the groundhog day project

Shall we talk about Never Say Never Again ? Or shall I ignore Octopussy , playing now, to talk about the four other movies I watched today to finish off this year's Oscar nominated films, with a couple weeks to spare? Because, I totally did that. An extra day off, and this week is speech week in my classes, so I've got nothing to prep, so I ignored the olympics for today, ignored any Dungeons & Dragons planning I might need to make soon, and turned on three documentaries ( Last Men in Aleppo , Icarus , Strong Island ) and one foreign language film ( On Body and Soul ) (all conveniently on Netflix, hence putting them off to the end). But, how about that Never Say Never Again ? Actually, I don't intend to talk about the film itself. I think I only ever saw it all the way through the one time, in the theater. I was seven, mind you, and I knew about the copyright issues that led to there being two different James Bond films in the same year. Never Say Never Again and Oc...

So, Octopussy begins with Bond (Roger Moore, again, and always my baseline for evaluating any Bond) trying to blow up some satellite thingy, failing, and getting away in a plane hidden in a horse trailer (in a sequence that is not nearly as exciting as I remember it being when I was a kid). And, thinking on what's coming in this film--it has been a while since I've watched it--it's occurred to me, because sometimes I can't quite put my finger on what these old movies put into my head all those years ago, that--and maybe this is odd since I was just seven when this film came out--that this is where I first heard of Faberge eggs, and when I was an undergrad history major, I took a few Russia-specific history classes and even did some research into Faberge eggs and how much they cost to own, what makes each one unique, stuff like that. (Now, two things occur to me: 1) that was a really long and convoluted sentence. I apologize. 2) Writing that just now, it occurred to ...