Posts tagged action

Wait. So the new Transformers movie is subtitled “Dark of the Moon?” I’ve been thinking the whole time that it was “Dark Side of the Moon.” Maybe it’s Pink Floyd’s fault, but the latter just rolls off the tongue better. “Dark of the Moon” just doesn’t sound right. Or is it just me?

For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

What a great year 1983 was! Not one, but two James Bond movies were released that year. How fitting it is then that I review Octopussy and Never Say Never Again as back-to-back blog entries. I’ll get into particulars in a moment, but while Never certainly has its flaws, it’s better than Octopussy.

The Wikipedia entry has the details, but in short Never Say Never Again is a remake of the older Bond film Thunderball, but made by another film company. It’s a fascinating story reading about how this all came about. I’ve seen Thunderball many times and even read the novel, but the plot of Never Say Never Again still felt pretty unfamiliar too me, even though I watched it as recently as a couple of years ago. Basically SPECTRE compromises a U.S. military officer to aid them in stealing two nuclear warheads and holds NATO ransom. (I think it was NATO.) Bond has to hunt down SPECTRE’s project manager in charge of the operation, a man named Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) who has seduced the compromised U.S. officer’s sister, Domino (Kim Basinger). Largo is assisted by the evil Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera), who spends most of the movie unsuccessfully trying to kill Bond.

As a libertarian who doesn’t believe in intellectual property, I love the whole concept of this movie! I know the filmmakers went to great pains not to violate the copyrights of EON Productions, who make the “official” Bond movies, but even so watching this movie is like getting a glimpse into a world blessedly unfettered by copyright. And on top of that, it’s not a bad Bond film. After all, when you’ve got Irvin Kershner as your director (he directed The Empire Strikes Back), how can it not be at least decent?

Let’s get the bad out of the way, shall we? The music is terrible. I mean just dreadful. I think it’s safe to say this movie has the worst music of any Bond movie, starting with the terrible theme song. I’ll give them points for going for the classic style of a Bond theme song, but it’s just awful. And yet I can’t get it out of my head. The rest of the music in the film is bad too. It really sounds like stereotypical 80’s TV drama music, not something from a major motion picture.

The worst scene in the movie is the one in which Bond finally kills Blush. It’s by far the worst Bond-getting-out-of-almost-getting-killed scene in all of Bond history. So she finally catches him after a pretty awesome chase scene. She has him sitting on the ground, gun pointed at his crotch telling him where the first shot will go. In his pocket he has a pen that shoots an explosive projectile. So how do the writers get him to use it? He tells Blush that he was going to write her into his diary, so she grabs a piece of paper and orders him to write down how great a lover she was, thus giving him the chance to use the pen. Ok, so he takes advantage of her pride, but come on. Couldn’t they think of some more plausible way for him to kill her? And then right after she explodes, Felix walks in (Bond’s CIA counterpart). Bond asks how long he’s been standing there to which Felix responds, “Long enough.” Really? Your associate is about to get shot in the crotch before being killed and you’re just going to stand there to find out how he gets out of the situation? If I were Bond I’d have suspected Felix were in on it.

I’m not a big fan of Kim Basinger in general, but I really can’t figure out Domino’s attraction to Largo. I guess he’s charming and rich and all. But early on in the film she asks him what he would do if she were to leave him and after laughing it off he tells her quite seriously that he would cut her throat. She looks a little nervous, but wouldn’t you try really hard to get away at that point?

All that aside, I did enjoy this movie. Sean Connery reminds you why he’s the best Bond with his charm and confidence. Brandauer is actually quite a good bad guy. He does a good job of being creepy crazy. Max von Sydow is Blofeld! He’s only in the movie a short amount of time, but it’s still excellent casting. And then there’s Rowan Atkinson, the bumbling British government worker Bond runs into in the Bahamas. Atkinson is of course famous for playing Mr. Bean. My dad and brother used to always say, perhaps to annoy me, that Atkinson should play Bond. Well, here he is in a Bond movie. And that game Domination that Bond and Largo play? I want that. The three dimensional CGI globe still looks cool almost thirty years later.

The Wikipedia article points out the similarities between the way M sees Bond as archaic in this movie to the way M viewed Bond in 1995’s GoldenEye. I thought another similarity was in the female villains in the two movies. Fatima Blush seems like the prototype for Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp with her obvious insanity and lust for killing.

If you haven’t seen this one, it’s worth checking out. If it’s between this one and Octopussy, watch this one.

For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

Oh, boy. If we’re rating Bond movies on a simple “this one is good” and “this one is bad” scale, Octopussy definitely falls in “bad” category. First of all it has not one, but two double-0 agents dressed as clowns, including 007. I could stop right there since clowns frighten and annoy me, but of course I must go on.

Before I get too far I’ve gotta say that the opening was awesome. I might go so far as to say that it was among the best openings of any James Bond movie with that awesome little jet. And mad props to the stunt pilot who flew the plane sideways through the partially closed hanger doors. According to Wikipedia, that was a real stunt! I also found the Rita Coolidge theme song to be pretty good, though I’m not a huge fan of the saxophone parts.

