Good points about the city hall part of the film and firetruck chase not being so hot. In my recent viewing of it a few weeks back I actually skipped that entire part of the movie.
Goldfinger on Sunday. While I have always enjoyed the first half of the film, in my opinion it goes flat after Bond is taken to America up until the point he gets locked in the vault.
LTK is on on Saturday (HD) so I will be watching that. I did watch TLD but, although I enjoy certain parts, it is not one of my favourites. To me one of its faults is that there is no real strong villain.
The last Bond film I watched was the 1954 version of Casino Royale with Barry Nelson. My first time ever seeing it, in fact. Needless to say, it was an interesting watch.
Also, random question, but I have read online that Safin was mentioned in Spectre (the film), before appearing proper in No Time to Die. Where was Safin first mentioned though? What was the line/dialogue? I've seen Spectre twice and I never noticed that before.
"A man once came to our house to kill my father. He didn't know I was upstairs playing in my bedroom, or that Papa kept a Beretta 9mm under the sink with the bleach. That's why I hate guns."
I could have gone to my local Vue and caught this on the big screen, but as it's IMO a minor entry in the Bond canon, I didn't see why I needed to shell out hard earned cash when ITV was handily repeating it for me at almost the same time:
Licence to Kill isn't a bad film; no Bond film is a bad film, there are just good Bond movies and bad Bond movies. However, the tone of this one is completely off from the get go and never shifts from its insane veering of revenge to humour to romance to intrigue to action hero. About the only thing missing is some actual espionage. That's done by some Hong Kong narcotics guys who get killed off midway. Bond is oblivious to everyone and their motives and makes a right hash up of his personal assassination attempt. It doesn't help that his two most reliable assistants, the villain's mistress and a CIA plant, don't ever tell him what they know until it's all too late.
I hate the opening PTS of this film. The whole wedding thing is sentimental and rubbish. Della would have walked from the altar. Leiter acts a twit. Bond is the world's worst best man. The DEA sends one helicopter, two agents and a couple of wedding guests to apprehend South America's most notorious drugs lord. Meanwhile said drug lord is whipping his adulterous mistress [can a mistress be adulterous?] and she appears to enjoy it. More hijinks in planes. A parachute jump. Everyone loves Bond and Leiter and the credits cut in. Maurice Binder was well past his prime by now and these credits are just dull dull dull. No need to get excited about silhouetted nipples like we did in the seventies. I could pop down the video show and hire an XXX movie for something more revealing than that.
It doesn't get any better for the first hour. Timothy Dalton smokes a lot [hurrah!] and looks grim faced. There are moments in this movie when I can almost see Daniel Craig itching to escape like a baby Alien trapped in Dalton's stomach. The scene at the airport for instance where Bond learns Sanchez has escaped; or the brief skit at Krest's marine warehouse where he's obviously suspicious; the dalliance with Lupe on the Wavekrest. Overall though, Dalton is simply glum and often seems to be inhabiting a completely different film. No, scratch that: he's in the right film, it's everyone else who's got it wrong, being either too offhandedly silly or too damn serious. This is a screenplay issue. It's a dud. I can't explain how many times I cringe hearing the dialogue in this one. The addition of a few swear words perks it up, but without a decent screenwriter, your characters will appear shallow and nonsensical. So, there they are. Bond becomes an obsessive avenging killer. Sanchez is a psycho with deep pockets. Truman Lodge is a high flying money obsessed accountant. Killifer a self-centred CIA stooge. Leiter an imbecile. Della an unfortunate. Lupe a whore. Pam is easily pleased. The only one who comes out of this with stars is Q, that's for Desmond Llewelyn's comic timing. Well, in fairness, Robert Davi is a great bad guy, but he's a one-dimensional bad guy.
Things pick up in the unreal Isthmus City, but the film is already stretching two Ian Fleming scenes to breaking point and it has to branch out somewhere. At this point, I'm more interested in Lupe and the idea of betrayal within, perhaps for love. But Pam Bouvier keeps sticking her nose and ever erect nipples into the plot and distracting Bond from exactly the sort of woman Ian Fleming usually has him falling for: someone who needs rescuing and whose past is creeping up on her. Pam is a virtual saint. "Bless you, my child!"
Oh, yes, Wayne Newton as Joe Butcher. A cute angle this which I enjoy. A little deception to sell drugs via a religious fund raising sanctuary. Now that has legs. So does Carey Lowell. And Talisa Soto. But only one has nipples. Benicio del Toro is great in a minor role as a henchman. He needed more screen time. Others should have bitten the dust, like El Presidente. It proceeds quite swiftly and when Bond and Sanchez share a couple of 1-2-1s, the tension increases in spades. Much like Bond's $10,000 chips at the casino. You sense two actors who really understand their game, but are being hamstrung by the product and corporation surrounding them. The plot resolves itself at a strange meditation centre, which looks odd even for James Bond. The exteriors are a real location. The studio sets look too small. And I kept asking myself why all the Chinese drug barons carry suitcases. Bond almost carps it, but he's sown the seeds of doubt in the villain's mind and once Sanchez is out of control, it's a recipe for mayhem. So it proves. There are some nasty murders and a crazy petrol tanker chase at the film's climax.
