Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

Isn't The Spy Who Loved Me widely considered to be the best of the Roger Moore era? I see that it has both the best RT score (%79) and IMDb score (7.1) of the seven Moore films.

I haven't seen it in years, yet surprisingly a lot still stands out. The Lotus submarine (always a favorite as a kid), Jaws (one of the most iconic henchmen from the series), great opening theme, the ski jump in (I believe) the pre-credits Stromberg's underwater lair and Barbara Bach, a unique beauty whose acting was... she was a unique beauty.

Moonraker is probably the most notorious film of the Moore era. I believe *checks* yep, For Your Eyes Only was supposed to follow The Spy Who Loved Me, but a little film called Star Wars came out and producers decided (again) to follow a trend rather than set one.

Revisiting Moonraker a few years ago I was surprised how not completely awful it is; particularly the space stuff. Silly, sure, but goofy fun. I also quite like Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax. I used to confuse he and Maximillian Schell's Hans Reinhardt from another sci-fi themed film from '79, Disney's The Black Hole. Awful, awful theme, though. Not even Shirley Bassey can save it.

 

As Al Murray pointed out, Moonraker is like a James Bond film designed by a seven year old boy. And it's great. Michael Lonsdale is way better than Ackland was. The gleeful preposterousness of Drax's whole operation, before it even reaches space, and the return of Jaws makes up for the general naivete.

Moonraker is my second favourite Bassey sung theme after Diamonds Are Forever. Ordinarily, her style makes my sick in my bones. I flinch every time she launches into Goldfinger. Clearly talented but hysterically bogus, IMO.

Spy Who Loved Me is cool too.

 

Moonraker is the pits.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half, you an interesting definition of good. I thought that sounded terrible.

 

My thoughts about it was this:

 

Sexist? But they let the actress in a sexy outfit who gets chased through the forest by rottweilers wear sneakers instead of high heels.

 

Dr Goodhead is one of my favorite Bond girls, smart, skilled, and confident. Too bad they didn't give her more to do.

 

Currently watching Raise the Titanic on one of the satellite channels. I love the scene (and the music) when the ship comes up.

 

A Fish Called Wanda (1988) - Kevin Kline is still quite funny in this.

 

Yeah - that's a pretty funny film.

 

Daddy's Home

Better than I expected it to be. Probably watching the second one at some point over the next few days, since mum really wants to see it for some reason.

 

For Your Eyes Only - I'm really starting to understand why people resent Moore's silliness, it's really starting to wear thin. Let's try to keep this one short, because it's just more of the same nonsense. Moore has pretty much gone full on nice guy here, the ending is just full of it, including capturing a mook and patching up his wound. And there's the anti-revenge moral, of course.

******* Blofeld is back and you know what just **** that guy. Yeah, that's how I feel about that.

The title sequence is solid but not spectacular. The lyrics are nonsense (probably the most incoherent in the series up to this point), but the piano and Easton's vocals make it listenable. The water effects were neat, but they could have done a bit more with it.

Bill Conti of Rocky fame ran the score...and yeah it's pretty Bill Conti. Every chase scene is accompanied by what is basically montage music...which was kinda amusing in a weird way. He abuses the hell out of FYEO. It's just a weird soundtrack, sounding more like an early 80s action television series (like the A-Team or some ****) than a Bond film.

Bond gets another sweet Lotus, Charles Dance has a small role, and Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo to congratulate Bond at the end. Jesus, I had forgotten that last part.

Remember the hockey scene? Yeah. Sad.

The climb up the cliff face near the end is excruciatingly dull and brings the movie to a halt with only some twenty minutes to go.

Another tough call. I guess it's slightly better than Moonraker because it's not as ******* stupid? Whatever, it makes no difference, these Moore movies are becoming interchangeable.

Another silly Moore Bond movie with some fun chase scenes accompanied by a bizarrely amusing soundtrack and overuse of a solid title theme, but ultimately tiresome.

Rankings

On Her Majesty's Secret Service
FRWL
Goldfinger
Dr. No
TMWTGG
The Spy Who Loved Me
Live and Let Die
For Your Eyes Only
Moonraker
Thunderball
You Only Live Twice
Diamonds Are Forever

 

I actually fell asleep during For Your Eyes Only in the cinema , that bit underwater in the middle , underwater scenes are hard to keep the energy up .
there are a few good bits , I rather like the woman who pretends to be a sophisticated French woman but turns out to be a lass from Manchester (Pierce Brosnan's wife I believe )

 

Yeah, every time they go underwater, in any Bond movie, I just want to check out.

 

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage Wow. That was dumb. I mean really really dumb. I liked Nina Dobrev a lot, though. Has she made anything good?

 

Moonraker was the first Bond film I had the misfortune to see. It put me off the series for years. I figured it was representative of the series as a whole. It's absolutely dreadful. It just screws everything up. The space battle is dreadful, the Venice sequence is cringe inducing (isn't this the one where a pigeon does a double take?). I mean, there's cartoonish and then there's cartoonish. And, last but not least, let's be sure and take the imposing and genuinely menacing villain from the last movie and give him a romantic subplot(?!). Moonraker is the Bond series at nearly its worst.

