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The James Bond Series

sandman

By sandman,
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Silent Runner

Silent Runner

Posted
Posted

Prepare yourself for the next one. It's fucking terrible.

The Man with the Golden Gun
Bond is led to believe that he is targeted by the world's most expensive assassin and must hunt him down to stop him.
This was the second Roger Moore 007 effort. I quite liked his first film but this one isn't very good. All the interesting and fun parts are outdone by an endless amount of sillyness.
There was a lot of good stuff here:
  • Saruman is excellent as the urbane and suave hitman
  • There's some good locations and sets, the British have a base set up in a partially sunken battleship that's particularly nice
  • The plot makes sense
  • Scaramangas base is cool, as is his henchman
  • Excellent car chase
  • The girls are pretty
Unfortunaly all the above are outweighed by some really bad choices from the maker:
  • The worst theme song in the series so far. Lulu wailing away like a dying walrus.
  • The return of the racist sherrif from the previous film. I suppose he's there to provide comic relief and maybe in the 1970's this one-note racism was funny but it was horrible to watch.
  • Flying cars
  • The karate twins.
  • The final battle with Scaramanga was terrible. It was hyped up as the best assasin in the world vs. the best secret agent. Instead we get two old boys bumbling about in a hall of mirrors before James shoots him in the back. Then we get James fannying about trying to get some piece of tech out of a machine while his sexy but dim sidekick presses buttons with her fine ass. AND then the coup de grace,a comedy fight that ends with Nick Nack getting stuffed into a suitcase. Terrible.
Bad stuff all round.
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SeanR

SeanR

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There's a new CGMF file right there.

"One of the greatest stunts in movie history, and they felt the need to add a comedy whistle to the shot."

"Swanee whistle:

The Man with the Golden Gun

Moonraker

Die Another Day"

"I hate whoever was responsible for putting the sliding whistle over the greatest stunt ever filmed in TMWTGG"

"They should bring back the slide whistle from The Man with the Golden Gun."

"The greatest stunt of all time ruined with a swanee whistle?"

"Because we can't see Roger Moore's face during the stunt, the whistle is the audio equivalent of his eyebrow raise"

"The whistle owns!!"

"I'm surprised they didn't cut the sliding whistle out of the DVD editions."

"and then they go and ruin the thing with that bloody sliding whistle."

"(accompanying one of the greatest stunts in film history with... a slide whistle?)"

that sort of thing?

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  • 1 month later...
Glasgowchivas

Glasgowchivas

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..won't happen, at least not until Craig is replaced, Nolan would want to start with a 'clean slate' so to speak.

He has a clean slate. Skyfall basically rebooted the reboot, ready to start a series with the same old/new faces. He's said before that Inception let him make his Bond movie but I wouldn't rule him out. Personally, I think he's an awful choice for director. Bond needs more passion, more style not to go even more clinical and sexless.

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K

K

Posted
Posted

I was imagining what a Nolan Bond film would be like - far too long, incomprehensible action sequences, deranged plot - and then remembered that we've already had that Bond film, and it was Quantum of Solace.

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Rudi von Starnberg

Rudi von Starnberg

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I was imagining what a Nolan Bond film would be like - far too long, incomprehensible action sequences, deranged plot - and then remembered that we've already had that Bond film, and it was Quantum of Solace.

Wasn't Quantum of Solace about 8 minutes long?

the rest is spot-on though.

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Harsin

Harsin

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Tarantino!

I think I've already said this in this thread, but if we ever discover a way to access parallel universes I'm heading straight to the one where Tarantino got the chance to make that black and white Casino Royale adpatation starring Pierce Brosnan that he wanted.

Then I'm off to watch Jodorowsky's Dune.

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K

K

Posted
Posted

Wasn't Quantum of Solace about 8 minutes long?the rest is spot-on though.

You're right! I had it in my head that it was the longest Bond film for some reason, and didn't bother to verify this as I needed three points to give my QoS = Dark Knight Rises comparison the veneer of credibility.

