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| Blair Paddy Mayne (DSO with 3 bars) |
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If I have one complaint about the audiobook its over Molina's accents - his New Zealanders sounded like South Africans to me and the voice he gave to Blair (Paddy) Mayne is a bit of a travesty in the fake Oirish department. Mayne was a legendary SAS commander who drove behind enemy lines in N Africa shooting up airfields, scouting German positions and gathering intel. He was a famous rugby international before the war and one of the great characters of the desert campaign. (He really deserves a novel of his own.) Mayne was from deepest Ulster but when he appears in Killing Rommel Molina gives him the accent of a leprechaun from a Lucky Charms commercial. I'm sure very few people will notice this or care but when it happened it somewhat took me out of what is an otherwise fantastic audiobook.
29 comments:
A leprechaun from a lucky charms commercial ? OMFG there goes the ipad with a mouthful of columbian grind. Wonder if you know anyone who might've helped with the Belfast accents ? Ironic too that the hunt for Rommel was a series of screw ups and misfires ? Tora Bora anyone ?
I like Molina too. It's funny that the Wikipedia article has his photo at the San Diego Comicon, which would not be my first association to him.
Oddly enough, a book that seems to be going around Santa Cruz right now, at least among the aspiring young writers set, is Pressfield's The War of Art. I have no idea why, it's not new, but we have it on one of our display tables right now. I took a look at it while sitting at the info desk one day. It's in little chunks and very readable. Not surprisingly, it takes a kind of warrior's approach to overcoming blocks, but I thought it was very good on talking about resistance as part of us and going about overcoming it in many areas.
Accents are challenging. I saw quite a good Hotspur at the Shakespeare Festival this year, and discovered that several young women I work with are in love with the actor, but I found the way his accent seemed to drift from I guess Northumberland to the American South disconcerting. On the other hand maybe he had researched it to a T and it was just an unfamiliar one to me.
Rasta
The mistakes and debacles gave it an authentic feel, miles away from those old 1950's war films where everything works out OK in the end.
I blame the director for Molina's Irish accent. He's such a good actor that I'll bet if he'd been pointed in the right direction he could have pulled off a decent attempt at an Ulster accent.
Seana
Wasn't he in Spiderman or Superman or something? As a villain?
And don't forget that one of his very first film roles was the guy who betrays Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Fanboys at Comicon would eat that up.
I'll bet the War of Art is good. He's a meticulous researcher.
Yes, he was inI understand why he was at the Comicon convention--I just don't understand why they would pick that as the most definitive picture. It's not even a very good picture.
To boil down The War of Art to one statement: The enemy is within.
I'll see if I can get around to one of his novels at some point. You do kind of wonder when someone is writing one of these tracts whether their own writing is any good.
Did you read Gates of Fire, Adrian? That book made me want to join the spartans myself.
Matt, you've jogged my memory, because I now remember that that was a book one of my former coworkers tried unsuccessfully to get me to read. She wasn't really into war books, or even historical fiction usually. Apparently I should have listened.
Paul Fusell's Boys Crusdae is another great recent war book.
One of the better war novelists I've read is Derek Robinson. I read his Hornet's Sting which is about a British fighter squadron in WW I. His first novel, Goshawk Squadron, was nominated for the Booker Prize. He's also written a lot of books about the history and rules of rugby.
Matt
Didn't read Gates of Fire. I did read Fields of Fire about a completely different war.
Seana
I'm curious to know if there's a genre that you havent tackled.
Rasta
Havent read that but The Great War and Modern Memory is very very high on my all time list. If I was a canny publisher I'd already be thinking of the 100th anniversary in 2014. Get out the trade pbks of Great War, Guns of August etc.
Cary
I havent read Goshawk Sqdn, but I did read and enjoy Piece of Cake which if memory serves was about Hurricane pilots in the Battle of Britain.
Tackled as in read? I'm pretty skimpy on a lot of them, but I guess I do read across the boards. I would say I haven't read any real Harlequin style romance, except fot the fact that later in midlife, my mom decided to try and write some, so I read those. They were actually pretty good, though a little tame by the standards she was trying to get them published under. But she used her own experience of being in Germany after the war and Mexico somewhat before then, so they had some interest for me beyond the purely romantic story line.
