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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shutyertrap" data-source="post: 293329" data-attributes="member: 134">If you are getting sick of seeing my posts about my Bond binge, think how I’m feeling actually watching them! I am officially done with all the various Bond actors other than Brosnan. Remember, Daniel Craig’s Bond films are not part of this binge since they were unavailable to me. More things I’ve noticed as I’ve gone along... the same director, John Glen, did 5 Bond films in a row. There is a dolly grip who’s name I’ve noticed on all these films too, and considering how these things were coming out every other year, I gotta believe many more crew just rolled over film to film. There is a certain way interiors are lit, regardless of the DP, that is a dead giveaway when it was shot on a soundstage. There’s also something to the set design that gives it away as rooms are way too big. Bullets always are accompanied by a ricochet sound effect, even if there’s no metal surface for them to make that sound from. Now, on with the show…NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (1983)This isn’t an official Bond film, as it was not made by Eon productions or MGM, but it gets away with using 007 and character names. Remember how I mentioned there was a legal thing regarding the writer of Thunderball? Well, here’s the result, a remake of Thunderball starring Connery. It doesn’t do the Bond opening at all or the stylized credits, and you won’t hear the Bond theme anywhere in the movie. The look of the movie is a bit different too as most of it feels like it was shot using actual locations whether they be interiors or exteriors. There was only one brief moment of projection or green screen, so that was refreshing too. Irvin Kershner had directing duties, and if that sounds familiar it’s because he directed Empire Strikes Back. By and large the major changes that are made to the story ground the film more in reality. So no transforming ships or ginormous lairs. The special effects work is also rather good, especially for ‘83 and when directly compared to Octopussy which came out the same year.Basic story is the same as Thunderball, which is a Blofeld disciple steals two nukes and plans on threatening major targets with them all for the purpose of SPECTRE seizing power. Largo lives on his giant yacht with girlfriend Domino, who jokingly asks what he’d do if she left him, and he responds he’d cut her head off. Haha, just kidding! Sorta. Dude is deliciously mental. His henchwoman is Fatima Blush, she’s #12 in SPECTRE, and she has a complex about being the best. Having slept with Bond and attempted to kill him here and there, she finally has him dead to rights, but first demands Bond write a note stating she was the best lover he ever had. Was she gonna get it framed and hung over her bed? So odd. By and large (and coming after 3 terrible movies) this was a good flick. M has shuttered the double 0 program, sends Bond to a health farm to purge all the toxins and bad habits out of him. Funny. Eventually M is forced to open things back up and put Bond to mission. Q is most excited by this, as his department budget has been woefully slashed since there were no secret agents to equip with cool gadgets. He tells Bond “I hope this means lots of gratuitous sex and violence”, and indeed it does! In the Bahamas Bond meets up with another Brit, and it took me a moment to realize it was Mr Bean, er well Rowan Atkinson. Cracked me up. Sign of the times, Bond goes into a casino charity event hosted by Largo. He follows Domino who skips right past the gambling and into the attached video arcade, where a sea of Centipede cabinets and a few Dig Dugs await. Thanks Atari! Largo has a video game the size of a pool table he wants to play Bond on, and there’s nothing quite as amusing as seeing Connery pretend he has a clue what to do with a joystick. We get the requisite shark scene, only now it’s a homing shark that cues onto the beacon Fatima attaches to Bond. There’s some quality stunt work with Bond on a motorcycle tricked out by Q, a moment where Bond jumps a horse from way up high into the water, and that first moment of the jump looks like Monty Python’s French taunter castle launching a very stiff horse. A second later though, when they hit the water, a real horse was used so all is forgiven. The underwater stuff looks great, with action moving to an underwater cavern that actually makes sense for why it exists. In Thunderball the ensuing battle between the Navy and Largo’s men took place underwater and there were lots of casualties on all sides. Here it takes place in the cavern, and the Navy actually looks like they are trained soldiers. Gone is the end boat at