The James Bond Thread

By far the WORST Brosnan film was Die Another Day. In fact that film is one of the worst Bond movies in the entire series. Invisible car? Bad guy fortress sculpted out of ice? OH BROTHER!

The World Is Not Enough is practically genius by comparison.

S.D. wrote:

By far the WORST Brosnan film was Die Another Day.  In fact that film is one of the worst Bond movies in the entire series.  Invisible car?  Bad guy fortress sculpted out of ice?  OH BROTHER!  

The World Is Not Enough is practically genius by comparison.

I own Die Another Day on DVD, but have only watched it once, when I first got the disc ... which was what, ten years ago? Wow, has it really been that long?? I honestly remember very little of it other than Halle Berry's famous homage to Ursula Andress' rising-from-the-ocean scene in Dr. No.

Since I seem to be on a Brosnan Bond kick of late I may be revisiting that one soon, now that you've got me thinking about it.

If you get the "Encore" movie channel on your cable, September looks like it'll be 007 month -- been seeing a lot of promos for "The Bond Marathon" on the channel coming soon. Sweet!!

Fat Freddy wrote:

If you get the "Encore" movie channel on your cable, September looks like it'll be 007 month -- been seeing a lot of promos for "The Bond Marathon" on the channel coming soon. Sweet!!

I'm happy to say that I haven't had cable TV for 5 years now. I honestly haven't missed it. Between over the air HD broadcast channels, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime I have it covered.

S.D wrote:

I'm happy to say that I haven't had cable TV for 5 years now.  I honestly haven't missed it.  Between over the air HD broadcast channels, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime I have it covered.

Except for Hulu, that's how we roll at my house. I LOVE Antenna TV and METV. Some great old shows on those channels!

S.D. wrote:

The World Is Not Enough is practically genius by comparison.

I thought The World Is Not Enough was one of the better Brosnan films. It felt more like a traditional bond movie, cheese and all.

SwapaDVD has been very beneficial to my James Bond collection lately. Just got "Moonraker" in the mail yesterday.

...I just put every Bond film I don't have on my "wish list" there so hopefully I can fill in the rest of the gaps as I go along.

I know it's a geeky request, but when you watch Moonraker pay attention to the score, I think it's one of the best John Barry did for the series.

S.D. wrote:

I know it's a geeky request, but when you watch Moonraker pay attention to the score, I think it's one of the best John Barry did for the series.

I've already seen "Moonraker" once this year so it may be awhile before I feel the need to spin it again, but when I do, I'll keep that in mind.

On a somewhat related note, I am hoping that a copy of "Dr. No" will be on the way to me from SwapaDVD within the next couple of days...

Encore will be playin' the hell out of the vintage Bonds all during the month of September so I'm gonna try to catch some of the ones I haven't seen in a while (or don't already own on DVD). Last night I started on 1983's "unofficial" Bond movie Never Say Never Again, which I'd recorded over the weekend, but bailed due to extreme sleepiness about halfway thru. I'm gonna have to finish it off tonight.

I haven't seen this one since it first hit HBO back in the early '80s and at the time I had only the dimmest idea of the behind-the-scenes legal drama that led to the film's creation (for the uninitiated, I'll get into that when I post my "review" of the film after I've finished it)... all I can say for now is that even with Connery back in the Bond role, this movie thus has been like a weird, alternate-universe version of the "regular" 007 series.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Encore will be playin' the hell out of the vintage Bonds all during the month of September so I'm gonna try to catch some of the ones I haven't seen in a while (or don't already own on DVD). Last night I started on 1983's "unofficial" Bond movie Never Say Never Again, which I'd recorded over the weekend, but bailed due to extreme sleepiness about halfway thru. I'm gonna have to finish it off tonight.

I haven't seen this one since it first hit HBO back in the early '80s and at the time I had only the dimmest idea of the behind-the-scenes legal drama that led to the film's creation (for the uninitiated, I'll get into that when I post my "review" of the film after I've finished it)... all I can say for now is that even with Connery back in the Bond role, this movie thus has been like a weird, alternate-universe version of the "regular" 007 series.

Pretty much... But still a better flick than the "official" Bond flick released around the same time, Octopussy.... which is on tonight, but not watching it - watched it again recently and it bored the tears out of me.... I did catch "For Your Eyes Only" again - my favorite Moore Bond flick and IMHO his absolute best performance as Bond.

