Saturday Is Bond Day, #19: Tomorrow Never Dies

My sons are not particularly invested in the Bond movies at the moment -- this time more than even last week, since they'd just gotten new rental video games (the reward for getting all As and Bs on their report cards) that morning. So I was the only one who saw Tomorrow Never Dies straight through, and even I had a laptop in front of me most of the time.

It seemed to be a serviceable Bond movie, and my general impression was that it was stronger than Goldeneye in nearly every way -- Jonathan Price makes a splendid villain, not quite chewing the scenery but acting with gusto and energy; Michelle Yeoh is possibly the toughest Bond Girl ever, not actually sleeping with Brosnan's Bond (unless I missed something, which is possible) and beating up nearly as many henchmen as he does; and the chases were slightly more realistic, including some great motorcycle scenes.

However, Brosnan's Bond still does get beaten up an awful lot -- the bad guys get the drop on him repeatedly, and he survives mostly because the plot needs to be explained to him before he's killed. And Brosnan does have difficulty looking tough enough for the part; he comes across as a lightweight who needs his semi-automatic rifles to compensate for his weaknesses in traditional spycraft (and possibly other areas).

The title makes absolutely no sense, but it sounds like a Bond title, which I suppose is sufficient. I bet I would have liked this better if I'd given it more attention, but I was making lunch and having boys running in and out during the running time -- as I discovered the first time around, watching movies at lunchtime on Saturday is not the best time.
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Listening to: My First Earthquake - Meat Pies
via FoxyTunes

Saturday Is Bond Day, #18: Goldeneye

After a long hiatus, my older son (Thing 1) requested that we get back to the Bond movies, and so we hit Goldeneye this past weekend. (Yes, we did give the two Timothy Dalton movies -- The Living Daylights and License to Kill -- a miss for now, though we may go back and pick up Daylights at some point. The boys are still not going to see the Daniel Craig movies. We may see the '60s Casino Royale if I feel in the mood to utterly confuse them some day.)

Goldeneye is PG-13, and clearly is aiming to be much more "serious" and "real" than the general run of the Roger Moore films. One of the things that means is that Pierce Brosnan's Bond, more often than not, is toting a semi-automatic rifle. (That doesn't say much for his stealthiness or marksmanship, of course, but Big Action Movies require lots of bullets flying about.) It also means that the Bad Bond Girl, Famke Janssen's Xenia Onatopp, is an over-the-top sadist with literally killer thighs. That wouldn't be out of character for one of the Moore movies, but it would have been humorous there, and here it's just meant to show how tough and nasty she is. You can actually feel Goldeneye clenching its teeth at times, which is distracting.

This was the first post-Cold War Bond movie, though the plot is entirely concerned with Russians and only the iconography shows a difference. There is a doomsday machine -- it's always good to see one of those in a Bond film; it shows the writers are trying -- but it's only moderately exciting, a single-shot orbital EMP device that the Secret Villain is using to cover his actual get-rich-quick scheme. Honestly, it's a bit wasted here, and I started wondering what a real evil genius like Blofeld could have done with it. Trying to make Bond movies fit into the real world is a futile exercise; they really need to get back to serious villains and allow European actors to emote wildly and chew the scenery again.

The action set-pieces are fine here -- the tank chase through St. Petersburg is a lot of fun, though, like all of the similar moments in Goldeneye, it shows Brosnan's Bond using a sledgehammer where previous Bonds would use a scalpel -- and the supporting cast, particularly Alan Cummings as a computer programmer, are all entertaining. (Though my young sons were surprised, and possibly appalled, to see that M was now a girl. They'll need to get over that reaction if they hope to get anywhere in life!) Oh, and it was great to see Joe Don Baker as a CIA agent.

Goldeneye is too long and too full of itself, and Brosnan too reserved -- he's just there a lot of the time, rather than centering the movie and action on himself -- but it's a solid Bond movie, and I suppose it must have come as a relief after the high camp of many of the Moore films and the wilderness years of Dalton. At this point, with three more Brosnans to come, I'm just hoping he lightened up a bit and removed the pole from his nether regions.
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Listening to: Anna Ternheim - No Subtle Men
via FoxyTunes

Saturday Is Bond Day, #15: A View To a Kill

Well, now I'll have that Duran Duran song stuck in my head for five years again. Luckily, I have a lurking fondness for DD -- my guilty-pleasure tastes as a teen tended to the more baroque end of the New Wave to begin with.

A View to a Kill sees the final appearance of Roger Moore as Bond, which even his greatest fans will probably admit was two movies and at least four years later than it should have been. (If Moore's movies had come out as quickly as Connery's early movies did, it might have been different -- but he was three years older than Connery to begin with, and Bond really shouldn't look like a man in his mid-fifties.)

But View to a Kill holds together better than I remembered; it's a better movie than Octopussy, all in all, even if Grace Jones (as Mayday, one of the rare villain's top henchman/Bad Bond Girl roles) hasn't mastered any acting more subtle than a growl at this point. Christopher Walken is the main villain, a microchip tycoon/racehorse breeder named Max Zorin who has a complicated backstory that mostly serves to drag in a cute blonde KGB agent for Bond to bonk in the middle of Act 2.

