Tag: movies (Page 10 of 12)

Bond is back! After a long, long break, I finally dove into Pierce Brosnan’s first turn as Bond, GoldenEye, Tuesday night. Strangely, as I got deeper and deeper into the flick, I realized that I had never seen the entire movie. I’ve seen the beginning many times, and parts of the rest, but there were parts I’m sure I never saw. Weird, because I remember being pretty excited about the new era of Bond back in 1995.

After a lengthy delay due to various legal issues, Timothy Dalton jumped ship before serving as Bond for the third time. Which gave the production team a chance to finally get the man they’d coveted for 15 years, Brosnan. Fair or not, the failure to get Brosnan when Roger Moore retired doomed Dalton’s run before it began. So it’s safe to say there was a fair amount of pressure on Brosnan to deliver. For the most part, he did.

We open in the Soviet Union, in the mid-80s. Bond fearlessly runs across the top of a massive dam, hooks a line to the railing, and leaps over the side. Soon he is crawling around the interior of a chemical weapons plant, where he meets up with his partner, 006. They are placing explosives to blow the joint when they are discovered. 006 is murdered but 007, of course, makes a daring escape. On his way out, he chases a runaway aircraft, which hurtles over a cliff into the massive valley below. He leaps, somehow catches up, pulls himself in, takes the stick, and pulls the plane up at the last second.

We’re in good Bond territory here, with three levels of unrealism going on. 1) His single-handed escape from a heavily armed weapons plant. 2) The whole catching/saving the plane thing. 3) How he manages to get home safely from deep inside the Soviet Union in just a single propellor plane. Which is all fine. It feels like home again.

Brosnan isn’t the only big change, though. Soon we meet the new M, Judi Dench. She’s not just a new actor in the role, M has been redefined for the age. Where the old M came from the world of spooks, the new M is an accountant and pours through the numbers to justify missions. As with baseball today, the British intelligence service was split between the numbers people and the tools people in 1995. Maybe that’s where Michael Lewis got the inspiration for Moneyball!

Good old Q is still around and Bond drives a gorgeous Aston Martin DB5 early on. Joe Don Baker, who was evil guy Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights, returns as CIA agent Jake Wade this time. I like him better as a good guy than a bad guy, unless he’s being Chief Karlin. So we’ve got some solid connections to the past as well.

Bond is off to France and then St. Petersburg, chasing the bad guys, unwrapping the mystery, and eventually saving the day. As well as Brosnan does as Bond, the movie as a whole feels uneven. There are a few high points, but through much of the movie, I was wondering how the hell the pieces were supposed to fit together.

Sean Bean is forgettable as Alec Trevelyan/006. For all the areas where this movie pushes the franchise forward, it got a pretty boring villain.

Bond Girls

Izabella Scorupco as Natalya Simonova. We need more computer programers like her. Beautiful, modern, and fearless. A solid addition to the Bond Girl world.

Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp. From the Wikipedia: “A sadist, she enjoys torturing her enemies between her strong thights.” Awwww yeah! Onatopp is just the latest update on the psycho villain Bond Girl archetype. As our culture was beginning to become hyper-sexualized with the rise of the Internet, Onatopp is a perfect woman for the times. Her overt sexuality and brutality is way beyond what we’ve ever seen from an evil Bond girl in the past. For that alone, she’s one of the most memorable ones in the franchise’s history.

And for that, she deserved a better ending. Her demise is far too quick and easy.

Also a cameo by an about-to-breakout Minnie Driver as a singer in a St. Petersburg strip club. I hate to be that guy, but I was disappointed she kept her top on for the scene.

So what did I think about the movie? I like Brosnan as Bond quite a bit. He certainly looks the part and has a nice blend of suave sophistication and believability as a physical actor. That said, his performance feels a little forced at times. Not as in it being a stretch for him, but more than he’s playing the shit out of Bond to make up for lost time.

The supporting cast is mostly good. But there are a few gaps in the movie that distract quite a bit. The most notable is that explanation for how 006 made it from 1986 to 1995. There are other smaller ones though that kept making me think, “Wait, what?”

When the problems with the movie are in the story rather than the actor, that’s progress for the series though. Dalton tried hard but just wasn’t right for the job. Brosnan was the perfect man.

A couple other things:

There are two notable references to other movies. When Bond tells 006 that he’s nothing more than a common thief, that’s a straight pull from Die Hard. And the scene where 006 and 007 hang from the antenna support in Cuba is clearly cribbed from The Empire Strikes Back.

How many Bond movies have ended with an evil lair in flames? A lot, I bet.

There were a couple mentions of the Internet, which I bet a lot of people still knew nothing about in 1995.

