Wednesday, December 12, 2012
2013 Results: Bonds, Clemens, Piazza and Biggio are elected to the Hall of Merit!
(bbtf)
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza and Craig Biggio have been elected to the Hall of Merit!
The timing for our first year electing 4 candidates could not have worked out better, since class of 2013 is the strongest in terms of electees that we’ve ever had. The top of the 1934 ballot included Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Pop Lloyd, Smokey Joe Williams and Cristobal Torriente, but only 2 were elected.
Bonds and Clemens were each unanimous at 1 and 2. I believe that’s the first ...
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1 2 3 >Depends; did she get pregnant?
Today they just have no idea how computers and networking operate.
Part of me thinks that was semi-intentional in Skyfall given the film's tendency to explicitly reject gadgets and technology. I don't think audiences really know, either. I mean, Dark Knight Rises assumes there is no way to reverse a bunch of financial trades made by masked villains after breaking into a stock exchange.
Are there any films that get this stuff right?
Wait a second, who seriously thinks that You Only Live Twice is better than Dr. No?
The first three Connery Bond movies are highly incredible, but they are fast-moving and clever films that have been imitated endlessly, their own many sequels forming only a small part of that imitation. They move too fast for you to ask questions about their realism except in retrospect and at leisure. The films with Craig show a nice level of seriousness (the cartoony feel of the Moore and Brosnan films got embarrassing early on, and Dalton I can't even visualize in the character; though as with Lazenby, I'm sure he has his proponents). I'd wait a few years to see if the Craig films are particularly memorable or distinctive. As noted, they don't really set high marks for credibility either.
What part of the word "galore" don't you understand?
I've only seen Casino Royale with Craig and loved the darker edge. I don't know how you can compare Craig vs. Connery; both seem near perfect for what they were trying to do.
I don't know about that. They pretty much pioneered the concept of the "silly action movie". At the time all the good action movies were war movies or Westerns, weren't they? In the field of silly 1960s action movies the Sean Connery films are competing with their own knock-offs (Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies, "Modesty Blaise", "Fathom" starring Raquel Welch) and things like "Fantastic Voyage" and "Barbarella" and "Robinson Crusoe On Mars". Maybe they look bad by comparison with "Cat Ballou".
[edited to add the word "good" and add more examples]
** "There's only ONE WAY to keep faith with a Pole. Put your faith in your sword and the sword in the Pole."
The answer is in the titles...
Moonraker or Die Another Day?
o r ker or ie A other D y?
M on a D n a
MaDonna?
The scuba battle scene that you referenced takes place in Thuderball, but the tuxedo scene is from the beginning of Goldfinger. Bond sneaks ashore of an unnamed banana republic and plants a bomb to destroy a heroin processing plant. After planting the bomb he removes his wetsuit to reveal a perfectly pressed white tuxedo. He then enters a club and calmly lights a cigarette while the bomb explodes and bedlam ensues.
The Daniel Craig Bond films are completely different films than the Connery/Moore films. The newer films are more similar to Jason Bourne series than they are to the old Bond films.
Anyone who saw the Japanese girl (Mie Hama) Bond married and developed urges.
This.
Diamonds are Forever.
Don't forget the invisible car! Or the rocket car where you see its clearly a model. I thought the story in Die Another Day was not bad, but it was undermined by B Movie effects.
Dalton's first film (living Daylights) was fantastic at the time. Some of this could have been because I was comparing it with the last few awful moore films... But I thought it was smart, lots of fun twists, good action, and a nice brisk pace. The other Dalton film was terrible, but mostly it was the writing in Licence to Kill... Dalton was fine.
I think Moore and his movies are underrated. He made two really terrible movies, Moonraker and View to a Kill, but Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, and For Your Eyes Only are all excellent IMO. Octopussy is pretty good, and the Man with the Golden Gun is ok.
Fully agreed. I've _tried_ to like Bond films - they are of a genre that I love - but I just can't.
The bad scripts and bad acting performances don't support the overlong, overdone, and preposterous action sequences.
I've seen a few, new and old, every Bond (or nearly every Bond)... I like plenty of other 'guy movie' archetypes -- I love a good western, for example. I even liked the Bourne movies (to a diminishing degree as the franchise progressed...) and can appreciate a good spy thriller.
But the Bond movies - I skip past them whenever someone does a marathon, I have very little desire to see skyfall, etc.
Maybe it's time I just face up to the fact that I'm Ray's evil twin... or is that benevolent twin?
In Roger Moore's defense, he had unenviable position of having to follow a great act (Sean COnnery's). He played it more for humour and I think he even said that was deliberate because Connery's was so stoic. I think it works more or less although I like Connery's better.
On the You Only LIve movie: I thought Mie was quite striking, really liked her but I thought the cinematography was really off. It seemed there were a lot of long range shots of her and very little close ups or anything to really give her her due maybe I am misremembering it. I like the musical score a lot too.
From Russia With Love was perhaps the only one where the plot engaged me. That girl was also really beautiful. Also the way the two chicks: Talisa Soto and Carey Lowell in License to kill play off against each other was sort of an interesting plot to me.
HOnestly, at this pt. I only watch them for the chicks, so my question is: Wouldn't an R rated Bond be better?
