Unfortunately, it’s not me.
Holy Bondage, Batman
I know you’re not supposed to judge books by their covers (especially comics since what you see might not be what you get) but the cover for October’s issue of Grayson is gorgeous. It’s more than a little bit kinky thanks to the lovingly rendered knots in the rope and the femdom-y vibes to the […]
Bond Girl: Octopussy
This week’s Bond Girl post is about the awkwardly-named Octopussy.
Here’s an excerpt:
I love how take-charge Octopussy is in this. She’s powerful in this film, her gang of smugglers immense enough to fill an entire palace. I think that while her character is superficially similar to that of Pussy Galore, she gets to do more. She’s not just a smuggler.
She takes care of the women that come to her and has an empire built up that has many avenues for them to be successful. These avenues range from owning hotels to carnivals and her famous circus. After the death of her father – a man that Bond went after on orders from his superiors for stealing gold – she turned what could’ve been a chance to spend her life trying to get revenge into a successful life that has her as a powerful, wealthy, and feared name in the world. She made smuggling her profession and proved that crime really does pay if you’re good at it.
If you liked this and want to read more about what I liked , check out Bond Girl: Re-Watching and Re-Evaluating Octopussy on The Mary Sue site! And comment (if you want) or feel free to chat me up on Twitter about everyone’s slightly sleazy favorite man of international espionage!
Is a James Bond Musical really in the works?
I hope you’re prepared for me to squee about this for as long as it takes for it to come out. I literally didn’t know I needed this sort of musical until the Independent announced it. Now it’s all I can think of.
It’s like the universe remembered how much I love musicals for things that really shouldn’t be musicals (Bring It On, Legally Blonde, and The Vampire Lestat to name a few recent book/film franchises that got the musical treatment).
I can’t figure out how I feel about this aside from the ear-piercing squee from two of my major interests colliding. I love musicals no matter what they’re about and um, hello, I can’t get enough of the Bond franchise. Even though nothing will ever be better than the original Legally Blonde show, I’m so excited to see where this goes.
What’s cool about this development (aside from how it probably pisses off everyone that hates musicals but loves James Bond), is that it could possibly count as an official entry into the official James Bond canon because the daughter of Eon Productions’ original producer Harry Saltzman is working on it. Sure, it’s a stretch, but okay it’s my kind of stretch.
How do y’all feel about our international ham-fisted man of mystery taking it to the stage and singing his heart out?
Selma
My face is still wet with tears from watching Selma.
I rented it to watch with my mother and I wound up watching it because Ave DuVernay had me hooked from the opening with the bombing of that church. I have been crying for the past two hours, through most of this entire movie, and despite the fact that I’m a snotty mess right now, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I needed to see Selma. I needed the reminder that the world was this way and in some cases, it’s not changing fast enough. I needed to see how horrible people that look like me and people that are allies to me and mine were treated. I’ve seen archive footage and listened to my mother talk about the discrimination she faced growing up as a teenager /young woman in 1960s NYC. The stories and the footage moved me, but this movie –
This was something else.
Selma needs to be required viewing (in schools and in life) because people need to look and see that we’ve come far but in some ways, we haven’t come far enough.
The Sandman: My Ultimate Problematic Fave
The first time I read The Sandman, I was twelve years old.
I came into it a bit late because the first issues were published before I was even born (and I think the series had already ended by then as well), but I knew from the first time I picked up the graphic novel at my local library, that I was going to read all of it. I had a history with books that weren’t age appropriate and I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to take it out, but the public system in my neck of South Florida has always been a little lax when it came to graphic novel rating.
As much as I feel a little appalled at how easy it was for me to get books I really shouldn’tve been reading, I feel a little thankful to the library for their lax attitude towards monitoring who was taking out what. If not for librarians too out of the know to realize that Batman: Red Rain was a gorefest of epic and kind of awful proportions, I doubt I’d be the person that I am today.
Certainly, without Red Rain as my gateway to graphic novels, I wouldn’t have known about The Sandman.Read More »
Bond Girl: For Your Eyes Only
This week’s Bond Girl post focuses on the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. Here’s an excerpt: For Your Eyes Only isn’t like that and that’s surprising. This is the twelfth Eon Productions Bond film and Roger Moore’s fifth. Like the two films before it, it pulls from different sources and doesn’t have one Fleming […]
When Amazon gift cards attack
A few weeks ago I won a $25 gift card through a program I’m running on my computer. It’s a little thing and not a big deal. I completely forgot about it though until yesterday afternoon when I got mail and there was my gift card.
$25 can buy a lot of books so it’s no wonder that I have spent the past 24 hours trying to figure out what books I was going to buy. Finally, I settled on four books that came up to $27 (including like tax and stuff). I’m a little over my gift card’s limit but essentially I’m getting four awesome books on someone else’s dime (and supporting authors I LOVE in the process!)
Here’s what I got with my hard earned gift card because these are all amazing books that everyone should read:
Grayson #9 – A List
I am really into making lists right now so here are 9 things that I loved, liked, or lost time thinking about while reading (and rereading) Grayson #9.Read More »
Another day, another bland MCU casting
I’m sure that Tom Holland will do an admirable job as Spider-Man in the MCU.
What I’m also sure of is that we really didn’t need another white teenage version of Peter Parker. This is our third live action Spider-Man and it’s not like they’re going to do anything different about this film to warrant this casting decision.
Peter Parker’s backstory is set in stone.
You do the character as a teenager just starting out and you have to do it all over again: the deaths of his parents, the loss of Uncle Ben, betrayal at the hands of his friend Harry, and him coming to terms with his new powers. I’m all for superhero origin stories but not when we’ve gotten five Spider-Man films in the past twelve years with two of those films revolving around the same main plots of Peter’s life.
At this point, Peter Parker as a teenager just isn’t interesting.Read More »
Bond Girl: Moonraker
This week’s Bond Girl recap was about the strangely unsatisfying Moonraker.
This movie is just very derivative for me and it’s not a good feeling because James Bond movies are two hours long.
Two hours are a lot of time to spend watching overused tropes in a plot that we basically explored in the last movie. This is honestly the first of Moore’s movies where I kept checking the clock and hoping that it was almost over because it was in turns boring and annoying.
How is this one of the highest grossing Bond films?
To read more, head on over to The Mary Sue for Bond Girl: Re-Watching and Re-Evaluating and give it a read. There you’ll find snark, complaining about the major holes in the villain’s master plan, and the odd historical reference.
Feel free to comment too (because that would be awesome!!).
And as always, come and talk my ear off about James Bond movies over on twitter!
Father’s Day
My mother may have taught me to read, but I would be nowhere far in nerddom (or in life, really) if not for my father.
Bond Girl: The Spy Who Loved Me
This might be my favorite James Bond movie.
At the very least, it’s definitely one of the best Bond movies in Roger Moore’s run.
It definitely has my favorite Bond villain and one of the most amazing Bond girls in the entire franchise. It also has the best shark-related scene in the franchise – a scene that blows the one from Thunderball out of the water.
The Spy Who Loved Me is the tenth film in Eon Production’s James Bond series and Roger Moore’s third film in the franchise. The only thing it has in common with Fleming’s original novel is the title and perhaps a few henchmen made larger than life for the film. The Spy Who Loved Me has a storyline that involves billionaire megalomaniac Karl Stromberg (Curd Jürgens), who plans to destroy the world and create a new and perfect world under the sea. Of course, a plan that strange can’t be allowed to stand and so James Bond teams up with Russian agent Major Anya Amasova/Agent Triple X (Barbara Bach) to take him down.
To read more, head on over to The Mary Sue for Bond Girl: Re-Watching and Re-Evaluating The Spy Who Loved Me and feel free to talk my ear off about James Bond movies over on twitter!
On Christopher Lee
The thing about Christopher Lee’s death that gets me good is when I think about how much a staple he’s been in my life as a history nerd and a film buff. He’s been in a huge chunk of films that I’ve watched, loved, and analyzed the hell out of. Hell, I’ve watched movies just because he was in them and I wound up loving them. (And some of those movies were truly terrible besides…)
It’s so weird but I keep saying that I’m going to miss him. I’ve been talking about him like I knew him beyond what I’ve seen of him in his movies and I know it’s super weird but I can’t stop because he was in so much of the things I watched. He was pretty much in everything. He was the scariest dude on screen more often than not and his Dracula was the best I’ve ever seen.
I mean… it was just last week that I was watching him as Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun. When I saw the first tweets about it from Tor yesterday morning and then clicked through to the webpage, I was crushed. I’m still crushed.
But I keep reminding myself Christopher Lee lived a long life. More than that, he lived an amazing life that was rich and fill of adventure in its entirety. He’s what action heroes could’ve and probably should’ve been like. Geez. I can’t think about him without wanting to marvel at the life he lived. He’s a history major’s dream figure because he did so much, lived so much, was so much.
The world will truly be a truly poorer place without him.
Street Harassment SUCKS!
You know those old Tex Avery cartoons with the wolf like Swing Shift Cinderella or Red Hot Riding Hood?
They’re the ones where the overly amorous horndog wolf makes an actual fool of himself over a woman that isn’t interested in him in the slightest. He hoots, he hollers. He bangs on the table and howls at the moon like he doesn’t have anything better to do with himself than make loud noises to harass women.
Picture those cartoons in your head.
Picture them real good.
That’s what I had to deal with on my way to work this morning.
Stitch's Media Mix 
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