Bond #24: SPECTRE

Vin Diesel as Blofeld iirc.

Meryl Streep as Javier Bardem.

Miley Cyrus is the new M.

^^ would watch

billy ray cyrus as the next bond imo

He's got a license to kill, and you know he's going straight for your achey breaky heart.

i was only 12 when goldeneye came out and even then i knew it was garbage

casino royale is way better

also i am definitely not a bond aficionado, i havent seen anything pre-brosnan and idgaf really if i ever do

Except for a few isolated cases of shakey cam I can't understand, let alone accept, the hate QoS got: It stuck with Craig's hard ass style of Bond (every Bond actor's movie should respect his character) yet featured lots of neat Bond work, gorgeous locations, supremely tight editing, a villain that wasn't just there for Bond to awkwardly ruminate on his life and a gorgeous Opera set piece. Also a female character who isn't a joke, unlike with Skyfall.

QoS is a potentially OK movie marred by noted hack Marc Forster's incompetent action directing and the fact that the writers' strike left them with a partial script that had to be figured out during production, in part by Craig himself(!). Olga Kurylenko kicks ass, Mathieu Amalric is amusing to watch squaring off against Craig, and there are some great locations, but it doesn't really work overall.

kinda wish there was a way to split the franchise so that there one set of films for the fans of sadface bollock-tortured 'realistic' bond and another parallel series focusing on the international man of mystery, sexually-incontinent, hollow-volcano-explorer bond

Waltz has said he is not Blofeld - the going idea is that he is Franz Oberhauser

― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, October 15, 2015 9:03 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

all the leaked Sony email notes with the producers referring to "Blofeld" are kind of telling -- they're just not going to have a Blofeld character in the Daniel Craig Bond films, and this dude is kind of in charge of SPECTRE, so for all intents and purposes...

bizarro gazzara is on to something -- I definitely have a specific idea of "this is how James Bond should be," but I also enjoy some of the goofiness that the movie series has brought to the screen.

I think one of the main problems is consistency in characterization. Some of the Roger Moore films are practically played as farce, but it's more (Moore?) jarring to see characters swing between caricature and intense seriousness in the course of a film.

Bardem's villain swinging from methodical planner with a hint of a truly violent nature to a guy who is yelling over a bullhorn and commanding a gunship to blast a house in the middle of nowhere made him seem like there was no consistency. If they shoehorned in some dialogue between Bond and his character about how he'd had to resort to this, with some sort of breakdown taking place, there'd be some sort of emotional resolution but it fell flat.

On the other hand, I have a soft spot for Goldeneye, which carried on a hint of the comedic beats the Moore films tried for in the earlier days and the Connery films exhibited in a series of ridiculous henchmen. It had the hint of backstory (a colleague who was left behind as villain) and balanced it with two henchmen -- ridiculous Russian hacker Boris (Alan Cumming!) and sexual sadist Xenia Onatopp (up there with the most ridiculous Bond series names) who are comedic but completely consistent throughout the plot, and in a way that doesn't deviate from the progression of the story. There's a point that capitalizes on Boris being a fidgety nerd that leads him to detonate a pen grenade that moves the plot forward while being completely in character.

(I was 14 when Goldeneye came out and feel the Brosnan films were victim to the worst parts of the Bond series -- uneven tone, product/gadget and music placement that seems emphasized more than the actual plot, shoehorned in villains/sidekicks that have no real reason to be there) but they did start with a movie that, while flawed, was probably the best of his run.

Re: Onatopp, I forgot to mention that one of the other characters in TWINE is Dr. Molly Warmflash.

Obviously I recognise the division that bizarro gazzara identifies, while not particularly having much time for the other part of it (which is better done by other less inherently ridiculous franchises). Some of the Moore films mine the hollow volcano quite effectively (so to speak), but Moore himself is awful, is the problem.

"Except for a few isolated cases of shakey cam I can't understand, let alone accept, the hate QoS got"
Agreed on this. It's far superior to Skyfall. I'm convinced QOS negative rep has to be solely due to its awkward sounding title.

