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But, the running time is utterly undeserved. I get it with the relaunch film CR, and the anniversary film SF. But Spectre at 2:30? Wish I could have been given final edit.
And I agree @Birdleson with your thoughts on Craig. His angst ridden Bond in the first three was a breath of fresh air. It was like no one had ever played Bond before. Then we get to Spectre and as you say
his attempts at nonchalant irony, that does not work for me
and
Craig's attempts at laid back sarcasm come across as snarky and bitchy
are exactly in line with my thinking.
It isn't the worst performance as Bond (for me). I personally think Dalton gets it all wrong in LTK. But it's Craig's worst
So the first five I've gone through are For Your Eyes Only, Spectre, From Russia with Love, A View to a Kill, and You Only Live Twice.
For a long time, I've assumed For Your Eyes Only to be my favorite Moore entry, largely because my favorite Bonds tend to be the ones that flirt with seriousness (virtually no Bond movie can be taken actually seriously). Watching this time hasn't changed my view of the film itself so much, but I suspect some of the earlier Rogers are going to be ranked higher from here on out.
That said, complaints I used to have about FYEO have basically all disappeared. Bill Conti's score is now one I find fantastic. I just wish there were more of it. Silence obviously has a place in any soundtrack, but I get the feeling there was a time or cost issue in this case. I now fully love the PTS, and don't even mind the absurd Blofeld stuff. It's a nice way to transition away from the silliness of some prior movies and dumping it down a smokestack. Lynn-Holly Johnson is fine, as are all the performances.
What I like in this movie is that it takes the "serious if you squint from a distance" tone of a FRWL and turns up the dial on some of the action sequences in terms of creativity and intensity. Every action scene in this is inspired, apart from the one thing I still hate in the movie: the hockey scene.
The characters in this movie, in contrast to most Bonds, all feel like real human beings, and the chemistry between Bond and Lisl, or Bond and Colombo, is excellent. Up to this point, OHMSS is perhaps the only film to have a believable ally relationship and a believable romantic relationship.
Next came Spectre. When I saw this in the cinema, I could barely comprehend what I'd just watched. I enjoyed the fan service, but felt that the Bond-Blofeld connection was by far the worst decision ever made in the history of the franchise. I still feel that way. And 2015's extremely similar MI: Rogue Nation, a movie I adore, seemed to me to do Spectre better than EON did.
Having said that, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. Craig is doing classic Bond. He's not busting through drywall, drinking Heineken or being melodramatic. (I should say I have loved all of his movies so far) He's cool and confident, but Craig still gives the viewer the feeling that he's the guy who lived through the previous three movies.
The other actors are great as well. Ben Whishaw is a highlight, and Dave Bautista may be the first giant invincible henchman to have an air of intelligence about him. Christoph Waltz is loads of fun for me to watch in this. While I wish they'd handled some aspects differently, and perhaps given him this arc over two films, he's definitely one of the better Blofelds, as faint praise as that unfortunately is.
What I love about the movie is the tone. I like goofy Bond, and I like quirky Bond. This movie, not unlike Dr No or Live and Let Die, begins relatively grounded, but ends up in a pretty wacky place. Blofeld's Morocco base is one of my favorite locations in all of Bond, inside and out. It's otherworldly, but not for any one specific reason. The cinematography, which is great throughout, really adds to the dream-like quality, both in the strange coloring, and in shots of random lizards.
The final quarter of this movie is indeed pretty ridiculous, but not more so than the final quarter of most any Bond film released between 1962 and 1985. This feels like the kind of thing Cubby might be producing today. If there were a couple bad decisions made in this film, they don't break it for me. If I can accept that there's a (great) Bond movie with a literally supernatural henchman, I can accept that in this one, Bond and Blofeld lived together in a cabin as kids. What the hell. It will never be referred to again! I think the current hate for this movie is wildly, crazily hyperbolic.
From Russia with Love is a movie I've always enjoyed, and certainly respected, but also one I rarely watch. It's one I feel I can recall mentally and have the impression I've just watched it. I was way overdue for an actual viewing.
To me, this movie offers Sean's best performance by a mile. He's more consistent than in Dr No (no angry barking, no looking sedated when being cool), and has yet to enter his "actually more invincible than Roger" phase. He's a delight. As usual, he doesn't seem to care about any of his allies, but his chemistry with Kerim Bay is great, and it's charming to see what is clearly non-acting cheerfulness during some of the gypsy camp scenes. Again, at least barring Kerim's death, this Bond feels human.
