Bringing Back That Lovin' Feelin', or Rebooting the Seventies

When I was discussing this follow up blog hop with Caroline, what immediately came to mind was James Bond. Because what franchise has been more sensitive to the ebbs and flows of time and favor? In English: Dude, they’ve been making movies for 55 years, so obviously some of them are going to be better than others.

When Bond is good, he’s very good, and Sean Connery was a tough act for everyone after him to follow. When people think of Bond, his is the image that pops into their heads. And well it should.

I’ve already written about how Jack Lord stole the show in Dr. No, but only just barely. I have no problem publicly admitting that teenage me watched that whole movie wide-eyed (and maybe with my mouth slightly open). Connery’s Bond was smart, clever (unless he was up against Felix Leiter), tough, and, well, incredibly easy on the eyes.

Just hanging out

I lusted after the 1962 version of Connery in 1990. There, I said it. But he wasn’t the only thing that made Dr. No a really good movie. The plot was discernible (people, if you’ve seen Bond movies since then, you know what I’m talking about), the opening sequence (both the music and the action) was contemporary and even bordered on suspenseful, and Jamaica, while being both fun and cosmopolitan, made sense as a location for all kinds of nefarious activity in the ex-pat community.

The Bond Girl by which all others are measured

And...Ursula Andress did not suck as the Good Bond Girl. Yes, yes, yes, her character's name is Honey Ryder (get it???), she’s only half-dressed for the majority of the movie, and she’s one of Bond’s more naive companions. (And, as an aside, I’m probably not the only one who spent a couple of years comparing my body to hers.) But she could also take care of herself, beyond being willing to draw a knife on Bond when she met him. When she told him how she slowly killed her rapist with a poisonous spider, even he was taken aback.

Dr. No was an almost perfect Bond movie, so of course everything that followed suffered a little bit by comparison. And sadly, it must be said that the late Roger Moore changed Bond, and not for the better. His movies made Bond seem a hell of a lot more cerebral than he had been before, but not in the good way. And the camp factor was off the charts; I’m talking Adam West’s Batman campiness, you know? Having seen Moore in The Saint, I continue to scratch my head about the choices the writers and producers made: he had a proven ability to be suave, smart, and scrappy/street fighter tough. He could have been a really great Bond, but instead he’s the one we associate with the cringiness of the franchise.

So much potential

One of the worst Bonds ever made, on so many different levels

My enthusiasm for the two Bonds who followed was hampered as much by low expectations as it was by the times they were made in. Timothy Dalton is another actor who has done a really good job in many other things (if you haven’t already seen him in Hot Fuzz, stop reading this and go watch it right now), but the tone of his Bond was off; it was almost as if he was pushed a little bit to the background of the movies. And while I loved Pierce Brosnan on Remington Steele (when is someone going to revive that?), they also played him a little too campy and sarcastic. The fierce and deadly factor Connery brought to the screen was gone.

We are not screwing around anymore

And then it wasn’t. I have to admit, I didn’t have high hopes when I heard that Daniel Craig was cast as the next Bond, but maybe that’s why I’ve been so happy with him. Let’s agree that while  they got rid of a lot of the camp they might have done it at the expense of the character’s humor; now let’s say that in the times we live in maybe we don’t have the luxury of laughing at messy world relations. Bond and the rest of MI6 are taking their jobs very seriously now, and Craig’s version of the character is deadly, haunted, and ready to pounce at any moment.

She almost can't be called a Bond Girl

This is the first time we’ve gotten a close look at the psyche of Bond, and it’s about as pretty as you’d expect for an assassin. And while this Bond sleeps around about as much as the others, his romantic entanglements are likelier to get under his skin. His affair with the doomed Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) was intense (and convincing) enough that we can understand why it took three more films to exorcise her.

This is also the first time I’ve been enthusiastic about his whole team. M (first Judi Dench, then Ralph Fiennes), Q (Ben Whitshaw), and even Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) are badass on their own, and they put Bond in his place a little more forcefully than their predecessors. Good. And even Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) is bringing more force and complexity to the role than we’ve seen since, well, Jack Lord’s version.

