You Only Live Twice

I don't consider myself a 007 officionado. Hell, I haven't even seen all of the movies; and I couldn't really tell you alot about the plots for the ones that I have seen. Except for one - a perfect Bond movie all by itself - "You Only Live Twice". I finally recently procured this film, one of my all-time favorites, for a whopping $5 from Amazon. Without argument, this is the best Bond flick ever made (runner-up would be last year's "Casino Royale"), and Sean Connery was hands-down the quintessential best actor to ever don the Walther PPK and the dry martini. If you would like to challenge me on that statement, I'll happily go a few rounds with you. And what makes YOLT so special to me is that the majority of the film is set in Japan, with a focus on Japanese culture that does not parody it. Consider the year this film came out - 1967 - Japan at that point had had 20 years of almost lightspeed industrialization and rebuilding after being all but destroyed during WWII. So this film, if you think about it, represents one of the very first forerunners of the West's modern fascination with Japanese culture - that's pretty culturally groundbreaking considering the bloody course of events which had transpired barely a quarter of a century earlier. But sociological points aside, this movie has several other great aspects - e.g. a fantastic soundtrack by composer John Barry (with the title track hauntingly crooned by Nancy Sinatra - see my playlist below), a great sense of mid-century style (note the beautiful Eames-esque furnishings in the Osato Chemicals head office - it killed me to see Bond toss those chairs around like throw pillows), fashion (mod suits galore!), and originality (what villain up to that point had his headquarters in a hollowed-out volcano?). Not only that, but look at all of the great fodder it provided Mike Meyers to spoof in all of the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil is Blofeld! See also Pixar's "The Incredibles" - plenty of YOLT influence there as well. I'm sure there's plenty of other movies out there that have also been subconsciously inspired by this film. Yes, I'm totally otaku about this movie!