Look. I didn't dislike it. I wonder, though, if a new director might have been required. John Glen had done decent work on FYEO, but he was treading water ever since and his touch is seriously heavy handed here. He isn't helped by the script, sure, but even so. My lasting memory is Dalton's shocked expression as he's almost impaled on a marlin spike during the Barrelhead Bar fight. Saturday morning cartoons spring to mind. Dear oh me...
Thanks for your observations on LTK, @chrisno1 For reasons you know about - https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1047555#Comment_1047555 - I can't quite count LTK as 'the last Bond film I've seen'. Not until tomorrow evening, anyway. Right now, it's the last Bond film of which I've seen two thirds!
I mostly disagree with you about LTK. For me, it's a gem of a movie. Yes, there are flaws, but to my mind it had the most engrossing story of any Bond film for years. At times, it reminds me of what it feels like when watching FRWL, an absolute classic, despite the differences of period and milieu. I'd certainly rate it as the best of John Glen's entries in the series, over and above FYEO.
That said, as with any Bond film - perhaps particularly the Glen ones - I don't think commercial TV serves it well as a viewing context.
Of course, it's fine to disagree; part of the enjoyment of this site is in reading others' opinions and getting different takes on things! I've now expanded my own review of LTK to one character short of the maximum permitted for a single post: the link's in the above link!
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I think @chrisno1 summed it up quite well but other observations I might add are Milton Krest has one of the most gruesome Bond deaths in the franchise. 'You earned it, you keep it, Old Buddy' is one of my favourite Bond quotes and finally, Timothy dalton looks super hot in a wet suit.
Part of the fun of reading other posters reviews is seeing how different we are when we see a film. For me, LTK is the best Bond outside of the original 6 from the 60’s. It was something different and Timothy Dalton is the closest anyone has got to portraying the Bond of the books. So whilst I disagree with most of what @chrisno1 wrote, it is interesting to see, from my point of view, how he gets it all wrong 😁😉
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I might agree with @chrisno1 in terms of the film's quality and the scripts like some dialogues that didn't land off well to me "I love James so much" everyone?
Opposite for me is I didn't liked Wayne Newton and the whole Olympatec Meditation Institute lair like building, it's kinda bit weird for me.
It also felt like a TV Movie akin to Miami Vice and Lethal Weapon or Heck even Die Hard!
Also some of the comic things in this movie was felt out of place like the toothpaste gadget, Q and his broom camera, the camera that Pam used to captured Bond and Q's skeletons, it felt out of place.
The movie itself I was not a fan of, the thing that I liked about it were Timothy Dalton, his chemistry with Carey Lowell and Robert Davi (the actor himself, not the character).
The rest, I'm pretty mixed.
I agree, I also didn't liked the wedding scene in the PTS, though the stunts that they made on that scene was great.
But this film was definitely an improvement over TLD for me which had the weak villains, inconsistent and muddled plot and where Dalton didn't quite fit in because that film had the left offs of Roger Moore and some remnants of Brosnan (as he was originally intended for the role).
I saw LTK in an Odeon cinema last night - the whole of it; no technical issues, this time! - and the film just keeps going up in my estimation. It's a gripping, absorbing movie. Glen's direction is busy, full of classy touches, and there are many brilliant notes in performance throughout.
Even though it sought in its day to break the mould in some respects, LTK exudes a fine-grained sense of engagement with all that has gone before. I'd go so far as to say that LTK is the last of the classic Bond films, the final apple to fall from Broccoli's original tree. Certainly there was a long hiatus between LTK and GE, with some long-standing contributors to the series either passing away or ending their involvement during that interim, Richard Maibaum among them.
Much as I'm entertained by Martin Campbell's two entries in the series, by TND, TWINE and many elements in all other subsequent Bond films, the Brosnan and Craig films feel to me increasingly like 'post-Bond' Bond movies, repeatedly toying with an idea that Bond is out of (his) time and eventually (during the new millenium) evolving into 'fan fiction on film'.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Re your other review of LTK and how it narrowly got ahead of a real-life terrorist attack on an airliner, its successor GoldenEye had a similar lucky escape. I have to say I felt uneasy about Xenia Onnatopp's sadistic machine gunning of civilians, not to mention its preceding scene that evoked the recent Schindler's List - personnel being timed and tested, but how much worse had it been delayed by a few months, when the Dunblane gun massacre occurred - no way would that scene have gone across well in the UK.