And the horse-breeder aspect is another example of the pointlessly elaborate plotting of the late Moore Bonds; it's as if they had a series of hats with kinds of scenes -- posh expensive sporting event, party in sumptuous location, unlikely villain's lair, chase with unusual vehicles, interaction with comedy-relief local, escaping death-trap, and so on -- picked one from each hat, and only then figured out a way to get the movie to thread through all of them in turn. On the other hand, the late Moore Bonds do have the vague overall plot involving M (Bernard Lee and then Robert Brown) skirmishing with his KGB opposite number, General Gogol (Walter Gotell), which is a nice bit of continuity and helps to ground the series. Well, as much as it can be grounded.

So, once again, Bond wanders around the edges of something nefarious, trying to figure out exactly what the bizarre plot is this time, shooting thugs and bedding wenches and just generally being dashing as he goes. Moore was 58 at this point, and he seems to be even slower than he was in Octopussy; the action is mostly shooting and climbing rather than hand-to-hand combat.

And the plot is even more bizarre than normal: Zorin intends to blow up the bottom of San Andreas Lake, using that water and a bomb placed on the "lock" of the fault -- yes, I don't think geology works that way, either, but let it pass for now -- to destroy Silicon Valley, corner the world's microchip market, and possibly go into the waterfront property business with Lex Luthor for all I know. That leads to an oddly flat and extended climax, in which we get to watch Zorin slaughter faceless mine workers (which is a metaphor for American capitalism if I ever saw one) while Bond and the utterly useless Good Bond Girl (Tanya Roberts, as the simpering blonde excuse for a geologist this movie calls Stacey -- and why did action-movie heroines suddenly get so wimpy in the mid-80s? I claim a trend, counting Stacey here and Willie in Temple of Doom.) run away from Mayday for a while, then fight the flood, and then get separated for plot purposes.

Stacey is pulled up from somewhere by Bond approximately once every five minutes throughout the last forty minutes of the movie, which is blatant enough that the entire group I watched the movie with -- as usual, my two sons, Things 1 and 2, and The Wife -- noticed it, and began commenting MST3Kially on that and other silly aspects of the end of View to a Kill.

(For another example, Stacey is run down by a blimp, and then pulled up...by Zorin! It's like she has a sign on her back that says "please pull my outstretched arms.")

It's very hard to take the end of View to a Kill seriously, and the mine sequence ends up being a disappointment -- no race down the tracks, only minor explosions -- but it's fun and good-natured, with a decent use of the Golden Gate Bridge for the final confrontation. View to a Kill does tend to end the Moore years with a whimper rather than a bang, but I still think it's better than Diamonds Are Forever, so he wins that particular battle with Connery on points.

And, from here, I'm going to be seeing Bond movies for the first time -- I stopped watching this particular style of dumb movies for nearly twenty years for no obvious reason, and so I missed the Dalton and Brosnan movies. It'll be interesting to see what I missed.

Saturday Is Bond Day, #14: Never Say Never Again

The boys and I caught the second half of 1983's Bond double-feature this afternoon, and discovered that Never Say Never Again is as thin and tired as Octopussy, but in slightly different ways. Connery was actually younger than Roger Moore in 1983 -- as in every other year -- but his '83 entry is constructed as a story about an older Bond, perhaps a step slower but still deadly. (The official series, though, never notices that its Bonds get older and craggier before they change entirely.)

This is a remake of Thunderball, with many of the plot elements -- SPECTRE, a villain named Largo, the gorgeous Domino (Kim Basinger this time), the hijacking of two nuclear missiles and consequent blackmail -- basically intact. This time Blofeld is played by Max von Sydow in the deep background -- as in Thunderball -- though he oddly seems to be channeling George Bernard Shaw the whole time. Klaus Maria Brandauer is Largo, and is suitably Teutonically menacing when he needs to be. But his boat's name has been translated from Disco Volante to Flying Saucer, presumably to chase falling American intelligence levels, and the plot doesn't work nearly as well. The seven-day deadline for the blackmail payment to SPECTRE is essentially forgotten, and this becomes another one of those poorly-plotted films where Bond just pokes about and waits for things to happen instead of seizing control of events.

Connery is trying harder here than he was in Diamonds Are Forever, but he's still a bit old and doughy and slow for the part. Never Say Never Again is a C-minus Bond movie: it's watchable but equally forgettable, and the lack of the usual trappings (Desmond Llewellyn as Q, Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny, the John Barry theme music, the iris-and-shot cold opening) turns it into something more like a generic early-'80s action movie than a real Bond film.

Saturday Is Bond Day, #13: Octopussy

Bond Day is turning into a movable feast; this week it came on Thursday. By Octopussy, Roger Moore is definitely getting too old and the movies too silly; this is what we all think of when we think of the Moore Bond.

Interestingly, though, this time he's paired with two women who are also notably older than the usual run of Bond Girls -- the False Bond Girl is Magda (Kristina Waybourn, 33 when the movie was released) and the True one is the titular Octopussy (Maud Adams, returning after being the False one in The Man With the Golden Gun a decade before, and now 38). Sure, even Adams is a good decade-and-a-half younger than Moore, but at least she's not 22.