high speed fight, which was my least favorite part of Thunderball anyway.Was there really a point in making this remake? No. More likely they did it because they could. Most of the silliness was removed, way fewer one liners, a little steamier with the sex. Not being able to use the Bond theme music hurts it the most, but the villains are better here.A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)The last of the Roger Moore era, and it gets a lot of hate from the people that rank Bond films. It is a bit clunky, Tanya Roberts is a terrible actress, and the point of villain Zorin’s plot to be the main supplier of micro chips worldwide (thrilling!) leaves a lot to be desired, it does feature some of the best stunts to date. I mean you can clearly see when it’s the stunt double instead of Roger, which is most of the time, but the stunts are still pretty good. It also has the best song of any Bond film by Duran Duran. It’s fast, loud, perfectly incorporates the Bond sound into a pop song, just perfection.Movie starts with yet another ski sequence, but wait, Bond has to improvise at one point by using a part off a snowmobile to essentially snowboard. Why the Beach Boys’ California Girls suddenly starts playing is beyond me though. Also, we have now moved away from rear screen projection into the green screen era. Better, but still obvious. Bond gets ferried away in a sub disguised as a tiny iceberg, but at least it as a plush couch for having sex on. We get introduced to Zorin and his steroid enhanced horse racing side business. He has a henchwoman named Mayday who wastes no time making an impression by killing Bond’s dinner guest with a fish hook, fleeing up the Eiffel Tower, and then base jumping off of it. Really a nice but too short sequence that features Bond driving half a car. Then Bond goes undercover once more by only changing his name, not anything else. When he does get found out, Zorin has him sunk into a lake in a car. They wait all of 2 minutes before declaring he must be dead and everyone bails. Bond was sucking air from the car tires though, creating a mass of bubbles that would have been obvious on the water surface, but oh well.Location switches to the Bay area where Zoran proves how much of a villain he really is by showing off his extra large model miniatures map that rises up from a conference table. That’s like villainy 101. Better yet? It’s in a blimp. When this movie was made, we are to believe that 80% of all silicone chips are made within Silicone Valley. This cracked me up because that would be China now. And the one ‘investor’ who didn’t like the plan? Asian guy. Bond busts into Stacy the geologists house using a lock pick credit card that Sharper Image apparently provided. Good ol’ product placement! A bunch of Zoran goons attack the house, and after Bond chases them away, he and Stacy act like nothing at all unusual just happened, don’t bother calling the cops, but he does make her a quiche. What a man. They later go sneak into city hall for some files, Zoran catches them in the act, and of course why shoot Bond on the spot when you can create some overly wrought plan that Bond can escape from? This leads to the building being set on fire, the obvious lack of a government building having any fire sprinklers at all, and Bond and Stacy running up stairs instead of down to escape the flames. They do this via a firetruck ladder, with not a fireman in sight that is using it. Bond is about to be arrested, so he flees and steals the first vehicle he can find...a firetruck. The type that requires a second driver at the back. Genius getaway vehicle! It’s a really nice stunt sequence, but it’s also completely mental. Not only do they escape the cops, they drive it all through the night and to Zoran’s bad guy mineshaft the next morning. The underground mine is the big set piece that shows off how big Pinewood Studios is. I mean it’s probably written into every Bond film as part of the stage’s rental agreement. Also, clearly someone was jealous of Temple of Doom, right down to the whole thing being flooded. Zoran goes up, up, and away in his beautiful balloon, er blimp. In case you don’t know, Christopher Walken plays Zoran. While in the blimp he utters these magical words, “we need more, more power” but all I heard was “cowbell”. The blimp makes its getaway with Bond hanging off one of the mooring lines, all so we can have a fight at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Again, really good stunts, poor story decisions. One of the baddies goes to the safe that’s on the blimp, which among other things has sticks of dynamite in it. Why? Because we need the blimp to explode of course! I know I’d carry sticks of dynamite wherever, especially a blimp, if I were uber rich.So ends the Roger Moore era. Good thing, because he was too old to do basic stunts and too old to not look completely creepy sexing up the 20 somethings. This was also the last film for original Moneypenny. We don’t even get the title for the next Bond film at the end, only the words “James Bond Will Return”. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)Welcome our new James Bond, Timothy Dalton. His Bond is way more serious, much more prone to anger, recognizes the life threatening dangers around him, and seems downright embarrassed to utter the famous one liners. Honestly I’m not bummed by this approach, as it is very similar to how Daniel Craig eventually does it but with a key difference, Dalton’s Bond seems to take no pleasure in anything. Women? He only hooks up with one (monogamy was very on trend thanks to AIDS) and it’s almost begrudgingly. Drink? Yeah, shake the martini, give him Bolinger Champagne, but he’s not going to make a point of stating the year and acting all uppity about his palette. At one point the action switches to a carnival style amusement park and you’ve never seen someone looking more out of place and having less fun than Bond in a tuxedo going on a rollercoaster. I don’t think he even particularly likes the killing aspect of his job, which is precisely the thrill of being a double 0 and having a license to kill. Speaking of double 0’s, the movie starts with 3 of them being on a training exercise to infiltrate a base undetected. The first two get taken out so quickly and easily, it’s a wonder the double 0’s are so renowned. This isn’t really new, as in the previous movies when we’ve seen that another double 0 is killed, it’s usually from being stupid and showing no tactical training. Shoot, the fact Bond is still alive has more to do with dumb luck than actual skill. Bond gets put on assignment to help a Russian defector and take out any snipers. The sniper rifle he uses is the most absurdly large rifle ever, and he’s literally stationed across the street from his target. Back in London, we see there’s a new Moneypenny, Bond once again takes up smoking, and Q gives him another Aston Martin but not before showing him the Ghetto Blaster, a rocket launcher that looks like a boom box “for the Americans”. The villain plot has something to do with becoming the leading arms dealer of the time, with a diamond and opium scheme mixed in for good measure. It’s kinda confusing to be honest, as the double and triple crossings and playing of one country against another gets really muddled. They were trying to be clever here, which is new for a Bond film, so I’ll at least give them that. Unfortunately the villains are completely forgettable, even the main henchman. While there’s barely a shred of sex in the movie, it does become the first Bond movie with nudity...bare butts of military guys in a tent shower that gets pulled away. There’s also a side boob with nipple shot that slipped in, which seems astonishing it took so long after all these years. Where the movie makes its mark is in the action scenes. We get to see the Aston Martin do a snow chase (screw skiing!) that has it using all of its tricks to great effect. A rooftop chase in Tangiers goes to show how much better Bourne could do that sort of thing (unfortunately with shaky cam and chaos editing). There’s also a good cargo plane fight that has Bond and henchman dangling out the back, clinging to cargo netting. The moment leading up to that is a bit odd though. See, they are in Afghanistan which has Russians on one side, and rebels on the other. If I’m not mistaken, today we’d know them as the Taliban. So yeah, Bond assists in what ultimately would lead to the rise of Bin Laden. Way to go dude. Don’t feel too bad though, Rambo did the same thing in Rambo 3. Back to the cargo plane, it’s running out of fuel and we see a shot of some VERY mountainous terrain and Bond declares there’s no place to put it down. He tells his boo to hop in the Jeep in the cargo hold, opens up the back ramp, and I’m thinking parachute drop, right? Partly. He indeed hooks a parachute up the to Jeep, but then we see a shot of the plane about 10 feet off some very flat ground as the parachute opens and the Jeep lands safely on the ground. Next shot shows the plane crashing into a mountain range. Back to the Jeep, there’s a goddamn paved road right there! What’s this no place to set her down bull****? On the plus side, this movie isn’t silly, doesn’t make you roll your eyes at some huge leaps of logic like others have, and continues with having good stunts. The negative is it just has no style, no flash. It suffers the same way Lazenby’s go of it did by being solidly put together but hitting no real highs.LICENSE TO KILL (1989)Or as I used to call it, Miami Bond Vice. This