which is the best James Bond movie?

The highs of Goldeneye are series highs tho, and so many of them are terribly paced that that almost doesn't even apply.

Last time I tried to watch OHMSS it was soooooo slooooooooooow

re: goldeneye, i am so tired by the time bond drives a tank through saint petersburg. and that's like, what, the halfway mark?

imo *prepares for no one to agree with me* the best brosnan movie is the world is not enough

the action in ohmss is filmed and edited so beautifully that who gives a shit how slow it is, i love slow

omg TWINE is in my bottom five of all bonds ever. DAD gets a bad rap and there is some very dumb stuff in there but at least you have halle berry and that cool swordfight and.... okay that might be about it but still. the only pleasure TWINE has given me is chuckles over the bad guy's ludicrous gimmick that a bullet in his brain is causing him to become more and more impaired and ineffective as the movie goes on. the rest is sooooooo forgettable and generic and dull except for how terrrrrible denise richards is. honestly i kinda think Tomorrow Never Dies is the sleeper hit of that bunch - jonathan pryce as rupert murdoch! handcuffed-together motorcycle chase antics with michelle yeoh! properly cartoonish torturer henchmen! a genuinely diverting afternoon's entertainment, though you'd probably still be better off watching Supercop and pretending Jackie Chan is actually playing James Bond in a surprise recasting decision post-Dalton.

I love slow if it's Mohsen Makhmalbaf, not George Lazenby sassing his way through

DAD gets a bad rap and there is some very dumb stuff in there but at least you have halle berry and that cool swordfight and.... okay that might be about it but still.

berry is worse than denise richards in that movie ffs. the swordfight is good but die another day is shot like a sequel to xxx, it looks unbelievably horrible

the rest is sooooooo forgettable

the rest is "bond gets betrayed by someone he actually falls in love with" which RULES imo

re: goldeneye, i am so tired by the time bond drives a tank through saint petersburg. and that's like, what, the halfway mark?

this is totally otm, i can remember thinking exactly the same thing in the cinema during that exact scene

I think i enjoyed DAD more than any other Broz bond, because it's the only one that's dumb fun when your expectations are lowered. the first two are boring and TWINE is just insanely lame

...I'd still rather see any of them than Spectre again

Also thank you for the reminder to finish watching The Spy Who Loved Me, I'll do that now

i haven't seen TWINE since it came out but I remember liking it much more than Tomorrow Never Dies, or Die Another Day later on.

Goldeneye is about as good as the best Moore movies, though not as good as Martin Campbell's work in Casino Royale, which was the best Bond since the Connery ones for certain. not sure why they gave Sam Mendes two consecutive Bonds, his direction and staging is vv pretty but cinematically inert even when things are moving swiftly. Campbell made the two best Bonds of the post-Dalton era (maybe including the Dalton era.)

i will never understand enjoyment of Brosnan Bond. i find those movies overstuffed and fuuuuuhuuucking stupid. Tomorrow Never Dies is kinda watchable & that is not saying much

thus endeth my grumpy post

I know it was hobbled by the writers' strike (Daniel Craig wound up writing some of it himself iirc) and QoS is superficially interesting in some ways but it really is amazing just how badly Marc Forster fucked up on his turn at bat

i love QoS so maybe my argument is invalid idk

again it has interesting aspects (it's refreshingly short and low-stakes, Kurylenko is good, Amalric is hilariously out of place) but the execution is inept and the action is below Greengrass levels of comprehensibility

i think the pleasures of something like Casino Royale are that it's such a classically composed, cleanly shot, clearly staged thriller w/a compelling cast, and that it's not just a good Bond film but a great action film. i think the producers overthought things at least creatively, being influenced too much by the gloomy Nolan-type blockbusters for the last two, and a bit too much by the Bourne films for QoS. I guess Spectre was an effort to return to some semblance of classic Bond but they whiffed on that one too. CR was refreshing because it just felt like the first Bond film in eons that wasn't campy or self-referential or a joke. Humorous enough to be charming, dark enough to hit hard when it had to, smart in all the right ways, and so on.

Solace is the only one i've ever written about.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/quantum-of-solace

I can't see Die Another Day getting many votes

The fact that it even got one vote, Jesus Christ. Visiting home and my mom ended up watching it this evening; seeing it again was just painful. So horribly 2002.

for your eyes only is awesome, partially for how much it breaks with bond traditions and also reduces the plot to pretty simple espionage. the underwater scenes are v gorgeous

octopussy's first half is p good but it loses a lot of steam when they get to the circus

Agree with both -- these were the first two Bonds I ever saw (thanks early 80s HBO running them constantly) so I'll always have a fondness. I'd argue that there's just enough tension in the defuse-the-bomb run to make it work. (Also I still can't get over Gaston from Gigi as the villain, as that was the only way I knew who Louis Jourdan was at the time.)

Die Another Day contains what are definitely the worst FX in the series with those ice floats.

I saw For Your Eyes Only in the theater with my dad so that movie has a special place in my heart, even if it does feature The World's Dumbest Henchman:

https://youtu.be/8FDX6_BSas8

Cinemark is showing The Spy Who Loved Me next month, think i might try to go. I've never seen it on the big screen!

Extremely challopsy stuff from the BFI here:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/007-great-underrated-james-bond-films

i like most of those movies but diamonds are forever is a soulless incoherent slog

TWINE is the only irredeemable one on that list.

again the world is not enough is good and die another day is horrible

I remember Die Another Day being pretty funny

If you treat it as parody it might work.

wait

is live and let die......good?

they're still all bad

OHMSS ofc

Live & Let Die is good-ish until it turns into the Dukes of Hazzard & you are stuck watching a chase that lasts 72 years

wait that doesnt compute, how can that be the bad part

live and let die rules, you're right deems

i revisited ohmss for christmas and yeah it's still the best one and is maybe my favorite action film of all time

LALD's chase is the one where a boat goes through a wedding cake yes

xp really have to give that a watch, i hear all the right things about it

anyway thus far (just david blained jane seymour into bed) this is a pretty cracking mix of blaxploitation, forsyth-swinger spy pad and moore being much more of a modern quipper than i remember from later bonds

it's moore's third best bond film imo (after for your eyes only and the spy who loved me) and it's remarkable to me that his initial approach to playing bond is even more severe than connery's! ofc afterward he leans into the camp

hmmm maybe a project for the new year....

they're still all bad

^^^

holy shit its the one with the exploding couch/shark as well?

/kotto

correct!

dont get me wrong, i love LALD but i hate the sherriff & the chase is SO long. Like, Thunderball underwater fight scene long. LONG.
it was the first James Bond movie i remember watching all the way through - it has a very “Saturday late night tv movie” look to me that i love (Enter the Dragon has this same nostalgic look/feel to me also)

i showered and got a wash on while the chase happened tbh

absolutely agree that the movie only benefits from dropping it, tonally as well as running time/tightness

the living daylights

^^^