Movie and a Book

I've been reading at a tremendous rate recently. Not sure what's up with that but I never complain about having time to read. Plus caught a classic film I'd never seen before.

The Dig by Alan Dean Foster(1995) - I've read Foster before (most especially his books involving Flinx and Pip) and always enjoyed him. So I assumed this would be more of the same when I picked it up at my local library's annual book sale. What I didn't know till I'd finished it was that the book is actually based on a video game. Foster does a lot of novelizations of TV shows, movies and the like. This one didn't really do much for me. The video game roots of the book didn't serve it especially well.  My first impression was "These characters sure have dumb names" (Boston Low? Seriously?) I'll give it this, the book starts off pretty well. This is a First Contact story but the most obvious conclusions are ignored over and over by the characters (a meteor suddenly appears in the solar system basically just outside the Moon's orbit. Then it suddenly decelerates and goes into low earth orbit. Somehow it doesn't occur to ANYONE that maybe, just maybe this thing is acting like an artificial artifact NOT a natural one? It stays consistent from there.  Whatever they should do they almost certainly DON'T do) setting up the conflict in the story by simply being stupid. Despite the fact that everyone in the story is supposedly quite bright. The ending is obvious by about half way through the book and the conclusion just seems to arrive very abruptly. Not a waste of time but certainly going right back into the give away pile.

Green for Danger (1946) - Not sure how this ended up in my Netflix queue but I'm glad it did.  Probably because it stars Alastair Sim.  Sim is a wonderful actor (my favorite Scrooge) and lived up to my expectations.  Never sure about movies of this vintage.  Many are brilliant and many are also really cliched and hackneyed.  This one is one of the better class.  A war time murder mystery in a small hospital in the English countryside.  Seems that one member of a 5 person surgical team killed the local postman.  Part of the mystery is why anyone would kill the old geezer.  The movie is pretty straight forward till Sim's Inspector Cockrill arrives.  Cockrill is very much the modern movie police detective - quick with a quip and with his own set of quirks.  The Inspector has a whimsical side and brings a whole new tone to the movie.  I will admit that the murderer was not obvious to me even though the clues were there (no surprise twists just good plotting).  The cast isn't particularly well known to me other than Sim and Trevor Howard.  The "creative team" of  Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (between them they covered most of the writing, producing and directing duties) have more than 60 movies credits each to their resumes.  They had a long and productive career together.  I would bet that they're virtually unknown in the States but they shouldn't be.  I really enjoyed this movie.  A good story with a solid cast and only 91 minutes long.  What's not to like?