Bond flicks: for your eyes only

[doubleoLisa]

Lenore doesn't like Bond movies at all. I thought it would be curious to see what you guys would say for a response.

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Article published Jul 9, 2009

Bond flicks: for your eyes only
Lenore
Skomal
Some people will live their entire lives without ever leaving Erie. Others will live their lives without ever coming to Erie. And there will be the rare, oh-so-sad few, who won't even know Erie exists. Life is like that. One man's boring routine is another man's "Are you nuts?" It is part of the wonderful, variegated shades of living on this planet.
What people like and dislike depends on taste. Or as my father used to call it, "What makes Johnny run."
I think he meant motivation. At their most basic, motivations can power the simplest yet sometimes hard-to-maintain goals, such as being able to put food on the table and pay the cable bill.
And in paying the cable bill, you can perhaps enable yet another motivation -- being able to watch endless reality television. Or, if you are a male living in my house, back-to-back James Bond marathons.
I have never watched a James Bond movie. I loathe them. Which of course begs the question from you, the ever-astute reader: If you've never seen them, how do you know you don't like them?
To me, that's like being asked if you'd like to free fall off a sheer cliff; some things you just know aren't for you.
It's not personal. I have nothing against Sean Connery, Robert Moore, Pierce Brosnan, or the other guys. It's just a very simple matter of taste. The movies all have roughly the same plot and James Bond doesn't die in any of them. Right?
I wanted to calculate just how much time I have saved in my life by not watching these movies.
Trying to find the official number of James Bond movies in order to calculate this was vexing. Some in the blogosphere say 21. Wikipedia pegs the number at 22. Using the latter, if the average movie runs two and a half hours, that's roughly two and one third days of my life that haven't been spent with James Bond.
I was once almost suckered into watching "Goldfinger," lured by a scene where someone named Oddjob breaks necks with his steel-rimmed bowler hat. But I didn't succumb. I saw only the five seconds when this actually happened and then left wondering why I did.
It's not like this "Just say no to James Bond" is a died-in-the-wool principle I have cemented myself into.
It just sort of happened over time. But I have found that some people, mostly men, view it as a character defect; a flaw in my personal makeup.
After all, I have no Bond repertoire in my arsenal from which to draw. Except for "shaken, not stirred," I know of nothing Bondian with which to impress.
But lest you worry that I have no spy who loved me, I did learn this: You only live twice so therefore you can live to die another day.
Sadly, even with this knowledge, you often realize that the world is not enough. So you might as well just live and let die.
LENORE SKOMAL writes every Thursday in the Erie Times-News.

[katied]

To use one of my favorite phrases, "To each his/her own". I like the Bond films,but I was exposed to them from a young age,so that may have something to do with it.

[oscartheman]

It takes all kinds.I've heard stuff like this all my life.Too bad this is the kind of thinking behind hiring Craig.

[katied]

I find Sean Connery incredibly attractive, even though he's almost old enough to be my grandfather.

[carl stromberg]

I knew lots of people and critics who hated the James Bond series. These people love the Craig Bond films (or probably just CR): what does that tell us!

[Mazer Rackham]

I knew lots of people and critics who hated the James Bond series. These people love the Craig Bond films (or probably just CR): what does that tell us!

Precisely. I know some of the type of lads in the business. Some of whome think the Craig Bond is even more obscene than the Connery Bond series (1962-2002) since in their minds at least the Connery Bonds had a semblance of a pedigree.
I am sort of surprised this strumpet didn't give the Craig mockery a exemption.

[CaptainLewis]

It's not personal. I have nothing against Sean Connery, Robert Moore, Pierce Brosnan, or the other guys.

Well, Lenore didn't even get Roger Moore's name right! Who is Robert Moore?