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Good one, Veronica!
Nice!
Some classic Getting Bond Wrong from Rylan on Radio 2 this afternoon:
"It's an online feshtival...feshtival? Who am I, Roger Moore?"
Didn't notice that until you mentioned it – nice detail for sure!
The absolute worst depictions of San Francisco in film
Kind of a muddled piece. They don't acknowledge the horse scenes take place in France, not in SF. And the city itself is nicely showcased actually. This seems more of a diatribe against Moore and the filmmakers than anything against the city itself. And I'm somebody who considers AVTAK one of the two weakest Bond films.
I like AVTAK. Partly (not entirely) because of the SF scenes. And as @Revelator knows, I'm a resident of the SF Bay area. The (deleted from the film but available elsewhere) scenes from a boat checking out Chevron's Pt. Richmond refinery are like Old Home Week for me!
Where can you watch this, @BeatlesSansEarmuffs?
Thanks for the link, interesting piece. That was the same week I graduated high school. Rambo was the most anticipated movie by most of my classmates; being a Bond fan was pretty lonely, although friends from other schools were also fans, but I also looked forward to Rambo as First Blood was a good film, so there was lots of good will.
'85 was the summer of Rambo. It wasn't great action or a very good film, but it was what people responded to at the time. AVTAK was indeed a letdown and seemed tired in comparison. Stallone having Rocky IV just 6 months away made him the man back then.
Another factor back then was the interest in the Vietnam war. They mention Chuck Norris but I don't think it referred to his 2 Missing in Action films, the first which had the same concept of going back for POWs and both were modest hits. Platoon was 18 months away and many of the other films about Vietnam. Norris wasn't so much with the program as the author claims as he was available, churning 3-4 cheap films a year at that point, always basically the same character.
Of course, the legacy was that by the time of the third Rambo three years later, the interest had waned and it underperformed at the box office and the character was mothballed for 20 years before being brought back in ultra-violent sequels nobody really asked for. Bond came back strong in TLD and there's some irony in that Rambo also went to fight alongside Afghani freedom fighters against the Russians in III. I wonder if reviews at the time noted the similarity.
Lastly, looking at that top 10 chart for that week, I saw 9 of them. The exception was Rustler's Rhapsody, which was the film AVTAK replaced at the theater in my town.
http://comicboxcommentary.blogspot.com/2020/03/review-jimmy-olsen-9.html
In the most recent episode of the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, there's a mention of a quite odd press release by National Express, from the time of the release of SP.
It's in the extras of the MGM Special Edition DVD of AVTAK. (Sorry for the delay in getting back to you...)
I think Rutger Hauer was also mentioned as a potential Zorin, but said he'd only be in a Bond movie if he could play Bond. That was more than 20 years before the notion of a blond Bond was a possibility.
I'll ask my grandfather.
And Sting.