Kissy Suzuki! could have been a hit if she wanted to be.
Granted, those fans who swear fealty to “classic Bond” are, nearly unanimously, in the bag for the one and true Bond, Sean Connery. He’s Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle to Roger Moore’s Dave Kingman or Daniel Craig’s Roger Clemens. Connery had no use for submarine BMWs or nuclear physicists played by Denise Richards, and he never took his charm to the moon. But Connery’s run wasn’t perfect and anyone thinking otherwise is whitewashing their childhood the same way baseball fans choose to forget that the only reason Ty Cobb had 46 inside-the-park home runs was that no one knew how to field baseballs in those oversized parks at the turn of the century.
“From Russia With Love”, for example, starts out with a group of villains walking through their henchman-training facility—a large, outdoor room with temporary walls and no roof that magically suppresses the sound of all the gunfire going on within. In “You Only Live Twice”, Bond puts on a Spock wig and some thick(er) eyebrows and magically becomes Japanese, though he never speaks a word of it. “Goldfinger”, the movie most Bond movies are compared to, featured a megalomaniac who was more than happy killing 50,000 men, women and children in order to make a few million dollars and whose plan to do this involved a team of stunt-flying bombshells crop-dusting Fort Knox with a lethal neurotoxin.
These are the three best Bond movies starring the single greatest Bond ever and yet they still have such prominent, glaring weaknesses, weaknesses that would never see the light of day today. And all that is before we mention any of the chronic shortcomings present in every Bond movie, including the stunted, sped-up fight scenes, the cheap, bloodless deaths, and the terrible acting from non-essential characters. We typically let those blemishes go as a product of their time, but, like second and third string players on the Washington Senators or St. Louis Browns, they must be acknowledged for what they are.
The Sean Connery Bond movies have many terrific strengths and helped create some iconic scenes in movie history, but there’s a lot in there that doesn’t stand up past the filters of nostalgia. Much like comparing today’s players—from Albert Pujols and Justin Verlander down to Matt Treanor and Lew Ford—with the “golden age” contemporaries of Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle, saying that 2012’s “Skyfall” is the greatest Bond movie ever does not take away from Sean Connery’s legendary run as the secret agent. One does not wash away the other.
Repoz
Posted: November 12, 2012 at 02:41 PM |
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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).
Diamonds are Forever.
Agree with this. Diamonds Are Forever seemed like a cheap Friday-night TV movie. The casting (Jill St. John) and the sets were low-rent, and Connery was too old and was just coasting. I also didn't like A View to a Kill very much -- by that time, Moore was far too old for the role and Grace Jones terrifies me.
Skyfall was pretty good, but Casino Royale was better.
I went to a bachelor party in the late 1990s which was a James Bond marathon. Diamonds are Forever was embarrassingly sexist and homophobic to us, especially given there were two gay men at the party (though not involved with each other).
One day I had $20 burning a hole in my pocket and bought the Aris Kristatos, For Your Eyes Only watch from this collection. The reasons for picking that one are complicated, but they included not picking a popular villain like Odd Job from Goldfinger.
I've often thought someone should actually make a movie based on the novel. Maybe even a period piece, circa 1952ish.
Beautiful song. A bit over-produced, but a fine example of John Barry's lush style. Louis Armstrong's last hit...doesn't fit in with his career, of course, but it adds another bittersweet note to the concept of Bond's final words in the film.
Visited several of the sites used in the filming of OHMSS while in Switzerland, including Piz Gloria, Blofeld's Alp-top fortress, and the ice rink in Grindelwald where Tracy finds Bond after his escape from Blofeld.
It really did hit the right notes. As someone said, not as good as Casino Royale, but darn good. Just to see the Aston Martin in real 007 use was a genuine treat; I was grinning ear to ear.
(Thunderball was my first Bond film at the movies...I was 11. My parents wouldn't let me see any of the first three...too violent and sexy. Luckily, those were the day of re-releases, so I saw all of the first three on the big screen in various combinations, usually as double features.)
The Spy Who Loved Me is also getting short changed. It's the crown jewel of the Moore period and an easy top 5 pick.
