James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

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Lost Highway
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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#451 Post by Lost Highway » Mon Mar 19, 2018 2:52 am

Robespierre wrote:Are there any hardcore fans of the series on this forum? All you guys sound like you've seen the films maybe one time apiece, especially QoS which is a lot better than its reputation and a one time viewing would suggest. Lately I've even thought that it may be better than Spectre.
I‘m pretty hardcore having watched all of the films multiple times since I was a kid and giving even Quantum of Solace a second try to see whether as I liked it any better and I didn't. You’ll find dislike for the film is not uncommon among Bond movie fans. I have no idea how you can determine how many times people here have watched the movies.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#452 Post by John Cope » Mon Mar 19, 2018 2:57 am

Love QoS, especially as a companion piece to Casino Royale (an appropriately, even necessarily jagged and fragmented post-traumatic companion piece with a wonderfully ironic title). The scene toward the end in which Bond briefly flirts with murder-suicide as all other options seem to dissipate was and is a genuinely startling and bracing moment; I can't think of a comparable one in any of the other films. As to Danny Boyle, he seems a fine pick to me, though I always wanted Roger Michell to helm one of the Craig Bonds, especially as he directed one of Craig's finest performances in the deeply underrated Enduring Love (or, for that matter, John Maybury who directed Craig in the great Love is the Devil).

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#453 Post by tenia » Mon Mar 19, 2018 4:39 am

John Cope wrote:Love QoS, especially as a companion piece to Casino Royale.
For me, QoS feels actually probably even worse this way, because I always found the quality gap between Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace particularly big, and watching them this way only makes this gap more visible.

Casino Royale felt very balanced to me, between psychological evolution, emotional drama, tense poker plays and stares cat-and-mouse style, and action pieces. It just feels competently done, and in a way, since I kind of always had a soft side for GoldenEye (I'm born in 1987 and GoldenEye is the first Bond movie I saw in theaters), I always felt that Martin Campbell had a lot to do with how simply competent it feels.

Quantum of Solace thus felt massively disappointing to me because it just feels inferior in many respect : the JB Girl is way less interesting, Amalric is awful (and his character too), the action sequences are undecipherable and the story isn't captivating a bit. It should feel much tighter too (Casino Royale feels a bit overlong at 145 minutes while QoS is the shortest Bond movie at 106 minutes) but it doesn't. It just feels empty.
Lost Highway wrote:You’ll find dislike for the film is not uncommon among Bond movie fans.
Pretty much, yes.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#454 Post by Big Ben » Mon Mar 19, 2018 2:27 pm

Incomprehensible is a fairly good description of those action scenes. The one with the plane for instance boggled my mind when I saw it and I was nowhere near the picky asshole I was then that I am now. James Bond has always been a bit over the top and I'm fine with that but at some point I just reached my limit. I vastly preferred Skyfall. Spectre returned to this goofiness especially with it's final action sequence with a...handgun.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#455 Post by cdnchris » Mon Mar 19, 2018 2:53 pm

I'm a yuge Bond fan and have already corrupted my kids with my annual Bond-a-thon. But Quantum of Solace is garbage (not as bad as Die Another Day though). Its hard to follow action scenes and afterthought of a plot (more so than usual!) make it a chore. Even Spectre basically decided to forget that film existed.

As to that one it has kind of grown on me a bit but I still despise the half-ass linking of the previous Craig films leading to a real mess of a third act. It also turns Blofeld into an incredibly lame villain with daddy issues. Ugh.

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Lost Highway
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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#456 Post by Lost Highway » Mon Mar 19, 2018 3:25 pm

When Die Another Day came out it was well received and it was a huge hit but since then everybody claims to always have hated it. I quite like it but then I like the Bond movies for their kitsch value. That film is like a late period Roger Moore cheese fest and I’m someone who adores A View to a Kill. Spectre is middling Bond, it’s not awful like Quantum of Solace, just disappointing after the superior Skyfall.

