Articles in December, 2007

Commentary: Dr. No

The James Bond series leaps into action with guns blazing as Sean Connery spends several hours talking to British colonial officials and wandering around Jamaica looking for a clue. Then he turns up the heat and starts blasting by sneaking around an island for a while, hoping not to get captured, before getting captured. Okay, it’s a little slow for what we’ve come to expect, but in 1962, this rocked. And even today, Miss Taro and Honey Ryder can still make your palms sweat. I compare the film to the book thruout and look for motifs, iconic elements, and firsts. I compare it to the Flint and Austin Powers movies that it inspired and to other Bond flicks. Note: Some comments are shaken while others are stirred. Somehow I make the bizarre mistake of saying that Sean Connery appeared in Zulu Dawn.

Commentary: Ghostbusters

An imperfect commentary for a nearly perfect film. Bill Murray is chief idiot to Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis in a modern Marx Brothers-style epic comedy thriller. Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, and Ernie Hudson support, not to mention Rick Moranis, William Atherton, and Yugoslavian supermodel Slavitza. Director Ivan Reitman delivers the goods in thrills and chills while the top-talent cast supplies the laughs. I describe the statue-spirit motif, the dual-story structure of the plot, the cartoonish nature of the Ghostbusters which makes them inherently merchandisable, and the evils of synthesizer music. I mistakenly say that Gozer has a “Grace Slick haircut” when I mean a “Grace Jones haircut.”