Lettergrade: C+
For whatever reason - maybe just by default - The Wolverine wound up being the popcorn movie I was most looking forward to this summer. And yet, whilst watching it, I found myself a little under-stimulated for big sections, despite the fact that I think I appreciated on an intellectual level what director James Mangold was trying to do. If you had asked me, I would have said that I'd be all for an X-Men movie that takes moments for contemplation and philosophy. Now that I've seen one, however, I can't say that the extra screen-time made the character much more engaging than I found him to be previously. This movie is a little classier than the prior stand-alone Wolverine movie from 2009, but is it bad to say that at the same time it just isn't as much fun to watch?
Maybe the main problem is that the set-up is kind of shaky… This is Hugh Jackman's sixth (!) time playing the character… there were the original three X-Men movies, which appeared in theaters between 2000 and 2006. In them, Wolverine was a mysterious self-healing mutant who couldn't remember who he was, where he came from, and how his bones (and the claws that protrude from his hands when he gets upset) happened to be coated in nigh-indestructable "adamantium." 2009's moderately crappy prequel, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, filled in a lot of those gaps, detailing how the character fought in every major war over the last 200 years for the sheer thrill and blood-lust of doing so, before being shot in the head with an adamantium bullet and permanently losing his memory during the 1970s (a good decade to forget).
But on to what confused me… So this new picture opens with a scene where Wolverine saves a Japanese solider's life during the Nagasaki bombing of 1945. We catch up with Wolverine in the present day… he now lives alone in the woods, having killed Dr. Jean Grey at the end of X-Men 3 and feels really bad about it. Jean's memory appears as night visions, beckoning him toward an afterlife which his mutation will not allow him to reach. He is tracked down, however, by a mysterious woman employed by the solider whose life he saved some 60-70 years earlier. The soldier became a successful technology businessman after the war, and wants to repay his debt to Wolverine by taking away his immortality, thus allowing him to live to a ripe old age and die a natural death at some point down the line.
But wait… Chronologically in Wolverine's life, the Nagasaki scene is followed by his cameo in 2011's 60s set X-Men: First Class (where he tells the younger Professor X to "fuck off" during a scouting montage), then the events of the 2009 movie (at the end of which, once again, Wolverine PERMANENTLY LOSES HIS MEMORY), then the first three X-Men movies, in which Wolverine CANNOT REMEMBER WHO HE IS OR HOW ALL THAT ADAMANTIUM WAS GRAFTED ONTO HIS BODY, AND DOES NOT REGAIN ANY OF HIS OLD MEMORIES, before picking up with the rest of this new movie. Why, then, does Wolverine not utter some variation of "Hey, who the hell are you?" after flying to Japan and meeting with the guy?
Believe it or not, the fact that the movie is very unclear about how much Wolverine remembers or does not remember about this soldier and his life before the 1970s is the main thing that sabotaged the first half for me. My thinking is that Wolverine would look at the guy not as an old friend, but as a stranger. What, then, is his personal stake in protecting the man's granddaughter from an assassination attempt in the first third of the movie, and going on the run with her through Japan with the Japanese mafia in full pursuit? It seems to me that the Wolverine from the other movies would have been a little more like, "Wait, who are you again? Okay, fuck this: I'm outta here!" and gone to the airport.
Instead, however, Wolverine is protecting a person he doesn't seem all that motivated to protect, and spends a lot of time contemplating deep, quasi-symbolic imagery that doesn't really seem to play into the film's conclusion at all, nor does it mesh well with the film's aggressive action bits. I hate to admit this, but I found my interest peaking up a bit in the movie's 2nd half, when it falls a little more into the genre traditions, if only because the material became much more straightforward at that point. Unlikely, implausible plot twists… a doomsday machine that musn't be activated… insurmountable odds that are somehow surmounted… and well, you know the rest. There's even a big section at the end where Wolverine must fight a large mechanical Samurai warrior that's sort of like the Japanese version of Iron Monger from the end of the first Iron Man crossed with ED-209 from RoboCop. This segment isn't terribly inspiring, mind you, but it doesn't have the problems that the first half has in terms of being unclear about what Wolverine knows and why he's doing anything that he's doing.
Jackman is again really solid as the title character. He might even appear a little more ripped and savage in this movie than he has as Wolverine in the past. The largely Asian supporting cast is decent as well, with Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima playing women who romance and help Wolverine along the way. The weak link is the main mutant baddie… she's called "Viper" and is played by Russian supermodel Svetlana Khodchenkova. I'm almost entirely convinced that her voice was dubbed (poorly and out of sync, at that), but that aside, her body language alone sinks her performance and turns her part into ridiculous caricature.
I think Mangold is an interesting director… I was a big fan of Copland, his debut movie, in 1996 and thought that the way in which he combined story movement with musical performances in his 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line was brilliant, exciting filmmaking. I'm always happy to see a quality director like him take on material which might otherwise be visual effects driven pulp in other hands (ahem, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), but at the same time, I kind of wish the end result packed a bit more of a wallop.
I will say, however, that as an American who has always been fasciated with the ways and culture of Japan, I did find the scenery and the tour of the country that the film takes you on to be very enjoyable. More than once, I thought of Sean Connery's fifth James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, which saw the secret agent taking residence in Japan himself in order to unravel yet another plot by S.P.E.C.T.R.E. to hold the world hostage. Wolverine's adventure in the land of the rising sun isn't quite as consequential as James Bond's was, but I guess that if they're going to keep making these things, at least they're choosing pretty scenery for the actors to stand in front of.
My entires on
X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: First Class.
July 30, 2013
July 19, 2013
Pacific Rim (7/19/2013)
Lettergrade: C
I don't think I'm engaging in much hyperbole when I say that Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim is the finest motion picture yet made where people in giant robot suits punch interdimensional lizard monsters that have arrived to Earth via portals at the bottom of the ocean.
That said, it's also a movie that I enjoyed greatly for a good hour or so, but ultimately kind of tuned out on during the third act. I'm not sure why that is... I think it's because the picture ultimately descended into a flurry of hard-to-follow action (and a climax that was bizarrely identical to the climax of The Avengers from last year) without generating enough interest in its lead characters to justify the bulky 132 minute running time.
The movie's main dude is played by Charlie Hunnam, whom I've really liked in various roles in the past (particularly Douglas McGrath's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby in 2002). Here he plays a down-on-his-luck robot (or "Jaeger") pilot who was thrown out of the Robot Fighter Academy (or whatever) when he pulled a cocky move on a mission and got his co-pilot brother killed as a result. Now, with the program on its last legs due to political issues, and the monsters increasing in size and frequency, Hunnam must come out of involuntary-retirement and team up with a petite, untested rookie played by Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi. I've got to say that she's a little more interesting than he is in the movie, but by and large we're not really talking about a significant threat to the "great screen couple" status of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn here.
All in all, Pac Rim is kind of like Godzilla meets Robot Jox and Top Gun seasoned with Rocky and a dash of Rush Hour in there (at least, that's how I'm imagining the pitch meeting went). I took a lot of enjoyment in the intentional ridiculousness and the over-abundance of testosterone, but the whole concoction didn't entirely work for me as a satisfying movie.
As is true of the other del Toro pictures that I've liked (Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army) - and even the ones I haven't (Hellboy 1, Blade II and his English debut, Mimic) - the creature designs are imaginative and exciting, and the action feels very real and visceral, even when it's largely computer generated. The supporting cast is delightfully full of del Toro regulars - Ron Perlman, to be specific - and there are a few first timers in there as well, most notably the scene-stealing Charlie Day (from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia) and the freakish-looking Burn Gorman as a pair of scientists studying the alien "Kaijus."
When I think back through the movie, the scenes where Day runs around Tokyo trying to find a way to telepathically communicate with a Kaiju brain are the ones I remember enjoying the most. Many of the others sort of run together. I seem to recall a complicated backstory for Rinko Kikuchi involving her family dying in a much earlier Kaiju attack when she was little. The movie makes a big deal out of the fact that she was saved by Idris Elba (who plays the Robot Boxer League's crusty supervisor, and serves as sort of a Burgess Meredith / Pat Morita figure to her), but it didn't seem that shocking to me when the reveal happened. Honestly, though, I don't really remember much else other than some cool fights. And I saw this movie in the middle of the day when I was wide awake, so there's no real excuse other than that it just must not have left much of an impression.
My only other real thought about this movie is that it is another good example of a big expensive Hollywood blockbuster stacking its cast with actors who are popular in other countries... in order, I presume, to play to a much larger international audience. I actually think this practice is kind of cool: 2011's fantastic Mission: Impossible: Ghost: Protocol did this in spades (which I suspect contributed to the movie doing so well both domestically and abroad) and Iron Man 3 earlier this summer even contained an "extra scene" that was only part of the Chinese version of the movie and designed to play to that audience. I don't much like the idea that different counties might ultimately see different versions of big popcorn movies, but the overall trend seems to indicate that movies like Iron Man 3 and this summer's Japan-set The Wolverine, and this one will embrace other cultures (and pop-cultures) a bit more aggressively moving into the future.
There's something a bit more exciting about that to me than in seeing new action-adventure movies return to the same three cities in Canada that all the other ones have been filmed in lately, and I think it's a clear sign of things to come.
Other movies I've seen throughout the years where giant robots punch shit:
The Transformers (07/06/07)
Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen (07/04/09)
Transformers 3: Dark Of The Moon (7/24/2011)
Real Steel (10/08/2011)
I don't think I'm engaging in much hyperbole when I say that Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim is the finest motion picture yet made where people in giant robot suits punch interdimensional lizard monsters that have arrived to Earth via portals at the bottom of the ocean.
That said, it's also a movie that I enjoyed greatly for a good hour or so, but ultimately kind of tuned out on during the third act. I'm not sure why that is... I think it's because the picture ultimately descended into a flurry of hard-to-follow action (and a climax that was bizarrely identical to the climax of The Avengers from last year) without generating enough interest in its lead characters to justify the bulky 132 minute running time.
The movie's main dude is played by Charlie Hunnam, whom I've really liked in various roles in the past (particularly Douglas McGrath's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby in 2002). Here he plays a down-on-his-luck robot (or "Jaeger") pilot who was thrown out of the Robot Fighter Academy (or whatever) when he pulled a cocky move on a mission and got his co-pilot brother killed as a result. Now, with the program on its last legs due to political issues, and the monsters increasing in size and frequency, Hunnam must come out of involuntary-retirement and team up with a petite, untested rookie played by Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi. I've got to say that she's a little more interesting than he is in the movie, but by and large we're not really talking about a significant threat to the "great screen couple" status of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn here.
All in all, Pac Rim is kind of like Godzilla meets Robot Jox and Top Gun seasoned with Rocky and a dash of Rush Hour in there (at least, that's how I'm imagining the pitch meeting went). I took a lot of enjoyment in the intentional ridiculousness and the over-abundance of testosterone, but the whole concoction didn't entirely work for me as a satisfying movie.
As is true of the other del Toro pictures that I've liked (Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army) - and even the ones I haven't (Hellboy 1, Blade II and his English debut, Mimic) - the creature designs are imaginative and exciting, and the action feels very real and visceral, even when it's largely computer generated. The supporting cast is delightfully full of del Toro regulars - Ron Perlman, to be specific - and there are a few first timers in there as well, most notably the scene-stealing Charlie Day (from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia) and the freakish-looking Burn Gorman as a pair of scientists studying the alien "Kaijus."
When I think back through the movie, the scenes where Day runs around Tokyo trying to find a way to telepathically communicate with a Kaiju brain are the ones I remember enjoying the most. Many of the others sort of run together. I seem to recall a complicated backstory for Rinko Kikuchi involving her family dying in a much earlier Kaiju attack when she was little. The movie makes a big deal out of the fact that she was saved by Idris Elba (who plays the Robot Boxer League's crusty supervisor, and serves as sort of a Burgess Meredith / Pat Morita figure to her), but it didn't seem that shocking to me when the reveal happened. Honestly, though, I don't really remember much else other than some cool fights. And I saw this movie in the middle of the day when I was wide awake, so there's no real excuse other than that it just must not have left much of an impression.
My only other real thought about this movie is that it is another good example of a big expensive Hollywood blockbuster stacking its cast with actors who are popular in other countries... in order, I presume, to play to a much larger international audience. I actually think this practice is kind of cool: 2011's fantastic Mission: Impossible: Ghost: Protocol did this in spades (which I suspect contributed to the movie doing so well both domestically and abroad) and Iron Man 3 earlier this summer even contained an "extra scene" that was only part of the Chinese version of the movie and designed to play to that audience. I don't much like the idea that different counties might ultimately see different versions of big popcorn movies, but the overall trend seems to indicate that movies like Iron Man 3 and this summer's Japan-set The Wolverine, and this one will embrace other cultures (and pop-cultures) a bit more aggressively moving into the future.
There's something a bit more exciting about that to me than in seeing new action-adventure movies return to the same three cities in Canada that all the other ones have been filmed in lately, and I think it's a clear sign of things to come.