Octopussy is a step slower than the grounded and stylish For Your Eyes Only, and a return to the more cartoonish saving-the-world of the previous movies: Octopussy is the head of a large international jewel-smuggling ring, in cahoots with Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan, who is not the most threatening Bond villain one can conceive of), though their actual modus operandi is more complicated than I could follow. (It involved a bloodthirsty Soviet General, Orlov, sneaking out Faberge eggs and other priceless treasures so that Khan's pet jeweler -- whom we never properly get introduced to -- can copy them, and then either the originals or the copies are then sold, or smuggled, or something.)

Bond gets caught up in this when agent 009 -- not otherwise named, and unrecognizable under clown makeup in his only scene -- is killed while investigating Octopussy's circus somewhere in Europe. But the trail doesn't lead him to her for quite a while; this is one of the Bond movies where the plot is just an excuse to stitch together scenes that Cubby Broccoli or the director, John Glen, wanted to put in: various chases (including one with elephants), Indian palaces, and of course a bevvy of female eye candy.

Moore is still game, and the technology behind the stunts is improving enough that it's not always obvious that he's in front of a blue screen, but he's obviously older and slower and the script gives him ever more jokey one-liners and silly scenes (such as a battle among Indian fakirs, where all of the cliches you are thinking of right now are deployed one by one).

Octopussy is fun as long as you don't take it seriously, and it's difficult to take it seriously with a lightweight like Jourdan as our world-threatening villain. (I might have missed it, but there doesn't seem to be any explanation of why he wants the Soviets to conquer Western Europe.) Steven Berkoff as Orlov is nastier and crazier, but he has only a few scenes. The only real reason to watch Octopussy these days is if you're a huge Maud Adams fan or if you're making a point to watch all of the Bond movies.



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Now playing: The Judybats - Down In The Shacks Where The Satellite Dishes Grow
via FoxyTunes

Saturday Is Bond Day #12: For Your Eyes Only

This week Bond Day fell on a Sunday, since Saturday was BEA (for me, at least) and Friday evening was taken up with a four-hour drive back from Boston. But we did all assemble, as night fell on the end of the weekend, to watch Roger Moore drop Blofeld (or a double) down an industrial chimney as For Your Eyes Only began.

That got the boys excited -- they're always up for more Blofeld -- but it had nothing to do with the rest of the movie, as usual. (It does function as a wink from the filmmakers to the audience, saying that they realize that Moonraker was too far over the top and that things need to settle down to earth -- and that leads into one of the smaller-scale Bond stories, without a world-destroying villain or a cartoonish sidekick.)

The actual plot of For Your Eyes Only starts with more typical spycraft: a disguised British spy ship off the coast of Armenia hits an old mine and goes down -- too quickly for the crew to self-destruct a secret encryption system. And then both the Soviets and the British send cut-out assets after the sunken ship; the British have an undersea archaeologist supposedly examining a Greek temple on the seabed, while the Russians send a killer to get rid of him.

Both Bond and the eventual Bond Girl -- Melina Havelock (played by Carole Bouquet), the daughter of the dead archaeologist -- go on the hunt for that killer, and Melina hits him with a crossbow bolt (allowing James to escape; he'd been captured, yet again, by the villain). They cross paths again a couple of times across Europe, as Bond traces the money towards those Russian overlords and teams up with Melina to retrieve the surveillance device from that sunken ship.

The villains are mostly mid-level Euro-thugs -- a guy with octagonal glasses, an East German biathlon champion, and the usual faceless minions -- with a mastermind whose identity is actually kept murky for most of the movie, in a nice touch. It's a smaller movie in terms of the stakes, though there's still the usual panoply of ski chases, underwater battles, and seduction of countesses to make it as Bondian as any other movie in the series.

Moore is starting to look old by this point, though -- he's in his mid-fifties, and a step slower than he was a decade before when he took on the role -- and his sophistication does tend to harden into aristocratic disdain, which is the wrong attitude for Bond. But, still, he's a better Bond than I'd thought he was (not having seen these movies for twenty years), and For Your Eyes Only is a quite good spy movie that's about as realistic as any Bond movie should ever be.

Saturday Is Bond Day #11: Moonraker

Bond Day fell on a Monday this week, since that's when Moonraker arrived in the mail from Netflix. The boys had a good day at school -- if it's been a bad day, all electronic devices are disallowed -- so we settled in to watch the very obviously post-Star Wars part of the Bond canon.

It was a crowd-pleaser in that room, but I'll tentatively say -- before seeing For Your Eyes Only next week -- that this is where the Roger Moore Bonds teetered over into self-parody. As I noted briefly in the last entry, Moonraker is one part Star Wars and one part photocopy of Spy Who Loved Me: space battles, a tough competitive female agent as the Bond Girl, a world-destroying villain with a secret lair to top the last one, and so on. In fact, the only obvious thing for a big 1979 action movie that it doesn't have is a monorail in the villain's lair. (I explained my theory of villain monorails to the boys when we saw You Only Live Twice -- which has the platonic idea of a lair, with not only a monorail, but a volcano, space-launch capacity, and Blofeld -- and Thing 2 has joined me in my love of all things monorailian.)

Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax is a surprisingly good villain, and Lois Chiles is a decent Bond Girl even working under the snicker-inducing name "Dr. Holly Goodhead." But this movie really belongs to Richard Kiel's Jaws, who was brought back from Spy either as part of the general transplantation or because of his popularity. Either way, Moonraker almost turns into his story, and he not only gets a girl, but also gets his own face turn near the end and a happy ending. Speaking of happy endings, Moonraker exactly matches Spy's ending as well, making this viewer wonder when, precisely, cheap Xerox machines reached the offices of United Artists.

Watching Moonraker soon after Spy inevitably diminishes it, as does watching it with any solid knowledge of physics. (The "zero-gee" space scenes are particularly painful, or laughable, depending on your tolerance for such things.) This is where the Moore Bonds lost their tenuous attachment to consensus reality and started floating away into their own realm, which was fine as long as Moore could sustain them. He still could, this time. Next up is For Your Eyes Only, and we'll see how he did there.

And I'll end with a question for the audience: how far into the series should we watch, myself and my two sons (aged 8 and 11)? I'm committed to running through the last Moore, A View to a Kill, and I'm tentatively planning on including Never Say Never Again (the tepid return of Connery in an unofficial film) and The Living Daylights (the first Timothy Dalton, in a script only mildly changed for him). I'm pretty definite that we'll miss License to Kill, the bloody and depressing second Dalton film, but I'm unsure whether to queue up any of the Pierce Brosnan movies. Any opinions on their suitability for two boys who will have seen all of the Connery and Moore films by then?

Saturday Is Bond Day #10: The Spy Who Loved Me

For me, The Spy Who Loved Me was always "the one with the underwater car." But my sons were looking forward to it since they knew Jaws was in it. (Though they didn't get the visual pun at the end, when the Richard Kiel villain Jaws was dropped into a tank with a great white shark. Ah, youth!) In the end, we all liked it -- even The Wife, who joined us for a special Friday evening installment of "Saturday Is Bond Day." (I'm hoping to make the change permanent; there's so much else to do on a Saturday afternoon, and I want to see more movies as a whole family.)

Spy Who Loved Me is a big flashy Roger Moore James Bond movie, complete with a villain with plans to destroy the world -- Curt Jurgens as fish-lover Karl Stromberg -- and a tough Bond Girl who's plenty capable in her own right in Barbara Bach as Russian agent XXX, aka Anya. (The next movie, Moonraker, tries to push all of the same buttons, but is more ham-fisted in doing so.) Bond chases Stromberg around the world, trying to figure out his plot and avoid being killed by him (or his hired killer, Jaws) and bumping into Anya repeatedly along the way. The Maguffin this time is very similar to several earlier installments: Stromberg has captured two nuclear submarines in a way amazingly similar to the methods used by SPECTRE to grab spaceships in You Only Life Twice. But Bond movies have never been afraid to re-use a good gimmick.

I still like The Man With the Golden Gun better as a movie -- it's got Christopher Lee, and Herve Villechaize, and one of the least typical villain's lairs -- but I'll concede that The Spy Who Loved Me is the quintessential Moore Bond film; it encapsulates all of the things the series did well in his era, and shows all of the flaws of the Moore years as well. (For the former: style, energy, set-piece action scenes and the honest feeling of being larger than life. For the latter: cartooniness, plots that turn into a mere sucession of locations thinly tied together, and an emphasis on style over substance. Oh, and a large dose of '70s sexism.) If you only watch one Moore Bond movie, it should probably be this one.

Saturday Is Bond Day #9: The Man With the Golden Gun

I remembered The Man With the Golden Gun fondly, and I wasn't disappointed when I saw it again. (Though I'd forgotten just about everything about it except for Christopher Lee, his desk set-cum-pistol, and the unlikely funhouse atmosphere of his island lair.)

This is Roger Moore's second Bond movie, and one of his best. He'd seemed a bit effete and weak in Live and Let Die -- particularly when contrasted with the variety of Southern/Caribbean stereotypes that he came up against -- but he's more physical, even cruel in this movie. (He twists one young woman's arm to get her to talk to him -- not admirable behavior, but just what to expect from a cold licensed-to-kill operative like Bond.) Moore has more fight scenes in this movie as well, which helps to establish his Bond as physically accomplished as well as debonair.

Lee, of course, is Scaramanga, the million-dollars-a-death international hit man, and the plot is kicked off by the arrival on M's desk of one of Scaramanga's bullets, carved with "007." This is taken to mean that Scaramanga -- whose identity and likeness are unknown, though oddly the entire world knows he has a third nipple -- has taken on a job to kill Bond. So Bond goes after Scaramanga, tracking him through the man who cast the bullet and then, eventually, Scaramanga's young girlfriend Andrea Anders (Maud Adams).

Adams is the False Bond Girl in this movie; there hadn't been many of them in the last couple of films, but they've been around since Dr. No (when Ursula Andress, as the True Bond Girl, only shows up in the last half-hour once Bond reaches the island of the secret lair). The True Bond Girl this time out is another British agent, Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland), who is not notably efficient or useful at her job. (She's not even as good at what she does as the similar character of Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace, who meets a grimmer fate to prove to the audience once again that the Daniel Craig Bond is dark and tormented and that Bond movies are now not allowed to have any fun in them at all. The more of the earlier Bonds I re-watch, the lower the entertainment value of Quantum drops.)

