Albert R Broccoli Presents Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 in...

[Thad]

So I picked up the complete* James Bond set on Blu-Ray. Not the fancy-pants deluxe edition; the one I got is so basic that I'd mistake it for bootlegs except bootleg discs usually have packaging that's a little more creative than "007" on a white label. Seriously, this packaging is plainer than my copy of Mallrats, which is just a Hollywood Video box.

Anyway, I'm probably going to watch all of these eventually, though I expect some of them will not be getting repeat viewings.

What I've watched so far:

Goldeneye: You know what this movie really pulls off is the perfect balance. It's less silly than most of the Moore era or, say, the next three Brosnan movies**, but it's still got ludicrous action setpieces like the tank scene that are enjoyable as hell but far too silly for the Craig era. It's got a cast full of ringers (I've never been so excited to see Joe Don Baker show up), most notably Judi Dench in her first appearance as M, and she makes for another example of the movie striking a balance between the old and the new, acknowledging Bond as "a sexist, misogynistic dinosaur" and calling him out as a relic of a bygone era without going so far as the Craig series and turning him into a full-on antihero. It does everything you could ask of Bond in the '90s. I expect I'll be watching this one again, though I probably won't spend as many hours with it as I did with the N64 game.

Live and Let Die: Holy shit this movie is super-racist.

* excluding Never Say Never Again

** I haven't actually seen Tomorrow Never Dies but I saw the last two in the theater

[Mazian]

** I haven't actually seen Tomorrow Never Dies but I saw the last two in the theater

TND is one of the two Bond films I like more than I can honestly justify. Jonathan Pryce is having so much fun being the villain, and Michelle Yeoh is easily the best sidekick of the Brosnan era and then some. The rest of it is, admittedly, pretty silly; too gadget-heavy and product-placement-y. I rank it squarely between Goldeneye and TWINE; curious to see what you'll think of it. (And especially curious about that second film which I'm not admitting to yet.)

[Mongrel]

James Bond can be a lot of fun, or it can be trash - or both.

I still enjoy the Connery ones most as the most distilled product of their era and the "spy-fi" genre in general (and yes they feature atrocious racism at times too - Connery as a Japanese fisherman in You Only Live Twice is just plain ludicrous, though IMO that film also has the sexiest Bond car and the best Bond Theme).

The Moore ones are fun if you don't take them even remotely seriously. Christopher Lee is easily one of the best Bond Bond villains in Man with the Golden Gun (I mean, it's Christopher Lee, come on), but the movie is a mixed bag otherwise (Sherrif Pepper makes a second appearance, argh). They're Bond slapstick, really, and the outcome of the Bond franchise trying to one-up a wave of competing spy-fi movies. It's often terrible, but sometimes it works though (Moonraker is easily way, WAY over the top, but is still great fun).

Now, On her majesty's Secret Service... that's the one Bond flick that actually manages to be a great film in it's own right.

The Timothy Dalton ones are an interesting experiment (returning Bond to his roots and trying to resurrect some sense of "realism"), but I think they end up pretty flat, albeit with some good scenes.

Brosnan is just kind of downhill from Goldeneye, really, but I don't have very strong opinions on the Brosnan films other than, yeah, Goldeneye is awesome, and pretty much the epitome of 90's Bond.

EDIT: A reminder that Christopher Lee was almost certainly the real-life model for Fleming's Bond!

[Thad]

The Moore ones are fun if you don't take them even remotely seriously. Christopher Lee is easily one of the best Bond Bond villains in Man with the Golden Gun (I mean, it's Christopher Lee, come on), but the movie is a mixed bag otherwise (Sherrif Pepper makes a second appearance, argh). They're Bond slapstick, really, and the outcome of the Bond franchise trying to one-up a wave of competing spy-fi movies. It's often terrible, but sometimes it works though (Moonraker is easily way, WAY over the top, but is still great fun).

Yeah, there's that bit where he seduces Solitaire by having her draw a Lovers card from a Tarot deck that turns out to be nothing but Lovers cards which, aside from all the supernatural weirdness and ick (she loses her power to predict the future after she loses her virginity) does raise the question of what the fuck he was doing with a Tarot deck made entirely of Lovers cards. And the answer is that he had it for the same reason Harpo's got all that shit in his trenchcoat.

I'm thinking I may go for another of the lesser Moore efforts next and then one of the good ones as a palate cleanser. I do not relish the idea that there are worse movies in the series than Live and Let Die.

Wife and I have been meaning to give Casino Royale and Skyfall a rewatch, too, and watch Spectre for the first time. I hear it's a lesser effort (which is a shame because "Christoph Waltz as Blofeld" is brilliant on paper) but judging by the No Time to Die trailer there's going to be some continuity creeping into the next film.

We had a Bond thread on the old boards. Some good thoughts there all around, I think, though most of the discussion is pre-Skyfall and all of it is pre-Spectre.

[Mongrel]

I guess the two things I can say that are different from that thread are.