Other movies I've seen throughout the years where giant robots punch shit:
The Transformers (07/06/07)
Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen (07/04/09)
Transformers 3: Dark Of The Moon (7/24/2011)
Real Steel (10/08/2011)
June 21, 2013
June 17, 2013
Man Of Steel (06/17/2013)
Lettergrade: C+
Wow, a good number of my friends seemed to really hate Zack Snyder's Man Of Steel over the weekend. Maybe knowing that when I went to see it myself today is what softened me up a bit: I really didn't think the movie was all that bad… In fact, I was surprised to find that I even kind of liked it for certain segments.
The main thing that cut through my cynicism, I think, is the stellar casting and a handful of really strong character moments spread throughout. The downside is that those moments are often way too brief and far between. Since the movie spends so much time detailing the intricacies of Krypton society at the beginning (backstory which I don't think I was ever all that curious about to begin with), and so much time in the back half with the big, kinetic, highly-destructive action sequences (where two indestructible guys punch each other endlessly, destroying most of Metropolis in the process), you don't really get much of a look at what Henry Cavill's take on Superman really is.
He seems to have found a performance that smoothly blends the character's wholesome boy-scout'dness of Christopher Reeve's portrayal with kind of a tortured altruistic loner quality… Every time you get a flash of what he's doing with the character, you really want to see more of it. When we first meet him (as an adult) he is a transient, wandering from place to place and helping people however he can, much like Bruce Banner or The A Team. The movie, of course, charts his decision to emerge into a public figure and become the Superman that we know. If it has a failing, it's that it severely shortchanges detailing who Superman is in favor of showing us scenes of what Superman can do.
I couldn't help but think of the Superman movies I knew as a kid more or less constantly during this one… not only because the film retells Superman's origin story a bit, but also because it brought back General Zod, Superman II's primary baddie (so memorably played by Terence Stamp) and recast him with Michael Shannon (of Revolutionary Road and HBO's Boardwalk Empire). Shannon is fine in the role, but a curious pattern of 2013 is that both this movie and Star Trek Into Darkness have recast incredibly memorable screen villains for their franchise revivals… moves which seem highly questionable to me because it's pretty tough to go up against people's fond memories of screen heavies of cinema past.
Along those lines, I think the movie did make a serious tactical error in retreading so much material from the earlier Superman flick. Whenever Man Of Steel had a scene that has an equivalent in the 1978 version (such as all the origin stuff, scenes with ma and pa Kent in Kansas, any verbal throw-down with Zod, et al), I almost always felt that the 1978 version was better. Although Kevin Costner is one of the strongest parts of this new movie, Jonathan Kent's death wasn't handled as well for me as it was 35 years ago. Having him die in a twister, much like the dad in the movie Twister did, lacks the simplicity and poignant beauty of Jonathan dying more or less of natural causes. "All those things I can do... All those powers…" laments Christopher Reeve's Clark in the earlier flick, "and I couldn't save him." Superman could rush in to pull someone away from a tornado (although I understand that the point of the scene is that Jonathan is adamant that he not do so), but he can't save someone from a fatal heart attack, a sullen reminder of the fragility of human life that hangs over much of the 78 picture and seems to guide much of the earlier Superman's character.
My other main thought is that doing an extended sequence on Krypton right at the start of the movie (much like the 78 one did) invited unfavorable comparisons to the earlier picture, and more than that, was simply a little confusing and kind of boring. I believe that if you were to lop that opening segment off and start the picture with Clark saving the people on the oil rig, the whole first part of the flick would have been significantly more gripping. All the Krypton backstory could have been revealed much later in the picture, when Clark himself learns about it. It might not have worked, but I think it'd be a lot more engaging than starting the movie with a bunch of bulky, lukewarm "Lord Of The Rings In Space" bullshit.
In the last 7 years, we've gotten two very different examples of how these movies can go. Bryan Singer's Superman Returns payed reverential tribute to the earlier movies in 2006… very much to a fault, I thought. It kept the musical themes and a lot of the same set designs from the earlier picture for no clear reason, struggled to establish awkward continuity links with 1980's Superman II, and cast a Superman for the primary reason that Brandon Routh (an actor I like, but who was a little miscast and underused) resembles the late Christopher Reeve.
Now in 2013, Synder's Man Of Steel pretty much ignores the Christopher Reeve version completely, reinventing and rewriting aspects of the franchise as it sees fit. To tell you the truth, I almost always prefer that another entry in a mega-franchise like this has the freedom to do its own thing and find its own voice rather than to be encumbered by past installments. Although I am not entirely in love with this version, I'm glad that it got away with doing what it wanted to.
MOS is not my ideal version of what a Superman movie is and can be, but it does take the Superman mythos and adapts it to the bleak, modern post Batman Begins style of superhero picture with some moderate success while still hanging on to enough of what makes Superman Superman to keep me interested. I've got several beefs with it, sure - and frankly, I can't imagine a scenario anywhere down the line where I'd ever want to watch this movie again - but if we're talking about a decent few hours at the cinema, it didn't let me down.
A few additional thoughts:
-When Zod and his army are imprisoned and sent to the Phantom Zone early in the picture, am I the only one who thought that it looked like they had been encased in individual flying space dildos?
-Another example of questionable production design: Krypton is a super advanced society, but they communicate with each other using Pin Point Impression toys that you can buy through the Sharper Image catalogue? (with compliments to Mike S. for the joke)
-At the end of the movie, when Clark starts at the Daily Planet a few days after the picture's big action climax, it seems that everything's back to normal... the slimy co-worker asks Lois if she wants to go to the game because the MLB decided not to cancel their schedule in light of the GIANT FUCKING ALIEN INVASION THAT DESTROYED MOST OF METROPOLIS AND KILLED COUNTLESS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE.
Wow, a good number of my friends seemed to really hate Zack Snyder's Man Of Steel over the weekend. Maybe knowing that when I went to see it myself today is what softened me up a bit: I really didn't think the movie was all that bad… In fact, I was surprised to find that I even kind of liked it for certain segments.
The main thing that cut through my cynicism, I think, is the stellar casting and a handful of really strong character moments spread throughout. The downside is that those moments are often way too brief and far between. Since the movie spends so much time detailing the intricacies of Krypton society at the beginning (backstory which I don't think I was ever all that curious about to begin with), and so much time in the back half with the big, kinetic, highly-destructive action sequences (where two indestructible guys punch each other endlessly, destroying most of Metropolis in the process), you don't really get much of a look at what Henry Cavill's take on Superman really is.
He seems to have found a performance that smoothly blends the character's wholesome boy-scout'dness of Christopher Reeve's portrayal with kind of a tortured altruistic loner quality… Every time you get a flash of what he's doing with the character, you really want to see more of it. When we first meet him (as an adult) he is a transient, wandering from place to place and helping people however he can, much like Bruce Banner or The A Team. The movie, of course, charts his decision to emerge into a public figure and become the Superman that we know. If it has a failing, it's that it severely shortchanges detailing who Superman is in favor of showing us scenes of what Superman can do.
I couldn't help but think of the Superman movies I knew as a kid more or less constantly during this one… not only because the film retells Superman's origin story a bit, but also because it brought back General Zod, Superman II's primary baddie (so memorably played by Terence Stamp) and recast him with Michael Shannon (of Revolutionary Road and HBO's Boardwalk Empire). Shannon is fine in the role, but a curious pattern of 2013 is that both this movie and Star Trek Into Darkness have recast incredibly memorable screen villains for their franchise revivals… moves which seem highly questionable to me because it's pretty tough to go up against people's fond memories of screen heavies of cinema past.
Along those lines, I think the movie did make a serious tactical error in retreading so much material from the earlier Superman flick. Whenever Man Of Steel had a scene that has an equivalent in the 1978 version (such as all the origin stuff, scenes with ma and pa Kent in Kansas, any verbal throw-down with Zod, et al), I almost always felt that the 1978 version was better. Although Kevin Costner is one of the strongest parts of this new movie, Jonathan Kent's death wasn't handled as well for me as it was 35 years ago. Having him die in a twister, much like the dad in the movie Twister did, lacks the simplicity and poignant beauty of Jonathan dying more or less of natural causes. "All those things I can do... All those powers…" laments Christopher Reeve's Clark in the earlier flick, "and I couldn't save him." Superman could rush in to pull someone away from a tornado (although I understand that the point of the scene is that Jonathan is adamant that he not do so), but he can't save someone from a fatal heart attack, a sullen reminder of the fragility of human life that hangs over much of the 78 picture and seems to guide much of the earlier Superman's character.
My other main thought is that doing an extended sequence on Krypton right at the start of the movie (much like the 78 one did) invited unfavorable comparisons to the earlier picture, and more than that, was simply a little confusing and kind of boring. I believe that if you were to lop that opening segment off and start the picture with Clark saving the people on the oil rig, the whole first part of the flick would have been significantly more gripping. All the Krypton backstory could have been revealed much later in the picture, when Clark himself learns about it. It might not have worked, but I think it'd be a lot more engaging than starting the movie with a bunch of bulky, lukewarm "Lord Of The Rings In Space" bullshit.
In the last 7 years, we've gotten two very different examples of how these movies can go. Bryan Singer's Superman Returns payed reverential tribute to the earlier movies in 2006… very much to a fault, I thought. It kept the musical themes and a lot of the same set designs from the earlier picture for no clear reason, struggled to establish awkward continuity links with 1980's Superman II, and cast a Superman for the primary reason that Brandon Routh (an actor I like, but who was a little miscast and underused) resembles the late Christopher Reeve.
Now in 2013, Synder's Man Of Steel pretty much ignores the Christopher Reeve version completely, reinventing and rewriting aspects of the franchise as it sees fit. To tell you the truth, I almost always prefer that another entry in a mega-franchise like this has the freedom to do its own thing and find its own voice rather than to be encumbered by past installments. Although I am not entirely in love with this version, I'm glad that it got away with doing what it wanted to.
MOS is not my ideal version of what a Superman movie is and can be, but it does take the Superman mythos and adapts it to the bleak, modern post Batman Begins style of superhero picture with some moderate success while still hanging on to enough of what makes Superman Superman to keep me interested. I've got several beefs with it, sure - and frankly, I can't imagine a scenario anywhere down the line where I'd ever want to watch this movie again - but if we're talking about a decent few hours at the cinema, it didn't let me down.
A few additional thoughts:
-When Zod and his army are imprisoned and sent to the Phantom Zone early in the picture, am I the only one who thought that it looked like they had been encased in individual flying space dildos?
-Another example of questionable production design: Krypton is a super advanced society, but they communicate with each other using Pin Point Impression toys that you can buy through the Sharper Image catalogue? (with compliments to Mike S. for the joke)
-At the end of the movie, when Clark starts at the Daily Planet a few days after the picture's big action climax, it seems that everything's back to normal... the slimy co-worker asks Lois if she wants to go to the game because the MLB decided not to cancel their schedule in light of the GIANT FUCKING ALIEN INVASION THAT DESTROYED MOST OF METROPOLIS AND KILLED COUNTLESS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE.
June 14, 2013
This Is The End (06/14/2013)
Lettergrade: D+
During the end credits of This Is The End, I learned that the movie is based on a 2007 short film called Seth And Jay Vs. The Apocalypse. I haven't seen that earlier version, but I suspect this material would be really funny at a short film's length… When forced to come up with enough padding to get to 90 some minutes, it's a slow, meandering slog briefly punctuated by a few good laughs.
One of the online critics I really like described the movie as a 90 minute in-joke. I think that's right on… the flick has actor Seth Rogen (who also co-wrote and co-directed) playing a narcissistic version of himself - actor Seth Rogen - alongside Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride (among others) who all do the same.
The idea is that Jay, a successful actor in Canada, has come to L.A. to visit his old friend and former Undeclared co-star Rogen , but is dragged to a wild party at James Franco's house that he doesn't really want to go to. Whilst on a cigarette run, the ground shakes and blue light shoots down from the sky, beckoning all those who are worthy up to heaven, and leaving all others to suffer in the chaotic, fiery wasteland below. Noticeably, Seth and Jay are NOT among those pulled up to heaven. When they get back to the raging party at Franco's house, no one at the party knows that anything has happened because none of them were among the chosen either. Rather quickly, the movie finds our half dozen heroes taking refuge in Franco's mansion… Things on the outside only seem to be getting worse and worse, and the tensions and suspicions in the house steadily rise. All in all, it's kind of like a less funny version of Stephen King's The Mist.
At times, aspects of the movie seem like a semi-brillant and very dark take-down of the thinness and excessive bullshit of celebrity culture. That's the kind of ballsy subversive statement I could really get behind in a movie like this! Unfortunately, those sentiments never stick around for long… this is a wide-release Hollywood picture we're talking about, after all, and as the story continues, it kind of becomes clear that, yeah, these people are a little bad, maybe, but really they're just a good deed or two away from maybe gaining access to the pearly gates themselves.
And that's the thing that kind of bothers me most about this movie, on a philosophical level. If you're going to go down this path, it just feels wrong to build in an escape clause so at least some of the characters can get to a happy ending. When all the boys in the house speculate about what the hell is going on, Baruchel is the one who realizes that the scenario they've found themselves in is a lot like the end of the world as described in the book of Revelations. It's a legitimately creepy moment that reminded me a bit of a similarly scary beat in the first Ghostbusters movie where Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson are in the Ecto 1 together, talking about the same part of the Bible. Unlike Ghostbusters, though, This Is The End never really finds a way to pivot back away from its chilling Biblical reference and make it work toward the conclusion. Even if each of the guys had embodied a different one of the deadly sins or something else quasi-Biblical like that, I would have been a little more cool with all screen time where people are just kind of waiting around, but I don't think the movie has that kind of sub-layer going on.