movie forgets what it is to be a Bond movie. It starts with him being the best man to CIA agent Felix, who of course is played by someone new, as is the norm. Bond being who he is, I can’t believe he’d have that kind of personal connection to anyone, as he can’t afford to have those type of connections in his life. Going to the wedding, Coast Guard snatches up Bond and Groom to nab a drug cartel guy named Sanchez who popped his head up for the first time in forever here in the Florida Keys. This leads to a nice bit of helicopter to plane stuntwork. Later that same day there’s a segment on one of the Keys bridges, and my love for True Lies just grows more in comparison. Well Sanchez escapes and then proceeds to have Felix fed to a shark (naturally) and his bride killed, on their wedding night. This sends Bond into a fit of vengeance rage, the point of the rest of the movie. By the way, Felix somehow survives the massive blood loss that would come from a Shark biting your leg off and then being placed in a body bag for at least 8 hours. Bond gets a bit violent in investigating where Felix was used as chum, much to the displeasure of M who comes all the way to Miami to tell Bond he is stripping him of his license to kill and sending him back to London under guard. Bond immediately makes a run for it, where everyone starts shooting at him. What? Why would Brits fire on their own man? He escapes, finds the yacht of the drug smuggler that failed to finish Felix off, and proceeds to destroy his drug shipment and steal all his money. Flush with cash, Bond cruises up to a harbor bar in a new cigarette boat looking for more info. His contact is his soon to be main squeeze, but she proves quickly she isn’t the typical “save me James” kind of Bond girl. Bad guys show up and one of the henchmen is a very young Benicio del Toro, and the dude had it even back then. A bar fight starts, but the go-go dancer in the middle never stops dancing, that’s how dedicated she is!Turns out Bond girl is a former army pilot, so he pays her to fly him to somewhere in South America called Isthmus. The price negotiations for doing that apparently makes both of them horny as they immediately get to smashing once the price is settled on. In Isthmus Sanchez owns everything, including the president, a casino, and a televangelist played by Wayne freakin’ Newton . Bond goes to the casino and finally plays a game the audience can understand, Black Jack. As is the new norm for Dalton Bond, he takes no pleasure in winning huge sums of money. The same plot as was in Live and Let Die is revealed, with Sanchez wanting to control the drug market across the world, but mainly in Asia. Or as they are referred to here, “the Orientals”. At one point Bond is attacked by ninjas, who are revealed to be part of a deep cover assignment by Hong Kong agents, and then are promptly killed. Bond manages to ingratiate himself with Sanchez, partly by telling the truth that he is a former British agent and assasin, and the dead ninja proves he must not be on the good guy’s team. Way to do a background check there, drug kingpin. The drug lab is at the televangelist compound, where we find that the cocaine is mixed with gasoline and shipped that way, thus undetectable. Also makes things rather ready to go boom. Bond gets identified by good ol’ Benecio, so to make his escape Bond essentially tosses the lab version of a molotov cocktail. The amazing part is the lab has no fire suppression system, and despite the fire only being small to start, everyone in the whole complex evacuates as if all is a lost cause. Four tankers of gas flee the scene, and the entire complex goes up in massive explosions as if a self destruct button had been pushed. The ensuing tanker chase merely reminds me of Fast and Furious 4, which does it so much better in half the time. Except they didn’t bother have a truck cab pop a wheelie, did they? Booyah! The movie, and Dalton’s career as Bond, end with a bit of weirdness being one Bond girl getting jealous of another, and Bond having to go chase after her to say he wants to be with her. Q happens to be on scene to witness this and shakes his head, clearly knowing Bond’s history with women and how long any of those relations last. While I like the more serious tone of these last two movies, I’m glad they moved on from Dalton. He just lacked charisma as Bond, though he also might have been victim to a film franchise that had been cranking out movies every other year since the 60’s. 007 needed a hard reset, with new blood and ideas behind the camera, as well as in front. The six year gap felt like an eternity, for me though it’s just one night as I’m on to my final push through this 21 film binge.</blockquote>

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