Dr. No

So I'm gonna watch all the James Bond movies. The reason for this is pretty simple - I've usually only seen the earlier films as part of marathons on TV where everything runs together, and so my mind is full of incomplete and fuzzy ideas of what the series is. Really, the only Bond actors whose films I can actually distinguish from each other are Pierce Brosnan and and Daniel Craig. Anyway, here we start at the beginning with Sean Connery's first turn as the famous character. Dr. No does a pretty solid job of establishing the franchise as we see a lot of the key elements in place. There's no opening scene before the credits, and said credits don't feature girls dancing around or a famous singer crooning a theme with the title in the lyrics. But Bond says some clever things, romances a few girls, faces off against a slightly over the top villain, spouts a couple catchphrases for the first time, and a few things blow up.

Really though, the movie is fairly tame. Not too violent, not too long, only one major exotic location. There's not even a scene where Q gives Bond a wacky high-tech gadget, just one where he's lectured on his choice of firearm. From what I can tell this was intentional, to start a movie series on a grounded, reasonable footing before letting things get bigger and more explosive. Dr. No himself is a pretty good villain though, complete with metallic hands and a menacing dinner conversation. He's one of the only early antagonists or main Bond girls to actually use his own voice, and it's fun to watch him interact with Bond for the first time, really setting a tone for what was to come. Ursula Andress is pretty damn hot in her bikini, but although she went on to some other movies doesn't do her own voice and just sort of stands around looking pretty in the second half of the film, more femme than fatale. In the end, it's a solid movie, not great, but better than a few other Bond flicks I've seen.

James Bond stats
Theme song: James Bond theme
Foreign location: Jamaica
Bond, James Bond: 8:00
Martini shaken, not stirred: 24:40, 1:28:10
Ladies seduced: 3
Chases: 2
Kills: 3 humans, 1 tarantula
Non-lethal takedowns: 9

Clash of the Titans

For some reason I've been thinking about Greek mythology lately, probably because of a desire to play the God of War games again with the third coming out next year, and this was available on Netflix streaming, so why the hell not. It's a pretty fun fantasy action film that refers to the myth of Perseus even if it isn't quite accurate, changing details to get away with huge impressive monsters when they want to. It also plays fast and loose with the definition of titan, which I think are one of the more interesting aspects of the myths and don't actually appear at all in the film. From what I can tell the Kraken isn't even originally an aspect of Greek myth, being a western European thing, and the one here certainly doesn't look like any interpretation of the beast I've ever seen.

Beyond that completely unimportant stuff though, the movie is an entertaining adventure. It comes from that special time in the early 80's when special effects were nearly acceptable but not quite there yet and you could get away with some blood and nudity in a PG movie because PG-13 hadn't been invented yet. Harryhausen was best known for his stop motion effects his whole career, and some of the creations here don't look too bad. The problem is whenever they have to be integrated with live action footage, the composite effect ends up looking terrible as one thing is clearly being pasted on top of another. It's the sort of movie that could really use a modern cleaning-up along the lines of the Star Wars special editions, or a remake next year as the case may be. Anyway, Harry Hamlin plays with some neat magical gifts from Olympus, fights some hideous monsters, meets a wacky robotic friend, and gets the girl in the end. Not a bad use of a couple of hours.