When Baruchel and the others realize that they're still on the smokey remains of Earth because they just haven't been very good people, how are we supposed to read that? The in-joke might be, "well, this is funny because Jonah Hill and James Franco aren't really like that." Seth Rogen - the real one, I mean - might know that… and their real-life friends might know that… but is there a laugh there for most of the rest of the population who, outside of their movie roles, may only "know" those guys from occasional appearances on Conan? I'm not sure that there is… there's the rhythm, cadence, and attitude of a joke there, but what's the joke?
Why am I going on about this, though? I have a feeling that the concept of this movie was born when Rogen, co-screenwriter/co-director Evan Goldberg, and a bunch of their friends were sitting around one night saying, "You know what would be funny…?" I don't think there's any big attempt at anything deep here, despite the fact that deep subjects are alluded to semi-frequently. And in the end (of the movie), the Backstreet Boys are performing in heaven and all seems to be juuuuuust fine. No lessons, morals, point, or purpose for anything you just saw. I feel like they could have done a little more with the premise - I don't think it's ever even mentioned that several of them are of different religions while others still are very public atheists, for example - but hey, it's not my movie: I was just dumb enough to pay 8.50 to see it.
During the end credits of This Is The End, I learned that the movie is based on a 2007 short film called Seth And Jay Vs. The Apocalypse. I haven't seen that earlier version, but I suspect this material would be really funny at a short film's length… When forced to come up with enough padding to get to 90 some minutes, it's a slow, meandering slog briefly punctuated by a few good laughs.
One of the online critics I really like described the movie as a 90 minute in-joke. I think that's right on… the flick has actor Seth Rogen (who also co-wrote and co-directed) playing a narcissistic version of himself - actor Seth Rogen - alongside Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride (among others) who all do the same.
The idea is that Jay, a successful actor in Canada, has come to L.A. to visit his old friend and former Undeclared co-star Rogen , but is dragged to a wild party at James Franco's house that he doesn't really want to go to. Whilst on a cigarette run, the ground shakes and blue light shoots down from the sky, beckoning all those who are worthy up to heaven, and leaving all others to suffer in the chaotic, fiery wasteland below. Noticeably, Seth and Jay are NOT among those pulled up to heaven. When they get back to the raging party at Franco's house, no one at the party knows that anything has happened because none of them were among the chosen either. Rather quickly, the movie finds our half dozen heroes taking refuge in Franco's mansion… Things on the outside only seem to be getting worse and worse, and the tensions and suspicions in the house steadily rise. All in all, it's kind of like a less funny version of Stephen King's The Mist.
At times, aspects of the movie seem like a semi-brillant and very dark take-down of the thinness and excessive bullshit of celebrity culture. That's the kind of ballsy subversive statement I could really get behind in a movie like this! Unfortunately, those sentiments never stick around for long… this is a wide-release Hollywood picture we're talking about, after all, and as the story continues, it kind of becomes clear that, yeah, these people are a little bad, maybe, but really they're just a good deed or two away from maybe gaining access to the pearly gates themselves.
And that's the thing that kind of bothers me most about this movie, on a philosophical level. If you're going to go down this path, it just feels wrong to build in an escape clause so at least some of the characters can get to a happy ending. When all the boys in the house speculate about what the hell is going on, Baruchel is the one who realizes that the scenario they've found themselves in is a lot like the end of the world as described in the book of Revelations. It's a legitimately creepy moment that reminded me a bit of a similarly scary beat in the first Ghostbusters movie where Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson are in the Ecto 1 together, talking about the same part of the Bible. Unlike Ghostbusters, though, This Is The End never really finds a way to pivot back away from its chilling Biblical reference and make it work toward the conclusion. Even if each of the guys had embodied a different one of the deadly sins or something else quasi-Biblical like that, I would have been a little more cool with all screen time where people are just kind of waiting around, but I don't think the movie has that kind of sub-layer going on.
When Baruchel and the others realize that they're still on the smokey remains of Earth because they just haven't been very good people, how are we supposed to read that? The in-joke might be, "well, this is funny because Jonah Hill and James Franco aren't really like that." Seth Rogen - the real one, I mean - might know that… and their real-life friends might know that… but is there a laugh there for most of the rest of the population who, outside of their movie roles, may only "know" those guys from occasional appearances on Conan? I'm not sure that there is… there's the rhythm, cadence, and attitude of a joke there, but what's the joke?
Why am I going on about this, though? I have a feeling that the concept of this movie was born when Rogen, co-screenwriter/co-director Evan Goldberg, and a bunch of their friends were sitting around one night saying, "You know what would be funny…?" I don't think there's any big attempt at anything deep here, despite the fact that deep subjects are alluded to semi-frequently. And in the end (of the movie), the Backstreet Boys are performing in heaven and all seems to be juuuuuust fine. No lessons, morals, point, or purpose for anything you just saw. I feel like they could have done a little more with the premise - I don't think it's ever even mentioned that several of them are of different religions while others still are very public atheists, for example - but hey, it's not my movie: I was just dumb enough to pay 8.50 to see it.
April 4, 2013
Moonraker (Bond #11) [Bond 50 BluRay Set]
The general consensus among those who know the James Bond franchise well seems to be that 1979's Moonraker is one of the shittier entries. Having just seen it myself (albeit over several sittings), I have to agree.
But before you think I'm just jumping on the hate wagon here, I should emphasize that I started to dislike the movie well before I got to the notorious third act where Bond is in space firing lasers. That's incredibly stupid, don't get me wrong… but even if we ignore that whole section, I still think the movie suffers from having an unclear, meandering plot and an excessive case of the sillies.
Watching all the Bond movies in order as an adult has been revelatory because I've found that more often than not, the movies have layers and complexity and cohesion that I just didn't pick up on when I was a teenager. That's doubly true of the three Roger Moore flicks that came before this one - Live And Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me… all of which somewhat upended my earlier impression that the Moore era was defined by hammy one-liners and semi-nonsensical plots. Those earlier three movies aren't really like that, I've found, but Moonraker is the first Bond I've encountered in my 11 movie journey thus far that kind of fits my mental criteria of what the series can be at its worst.
One of the key things about this movie that's indicative of went wrong in terms of thinking and concept is the incessant inclusion of "Jaws," the terrifying, scene-stealing steel-toothed thug who first appeared in the previous movie. Bond's first scene in this one finds him having to make a hasty exit from an airplane sans parachute. Once Bond jumps out, it is revealed that Jaws was on the plane too and is coming after him (although we didn't see him at all in the previous bit). Why did Jaws decide to stay hidden during the fist-fight that happened on the plane before everyone bailed? The mission Bond was on seems to have had nothing to do with him, so why was he even up there in the first place? And where's HIS parachute? One gets the feeling that Jaws has just been following Bond around more or less continuously since The Spy Who Loved Me came out, which frankly makes me think of him as a fairly lousy killer.
Right away, though, bringing Jaws back seems like a weird thing for the franchise to do. The series hadn't really continued a secondary bad-guy from one movie to the next before… Blofled appears in five of the first seven Bond pictures (sometimes only briefly and with his face obscured), but generally speaking, once the end credits roll, that's the end for Kerim and Oddjob and Largo, and Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd… usually because they're dead, of course, but you know what I'm saying.
Anyway, having Jaws pop up pretty much every time there's an action scene throughout Moonraker - often without much logic or purpose - seems to suggest that the filmmakers had a "if-they-liked-it-last-time, we'll-give-em'-a-bigger-helping-this-time" approach to making this movie, and that's a big part of what feels lazy and uninspired. Indeed, everything is "more"… more exotic locations, more action scenes, more double-entendre, more gadgets, more women for Bond to sleep with, and the most deadly of all, more of the camp that would somehow become synonymous with Moore's portrayal of Bond. It's not as smooth a cocktail as it was in the previous movie, and the story seems to get crowded out a bit by all the excess.
While we're on the topic, though, let's see if we can make some sense of the plot…. During the pre-credit sequence, we see a space shuttle get hijacked mid-air whilst being transported from California to Europe. The UK was apparently responsible for the shuttle's safety, so MI6 sends Bond to investigate. He first goes to Los Angeles (via stock footage), where eccentric space ship industrialist Hugo Drax - played by an astonishingly uncharismatic Michael Lonsdale - has built a sprawling estate next to his space ship factory that is supposed to look exactly like an estate in France (because in reality the movie was filmed in France for tax purposes).
Chang, one of Drax's lackees, tries to kill Bond using a g-force simulator for no clear reason, and then after Bond randomly has sex with Drax's personal jet pilot, the billionaire tries to have him assassinated during an impromptu duck hunt on the estate's front lawn. Right away the movie lost me because Drax could have been a little friendlier to the British secret agent up front as opposed to, oh I don't know, trying to kill him multiple times, and then his evil plot might have gone off without as many hiccups.
The various attempts on Bond's life do arouse some mild suspicion, however… so much so that he inexplicably goes to Venice, Italy, where he has several scenes where he just looks like a sad old man wandering around aimlessly, much like John McCain at a Presidential debate.
Fortunately, after a while Bond randomly stumbles upon a secret chemical lab that happens to be producing some highly deadly nerve gas. Why are they doing that? And what does it have to do with the missing space shuttle? Well, the movie waits another goddamn hour to tell us, and meanwhile, Bond decides to go to Rio for no clear fucking reason that I was able to piece together based on anything that was said or demonstrated elsewhere in the movie. Once there, he has sex with another stunningly attractive woman who is probably 30 years younger than he is, and then goes to a street festival.
Meanwhile, Jaws is relentlessly in pursuit and continues to easily survive situations like falling 20,000 feet from the sky into the hard ground, and sliding down a lift cable and smashing into a brick building. He then meets a short blond girl with enormous breasts whom we instantly know he is in love with because Tchaikovsky's "Romeo And Juliet Overture" plays when we first see her. Their blossoming romance mercifully happens entirely off-screen, but then later they both show up on Drax's space station in the third act. Once Jaws realizes that Drax's plan for using the nerve gas to kill everyone on Earth and then having all the preppy models he's brought into space create a new "master race" to repopulate the planet miiiiiiiiiiight not include a gigantic steel-toothed freak and his 4 foot tall, triple-D cup girlfriend, he suddenly switches sides, and helps Bond save the planet. Urgh.
Drax's plot is very unclear until the last half hour of the picture. I've been thinking a lot about that and whether or not it contributed to the film's crippling lack of momentum for me. When I think of it, many of the other Bond pictures have done this too, starting at the beginning of the franchise with Dr. No, to varying degrees of success. Maybe Moonraker's problem isn't that there are too few breadcrumbs being thrown down as much as the fact that how it gets you from one to the next just isn't all that interesting.
But of course, Hugo Drax bears a lot of the blame too. Roger Ebert sometimes quotes Gene Siskel's observation that "a Bond picture is only as good as its villain." So far, I've really found that to be true… the two Bond pictures I've liked the least thus far - 1965's Thunderball and now this one - have the misfortune of following the intimidating Auric Goldfinger with the dull mumbling Largo, and the steely aquatic-obsessed Stromberg with Hugo Drax, who looks like he came to set immediately after appearing at a Renaissance Fair. He's given so little screen time that it's hard to even really feel all that intrigued or intimidated by him. In fact, Drax basically sub-contracts out the disposal of Bond to Jaws early in the movie, and then disappears for a good hour or so. How are you supposed to root against a villian when you don't know anything about him or what he's doing?
Now in Drax's defense, it's truly a scary scene 90 minutes in when he launches all of his shuttles into space, and we still don't have much of a clue about what he's up to, but I stand by my overall comment that he's one of Bond's less interesting baddies. You can be good, and you can be bad… but the biggest sin is being "boring." Drax is just plain boring.
Oh, and after a parade of bubbly bimbo Bond girls like "Plenty O'Toole" and "Mary Goodnight" throughout the 70s Bond pictures, the series continues the radical concept from the last movie of having Bond's primary love interest be a little more intelligent and respectable. Still unable to resist Bond's penis, mind you, but at the very least, she's less ditzy and outright stupid. This time, it's an American CIA agent who is posing as a rocket scientist in Drax's organization. She has the dignified name "Dr. Holly Goodhead" and is played by Lois Chiles, who makes for a surprisingly bland and uninspiring foil to Bond, certainly so relative to Barbara Bach in the previous movie. But hey, that kind of nondescript dullness seems to be par for the course with this movie.
Several key creative personnel were carried over from 77's The Spy Who Loved Me… most notably director Lewis Gilbert and screenwriter Christopher Wood. This was the last time either would work on the franchise. It was also the last movie for Bernard Lee as "M." Lee would pass away early in the production of next movie, 1981's For Your Eyes Only, before any of his scenes were shot.
I could be wrong, but Moonraker - the 11th "official" James Bond movie - really feels a bit like the end of an era for the franchise. I liked the earlier Moore pictures, but it seems that this is the point where the movies got a little less inventive and Moore's camp and schtick went a little over the top in terms of corniness.