I've always found the plot of this movie a bit nonsensical ("Hey, she's offering a Lektor if we just bring her to England and blow up a Soviet consulate! Let's go!", but there's excellent suspense on offer once we get to the Orient Express, and the film is a visual treat throughout. The train, the camp, the chess tournament, all a feast for the eyes. Ken Adam is not missed.
Robert Shaw is another highlight. I still experience a slight shock when he finally speaks. I think enough has been written about the wonderful fight at the climax and I can only add that it's become slightly overstated, great as it is.
A View to a Kill was the first Bond I watched after Goldeneye, and as someone who basically never watches Brosnan Bonds, this sort of feels like my actual first Bond.
I enjoyed the watch, as usual, but for the first time, I started to relate to some of what people don't like about this much maligned movie. At some point in the first third, I wondered why James Bond, Pet Detective, was so goddamned concerned about horse doping. Why a CIA agent is selling seafood all day, just waiting for James Bond to come around. Why Zorin feels the need to be personally present for his most high-risk crimes (e.g. shooting a civil servant and burning down city hall!)
But the film is full of great stuff. One of Barry's strongest scores, an excellent villain and henchwoman, a marvelous climax in the mine, Patrick freaking Macnee, and of course Duran Duran's song. Roger is good here, but perhaps as a combination of how he's written, and how we know he felt about the film, he's slightly joyless. This Bond would have been okay from a Tim or Sean, maybe, but there's a surprising lack of mirth from Roger here. On the whole, it's less than the sum of its parts.
Finally, I watched You Only Live Twice. I've never been much of a fan of this one, but I can now affirm that this film's second life in memory is better than the first life of actually watching it.
It's generally a fool's errand to pick apart Bond films for plot holes or mistakes, but YOLT can't help but beg you to do it. While not the worst Bond film, per se, it's by far the most relentlessly stupid movie in the franchise.
Most of the issues are well-known: Bond fakes his death in private, people repeatedly watch events on screens that are not being filmed, Helga tries to kill Bond in the most hairbrained way imaginable, becoming Japanese, triggering a volcano, it just goes on and on. I like silly Bond (I love Moonraker!), but this is just internally nonsensical.
But I was aware of this before watching. What I was looking forward to more was more the frosting-on-the-cake stuff, like the score, or the production design. Barry's score is good of course, but not quite what I remembered, nor anywhere near an OHMSS or AVTAK. More surprising to me was Ken Adam's work, which I feel disappointed.
Set work is huge to me on these movies, and elevate films like Dr No, TMWTGG, and DAF a couple rankings. This film is probably Adam's most famous work, but apart from the famous volcano, I found a lot of the sets to be kind of generic Adam, and more problematically, underdressed. A lot of these rooms, apart from their straight lines and weird angles, feel too empty, or not empty enough. Just a couple props here and there. One exception is Henderson's flat, which I quite like.
Both the iconic volcano and the iconic Blofeld are aspects of this film I've never liked. The volcano comes across as unfilmable: it's dull when we zoom in on the action, and static in the (frequent) long shots inserted to remind you of their architectural achievement. When I see photographs of the set, I think "that's one hell of a set", but in the movie, it's a minus. Dr No's lair was far more successful.
Donald Pleasence is an actor I like, but this Blofeld is useless. Simply put, this character would never be able to reach the position he's in. Nothing of his intellectual or physical presence, and certainly nothing of the competence on display in this film, would ever lead one to believe this guy could lead an organization like SPECTRE.
I should point out some positives, and there are quite a few, as in any Bond film. The allies are all wonderful: Aki and Tiger in particular (even if the latter is voiced by Largo), and Henderson and the MI6 crew as well. Japan is a great location, and there are some nice scenes: the weird couch fight, Aki's death, Tanaka's train. But overall, it wasn't a great watch.
So my rankings so far, which I hope don't get me banned:
Spectre
For Your Eyes Only
From Russia with Love
A View to a Kill
You Only Live Twice
Next on the dock are Skyfall, The Living Daylights, Goldfinger, and Diamonds are Forever. (I've watched a lot of Roger in the recent past, so his will come along a little later...)
Craig's films started with Casino Royale, an adaptation of the first Fleming novel, and a (sort of) attempt to be more Fleming-like generally.