I'm surprised to see such a negative response from you for For Your Eyes Only. My memories of it is that it's probably second best of the Moore films. It's easily the most serious of them, I'd say. The feud between the Greek businessmen is interesting to me and it's of note, in my opinion, that this is one of, I think, only two Bond films where Bond doesn't actually kill the main villain. I think this one just has a more complex story, the only pass the Moore films really made at an actual spy story. The climax features Bond being saved from the main villain when someone else kills him and then sacrificing the Macguffin in order to keep it from being snatched right out from under him. That's interesting to me. I agree that Moore isn't particularly good, but this movie might have really worked with Dalton as Bond. Bond kicking the car down the cliff is as cold as Bond got in the Moore years. Anyway, I haven't seen it in a while and that Thatcher bit at the end is one of the worst moments in the entire franchise, but still I'm quite a bit more positive on this one than you are. Maybe I should see it again.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service
From Russia With Love
Goldfinger
The Spy Who Loved Me
Dr. No
For Your Eyes Only
The Man With the Golden Gun
You Only Live Twice
Diamonds Are Forever
Live & Let Die
Moonraker
Thunderball

As to the themes, they're both pretty bad. The Moonraker is yet another example of the songwriters just going for complete incomprehensibility in order to shove the title in. It's particularly painful just how stupid these lyrics are when they follow right on the heels of Nobody Does It Better. It's . . . kind of pretty in an easy listening kind of way. That's the extent of it.

For Your Eyes Only starts a really dire trend. It's the first of the Bond themes, in my opinion, to really break from any stylistic similarity to the Bond theme template in order to have a very "contemporary" feel. It's low-key, which is fine, but it's just offensively cheesy, absolutely inert and holds up terribly. It's unutterably dull.

James Bond Theme (from Dr. No)
Diamonds Are Forever
Nobody Does It Better (from The Spy Who Loved Me)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
You Only Live Twice
Live & Let Die
Opening Titles: James Bond is Back/From Russia With Love/James Bond Theme
Goldfinger
The Man With the Golden Gun
For Your Eyes Only
Moonraker
Thunderball
Kingston Calypso (from Dr. No)

 

Sorry, double post. I forgot I wanted to post this review tonight and anyway, the Bond talk and this review together would be way too long for one post.




Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – Denis Villeneuve

I know what’s real.

I was worried about this movie. Part of it is that I hold the original Blade Runner (though I suppose actually the original is that dreadful one with the voice-over and the happy ending, so it’s actually the Director’s Cut) up as a near-perfect movie. It’s just astonishingly great. So I couldn’t really see how this movie could hope to even stand up as a worthy sequel. And I didn’t want to see Denis Villeneuve, a brilliant director, wreck on a horrible franchise movie. Well, I needn’t have worried. Blade Runner 2049 isn’t, upon immediate viewing, the absolute masterwork that the first film is, but it is a more than worthy sequel, a great, gorgeous movie in its own right and ultimately, it goes right up there on the shelf next to the original without any embarrassment.

The technical virtuosity is breathtaking. The imagery is both seamlessly of a piece with the first movie and yet also a clever and beautiful expansion of those visuals. Hans Zimmer is having a kind of a renaissance this year. He already turned in his best score in years (maybe a decade) with Dunkirk, but he’s already topped that one with this one, a score that is both beautifully intimate and grimly epic. It’s striking and brilliant.

The performances are also really brilliant. Ryan Gosling is as good as you’d expect, but the supporting cast really shines. Sylvia Hoeks gives a star-making performance as the vicious replicant Luv, as good a villain as I’ve seen in the theater this year. Ana de Armas is a revelation as Gosling’s virtual girlfriend; she takes an initially one-note role and as the film deepens her character over the film, she just hits everything perfectly, embodying the slowly awakening consciousness of Joi beautifully. Harrison Ford is fantastic; his franchise based renaissance has reached exhilarating levels – it’s almost enough to make me hopeful about another Indiana Jones movie. His scene with Jared Leto is some of the best acting he’s done in . . . God, more than a decade probably. Jared Leto, an actor I almost always dislike, is really perfect as well. Robin Wright deserves a ton of praise for her turn as the hard-bitten Lt. Joshi. And a brief note that Dave Bautista gives his most subtle performance yet in a quiet & emotional cameo. We already knew he has charisma and comic timing; now we know he can really communicate emotion powerfully as well. And a word for Carla Juri; again, it’s a tiny role, but she manages to really land emotionally in just a couple of scenes.