The films haven’t been perfect: there’s something a little too serious and dark about some of the last few, to the point where it feels like they’re trying to be “better” than a Bond film with all of the psychosis. Just be Bond, that’s all we want.

Bond’s an example of something that started strong out of the gate and then lost focus before it got it back. On the other hand, Battlestar Galactica is something that started out in the Seventies with silly written all over it and then found its footing decades later to be the great show we always believed it could be.

One big happy family...

The premise for both the Seventies and Aughts version is the same: a small group of pantheistic human beings have just barely escaped annihilation (dare we say, genocide?) at the hands of the Cylons, a race of robots or cyborgs that humans built but quickly lost control of, assisted by the treacherous Gaius Baltar. The best promise for what’s left of the human race is the mythical planet Earth, and Captain Adama is in charge of finding it while he evades Cylon attempts to finish their job.

The Seventies version made it one season, and it was foolish very quickly. There was a lot of emphasis on cute robots and pets, cameos (e.g., Fred Astaire!), and clunky standalone plots that were reminiscent of the third season of Star Trek: The Original Series. It was an example of something that showed a lot of promise and got a lot of buzz, but by the time it was canceled many viewers were already done.

but they might kill each other before the Cylons can

By contrast, the rebooted BSG was uncomfortable to watch from the first episode on, when newly installed President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) chose to abandon several ships so the rest of the fleet could escape. In this reboot, Gaius Baltar (James Callis) had no idea that he was dealing with the Cylons—in part because his contact was a gorgeous woman, Six (Tricia Helfer). Finding out that the Cylons now looked like humans added an element of suspense throughout the series, especially as we tried to figure out the identities of the last five “models”. Trying to figure out what the Cylons really wanted (“the plan”) was also a big hook, never mind that one of the executive producers recently admitted that they didn’t really have a master plan. The truth was that they wanted many things, and chief among them was to be able to create new models: i.e., have children.

You don’t run a compelling series strictly on the back of protagonist and antagonist. The humans were frequently at cross-purposes with each other, whether it was murky family dynamics (Captain Bill Adama was an absentee father to Commander Lee “Apollo” Adama), personal demons (the only person more screwed up than Colonel Saul Tigh was Lieutenant Kara “Starbuck” (!) Thrace), and messy relationships (Callie loves Galen, who loves Sharon, who’s really a Cylon, and one of her copies, Athena, loves Helo; Kara and Lee have been fighting feelings for each other since she was his late brother’s fiancee; Gaius is so obsessed with Six that she comes to him in prophetic visions; Tigh’s wife Ellen frequently carouses with other men, in part because he’s always been more devoted to his job—and Bill—than he is to their marriage; etc.). And then there was the dizzying politics and philosophy: President Roslin and Captain Adama’s (Edward James Olmos) frequent clashes over the best course for their people; Roslin’s decision to fix an election to stop Baltar and then her subsequent confession; terrorist-turned-vice president-turned-terrorist Tom Zarek (the late Richard Hatch, who played Apollo in the original version); the question of whether terrorism was justified when a colony was overrun by Cylons; and whether torture is justified when it’s a matter of life and death (watch the award-nominated episode "Pegasus" before you answer). And that’s just some of it.

It was a show that asked uncomfortable, timely questions, and that’s why so many of us couldn’t stop watching (Portlandia captured perfectly what happened to me and my husband one weekend). There were a lot of complaints about the ending, and maybe it was wrapped in too neat a bow, but it was still something I loved so much that I’ve forgotten how much the original disappointed me.

Thank you for reading! Please let me know in the comments what you think of old and new Bond and BSG in the comments, and then head on over to Jami for the last edition of the Bring Back That Lovin’ Feelin’ blog hop.

An American story

I can be critical of Boston, and especially critical of Boston politicians (you might have noticed that in The Golden Boy Returns). But when we're good, we're very good, and we are good this week.

You can head to this link to see what Massachusetts' Republican Governor and Boston's Democratic Mayor have to say about what happened last weekend in Charlottesville, but it's exactly what you'd expect: we are saddened, we stand in solidarity with another municipality that was thrown into chaos, and we're disappointed by the lack of moral leadership we've seen at the federal level.