We're now at the end of his run, and if you look at the end of Fleming's Bond novels, you see some pretty weird stuff that would annoy a lot of fans if done literally. OHMSS contains a comedy dream sequence. You Only Live Twice, well. Bond's final meeting with Blofeld is the result of a massive coincidence. It's only slighly less ridiculous, objectively speaking, than what we got in the Spectre film. Add to that Blofeld's stomping about a garden of death in a suit of armor, a suggestion that statues of Japanese gods are alive, Bond screaming "Die Blofeld die!", and an escape via balloon, and you've got a real shark jump of a novel (also my favorite Fleming book). In Golden Gun, a brainwashed Bond comes back to kill M. This is wild, silly stuff.
Spectre feels like that tone to me. It's sort of real world, but there's crazy coincidences and whimsical set pieces done for the hell of it. Late Fleming was all about this stuff, and several of the films are full of it. It's sort of like how a lot of people don't like the weirder Roger movies, perhaps forgetting that Fleming's Bond fought a giant squid once. There's a wide world for Bond to inhabit, and each film, each novel, can be a bit different, and as a self-contained entity, can be appreciated if approached on its terms. My favorite Bond is probably LTK but I've watched Moonraker three or four times in the last year and loved it. Most of these movies can be pretty damn great if one meets them where they are. (Of course, having said that, I need to find a path to where YOLT the film is!)
I think people have taken Casino Royale (the film) and wanted the Craig series to continue in that vein, and it just hasn't happened. I for one am glad, and it's not at all hard to see how the series has stayed true to itself even in some of the more off-putting directions they've gone.
EDIT: Decided to watch them at random, and will incorporate the old CR and NSNA, as well. First up: LTK.
I've also thought about trying to create some sort of 'flow' order whereby each film is surrounded on either side by a film that pairs well with it. It's a very vague idea. Something like CR->QOS->DN->LALD->LTK->TLD->GE, etc. But it'd be obviously quite subjective at points.
That's a good idea, and I still want to do a Bondathon solely in black and white, could be fun, as well. I just spent a couple weeks settling on the perfect method and never did, so I knew I'd never get around to doing one if I didn't finally settle on one, and just went with the randomized number generator to choose, which I've done once before.
I would've gone with a traditional marathon, but SF and SP are easily my least favorites in the series and I hate ending a string of 24 films on such a bad note.
Compelling and thought provoking argument Prof.
I love YOLT and dislike LTK intensely but what you write about Fleming's books and Spectre makes perfect sense.
[/quote]
All enjoyable, except TND.
All enjoyable, except TND TLD.[/quote]
[/quote]
Bold boy! Go to your room (the one with the Kara poster!)
Dalton humour? Yes I agree somewhat that he wasn't entirely comfortable with the one-liners.
But for me the humour is not an essential part of Bonds make up. Fleming's Bond was virtually humourless, and this part was mainly developed by Connery, who was a gem with the quips.
QOS is Craig's raw energy. Start to end the film is in lock-step with him, and I love it. I see more of him in this one than his others. I bet it helped that there was little script and he was writing bits here and there and probably felt up against it. It all comes shining through.
The only way they could've further had the audience sympathize with Camille would be some odd, out of place flashback. I think it was proper motivation, I sympathized with her throughout. Once we hear her story of why she wants Medrano's head, I was rooting for her the whole way.
How is the plot uninteresting?
Stealing a countries water supply is a pretty good story. And u don’t like medrano and Greene? Why not
And no interesting characters?? I think Greg Beam is one of the most memorable, and Mathis really shines in his scenes with Bond and even though she was underwritten I thought Gemma Atherton did really well with Fields character! And who can forget Elvis? (Ok, maybe not that last bit!)
That is probably the explanation.
If I could change one thing about the Bond franchise, giving Brosnan another GE-worthy or better installment would be right up there. He was a good Bond with a mixed era.
Suddenly hating OHMSS... that’s nearly as unlikely as me suddenly liking Donald Trump!
SF has always been top-tier for me, so it will stay in my Top 10 with ease. It has great rewatchability I think.
But it's the least rewatchable of Craig's films for me and I don't see that changing anytime soon!
How can a film like LTK be only 10 years on from MR, which in itself is only 10 years on from OHMSS? The most opulent and romantic Bond film, the most comical and the most grisly.
Love these assessments Birdleson, keep up the good work.