1) My opinions Bond dogma have baaasically softened to the point of "Oh, who cares". (lol)

2) I did in fact end up seeing Casino Royale a few years back, and I remember liking it, but I honest to god couldn't tell you a damn thing about it right now. xD

[Mothra]

Die Another Day is insane but fun, one of the better ones in my opinion. The villain is good, the stunts are ridiculous, and the plot about the korean double-agent is just classic Bond camp.

[Thad]

2) I did in fact end up seeing Casino Royale a few years back, and I remember liking it, but I honest to god couldn't tell you a damn thing about it right now. xD

Casino Royale is great; one common thread I've seen across multiple "the Bond movies, ranked" lists is that most everybody seems to agree it's the best non-Connery one.

Skyfall's good too. Quantum of Solace was pretty middling and eminently skippable, and I don't hear much good about Spectre.

[Thad]

Christopher Lee is easily one of the best Bond Bond villains in Man with the Golden Gun (I mean, it's Christopher Lee, come on), but the movie is a mixed bag otherwise (Sherrif Pepper makes a second appearance, argh).

Yeah, that's about right. "What, they're doing another boat chase already? ...oh, they're hanging a lampshade on it by having the guy from the last boat chase show up." They dipped back into the "woman hiding in the closet" gag, too.

They're Bond slapstick, really

Yeah, and I suppose establishing a set of running gags even if they're not funny is an important part of slapstick.

I think on the whole I ended up enjoying it more than Live and Let Die; it was slightly less over-the-top, a little less egregiously racist (I mean, still pretty racist, and nobody involved seemed to know or care that Hong Kong and Japan are different places), and like you say, Scaramanga is one of the all-time great Bond villains, and I think that counts for a lot.

It's also got the landlady from Kung Fu Hustle in it.

[Thad]

I'd already planned to go back to the beginning with Dr. No as my next entry, and Connery's death clinched it.

It's...interesting. It's long and it's slow and the formula's not quite there yet. It's more racist than Man with the Golden Gun but less racist than Live and Let Die. The sexism is pretty remarkable even for a Bond film; Honey volunteers her rapey backstory within ten minutes of appearing onscreen, and there's a clear and casual threat of sexual violence when Dr. No tells the guards to take her away. Neither of those things contribute anything but shock value, there's really no reason for them to be there, and the most unsettling part is that they made it to the final cut and nobody along the way thought to suggest they could be cut. The references to sexual violence in themselves feel less disturbing than how casually and thoughtlessly they're tossed out.

There's not enough of Dr. No. The scenes he's in are good; his tete-a-tete with Bond over dinner is fantastic and a clear template for Bond villains to come. But it's largely too little, too late. This feels a lot like a monster movie, in that it kills a whole lot of time before you see the villain and while the last act is pretty good it goes by too quickly.

It's not a bad film but it seems pretty unremarkable viewing it 57 years later. While some of the basic elements of the formula are here, it's not a movie I'd watch and say "Oh yeah, this is going to spawn a franchise that's still going to be going sixty years from now" if I viewed it in isolation without knowledge of the future.

Of course, the reason we are still talking about the James Bond film franchise is that Connery is so damn striking and charming in the role. Why'd they make more movies after this one? Well, there are some good bits here and there; car chases, explosions, beautiful scenery, beautiful women, double-crosses, a scenery-chewing villain with a hook. But there's no doubt the real answer is Sean Connery. He's way better than the movie he's in.

[Thad]

From Russia with Love is a great entry that suffers from falling between Dr. No and Goldfinger. It's only the second film and it already feels formulaic -- but it doesn't feel like it's quite perfected the formula in the way that Goldfinger does. It's less interesting than Dr. No because it lacks its rough edges, and it's less entertaining than Goldfinger for a variety of reasons, including a less compelling supporting cast and a less compelling script.

But for all that, it's got a lot going for it. It does a whole lot of worldbuilding, fleshing out SPECTRE and introducing Blofeld with the iconic image of a man whose face you never see who strokes a white cat. And it slots the series firmly into the Cold War where it's most at home, foregrounding the conflict between the Soviets and the Free World in a way that even most of the other Cold War-era Bond films don't.

I'd even argue that the casual misogyny in this one raises some interesting questions about Bond (and Connery) as a bastard and an antihero that the series wouldn't fully explore until the Craig era. (There's nothing compelling about the racism, though; it has nothing interesting to say, it's just racism.)

It also feels like the movie that kicks off the series' regrettable trend towards bloat. They spend way too goddamn much time on that train.

[Thad]

Casino Royale holds up.

I'll link to my post in the Fossilized forums and add that man, I'd forgotten how much the movie beats you over the head with its Macbeth allusions. Not only does it remind you every 15 minutes or so that it's about how once you start killing, it gets easier; it's even got a scene where Vesper breaks down and babbles about how she can't wash the blood off her hands.