Why am I putting this here? Because I write about a multi-ethnic group of friends and lovers who manage to be imperfect people without being racist. I titled my series The New Pioneers because they are young Americans trying to make it through the 21st century: new immigrants, old blue bloods, and many variations in between. They suffer through unique challenges, but the one thing that's true is that they are always better when they work together. That is the American story.

The Boston Common: it's been there and done that

Why else am I putting this here? Because saying you're disgusted by neo-Nazis and white supremacists should be the least controversial thing anyone can say.

Boston is not Shangri-La. The day after this is published, we're going to have a rally on the Boston Common that will feature some of the "luminaries" that came to speak in Charlottesville last week. Those speakers disgust me, but I'm glad they can speak: let the ugliness come out in a bright light so we don't have to worry about it festering in the dark. And because we watched what happened last weekend, we're taking precautions to make sure the same violence doesn't happen here. (Spoiler alert: you have the right to say horrible things without fear of being imprisoned, but you don't have the right to bring weapons with you when you do.)

It's not perfect, but it's the best we can do. And that's part of the American story too.

The Bringing Back That Lovin’ Feelin’ Blog Hop

Earlier this year, a couple of friends and I talked about old loves we needed to walk away from. As much as I'm a strong believer in moving on, I also love a good reunion story, so we're taking a stab at things we ultimately couldn't keep away from later in August.

Some things get better with age...after they get, you know, worse

Here's the schedule below. Watch this space for details, visit these guys and say hi, and let us know what you loved, lost, and then regained.

Morgan: 8/26

Kerrie: 8/27

Caroline: 8/28

Deb: 8/29

Jami: 8/30

Me Fat You Skinny: The Inner Beauty Project (Book 1 of 2) by L.A. Leidy

Avery Michaels is very pretty and attractive, but she is also a curvy girl—a size twelve on a good day, but most of her clothes are a comfortable size fourteen. When she is offered a creative director job at a modeling agency, she had to think about it for like a whole day. I mean she’s clumsy, a little insecure and self-deprecating—she accepts.

Within a week, Avery is flying to Paris to help with the agency’s largest campaign called Inner Beauty. The photographer had been struggling to portray the concept on film--that was until he met Avery. Getting caught in the middle of his past was not part of the job but neither was falling for him. 

Avery has to navigate through a world of smoke and mirrors to find that who she is on the inside matters more than she realized. She never knew what her inner beauty was until someone showed her in the grandest of ways. 

Me Fat You Skinny, the Inner Beauty Project is book one of a two part series.

Instafreebie Preview | For sale on Amazon for .99 cents

L.A. Leidy creates stories that are light-hearted, fun and relatable. She often finds herself falling for the characters she creates. The complexity of life mixed with raw emotions. She enjoys twisting their lives around for the greater good. Now add a little bit of drama, suspense and of course a love story and you have the perfect recipe for a compelling story.

L.A. Leidy is a northern girl transplanted to the south. She feels unconditional love from her husband, young son and a fat cat that snores under her feet while she writes.

Me Fat You Skinny and One Last Game are the debut series for L.A. Leidy.

If you would like to know more about L.A. Leidy, please check out her official website at www.laleidyauthor.com  

You can also find L.A. Leidy on several social media sites:
Twitter: @laleidy_author
Instagram: l.a.leidy_author
Facebook @laleidyauthor

Prophecy of Solstice's End by Diantha Jones (Oracle of Delphi #3) -- Cover Reveal

Readers of this blog know that I love Diantha Jones' work, so I'm pleased to help reveal her new cover for Prophecy of Solstice's End. This new cover gives a taste of how fierce Chloe is as she comes into her own, but to get a better taste, go pick up the book! 

Prophecy of Solstice's End

Oracle of Delphi #3

By Diantha Jones 

BLURB:  Summer Solstice is here. Let the games begin. Nothing but lies (some of them her own) and deceit have brought Chloe to Olympus for the Solstice Olympic Games. As the Oracle and the special guest of the King of Myth, Chloe becomes immersed in a life of unfathomable luxury, taunting history, and overwhelming excitement. Though scheming and untrustworthy, the gods remain on their best behavior as the tension and anticipation builds around the outcome of the Quest of the Twelve Labors, the deadliest competition of the Games. All seems well on the celestial front...until athletes start turning up dead and a philosopher missing for months returns with a most terrifying story... But that’s not all. As Strafford confronts his troubled past and more is learned about the Great Unknown Prophecy, Chloe grows close to another, setting off a chain of events that will bring her face-to-face with a truth that will rock both of her worlds to their core. And it’ll all happen before Solstice’s end...