Anyway, you know how it must end: Bond confronts Scaramanga on his isolated island home, with Scaramanga's manservant Nick Nack (Herve Villechaize) kibitzing. Bond wins, as he has to, but he does it well, and the ending of Man With the Golden Gun is more suspense and less action sequence than most Bond movies. Moore's tenure as Bond ended weakly a decade later, but his mid-70s movies were perfect examples of their type.

Saturday Is Bond Day #8: Live and Let Die

This week, the hope was to move the standard movie time to Friday evening -- since it's now generally nice and warm and sunny on Saturday afternoons, so spending them indoors in a darkened room isn't the best idea -- but Thing 2's baseball game put the kibosh on that. And then we spent all day Saturday in NYC, hitting the Central Park Zoo (which the boys thought was fun, but were slightly disappointed in the way it differed from Madagascar), wandering through the park, and eventually having a late lunch at Patsy's (hat tip to Colleen Lindsay for introducing me to Patsy's through their Village outpost, so I was able to promise two food-shy and hungry boys that they'd really like the pizza...and they did).

So Bond Day shifted to Sunday -- Sunday evening, in fact. And The Wife made a rare guest appearance as well, sitting in and telling Thing 1 every few minutes not to repeat just about every single line of dialogue from that stereotyped redneck sheriff.

When you talk about Live and Let Die, you'll inevitably talk about stereotypes -- not just that very broad good ol' boy, but the voodoo-tinged black villains. (They are genuinely threatening, not played for laughs, so they stay awfully '70s and blaxploitation-influenced, but don't fatally harm the movie.) Yaphet Kotto has a dual role (for about the first half) as the two main villians: the Harlem drug lord "Mr. Big," and Kananga, minister of something-or-other for a fictional Caribbean island. He has several major henchmen, at least two of which -- Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi and Julius Harris as Tee Hee -- have real menace. But there are so many named henchmen, so many would-be Oddjobs, that the film can palm one to hold in reserve -- if the viewer hasn't been paying close attention.

Live and Let Die was a retrenchment film -- it's the first movie with Roger Moore as Bond, and at the time, there must have been a question about whether he'd continue or pull a Lazenby and disappear after one movie. And Diamonds Are Forever was studiedly over-the-top (in a slightly lower-budget-looking way than the best of the Connery Bonds) in a way that Live and Let Die extends but deals with more naturally -- it fits the Moore Bond much better than Connery's.

And so there's a series of set-pieces that feels like a Bond "Greatest Hits" package -- fight in a train sleeping car from From Russia With Love, a speedboat race/fight also from Russia, sharks from Thunderball, Quarrel (Junior) from Dr. No, and so on. On the other side, since the most successful Bond movie -- Goldfinger -- was set largely in the US, both this and Diamonds were set primarily in the States, and this time in very unlikely bits of it for Bond -- rural Louisiana and Harlem.

I'm generally a Connery partisan, but, watching these movies in order, I have to admit that Moore here looks better than Connery did in Diamonds. He's not the same Bond -- he doesn't have the physicality that Connery did, for the biggest and most damaging difference -- but he wants to be Bond in a way that Connery didn't in his last movie, and he's given material that he can work with. (Including Jane Seymour as the obligatory girl, Solitaire.)

Live and Let Die has, hands down, the best title song -- though it does say something about the Bond series that the most rocking song they managed was from Paul McCartney -- a plot that generally makes sense, a villain who's nasty enough without wringing his hands, and an excellent Bond girl. It's not the best in the series -- it's not even one of the top two Moore Bonds -- but it steadied the ship when that was needed and is a nice thick slice of early-70s action cinema.

Saturday Is Bond Day #7: Diamonds Are Forever

Diamonds Are Forever is where the Bond Movies tip over into self-parody; fittingly, this is the first movie to be made in the '70s. For all of the flaws of On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- and it certainly was flawed -- it was at least in the vein of the earlier movies, with a tough and steely James Bond. Diamonds is a premature Roger Moore Bond; Connery returns here four years after his last outing as Bond looking at least a decade older and slower. The tough, toned young Connery of the first five movies -- four of which were filmed within four years -- has softened, and there's a slowness in his step and a hint of gray in his hair. If the movie took note of that, or acted as if the last movie happened (other than Bond's monomania against Blofeld), that would be one thing. But it doesn't; it pretends that this is what Bond always was like.

There are those who prefer the half-seen Blofeld of Thunderball and From Russia With Love. There are those who admire Telly Savalas's hard-edged portrayal from Secret Service (though I found Savalas far too American, and far too different from the previous actors). And there are the wise, who know -- with me -- that Donald Pleasance as the facially-scarred Blofeld from You Only Live Twice is the epitome of the character. But I very much doubt if there's anyone now -- even if there might have been a very few in the early '70s -- who would give preference to Charles Gray as the multiple Blofelds of Diamonds. (For one thing, it's impossible to see Gray now and not see him spinning a globe and taking us on a strange journey.) Gray's Mao jackets -- though less embarrassing than some of the '70s wear sported by other members of the cast, and undeniably super-villain-esque -- are also not particularly intimidating.

