Just Like Old Times

Thanks to an unhealthy dose of insomnia I have been devouring movies and books on a massive scale for the last week. The reviews continue.

I finished reading the second Jack Higgins' crime novel tonight. It's called Brought in Dead and it was pretty damn good, until the end. The ending was so abrupt that it really undermined the long emotionally gruelling story. That said, the rest of the story was a pretty good 60's precurser to movies like Death Wish. A good revenge thriller.

I also read Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson tonight. Which is a great book. Hunter doesn't go totally over the deep-end in it, altho he does party quite a bit with the gang. The book is really an excellent history of the Biker Gang phenomenon of the Sixties with a good dose of criticising his fellow journalists for fictionalizing their story and passing it off as fact. Top-notch.

In the realm of movies - I watched Ice Station Zebra tonight, which I think is just an incredible movie. First as a wonderful Cold War thriller with crackling dialouge and bad-ass Patrick McGooan. Second for it's nail-biting "under the ice" sequence. A model and some fake ice and it has more tension than any CGI I've seen yet.

I also watched part one of the original The Bourne Identity television mini-series starring Richard Chamberlin. This was a great mini-series that is very accurate to the book for the most part. What I particularly like about it is the fact that they keep the Carlos the Jackal storyline, which was removed from the new Bourne movies (which are great in their own right). The mini-series also has a slower more traditional espionage thriller pace to it and a great 70's/80's look. It was a total surprise finding this on dvd and well worth the $7.

Originally posted on June 6, 2005 on Myspace.