And I'd remembered the torture scene -- it's kinda hard to forget -- but I forgot that Le Chiffre prefaced it with a remark to the effect of "I've never understood complicated torture methods." It's a pretty direct statement of purpose about the new-old Gritty Realistic Bond -- you don't need to point a frickin' laser beam at a dude's junk to threaten him; you can whack somebody in the balls with pretty much any solid object and get your point across.

Now, that scene is in the book (and IIRC much more didactic in explaining the extremely obvious subtext of threatening Bond's manhood), so it's fascinating to me just how much it works as a commentary on the difference between this film and the previous ones -- pretty much any of them, but most specifically Goldfinger.

[Friday]

I really like Casino Royale at any point it is not at the poker table.

As someone who actually plays poker, the "movie" version of the rules and etiquette and shit bugs me, but that's not why I dislike all the poker scenes.

I dislike them because they're entirely predictable. All the twists, all the hands, everything. It's all 100% what you would expect. Anyone with half a brain could flawlessly foresee every scene at that table.

But yeah everything up to that middle third of the movie rules, and everything after does too. Even the scenes where Bond randomly gets into fights and poisoned in between the actual table scenes rule.

I'd say it's my second favorite Bond film. Third is Goldeneye, which is just a ton of fun. I'll comment on my favorite when you get to it.

[Thad]

I dislike them because they're entirely predictable. All the twists, all the hands, everything. It's all 100% what you would expect. Anyone with half a brain could flawlessly foresee every scene at that table.

I don't remember the book well enough to remember how much of that formula was lifted from it. (They play baccarat in the book; the movie presumably changed it to Texas holdem because of its popularity on TV. But, as you say, the rules of the game aren't really relevant to how the story plays out; they could be playing billiards or Mario 99 or whatever and the formula of "bad guy bluffs to trick the good guy" would still fit.) I'd say it's slightly more excusable if that particular formula was lifted from a book written in 1953.

[Friday]

Fair point. I remember watching Casablanca with a friend (his first time, my fifth or so) who kept commenting how "cliche" all the dialog was, despite my repeated attempts to inform him that no, it was Casablanca that everyone was copying and quoting later on so shut up.

[Büge]

they could be playing billiards or Mario 99 or whatever

[Mongrel]

They play baccarat in the book; the movie presumably changed it to Texas holdem because of its popularity on TV.

I thought it was because they didn't want to explain Bond's portable baccarat detector to casual audiences.

[Thad]

I think Thunderball has the worst first act of any Bond film I've ever seen. The assassin dressed as a grieving widow, the jetpack, the entire fucking health resort sequence...if Goldfinger is the movie that perfected the formula, Thunderball is the one that started it on the road to self-parody.

Fortunately, it picks up later on. It doesn't have the most compelling villain (except for the two scenes where Blofeld's onscreen -- well, half onscreen), or the most compelling supporting cast in general really, but it moves at a good clip and it's technically impressive. The climax drags a bit and there definitely comes a point where they're just showing off, but on the other hand they've fucking earned it; I don't think I've seen anything like that underwater fight scene. (At least, not without CG.)

It's got very high highs, very low lows, and very middling middles. It averages out to fine.

[Thad]

Quantum of Solace isn't as bad as its reputation.

It's not great, either. It's a middling, forgettable Bond movie. The most notable thing about it is that it's unusually continuity-heavy; it's not just the next entry in the franchise after Casino Royale, it's a movie about what happens next after Casino Royale. Which makes it weirdly perverse how little anything that happens in this one seems like it matters. It tries its hand at serialized storytelling and winds up being the least essential Craig-era entry to date. (I haven't seen SPECTRE, and by all accounts it isn't very good, but it's already a more important installment than QoS just by virtue of its title; bringing back SPECTRE and Blofeld after a 44-year absence is a big deal even if nobody liked the movie.) Judging by the trailer, No Time to Die is leaning pretty heavily into continuity too; hopefully it fares better than QoS did.

At any rate, eh, it's fine. Has its moments. Good cast, some good action setpieces. Suffers by comparison to Casino Royale and Skyfall, but looks pretty good compared to, say, the last couple Brosnan entries.

[Thad]

You Only Live Twice feels less than the sum of its parts. It's got a lot going for it -- it never drags, it's less rapey than its predecessors, and it's got some all-time great pieces like the volcano base and Donald Pleasance as Blofeld -- but by this point the franchise has settled into its formula and by God this film does not deviate from it.

It's well-made but it all feels a little perfunctory. Including the Blofeld reveal, which feels more like a "welp, we've strung them along for long enough, we should probably do something about that" kind of development than something dictated by the story.

It's fine. It's not bad. But damned if I can remember much that happened before the last half-hour.

[Mongrel]

It does have best-ever Bond car and best-ever Bond theme going for it. I will die on that hill.

Also maybe the most comically egregious racism in the entire Bond franchise (and that would be saying something, if so) with the sequence where Bond goes undercover living as a Japanese fisherman.