The plot is silly and makes little sense; even Bond objects to his being dragged into a routine diamond smuggling case. And then the movie bogs down in Las Vegas for most of its length, including an inexplicable moon-buggy chase in the desert. The major henchmen -- Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd -- are creepy in a bad way, and never seem to be a serious threat to Bond. (And the killer bimbos, Bambi and Thumper, are just hang-your-head embarrassing.)

It's a '70s Bond movie, and the template for the ones to come. Moore does this kind of Bond better than Connery does, and gets better set-ups to act against. But this was definitely the harbinger of things to come, sadly.

Saturday is Bond Day #6: On Her Majesty's Secret Service

This was the hardest yet of the Bond movies to find; I ended up getting a VHS tape from a library after Netflix, Blockbuster, and several other libraries failed to get me a DVD on time. And that makes sense; On Her Majesty's Secret Service is easily the most obscure of the Bond movies and features George Lazenby's one-off appearance as Bond.

I also found it the longest and dullest of the movies so far; this may in part have been because there were two squirming boys on the couch opposite...but those squirming boys were also reacting to the movie, and hadn't squirmed like that for any of the previous films.

Lazenby isn't bad as Bond, but he's much more stolid and uninspiring than Connery was, and doesn't seem as lethal or focused as Connery could be. He's not quite carved out of a block of wood, but he might as well have been.

Telly Savalas picks up the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and I didn't think he did it well at all. Savalas is essentially American, which doesn't suit Blofeld. He's also much too straightforward and hot-headed; Blofeld is a conniver and a schemer, always in the background and always two steps ahead. (Charles Grey, in the otherwise much worse Diamonds Are Forever, gets that part of Blofeld right.) Blofeld, to mention just one thing, would never ski down a mountain after Bond -- that's what minions are for.

Secret Service has two essentially separate plots, which touch each other only in occasional and unlikely ways: Bond falls in love with Countess/mob daughter Tracy (Diana Rigg, the best thing about the movie), and Bond pursues Blofeld, who has a silly plot to conquer the world through hypnotized gorgeous young women in an Alpine allergy-research facility. And they both take too long, and are unconvincing. Secret Service does end well, I must admit -- the last five to ten minutes are the best thing about the movie.

I suspect some Bond fans like Secret Service because it was the last of the serious Bond movies for a good twenty years, and because it's a plausible counter-intuitive choice as "best in the series." But it's really not all that good -- if it had Connery and Pleasance, a tighter hand on the screenplay and about twenty minutes cut out of it, it could have easily been the strongest Bond movie, since the material was there. But the Secret Service that was made squandered its potential, and the movie that actually exists is minor and bland in a dozen ways.

Saturday Is Bond Day #5: You Only Live Twice

I'm a week late writing about You Only Live Twice -- the boys and I watched the next movie this very afternoon -- so I'll be brief, and make this post mostly for the sake of symmetry.

This is the one where Bond's death is faked before the opening credits, where we finally see the face of Ernst Stavros Blofeld (in a scarred Donald Pleasance), and where we learn that even ninjas are no match for 007. It also continues the SPECTRE plot, which has been bubbling along since the first movie, Doctor No -- though its focused down to a Bond vs. Blofeld showdown at this point.

So: Bond is officially dead, and so Bond goes to Japan to find out what happened to an American space capsule (which was captured within a mysterious spaceship, which then disappeared somewhere in the Japan Sea). Of course it's SPECTRE and Blofeld, fomenting a US-Soviet war in order to pick up the pieces afterward, and of course Bond leads a team of ninjas to attack the SPECTRE base and foil the nefarious plot -- but he has to get involved with a couple of girls first!

You Only Live Twice has excellent action sequences, and one of the quintessential Bond villains in Pleasance's Blofeld -- it's just a shame that Pleasance and Connery didn't stick around for the next movie, since their replacements were much less exciting.

Movie Log: Quantum of Solace

If I were really, really anal-retentive, I'd have saved this movie up to be "Saturday Is James Bond Day #22," but I'm not -- and, besides, I think my kids are only going to see the movies up to the end of Roger Moore this time around.

So The Wife and I saw Quantum of Solace by ourselves -- though I have to say that both boys noticed we had the movie and showed interest in seeing it. (If they had seen it, though, I doubt they'd have wanted to see a Bond movie ever again -- this one is adult in the least interesting ways and manages to make Bond dull.)

I chose this particular product shot for two reasons: one, because Daniel Craig's head is so poorly composited onto that generic body, and, two, because The Wife noted specifically during the movie that Bond never uses automatic weapons. (And she surely wasn't the only one to notice that.) Photoshop can be so dangerous in the wrong hands, can't it?

Quantum of Solace looks like a giant pile of wasted opportunities to me, from beginning to end. After rebooting the series with Casino Royale -- which was a little self-indulgent with the parkour, and made other changes to the novel for silly reasons, but was a solid thriller movie and basically accurate to Fleming -- Broccoli & Co. could easily have slid right into Live and Let Die and continued their string. Instead, they picked one of the last few remaining unused Fleming titles (left unused for a reason, along with unsuitable titles like "Property of a Lady" and "Risico"), grabbed an off-the-shelf supervillain plot on special at Kmart, threw in an uninspiring villain, and let it all sit until tepid.