  Book Links: Amazon  | B&N | Goodreads

Author Bio: Diantha Jones loves writing fantasy books filled with adventure, romance, and magic. She's the author of the Oracle of Delphi series, the Mythos series, and the Djinn Order series (as A. Star). When she isn’t writing or working, she is reading or being hypnotized by Netflix. She is a serious night-owl and while everyone else is grinning in the warmth and sunlight, she’s hoping for gloominess and rain. Yeah, she’s weird like that.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Goodreads (A. Star) | Amazon | Pinterest | DJ's Book Corner

Don't worry, I still love some things

I can be a snarky critic, but when something impresses, I'm a natural enthusiast. I can't have you read my last post and leave you with the impression that I'm looking at everything skeptically. Here's a list of what's currently knocking my socks off on TV. (Check my Amazon profile if you want to see what I'm loving in books.)

Legion Oh my god, this show. We're five episodes into an eight episode season, I can't tell you exactly what's going on, but I can't stop watching. How much do I love this? I actually stay up to watch this at 10 PM because I might not be able to sleep anyway if I have to miss it. Dan Stevens, who's almost unrecognizable from Downton Abbey, is David Haller, a super powerful mutant whose power (consciousness? brain? reality?) has been food for some kind of creature (another mutant?) since he was a young boy, and it's screwing with his mental health. Is he imagining everything we've seen since the first episode? Or is reality this disconcerting to someone with so much power? I can't tell you yet--hell, I can't even tell you when this is taking place--but I can't wait to find out. 

The Americans Another series on FX that's taking a much slower pace of storytelling, but it's just as engrossing. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are "Elizabeth and Philip Jennings" in the early 1980s, but they're really Soviet spies who have been here for decades and have gone full-on into their covers, including raising a family together. It's 1984 now, and the Cold War tensions are escalating. Elizabeth is a true believer and is willing to do anything to serve her homeland, while Philip has always tormented himself with questions before he does the same things. Giving them pause are their children, particularly daughter Paige (Holly Taylor), who knew something was off and had her worst theories confirmed. Elizabeth thinks they can be both good parents and patriots, but Philip knows that something is going to have to give. And that's just for starters. 

"Knock, knock"

The Young Pope I was as skeptical as everyone else about this series, and I was just as wrong. It's absurdist in part because nothing stays sub rosa for long, but part of its brilliance is its acknowledgement that everything changes eventually, even the Catholic Church, no matter how much the young, energetic pope can force his possible supernatural will over his minions. Jude Law is amazing--I need to be reminded that he's in fact British--as the man who's neither good nor bad but pure in it's most ruthless sense. 

Westworld Another example of someone taking a piece of Seventies schlock and turning it into an artistic masterpiece. How much consciousness does something have to have before it becomes immoral to treat it like a tool? And what does it say about someone who needs to play at inflicting pain in order to feel alive? Rachel Evan Wood, Thandie Netwon, Jeffrey Wright and Anthony Hopkins are mesmerizing as the people (and androids) both grappling with those questions and living out those consequences. 

Finally, while I don't get to movie theaters that much, I did get to see The Lego Batman Movie, and I was legitimately impressed. The whole movie is one big wink at superhero storytelling period, but it's brilliant in addition to being hilarious. And can we give a big shout out to the casting department, if only for casting Kate Micucci as Clayface? 

When the magic is gone: The I've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' Blog Hop

Thanks to Lanea Stagg for starting us off yesterday!

As for me, I'm a sentimental fool. Part of why Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” mantra was so life-changing is that my inclination is to keep things around me because of what they used to mean to me, never mind what they do for me in the here and now. So to be given permission to let something go without guilt is the most liberating thing I can think of.