QoS falls over because the main villain scheme doesn't have a connected action scene or denouement act. There's no part where they blow up a huge underground reservoir and return water to the people or w/e. It's down to assuming with the CEO of the speculation company and the military dictator dead, things will somehow get better? It fits with the tone of the movie and the series overall, but the big payoff after Bond loses two of his compatriots and the big payoff is a moderately-sized building in the middle of nowhere blows up and a guy drinks a can of oil offscreen

That said, yeah, more cohesive than Skyfall

threads for unseen movies = what a blast of rehashing

so Jez Butterworth, the Brit playwright turned screenwriter, has a credit on this along with the 3 guys who did Skyfall (incl John Logan and the other guy who've been on all the Craigs). Weird filmography -- Black Mass presumably cuz he's done gangster stuff, but the James Brown biopic and Edge of Tomorrow too.

What's your opinion re: Black Mass?

mine? doubt i'll ever see it

one set of films for the fans of sadface bollock-tortured 'realistic' bond and another parallel series focusing on the international man of mystery, sexually-incontinent, hollow-volcano-explorer bond

in the best Bond movies these things all gel together and i pity the fool who can only deal with one flavour at a time

Connery's brutish aura made the fantasy digestible

agreed 100% about "spy shit," disagree that he doesn't do very much of it - feel like there is at least some of it in almost every movie. quite a bit in the first few connery flicks seems very much in the spirit of fleming and a more grounded "spy" as opposed to "superspy" - taping a hair across the doorframe to see if the room's been disturbed, all that stuff. of course (nearly) every movie involves some spy-style detective work... talking to people, turning up false leads, realizing the bigger scheme that's going on. sometimes the 'spy stuff' is really the best thing in the film, as in say diamonds are forever where basically the only thing I can remember, besides the two assassins and blofeld looking like brack from this island earth, is Bond killing the guy sent to assassinate him, planting his ID on him, and letting Jill St. John conclude "You've just killed James Bond!" "Was that who that was?"

i only grow fonder of the brosnan era the more i see of moore's films. virtually the only thing he does convincingly is eat the cucumber sandwiches and get hoodwinked by the villains. he really seems deeply incompetent a lot of the time. constantly getting snuck up on and falling for obvious traps. also by far THE worst at convincing us that the actor and the stuntman are the same person from shot to shot. there's stuff that's goofy in goldeneye, lots more in tied-for-seconds TND and DAD, but i'd rate all of those above all the moore that i've seen (note, i have not seen 'the spy who loved me' which i understand is supposed to be his best). brosnan manages the tuxedo and the jokes without ever seeming quite like moore's ultra-posh dowdy clown, even if he can become a cartoon surrounded by effects. goldeneye attempts to dress the setup up with "contemporary" themes (fall of cold war, bond as sexist dinosaur) but hasn't actually got anything to say about them; its feeling of being more substantial comes mainly from a grittier visual feel, the spectacular opening stunt, the tank chase, and sean bean's villain. but it's a fun movie to watch IMO.

i might be one of those people for whom dalton is, if not the favorite bond, the only i'd want to have seen more movies from. he didn't nail it in either of his films but i feel like he was getting close to something, and he was at least distinctive. the scripts he had maybe didn't mesh well enough with where he was taking the character - the odd fatherly quality of his relationship with the cellist in living daylights (some kind of holdover plot idea for a moore movie, surely - - - see also the SUPER awkward relationship with the teenage gymnastics trainee in 'for your eyes only') is interesting but a weak fit for this lean, mean bond. no shortage of spy stuff, though.

Agree Dalton is definitely overrated, and TLD is in my top five Bonds. Remember not being too impressed with LTK, but I don't think I've seen it since I was quite young, and I know it has its defenders.

Sorry, UNDERrated.

I think a better question would be to determine what Bond film is the least cohesive. Not least enjoyable, but most nonsensical.

A View to a Kill is up there, for sure. That Brosnan-era one that has something to do with uh, diamonds or lasers, and has a final act in an ICE HOTEL for no particular reason is also up there.

Have to shout out to the worst product placements in the Brosnan years, like peak Ford-era Jaguar

have meant to rewatch Octopussy since Louis Jourdan died. Delighted with it at original release.

http://news.doddleme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Screen-Shot-2015-07-22-at-4.00.51-PM-300x184.png
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hDNY_rlcSSo/maxresdefault.jpg

View to a Kill is almost completely nonsensical. cf: crazy Eiffel Tower butterfly show - seriously I have watched this movie many times and I *still* dont know what that was

Thunderball is boring & mostly stupid, not even bizarrely enjoyable like VTAK

it's been a very long time since i've sat thru all of Live and Let Die but i seem to recall it making very little sense

Thunderball clearly redeemed by the afternoon we liveblogged it on here

i don't really rate the Brosnan Bonds because I just can't with those movies. I can't

