus. Seriously, Dirk's combination of applicable and relevant past experience, strength, wit, knowledge and intelligence borders on ludicrous. (Oh, and he's apparently very handsome and not a womanizer and a very nice guy.)

If they do another Dirk Pitt movie, I'll see it on video. I won't read another Clive Cussler book. For the last three nights, I've laid here in bed reading it, pausing occasionally to yell at the book demanding that it get finished already.

Next up: Getting Things Done. Someone in the office got a number of copies of GTD. They gave a copy to my boss, who really needs to read it. Well, he hasn't gotten to it, so he gave it to me (despite round-tripping to London next week, though he usually uses the flights to reduce his inbox by several thousand e-mails). I'm looking forward to it. The GTD stuff I've found from Lifehack, Lifehacker, ParentHack and Unclutterer (to name a few) has really been exciting stuff.

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