diane learns the limits of how far she can walk.
This is the crack team that foils my every plan? I am deeply shamed.
Exxon and Mobil got the okay to merge today. (Because each of them wasn't large enough on its own, I guess.) What company did these two used to be part of?
Bonus question: what does WTO stand for, anyhow?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
Yesterday I walked over to the nearby theater to see The World Is Not Enough, which Darin had already seen with Fernando. Taking walks is an interesting business these days. For one, it involves being away from a bathroom for an extended period of time, which is already dicey (and evidently will just get more so, as Bug continues to push my bladder into a smaller and smaller area).
For another, walking leaves me with a sensation that there's a heavy weight stuck in my lower groin, which is probably an accurate picture of what's going on down there, but it leaves a bizarre feeling nonetheless. I already feel a bit off balance when I'm walking. I'm not aware of this sensation at all just walking around the house, because I intersperse walking with sitting or lying down. It's only on long walks I get this "heavy weight" sensation.
I liked The World Is Not Enough, though I was left feeling that it could have been so much better. The key to any James Bond movie, of course, is the attractiveness quotient of the guy playing Bond, and I rather like Pierce Brosnan. Which is why I don't like the Roger Moore movies -- it's not so much the snarkiest factor as the "Not on a dare" factor.
I'd like to tell you the plot of The World Is Not Enough, but that's one of the weaknesses of the movie -- it's ridiculously overcomplex, which overshadows some of the major points it could have hit. Is the villain doing their thing because of the power the end result will produce? To create anarchy? For love? Doing it for love is the neatest twist on the whole Bond formula here, but it's really underplayed.
Sir Robert King, mega-billionaire, is murdered. Bond is assigned to protect King's daughter, Electra (Sophie Marceau), who was kidnapped a number of years previously by Bad Guy Renard (Robert Carlyle, mostly wasted). Bond suspects that Renard is behind the murder of King and thinks he's after Electra again too, so he jets off to Azerbaijan, where Electra is finishing her father's greatest project, a gigantic oil pipeline. There's malarkey with Russian gangsters (primarily Robbie Coltrane, back from Goldeneye) and somehow Russian nukes figure into it, but I wasn't quite sure how. I just went along with it.
Bond, of course, untangles all of this handily, keeping as close to Electra as he can to protect her while checking the figures of noted nuclear scientist Denise Richards (easily the silliest woman in a Bond flick for a while).
Explosions, seductions, cool gadgets, and John Cleese as the venerable Q's replacement R. It's not deep -- here it is, 24 hours later, and I can't tell you the story -- but I enjoyed myself, much as I do at all Bond films. (Though I didn't care for Tomorrow Never Dies, if that gives you a gauge.) The commercialism is still there, though it seemed to be a bit more muted this time than in previous ones. Of course, I learned that Volvo makes boats.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com