Feel like if Living Daylights were tightened up a bit (we get to Afghanistan right around the time it feels like the movie has to be ending soon), if they'd figured out more precisely what they wanted to do with Bond's relationship with the cellist, and they'd cast someone better than Joe Don Baker for the main villain, it'd basically be top five. Dalton's great, the Gibraltar open is great, the ski/cello case is great, the assassin milk-delivery dude is great, the airplane/net thing at the very end is great... I mean it's very much going for a Casino Royale franchise reset, shooting for grittier, tougher, more "now" than the fuddy-duddy Moore films that preceded it, and I think it mostly pulls it off. (BTW it's kind of amazing to me the same guy directed everything from For Your Eyes Only through License to Kill.)

I found For Your Eyes Only totally nonsensical but usually at the 'local' level, where just everything that was happening within a scene didn't add up whatsoever, like the big rock-climbing set piece for example. Why did Bond waste undisclosed amounts of precious time arranging an elaborate meeting with Q just to be informed that there is more than one St. Cyril's church in Greece, when he has already enlisted "The Dove" (only good character in the movie) as a guide? Why doesn't the bad guy just shoot him? If Bond can see his friends down the way, why can't the bad guys? Why does Bond give the go-ahead to let everybody up after taking out that one guy, even though it's not the same guy their binocular surveillance told them was also patrolling up there? How does Roger Moore fall seemingly a hundred feet and then climb right back to where he was in the space of seemingly a minute? Or say, the big submersible scene where they finally get the gizmo: if they're deep enough that they have to use this special breathing apparatus, why are they diving bare-skinned, and why does the 8-minute time limit never actually come into play? Why do the bad guys even bother sneaking up on them down there when clearly their plan was to let Bond figure out where the thing was and let him do the work of bringing it up for them? How did the bad guys get their ship and deep-sea diver guy into place without Bond and Melina noticing? How is it that all this is back adjacent to the "underwater temple" location, for the coral/shark scene, when clearly Bond and Melina left there after learning the correct location from the parrot (so stupid)? Why do the bad guys fuck around with the coral torture thing, when lead guy is just kind of a black market dealer of gizmos to the Russians with no personal master plan or vendetta against Bond? Some of that sounds like nitpicking I know but seriously like every two minutes watching that movie you're like "why the fuck are they doing THAT?"

Live and Let Die I enjoy, but that may be just bcz I have a soft spot for yaphet koto

Living Daylights holds up pretty well

john glen was a bond series MVP. Though I think as far as directors go martin campbell's work on goldeneye and especially casino royale is so good, mctiernan good.

it's been a long time since i've seen license to kill but iirc it's really mean and unpleasant in a way that doesn't feel very "bond." casino royale is in a lot of ways the right way to make license to kill

I want to dress like this
http://news.doddleme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Screen-Shot-2015-07-22-at-4.00.51-PM-300x184.png

but Joe Don Baker played a villain named Whittaker!

I feel like the current Bond series has a very short window to get a Joe Don Baker cameo in, but they should try

license to kill is fun as a canon pictures bond flick

i'm just going to pretend i didn't see you fuckers dissing thunderball

Live and Let Die I enjoy, but that may be just bcz I have a soft spot for yaphet koto

― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl)

Live and Let Die is fun in a batshit ignore-the-racism way, and it's the only Moore entry in which you can see why they cast him - he possesses a suavity in it which he seemed to abandon him completely in later entries.

Feel like if Living Daylights were tightened up a bit (we get to Afghanistan right around the time it feels like the movie has to be ending soon), if they'd figured out more precisely what they wanted to do with Bond's relationship with the cellist, and they'd cast someone better than Joe Don Baker for the main villain, it'd basically be top five. Dalton's great, the Gibraltar open is great, the ski/cello case is great, the assassin milk-delivery dude is great, the airplane/net thing at the very end is great... I mean it's very much going for a Casino Royale franchise reset, shooting for grittier, tougher, more "now" than the fuddy-duddy Moore films that preceded it, and I think it mostly pulls it off. (BTW it's kind of amazing to me the same guy directed everything from For Your Eyes Only through License to Kill.)

Kinda my take all around, and echoing comments above, John Glen was a pretty solid yeoman's director who worked twenty-plus years in the entire franchise. I don't think he ever directed a totally great film but Living and Eyes Only are the closest.