Also I'm not sure I've read any true crime, although I have read some good magazine style pieces in that mode.
I read Paul Fussell's Wartime, which is about the second world war, and thought it was great. Unfortunately, I was reading it just at the outset of the first Gulf War and it pretty much alienated me from my family for awhile, whom I happened to be traveling with at the time. Even though later, we were all pretty much on the same page.
Seana
Those Harlequin books dont look so interesting but man I bet they would be really fun to write.
I read the WW2 Fussell as well but for some reason didnt quite enjoy that one as much. One of the morbid facts from that book which sticks with me is the number of times a GI would get buried and reburied as they moved cemeteries.
Seana
And yet more circling of the wagons on Breaking Bad last night...
Off topic, but you mentioned boarding school in this post and it got me thinking how the boarding school experience never seemed to become a part of American pop culture the way it has in England. There are boarding schools in the US, I know this because I've seen Dead Poets Society, but I can't think of any rock bands that came from American boarding schools.
John
Well I've always thought it was a perverse thing to do. Take a child you love and pack them off to a drafty school where they are ritually tortured and forced to learn Latin and Greek. I can't imagine that you escape from that situation psychologically whole.
As to Harlequins, you should write one Adrian under a nom de plume. I bet you would suss out the necessary formula pretty easily. You could even interview yourself here and no one would be the wiser.
Somewhat to my embarrassment I dozed off in the middle of Breaking Bad last night. True, it was late, but I don't think this is a good sign. I will now have to watch it again on On Demand, though I will be fast forwarding judiciously.
One thing I can say is that Gus as a Rambo style macho man doesn't play well for me at all. This is not his modus operandi.
I still think those boarding school boys are lucky in their Greek and Latin. Probably they should have been allowed to home in between classes, though.
Check out Gates of Fire if you have a chance, Adrian. I'd say it's definitely Pressfield's best book. Michael Mann was going to adapt it at one point, maybe reuniting him and Day-Lewis, but after 300 was green-lit they canned it.
As for Harlequins, one of my favourite writers, Mitchell Smith, wrote a dozen westerns back in the early 80s, the Buckskin series. Filled with gratuitous sex and violence. Very well-researched. I wondered if he used it to as an opporunity to sharpen his writing skills. He went on to write the prison novel Stone City and the sci-fi Snowfall trilogy.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2001931413_smith18.html
Seana
I think I'd enjoy writing one of those. Mine would definitely have pirates. Probably horses. I don't know how much they pay though and I am a very slow writer so I dont know if I could justify taking a year to churn out one.
Matt
I will check it out. Especially if there is an audio version. I'm always on the look out for a good audio.
It would probably just write itself, so that wouldn't be a worry.
The audiobook is quite good. Derek Jacobi narrated it iirc.
Matt
Ok I'll hunt that down..
That's interesting. I never really thought about how WWII was portrayed in movies, TV and books. But you're absolutely right. I guess it wasn't until Vietnam books and movies came out that the more ambiguous stories of war appeared. Was it a result of art changing? The way we view the world changing? Are we more cynical as people?
Lew, the content of movies and TV shows in the USA was quite controlled after 1947 until the blacklist was finally broken in the 60's and certainly the portrayal of the war was almost always positive.
A little while ago I bought a CD of World War II protest songs and a few of my friends were surprised to find out there was such a thing as World War II protest songs. That stuff was certainly buried.
I think we see it differently in Canada because our "major battles" were sometimes disasters like Dieppe and we learn about them in school.
I also found it funny that on the Wikipedia page for the movie "The Best years of Our Lives" (a movie critical of the way veterans were treeated after the war that snuck by in 1946 before the HUAC trials) has this quote from a critic: "a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz."
JOhn
If they made a modern movie about the Dieppe raid it would be the feel bad film of the year.
I have never understand the point of that operation even if it had been a 100 percent successful.
John, wow, I never realized that. Someone should write a book about that. You guys know any authors?
I love your books, by the way.
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