It’s another of those crazy-making weeks that offers little chance to blog (and naturally, these are the weeks when I seem to have the most I want to blog about — this is an immensely frustrating situation, believe me), so to keep you entertained until I manage to actually, you know, write something, allow me to direct your attention to Jaime J. Weinman’s rationalization of how he can call Moonraker the dumbest James Bond movie ever (even over Die Another Day!) and yet still feel a certain affection for it:

…it’s just so very good-natured and unpretentious in its desire to do anything to entertain; it wants you to like it so badly and will do anything to be liked, whether it’s repeating the plot of a movie made two years earlier or turning a psychotic killer into a kid-friendly romantic comedy lead. I can’t help but be a little charmed by a movie that’s so anxious to be loved; today, when a blockbuster movie is bad, it’s just loud and obnoxious, demanding our attention rather than giving us beautiful things to look at. Moonraker is like [director] Lewis Gilbert’s home movies reel of cool stuff [production designer] Ken Adam built; that’s enough to keep it out of Die Another Day purgatory.

For the record, I, too, harbor some warm feelings for Moonraker. It was the first Bond movie I ever saw; my mother took me and a half-dozen of my friends to see it for my tenth birthday. She was mortified by all the innuendo in the dialogue, certain that she would be getting some nasty phone calls from other mothers once my buddies started repeating things we’d heard, but we didn’t care about all that mushy stuff — in those days of the post-Star Wars space-movie craze, we were only there for the shuttles and lasers.

You might also want to check out I Expect You to Die!, an entertaining blog whose proprietor is reviewing one Bond flick a week until the release of the next one, Quantum of Solace, this fall. He’s also doing additional commentary on certain related issues, such as the amusing (and dead-on) observation that the Bond-o-verse invariably presents Americans as bumbling yokels, and yet American audiences love the series anyhow.

I hope to be back later today with some thoughts on last weekend’s concert experience…