I found the plot of this movie to be extremely hard to follow, but fortunately the good folks at Wikipedia were there to help. Let me see if I can make sense of things. Here goes. So General Orlov, a Soviet general (Steven Berkoff), is out for Soviet domination of Europe, so he’s going to blow up a bomb at an American military base in West Germany and make it look like an accident so no one will suspect Russia. Europe will demand a curtailment of nuclear weapons deployments, and the Soviets can waltz right into Western Europe and take it. Orlov is doing this without the knowledge of the Soviet government. First of all, hat’s off to Peter Lamont, production designer on this movie. The Soviet war room was one of the coolest sets in motion picture history. It was like a huge light-colored marble room with a semi-circle table with Soviet military men sitting around it. At one point Orlov opens a view screen in the wall, and the entire floor rotates over so the men at the table can see it. My description doesn’t do it justice, you’ve gotta see it. Also, check out Lamont’s IMDb page. He’s got some movies featuring excellent production design on his resumé.

The weird part is that while Orlov is technically the big baddie since the whole thing was his plan, he’s not in the movie all that much, and Bond doesn’t even kill him. The main bad guy in the movie is Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), described as an Afghan prince. And no, Bond at no point screams, “Khaaaannnnn!!!!” Pity. Now this is the part I found very confusing, but my understanding is that Orlov and Khan are making fake jewels so they can smuggle the real ones into the West, while at the same time smuggling the bomb. 009 is killed bringing a fake Fabergé egg to the British ambassador which sets Bond off on this case.

In order to smuggle the bomb onto the military base, Khan hires a female smuggler, known as Octopussy (Maud Adams) who also luckily has a circus. (Ok, side note. Would you got to a show called “Octopussy’s Circus?” I didn’t think so.) Octopussy thinks she’s just smuggling jewelry, but they’re also using her to smuggle the bomb unbeknownst to her.

At any rate, there’s an exciting chase scene involving Bond hanging off of a the circus train. At some point he falls off and has to race to get to the military base in time to diffuse the bomb. What follows is a decently hilarious set of mishaps in which he has trouble acquiring transportation. He tries to hitch a ride to no avail before a sports car with a load of teenagers stop and beckon him to join. He starts to run to the car and it speeds away, the kids laughing at him. Clichéd prank, but I actually laughed out loud at that one. Then he hitches a ride with a super-stereotypical overweight German couple in a Volkswagen Beetle. They even offer him sausage and beer in the car. I’m not making this up. They drop him off at a town where he tries to enter a phone booth, but a German woman beats him to it. At that point I actually got pretty fed up. I mean, thousands of lives and the balance of power in Europe are at stake and James Bond isn’t going to yank a lady out of a phone booth? But then he totally makes up for it by stealing the woman’s car.

He finally gets to the base and is able to diffuse the bomb, sadly having to disguise himself as a clown to do so. *sigh* Octopussy finds out she’s been conned and she and her all-female circus troop assault Khan’s palace. Lame city. Khan kidnaps Octopussy and Bond chases down his airplane as he’s trying to take off, jumping onto the back of it. So it apparently wasn’t enough that twenty minutes ago we had Bond hanging off the side of the train. Oh, no. We’ve also got to see him hang on to the top of an airplane while it barrel rolls. Then to take it to the next level, Bond has to have a fight on top of the plane in mid-flight. Somehow Bond disables the tail of the plane with his foot. (Didn’t seem realistic.) That combined with his earlier sabotaging of one of the plane’s engines causes it to crash, killing Khan, but not before Bond and Octopussy roll out after Khan tries unsuccessfully to land. Just a bad ending.

Some specific complaints:

Octopussy? Really? You named a major character and the entire movie Octopussy? It’s completely laughable. Whenever any character utters her name it just invites eye-rolling. All of them take it completely seriously, but it had to be hard to say those lines. It’s also interesting that Maud Adams got that part since she was a minor but significant Bond girl in The Man With the Golden Gun. Sadly nearly everything about her character is just ridiculous in this movie.

Most of the movie is set in India, and that’s neat and all, but early on in the film James Bond has a fight scene in the middle of a huge stereotype of Indian culture. There’s snake charming, sword swallowing, a guy on a bed of nails, and another guy walking on a bed of hot coals. Maybe there’s a market in India somewhere where all that really happens, and I’m not even saying it wasn’t a little cool, but just seemed a little like they were stereotyping. I’m also thankful to Wikipedia for reminding me about the awful scene where the Indian agent Vijay plays the James Bond theme song with his snake charming horn. Terrible. Oh, and I mustn’t forget the Tiger. While trying to get away from Khan, Bond is stalked by a presumably wild tiger. He tells it to sit and it does. Grrr…

Later there’s the guy with the yo-yo buzz saw which, admittedly, is a pretty cool weapon for a Bond henchman to have, but I somehow doubt it could function like that in real life. The crocodile submarine was downright cool, but they way Bond escapes Octopussy’s palace by making it look like he had gotten eaten just didn’t seem plausible.