The previous movie, 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, was probably a bit of a sea change too.... It was the first outing where long time Bond producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli handled one of the movies solo, after his partner Harry Saltzman had to sell his stake in the franchise. With Spy, it's like Broccoli knew that he was under a lot of pressure and the movie had to be good. It was. But Moonraker feels more like "product"... a mismatched collection of established Bond traditions and clichés rather than a movie that feels like a unique entity which moves the series forward.
Longtime Bond editor and 2nd unit director John Glen would direct the next five pictures, all of them made throughout the 80s (three more starring Moore and two with Timothy Dalton). My vague memories of the Bonds of this era are not terribly positive, but I will go in with an open mind and I guess I'll have to see how I feel when I watch 'em.
I wonder, though, that if I had been old enough to see the movies in theaters as they were released, if I wouldn't distinguish the Bond pictures between those that came out before Moonraker - the "good ones" - and the ones that came out after.
Miscellaneous observations:
•Look, I'm as big a fan of the original 1977 Star Wars as anyone, but 1979 must have been a tough time to go to the movies, what with all the Star Wars knock-offs and other assorted space-based adventures that were in theaters. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, The Black Hole, plus the original Battlestar Galactica on TV. I think I would have been so sick of seeing glacially paced starship movies that I would have staged some kind of a boycott.
•Another Star Wars influence... Bond seems to use The Force during the movie's climax in order to shoot down one of Drax's satellites that is set to release nerve gas into the earth's atmosphere. Uh-huh...
•Just before Bond discovers the nerve gas factory in Venice, someone punches an access code into a keypad. The tones match the famous five notes from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind two years earlier. A sign of the bald-faced sci-fi pandering to come later in the film.
•The martini returns again for only the 2nd time in the Moore series thus far. The sexy 20 year old agent that Bond teams up with in Rio makes it for him.
•The product placement is out of control after the scene on the cable car in Rio. There are 7UP billboards all over the place, and shortly after that, ones for Seiko, Marloborogh and British Airways. It still doesn't beat all the Kentucky Fried Chicken product placement in Supermans II and III for me, but it's still worth mentioning.
•The picture returns to Venice for the first time since From Russia With Love. During The Spy Who Loved Me I was starting to feel that the movies were flirting with repeating action scenes… the opening ski chase is Spy is like a faster version of the many ski chases from On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Also in Spy there's the fight with Jaws on the train that brought From Russia to mind as well. I wonder if these are all intentional homage or if the movies just ran out of locations and concepts?
•Again, Moonraker follows the roadmap of the previous movie a little closely, but without the same sense of fun. Drax's plot is ultimately the same as Stromberg's in the last movie, but set in space instead of under the sea. The car chase in Italy during The Spy Who Loved Me was very exciting and badass… Moonraker attempts two similar sequences where Bond suddenly gets into trouble and escapes using a tricked out vehicle that Q has supplied him with. The much more stupid one happens first: That's when Bond is minding his business on the canals of Venice when bad guys start shooting at him. Luckily, Q foresaw this and happened to design an MI6 gondola loaded with rocket launchers, and which can turn into a hovercraft. The other scene is an exhausting speedboat chase before the film's third act, which is mainly notable because whenever Bond blows up a rival ship, there's a ridiculous shot of a bunch of dummies being propelled through the air by the explosion.
•Another repeated pattern from the last movie: Bond is getting busy with the chick-of-the-flick when he's suddenly caught by M, MI6, and some rival government. It's moderately disturbing to me that he doesn't seem to mind his superiors catching him in the act. In both cases, the women don't seem have a problem with having been caught either.
•For some reason, the title song performed by Shirley Bassey (her third for the series) really irked me in this movie. Some of the Bond songs are about the movie's bad guy (Goldfinger, Thunderball, The Man With The Golden Gun, etc) while others seem at least tangentially related to something in the movie (Diamonds Are Forever, et al). This one is another love song - presumably because the song from The Spy Who Loved Me was so successful - but a love song for who? There's no real love story in the movie. Check out these lyrics:
Where are you? Why do you hide?
Where is that moonlight trail that leads to your side?
Just like the moonraker goes in search of his dream of gold,
I search for love, for someone to have and hold,
I've seen your smile in a thousand dreams,
Felt your touch and it always seems,
You love me,
You love me.
Well, the 'Moonraker" is one of six spaceships that's going to enable some asshole to kill everyone from space. Did lyricist Hal David even watch the movie? I guess you could argue that the song is about Jaws and his desire to find a lifemate... it's way funnier that way, to be sure, but I'm not sure I entirely buy it.
•I don't have much of an impression of John Barry's score for this one, overall, but I thought that the cue he wrote for when you first see Drax's private space station was really chilling.
•Speaking of 2nd tier baddies usually not returning for subsequent movies because they're dead… I'd like to point out that Nick-Nack did survive the end of The Man With The Golden Gun. I have high hopes that he'll return in the next Daniel Craig picture, maybe played by Peter Dinklage or Tony Cox now… we'll have to see how that shakes out.
But before you think I'm just jumping on the hate wagon here, I should emphasize that I started to dislike the movie well before I got to the notorious third act where Bond is in space firing lasers. That's incredibly stupid, don't get me wrong… but even if we ignore that whole section, I still think the movie suffers from having an unclear, meandering plot and an excessive case of the sillies.
Watching all the Bond movies in order as an adult has been revelatory because I've found that more often than not, the movies have layers and complexity and cohesion that I just didn't pick up on when I was a teenager. That's doubly true of the three Roger Moore flicks that came before this one - Live And Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me… all of which somewhat upended my earlier impression that the Moore era was defined by hammy one-liners and semi-nonsensical plots. Those earlier three movies aren't really like that, I've found, but Moonraker is the first Bond I've encountered in my 11 movie journey thus far that kind of fits my mental criteria of what the series can be at its worst.
One of the key things about this movie that's indicative of went wrong in terms of thinking and concept is the incessant inclusion of "Jaws," the terrifying, scene-stealing steel-toothed thug who first appeared in the previous movie. Bond's first scene in this one finds him having to make a hasty exit from an airplane sans parachute. Once Bond jumps out, it is revealed that Jaws was on the plane too and is coming after him (although we didn't see him at all in the previous bit). Why did Jaws decide to stay hidden during the fist-fight that happened on the plane before everyone bailed? The mission Bond was on seems to have had nothing to do with him, so why was he even up there in the first place? And where's HIS parachute? One gets the feeling that Jaws has just been following Bond around more or less continuously since The Spy Who Loved Me came out, which frankly makes me think of him as a fairly lousy killer.
Right away, though, bringing Jaws back seems like a weird thing for the franchise to do. The series hadn't really continued a secondary bad-guy from one movie to the next before… Blofled appears in five of the first seven Bond pictures (sometimes only briefly and with his face obscured), but generally speaking, once the end credits roll, that's the end for Kerim and Oddjob and Largo, and Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd… usually because they're dead, of course, but you know what I'm saying.
Anyway, having Jaws pop up pretty much every time there's an action scene throughout Moonraker - often without much logic or purpose - seems to suggest that the filmmakers had a "if-they-liked-it-last-time, we'll-give-em'-a-bigger-helping-this-time" approach to making this movie, and that's a big part of what feels lazy and uninspired. Indeed, everything is "more"… more exotic locations, more action scenes, more double-entendre, more gadgets, more women for Bond to sleep with, and the most deadly of all, more of the camp that would somehow become synonymous with Moore's portrayal of Bond. It's not as smooth a cocktail as it was in the previous movie, and the story seems to get crowded out a bit by all the excess.
While we're on the topic, though, let's see if we can make some sense of the plot…. During the pre-credit sequence, we see a space shuttle get hijacked mid-air whilst being transported from California to Europe. The UK was apparently responsible for the shuttle's safety, so MI6 sends Bond to investigate. He first goes to Los Angeles (via stock footage), where eccentric space ship industrialist Hugo Drax - played by an astonishingly uncharismatic Michael Lonsdale - has built a sprawling estate next to his space ship factory that is supposed to look exactly like an estate in France (because in reality the movie was filmed in France for tax purposes).
Chang, one of Drax's lackees, tries to kill Bond using a g-force simulator for no clear reason, and then after Bond randomly has sex with Drax's personal jet pilot, the billionaire tries to have him assassinated during an impromptu duck hunt on the estate's front lawn. Right away the movie lost me because Drax could have been a little friendlier to the British secret agent up front as opposed to, oh I don't know, trying to kill him multiple times, and then his evil plot might have gone off without as many hiccups.
The various attempts on Bond's life do arouse some mild suspicion, however… so much so that he inexplicably goes to Venice, Italy, where he has several scenes where he just looks like a sad old man wandering around aimlessly, much like John McCain at a Presidential debate.
Fortunately, after a while Bond randomly stumbles upon a secret chemical lab that happens to be producing some highly deadly nerve gas. Why are they doing that? And what does it have to do with the missing space shuttle? Well, the movie waits another goddamn hour to tell us, and meanwhile, Bond decides to go to Rio for no clear fucking reason that I was able to piece together based on anything that was said or demonstrated elsewhere in the movie. Once there, he has sex with another stunningly attractive woman who is probably 30 years younger than he is, and then goes to a street festival.
Meanwhile, Jaws is relentlessly in pursuit and continues to easily survive situations like falling 20,000 feet from the sky into the hard ground, and sliding down a lift cable and smashing into a brick building. He then meets a short blond girl with enormous breasts whom we instantly know he is in love with because Tchaikovsky's "Romeo And Juliet Overture" plays when we first see her. Their blossoming romance mercifully happens entirely off-screen, but then later they both show up on Drax's space station in the third act. Once Jaws realizes that Drax's plan for using the nerve gas to kill everyone on Earth and then having all the preppy models he's brought into space create a new "master race" to repopulate the planet miiiiiiiiiiight not include a gigantic steel-toothed freak and his 4 foot tall, triple-D cup girlfriend, he suddenly switches sides, and helps Bond save the planet. Urgh.
Drax's plot is very unclear until the last half hour of the picture. I've been thinking a lot about that and whether or not it contributed to the film's crippling lack of momentum for me. When I think of it, many of the other Bond pictures have done this too, starting at the beginning of the franchise with Dr. No, to varying degrees of success. Maybe Moonraker's problem isn't that there are too few breadcrumbs being thrown down as much as the fact that how it gets you from one to the next just isn't all that interesting.
But of course, Hugo Drax bears a lot of the blame too. Roger Ebert sometimes quotes Gene Siskel's observation that "a Bond picture is only as good as its villain." So far, I've really found that to be true… the two Bond pictures I've liked the least thus far - 1965's Thunderball and now this one - have the misfortune of following the intimidating Auric Goldfinger with the dull mumbling Largo, and the steely aquatic-obsessed Stromberg with Hugo Drax, who looks like he came to set immediately after appearing at a Renaissance Fair. He's given so little screen time that it's hard to even really feel all that intrigued or intimidated by him. In fact, Drax basically sub-contracts out the disposal of Bond to Jaws early in the movie, and then disappears for a good hour or so. How are you supposed to root against a villian when you don't know anything about him or what he's doing?
Now in Drax's defense, it's truly a scary scene 90 minutes in when he launches all of his shuttles into space, and we still don't have much of a clue about what he's up to, but I stand by my overall comment that he's one of Bond's less interesting baddies. You can be good, and you can be bad… but the biggest sin is being "boring." Drax is just plain boring.
Oh, and after a parade of bubbly bimbo Bond girls like "Plenty O'Toole" and "Mary Goodnight" throughout the 70s Bond pictures, the series continues the radical concept from the last movie of having Bond's primary love interest be a little more intelligent and respectable. Still unable to resist Bond's penis, mind you, but at the very least, she's less ditzy and outright stupid. This time, it's an American CIA agent who is posing as a rocket scientist in Drax's organization. She has the dignified name "Dr. Holly Goodhead" and is played by Lois Chiles, who makes for a surprisingly bland and uninspiring foil to Bond, certainly so relative to Barbara Bach in the previous movie. But hey, that kind of nondescript dullness seems to be par for the course with this movie.
Several key creative personnel were carried over from 77's The Spy Who Loved Me… most notably director Lewis Gilbert and screenwriter Christopher Wood. This was the last time either would work on the franchise. It was also the last movie for Bernard Lee as "M." Lee would pass away early in the production of next movie, 1981's For Your Eyes Only, before any of his scenes were shot.
I could be wrong, but Moonraker - the 11th "official" James Bond movie - really feels a bit like the end of an era for the franchise. I liked the earlier Moore pictures, but it seems that this is the point where the movies got a little less inventive and Moore's camp and schtick went a little over the top in terms of corniness.
The previous movie, 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, was probably a bit of a sea change too.... It was the first outing where long time Bond producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli handled one of the movies solo, after his partner Harry Saltzman had to sell his stake in the franchise. With Spy, it's like Broccoli knew that he was under a lot of pressure and the movie had to be good. It was. But Moonraker feels more like "product"... a mismatched collection of established Bond traditions and clichés rather than a movie that feels like a unique entity which moves the series forward.