I do highly recommend Glen's book from a few years back, BTW -- I don't think it's gotten as much attention as it should, but as a story of both his filmmaking life in general and the Bond work in particular, it's really enjoyable, and a particular portrait of time/place as a franchise that had established itself as a particular high level affair had to figure out how to keep adjusting.

http://www.amazon.com/For-Eyes-Only-John-Glen/dp/1422358135

Great anecdote in there about the time Roger Moore demonstrated to him how to fold your suit and pants in luggage to prevent wrinkles. Moore WOULD know how to do that, and I want to know what his method is!

LTK is great imo. enjoyed the fact that the villains were strictly b-movie dudes (except benicio del toro, who was quite memorable) and how it feels like an extended episode of Miami vice refitted for Bond. Also iirc the original title was "licence revoked" but they thought "revoked" was too big a word for american audiences. quantum of solace of course goes does easy title wise.

IIRC they were originally thinking (since practically all the original story titles from Fleming were used up at that point, though "Quantum" obv slipped through later) that they might go ahead and start looking at John Gardner's 1980s official book franchise contributions as sources for further films. The first one of those was License Renewed; License Revoked is a pretty obvious nod to that, at least.

I struggled with the Miami-Vice-episode quality as a lot of people I think do, but I think eventually it got larger-than-life enough to feel Bond-ish. Thought Davi's villain was really good, first credible threat in a while, and a great case of 'spy stuff' with Bond posing as an assassin-for-hire and infiltrating his confidences (a bit abruptly-handled but cool). Del Toro as henchman was sadly underused but fun. Big chase at the end was a blast, lots of "aahahahahah they went for it!" moments. Also Anthony Zerbe gets inflated til he pops. The love interests are both lame though IIRC. Maybe the one thing it needs is a little more change of scenery; the plot and the scope of Davi's scheme don't really allow for him to hop between continents, but maybe this is why people think it feels less Bond-ish? (Bond generally is obviously a surrogate agent of the bygone British Empire; his freedom of movement throughout the global Anglosphere and near neighbors, the magic power of the British passport blown up into the License to Kill, is his means of protecting old dowdy colonials and their iced drinks from the Threats Of The Liberated Other etc etc etc. So having him stuck the entire time in the Caribbean - Dr. No notwithstanding - just isn't "Bond" maybe.)

People have the impression that it was this underperforming dud and that Dalton was let go for it, but my understanding is that the rights fell into some kind of limbo, and it was taking so long to work it out that Dalton exercised an option to bail in his contract and they thus went back to Brosnan who they had wanted in the first place (but for Remington Steele tying him up). LTK didn't do great in the US but according to Wiki it was, worldwide, "the twelfth-biggest box office draw of the year."

Stepping back a bit to your earlier point, DC: The Living Daylights as very self-conscious reboot is a bit missed now, but it was definitely the case -- it was also the 25th anniversary of the franchise and that fact was played up as much as the 50th was for Skyfall. It's interesting to see the changes they did and didn't do -- Dalton as darker/cynical Bond is the most obvious one (him talking about having read the books directly was much mentioned), a new Moneypenny for the first time since the start, a certain sense in the air that the feel of the Cold War is juuust starting to go a bit (which four years after Octopussy is a pretty notable change -- and I think the whole nuclear bomb sequence towards the end is a bit underrated, thinking of moments like Berkoff's death scene and how Moore, playing Bond in a clown costume no less, is actually able to convey not merely urgency but angry, honest fear that it's all about to go to unavoidable hell). Then in contrast, M remains the same, Q is Q, lots of overt jokes, etc. etc.

Dalton was amazing and License.. has one of THE best theme songs.

Robert Davi was cast following a suggestion by Broccoli's daughter Tina,[4] and screenwriter Richard Maibaum, who had seen Davi in the television film Terrorist on Trial: The United States vs. Salim Ajami.[18] To portray Sanchez, Davi researched on the Colombian drug cartels and how to do a Colombian accent,[8] and since he was method acting, he would stay in character off-set. After Davi read Casino Royale for preparation, he decided to turn Sanchez into a "mirror image" of James Bond, based on Ian Fleming's descriptions of Le Chiffre.[4] The actor also learned scuba diving for the scene where Sanchez is rescued from the sunken armoured car.[8]

Davi later helped out on the casting of Sanchez's mistress Lupe Lamora, by playing Bond in the audition,[6] with Talisa Soto being picked from twelve candidates because Davi expressed he "would kill for her".[4]