36. Shotgun a beer.

I shotgunned a tallboy of Keith's at Andrea's last night. I'm glad I had some old hands nearby to tell me to stand in the shower.


The Spy Who Loved me is the third film to star Roger Moore as Bond. I found that it borrowed quite liberally from From Russia With Love and even Thunderball to certain extents. I don't understand the Broccolis' obsession with underwater sequences. Since being underwater never allows for quick movement, the sequences tend to drag. I will say that it's a pretty good film, though. While there's no obvious injection of outside genre this time around, Moore stays solid as Bond, and the women in the film are ridiculously gorgeous. Barbara Bach is a Russian agent meant to parallel Bond as his female opposite, but she doesn't have the same chops. Wide-eyed and beautiful, she doesn't have Bond's wit, and what a better film it would have been if she had, since The Spy Who Loved Me rotates on the axis of their relationship.

Location-wise, it's astounding. The scenes shot in Egypt are breathtaking as Bond and Amasova weave in between ancient pillars and structures trying to steal a valuable microfilm back from the enormous hands of Jaws. And Jaws is one bad, indestructible dude. He survives a collapsing building, being thrown from a train, electrocution, being shot in the head, and drowning in a sinking city. And oh yeah, he kills a shark with his bare hands.

Maybe that's the obsession with shooting underwater. The Broccolis must have had some sort of bizarre shark fetish. This is the third or fourth Bond film to present sharks as a threat. And Bond often ends up adrift at sea at the end of his adventures. Is it cheaper to shoot at sea? It doesn't seem likely. With so many places in the world to visit, I'm hoping they give it up soon.

I've heard that one of the reasons why the Bond franchise starts to tank is because it gets too obsessed with gadgets at the expense of story. This is really the first film in which I've started to notice it. There's a bit of an extended sequence where the agents walk through a testing ground for Q's latest inventions. Pretty cool if gratuitous. And Bond is paying less and less attention to Q. There's a scene in which he jumps into a car and pretty much gives Q a "Whatever, I'll figure it out" before taking off. We all know Bond is the man, so just give him the buttons to push and let him be on his way.