Another start

2009 disappeared in a haze of late night writing and lack of sleep. I failed entirely to keep up either this blog or the PhD - our situation at home meant I had to take on a lot of extra work, and there simply wasn't time.

But no moping here. The PhD is, I believe from my last conversation with my unimaginably patient tutor, a going concern. And my wife Sarah recently started a full-time maternity cover job as production editor on my magazine, meaning fewer hours in write club. Spurred on by Andy Kelly's second attempt at 365-day blogging, I'll be updating here regularly (as I told Andy, I'm aiming for once every other day but twice as good as everyone else taking part) and prodding more or less effectively at the thesis.

So this is day one. I watched Dr No tonight so I'd have something to write about. Why Bond? I'm reading Mark Harris' Scenes From A Revolution which Sarah's parents bought me for Christmas. It's good - enjoyably anecdotal, well-researched and readable, and about a period of Hollywood I don't know tons about. Something that struck me in the first chapter was passage about Bonnie And Clyde screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman, in Manhattan in 1962, and their shared love of Nouvelle Vague and European art films:

The last couple of years had brought an almost unimaginable wealth of world cinema to the United States, starting, as always, in New York City and then moving west. Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita - an immense exploding flashbulb of a movie - and Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura - stone-faced, elliptical, unsolvable - had arrived within weeks of each other; Antonioni's La Notte and L'Eclisse followed quickly, and that Spring, Fellini's 8 1/2 was just weeks from opening.

Mark Harris, Scenes From A Revolution p 8

It's a strength of the book that it takes well-known and familiar things and places them into an immediate context - it's fairly idiotic that I'd not considered it before, but the idea of these films arriving as a group, rather than watched as part of an established cannon, is fascinating. As is Warren Beatty's inclusion of the British films made by Woodfall by Tony Richardson and John Osborne into that same, exciting wave.

So long story short I wanted to watch a British film from the sixties, and Bond is on my shelf unwatched, even if it's at the very opposite end of the production spectrum to Look Back In Anger. I actually wanted to watch From Russia With Love - it's always looked cooler, and I have both that and Dr No on unwatched blu-ray check discs - but a geek impulse made me want to start from the beginning.

The result? Aside from the fact that Sean Connery's staggering shoulder pads make him look like Mr Incredible - cartoon superhero silhouette - and that I get a few gags in Austin Powers that eluded me previously, it turns out I have very little to say about it. It was fun, and the camera pervs at Connery at least as much as at Ursula Andress. I should probably order a dvd of The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner.