Entirely unexpected

YouTube decided that I might be interested in an obscure TV promotional clip that was broadcast shortly after the filming of "Twenty Years After" -- I was, but not least because the young man sitting in the background behind everyone else ("because he sings offstage", jokes Georgii Jungwald-Khil'kevich, a.k.a. the Unpronounceable Director -- Smekhov refers to him in his memoir simply as 'Khili' :-p) turned out, much to my surprise, to be a remarkably good-looking Igor Nadzhiev. I mean, he was striking enough that I'd actively been wondering who he was, since he definitely wasn't one of the actors in the picture. In fact he was the solo soundtrack singer, whose appearance I'm more familiar with from the covers to various individual tracks from the film, obviously released much later:

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But by that point he has a fine voice but bears a disconcerting resemblance to Michael Jackson.

Apparently right at the beginning of his career, with shorter hair and several nose jobs earlier, he actually looked quite different...

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"Thunder on the Right", Mary Stewart

I picked this book up halfway through at random (to be precise, at the scene where Stephen is clawing desperately at the hands of Pierre Bussac, who is trying to strangle him), read from there to the end, and found the novel to be very much better than I had remembered. And Stephen, "clever, sensitive, gentle" -- who rejects the role of storybook hero and ends up ignominiously defeated when forced into the thoroughly unromantic business of real-life combat, then solves the problem with his intelligence -- is precisely the type of protagonist who appeals to me, as does his ability to subjugate his own long-held desires to Jennifer's immediate need for fraternal comfort and support, rather than playing the he-man and insisting on sweeping her off her feet. I liked the shift in perceptions of Bussac a lot, as well, from terrifying menace to the lesser of two evils to brave ally (and like Jennifer I was sorry that he died, although obviously it simplified the outcome of the plot!)

Then I went back to the beginning and read the book all the way through in order as intended, and found myself back at my original impression of this as being one of Mary Stewart's less satisfactory books, which is a very odd outcome! ( Read more... )