One of the weirdest years in 007 history had to be 1983, when fans had not one, but two James Bond movies dueling for their attention. Roger Moore's Octopussy was released in June of '83, and though it performed well at the box office, it was trumped in terms of notoriety by the independently-produced Never Say Never Again, which was released in October. Never Say Never Again marked the return of Sean Connery to the James Bond role for the first time since 1971's Diamonds Are Forever.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Never Say Never Again came about as part of a settlement in a long-standing legal feud between screen writer Kevin McClory and the Ian Fleming Estate (as well as Eon Productions, makers of the "official" Bond film series).  Prior to Cubby Broccoli's Eon Productions landing the Bond film license in the early 1960s, McClory had collaborated with Ian Fleming on material for a potential James Bond film to be titled Latitude 78 in the late 1950s, but nothing ever came of the project. Instead, Fleming took some of the story ideas from McClory's scrapped screenplay and used them in his novel Thunderball. When Thunderball was made into a movie in 1965, McClory threatened Eon with legal action for using "his" ideas in the film. After a court battle in which it was decided that McClory did indeed "own" certain elements of the Thunderball story, Eon gave McClory a producer's credit on the film version.

McClory announced plans to use those story elements as a springboard to produce his own competing series of Bond films throughout the 1970s, but could never get financial backing until he eventually managed to convince Sean Connery to come aboard in the early 1980s. Connery was 52 years old at the time - three years younger than Eon's "Official" Bond, Roger Moore. McClory tried to get former Bond director Peter Hunt of On Her Majesty's Secret Service to direct the film but he declined out of loyalty to Eon, so Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) was hired. Max Von Sydow, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Barbara Carrera, Kim Basinger and Rowan Atkinson filled out the cast.



The film follows the skeleton of the "Thunderball" plot, with 007 on the trail of two stolen nuclear missiles in the Bahamas, but it goes off in a dozen different directions, moves at a much slower pace and feels quite dated. This movie is at least a half hour too long, and aside from one hilariously cheesy scene set in a video-game arcade to put it in the "80s" time frame, everything else - from the sets to the technology and the music - looks and feels straight out of the 1960s.

It's fun to see Connery playing Bond again with his usual self-satisfied cool, but without such familiar touchstones as the "James Bond Theme," the "gun barrel" opening, or Maurice Binder's famed opening-credit sequences, and with different actors playing "Q," "M," "Moneypenny," etc., Never Say Never Again is like watching a weird alternate-universe version of James Bond.

It's not as flashy as Octopussy (which came out on top in the box office Bond Battle of 1983, but just barely) but for an "unofficial" Bond this was a decent enough watch.

Happy Birthday to former Bond Sir Roger Moore, who turns 86 (!!) today.

Never Say Never Again and Octopussy were both pretty abysmal as far as I was concerned. I saw them both theatrically in 1983 and at the time I preferred Never Say Never Again...but re-watching that several years ago proved painful and I ended up just deciding to re-watch Thunderball instead.

I will never forgive Octopussy for dressing Bond up as a clown and having him work undercover at a circus, that is easily the DUMBEST fucking thing anyone ever did to Bond.

Well, having him drive an invisible fucking car is pretty close....

Just added "Dr. No" to my James Bond DVD collection thanks to SwapaDVD... I now have ten 007's on the shelf.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Just added "Dr. No" to my James Bond DVD collection thanks to SwapaDVD... I now have ten 007's on the shelf.

That is the only Bond movie I've rewatched recently and it's still one of my favorites.

S.D. wrote:

Fat Freddy wrote:

Just added "Dr. No" to my James Bond DVD collection thanks to SwapaDVD... I now have ten 007's on the shelf.

That is the only Bond movie I've rewatched recently and it's still one of my favorites.  

Yeah, when I started this whole "revisit the entire Bond series" thing during the past year, "Dr. No" held up very well. I'd say that the majority of the Connery films have held up way better than most of Moore's output.

Fat Freddy wrote:

S.D. wrote:

Fat Freddy wrote:

Just added "Dr. No" to my James Bond DVD collection thanks to SwapaDVD... I now have ten 007's on the shelf.

That is the only Bond movie I've rewatched recently and it's still one of my favorites.  

Yeah, when I started this whole "revisit the entire Bond series" thing during the past year, "Dr. No" held up very well. I'd say that the majority of the Connery films have held up way better than most of Moore's output.

Agree - they do, outside of Diamonds (which is still better then several of the Moore flicks)

Quote :

Agree - they do, outside of Diamonds (which is still better then several of the Moore flicks)

My fave Moore is "The Spy Who Loved Me." Hell, that's one of my favorite films in the whole Bond series.