When it comes to action scenes, the M:I movies easily kick Bond’s butt these days but I still like the Bond movies for the whole entertainment package deal and how shamelessly basic they are about that. You can’t afford that holiday, car, suit, mansion and you’ll never get a girl this beautiful ? Here, pay $12 and you’ll get all of that for two hours. I like how they reshuffle the same limited number of elements and stock characters. Here comes the secondary Bond girl. Will she be the villain‘s girlfriend, will she be good or evil and will she survive the movie ? There almost never are any more options for that character. Their repetition is almost what’s most pleasurable about the Bond movies for me and that limited canvas makes for fantastic time capsule movies which track the style, fashions, aspirations and fads of their period better than any other series of films.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#457 Post by cdnchris » Mon Mar 19, 2018 3:54 pm

I thought the opening to Die Another Day was great (I would actually rank it as one of the better cold openings), and I liked that they worked the Korean conflict in there (i missed the whole "foreign nation as generic villain" aspect missing since the Cold War Moore films) but then the film felt more like XXX than a Bond film. I do like Halle Berry but I thought she was miscast, there was some horrible CGI and action set pieces (that awful wind surfing bit being the peak of both) and I like me the double entendres but this film was ridiculous in that department, even though it still lacks the worst one in the whole series, the "Christmas comes once a year" line. Oh yeah: invisible car.

I was actually mad when I came out of the theater. I didn't even feel that coming out of The World is Not Enough. You're right about the Bond formula and how comfortable it is and entertaining it is in it's own right, but this one wasn't good and didn't feel like a Bond film to me. That's probably why I dislike it.

I love the Moore films too (even A View to a Kill and The Man with the Golden Gun) but this one even tested my blind loyalty to the franchise. Until Quantum of Solace anyways.

But still, after all that, my feelings on it are probably moot anyways: i still watch it every Bond-a-thon.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#458 Post by Luke M » Tue Mar 20, 2018 4:45 am

I think M:I is competing with Fast and Furious for action scenes. And I don’t think M:I had ever achieved F&F blend of over the top ridiculous while being incredibly entertaining.

I like Bond for the reasons listed. You understand the formula but you watch anyway because changing the setting, women, and bad guys is enough as it is.

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Lost Highway
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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#459 Post by Lost Highway » Tue Mar 20, 2018 6:46 am

I'm afraid I've never managed to make it through a F&F movie for more than 20 minutes. They may well have their virtues but they are not for me.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#460 Post by Robespierre » Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:41 am

Well I clearly underestimated the posters on this forum. I thought it was going to be heavily skewered towards the art house fare crowd so I'm pleasantly surprised to find out this isn't the case. For that I apologize. I'm also a huge Bond fan. Really I can credit Bond with getting me into older movies and later classics, and eventually CC. I'm well aware that QoS is not a loved (or even liked at all) entry but the fans are slowly coming to it's defence. For me it gets incrementally better every time I watch it. The only action scenes I'm not crazy about are the boat chase and the plane sequence but even then I don't hate them as much as some of the lamer moments from Golden Gun, A View to a Kill or Diamonds are Forever. I'm also partial to TND and OP myself, so I have a thing for what are probably the lesser liked entries.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#461 Post by tenia » Wed Mar 21, 2018 4:27 am

What surprises me is actually seeing A View to a Kill and The Man with the Golden Gun used so often as some kind of all-time lows for the franchise. I thought Octopussy and Moonraker would be those, and having seen them again a few years ago, I'd tend to agree with that.
(I was, however, positively surprised by For Your Eyes Only, which is actually very good. I didn't remember it was)

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Lost Highway
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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#462 Post by Lost Highway » Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:13 am

tenia wrote:What surprises me is actually seeing A View to a Kill and The Man with the Golden Gun used so often as some kind of all-time lows for the franchise. I thought Octopussy and Moonraker would be those, and having seen them again a few years ago, I'd tend to agree with that.
(I was, however, positively surprised by For Your Eyes Only, which is actually very good. I didn't remember it was)
Moonraker was long considered the nadir of the franchise but it has become a bit of a cult favourite since. It's become one of my most revisited Bond movies, in no small part due to Ken Adam's outstanding set designs (sadly his last work on the series). It also features one of John Barry's most beautiful Bond scores and my personal favourite of the three Shirley Bassey title songs. It's often silly but never boring and the action sequences are pretty great. A couple of decades ago I saw an retrospective at London's Serpentine Gallery devoted to Ken Adam (the first art show ever devoted to a production designer, I believe) and being stunned by the intricacy of the designs. It made me go back to a movie I only caught on TV before and never paid much attention to.

