Simon ,'Jaynestown'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I love Movie!Bourne. He's all woobieful and etched with pain, but he doesn't burble about it; he just shoots the shit out of people and snaps their neck and stuff, and then he looks broken some more, occasionally in shirts that show off some arm. That's good enough for me.
As always, JZ says it best.
You were just waiting for that one, weren't you?
I'd have answered sooner, but y'know. Happy hour.
Except he only kills people who are actively trying to kill him. Cops and security guards and people like that who are just doing their jobs he tries not to hurt more than he really has to.
"Here's your double mocha latte with extra whipped cream, Mr. Bourne."
"Do you know how much sugar is in this? How much fat? Do you know what this will do to my cholesterol?"
*snapcrunchspackleowiepunchtodeath*
"Fucker was trying to kill me. Hey, where are the napkins?"
I liked BookBourne just fine. He's not as hot as MovieBourne, but he was more complicated and had the decency to fall for a woman who had some use to the plot beyond her death.
She was in banking, IIRC.
The fact that book-Marie was in banking is the reason why there is a 100-page digression about how to transfer money illegally across national borders before the advent of the internet. Let us merely say that Ludlum had a pretty good idea for the first Bourne novel (the other two struck me as faintly ridiculous) and went about it in methods that don't fly very well for people who aren't already fans of angsty spy novels.
I was raised on angsty spy novels. Well, them and stories of racial violence in the deep south. So I had no learning/loving curve at all.
I mean, there are people that don't like angsty spy novels? And pick up Ludlum?
Harrumph.
I wiki'd, and apparently she's a Canadian economist. Which would explain why we're all right. I remember her being at a conference.
I've had a bad day at work, this is why I'm trainspotting here.
She was in banking, IIRC.
She felt to me like total flobotanum -- Bourne's shadowy past could be sussed out if he only had the assistance of someone who knows international banking inside and out, if only -- why, hel-LO, Marie!
It may also be that I'm ruined for spy novels by having started out with Le Carré, lord and king and master and commander of the angsty spy novel (TM Nutty), and I probably shouldn't have read Bourne quite so immediately after The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, as it was bound to suffer in comparison. I should have waited a bit, say, two or three years. t /serious Ludlum issues
Ludlum's more pulpy. There are many people in Le Carré's league. Graham Greene, perhaps?
Graham Greene is so infinitely better than Ludlum. Though he doesn't really inhabit the "spy novel" portion of my bookbrain.