Also, why does Octopussy continue to do business with Khan? He tells her he wants to kill Bond and she tell him she’ll handle it. But then he sends his goons to attack Bond (and her) at her palace anyway. And she still wants to smuggle the jewels for him? Are you kidding me?

I’m sure there was more I’m forgetting to rant about, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I always like to look for the “James Bond will return in” moment in the end titles, and this said, “From a View to a Kill.” Or course the next movie was titled, “A View to a Kill.” No big deal, just an interesting item of interest.

For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

Boy, it’s a lot easier (and more fun) to write about a movie that’s bad, like our last installment in my Bond series, than one that’s good. That’s why it’s so hard for me to write about For Your Eyes Only. I’ve maintained for a while now that FYEO is the best Roger Moore James Bond movie, though I was momentarily distracted by the awesomeness that is The Spy Who Loved Me into thinking that it might actually be the better film. No way. Having watched it again I can attest that without question, For Your Eyes Only is not only the best Roger Moore James Bond film, it is one of the all time best Bond films period. I also really like the Sheena Easton theme song.

It starts out well with a nice tip-of-the-cap to the Bond films that came before it by having Blofeld attack Bond while he’s visiting the gravesite of his dead wife, and gives Bond the chance to dispatch Blofeld once and for all (though we’ve certainly thought that before). The only goofy part is when Blofeld is begging for his life and offers to buy Bond a delicatessen. Huh? What’s that about?

The rest of the movie is a good old fashioned spy caper about the fate of a piece of British military technology capable of, if in the wrong hands, ordering British submarines to fire missiles on London. At the beginning of the movie it’s being housed in a British spy ship disguised as a fishing vessel. The boat is sunk by a mine. The Russians want it, but they can’t launch an official recovery operation. The British can’t either, I guess because they’d have to admit it was aboard a spy ship, so they get one of their agents to look for it instead. The British agent and his wife are assassinated, and his daughter Melina, our main Bond girl, is off to get revenge. Bond is sent to find out who hired the hit man who is killed by Melina by a cross bow. Awesome.

Honestly the movie’s plot is so involved that I could write paragraphs more describing it, but that’s not to say it’s too complex, just that it has a lot of details. As The Dude might say, “a lotta ins, a lotta outs.” You really just need to go and watch this one.

I love the car chase with the little Citroen or whatever it is. As cool as the whole Lotus car chase was in The Spy Who Loved Me, I love Bond driving this ridiculous little car and still taking out the bad guys. Love when it overturns and Bond and Melina have to get the village people to help him push it over and give him a push start. 

As an aside, I love Roger Moore’s style. There’s a scene during that chase when one of the bad guys pulls up next to him while he’s driving. He does like a startled double take and then just flashes a trademark Moore grin: classy, but amusing. Love it!

I love the scene where Bond kicks the henchman’s car off of the cliff. Very dark, but then he reminds you that you’re watching a Bond movie by remarking, “He never had a head for heights.” I remember when I watched this scene a few years ago that line totally ruined the scene for me, but this time around I liked it. I don’t want Bond to be too dark, and the humorous line nicely takes the edge off of the situation.

I dig the skiing scenes, and the tense moments at the end with the cliff-hanging stuff. And you gotta dig Julian Glover as the villain. At first he appears to be an ally of Bond before later being revealed to be the bad guy. Sort of a template perhaps for Glover’s character in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a few years later? It’s also nice that he’s not a larger-than-life unrealistic villain as Bond movies usually get, but just a criminal middle man. Sounds anticlimactic, but it’s rather refreshing after the absurdity that was Moonraker’s plot.

About the only thing I really didn’t like in the movie was Bibi, the figure skater. Was she in the movie just to make Roger Moore seem old?

Interesting fact: Cassandra Harris, minor Bond girl in this one, was the wife of future Bond Pierce Brosnan.

For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

John Gruber has mentioned on The Talk Show podcast that it must have been the success of Star Wars that pushed the Bond filmmakers to make Moonraker what it is, and the Wikipedia entry for the movie bears this out. Based on some comments I’ve gotten online, this seems to be a poorly regarded entry in the series, yet it was well received by the movie-going public at the time, at least as measured by box office results. According to Wikipedia it was the highest grossing Bond film until 1995’s GoldenEye. (Sidenote: GoldenEye is my favorite Bond movie, and the first one I ever saw in a movie theater.)

I totally get the negativity towards Moonraker, and would definitely rank it amongst the poorer Bond movies, yet I don’t hate it. As I was watching it I realized it felt super familiar to me even though I hadn’t seen it in years. I have a feeling that means it was one of the ones I watched the most as a kid. Makes sense really. It has everything a boy would love: space, laser gun battles, etc. The adult version of me, however, has a different view of those things… More on that later.

So it starts off with a jumbo jet flying across the Atlantic ocean carrying a space shuttle (called Moonrakers in the film) on its back. The Moonraker is highjacked mid-flight leading to the destruction of the airplane, and 007’s mission. In the universe of the movie space shuttles are built by a man named Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale). Apparently the shuttle was flying to Britain to be on loan to the British. So… what were the British going to do with a space shuttle? This is never explained in the film.