I'm still no fan of The Man with the Golden Gun. That film would be much improved by having Maud Adams be the main Bond girl and killing off Britt Ekland early on. (When they gave Adams the female lead in Octopussy, it was a nothing role). The first two Moore Bond movies have a slightly low rent look to them and they still wrote for Moore as a tougher Connery Bond. He doesn't look comfortable in the role till Spy, when he settled into a lighter groove more suited to him.

For Your Eyes Only was always held in high regard, being considered a return to basics after the excesses of Moonraker and it still holds up very well indeed.
Last edited by Lost Highway on Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#463 Post by tenia » Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:23 am

That was my understanding about Moonraker too, but when I bought in 2012 the Bond 50 set on BD, I started first by watching the movies I hadn't watched for a long time, which ended up mostly being the bad ones (or at least perceived as bad ones) : Diamonds are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, Tomorrow Never Dies & Quantum of Solace.
And to be honest, I didn’t revise lots of my opinions on those movies (except The Spy Who Loved Me) : Diamonds is trivial, Golden Gun feels like a patchwork lacking coherence, Spy and For Your Eyes Only are actually quite good (Spy vastly surprised me, actually), Moonraker and even more so Octopussy are totally incompetent, Quantum of Solace is very poorly shot and edited, and Tomorrow Never Dies is so boring past its opening sequence it’s the only one I stopped and never finished rewatching.

However, I just realised I wrote For Your Eyes Only when I actually was thinking of The Spy who Loved Me.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#464 Post by Lost Highway » Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:30 am

tenia wrote:That was my understanding about Moonraker too, but when I bought in 2012 the Bond 50 set on BD, I started first by watching the movies I hadn't watched for a long time, which ended up mostly being the bad ones (or at least perceived as bad ones) : Diamonds are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, Tomorrow Never Dies & Quantum of Solace.
And to be honest, I didn’t revise lots of my opinions on those movies (except The Spy Who Loved Me) : Diamonds is trivial, Golden Gun feels like a patchwork lacking coherence, Spy and For Your Eyes Only are actually quite good (Spy vastly surprised me, actually), Moonraker and even more so Octopussy are totally incompetent, Quantum of Solace is very poorly shot and edited, and Tomorrow Never Dies is so boring past its opening sequence it’s the only one I stopped and never finished rewatching.

However, I just realised I wrote For Your Eyes Only when I actually was thinking of The Spy who Loved Me.
When was The Spy Who Loved Me ever perceived as being bad ? It was a huge financial and critical hit (the only Bond movie to get a rave review from Pauline Kael) and it revived the series after the franchise had gone into a decline. It's still considered the most successful of the Moore movies.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#465 Post by tenia » Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:36 am

My understanding (but also my memories of it) was that it was relatively mediocre, hence my pleasing surprise when I rewatched it after so long.
However, I based this mostly on my memories of watching these younger, I haven't had a look at the contemporary reviews.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#466 Post by MoonlitKnight » Wed Mar 21, 2018 9:14 am

Lost Highway wrote:
tenia wrote:What surprises me is actually seeing A View to a Kill and The Man with the Golden Gun used so often as some kind of all-time lows for the franchise. I thought Octopussy and Moonraker would be those, and having seen them again a few years ago, I'd tend to agree with that.
(I was, however, positively surprised by For Your Eyes Only, which is actually very good. I didn't remember it was)
Moonraker was long considered the nadir of the franchise but it has become a bit of a cult favourite since. It's become one of my most revisited Bond movies, in no small part due to Ken Adam's outstanding set designs (sadly his last work on the series). It also features one of John Barry's most beautiful Bond scores and my personal favourite of the three Shirley Bassey title songs. It's often silly but never boring and the action sequences are pretty great. A couple of decades ago I saw an retrospective at London's Serpentine Gallery devoted to Ken Adam (the first art show ever devoted to a production designer, I believe) and being stunned by the intricacy of the designs. It made me go back to a movie I only caught on TV before and never paid much attention to.