Longtime Bond editor and 2nd unit director John Glen would direct the next five pictures, all of them made throughout the 80s (three more starring Moore and two with Timothy Dalton). My vague memories of the Bonds of this era are not terribly positive, but I will go in with an open mind and I guess I'll have to see how I feel when I watch 'em.
I wonder, though, that if I had been old enough to see the movies in theaters as they were released, if I wouldn't distinguish the Bond pictures between those that came out before Moonraker - the "good ones" - and the ones that came out after.
Miscellaneous observations:
•Look, I'm as big a fan of the original 1977 Star Wars as anyone, but 1979 must have been a tough time to go to the movies, what with all the Star Wars knock-offs and other assorted space-based adventures that were in theaters. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, The Black Hole, plus the original Battlestar Galactica on TV. I think I would have been so sick of seeing glacially paced starship movies that I would have staged some kind of a boycott.
•Another Star Wars influence... Bond seems to use The Force during the movie's climax in order to shoot down one of Drax's satellites that is set to release nerve gas into the earth's atmosphere. Uh-huh...
•Just before Bond discovers the nerve gas factory in Venice, someone punches an access code into a keypad. The tones match the famous five notes from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind two years earlier. A sign of the bald-faced sci-fi pandering to come later in the film.
•The martini returns again for only the 2nd time in the Moore series thus far. The sexy 20 year old agent that Bond teams up with in Rio makes it for him.
•The product placement is out of control after the scene on the cable car in Rio. There are 7UP billboards all over the place, and shortly after that, ones for Seiko, Marloborogh and British Airways. It still doesn't beat all the Kentucky Fried Chicken product placement in Supermans II and III for me, but it's still worth mentioning.
•The picture returns to Venice for the first time since From Russia With Love. During The Spy Who Loved Me I was starting to feel that the movies were flirting with repeating action scenes… the opening ski chase is Spy is like a faster version of the many ski chases from On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Also in Spy there's the fight with Jaws on the train that brought From Russia to mind as well. I wonder if these are all intentional homage or if the movies just ran out of locations and concepts?
•Again, Moonraker follows the roadmap of the previous movie a little closely, but without the same sense of fun. Drax's plot is ultimately the same as Stromberg's in the last movie, but set in space instead of under the sea. The car chase in Italy during The Spy Who Loved Me was very exciting and badass… Moonraker attempts two similar sequences where Bond suddenly gets into trouble and escapes using a tricked out vehicle that Q has supplied him with. The much more stupid one happens first: That's when Bond is minding his business on the canals of Venice when bad guys start shooting at him. Luckily, Q foresaw this and happened to design an MI6 gondola loaded with rocket launchers, and which can turn into a hovercraft. The other scene is an exhausting speedboat chase before the film's third act, which is mainly notable because whenever Bond blows up a rival ship, there's a ridiculous shot of a bunch of dummies being propelled through the air by the explosion.
•Another repeated pattern from the last movie: Bond is getting busy with the chick-of-the-flick when he's suddenly caught by M, MI6, and some rival government. It's moderately disturbing to me that he doesn't seem to mind his superiors catching him in the act. In both cases, the women don't seem have a problem with having been caught either.
•For some reason, the title song performed by Shirley Bassey (her third for the series) really irked me in this movie. Some of the Bond songs are about the movie's bad guy (Goldfinger, Thunderball, The Man With The Golden Gun, etc) while others seem at least tangentially related to something in the movie (Diamonds Are Forever, et al). This one is another love song - presumably because the song from The Spy Who Loved Me was so successful - but a love song for who? There's no real love story in the movie. Check out these lyrics:
Where are you? Why do you hide?
Where is that moonlight trail that leads to your side?
Just like the moonraker goes in search of his dream of gold,
I search for love, for someone to have and hold,
I've seen your smile in a thousand dreams,
Felt your touch and it always seems,
You love me,
You love me.
Well, the 'Moonraker" is one of six spaceships that's going to enable some asshole to kill everyone from space. Did lyricist Hal David even watch the movie? I guess you could argue that the song is about Jaws and his desire to find a lifemate... it's way funnier that way, to be sure, but I'm not sure I entirely buy it.
•I don't have much of an impression of John Barry's score for this one, overall, but I thought that the cue he wrote for when you first see Drax's private space station was really chilling.
•Speaking of 2nd tier baddies usually not returning for subsequent movies because they're dead… I'd like to point out that Nick-Nack did survive the end of The Man With The Golden Gun. I have high hopes that he'll return in the next Daniel Craig picture, maybe played by Peter Dinklage or Tony Cox now… we'll have to see how that shakes out.
March 19, 2013
The Spy Who Loved Me (Bond #10) [Bond 50 BluRay Set]
Although I had seen 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me before, it had been a while.
For whatever reason, I was expecting that the movie - the 10th "official" Bond - would be a little cheesy and campy ala the less dignified moments of the previous one, 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun. I was really surprised, however, that while this movie does have a few silly moments, much of it is actually pretty exciting, and at times quite intense and scary… all making for one of the best Bond movies of this era and many another.
A key difference between this picture and Golden Gun is that the threat level is set pretty high in the very first sequence: Atomic submarines from both Britain and Russia mysteriously disappear, and so naturally MI6 and the KGB send their best agents into action to find out what happened. The best British spy is, of course, James Bond, played by Moore for the third time. The best the KGB has to offer is Major Anya Amasova (aka Agent XXX) played by the stunning American-born actress Barbara Bach. Just a few years later, Bach would marry Ringo Starr, meaning that she must have really really really wanted to be married to a Beatle, no matter what.
Anyway, the two independently track some stolen microfilm (Yay! Microfilm!) to Egypt where they compete with each other to get it first. Upon completing that phase of the mission, their two agencies decide that they should work together for, oh, say the rest of the movie in the name of ushering in a new era of Anglo / Soviet cooperation.
After nine movies full of hot women who basically just hang around until Bond decides to sleep with them, it's a relief and a pleasure to finally have a strong female character who can stand up to Bond and at least be his foil, if not his equal. Anya does have her "damsel in distress" moments in the picture, particularly in the last part of the film, but she never devolves into quivering jelly the way TIffany Case did in Diamonds Are Forever nor is she just there to stand around in a bikini like Mary Goodnight in The Man With The Golden Gun.
The other surprising thing to me that Moore's Bond has continued to have some really cold, steely moments in his three movies that always shatter my previously-held impression that his version of Bond was primarily silly. A neat moment is the scene where Bond and Anya first meet at a bar in Cairo… each rattles off vital statistics about the other to show how well-versed in the opposition they are. When Anya mentions that Bond had been married, but his wife was killed (at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service), Bond gets testy and cuts her off. It's a really interesting character moment for him the likes of which make his portrayal 1000 times more interesting to me.
Another striking moment is when Bond mentions he was in Switzerland a few weeks back on a mission (as seen in the pre-credit ski chase). Anya was in love with another KGB agent who was killed there around that same time. "Did you kill him?," she asks. Moore takes this revelation in, and then his face becomes cold and emotionless: "When someone's behind you on skis at 40 miles per hour trying to put a bullet in your back, you don't always have time to remember a face. In our business, Anya, people get killed. We both know that. So did he. It was either him or me." And then the finisher: "The answer to the question is yes. I did kill him."
It's a much darker sub-layer to the film than I remembered or expected... and I really loved it.
I also didn't expect to really dig the film's heavy: The ocean-obsessed Karl Stromberg, excellently played by Bavarian actor Curd Jürgens. Stromberg believes mankind is corrupt and in decay, and he means to trigger atomic armageddon by nuking both New York City and Moscow with his stolen subs. Humanity will then rebuild itself in Stromberg's proposed cities on the ocean floor. Jürgens is so chilling in the part that it somewhat transcends the usual Bond villain malaise, although I'm hard pressed to describe what about him exactly is making me feel that way. I think part of it is that he's not after some kind of ransom, as many of the other Bond baddies have been: He's destroying the world for ideology, which is far more unsettling.
The show-stealer, however, is Richard Kiel making his first appearance as the steel-toothed henchman Jaws. Moore is a pretty big guy, but the 7'2" Kiel easily dwarfs him. He positively looks like a giant during a train fight with Anya mid-way through the movie (that seems to pay homage to a similar train fight way back in 1963's From Russia With Love, I think).
Anyway, Jaws is one of the aspects of the movie is that truly scary, and I again I was surprised by how effective a baddie he was in this flick: When he popped out of nowhere to ambush a character, I jumped… when he does that slow, malevolent lean-in to kill someone with his teeth, I squirmed. A certain aspect of Jaws is played for laughs too, of course (such as the scene where he rips a service van to pieces with his bare hands while Anya and Bond attempt to drive away), but somehow the semi-comic aspects of him never diminish the fact that he's huge and terrifying.
The action sequences are quite excellent and varied in this picture: The pre-credit ski chase (an homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service?) complete with the brilliant finisher of Bond skiing off the side of a mountain, falling through the air for what feels like an eternity, then releasing a parachute that has the Union Jack on it…. The eerie sequence at the pyramids where Jaws chases and kills a key informant… The thrilling high-speed helicopter chase in Italy that ends with Bond driving his car into the water and turning it into a submarine…. Even the sequence in the last part of the film where Bond is desperate to get into the control room of the supertanker so he can stop the stolen submarines from firing their missiles. Bond is forced to use his head and take the warhead out of a nuclear missile to blow through the security door… a fantastically tense sequence that is all the more urgent in the film because it is only small component of the much bigger problem that Bond has to solve.
It's worth mentioning that the director is Lewis Gilbert who had also directed You Only Live Twice 10 years earlier. The two films oddly share a number of similarities… In Twice, Blofeld steals American and Russian spaceships to try to get the two countries to go to war with each other… in Spy, Stromberg has a supertanker that swallows atomic submarines for very much the same purpose. The interior of the volcano in Twice is cavernous and contains a monorail system… so does the interior of the supertanker in Spy, and so on…
Other thoughts….
-Unlike the previous movie, the plot actually feels big and consequential right away. It's amazing what a difference that makes.
-The martini returns! Anya orders one for Bond at the bar when they first meet to demonstrate how much she knows about him. Bond's shaken (not stirred) signature drink had been absent from the previous Moore movies.
-They really ramp up the double entendre in this picture. In the opening, after M has been informed of the missing atomic submarines, he asks Moneypenny where Commander Bond is. "He's on a mission sir. In Austria," she replies. M says, "Well, tell him to pull out! Immediately!" and then we cut to Bond making love to a woman. In another scene, an MI6 agent stationed in Egypt persuades Bond to stay the night in his camp by introducing him to a particularly gorgeous local there. A cheeky look crosses Bond's face, who wryly reasons, "Well, when one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into its treasures!" Classy.
-"Nobody Does It Better," performed by Carly Simon might be my favorite Bond song. It's in my top two or three, at least.
-2 of the 3 Roger Moore Bond movies have NOT been scored by the series' regular composer, John Barry, thus far. I actually kind of prefer what George Martin did on Live And Let Die and what the late Marvin Hamlisch did on this picture to what Barry did on Golden Gun and what he would do on Moonraker. I wasn't expecting to feel that way.
-Director Lewis Gilbert started to have fun with some of the Bond conventions. The one I thought was really clever was when Q introduces Bond to this amazing new car in Italy (before the helicopter chase). It's done from Anya's point of view… she sees Q pointing to parts of the car and explaining things, but she's too far away to hear any of the words. Later, when the car can fire missiles and go underwater, it's as much a surprise to us as it is to her.
-Again, not sure why I found Stromberg to be such a refreshing bad guy… Blofeld dominated three movies in a row: You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever. Then it was Dr. Kanaga in the next movie, and then the ridiculously three-nippled Scaramanga in the one prior to this... both had more modest goals. I guess it's just fun to have an evil heavy around hell-bent on world destruction again who gets you to believe that he really means it. It's not even that clear what exactly Stomberg's plot is until 90 minutes into the movie, which was kind of cool as well.
In conclusion, I was expecting a campier movie, and was surprised and delighted to find that that's not really what this picture is. Certain camp elements do start to work their way in during the 2nd half, however. This movie feels just about pitch perfect, though, with very few missteps, if any.
I'm told that the next movie, 1979's Moonraker, doesn't stir all the elements together into quite as pleasant a cocktail. I guess there's only one way to find out if I agree with that...
For whatever reason, I was expecting that the movie - the 10th "official" Bond - would be a little cheesy and campy ala the less dignified moments of the previous one, 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun. I was really surprised, however, that while this movie does have a few silly moments, much of it is actually pretty exciting, and at times quite intense and scary… all making for one of the best Bond movies of this era and many another.
A key difference between this picture and Golden Gun is that the threat level is set pretty high in the very first sequence: Atomic submarines from both Britain and Russia mysteriously disappear, and so naturally MI6 and the KGB send their best agents into action to find out what happened. The best British spy is, of course, James Bond, played by Moore for the third time. The best the KGB has to offer is Major Anya Amasova (aka Agent XXX) played by the stunning American-born actress Barbara Bach. Just a few years later, Bach would marry Ringo Starr, meaning that she must have really really really wanted to be married to a Beatle, no matter what.
Anyway, the two independently track some stolen microfilm (Yay! Microfilm!) to Egypt where they compete with each other to get it first. Upon completing that phase of the mission, their two agencies decide that they should work together for, oh, say the rest of the movie in the name of ushering in a new era of Anglo / Soviet cooperation.
After nine movies full of hot women who basically just hang around until Bond decides to sleep with them, it's a relief and a pleasure to finally have a strong female character who can stand up to Bond and at least be his foil, if not his equal. Anya does have her "damsel in distress" moments in the picture, particularly in the last part of the film, but she never devolves into quivering jelly the way TIffany Case did in Diamonds Are Forever nor is she just there to stand around in a bikini like Mary Goodnight in The Man With The Golden Gun.
The other surprising thing to me that Moore's Bond has continued to have some really cold, steely moments in his three movies that always shatter my previously-held impression that his version of Bond was primarily silly. A neat moment is the scene where Bond and Anya first meet at a bar in Cairo… each rattles off vital statistics about the other to show how well-versed in the opposition they are. When Anya mentions that Bond had been married, but his wife was killed (at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service), Bond gets testy and cuts her off. It's a really interesting character moment for him the likes of which make his portrayal 1000 times more interesting to me.
Another striking moment is when Bond mentions he was in Switzerland a few weeks back on a mission (as seen in the pre-credit ski chase). Anya was in love with another KGB agent who was killed there around that same time. "Did you kill him?," she asks. Moore takes this revelation in, and then his face becomes cold and emotionless: "When someone's behind you on skis at 40 miles per hour trying to put a bullet in your back, you don't always have time to remember a face. In our business, Anya, people get killed. We both know that. So did he. It was either him or me." And then the finisher: "The answer to the question is yes. I did kill him."
It's a much darker sub-layer to the film than I remembered or expected... and I really loved it.
I also didn't expect to really dig the film's heavy: The ocean-obsessed Karl Stromberg, excellently played by Bavarian actor Curd Jürgens. Stromberg believes mankind is corrupt and in decay, and he means to trigger atomic armageddon by nuking both New York City and Moscow with his stolen subs. Humanity will then rebuild itself in Stromberg's proposed cities on the ocean floor. Jürgens is so chilling in the part that it somewhat transcends the usual Bond villain malaise, although I'm hard pressed to describe what about him exactly is making me feel that way. I think part of it is that he's not after some kind of ransom, as many of the other Bond baddies have been: He's destroying the world for ideology, which is far more unsettling.
The show-stealer, however, is Richard Kiel making his first appearance as the steel-toothed henchman Jaws. Moore is a pretty big guy, but the 7'2" Kiel easily dwarfs him. He positively looks like a giant during a train fight with Anya mid-way through the movie (that seems to pay homage to a similar train fight way back in 1963's From Russia With Love, I think).
Anyway, Jaws is one of the aspects of the movie is that truly scary, and I again I was surprised by how effective a baddie he was in this flick: When he popped out of nowhere to ambush a character, I jumped… when he does that slow, malevolent lean-in to kill someone with his teeth, I squirmed. A certain aspect of Jaws is played for laughs too, of course (such as the scene where he rips a service van to pieces with his bare hands while Anya and Bond attempt to drive away), but somehow the semi-comic aspects of him never diminish the fact that he's huge and terrifying.
The action sequences are quite excellent and varied in this picture: The pre-credit ski chase (an homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service?) complete with the brilliant finisher of Bond skiing off the side of a mountain, falling through the air for what feels like an eternity, then releasing a parachute that has the Union Jack on it…. The eerie sequence at the pyramids where Jaws chases and kills a key informant… The thrilling high-speed helicopter chase in Italy that ends with Bond driving his car into the water and turning it into a submarine…. Even the sequence in the last part of the film where Bond is desperate to get into the control room of the supertanker so he can stop the stolen submarines from firing their missiles. Bond is forced to use his head and take the warhead out of a nuclear missile to blow through the security door… a fantastically tense sequence that is all the more urgent in the film because it is only small component of the much bigger problem that Bond has to solve.
It's worth mentioning that the director is Lewis Gilbert who had also directed You Only Live Twice 10 years earlier. The two films oddly share a number of similarities… In Twice, Blofeld steals American and Russian spaceships to try to get the two countries to go to war with each other… in Spy, Stromberg has a supertanker that swallows atomic submarines for very much the same purpose. The interior of the volcano in Twice is cavernous and contains a monorail system… so does the interior of the supertanker in Spy, and so on…
Other thoughts….
-Unlike the previous movie, the plot actually feels big and consequential right away. It's amazing what a difference that makes.
-The martini returns! Anya orders one for Bond at the bar when they first meet to demonstrate how much she knows about him. Bond's shaken (not stirred) signature drink had been absent from the previous Moore movies.
-They really ramp up the double entendre in this picture. In the opening, after M has been informed of the missing atomic submarines, he asks Moneypenny where Commander Bond is. "He's on a mission sir. In Austria," she replies. M says, "Well, tell him to pull out! Immediately!" and then we cut to Bond making love to a woman. In another scene, an MI6 agent stationed in Egypt persuades Bond to stay the night in his camp by introducing him to a particularly gorgeous local there. A cheeky look crosses Bond's face, who wryly reasons, "Well, when one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into its treasures!" Classy.
-"Nobody Does It Better," performed by Carly Simon might be my favorite Bond song. It's in my top two or three, at least.
-2 of the 3 Roger Moore Bond movies have NOT been scored by the series' regular composer, John Barry, thus far. I actually kind of prefer what George Martin did on Live And Let Die and what the late Marvin Hamlisch did on this picture to what Barry did on Golden Gun and what he would do on Moonraker. I wasn't expecting to feel that way.
-Director Lewis Gilbert started to have fun with some of the Bond conventions. The one I thought was really clever was when Q introduces Bond to this amazing new car in Italy (before the helicopter chase). It's done from Anya's point of view… she sees Q pointing to parts of the car and explaining things, but she's too far away to hear any of the words. Later, when the car can fire missiles and go underwater, it's as much a surprise to us as it is to her.
-Again, not sure why I found Stromberg to be such a refreshing bad guy… Blofeld dominated three movies in a row: You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever. Then it was Dr. Kanaga in the next movie, and then the ridiculously three-nippled Scaramanga in the one prior to this... both had more modest goals. I guess it's just fun to have an evil heavy around hell-bent on world destruction again who gets you to believe that he really means it. It's not even that clear what exactly Stomberg's plot is until 90 minutes into the movie, which was kind of cool as well.
In conclusion, I was expecting a campier movie, and was surprised and delighted to find that that's not really what this picture is. Certain camp elements do start to work their way in during the 2nd half, however. This movie feels just about pitch perfect, though, with very few missteps, if any.
I'm told that the next movie, 1979's Moonraker, doesn't stir all the elements together into quite as pleasant a cocktail. I guess there's only one way to find out if I agree with that...
March 18, 2013
The Man With The Golden Gun (Bond #09) [Bond 50 BluRay Set]
1974's The Man With The Golden Gun is the ninth "official" James Bond movie produced by EON productions, and the 2nd one starring Roger Moore as Bond.
Following 71's Diamonds Are Forever and 73's Live And Let Die, it's the last of three movies in a row that were directed by Guy Hamilton (who had also made Goldfinger earlier) and which had at least been co-written by Tom Mankiewicz. Neither would be credited on a Bond movie again (although Mankiewicz would do uncredited work), nor would long-time Bond producer Harry Saltzman, whose financial trouble ultimately forced him to sell his stake in the franchise to United Artists. This cemented Saltzman's status as the "Art Garfunkel" of James Bond producers, and left his old partner Albert "Cubby" Broccoli to continue producing the franchise solo.
My judgement is unclear when it comes this movie, honestly... It's the Bond picture I've probably seen the most, and my sister Lis and I have spent many an hour laughing about how cheesy it is.
Before I started watching all the Bond movies in a row like this (many of which I'm seeing for the first time, actually), I might have cited Golden Gun as one of the ones I got the most pleasure out of watching. In sequence, however, it's clear to me that it marks something of a step-down for the series in that the plotting feels a little slapped together, some of the story devices begin to feel routine and recycled, and the increased presence of all the campy humor that would define the Moore era already starts to feel like it is undercutting the "spy / thriller" stuff a bit.
That said, it will probably stay high up on my "guilty pleasure" list. One of foremost reasons is the always-awesome Christopher Lee as the film's title character, the devilishly hammy Francisco Scaramanga aka The Man With The Golden Gun. The hokey main title song performed by Lulu succinctly tells us all we need to know:
He's got a powerful weapon...
He charges a million a SHOT!
An assassin who's second to none:
The Man With The Golden Gu-huuuuuuun!
The other cast member that needs to be mentioned is future "Fantasy Island" superstar Hervé Villechaize as the diminutively named Nick-Nack. Even when I was a kid in the 80s, I remember being told that "midget" is a pretty derogatory term, and a much more polite thing to say is "little person." I guess that memo hadn't really circulated in 1974 as the "m-word" is fired off 8 or 9 times throughout the film, most memorably when Bond issues the steely threat, "You know I've never shot a midget before… but there's a first time for everything!" Classy.
Moore's performance as Bond is more cold-hearted and icy this time in addition to feeling a little cheesier as well... And of course, Bond's sex addiction continues to rage on. An early scene demonstrating all of these traits is the one where he slaps around the fetching Maud Adams, playing Scaramanga's errand girl / lover Andrea, in an attempt to get information from her… and then he turns on a dime and lures her into a quick roll in the hay before she has to get back to her boss.
Similarly, Britt Ekland plays an MI6 agent named Mary Goodnight, stationed in Hong Kong, who partners with Bond for much of the film. She's desperate to make sweet love to the famous 007, but he sadistically alternates between making suggestive comments about the tawdry things he's about to do to her and then treating her with cruel contempt, as if she's the dumbest character in the movie (which, to be fair, she kind of is). In other scenes, Bond punches a Thai kid knocking him into the water during a boat chase, and toward the end of the picture, he locks Villechaize up in a suitcase and threatens to throw him into the ocean.
Anyway, there's a lot of bullshit in the middle about this amazing solar energy device that can also be used to create a powerful laser. Scaramanga seems to think he can get really rich off it somehow, and then retire from killing people, I guess, even though he has a big speech earlier about how much he loves killing. They don't really do much with the "laser" part of this, except that Scaramanga uses it to blow up Bond's sea plane before the big showdown at the end. Maybe his plan is to somehow get important people from the rest of the world to come to his secret Chinese island and stand in the extremely limited pathway of his solar powered laser (that needs to be connected to a massive processing facility in order to function) and then somehow get them to give him a lot of money? Bond kills him before any of those details can be worked out, so I guess it doesn't matter.
The story is quite slim beyond that. I remember thinking that Live And Let Die felt a bit streamlined relative to its predecessors, but at least that film had levels and stakes that were raised throughout. I can't say the same for Golden Gun. So little is invested in the solar energy plot that it's tough to care about it. At the beginning of the movie, Bond is looking for a missing solar energy scientist before M reassigns him to track down Scaramanga, but when those two story points intersect much later, it's not much of an "ah-ha!" moment, nor is it especially intriguing… Certainly, it's not as much of a shock as finding out in the 2nd half of Diamonds Are Forever that Blofeld is still alive and behind everything. The trivia section of the IMDB tells me that indeed there was an energy crisis in the UK at the time, so I guess the solar energy plot was semi-topical, at least.
Also on this island, Scaramanga has built some kind of funhouse complete with a mirrored hallway and western saloon street for no clear reason. The picture opens with a scene where Nick-Nack lures a stereotypical American gangster who is still dressed like it's the 1940s into the funhouse so Scaramanga can kill him for sport. Naturally, the big finale at the end takes place in the same spot. But why is any of that there in the first place? It's a remote island in the north China sea, for Christsake. I can accept that all these bad guys have secret underground layers in many of these movies, but at least there was an aspect of practicality before... If you're building a doomsday device to threaten the world, say in a volcano or something, it goes to follow that you'll be spending many months there, so you might as well have all the contractors make a nice bedroom or maybe a lounge for you while they're at it. The inclusion of something so purposeless as a saloon facade in this movie kinda helps exaggerate everything into farce.
Yet another benefit of watching all these movies in order, though, is that I recognized the gangster from the beginning of the movie as also having been one of the mafia thugs from Diamonds Are Forever two movies earlier. Not sure if he's supposed to be the same character or not, but he's wearing the same costume. This isn't an earth shattering revelation or anything, but it's a kind of cool bit of connective tissue, much like how the character who drives the boat for Bond in the previous movie, Live And Let Die, is Quarrel Jr. - son of the character who drove the boat for Bond in Dr. No 11 years before.
Oh, and redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper from the last movie is implausibly back, now on vacation with his wife in Thailand. He seems to despise both the country and its people, referring to the locals as "pointy-heads" frequently. Not sure what that means, but let's just assume that it's incredibly racist. He's given a couple scenes, really… one where he sees Bond driving a river boat, and another where he's test-driving a car (wait - is Pepper really going to buy a car in Thailand?), only to have Bond commandeer it and take him on a wild chase. Again, I thought his scenes in the previous movie brought the film's momentum to a screeching halt… he doesn't cripple this film like he did the last one, but it really feels like shameless pandering, and it's yet another example of this movie doing things that make no sense at all, which accordingly hurt the overall credibility.
