I know! It bums me out. I was just thinking about this in the shower this morning.
Lamely, I've never read any Clarke--I started to read 2001: A Space Odyssey in college, but promptly put it down only a few pages in (to make a long rant short, it was totally not the right time to be reading that particular book). I plan to go back and give it another go, though.
And as for Minghella, it SUCKS that he was so friggin' young. (I can only assume, with cancer of the neck and throat, that smoking and/or drinking took its toll?)
Re: Clarke, I was first hooked on the short stories. "The Nine Billion Names of God" was one that really stuck with me. I haven't read them in ages, but many of them had great twists at the end, some profound, some silly. I remember one that's about a wrench that escapes on an EVA and winds up in a black hole so that he could work around to a joke about a "star-mangled spanner".
I assume Minghella was a smoker. Most Brits in showbiz are, and it's disgusting (I try to ignore the fact that both Billie Piper and Kate Winslet smoke, but it makes me want to grab them by the hair and shake them hard. With their skin, it's not going to go well as they age, and Winslet's got tots!
But yeah, I was really waiting for him to put it all together. Not that the movies aren't good, but he really needed to stop casting Jude Law in things and find someone who could act. It's almost as if his career went backward, with his culminating work coming at the beginning. Maybe that was the way it had to be, given his early death. But man...
He lost some of the weight and tried to quit smoking more than once. [See, e.g., http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,878759,00.html] It's a shame he died relatively young, but by all accounts, he lived a good life and did great work. We should all be so lucky by the time we're 54. Cheers!
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Lamely, I've never read any Clarke--I started to read 2001: A Space Odyssey in college, but promptly put it down only a few pages in (to make a long rant short, it was totally not the right time to be reading that particular book). I plan to go back and give it another go, though.
And as for Minghella, it SUCKS that he was so friggin' young. (I can only assume, with cancer of the neck and throat, that smoking and/or drinking took its toll?)
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I assume Minghella was a smoker. Most Brits in showbiz are, and it's disgusting (I try to ignore the fact that both Billie Piper and Kate Winslet smoke, but it makes me want to grab them by the hair and shake them hard. With their skin, it's not going to go well as they age, and Winslet's got tots!
But yeah, I was really waiting for him to put it all together. Not that the movies aren't good, but he really needed to stop casting Jude Law in things and find someone who could act. It's almost as if his career went backward, with his culminating work coming at the beginning. Maybe that was the way it had to be, given his early death. But man...
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Minghella though, that was a huge shock. He was cut off before reaching his prime really.
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