Bond spends the entire movie sulking over the girl who died at the end of the last movie, retroactively sullying Casino Royale by reminding us that it ended the wrong way but still making us wish we were still watching that movie instead of this one. There's also an equally sullen Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko), whom he doesn't even bother to try to sleep with. I'm pretty sure that Craig can act if allowed to, but the entirety of his direction in Quantum seems to have been "Scowl. OK, scowl harder. Furrow your brow....now, scowl again."

The effects sequences are well-staged, and things blow up nicely; it's not a boring movie. But it is an intensely dull one, which rises to self-parody once the audience realizes that the evil scheme of the fiendish Quantum organization is to corner the water market in Bolivia...by building secret dams half a mile from town and hoping no one notices. (The undertones are particularly unsubtle as well -- every time the pseudo-eco-friendly villains come back on, it's like having a repeated Rush Limbaugh elbow in the side -- yes, I get it, Cubby or whoever, you think global warming is bunk. Now go back to your villa to count some more money.)

There have been worse Bond movies than this -- there may even have been duller and more tedious ones, since I haven't seen any of the Dalton or Brosnan films -- but I'd hold Quantum of Solace up against anyone's turgid, pointless thriller.

Saturday Is Bond Day #4: Thunderball

"This is the best underwater fight ever!" yelled out one of my sons near the end of Thunderball -- and from that I take the lesson that they're still quite happy to watch early James Bond movies.

(Though we're taking a break next week, to get to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and then I'll be away for two weekends -- so the Bond streak will be broken until at least early April.)

Thunderball is the underwater one, set mostly in and around Nassau in the Bahamas -- making this the second time in four movies that the series is poking around the Caribbean. (I didn't notice that when I was a kid, and I suspect one of the reasons for the so-quick return trip may have been to have more excuses to have Connery walking around without a shirt.)

This movie also continues the overall SPECTRE plot, after the sidebar story of Goldfinger, and is filled with things that immediately became cliches, particularly the scene where a half-seen Blofeld (only called Number One in this movie; a hat tip to Thing 1 who remembered his name) strokes his white Persian cat, browbeats his numbered minions, and kills one of them via push-button.

The plot is fairly simple: SPECTRE stole two nuclear weapons by taking over a NATO fighter, and is threatening to blow up a US or UK city if not given a hundred million pounds. Bond and his fellow agents fan out quickly to search for clues, and our man James, of course, is the one who finds them -- with SPECTRE's Number Two, a middle-aged guy with an eyepatch named Emilio Largo. Bond is sure Largo has the weapons, but he has to both find them and prove it before he can call in the cavalry.

He does, of course, leading to the aforementioned big fight, where a whole lot of paratrooping SCUBA soldiers battle the marauding hordes of SPECTRE, who are trying to get one of the bombs to Miami.

This was the longest of the movies -- two hours and a few minutes -- which led Thing 2 to start asking how much more movie there was at about the one-hour mark. He stayed in the room, though -- and the big battle at the end, I think, made it all worth it. (And there wasn't as much "kissing" in this one as the last couple, which kept them quieter.)

I definitely expect the boys will like the Roger Moore movies better -- they're flashier, and move faster, as I recall -- but I'm still glad we started with Connery, as God and Ian Fleming decreed.

(Yes, I know Fleming didn't really want Connery. But it's still a good line.)

Saturday Is Bond Day #3: Goldfinger

The Wheeler boys continued on with their march through the cinematic oevure du Jacques de Liens with Goldfinger this past weekend. I thought the boys got a little antsy during the middle part, but then The Wife asked "did they sit through it?" and I had to admit they did. Eight- and ten-year-old boys don't sit through movies that they're not enjoying -- they just up and leave -- so I guess they did like it.

This is one of the big famous movies in the series, and the boys knew some of the plot points from that Mythbusters episode that got them interested in Bond in the first place. (Notably the girl covered in gold paint, and I think they knew about the souped-up Aston Martin as well.) I remembered it pretty well myself, though, again, I was surprised at how long it took before the main girl (Pussy Galore, snicker snicker) showed up -- possibly even later in the film than Ursula Andress in Dr. No. Luckily for Bond, he had a couple of disposable sisters -- I'm only slightly exaggerating, and remember this is still the early '60s -- to keep him warm earlier in the movie.

(Tangentally, the boys are still innocent enough -- or have good enough poker faces, which I doubt -- not to even crack a smile at "Pussy Galore." Thank Ghu for small favors.)

The movie itself is still solid, starting nicely in medias res and throwing Bond into conflict with the fiendish Auric Goldfinger (whom the filmmakers had the good sense not to try to tie in with the overall SPECTRE plotline, though that must have been a possibility). Again, the caper is pretty smart, though I wonder if it was possibly to so easily overfly Fort Knox even in 1964.

The "rape turns bad girls good" scene near the end is very uncomfortable these days -- it might not be quite rape, if you throw a lot of special pleading at it (I'd like to think Pussy Galore could have gotten away, if she wanted to), but it's so close as to make no difference. James, when there are as many willing women as there seem to be in your world, forcing yourself on an unwilling one is not just morally wrong, it's ungentlemanly.