Admittedly, this orientation brings me a little less joy when it comes to entertainment. Oh, how I love to grab a hot chocolate (LOL, hot chocolate when February brings a 68 degree day…) and let myself fall into an old favorite for a few hours. Why can’t everything just stay good?

A few months ago, I decided that I needed to watch Lawrence of Arabia. Having interviewed the author of a fabulous book about Lawrence a few years ago, I knew that the movie actually got a lot right, and there’s something to be said for accuracy in historical fiction. Yeah...and that’s why I could no longer abide Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal, Anthony Quinn as Auda, and Jose Ferrer as the Turkish Bey who assaulted Lawrence. All three are amazing actors, but after watching this film a number of times, I finally couldn’t get past them in what I’ll call Desert Tan Face. The fact that they’re in the same movie as the magnificent Omar Sharif only made it more difficult; even in the 1960s, there were known and talented actors from that part of the world. And considering what the story of T.E. Lawrence is really about—a sideshow to a sideshow can, in fact, have epic consequences, especially when mixed with a little noblesse oblige—it feels extra special wrong to have those actors playing those parts.

No

No

That's not insulting at all...

Well, there’s always the 1950s, and specifically 1950, which saw Born Yesterday, Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve (among many others). I was feeling like I needed a sassy, classy woman to guide me through my day, so obviously no one but Bette Davis could fit the bill. And since All About Eve was crowned winner in the 1951 Oscar race and I’d loved it before, I couldn’t go wrong.

Except of course I could. Maybe I’ve seen too many modern movies or just too much television, but Bette Davis, as incredible as she is, was over the top and not always in a good way. Her insecurities about being an aging woman are, sadly, as apropos today as they were sixty years ago, but Margo Channing’s diva act grated on my nerves. Not, however, enough to root for Eve Harrington, who was a masterful manipulator only because the weaknesses she had to exploit were so close to the surface of her victims, not because she was particularly brilliant. I can’t decide whether it’s Anne Baxter’s acting or the writing that made Eve’s scene with Addison DeWitt so unbelievable the second time around, but I cringed watching it.

On the plus side, Marilyn Monroe didn't make me wince

As I rued the expense of the two films I’d rented, I realized that this wasn’t the only time I’ve walked away from something I loved. When I was a high school sophomore, I thought The Scarlet Letter was the most thought-provoking book I’d ever read. The characters! The plot! The obsession with good, evil, and repentance! The ill-fated love between Hester and Roger! (And did I mention that Nathaniel Hawthorne was hot?) Be still my fifteen year old heart. So when I was assigned the book the next year at a different school, I was ecstatic...and then horribly disappointed. For whatever reason, the person who taught that book couldn’t stand the structure of the way it was written and seemed to feel that Hawthorne was obsessed with everything dark. Perhaps he was, but it was painful to sit through lessons taught by someone who couldn’t see anything redeeming about it. Since then, I haven’t been able to pick up the book again, and that’s probably when I began my policy to never re-read a book.

Sadly, the list of things I “can’t even” continues to grow. The soundtrack of Camelot? There’s, like, two songs I still like, and am I supposed to listen to them in an infinite loop? West Side Story? My twentieth time through, and I start wondering why the story couldn't have been Riff and Bernardo teaming up against those d-bags, Schrank and Krupke.

This is the couple I really mourn

And *deep breath* the last few times I've watched Star Trek: The Original Series, I've been genuinely upset over the number of stories they needed to shoehorn into existing costumes and sets, because a lot of times they didn't work that well. And then I watch some of my favorite episodes from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and I think Avery Brooks and Terry Farrell could have used a little more direction in their more dramatic scenes. There, I said it.

This was just stupid

Sisko was more dramatic than Kirk sometimes...

What we do is part of our identity, but so is what we love. It’s disconcerting—depressing, even—to not only fall out of love, but to change the standards by which we fall in love. (Maybe ST doesn’t do it for me anymore because I don’t think repressed, snarky guys like Spock are as hot as I used to.) Bear with me as I recalibrate.

Have you dropped anything you used to love? Want to defend West Side Story? Either way, let me hear from you in the comments below, and don't forget to catch Keri tomorrow (full schedule can be found here).