But it’s more than just the beautiful execution; this movie really is about something. It’s a compelling exploration, as the first film was, of the difference between the real and the fake and how the distance between those two things grows and shrinks in ways that are sometimes imperceptible and sometimes painfully obvious. The movie once again wants you to wonder if these “artificial” creations have souls or consciousness or emotions; and, once again, it wants you to wonder if they might not have more of those things than their “real” counterparts. The film makes you fear for artificial life only for you realize that all it’s done is take on the vulnerability of its real counterpoint. The film is really compelling in its exploration of these ideas and issues. The moment when K confronts a version of Joi that he hasn’t encountered before is powerful and terrifying; more than any other moment in the film, it hits straight to the heart of the human condition: maybe the most human thing “artificial” life does in this movie is change. But for all the doubts and the ways in which artificial becomes real and real becomes artificial in our perceptions, there are still moments of startling clarity. When Ford drops the best line in the movie and then calmly follows it up with, “I know what’s real,” you know that he does; but when K says the same thing earlier in the film, he’s both right and also wrong – the thing he’s talking about is real, but it’s the meaning of that reality that K fundamentally misunderstands.

Anyway, I’ve gone on at length and yet I still feel that I’ve left a lot unsaid. This film isn’t perfect, at least not on first viewing; a lengthy sequence involving holographic musical acts is both poorly conceived and executed. But I expect it to grow in my estimation on revisits and it’s already clearly a genuinely great film. When I watch the first Blade Runner, I will sometimes pretend this movie doesn’t exist; the ending to Blade Runner is so perfect that it deserves to stand as the ending to the story of Deckard & Rachel. But you know what? Sometimes when I watch the first Blade Runner . . . I will watch it with the understanding that this movie exists. I will let this movie continue the story of the first Blade Runner. I can’t think of higher praise than that. 4 stars.

tl;dr – beautiful visuals, astounding direction, fantastic performances, a thought-provoking & challenging script; not quite up to the original, but it’s a great film by any measure. 4 stars.

 

The Dirty Dozen (1967) Because who doesn’t dig Bronson, Brown and Marvin kicking nazi butt? Still great 50 years on.

 

Conti's body of work speaks for itself, but he was an odd choice for a Bond film and his disco-laden score often has me wanting to do a few lines and engage in unprotected promiscuity in the back of a '78 Mercury Cougar more than it does save the world. That said, Runaway is a great track.

I'm not sure she's ever made anything good, but she was good here in something very, very bad. Easily the best thing about the movie. Diesel doing the extreme sports shtick at 50, looking like 10 lbs. of mashed potatoes in a 5 lb. Ziplock bag in his ill fitting t-shirts, just doesn't fly anymore.

Yeah, you definitely saw that in the mid 80s w/the back to back New Wave numbers from Duran Duran and Ah-Ha. The latter clearly an attempt to have lightening strike twice. That said, I quite like both of those songs on their own and as Bond themes, and I like the way John Barry uses the arrangement in the AVTAK score.

 

@Jule Skywalker, I second the Duran Duran/Ah-a Bond love. When I was a teenager, I used to play Golden-eye a lot. I also had the 30Th Anniversary Best of Bond album. I always used to turn off the in game music track and had the Bond themes playing in the background.

 

I think I came off more negative than I felt. Most of the negativity was because I was just fed up with Moore's style. I think I was heavily fatigued, taking the movies too closely together. I needed a break, so maybe FYEO got a bit of a raw deal because of my fatigue. Hopefully I'm feeling refreshed before the next one.

I didn't find it serious at all, though. Any pretense of telling a story was overshadowed by near constant Moore-isms, the silly and overlong (but sometimes fun) chase scenes, the hockey scene, the jailbait skater, etc. I was going to mention the plot with Julian Glover, but I felt it got swallowed up.

If I had to pinpoint a highlight of the film, it's the chase with the old Citroen early on, specifically the point where Carole Bouquet actually let's out a laugh. It reminded me of Tracy laughing during the ice race scene in OHMSS, it was just so ridiculous she couldn't help but laugh. The chase is less bad guys trying to get Bond than a bunch of high school kids racing and goofing off with each other.

I'm guessing it's evident by now, but I like contemporary, offensively cheesy, inert music that holds up terribly. I would never claim to have "good taste" in music. I mean, I've been listening to Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now the last few days with a big grin on my face. I love 80s pop music, it cracks me up. Then again, I've always found the Bond title themes pretty silly stuff.

I've noticed you have all the silly songs at the bottom. Goldfinger, TMWTGG, Thunderball, etc.

I really dig that people can be fans of the Bond series and have tastes so far apart. It just really tickles me to imagine people seriously arguing over Moonraker.

 

yeah , that's a good description .

The thing is I reckon if the sillier bits were edited out ( pigeon / drunk double takes , Jaws and gf bits ) this is actually a pretty entertaining film , and I think Derek Meddings effects are terrific ) .
FYEO does have a more down to earth plot , which they needed after Moonraker , and its quite good for a while , but its also rather sluggish somehow . And I don't know what they were thinking with Barbi Dahl (Barbi Dahl LOL!)
.

 

There was a laser gun in Goldeneye 64? I don’t recall that at all. How did you get that weapon?