Agreed. It's the best of the Moore films, and perhaps the "prototypical" James Bond movie if not necessarily the best. It has pretty much everything -- good and bad -- that James Bond movies are famous for.
Octopussy does have Maud Adams and Louis Jordan (the best Dracula EVER in the BBC TV version years ago) and the really sexy woman who heads up Octopussy's girls...but it also has the Tarzan yell and Bond ordering a tiger to 'sit'. Ugh.
Spy Who Loved Me did have Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel, but I liked For Your Eyes Only better among the Moore Bonds. If they'd left out the skating and nymphet stuff, it would have been darn good, IMO.
"Do be careful!"
Beautiful song. A bit over-produced, but a fine example of John Barry's lush style. Louis Armstrong's last hit...doesn't fit in with his career, of course, but it adds another bittersweet note to the concept of Bond's final words in the film.
It depends on whether you have bangers or sausages for breakfast. Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World" was a hit single in England, but it never charted at all in America. Of course, the official charts are wholly inadequate for making sense or shape of Armstrong's discography.
Quantum of Solace was not a good movie. But, it improves exponentially if you watch it immediately after Casino Royale, back to back. Suddenly a lot of things that made no sense make a lot of sense...you can see the threads connecting the two. It seems like Casino and Quantum were the same story, but they had to break it up somewhere, so they broke it at the 2/3 mark and by the time the second half came out it made no sense.
Casino Royale is still the only movie of any sort I've seen twice in the theater. What a fabulous movie.
The 'original' Casino Royale was a god awful mess, and belongs at the bottom of the heap.
The best Bond girls are Bouquet, Jane Seymour, Eva Green, Ursula Andress, and Halle Berry.
Yes, it's not exactly cool. At least I can say that it was a gift. (It is, however, on display on a shelf in the dining room.)
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).
Yep, that's why lunchboxes with intact Thermos are so much more coveted among collectors. (I insist I knew nothing about this until receiving the Thunderball lunch kit...and I don't own any other ones. Honest.)
You could probably put all the Bond movies on a camp to serious scale that ranges from Casino Royale to Casino Royale.
I like this list. I'd add Diana Rigg and Mie Hama. If I could only vote for five, I'd bump Seymour and Berry off the list in favor of those two.
Klaus Maria Brandauer...probably most famous for Out of Africa. He's a genuine actor. He was one of the good things in the movie.
A triple feature of this, Myra Breckenridge, and Return to the Valley of the Dolls would be a great afternoon of sixties moviemaking at its most incoherent.
You could probably put all the Bond movies on a camp to serious scale that ranges from Casino Royale to Casino Royale.
Good point. If they remade the novel of Moonraker with Craig, that would be a potential bookend. (Though since the story has to do with post-war Britain and its place in the new world order at the time, it would be better if done as a period piece, which would leave Craig out.)
I think QoS is even more serious. It's basically a straightforward espionage adventure film with nothing amusing in it.
Diamonds was full of 'so weird it's funny' moments.
Bond escaping the bad guys by moon buggy?
The gay hit men? (not funny. just weird. Even THEN it was weird. I think everyone in the theater flinched every time Putter and Glover came into view.)
Jimmy Dean as Howard Hughes?
Plenty O'Toole ending up dead in a swimming pool for no reason whatsoever?
Connery wearing the worst hairpiece ever and working a good 30 pounds overweight?
A Mustang Mach I as the 'hot car'?
The aforementioned 'chase in the parking lot'?
Charles Gray playing Blofeld as if he were about to fall asleep?
What a lazy mess this was.
Overall I didn't care for Moore, but I really did enjoy Spy Who Loved Me. Possibly because of what #77 says.
Also, I adore Never Say Never Again, but I don't think I could come up with a logical defense for it.
Given how similar the films generally are, it can actually be difficult to describe why one is good and another is bad. The Spy Who Loves Me feels to me like it's running on all cylinders in a way that the other Moore films don't. (And no, it's not the first one I saw, or the one I saw when I was 12.) I guess it's just the right balance. Some of Moore's have rather great ideas -- Christopher Lee is Bond's dark mirror! Christopher Walken and Grace Jones as villains! -- but the scripting and acting don't carry it off. His others don't even have that much.