I can’t decide what I think of Lonsdale’s Drax. He has almost no personality, but he doesn’t come across as being a scarily cold bad guy, though he certainly shows he’s capable of extremely cruel acts, not the least of which includes his plan to wipe out all of humanity. Ultimately though he has perhaps the most diabolical plan of any Bond villain ever he personally comes across as kind of boring. Wikipedia mentions that James Mason was offered the role of Drax. I would have loved to see that, as Mason is one of my all-time favorite actors. He certainly would have added more personality to Drax. However, Drax is a little too similar to Captain Nemo, who Mason did play. Still would have loved to have seen it though.

While investigating Drax, Bond meets the main Bond girl of this film, Holly Goodhead. Yes, the thirteen-year-old boy they must have hired to crank out suggestive names for Bond girls is at it again. Here’s the problem: Lois Chiles is terrible in this movie. I don’t know if she was trying to play Holly as a cool cat since we learn later in the movie that she’s a CIA agent (not to mention a trained Moonraker pilot), but she just comes across as totally wooden. She has about the same level of personality as Drax, which is to say pretty close to nil.

The only two characters who are actually interesting are Bond, played excellently as always by Roger Moore, and Jaws (Richard Kiel). This was the first movie where to me Moore started showing signs of aging, but he’s still as cool as ever.

I have a feeling that those who strongly dislike this movie probably don’t like Jaws. He definitely is played for laughs in this one, but I absolutely love him in this movie. For someone who has only one line in the film, Richard Kiel does a lot of acting. He’s so expressive with his face, like at the end when Bond gets Drax to admit that only people who meet his standards of perfection will survive in the new order. Kiel makes it clear with his expression that Jaws understands what this will mean for him and his girlfriend.

Speaking of Jaws, I think my favorite scene in the movie is when he attempts to kill Manuela, Bond’s Brazilian contact. Bond and Manuela are in Rio de Janeiro where some kind of creepy parade is happening. Bond breaks into a warehouse while Manuela waits for him in the alley. Jaws approaches wearing a super creepy giant clown head. The costume is scary, and the way Jaws walks slowly down the alley totally sells it. I even like how the scene ends with the crowd of partiers getting between Bond and Jaws. The only thing I don’t get is why Manuela didn’t scream for help when Jaws grabbed her after the first batch of partiers came by. Jaws pretends to be dancing with her and… she just goes along with it? Dumb.

As I write this we sit near the end of the space shuttle era, so it was a little surreal to watch this movie which features the orbiter so prominently, particularly since this movie was released almost two years before the first shuttle launch.

So let’s talk about the ending. Drax has a huge orbiting space station from which he plans to exterminate human life on Earth so that he can repopulate it with pretty people. The pretty people are ferried to the station via several Moonraker shuttles. Bond and Holly are aboard one of them. They figure out that Drax has a radar jamming device on the station, and they have to destroy it so that Earth can mount an assault on the station. They succeed in destroying the jammer, and in what seems like five minutes the U.S. has launched their own Moonraker loaded with assault troops with laser guns. Drax attempts to shoot down the shuttle. When he’s unsuccessful he sends his men out in space suits with laser guns to attack the shuttle. Meanwhile the shuttle opens its cargo bay to release its assault troops with laser guns and a massive laser gun battle ensues that any boy will love.

Here’s the problem with this whole thing: It’s dumb. First of all, the U.S. doesn’t know the station is there because Bond didn’t know and therefore can’t tell them. Radar just detected the station after Bond and Goodhead destroyed the jamming device. So they don’t know what it is, just that it’s there. So they send in a bunch of armed troops? And how are they able to launch so quickly? It takes a lot of time to prepare a space shuttle. I guess the short answer is that in movies space shuttles always launch quickly. Besides, it’s 1979 and the general public doesn’t know how a space shuttle works. Even so, it’s really dumb.

It would have been way better had the assault shuttle not even been in the movie. Bond and Goodhead could somehow rig the station for self destruct and escape in one of the Moonrakers to shoot down the poison pods. That would have been a better ending.

Also, what’s up with the lasers? Earlier in the movie we see one of Q’s guys test-firing it, which would suggest it’s something cooked up by the MI6 Q Branch. However, both the American and Drax astronauts are armed with them at the end which would suggest that maybe Drax’s company built them along with the Moonrakers and maybe the Americans bought some from him? I guess? This is never explained in the movie. “Now pay attention, 007!”

Wikipedia’s entry on the movie has some fascinating background information, such as how they pulled off the parachute scenes at the beginning of the movie. They also have this interesting nugget about Jaws:

Jaws was intended to be a villain against Bond to the bitter end, but director Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he received so much fan mail from small children saying “Why can’t Jaws be a goodie not a baddie”, that as a result he was persuaded to make Jaws gradually become Bond’s ally at the end of the film.