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  • 3 months later...
Silent Runner

Silent Runner

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Posted

The Spy Who Loved Me

I started watching the Bond films earlier this year when I realised that I hadn’t seen about 80% of them. I’ve been watching them in order but I haven’t watched one for a while, I found Golden Gun and Live And Let Die slightly hard work. So yesterday I got back on the horse with The Spy Who Loved Me, a Bond film that’s as the same age as I am.

The plot here borrows heavily from You Only Live Twice. A megalomaniac steals a couple of Nuclear submarines in this film opposed to spaceships in YOLT. He plans to destroy the surface of the Earth and live forever under the sea, Little Mermaid style. The UK and the USSR have to team up to stop him. Bond is partnered with Major Amasova, Russias top agent. She’s smoking hot, of course, but is also in mourning for her partner who was killed on a mission a few weeks earlier. Unknown to her, he was killed by Bond.

This was fantastic. Easily my favourite Roger Moore so far and probably somewhere in my top 5 overall. They tone down the jokiness and silliness of previous Moore efforts and let him act a bit, giving his Bond a bit of depth (submarine joke). The story is exciting but nothing new and despite a serious running time it never gets tiring.

The other cast and characters are wonderful. Barbara Bach as Major Amasova is a highlight. She’s Bonds equal in the field and is one step ahead of him for a lot of the film. Stromberg is a great (but slightly clichéd) baddie and has there ever been a better henchman than Jaws? A relentless, scary monster that can’t be killed – a proto Terminator.

The locations are beautiful. Great desert shots in Egypt, lush Italian country side and beeches. These locations are perfect to show off Q’s latest toy; the underwater car! The sequence when Bond and Amasova escape a helicopter by driving into the sea is rightly famous. And I really liked that the car had an important part in the plot by enabling them to explore Stromberg underwater lair. And what a lair it was. The volcano base will always be my favourite baddie hide-out but Strombergs Atlantis is glorious.

As if all that wasn’t enough there's also:

  • An amazing theme song
  • A brilliant pre-credit sequence that Alan Partridge loves so much
  • A seduction sequence on a train where Bond and Amasova get undressed while on opposite side of a door.
  • A ridiculous sequence when American, British and Soviet sailors fight side by side inside the tanker. I love that Stromberg kept this army of trained soldiers alive inside his base instead of killing them after they were captured.

I reckon this is the high-point for Roger Moores Bond but I am quite looking forward to watching the rest of his movies.

4/5

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Monkeyboy

Monkeyboy

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Posted

Spy Who Loved Me is excellent. I love how the traditional Bond soundtrack is infused with a disco beat. It's one of my favourite scores for an action movie, knowing when to use silence -- sometimes several times within one action scene -- to create more impact. The underwater sequence with the Lotus, and the bit leading up to it, is a perfect example of this.

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  • 2 months later...
Goose

Goose

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Posted

Fifty years! From Comingsoon.net

The long-running battle between Kevin McClory and his estate with MGM and Danjaq, who own the rights to James Bond and related characters, is finally over after fifty years with MGM able to acquire the rights to the 007 franchise that had been held by McClory, who helped come up with the story for Thunderball with creator Ian Fleming. In the process of doing so, McClory has claimed that he created many of the iconic characters from the world of James Bond, presumably Blofeld and SPECTRE, who would appear in successive movies following that.

The lawsuits started flying in 1961 when McClory sued Fleming and received partial copyright to Thunderball that allowed him to remake it with Sean Connery in 1983 under the title Never Say Never Again. Neither MGM nor EON Productions have ever included that movie in any of the many James Bond box sets, considering it to take place outside of canon. Sony tried buying the rights from McClory and were promptly sued by MGM and McClory and his estate continued to be a problem for MGM and Danjaq over the years.

What could this mean for the future of the James Bond franchise? Well, for one thing, Danjaq's production division EON Productions could now theoretically introduce a new Ernst Stavro Blofeld or reintroduce SPECTRE after having created the crime organization "Quantum" for the Daniel Craig reboot Casino Royale.

No details of the settlement or the amount paid have been released.

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