Other random observations:
-The movie's signature stunt, where Bond and sheriff Pepper corkscrew their AMC over a river using a broken bridge, is so damn cool. In this age of digital effects, you really forget how thrilling it might have been to see something like that in a movie, knowing that there was no possible way it could be faked.
-Lots of martial arts in this one, in part to capitalize on the Bruce Lee craze of the time. Moore really looks stiff, awkward and unconvincing when using "judo" to take out baddies.
-Scaramanga has a third nipple, complete with a big John Barry musical sting when you first see it. Ridiculous.
-Scaramanga also has a scene where he and Nick-Nack drive into a barn and convert their 70s car into something that has wings and can fly, presumably back to their island in the north China sea. It seems to take them 10-15 minutes to convert everything and they clearly had additional hardware hidden in the barn that needed to be bolted onto the car before it could take off, all of which makes me seriously question the usefulness of having a car that can do that at all. Why not take a small plane into Thailand, then rent a car when you get there?
-Moneypenny is really starting to look old, and her flirting with Bond is already a bit creepy. Both she and Moore would stick around for 11 more years and five more movies… I'm starting to regret watching the movies in high definition. Moore's face is leathery enough in this, his second outing.
-At the beginning of the movie, when Bond is asked what he knows about Scaramanga, he has a preposterously long speech where he rattles off his entire biography from memory. Previous films have used these equivalent scenes for comic effect as well, but The Man With The Golden Gun really took it into cartoon territory. A sign of things to come...
Following 71's Diamonds Are Forever and 73's Live And Let Die, it's the last of three movies in a row that were directed by Guy Hamilton (who had also made Goldfinger earlier) and which had at least been co-written by Tom Mankiewicz. Neither would be credited on a Bond movie again (although Mankiewicz would do uncredited work), nor would long-time Bond producer Harry Saltzman, whose financial trouble ultimately forced him to sell his stake in the franchise to United Artists. This cemented Saltzman's status as the "Art Garfunkel" of James Bond producers, and left his old partner Albert "Cubby" Broccoli to continue producing the franchise solo.
My judgement is unclear when it comes this movie, honestly... It's the Bond picture I've probably seen the most, and my sister Lis and I have spent many an hour laughing about how cheesy it is.
Before I started watching all the Bond movies in a row like this (many of which I'm seeing for the first time, actually), I might have cited Golden Gun as one of the ones I got the most pleasure out of watching. In sequence, however, it's clear to me that it marks something of a step-down for the series in that the plotting feels a little slapped together, some of the story devices begin to feel routine and recycled, and the increased presence of all the campy humor that would define the Moore era already starts to feel like it is undercutting the "spy / thriller" stuff a bit.
That said, it will probably stay high up on my "guilty pleasure" list. One of foremost reasons is the always-awesome Christopher Lee as the film's title character, the devilishly hammy Francisco Scaramanga aka The Man With The Golden Gun. The hokey main title song performed by Lulu succinctly tells us all we need to know:
He's got a powerful weapon...
He charges a million a SHOT!
An assassin who's second to none:
The Man With The Golden Gu-huuuuuuun!
The other cast member that needs to be mentioned is future "Fantasy Island" superstar Hervé Villechaize as the diminutively named Nick-Nack. Even when I was a kid in the 80s, I remember being told that "midget" is a pretty derogatory term, and a much more polite thing to say is "little person." I guess that memo hadn't really circulated in 1974 as the "m-word" is fired off 8 or 9 times throughout the film, most memorably when Bond issues the steely threat, "You know I've never shot a midget before… but there's a first time for everything!" Classy.
Moore's performance as Bond is more cold-hearted and icy this time in addition to feeling a little cheesier as well... And of course, Bond's sex addiction continues to rage on. An early scene demonstrating all of these traits is the one where he slaps around the fetching Maud Adams, playing Scaramanga's errand girl / lover Andrea, in an attempt to get information from her… and then he turns on a dime and lures her into a quick roll in the hay before she has to get back to her boss.
Similarly, Britt Ekland plays an MI6 agent named Mary Goodnight, stationed in Hong Kong, who partners with Bond for much of the film. She's desperate to make sweet love to the famous 007, but he sadistically alternates between making suggestive comments about the tawdry things he's about to do to her and then treating her with cruel contempt, as if she's the dumbest character in the movie (which, to be fair, she kind of is). In other scenes, Bond punches a Thai kid knocking him into the water during a boat chase, and toward the end of the picture, he locks Villechaize up in a suitcase and threatens to throw him into the ocean.
Anyway, there's a lot of bullshit in the middle about this amazing solar energy device that can also be used to create a powerful laser. Scaramanga seems to think he can get really rich off it somehow, and then retire from killing people, I guess, even though he has a big speech earlier about how much he loves killing. They don't really do much with the "laser" part of this, except that Scaramanga uses it to blow up Bond's sea plane before the big showdown at the end. Maybe his plan is to somehow get important people from the rest of the world to come to his secret Chinese island and stand in the extremely limited pathway of his solar powered laser (that needs to be connected to a massive processing facility in order to function) and then somehow get them to give him a lot of money? Bond kills him before any of those details can be worked out, so I guess it doesn't matter.
The story is quite slim beyond that. I remember thinking that Live And Let Die felt a bit streamlined relative to its predecessors, but at least that film had levels and stakes that were raised throughout. I can't say the same for Golden Gun. So little is invested in the solar energy plot that it's tough to care about it. At the beginning of the movie, Bond is looking for a missing solar energy scientist before M reassigns him to track down Scaramanga, but when those two story points intersect much later, it's not much of an "ah-ha!" moment, nor is it especially intriguing… Certainly, it's not as much of a shock as finding out in the 2nd half of Diamonds Are Forever that Blofeld is still alive and behind everything. The trivia section of the IMDB tells me that indeed there was an energy crisis in the UK at the time, so I guess the solar energy plot was semi-topical, at least.
Also on this island, Scaramanga has built some kind of funhouse complete with a mirrored hallway and western saloon street for no clear reason. The picture opens with a scene where Nick-Nack lures a stereotypical American gangster who is still dressed like it's the 1940s into the funhouse so Scaramanga can kill him for sport. Naturally, the big finale at the end takes place in the same spot. But why is any of that there in the first place? It's a remote island in the north China sea, for Christsake. I can accept that all these bad guys have secret underground layers in many of these movies, but at least there was an aspect of practicality before... If you're building a doomsday device to threaten the world, say in a volcano or something, it goes to follow that you'll be spending many months there, so you might as well have all the contractors make a nice bedroom or maybe a lounge for you while they're at it. The inclusion of something so purposeless as a saloon facade in this movie kinda helps exaggerate everything into farce.
Yet another benefit of watching all these movies in order, though, is that I recognized the gangster from the beginning of the movie as also having been one of the mafia thugs from Diamonds Are Forever two movies earlier. Not sure if he's supposed to be the same character or not, but he's wearing the same costume. This isn't an earth shattering revelation or anything, but it's a kind of cool bit of connective tissue, much like how the character who drives the boat for Bond in the previous movie, Live And Let Die, is Quarrel Jr. - son of the character who drove the boat for Bond in Dr. No 11 years before.
Oh, and redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper from the last movie is implausibly back, now on vacation with his wife in Thailand. He seems to despise both the country and its people, referring to the locals as "pointy-heads" frequently. Not sure what that means, but let's just assume that it's incredibly racist. He's given a couple scenes, really… one where he sees Bond driving a river boat, and another where he's test-driving a car (wait - is Pepper really going to buy a car in Thailand?), only to have Bond commandeer it and take him on a wild chase. Again, I thought his scenes in the previous movie brought the film's momentum to a screeching halt… he doesn't cripple this film like he did the last one, but it really feels like shameless pandering, and it's yet another example of this movie doing things that make no sense at all, which accordingly hurt the overall credibility.
Other random observations:
-The movie's signature stunt, where Bond and sheriff Pepper corkscrew their AMC over a river using a broken bridge, is so damn cool. In this age of digital effects, you really forget how thrilling it might have been to see something like that in a movie, knowing that there was no possible way it could be faked.
-Lots of martial arts in this one, in part to capitalize on the Bruce Lee craze of the time. Moore really looks stiff, awkward and unconvincing when using "judo" to take out baddies.
-Scaramanga has a third nipple, complete with a big John Barry musical sting when you first see it. Ridiculous.
-Scaramanga also has a scene where he and Nick-Nack drive into a barn and convert their 70s car into something that has wings and can fly, presumably back to their island in the north China sea. It seems to take them 10-15 minutes to convert everything and they clearly had additional hardware hidden in the barn that needed to be bolted onto the car before it could take off, all of which makes me seriously question the usefulness of having a car that can do that at all. Why not take a small plane into Thailand, then rent a car when you get there?
-Moneypenny is really starting to look old, and her flirting with Bond is already a bit creepy. Both she and Moore would stick around for 11 more years and five more movies… I'm starting to regret watching the movies in high definition. Moore's face is leathery enough in this, his second outing.
-At the beginning of the movie, when Bond is asked what he knows about Scaramanga, he has a preposterously long speech where he rattles off his entire biography from memory. Previous films have used these equivalent scenes for comic effect as well, but The Man With The Golden Gun really took it into cartoon territory. A sign of things to come...
March 13, 2013
Live And Let Die (Bond #08) [Bond 50 BluRay Set]
1973's aggressively 70s Live And Let Die is the 8th "official" James Bond movie produced by EON Productions.
The big news in this one is, of course, Roger Moore's debut as Bond, and it's surprising to me how easily he appears to slide right into the character. Perhaps it could have something to do with the fact that I'm used to him seeing him in the role from basically growing up with him as Bond, but nevertheless he successfully avoids the awkward adjustment period that George Lazenby had when he assumed the role in On Her Majesty's Secret Service in this, his maiden voyage.
As with Connery, you get the sense that Moore's Bond is shrewdly considering all the angles and is ready to snap into action at any given moment. One key difference in Moore's performance, however, is that his reactions are much more broad and muggy. When a suspicious bit of information was passed to Connery, a subtle flit in his eyes would tell you that he smelled a rat. Moore makes a much bigger deal out of similar moments, letting his eyes shift wildly and taking big William Shatner style pauses before proceeding. Same deal whenever sexual innuendo is thrown his way… much more goofier reactions: Moore goes right up to the fourth wall without quite breaking it.
In this one, Bond investigates the mysterious murders of three agents in New York City, New Orleans, and the fictional island nation of San Monique, and eventually uncovers a nonsensical plot by the evil Dr. Kananga (aka "Mr. Big") to put all the United States' heroin dealers out of business by distributing 2 tons of it to the public for free. Once he's the only player left (and there will be so many more addicts around), he'll have the monopoly. The movie and its plot feels a little more streamlined than Diamonds Are Forever did, but was still a fairly entertaining ride for me… much more interesting than some of the earlier, more complicated pictures like Thunderball, to be sure.
Although as my friend JC pointed out in my observations on Diamonds, the book of Live And Let Die (written in the 1955) had the same setting and featured several heavies of African descent, I can't help but see this picture as a take-off on the very popular blaxploitation sub-genera that was highly profitable at the time. The original Shaft hit in 1971 and Across 110th Street in 1972 (the latter of which starred Dr. Kananga himself, Yaphett Koto). The early scenes in particular where Bond is in Harlem especially reek of this influence, with George Martin's funk'd up recordings of the Bond theme playing, and multiple references to Bond as a "honkey" by the flamboyantly dressed denizens of the neighborhood.
The movie spends a good chunk of time on San Monique, where Bond successfully nails a clairvoyant Tarot Card reader named "Solitaire," (played by Jane Seymour, future Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) thus robbing her of her power. Both Connery's and Moore's (and Lazenby's) Bonds are hopeless sex addicts, but Moore's seems to bang more women per movie than his predecessors did. This may not be accurate.
And then there's the debut appearance of Clifton James' racist southern sheriff character, J.W. Pepper. I was enjoying the movie just fine, but when Pepper shows up around the 85 minute mark, the movie grinds to a screeching halt, turning into what is essentially a dry run for Smokey And The Bandit, which would come 4 years later. I'm talking about the big-ass speed-boat chase. I didn't like the sequence, and my main problem with it is the fact that Bond is virtually absent from the whole thing. We go back to a close up of him every once in a while to show that he's still driving the boat to some unclear destination, but most of the main action follows Sheriff Pepper and the bad guys, and it's all weirdly not engaging.
Memorable sequences, however, include Bond's escape from the crocodile farm (just before the boat chase), and a chase around a small private airport that results in mucho property damage. I also really liked the two scenes in New Orleans where a traveling funeral procession winds up being an exceptionally large assassination squad. The scene at the end where Bond interrupts the ritual would-be sacrifice of Solitaire is strange, not only because Bond kills 5 or 6 people completely unprovoked, but also because it's the only scene in the Bond franchise that I'm aware of where something supernatural appears to happen.
Felix Leiter is back and has been recast for the fifth time, this time with David Hedison. He gets a lot to do in this one… The character would sit the next six movies out before appearing again in 1987, in Timothy Dalton's first Bond The Living Daylights. But THEN in 1989's License To Kill, Hedison is back in the part again! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!?!?