I love Jaws’ one speaking moment, though the way he and his girlfriend got away was lame. They help Bond and Goodhead get unstuck from the station, staying behind in part of the station that breaks away and floats off. Clearly they wanted to let the audience know that they’re alright, so Bond has a stupid line where he says something like, “Don’t worry, it’s only a hundred miles to Earth.” So… are there parachutes on this part of the station? Will it automatically re-enter the atmosphere and land on its own? These things are not explained, though I think there was a throw-away line later about Jaws landing safely.

I really liked the theme song for this one, sung by Shirley Bassey. It sounds amazing, though lyrically it makes no sense. From the song:

Just like the moonraker goes in search of his dream of gold,

I search for love, for someone to have and hold…

Why even use the word “moonraker” in the song since it’s clear from the context in the song that it has nothing to do with space shuttles. Aah, forget it.

Gruber has talked several times during the Bond commentary on The Talk Show about the fabulous set design work of production designer Ken Adam, who did set designs for some of the previous Bond movies as well as Dr. Strangelove. The sets are amazing in Moonraker, and not just the space station set. There’s the beautiful home that Drax lives in, and the room where Bond and M encounter Drax. Those two may have been existing structures, but I have to think Adam at least was responsible for picking them. The Aztec temple set where Drax’s Earth-based command center is was amazing. Of course I couldn’t help thinking back to the hours I spent playing GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 as a teenager in which the Aztec temple set is faithfully reproduced. Definitely got a bit nostalgic during those scenes…

Poor James Bond film, but not without it’s charms. Certainly better to me than Live And Let Die. Faint praise I guess, but there you go!

For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

Wow, this is without question the best Roger Moore James Bond movie out of the first three, and may wind up knocking off For Your Eyes Only as my favorite Moore Bond film period. This was a special one for me, because The Spy Who Loved Me is the only Bond film that I hadn’t yet seen beyond a few minutes of it. Imagine having a favorite long-running television series. You’ve seen all of the episodes but one, and then years later you finally see it. It was like that.

The plot suffered a little only in as much as it was kind of a ripoff of another James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. In that one the bad guy was using this cool space ship that literally swallowed U.S. and Soviet space capsules. The goal being to get the U.S. and Russia to blame each other for the thefts and get them to launch an all-out war with each other. In this movie, the bad guy is using a giant tanker ship to literally swallow up British, Soviet, and American submarines so he can crew them with his own men to attack the U.S. and Russia. See what I mean? It’s kind of the same. In this one the bad guy has dreams of mankind moving under the ocean, so starting a nuclear war on the surface will just speed those efforts along, or so goes the plan.

At least this time the Soviets and the West aren’t blaming each other. In fact, the Brits and the Russians work together, pairing James Bond with his Russian counter part, Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach). We know that Bond’s designation is 007. Well, in keeping with the way females in Bond movies are named, Anya’s designation is Agent XXX. Of course Bond and Amasova have a romance, after which she puts two and two together and realizes that Bond killed her boyfriend (who, let’s be fair, was trying to kill him). Bond was unaware of their relationship, but she threatens to kill Bond when the mission is over. You saw this coming since the killing was shown at the beginning of the movie.

Again, Roger Moore is flawless as Bond in this movie. He typically plays Bond as having a pretty good sense of humor about things, so it’s always refreshing to get a moment in a movie where he shows off Bond’s harder edge. Early on in the film after a really poorly done fight scene with a big bald henchmen, Bond finds himself standing near the edge of a roof. The bad guy is about to fall and is holding on to Bond’s necktie to keep himself on the roof. At first you worry for Bond’s safety, but then Bond starts interrogating him. The moment he gets the information, Bond chops the necktie out of the bad guys hand, sending him to his death. Great scene.

We also get the first of two Bond movies to feature Richard Kiel as Jaws, a very tall henchmen who is so named because his teeth are metal. Jaws is such an iconic henchmen, and he’s used effectively here. One of my favorite scenes of his was the one at the light show at the pyramids in Cairo where you see the one guy running away, the camera occasionally cutting to Jaws standing very still looking menacing. Very cool. (By the way, that looked like a very cool and very real light show.) Later in the movie he kills a shark with his teeth. The question must be asked, is it lame to see a character named Jaws, kill a shark by biting it with his teeth two years after the movie Jaws is released? I can’t decide, but it’s still a neat scene.

I think the whole underlying tension between Bond and XXX could have been handled better. The scene where they finally realize that Bond killed her boyfriend is great, and both players handle the emotion of the scene perfectly, but at the end there’s only mild tension when she has a gun on him only to melt and have sex with him. I think I would have enjoyed it better if she really had tried to kill him but he got away or something like that.

The bad guy, Stromberg, is played excellently by Curd Jürgens, who played the U-boat captain in one of my favorite WWII movies, The Enemy Below (which was the inspiration for a great Star Trek episode). Stromberg has a really cool base called Atlantis that can rise from and submerge under the ocean at will. That dining hall set is great, as was the scene early on where he kills the girl in the shark tank. (Seriously, what is it with Bond villains and sharks?)