I liked The Living Daylights a lot, but in Licence to Kill, he essentially becomes Sonny Crockett or something rather than James Bond, and I really do not like it. (Dalton plays it fine, but it's just not what I want to see from my Bond movies.)
I think GoldenEye is fantastic and the other Brosnans are forgettable. So, I essentially give one "must-see" film each to those three Bonds.
Connery and Craig delivered consistent product, although I still feel like Craig does not look the slightest bit like "James Bond."
I'm in the camp that views Connery not doing OHMSS as the great tragedy of the series. Lazenby wasn't an actor, and they worked around it as well as could possibly be done, but it's not a fixable problem.
Well, somebody's accent, anyway. ;-)
I have high hopes that Idris Elba will be the next Bond.
I just want to point out that Putter Smith is a genuinely great jazz bass player. I have no idea how he ended up playing a villain in a Bond movie.
Memory is a funny thing. I also thought it was a black tuxedo.
Well, whatever: action-packed bomb-planting scene! White tuxedo! Best thing!
Brosnan would have made a good Bond in the early 80's but was a poor choice for a Bond of the late 90's and early 2000's. By that point the world wanted a more rugged and dirtier lone hero and that isn't Brosnan. Late 80's and early 90's simply wasn't a good time for James Bond period. The Cold War was over and our biggest enemies at the time were drug dealers.
Bond is full of what-ifs like that. What if Connery had done OHMSS? What if Brosnan had taken over in the late 80s instead of Dalton (his near-casting as Bond led to so much publicity that it led to Remington Steele being renewed, which ironically took him out of the running)? What if Spielberg had decided to go ahead and offer to do a Bond film for the Broccolis instead of going with his friend George Lucas' idea of doing a "1930s James Bond" about a archaeologist? What if Dalton had been able to do another movie or two? What if there wasn't the whole stupid fight with Kevin McClory? What if Alfred Hitchcock had directed a Bond (he was Fleming's first choice)? What if David Bowie had been the villain instead of Christopher Walken in "View to a Kill"?
Countless, really.
IIRC Fleming's ideal film James Bond was David Niven (who did get into the farrago version of Casino Royale, of course). By the time of the first films, though, Niven was too old for the part.
From Russia with Love
Goldfinger
The Spy who Loved me
Casino Royale
Goldeneye
also I think that the Dalton and Brosnan Bond's were entertaining but Craig is definitely 2 or 3 steps above.
On a side note, Roger Moore was on Stern yesterday and I can't believe he is 85.
This really worked well, too, just like Live and Let Die's homage to Shaft and Hell Up in Harlem.
I'm surprised we didn't see James square off against some dinosaurs or aliens in the nineties.
Yeah, this is another point of divergence where I feel things definitely could have been better. It's not a knock on Dalton, but I think that would have been the perfect time for Brosnan to get it.
Heck, Dalton himself allegedly was considered to replace Connery, despite being really young at the time. At least if you don't think much of the Moore era (and assume Dalton would have played the role in the same manner as he did later), that might have been sensational -- the equivalent of doing the late-2000s reboot 30 years earlier, with a guy who could have plausibly stayed in the role for decades...
It's true, there really is no counterpart in that respect. (Although I'm sure Disney will try its damndest to change that with Star Wars.)
What about the various Ms, Qs, Felix Leiters, Miss Moneypennys and such? Are they Time Lords as well?
Godzilla pulled off the feat shortly after he fought Mothra for the first time. He's had FAR longer hiatuses than 007, however.
The opening car chase in QoS, where the cars are difficult to distinguish and at times you don't even know which is in front and which is behind, is an abomination. One minute in and I knew the movie was going to be a slog. It was.
edit: and why the hell didn't they work with a real poker player in devising the seminal hands in Casino Royal?
Perhaps the next Bond film, sans Craig, will explore the quantum mechanics of the wormhole that connects all of the various Bond universes together. Maybe Spock could cameo as himself. But new Spock, from the reboot, not Leonard Nimoy.
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