I guess the producers were really trying to distinguish Moore's Bond from Connery's, so he mostly orders bourbon whenever there's a drink to be had (never a Martini or champaign, although he would again in future installments), and he smokes ridiculous cigars ala Hannibal Smith from "The A-Team."
Kananga has what I believe is the most preposterous death scene of all the Bond villains. And this is the third picture in a row where after the main climax has happened, Bond is off with a girl only to have one of the secondary baddies show up and make one last bit of trouble before the end credits roll. In OHMSS, it's Blofeld and Nurse Bunt who drive by and assassinate Bond's new wife. In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond is enjoying a cruise with Tiffany Case when Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd show up again for one last attempt to kill him, only to have Bond savagely murder them both. In this one, the bionic-armed thug known as "Tee-Hee" shows up on the train where Bond plans to pork Solitaire for "sixteen hours," and starts some shit.
I can't remember, but I think the next movie, The Man With The Golden Gun, has a scene at the end where Hervé Villechaize's diminutively named "Nick-Nack" comes back too… but I'll have to wait until next movie to find out!
The big news in this one is, of course, Roger Moore's debut as Bond, and it's surprising to me how easily he appears to slide right into the character. Perhaps it could have something to do with the fact that I'm used to him seeing him in the role from basically growing up with him as Bond, but nevertheless he successfully avoids the awkward adjustment period that George Lazenby had when he assumed the role in On Her Majesty's Secret Service in this, his maiden voyage.
As with Connery, you get the sense that Moore's Bond is shrewdly considering all the angles and is ready to snap into action at any given moment. One key difference in Moore's performance, however, is that his reactions are much more broad and muggy. When a suspicious bit of information was passed to Connery, a subtle flit in his eyes would tell you that he smelled a rat. Moore makes a much bigger deal out of similar moments, letting his eyes shift wildly and taking big William Shatner style pauses before proceeding. Same deal whenever sexual innuendo is thrown his way… much more goofier reactions: Moore goes right up to the fourth wall without quite breaking it.
In this one, Bond investigates the mysterious murders of three agents in New York City, New Orleans, and the fictional island nation of San Monique, and eventually uncovers a nonsensical plot by the evil Dr. Kananga (aka "Mr. Big") to put all the United States' heroin dealers out of business by distributing 2 tons of it to the public for free. Once he's the only player left (and there will be so many more addicts around), he'll have the monopoly. The movie and its plot feels a little more streamlined than Diamonds Are Forever did, but was still a fairly entertaining ride for me… much more interesting than some of the earlier, more complicated pictures like Thunderball, to be sure.
Although as my friend JC pointed out in my observations on Diamonds, the book of Live And Let Die (written in the 1955) had the same setting and featured several heavies of African descent, I can't help but see this picture as a take-off on the very popular blaxploitation sub-genera that was highly profitable at the time. The original Shaft hit in 1971 and Across 110th Street in 1972 (the latter of which starred Dr. Kananga himself, Yaphett Koto). The early scenes in particular where Bond is in Harlem especially reek of this influence, with George Martin's funk'd up recordings of the Bond theme playing, and multiple references to Bond as a "honkey" by the flamboyantly dressed denizens of the neighborhood.
The movie spends a good chunk of time on San Monique, where Bond successfully nails a clairvoyant Tarot Card reader named "Solitaire," (played by Jane Seymour, future Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) thus robbing her of her power. Both Connery's and Moore's (and Lazenby's) Bonds are hopeless sex addicts, but Moore's seems to bang more women per movie than his predecessors did. This may not be accurate.
And then there's the debut appearance of Clifton James' racist southern sheriff character, J.W. Pepper. I was enjoying the movie just fine, but when Pepper shows up around the 85 minute mark, the movie grinds to a screeching halt, turning into what is essentially a dry run for Smokey And The Bandit, which would come 4 years later. I'm talking about the big-ass speed-boat chase. I didn't like the sequence, and my main problem with it is the fact that Bond is virtually absent from the whole thing. We go back to a close up of him every once in a while to show that he's still driving the boat to some unclear destination, but most of the main action follows Sheriff Pepper and the bad guys, and it's all weirdly not engaging.
Memorable sequences, however, include Bond's escape from the crocodile farm (just before the boat chase), and a chase around a small private airport that results in mucho property damage. I also really liked the two scenes in New Orleans where a traveling funeral procession winds up being an exceptionally large assassination squad. The scene at the end where Bond interrupts the ritual would-be sacrifice of Solitaire is strange, not only because Bond kills 5 or 6 people completely unprovoked, but also because it's the only scene in the Bond franchise that I'm aware of where something supernatural appears to happen.
Felix Leiter is back and has been recast for the fifth time, this time with David Hedison. He gets a lot to do in this one… The character would sit the next six movies out before appearing again in 1987, in Timothy Dalton's first Bond The Living Daylights. But THEN in 1989's License To Kill, Hedison is back in the part again! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!?!?
I guess the producers were really trying to distinguish Moore's Bond from Connery's, so he mostly orders bourbon whenever there's a drink to be had (never a Martini or champaign, although he would again in future installments), and he smokes ridiculous cigars ala Hannibal Smith from "The A-Team."
Kananga has what I believe is the most preposterous death scene of all the Bond villains. And this is the third picture in a row where after the main climax has happened, Bond is off with a girl only to have one of the secondary baddies show up and make one last bit of trouble before the end credits roll. In OHMSS, it's Blofeld and Nurse Bunt who drive by and assassinate Bond's new wife. In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond is enjoying a cruise with Tiffany Case when Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd show up again for one last attempt to kill him, only to have Bond savagely murder them both. In this one, the bionic-armed thug known as "Tee-Hee" shows up on the train where Bond plans to pork Solitaire for "sixteen hours," and starts some shit.
I can't remember, but I think the next movie, The Man With The Golden Gun, has a scene at the end where Hervé Villechaize's diminutively named "Nick-Nack" comes back too… but I'll have to wait until next movie to find out!
March 12, 2013
Diamonds Are Forever (Bond #07) [Bond 50 BluRay Set]
After the moody On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the Bond series kinda went back to basics with 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. I kinda sense that this one doesn't get a lot of love from Bond aficionados, but I found it to be a solid (if formulaic) entry which allowed some of the campiness that would characterize the series throughout the 70s to start to creep in.
George Lazenby was offered the part of James Bond again, but he didn't want to commit to a long and restrictive contract, according to the IMDB, so he passed. The producers then flirted with the idea of hiring American actors like John Gavin (who was actually contracted at one point) and Adam West (!) before deciding to pay Sean Connery a record-breaking fee to appear as Bond one last time (at least for EON Productions... he would return to the role yet again in the unofficial Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again 12 years later). Although it's great to see Connery in the role again (he actually seems excited to be there, which wasn't always the case in You Only Live Twice), he starts to look a little old for the part at certain points of the picture.
As I said in my last update, the end of OHMSS was so strong that you kinda want to see the series continue in that direction for a bit, and it makes you curious about what Lazenby might have done with the role had he continued to play it. As a result, the pre-credit sequence in this next movie (where Bond hunts Blofeld and unknowingly kills one of his doubles) is sort of disappointing because you get the sense that the series, for the first time, is really backtracking from the interesting course it started to take in the previous movie and is veering back into tried and true territory (and it's certainly not the last time it would do so!).
Nevertheless, Connery's charisma gets you to forgive all that really quickly... I was particularly entertained during the sequence in Holland where he poses as diamond delivery man "Peter Franks." When the real Peter Franks shows up, Bond must quickly kill him and switch their wallets. When Tiffany Case looks at the dead man's wallet and exclaims that he has just killed James Bond, the look of faux surprise on Connery's face is priceless. Other standout sequences are the car chase through the streets of old Las Vegas, and the climactic fight that Bond has with Bambi and Thumper.
Another recasting for Blofeld and Felix Leiter in this one: Blofeld is now played by Charles Gray, who appeared in You Only Live Twice as a totally different character... Felix now looks like a 1940s jewish comedian who just did an extended run in the Catskills. Jill St. John plays Tiffany Case, the first American Bond girl... weirdly, she's a hard-ass mercenary in her first scene, and kind of bubbly and ditzy toward the end of the movie. Lana Wood plays the brilliantly named "Plenty O'Toole," whose character is consistently stupid throughout (even when she's dead in a pool later on). Crispin Glover's father, Bruce Glover, plays one-half of the duo of thinly-veiled gay assassins who trail Bond throughout the movie and unsuccessfully try to kill him several times.
And then there's Jimmy Dean, the once and future pork sausage king, as "Willard Whyte," an eccentric billionaire recluse unmistakably modeled after Howard Hughes. I could be wrong, but the inclusion of a character like that in this movie is the first time an aspect of a Bond picture was so clearly influenced by a real-life person or event. Many of the 70s Bond pictures would do the same (and then occasionally in more recent entries, like Jonathan Pryce's character in 97's Tomorrow Never Dies who was clearly a less evil version of Rupert Murdoch). The next movie, 1973's Live And Let Die, was made in the post-Shaft era where Blaxploitation pictures were plentiful and earning a lot of money... as a result, the movie is largely set in Louisiana and many of the villains have African heritage. 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun was made the year after Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon hit, and therefore there's kung-fu a-plenty throughout the picture. And of course 1979's Moonraker was released two years after Star Wars and contained an extended sequence where James Bond is in space firing lasers at bad guys (a sequence which caused the series to have another major "let's get back to basics" moment for it's next picture).
Director Guy Hamilton returned for this his 2nd Bond picture (the first being Goldfinger), and he would go on to direct the next two as well, both starring Roger Moore. So far I've found his two movies to be most consistently enjoyable to watch, but I haven't seen his next, Live And Let Die, in a long time, so... onward!
George Lazenby was offered the part of James Bond again, but he didn't want to commit to a long and restrictive contract, according to the IMDB, so he passed. The producers then flirted with the idea of hiring American actors like John Gavin (who was actually contracted at one point) and Adam West (!) before deciding to pay Sean Connery a record-breaking fee to appear as Bond one last time (at least for EON Productions... he would return to the role yet again in the unofficial Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again 12 years later). Although it's great to see Connery in the role again (he actually seems excited to be there, which wasn't always the case in You Only Live Twice), he starts to look a little old for the part at certain points of the picture.
As I said in my last update, the end of OHMSS was so strong that you kinda want to see the series continue in that direction for a bit, and it makes you curious about what Lazenby might have done with the role had he continued to play it. As a result, the pre-credit sequence in this next movie (where Bond hunts Blofeld and unknowingly kills one of his doubles) is sort of disappointing because you get the sense that the series, for the first time, is really backtracking from the interesting course it started to take in the previous movie and is veering back into tried and true territory (and it's certainly not the last time it would do so!).
Nevertheless, Connery's charisma gets you to forgive all that really quickly... I was particularly entertained during the sequence in Holland where he poses as diamond delivery man "Peter Franks." When the real Peter Franks shows up, Bond must quickly kill him and switch their wallets. When Tiffany Case looks at the dead man's wallet and exclaims that he has just killed James Bond, the look of faux surprise on Connery's face is priceless. Other standout sequences are the car chase through the streets of old Las Vegas, and the climactic fight that Bond has with Bambi and Thumper.
Another recasting for Blofeld and Felix Leiter in this one: Blofeld is now played by Charles Gray, who appeared in You Only Live Twice as a totally different character... Felix now looks like a 1940s jewish comedian who just did an extended run in the Catskills. Jill St. John plays Tiffany Case, the first American Bond girl... weirdly, she's a hard-ass mercenary in her first scene, and kind of bubbly and ditzy toward the end of the movie. Lana Wood plays the brilliantly named "Plenty O'Toole," whose character is consistently stupid throughout (even when she's dead in a pool later on). Crispin Glover's father, Bruce Glover, plays one-half of the duo of thinly-veiled gay assassins who trail Bond throughout the movie and unsuccessfully try to kill him several times.
And then there's Jimmy Dean, the once and future pork sausage king, as "Willard Whyte," an eccentric billionaire recluse unmistakably modeled after Howard Hughes. I could be wrong, but the inclusion of a character like that in this movie is the first time an aspect of a Bond picture was so clearly influenced by a real-life person or event. Many of the 70s Bond pictures would do the same (and then occasionally in more recent entries, like Jonathan Pryce's character in 97's Tomorrow Never Dies who was clearly a less evil version of Rupert Murdoch). The next movie, 1973's Live And Let Die, was made in the post-Shaft era where Blaxploitation pictures were plentiful and earning a lot of money... as a result, the movie is largely set in Louisiana and many of the villains have African heritage. 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun was made the year after Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon hit, and therefore there's kung-fu a-plenty throughout the picture. And of course 1979's Moonraker was released two years after Star Wars and contained an extended sequence where James Bond is in space firing lasers at bad guys (a sequence which caused the series to have another major "let's get back to basics" moment for it's next picture).
Director Guy Hamilton returned for this his 2nd Bond picture (the first being Goldfinger), and he would go on to direct the next two as well, both starring Roger Moore. So far I've found his two movies to be most consistently enjoyable to watch, but I haven't seen his next, Live And Let Die, in a long time, so... onward!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)