Now, I’ve saved the best plot point to talk about last: the car. There’s an awesome chase scene with Bond and XXX being pursued in Bond’s white Lotus by motorcycles, a car, and a helicopter. He defeats the motorcycles and the car, but can’t outrun the helicopter. By the way, let me stop right here and say the machine gun shots from the helicopter were done spectacularly well. It looked real. Anyway, to get away from the chopper he drives the car off of a dock into the ocean where it transforms into a submarine! I knew this car was in the movie, but seeing it was something else! It was, hands down, the coolest thing in any Bond movie. Period.

I don’t know if I have a favorite James Bond theme song, but Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better has to be one of the best. It’s certainly one of the few that is a good song period, not just a good James Bond song. I love the way it starts with the little piano riff.

One thing of note, I think this is the first Bond movie to incorrectly state what the next Bond film would be. It says Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only at the end, but in reality it was followed by Moonraker. On the podcast, John Gruber has talked about how Moonraker was clearly influenced by the arrival of Star Wars, and I can’t help but wonder if they decided to move Moonraker up in the order after the success of Star Wars.

Man, what a great movie The Spy Who Loved Me was. Until next time!

For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

What a difference a year makes! The Man With The Golden Gun is better than Live And Let Die in possibly every conceivable way. Who knows, maybe the latter was plagued with bad source material? I dunno. What I do know is that this “review” is going to be very stream-of-consciousness, so watch out!

So when I watched this movie over and over again as a kid, Francisco Scaramanga (the bad guy) was just played by some guy. Adult John knows that the actor is none other than Christopher Lee, who played Saruman in Fellowship Of The Rings. Awesome! To be fair, he’s also the Christopher Lee who played Count Dooku in the crappy Star Wars prequels, but I don’t blame that movie’s flaws on him…

I like to gripe about stuff in movies, so let’s get right to the crappy stuff:

First of all, Sheriff J.W. Pepper is back. *sigh* That’s right, the bumbling, racist sheriff from the last Bond film. I guess someone thought that guy was really funny. I find him annoying and offensive, in more ways than one.

Also, they ruined perhaps the coolest car stunt ever captured on film. According to Wikipedia, the car is an AMC Hornet X. Very good looking car! I especially liked the upholstery. Anyway, Bond has to jump the car across a river, so he drives at high speed off of this twisting bridge that has collapsed causing the car to do this awesome corkscrew jump to the other piece of the bridge on the other side of the river. An amazing stunt! …which is ruined by the filmmakers adding a comic whistle-y sound over it.

I can’t actually decide whether I think Scaramanga’s gun is cool or lame. It’s established by Q that it’s a custom job. As the name of the film implies it’s either made of gold or is at least colored or plated in gold. But it comes in like three pieces so Scaramanga has to put it together before he uses it. In the high def closeup it looks kind of like it’s flimsy.

Ok, this isn’t so much bad as it’s bizarre: So Scaramanga lives in this awesome high-tech island hideout with his girlfriend, a big guy who runs the machines, and Nick Nack, the short-statured man from Fantasy Island who would shout, “The plane! The plane!” Anyway, since Scaramanga is a famous assassin, Nick Nack keeps him on his toes by luring people to the island through this weird funhouse in which Scaramanga must find his golden gun and kill the person. It’s heavily suggested that Nick Nack hopes one day to succeed in having Scaramanga killed so he can inherit his fortune. It’s just weird.

I do like that Netflix presented the movie in 16x9. I don’t know whether or not it was originally shown that way, but I like seeing movies in that format. Yeah, I know. I just blew any credibility I had as a movie nerd. It also looks amazing in high definition.

Once again, Roger Moore is fantastic as Bond, except for the really ghastly sport coat he wears to Scaramanga’s island at the end of the movie. Ugh. Seventies fashion. 

The fight scenes with the martial arts guys was pretty good too, though the karate nieces were a little much. Still though, it really looked like Roger Moore was doing a lot of his own stunts.

I also really dug the British intelligence base in the capsized and rusting ship in the harbor with its eye-twisting crooked layout.

Can’t wait til the next Bond film! The Spy Who Loved Me is the only James Bond film I have never seen. Until then!

For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

I hadn’t seen Live And Let Die in years, which is probably a good thing. If I’d remembered how awful this movie is I might have had a harder time making myself sit down and watch it. Seriously, this is making a serious run at worst Bond film ever. Let’s get all of the complaints out of the way first, shall we?

First of all, the plot is ridiculous. By the time the bad guy (Kananga) laid it out, I was having a hard time paying attention, so here’s a Wikipedia summary:

It transpires that Kananga is producing two tons of heroin and is protecting the poppy fields by exploiting locals’ fear of voodoo and the occult. Through his alter ego, Mr. Big, Kananga plans to distribute the heroin free of charge at his Fillet of Soul restaurants, which will increase the number of addicts. Kananga also believes that other drug dealers, namely the Mafia, cannot compete with his giveaway, to which Kananga can later charge high prices for the heroin after he has simultaneously cultivated huge drug dependency and bankrupted his competitors.