All in all, the boys and I were happy, which means I expect we'll be back next week for Thunderball, if we can manage to get a copy of it. (No library nearby has it on DVD, for whatever reason.)

Saturday Is Bond Day #2: From Russia With Love

After missing last week, the boys and I caught up with James Bond Movie #2, From Russia With Love, this afternoon over lunch. (Yesterday was entirely taken up with preparing for and having the annual Cub Scout Blue & Gold Dinner.) And I found that I remembered very little of the movie -- the fact that there was a train in it was about all that was familiar. It is a good spy movie, but most of the boy-appeal action is at the very end. (Which led to some fidgeting, though they both insisted that they really liked it. I bet they'll be much happier next week, when we get to Goldfinger.)

The first two acts, to speak pretentiously, do have some action sequences, but they're all part of a detailed plot by the evil organization SPECTRE to maneuver the British and Russian secret service organizations to fight and damage each other, while SPECTRE cleans up along the way. So the plot brings Bond to Istanbul, where a gorgeous young Russian signals officer is going to defect -- but only to him, since she's fallen in love with his file photo. (As an example of how sophisticated big adventure movies used to be, this is immediately assumed by everyone to be a trap, and a particularly obvious one.) The big blonde killer from SPECTRE sneaks around killing people, and getting Russians and British to kill each other. And then, eventually, Bond gets the girl (and a Russian Lektor encoding machine, which is the real coup) and heads off on the Orient Express. From there, we get more talking -- which made my boys restless but is gripping to those of us who were following the plot, a great hand-to-hand fight on the train, a helicopter explosion, and a boat chase. In the end, Bond is victorious, heading back to England with the "girl" who expects him to stay with her. (The first of many.)

This is also the movie that introduced the cliche of the evil mastermind whose face is never seen, only his hands petting a longhaired white cat. (This is, of course, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, whose name I'm not certain is actually mentioned during the movie.) From reading various things online, I've learned that the SPECTRE bits are original to the movie; the book was a purely us-versus-them Cold War thriller -- and the SPECTRE plot does seem overlaid, involving scenes mostly with a different cast in different locations.

I'm watching the reactions of Thing 1 to the sex-plots of the Bond movies with interest, since he's nearly eleven and has been showing a marked interest in buxom blondes. (Thing 2 is only 8, and seems to care much less about the boy-girl stuff at this point -- but he's also less demonstrative, so it's harder to tell.) Thing 1 ostentatiously hides his eyes during kissing scenes -- so does Thing 2, usually, but doesn't make as big a deal of it -- but was also really happy to see the opening credits (projected onto a bikini-clad gyrating dancer), a belly-dancer in mid-movie, and other semi-clad women. I'm pretty sure he doesn't yet know why he's interested, but he's definitely starting to be interested. Kids grow up so quickly!

Saturday Is Bond Day, #1: Dr. No

My two sons -- whom I'm still calling Thing 1 and Thing 2 -- have been watching Mythbusters a lot, partially because they enjoy some science-y stuff, but mostly for the explosions. And Mythbusters had a James Bond special recently, which they've now watched several times...which led them, particularly the ten-year-old Thing 1, to decide that they wanted to see the Bond movies. We finally decided -- since Thing 1 and I are both that kind of person -- to begin at the beginning.

So this last Saturday (February 7th), we watched Dr. No. We're going to miss this next week, since I'll be flying back from the AUTM conference on Saturday morning, but the plan is to watch the Bond movies, in order, every week until we get tired (or they hit PG-13 and I call a halt to it).

I haven't seen these movies since I was a kid -- not much older than my boys, if at all -- so it's also something of an exercise in nostalgia. (And will be a good starting point if I do decide to read all of the Fleming books straight through this summer.)

And the first thing that surprised me about Dr. No was the abbreviation -- for some reason, it's filed in my head as Doctor No. A very tiny point, I'm sure, but it made it hard to look up the movie on Netflix at first.

Otherwise, it was pretty much the way I'd remembered the early Bond movies -- Connery's Bond is tough but not sadistic, the women have quirks and characteristics but don't quite become characters in their own right, and the plot was exactly what we all think of as the "Bond movie plot": Bond foils an evil genius with a plan to get rich and powerful by nefarious means.

I had forgotten that it all took place in the Caribbean, and how many black characters were in it. (The minor villains tend to come off the best; they can be tough and competent, while Bond's boat-driver gets to be superstitious and borderline cowardly.) And I'd forgotten how long it took for Ursula Andress to show up; this movie hits the half-way point, and she's still not jumped on. (I did remember the big difference between her first scene and the way that it plays out in the book, however -- that's a scene no teenage boy reading Dr. No will ever forget.)

It's not quite a Cold War artifact, as I was afraid, and my sons seemed perfectly happy to watch it. They liked the fighting -- didn't seem to notice, or care, the older fight-choreography style, all chops and throws, instead of the modern wire-fu -- and covered their eyes for the kissing scenes. And I was happy to watch it again; it may be nearly fifty years old, but it's a dependably entertaining adventure movie with some fine moments and the was-he-ever-so-young? Sean Connery at its core. This project is starting to look like a great idea.