Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

After almost a year of having borrowed it and left it sitting on an end table, I finally got around to reading the copy of I Am Legend that I borrowed from Dmitrii.  It's a good story, but the other stories contained in the same compilation just aren't up to par with the title one.

For those of you who've never heard of it, it was the basis of the 1971 film The Omega Man.  It's not on my list of movies to see, partly because it stars Charlton Heston, a man who seems to have learnt how to act by watching bad parodies of Clint Eastwood, and partly because it just isn't supposed to be all that good.  To clarify:  There's good Heston (Ben Hur), there's good bad Heston (Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green), and then there's bad Heston (just about everything else he's ever done).  This is supposedly the latter, although it did inspire The Homega Man parody.  (To continue the Heston thread, there is one further category: bad Heston in a good movie, as exemplified by Touch of Evil.  I've got no idea whose idea it was to cast him as a Mexican detective, but it must rate as one of the worst miscastings in history.  On the other hand, it was the only reason that Welles ended up directing it, so I suppose some good came out of it after all.)

From what I've heard of it, the movie appears to be much in the vein of Minority Report or Blade Runner; the screenwriter took the basis premise of the original story, and reworked it into something bearing only a vague resemblence to the original work.  The difference being that Blade Runner was a great movie and a lousy book.  (Minorty Report is an entirely different matter, being a great short story with a twist ending that was changed into a needlessly complicated chase movie with a sappy ending.  Damn you, Spielberg!  Damn you!)

Since I've finished his book, it's now up to Dmitrii to finally get around to finishing A Clockwork Orange, which I loaned him at around the same time.  He's at least started it, and informs me that the slang language designed by Burgess is quite interesting if you happen to know Russian.

On a completely different note: Mozilla Firefox users should really try out Firesomething.  Everyone else (or at least those of you with Quicktime) should check out this.

(Before anyone says anything: yes, I know Heston started acting before Eastwood.  It was just too good a comparison not to use.)

Title is worth one point. Category: I mean you're not helping.  Why is that, Leon?.