I'm still no fan of The Man with the Golden Gun. That film would be much improved by having Maud Adams be the main Bond girl and killing off Britt Ekland early on. (When they gave Adams the female lead in Octopussy, it was a nothing role). The first two Moore Bond movies have a slightly low rent look to them and they still wrote for Moore as a tougher Connery Bond. He doesn't look comfortable in the role till Spy, when he settled into a lighter groove more suited to him.

For Your Eyes Only was always held in high regard, being considered a return to basics after the excesses of Moonraker and it still holds up very well indeed.
I agree with pretty much all of your assessments of the Moore era -- particularly regarding "Moonraker" (more on that in a bit). Moore really didn't gel in the role until "The Spy Who Loved Me;" in his first 2 outings, the filmmakers were obviously still tentatively trying to keep him in the Connery mold, even as Guy Hamilton continued to give the series a campier tone in its second decade. Of course, by "Octopussy" he had begun to overstay his welcome (he should've stuck with his gut and left after "For Your Eyes Only").

As far as "Moonraker" goes, while it has essentially the same premise as its predecessor (albeit concerning outer space instead of under the sea), I think it has probably the most snappy one-liners of any movie in the series, the best villain of the Moore era in Michael Lonsdale's Hugo Drax (next to Christopher Lee's Francisco Scaramanga -- the only genuinely positive thing about "The Man with the Golden Gun"), one of the more competent heroines of the Moore era in Lois Chiles' Holly Goodhead (granted, Barbara Bach's Anya Amasova and Carole Bouquet's Melina Havelock were no slouches, either), arguably the last great score John Barry composed for the series, and hands down the most underrated theme song (though I have to admit I would've loved to have heard Kate Bush sing it, as was originally intended). A lot of the stuff in the movie should've been ridiculous on paper, but they ended up not being half bad... including, dare I say it, Jaws' oddly sweet romance with a nerdy girl.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#467 Post by JSC » Wed Mar 21, 2018 11:00 am

I've always enjoyed the Bond movies for what they are. And while the direction
of the franchise since Daniel Craig was inevitable considering the trends in action
movies these days, I do miss that kind of flippant panache of the older films (hell,
even Octopussy had Louis Jordan as a villain...and I always get a kick out of
the backgammon scene in that movie).

Speaking of villains, while Moonraker isn't exactly a high point in the series,
I think the first forty minutes or so are pretty solid and I'll watch Michael Lonsdale
in anything, even when he's trying to look like he's playing Chopin!

As for For Your Eyes Only I see it as a good compromise between the tongue
and cheek humor of Moore's tenure as Bond, and the attempt to keep the series
in the tone of Ian Fleming's original stories.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#468 Post by cdnchris » Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:20 pm

tenia wrote:What surprises me is actually seeing A View to a Kill and The Man with the Golden Gun used so often as some kind of all-time lows for the franchise. I thought Octopussy and Moonraker would be those, and having seen them again a few years ago, I'd tend to agree with that.
(I was, however, positively surprised by For Your Eyes Only, which is actually very good. I didn't remember it was)
As others have pointed out For Your Eyes Only is one of the more highly regarded in the series, it's only major issue maybe being that the villain doesn't become clear well into the film, and said villain is one of the series' weaker ones. A weak villain usually harms a Bond film in a way it can never really recover from but this one gets around it as all of the other elements work so well, including a few action set pieces that really shine (the slow build-up in tension during the mountain climb at the end being the best I'd say). It also has one of the best colder moments in the series that puts everything Connery did to shame (kicking the car over the side) and the story is one of the more engaging, all the more impressive because I believe they just mixed together a bunch of elements from various short stories. It and The Spy Who Loved Me (where they finally found Moore's groove I feel) are the stand outs of the Moore films.

