Queue Tips: No Means No

So this is the first installment of the James Bond films.  Spoiler alert: it starts with a guy being shot in broad daylight and then his body taken away.  Quick and easy.  So then, later on when the bad guys decide to try to kill Bond, they decide to put drop a tarantula on him while he is sleeping.  Really?  A spider?  Who kills with a spider, honestly?  Like, what is this, a trained tarantula?  How did they know it actually intended to bite him?  What if he wasn't in the mood?

I did appreciate it for what it was.  Old school film making.  Rear screen projection.  Day for night scenes.  Practical effects.  Misogyny.  Stereotypes.

You can see the appeal, of course.

If Dr. No had been Japanese, his name would have meant Dr. Of.  Doctor of what?  LOL.  But he was Chinese.  Played by a white guy.  I used Google translate, and apparently in Chineses, No means No.  But not to James Bond.  The irony.  

My dad was a big fan of these films.  I think he fancied himself to be like James Bond.  After my mom moved to the United States, their underlying marital problems was exacerbated.  He accused her of being unfaithful.  In one of their arguments, he stated that he knew what it was like in America because he's seen it in the movies.

Anyway, the "T-minus 10 seconds and counting" countdown thing was definitely a familiar thing that I recalled seeing as a child.  My cousins and I would typically repeat it during our games that we would play.  I feel like that has been in other Bond movies.  If not, I guess I must have seen Dr. No as a child then.

I don't think we knew the order the movies came out.  Sometimes we didn't know which actor we would be seeing.  At least, us kids didn't.  We didn't care either way though.  We didn't know what was going on most of the time.  We just knew there was the hero and the bad guys.  And the action sequences were pretty cool.

As an adult, I still think the stunts are pretty impressive.  The fight scenes are not.  (One punch usually knocks out a henchman.  At one point, they hold down James Bond to beat him up, and the guy chops him in the neck.)  The plot and the devices are a bit silly.  It really is just a live action cartoon, if you think about it.  I think that's probably not the first time that's been said.  I guess it's not the last either.

I didn't catch whether Dr. No was a doctor of medicine, or dentistry, or if he earned a PhD and where.  I do like the 1960s sci-fi look though.  And film stock and film grain is just glorious.  No matter what you think of the plot, it must have been an amazing experience at the theatre.