Ok, I guess. But why does Kananga need to put on a weird false face and masquerade as this Mr. Big gangster character? He’s got tons of henchmen, so why can’t one of them be Mr. Big? After all, Kananga’s day job is to be a diplomat for his country. Why risk that, especially when American and British intelligence agents are following you 24/7?

Secondly, I didn’t care for all of the voodoo stuff. It was just goofy. First there’s the Baron Samedi character. He’s just creepy. And how come he shows up on the train at the end of the movie after we clearly see him fall into a coffin filled with hundreds of presumably poisonous snakes? I guess it’s supposed to be the voodoo magic, but I think it’s actually dumb writing.

Then there’s Solitaire, the chief Bond girl in this one. She’s Kananga’s fortune teller, using tarot cards to tell the future. They never come right out an say this, but they heavily imply that prior to Bond having his way with her she’s a virgin and that once she loses that she’ll lose her future-telling powers too. Huh? Goofy.

Also, there’s all the racism. First you have needlessly racially charged comments from the black henchmen. But even worse than that is the Louisiana sheriff. He and his cousin refer to one of the black henchmen as “boy.” Really? Is that necessary?

Speaking of the sheriff, I really want to know whose idea it was to include his character in the film. I would sit this person down and do my best impression of Seth Myers and Amy Poehler and just say, “Really?!?” over and over to him. On top of the racism he’s just generally extremely annoying. I would have much preferred to just see the boat chase, which was cool enough by itself without this bumbling comic relief character ruining the scene.

Ok, now that I’ve had my cathartic moments of complaint, some general observations:

Though Kananga’s a goofy character, Yaphet Kotto actually does a great job with a bad part. It wasn’t his fault the movie stank.

It’s also not Roger Moore’s fault. He’s great in this as well. I would tell you any day I think Sean Connery is the best Bond, but when I hear Roger Moore speak I’m hearing James Bond. I’m sure it’s because I grew up with his movies more than any other Bond films. It was also remarkable how young he looked in this one!

The Paul McCartney theme song is great, but I hated it when the lounge singer sang it in the movie. Way too meta for my tastes, though not as bad as Lazenby breaking the fourth wall in his Bond film…

Unlike the goofy sheriff, the scene at the beginning of the movie where M and Moneypenny come to Bond’s house in the wee early morning hours is actually pretty funny. Never mind the fact that it makes no sense that they would come themselves rather than send a lackey. You can forgive it because the comedy is right.

Probably my favorite scene of the movie is the one at the beginning of the movie where the agent gets killed in New Orleans. He’s standing on a street corner watching a New Orleans jazz band play a somber tune as pall bearers carry a coffin. The agent turns to a man who just walked up beside him and asks whose funeral it is. “Yours!” says the man before stabbing him. I like the way the shot is framed of the agent standing on the sidewalk as the band comes around the corner, and I like the evocative look of the band. It is kinda silly that they just set the coffin down over his body and then pick it up with the agent magically inside of it, but oh well. It’s still a cool scene. Then the band breaks into a peppy rendition of When The Saints Go Marching In, or something similar.

If you’re new to the Bond franchise, don’t start with this one. It’s got its moments, but is definitely one of the worst of the series. Can’t wait for The Man With The Golden Gun!

Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

I didn’t have high expectations for Nimród Antal’s Predators, but even so it let me down. Of course it’s the third movie in the Predator movie series, or fifth if you count the Alien vs. Predator movies. It was produced by Robert Rodriguez, director of the awesome Desperado.

For those not familiar with the series, Predators are basically big, strong, ugly aliens who hunt creatures like humans for sport. In the first movie we had Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, and Jesse Ventura facing off against them in a South American jungle. In the second one it was Danny Glover in an American city. 

This time the movie takes place on an alien planet that we learn is basically a big game preserve where the Predators bring in worthy creatures to hunt from other planets. The movie opens with Royce, played by Adrien Brody in free fall above the planet, eventually parachuting to the ground with no memory of how he got there. He’s joined by several other humans from different parts of Earth including Isabelle, played by Alice Braga, and Edwin, played by Topher Grace. I know what you’re thinking. Adrien Brody? Topher Grace? And you’d be right. Topher Grace is playing the weak whiner you’d expect him to play, but at least Brody does a decent job of playing a tough guy. Along the way they run into Laurence Fishburne’s Noland, who has survived multiple hunting seasons on the planet, but is a little crazy after all of that time. Basically our cast of characters are the baddest of the bad on planet Earth including murderers, military personnel, and mercenaries. 

The biggest problem with the characters is that we really have no protagonist. It’s not long before Royce and Isabelle become the main characters, but everyone in the movie is pretty bad in some way or other. That makes it hard to have anyone to root for. In the original Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Duke was the leader of a U.S. military rescue squad, and he was pretty heroic. In Predators, your main guy Royce is only in it for number one, even using other characters as bait without their knowledge (and later on with), and being totally willing to leave someone to die if he’ll slow the others down. About the closest thing you get to a good person is Isabelle who basically serves as Royce’s conscience throughout the movie. There’s really not much reason to care what happens to any of them.