The rest of the Moore films are lackluster or general messes but I enjoy them all to an extent. The Man with the Golden Gun is probably the worst one of his films. As MoonlitKnight pointed out Lee is the only positive but for me it's enough of a positive. It's one of the more scattershot and nonsensical Bond films, it's plot barely linking up: the villain changes from number one assassin to madman with a giant ray gun in a snap, complete with island hideout, which, other than Nick Nack, has just one henchman who has the obscure job of just standing around.

Octopussy's plot is another one that barely holds together. It has enough material for three separate Bond films but they're all patch worked together and its loose at best. It also manages to waste Steven Berkoff and Louis Jourdan in their respective villain roles. I have to admire how A View to a Kill's plot shifts all over the place, though, managing to go from rigging horse races to sinking Silicon Valley, but generally I found it flowed better than Octopussy. A View to a Kill is often cited as the worst but I have a soft spot for it. Moore is way too old and it's generally uninspired, but there is something about Christopher Walken as a Bond villain, delivering lines as Walken-y as possible, and the last act is actually pretty good.

Live and Let Die, for me, is... fine. How Yaphet Kotto meets his end is one of the worst moments in the entire franchise but the rest of the film is serviceable enough, plus I liked Tee Hee as a henchman. And Moonraker has grown on me a bit but I still can't rank it all that high. It's best moments are back on Earth. And though the Bond plots are all essentially the same in key ways, even as a kid I had to roll my eyes at how they really just redid the plot from The Spy Who Loved Me. But in space!

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#469 Post by tenia » Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:25 pm

I always found A View to a Kill to be a tad better because Walken and Jones are quite good in it (though Jones' change of heart is very sudden), and the plot flows indeed not too poorly overall.
In contrast, Octopussy's editing often is god-awful and full with stupid ideas (the shot of the pigeon, complete with making it look as if it's watching the racing boats passing by, typically), which is on top of a bad villain, a bad plot, and a generally tepid pace.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#470 Post by Ribs » Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:32 pm

The pigeon is in Moonraker.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#471 Post by tenia » Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:35 pm

Oooh, my bad then.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#472 Post by cdnchris » Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:50 pm

tenia wrote:I always found A View to a Kill to be a tad better because Walken and Jones are quite good in it
I remember Jones got a lot of flack at the time and still does, though it's completely undeserving. I assume she just didn't meet the usual "Bond babe" criteria (she's bigger, more built) and it gets overlooked she's more in the "henchman" role than the "bad Bond babe" role. Though no one had a problem Famke doing the same thing in Goldeneye. At any rate, she was rather evil in the film, but yes, that change of heart is sudden and is a bit disappointing.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#473 Post by Luke M » Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:52 pm

For those that like James Bond and politics, here’s a fun twitter thread.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#474 Post by tenia » Wed Mar 21, 2018 1:07 pm

cdnchris wrote:I assume she just didn't meet the usual "Bond babe" criteria (she's bigger, more built) and it gets overlooked she's more in the "henchman" role than the "bad Bond babe" role.
It's a shame though because that's what makes her actually so memorable : she's bigger-than-life in this role, she knows it and plays this card very well. I'd tend to think she's probably remembered much more than Tanya Roberts.

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Re: James Bond Franchise (1962-∞)

#475 Post by cdnchris » Wed Mar 21, 2018 1:38 pm

tenia wrote: I'd tend to think she's probably remembered much more than Tanya Roberts.
It's funny that you mention that: I was going to list Roberts as a weakness as well in my one post but couldn't recall her name (despite remembering her in Sheena) and just could not be bothered to look her up, so I just left her out.
Luke M wrote:For those that like James Bond and politics, here’s a fun twitter thread.
That's wonderful!

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