I was also a fan of Moore's first, Live and Let Die, as it was the first Bond movie I saw in a theater as a kid and it had a lot of memorable scenes/characters: Kananga, and his henchman the enormous bald man with the sunglasses and the pincer hook for a hand; the alligator farm; the southern sheriff who's trying to chase Bond and is almost decapitated as Bond flies over him in a speedboat, the voodoo, the New Orleans funeral, etc. It definitely made an impression on a 10-year-old.
i'd say worst overall was either die another day or quantum of solace. i thought craig gave a really good performance on a very poor script. think casino royale = one of top couplein the series.
agree #36 RE: jill st.! and i didn't see that until i was older. thought live & let die was one of the best in the series as well.
The "judo chop" wasn't unique to Moore. Connery also did the "judo chop" as well and had a ton of horribly staged fights as well.
It's kind of weird in that pre-Lee you had Connery and Moore doing fake "karate" and then after post-Lee Bonds for the most part stopped doing "karate" until the Bourne movies came along and now they do the Bourne style of "karate".
Agree, for awhile I thought Living Daylights was the best bond film i'd seen (saw it in the theatre when it came out) but Im less emphatic on that point these days, and just point to it as what i really want in a bond film.
I could not stant Man with a golden gun, and though I liked the Moore films when I saw them on cable and in the theatre as a kid, when I watched them later... Live and Let Die was the only one that really stood out.
As i side note i knew the grandson of Albert R. Broccoli (Producer behind all the Bond movies till he passed away), and awarded him a couple film grant to make short films while he was at Stanford. Last i saw he was an editor on the last Bronson Bond film. Creative, smart, kid.... well i guess he's not a kid anymore.
Exactly. The Craig movies, as many have noted, have a different and more serious premise (in many ways it's much closer to Ian Fleming, as the torture scene in the Craig Casino Royale, lifted straight from the novel, indicates; Fleming had a scary propensity to take himself seriously). But the first three Connery movies were slick adult entertainment that commented ironically on itself as it was going by ("Bond, James Bond. … Shaken, not stirred") and, to my mind, all the better for walking that thin line between camp and suspense-drama.
Then they forgot to hire a story editor for Thunderball and the series deteriorated quickly.
Just in the mid-80s Roger Moore category, I've seen Octopussy, For Your Eyes Only, and A View To A Kill. Would describe them respectively as too ludicrous and cartoonish to be good, too half-assed to be good, and just right. All three of those categories plausibly apply to all three of them. Since each one is a series of set-pieces, it depends on how those set-pieces affected you on a given day. I thought Quantum of Solace was a waste of time just after seeing it, but the parachuting sequence, the fight scene on the scaffolding, the girl's vendetta against the general, the high-tech opera sequence (unrelated though it was to the plot ... whatever happened to the Quantum organization anyway?) all stuck with me.
Thunderball is the least worth watching (though I haven't seen the Dalton ones or Moonraker). The 952 minutes of slo-motion combat between indistinguishable scuba divers was probably unprecedented and fascinating at the time, but I got nothing from it. Just listen to the theme song twice a day for a week. The song is great.
I would pay good money for a closer to come in to that song.
You hadn't had your fill from "Sea Hunt", I reckon. Every episode Lloyd Bridges would have to engage in an underwater fight. Nothing more tedious.
That's right, I've always been cooler than you.
After that, A View to a Kill, any of the Brosnans except Goldeneye, License to Kill, Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun (Christopher Lee wasted, Clifton James back as the moronic J.W. Pepper), and Live and Let Die (I see a lot of love for this one here. The ending alone, with Kananga blowing up like Bruce in 'Jaws' is painful enough...but the mix of blaxploitation and Bond just didn't work at all for me, though I did love Geoffrey Holder and Yaphet Kyotto as the bad guys - but the sheriff character? God, just kill me...and then they brought him back for another film!)
Next group, either so-so or flawed but still ok...Thunderball, You Only Live Twice (the score, Nancy Sinatra's dreamy rendition of the title song, the scenery, and Mie), Octopussy, For Your Eyes Only, The Spy Who Loved Me, Quantum of Solace.
The Hall of Fame: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Living Daylights, Goldeneye, Casino Royale, Skyfall.
Walt, I still have one, with intact thermos...a Christmas gift from my brother about 10 years ago.
I always think of the Dalton ones as "The Welsh ones" thanks to Lynne in I'm Alan Partridge.
Btw, youtube blocked here, but if the link in 19 isn't the start of The Spy Who Loved Me with Alan Partridge's commentary overdubbed, you should drop everything and find it now...
By contrast, Moonraker is one of Fleming's better novels. He tended to alternate readable pulp (Casino Royale) with Godawful raving pulp (Lie and Let Die), and Moonraker (the third novel) was an uptick. The best novel, IMO, is From Russia with Love. Goldfinger is also enjoyable in a 12-year-old-boy type way, the rest go from bad to worse.
Owning a Thunderball lunch box in the 1st grade -- cool. Owning one now ...
Ahh, the thermos. I musta broken 3 of those a year. I doubt the Thunderball thermos made it past early Dec (post-Thanksgiving turkey soup).
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