“This place sucks. It should be shut down.”
- Thread starter BobPSU92
- Start date
I like to think it’s based on Penn State Altoona. (A lot fits.) Again, Lucky Hank stars the great Bob Odenkirk and is based on Straight Man, by Richard Russo (Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool). Straight Man is one of my favorites, the funniest book I have ever read, the one book I gift, knowing it will be loved. (I’ve gifted like 20 copies, conservatively.) Trust me.
Damn, it will be interesting to see how many of you manage to guilt me into sending you a copy.When will my copy arrive?
Better yet, do your own McAndrew Board audio book and read a chapter a week and post the audio link here on the board!
If your title was about the test board on that other site I would agree with you 100%!
I just bought a copy. Can’t wait for the series. I read Russo‘s Wiki page … he wrote other books that were made into shows. Probably will read a number of his books, and watch the shows too.
Nobody’s Fool is a damn fine movie. It has Paul Newman’s best performance, but Bruce Willis steals the show, seriously. Willis is great. And Melanie Griffith flashes her boobs. Highly recommended.
Russo has said that Straight Man was a composite based on his time at various colleges, including PSU-Altoona.
I had to laugh at the “mediocre” in the headline. Here’s a line from Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, where a retiring professor is saying her goodbyes to her faculty colleagues: “I wish I could think of something nice to say about you people and this university, I really do. But the truth we dare not utter is that ours is a distinctly second-rate institution, as are the vast majority of our students, as are we.”My response was about the TV series, not the book
I would love to do this scene: Hank is demanding that the English Department be given a budget. He’s holding a live duck by the throat in front of local tv news cameras. “Starting Monday, I’ll kill a duck a day until I get a budget. This is a non-negotiable demand. I want the money in unmarked bills on my desk by Monday morning, or this guy is going to be soaking in orange sauce and full of cornbread stuffing by Monday night.”
The pilot for Lucky Hank aired last Sunday night at 9 pm, on AMC.
Hit or miss. I’m waiting for it to end before I tell people to get off my lawn. The most recent episode was pretty weak.
My biggest complaint is that it is lacking in focus, and the wanderings are not entertaining.
I had been wondering how the writers were going to extend the book (which takes place over five days) to eight episodes.
Same thoughts here, especially since their ultimate goal is to have it go more than just 1, 8 episode season.
Part of this is because the writers are bringing pieces of the novel into the show just because they’re in the novel and are not giving these pieces the time they need. In the novel the side story of Julie and Russell (Hank’s daughter and son-in-law) is an ongoing saga to which we return every thirty or so pages, it’s a good story. It would have been better to just leave them out of the tv show. (For one thing, Russell in the book is a very competent guy who got hit hard by bad luck; in the tv show he’s a poorly developed idiot.)
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Hollywood never wats just one season. Or just one film. Since it was announed as a series, not a mini-series, I'm sure that they have plans on more. I just don't know if my interest will last through these eight episodes. I'm guessing that an actual dead goose is off the table in these times, hence the threat to box a goose a day rather than to kill one a day. Not that I expected, or even wanted a page by page retelling. It just seems like they can't decide if they want to follow the arc of the book or take the spirit of the book and explore new ground.
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