Hey all... been a while since I stopped by to talk about some Bond-age... I think I've watched the bulk of the 007 series over the past year, so there aren't many left for me to revisit!

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Most recently, I gave Die Another Day, Pierce's swan-song as 007, a spin for the first time since it hit DVD over a decade (!) ago.



I remembered very little about Die Another Day except for a vague feeling that it was the weakest of Pierce's Bond outings. That memory was accurate, though there was still plenty of empty headed fun to be had. It starts off with Bond setting up a diamonds-for-illegal-weapons deal with a crooked North Korean General... which quickly goes sour and lands Bond in prison after an epic chase scene involving hovercrafts (!). The film's opening-credit sequence, rather than being a collage of fantasy images as usual, actually advances the story of Bond's time in prison, with its images of ice baths, scorpions and other tortures. 14 months later, a half-dead, bearded Bond is traded back to the West in exchange for the North Korean terrorist "Zao," who had been the General's right hand man... and Bond, of course, takes it upon himself to recapture him...

Zao was last seen hiding out in Cuba, where Bond meets "Jinx" (Halle Berry), a cat burglar/thief who naturally turns out to be working for the American NSA. She's also on the trail of the diamond-faced Zao so she and Bond team up, eventually heading to Iceland, where they find him working for a mysterious gazillionaire who wants to enslave the West with a solar-satellite weapon that can make curly fries out of any Earthbound target. The usual shoot'em up/blow'em up mayhem eventually ensues, of course.

I won't go into the rest of the details except to say that Die Another Day is an often bizarre mix of real-world politics (i.e. the bad guys are North Koreans instead of leftover Soviets) and Moore-esque 007 hijinks (Q Branch issues Bond a car that can turn invisible... which is really pushing the limits of believability even for this series!). There are numerous nods to earlier Bond films, since Die Another Day was released on the 40th anniversary of the release of Dr. No. When Berry first appears, rising from the ocean in a barely-there bikini, it's an obvious echo of Ursula Andress' entrance in Dr. No. In addition, the sub plot involving diamonds recalls Diamonds Are Forever, a laser beam torture device nods to Goldfinger, and the "Ice Palace" headquarters of the bad guy is right up there with Stromberg's "Atlantis" base from The Spy Who Loved Me or Hugo Drax's Death Star-inspired space station from Moonraker in terms of ridiculous villain HQ's.

Halle Berry's nice to look at but I think the only reason she's even in this movie is so audiences will go "Look! It's recent Oscar winner Halle Berry, in a James Bond movie!" Legend has it that at one point, MGM was considering spinning her "Jinx" character off into her own series of films, which probably would've been pretty cool...but the idea was eventually shelved and poor Halle ended up in Catwoman. Haha.

In an additional pointless celebrity cameo, Madonna (who also contributed the awful, auto-tuned to hell and back theme song) briefly turns up as a fencing instructor. I don't have any hard data to back this up, but I bet this was the first movie Madonna was involved with that made money in at least a decade.



In the end...I didn't hate Die Another Day but it'll probably be another ten years before I bother to revisit it again. By this point the Brosnan films had gotten so over the top that there was really nowhere left for him to go with the character. Naturally Pierce was willing to stick around for a fifth installment, but MGM's financial troubles and descent into bankruptcy protection put the series on hold for several years. By the time the machine was ready to roll again the decision was made to replace him with Daniel Craig.

Reading your reviews of the Bond movies is the closest I'll ever get to watching any of them. Not that I wouldn't like them but it takes a certain type of movie to make me sit and watch it. Oddly enough this weekend I watched Gravity.

Die Another Day is pretty bad, just like all of Brosnan's films other than Goldeneye. Don't get me started on that stupid invisible car...

Happy Birthday to former 007 Pierce Brosnan, who turns 61 today.

S.D. wrote:

Die Another Day is pretty bad, just like all of Brosnan's films other than Goldeneye.  Don't get me started on that stupid invisible car...

I remember how much you hated that!

Goldeneye was a great Bond film - still like that one. His Bond films did progressively worse. I did like Die Another Day better than TWINE, just slightly better. TWINE is near the bottom of my Bond rankings. I wish they had given Brosnan better scripts.....

I did re-watch Skyfall recently and it still holds up well. I like it better than the first viewing - most of my issues with the film (Bond's "death" again,his "injury" and other recycled elements) didn't bother me since it worked in the context of the film. Looking forward to the next one!

Martin Campbell directed both Goldeneye and Casino Royale (interesting the same director launched two different Bonds) and they are two of my favorite modern Bond films.