Surely an evil genius computer programmer would use passwords more difficult to crack than “knackers” and “seat” for his most important programs, right?

Finally, remember when you could talk about Guantanamo Bay and it meant safety and freedom?

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I suppose it says volumes of the Timothy Dalton era that it’s taken me nearly three months to watch his two movies. In my defense the holidays, and the Christmas movie season, were right in the middle of that stretch. And the copy of The Living Daylights our library has is scratched so badly the disk does not play after 45 minutes. But still, there was not much enthusiasm about getting through these two films.

A quick refresher on how we got here. Roger Moore finally retired, even though EON wanted him back for two more (!) Bond films. I’m not sure what the hell they were thinking.

Eventually Welsh actor Timothy Dalton was selected to take over the role. The same man who turned down the part in 1967 because he felt he was too young to play Bond, and again in the late 70s because he didn’t like the direction the series had taken. Dalton was the first choice to replace Moore again in 1987, but turned it down a third time because of previous commitments. That led EON to Pierce Brosnan, who accepted the role, only to have to renege after NBC refused to let him out of his contract. By the time the Brosnan drama had played out, Dalton was free of his obligations, and finally accepted the role of 007.

Whew. Now on to the movies.

The Living Daylights

The producers took pains to drive home the point that Bond was still Bond as Timothy Dalton took the reins. He parachuted. He skied. He rode horses. He flew planes. I’m not sure how they didn’t get him into the water, but that would come soon enough.

What struck me most about Dalton’s first effort was how he was indeed taking Bond a new direction. Gone was the easy, eye-winking humor of the Moore era. It was not, though, replaced with a return to the brutal masculinity of the Connery era. He was still a secret agent, licensed to kill. But he seemed more vulnerable. And, in contrast to Daniel Craig’s Bond who is also vulnerable but hard and dangerous as well, Dalton comes across as soft. He stares, doe-eyed at his love interest. When he is angry or direct with others, it feels forced. I think Dalton was probably too nice a guy to play a cold-blooded killer like Bond.

The only truly memorable scene is late in the movie, as Bond fights bad guys on a Soviet cargo plane flying over Afghanistan. When he and nemesis Necros are hanging out the back on a cargo net, it’s pretty spectacular. But that’s kind of it.

Bond Girls

Maryam d’Abo as Kara Milovy. If you’re going to pin the Bond Girl hopes on one actress, she better be a doozy. In all ways. D’Abo is pretty, intelligent, and I’m sure a fine actress and person. She lacks the chops, though, to carry the tradition of the greats who came before her. Trivia: her cousin, Olivia d’Abo played Karen Arnold on The Wonder Years.

It wasn’t the worst of the series, but in The Living Daylights, Dalton does not offer much hope that he’s going to return it to its glory days.

License to Kill

OH NOOOOEEESSSS! James Bond has gone rogue!

Or so they want us to think. After buddy Felix Leiter is horribly maimed, and Leiter’s new wife murdered, by a Latin drug lord, James Bond has his 00-status yanked as he refuses orders and instead marches off to bring Franz Sanchez to justice.

Ugh. It’s one thing for a Bond movie to miss because of a bad story. It’s another when the whole thing feels half-assed. And that’s the case here. The acting from most of the secondary actors is horrendous. The plot feels ripped from an episode of Miami Vice, which was well past its prime by the time this came out. The stunts stray far into unbelievable territory. There are hackneyed moments, as when a bunch of locals just happen to be walking down the road when Bond and the bad guys come barreling down the hill. They might even have the fakest looking stunt shark in the history of stunt sharks.

It was so bad that I began questioning every part of the movie.

Why the hell is Bond Felix Leiter’s best man? Aren’t they just professional acquaintances?
Would they really divert from the wedding to help catch a drug dealer rather than let the DEA take care of it?
Would a drug dealer really flew from authorities in a plane that could be caught by a Coast Guard helicopter?
Would a factory containing a highly volatile mix of cocaine and gasoline be be constructed so a single match in a laboratory would send the whole thing up in flames?
Would someone really shoot a Stinger missile at a plane that was ten feet away and hope to survive?

Oh, and we get submarines and underwater action!

It’s a train wreck.

Perhaps no other actor looked the part of a Latin drug kingpin more than Robert Davi, so kudos for bringing him in.

A young Benicio Del Toro exudes menace as Davi’s main enforcer.

Any Wayne Fucking Newton as a televangelist! I admit, that was inspired.

But everything else about this movie sucks.

Here’s the other thing I found odd. There is a graphic shark attack. A man’s head explodes on camera. Another drops into a pulverizing machine, spraying Bond with a bloody mist. And somehow this only got a PG-13 rating. In 1989. I bet if they showed some tits, though, it would have been slapped with an R. Because breasts are way more damaging to people than violence.