The Predators themselves follow the usual Predator script. The only thing interesting we learn about them in this movie that I don’t remember from previous installments is that there are apparently two different castes of Predators that are at war with each other.

There are some lame moments in this film including a totally cliched sword fight. Even if you haven’t seen Predators, you’ve seen this fight before. Two sword fighters face off against each other and three times charge each other. After the third charge the “protagonist” runs toward the camera and stops. Then there’s a pause followed by the “bad guy” falling over dead in the background. 

That lame sword fight sets up another lame moment. So Royce and Isabelle know that the first of three Predators has been killed in an explosion, but as best as I could tell they have no idea the second one died in the sword fight. So after they kill the third one, shouldn’t they be looking out for the second one that for all they know is still very much alive?

The last thing I’ll bring up is a pretty major spoiler that involved Topher Grace’s character. Turn back now if you don’t want to be spoiled. Still with me? Good. So Edwin is the one character throughout the movie that feels out of place. He’s not a tough guy like the others. He tells the others that the last thing he can remember before parachuting onto the planet is going to work at a hospital. So I think, alright, the Predators brought him to be the medic for the other guys. Only none of the characters jump to that conclusion in the movie. So at the very end we find out that Edwin is basically a serial killer and that he really does belong on the planet full of horrible people and creatures. So I get that the Predators are listening in on Earth and have figured out who all of the tough guy people are. But is their surveillance of Earth so complete that they even found this serial killer that seemingly even the cops don’t know about? It seemed a bit of a stretch to me.

The movie sets up a sequel, and we see more parachutes falling at the end. (What, more Predators arrived? What if the others weren’t done with their hunt? Did the others know the Predators were all killed on the planet?) But I’m really not that interested in seeing what happens next. The second Alien vs. Predator movie was garbage, but after seeing Predators I have to say I liked the first Alien vs. Predator movie more, and that’s not saying much.

Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

Wow. Salt’s a little tough to describe. If you watched the trailer you’ll know that the setup is that Angelina Jolie plays a U.S. intelligence operative named Evelyn Salt. When a Russian agent turns himself in, Salt interrogates him to find out what information he has that is worth their time. He tells her that a Russian agent will try to kill the Russian president in New York, and tells her that the agent’s name is Evelyn Salt. From there, Salt is on the run, but is it because she’s a Russian agent, or because she’s trying to stop the bad guys and clear her name? The answer’s a little complicated.

I think I saw one review that compared Salt to the Bourne Identity. But imagine if throughout the Bourne Identity you had no idea what Bourne’s motivations were, or whether he really did have amnesia, or was just faking as part of some elaborate plan. That’s pretty much Salt in a nut shell. At first when fingered she acts confused like she doesn’t understand how this could possibly happen, but then later on she acts like she knew she was a Russian spy all along. But she doesn’t do what the Russians want her to do, and winds up killing the two lead bad guys that we see in the movie (and a whole bunch of lesser bad guys). So if she did remember who she was the whole time, at what point did she change her mind and decide to be on the side of America? The movie doesn’t make any of that clear.

If the audience doesn’t know what is motivating the main character in the movie, you’ve got yourself a movie that’s tough to engage with. In playing Jason Bourne, Matt Damon gave us a character we could related to. How would you feel if you woke up on a fishing boat with a laser code embedded in your hip and no memory of how you got there? What made that relatable is that we knew what Bourne was feeling as he reacted to these things. 

Clearly this is the fault of the director and possibly the writer, but Angelina Jolie doesn’t help this problem at all. She’s very good at playing the tough female lead, but she tends to do it in a very cold, calculating way. Consider how much better the movie would have been if Tom Cruise had played the lead, as was originally planned. Stay with me now. I know Tom Cruise isn’t the most popular guy anymore, and he always pretty much plays Tom Cruise in anything he’s in. But the one character he always plays is full of emotion. It would take a lot of work for Cruise to play a very emotionally cold character. Ultimately, he would have been better in the role.

Salt was directed by Phillip Noyce, who directed Patriot Games, one of my all time favorite movies. It was written by Kurt Wimmer, who wrote Law Abiding Citizen, a movie I praised highly last year, and the fantastic Equilibrium, which you should run out and find a copy of right now if you haven’t seen. With that kind of talent I’m not sure why Salt isn’t a better movie.

The supporting cast is pretty good, particularly a couple of favorites of mine: Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor. They were as good as they always are, they were just wasted in this lackluster movie. 

The film has great action, and even has a decent story. It’s just a failure because it keeps its lead character’s motivations too hidden for us to really root for her. It also suffers from a bad ending. Sometimes when a movie ends you just want it to go on and on, especially when it’s clearly setting up the next movie. Salt, on the other hand, has an ending that sneaks up on you, and leaves you feeling unfulfilled. One of those where you go, “That’s it? You’re ending the movie there?” The problem is, I’m not that interested to see where they go from here.