Five days in and I feel like all I know is Bond, James Bond.
Today we have
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, which features Bond working from Japan to thwart the spacecraft-stealing plans of SPECTRE, coming face to face for the first time with its nefarious leader, Ernst Stravro Blofeld.
The Bond films are already hitting their stride. Slipping into this movie's plot felt like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes. And this is after less than a week in Bond-world! Wow, this is going to be a very long month. Absolute immersion.
We're almost to the end of the Connery era, but I'll resist speaking too much on him until the end of his era. Suffice to say Bond knows who he is here. More of interest to me is SPECTRE, who has now been the major antagonist factor for 4 of the 5 movies. It's a great progression. In Dr. No they were only spoken of. In From Russia With Love they met in a cramped office. In Thunderball, a cavernous conference room. And here, SPECTRE has created a literal cavern out of a Japanese volcano from which to launch their US-and-Russian-spacecraft-eating rocket ships (a really terrific end-of-movie setpiece that thankfully also gets plenty of screentime throughout). Most importantly we get the first face reveal and confrontation between Bond and Blofeld, SPECTRE's facially disfigured leader. It's satisfactory. Yeah, just satisfactory. This whole movie is good - not great, but good. Satisfying. A comfortable shoe. Nothing is shocking because everything feels like a logical progression of scope and scale.
Observations -
- We cut back on some of the cheesy elements found in Thunderball. The only truly egregious scene is Bond's successful crash-landing of a spiraling-out-of-control plane he is left to die in. But it's a brief, non-important moment.
- The theme song is nowhere near the quality of the last few - sorry Nancy Sinatra, it's not you, it's the forgettable melody - but the repeating musical motif that shows up throughout the movie is surprisingly pleasant.
- Moneypenny in Naval uniform on board a submarine? Be still my heart!
- Post-Japanese-Transformation Bond is a set of pointy ears away from being a Leonard-Nimoy-as-Spock doppleganger
- I'm realizing that sometimes the third act of these movies is more about building suspense than just action - there is always action, but it's the payoff for how much suspense is built. I have to remind myself that not everything needs to drive forward like an out-of-control speedboat towards the finish, sometimes it's okay to relax into the suspense and let that payoff for when the final 10 minutes of the film does arrive and it's action-go-time.
- BOND BONK - 3 times with 2 girls (both of whom die - ouch!). This carries us to 16 bonks with 13 bonkees.
Tomorrow we get the one-off George Lazenby as Bond before one last Connery appearance in movie #7.
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