Bond Girls

Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier. And now we’re back to the Bond Girls who can kick some ass on their own. Bouvier was an army pilot and can handle a weapon. She also has has very long legs. Which we get to see often. Kudos.

Talisa Soto as Lupe Lamora. Lloyd Cole & The Commotions have a song called “Perfect Skin” I believe it was written for Soto.

A solid 1-2 punch on the girl side of things.

Trivia: this movie was originally titled License Revoked, but producers worried that Americans didn’t know what revoked meant. I’m not sure I buy that, but that’s the story.

Dalton was contracted for two more movies, but because of various delays, he was able to escape from his contract after License. Which is probably a good thing. I don’t think you can say his run was a disaster, a la George Lazenby’s. There are moments in The Living Daylights that work. But Dalton seemed ill-suited for the role, despite his physical appearance. He did have his moment in the sun, though.

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There are times in every man’s life when he must undertake a specific challenge: watch all the Bond movies. Some men are even more ambitious, endeavoring to read all the Bond novels as well.

Friends, it is time for me to climb this mountain.

This is not my first attempt at Mt. Bond. I believe it was the summer of 1986, the summer in which I turned 15 and still relied on my parents for transportation, that I acquired a stack of Bond books at a used bookstore and spent hours on our deck reading them in the Midwestern heat and humidity. The movies were tougher to catch back then, but I would scan the TV section of the paper each Sunday to see if ABC or TBS would be showing any over the coming week.

But, like most summer plans, this one fell apart in the dog days of August and when school began in the fall, i was off to other things.

A couple years later, when we had more movie channels and you could expect to grab a few Bonds movies a month with your VCR, I built a small stack of VHS tapes with several of the movies. But, again, it was not a project I could complete.

In time, my interest in Bond waned. I caught a couple of the new movies in theaters, but when I ran across the old ones on cable, I would watch for a minute or two, chuckle at their primitiveness, and move on.

Still, it was like a childhood scar that sometimes itched, and when I scratched it the memories of those past immersions poured forth.

What caused this latest flareup of the old itch? Partially it was completing >The Wire and wanting to move on to another viewing project. Also, the hosts of a technology podcast I listen to have been watching and reviewing a Bond movie each week. Listening to them discuss the details of the classic early films set me on my path.

The big dilemma, as I began, was how to handle the books/films split. The movies were not produced in the same order as Ian Fleming’s novels. Should I read the novels in order, to get the proper exposure to Bond’s backstory? Or should I read them in concert with the films? I chose the latter path, mostly because it seems like if you’re going to undertake a Bond project, you really need to begin with “Dr. No” and not “Casino Royale” since it was the movies that made Bond a world phenomenon.

That long-winded intro leads us to what I did last week: read “Dr. No” Monday through Wednesday, then watched the movie Wednesday night.

I thoroughly enjoyed both. I’ve read the book before, and who knows how many times I’ve seen the movie, so everything was familiar. Yet there were enough details that had faded over time that it was still enjoyable to rediscover them.

I won’t write detailed reviews of the series as I go through it, but I do want to offer a few observations of each movie and each Bond girl.¹

When you watch the oldest of the Bond movies, the production value is easy to laugh at. The sets look cheap and basic. The car chases cheesy, with the projection of the trailing vehicle on a screen behind an image of Bond filmed in a studio. The overdubbed voices of many characters. Night scenes clearly shot during the day with heavy filters over the camera lens.

The sexism and racism I write off to very different times. These movies were never trying to make social statements, but rather reflective of how much of the world operated at the time. Thank goodness we have evolved a little since then.

That said, few things in movie history have been cooler than Sean Connery as Agent 007, of course. He was a baaaaaaad man. The cinema Bond was a far more confident man than the one of the books. In the novels, there are always moments of self-doubt, when Bond questions whether he’s made the right choice and if he can extricate himself from his predicament. Not of that doubt is present in the movies.

As for the Bond girls, Ursula Andress, as Honey Ryder, emerging from the sea is the enduring image of the movie and perhaps the most iconic image of the series. She was a baaaaaaaad woman, setting a difficult bar for later Bond girls to reach. Somewhat lost in Andress’ glow are two other impressive Bond women. Zena Marshall plays the exotic Miss Taro. And Eunice Gayson plays the glamorous and aggressive Sylvia Trench, who after battling Bond at the baccarat table, seeks more games. We’ll hear from her again. A promising start for horndogs everywhere.

Dr. No is a fine kickoff for the Bond franchise. The story lags a bit at points, and there is some era-based silliness in the writing and production. But all-in-all, it’s an entertaining flick.

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