Doctor No
The centerpiece of today's action was going to see Doctor No at Westgate Cinemas. I definitely like Sean Connery better in these early films than in his later films. Pretty much anything after (and including) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is pretty spurious, to my thinking. He started descending into Williams Shatner-esque ham-acting. I think his last really good role was in The Untouchables (which is also one of the few films in which I find Kevin Costner tolerable; the other is the excellent Silverado).
It's an interesting film to watch. It's a straight spy flick without the gimmickry which pervaded the later Bond films. But Bond's smooth-talking, sex-symbol presence is very much in evidence, as is the exotic locale (Jamaica) which is a hallmark of much of the film series. The plot is fairly loose; some things happen for little reason than because they're cool notions, and the film is quite conscious of its cliches - but goes ahead and indulges in them anyway. Chief among these being "the villain telling the hero his plans because he's the only one the villain can respect", and "the escape through the conveniently man-sized ventilation system".
I'm looking forward to seeing the other two films, and maybe I'll rent some others when I've seen them. Such as Thunderball (which I've never seen), On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me (a great adventure with some funny camp moments - and generally I hate camp - such as Barbara Bach's faux-Russian accent as "Agent Triple-X"), and For Your Eyes Only>. (You'd think I wouldn't need to see that last one, having seen it dozens of times on cable in the 80s, but it's probably been over a decade since I last saw it. Arguably the last really good Bond film, although admittedly I have not seen the last three.)
Meanwhile, tomorrow I might sneak out after working in the afternoon to see The Avengers, which I am morbidly curious about, don't ask my why. (And no, it ain't Uma Thurman that raises my curiosity.)
Tomorrow I may do my big review of the jazz albums I've listened to lately. Don't touch that dial.
I also picked up some used Dorothy Sayers mysteries, as well as David Brin's The Practice Effect, thus lengthening my already unwieldy reading list. But I sunk a couple of hours into Last Call tonight and want to get back into the swing of reading a lot of fiction, now that I've read nearly everything else lying around here.
I'm considering starting the big project of cataloguing a lot of my stuff, mainly for insurance purposes, and Jim persuaded me that doing so with a database is the way to go. So I'm looking at buying Filemaker Pro for my Mac (unless anyone has any better suggestions...). I had thought that MacWarehouse had it for $150, so I was rather amazed that CompUSA's price was $200. Turns out what I saw at MacWarehouse was the upgrade from earlier versions. MacMall has it for $190, but that's hardly worth the effort. I always kind of choke at the prospect of spending hundreds of dollars on computer software, but maybe I'll do it this time.
This reminds me: In CompUSA today I got to see my first iMac. it does look pretty slick, and I guess it's just selling like hotcakes. It's pretty amazing how ga-ga people are going over a low-end, entry-level computer. On the other hand, it's got the same chip that my desktop machine has...
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