Website cry for help, plus Parker movie news featuring Mark Wahlberg

A younger Mark Wahlberg in The Big Hit.

Hello, folks! Been awhile!

You’re far more interested in the movie news, so I’ll be quick in talking about the site.

I put the site up in its current form around 2008, using a theme called Atahualpa. It was easy to use and I was able to get it to do what I needed it to do with minimal effort.

Atahualpa is, for all intents and purposes, no longer maintained. This has created all sorts of troubles. I got a little help and was able to at least get the site security stuff updated, but the fixes that have been put in are band-aids, not solutions. At the moment, I can’t even edit the sidebars.

There are other problems due to the age of the theme. It isn’t the greatest on phones, for example, something that wasn’t an issue in 2008.

The trouble is, I don’t know much about this sort of thing, and it isn’t the kind of thing I have the time (or interest in) to put in the substantial effort of learning beyond the basics. It feels like work, and when The Violent World of Parker starts to feel like work, I stop doing it. Which, you may have noticed, I had for awhile.

So if you are a Parker fan who knows stuff about these newfangled website thingies and HTML, and you feel like volunteering to help me, that would be wonderful. I don’t have much to offer except my gratitude and the gratitude of the site’s readers, although I can certainly plug your business if you do this for a living.

On to the movie news…

When I last posted about this almost exactly two years ago, Robert Downey Jr. was set to star in  “a series of movie and television projects adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s ‘Parker’ crime fiction series.”

Finally, there is more. Padraig Cotter at ScreenRant, who has some familiarity with Parker or at minimum did some homework, has a good piece summing up the latest.

The movie has a title: Play Dirty.

It also has a plot (from The Hollywood Reporter): “An adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels, the feature stars Wahlberg as the hardened professional thief who is, naturally, double-crossed and left for dead. His hunt for revenge, however, brings with it a shot at the biggest heist of his career. … [H]e’ll still need to outsmart a South American dictator, the New York mob and the world’s richest man if he hopes to stay alive.”

Downey is out as Parker, and Mark Wahlberg is in. (Downey is still a producer.)

Grofield has gotten a race swap and will be played by LaKeith Stanfield.

Dermot Mulroney and Tony Shalhoub are also cast. Rosa Salazar is the female lead.

What do I think of this? I’m not sure. Downey is the better actor (although Wahlberg is good), but I thought when it was announced that Downey was too old. Wahlberg is six years younger, which may not sound like a lot, but he has lived a healthier life than Downey which magnifies the age difference appearance-wise.

I like Mark Wahlberg and hope he can pull it off.

The race swap would seem to indicate that the movie Grofield will be a rather different character from the literary Grofield, but the articles say that he will at least remain an actor. I’ve seen three movies with Stanfield, but he was in smaller supporting roles and I saw all three long enough ago that my memory is coming up blank, so I don’t know enough about him to have an opinion.

Speaking of blank memories…what book is this supposed to based on? It doesn’t sound like anything I recall and the articles don’t say. Is it an original story? If so, I’m not thrilled about that.

That’s the big stuff. You can follow the links for what else there is.

Getting back to the site itself, I’ve been trying to resume posting for a couple of (very busy) months, and I’m glad the movie news forced my hand—sometimes you just need something to get you started. I’ve got two or three pieces in my mental hopper, and I’ll try not to go months before writing them and posting them.

That’s all for now! More soon (I hope).