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David McK (3695 KP) rated From Russia With Love (1964) in Movies

May 8, 2023

From Russia With Love (1964)

1964 | Action, Classics, Mystery

7.8

(19 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Only the second (ever) Bond film, this is very much a product of its time (as are the books), complete with the Cold War setting.

Here, Bond is sent to Istanbul to obtain a decoding machine from a Russian defector in what is obviously a honey trap, but there are strings being pulled behind the scenes by SPECTRE - the organisation itself only name-dropped in the previous film - who are out for revenge for the defeat of Dr No in the previous film.

This is the film with the cringe worthy Gypsy encampment fight.

On the other hand, it's also the one with Roas Klebb and her shoes ...

Kudos

Sharpe's Storm (Richard Sharpe #19)

Bernard Cornwell

8.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

Book

A gripping novel featuring the legendary Richard Sharpe from Bernard Cornwell, the internationally...

Purrsistently (46 KP) rated Hospital Sketches in Books

Jun 21, 2018

It was a good thing to have read but it strongly underscored a painfully ignorant romanticized view of war that Americans are so fond of. She did not see children shot on the road in cold blood, she did not see officers give their men permission to rape any woman who disrespected them. She did not see the pow camps, did not see grandmothers and babies dead of exposure in the snow. She did not see the factory worker women (largely woc) kidnapped, raped over many days, and then abandoned hundreds of miles from home with nothing. There were no “white saviors” here or anywhere. War is not Romantic. Even the “Just Cause” lies on a bed of sending boys with little (if any) stake in the disagreement to maim and kill and torture other boys like themselves because old men can’t be bothered to work out their disputes at a table and instead delight in laying waste to their Nation’s youth.

Kudos

David McK (3695 KP) rated Ice Station Zebra in Books

Jan 30, 2019

Cold-War set thriller, by an author that (for some reason) I associate more with World War 2 settings, this concerns the journey of the Atomic submarine Dolphin to the Arctic, in order to rescue the survivors of the adrift Ice Staion of the title.

I also feel that this could be split into 3 very distinct sections - the journey to the Arctic, the search and rescue of the survivors, and the journey back, with it transpiring in the middle section that the Ice Station had been sabatoged, rather than just plain unlucky, and with it furhter being revealed in the final section that the saboteour is still alive and on the sub ...

While it may be slightly dated now (in that the USSR is no longer in existence) and in some of the state-of-the-(then)-art technology, this is still an enjoyable read once you put yourself into the right mindset!