Yes, the risks of sailing close to the wind when it comes to edgy topicality, or of ratcheting up the violence of a villain's evil deeds to establish their villainy.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Saw a fair bit of GoldenEye on ITV HD last night, the print was very good. The look and camera angles of the film just work for me, it has. a polished feel to it. All this is in contrast to the poor attempt at humour throughout - not so much one-liners as non-liners. It reminds me of what TV personality Barry Took wrote about one dodgy Dennis Waterman comedy, it wasn't so much written by humorists as 'cheerfulists' - characters making would-be amusing comments that aren't actually funny, just perky. There's an awful running joke between Bond and Natalya that goes 'I'm fine, thanks for asking!' which doesn't quite work anyway because the chemistry just isn't there, they are not actually on screen that much, other lines provoke a 'huh?' such as Treveleyn's boast that he and Bond share everything - but again, she and Bond aren't actually an item at that point, they've just met, so it doesn't mean much or even make sense. The reunion between Bond and 006 at Statue Park just doesn't work for me, a load of dialogue shoehorned in without pausing for breath... Or, before that, Valentin excusing the shooting of the Cossacks by saying they are a 'cruel race'... really? Well that's okay then. Just two years after Schindler's List... very odd though I understand the Severniya massacre was thankfully trimmed down for the TV version.
Ditto. Very much enjoyed it. I agree with @Napoleon Plural that the humour is a bit leaden in places and the romance doesn't work. Some scenes could and should have been ditched. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Very impressive on the big screen in Croydon.
Notwithstanding your and Shady Tree's enjoyable reviews on the other page, the film is crap. 😃
I'm reminded of how 006 keeps saying, I've got the better of you, Bond, admit it! This even happens after Bond has single-handedly - okay, with help from Natalya - dismantled his entire operation and it's in rubble.
Trevelyan says "I was always better!" when he thinks he's beaten Bond in the toughest bout of hand-to-hand combat seen in a Bond picture since Connery (though the scrap between Necros and Green Four in TLD comes close!) The fact that Trevelyan's plot to send London back to the Dark Ages has already come to nothing seems beside the point, to him, after such a full-on punch-up!
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
As Bond picks up Natalya and carries her - somewhat unnecessarily towards a waiting chopper (!) and The Experience of Love kicks in - you can hear just under the whirr of the blades a muffled voice shouting - Bean's Yorkshire accent giving itself away at times like this - 'I faked every orgasm!!!'
I'll give you that when Trevelyan gets angry with Boris and Natalya after she's changed the access codes, Bean's Yorkshire accent comes through slightly (changing the accent codes?): "Deal with it!/ Then get on with it!/ Tell him, now!"
As anyone who's walked through the centre of Sheffield on a Saturday night might understand, Trevelyan's evident usefulness in hand-to-hand combat hardly comes as a surprise!
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I watched Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only today. Introduced my 7 year old to Bond. Told my daughter I met Richard Kiel (Jaws) at a convention once. She told me not to meet him again, because he bites.
It's a funny thing that happens sometimes. You notice something, that you realize was always there, but you never noticed it before even though you've seen it tens of times before!
For me it came with a question: M:"Would you care for a drink?" JB:"Thank you, your predecessor kept some cognac on the.." M:"I prefer bourbon!" M then proceeds to pour for herself and Bond some Tennessee sourmash on the rocks.
That's when it hit me! Before I knew it, I was thinking "now why would you do that?".... Why would M deny cognac/brandy from Bond, even though there are those two crystal decanters right there behind her head on the self. 2 decanters, 2 different hues of amber liquid. For a some one who enjoys whisky/whiskey/cognac, it's obvious; she does have cognac! Well brandy of some sorts at least. And proper whisky. She can swig all that Jack Daniels rot gut all she wants, but why deny Bond his bidding?
The more I watch Judy Dench as M, the more she comes of as this petty, micromanaging, two-bit office Hitler. IF wrote, that M was someone Bond loved and respected, I don't see JDs M as some one that her senior employees would respect.
"I mean, she almost kills bond...with her ass."
-Mr Arlington Beech
Comments
Good points about the city hall part of the film and firetruck chase not being so hot. In my recent viewing of it a few weeks back I actually skipped that entire part of the movie.
"Better make that two."
Goldfinger on Sunday. While I have always enjoyed the first half of the film, in my opinion it goes flat after Bond is taken to America up until the point he gets locked in the vault.
LTK is on on Saturday (HD) so I will be watching that. I did watch TLD but, although I enjoy certain parts, it is not one of my favourites. To me one of its faults is that there is no real strong villain.
I would have liked to have seen this!
I know AVTAK is not a favourite of many people but it has always been one of mine since I first became interested in the JB films.
The last Bond film I watched was the 1954 version of Casino Royale with Barry Nelson. My first time ever seeing it, in fact. Needless to say, it was an interesting watch.
Also, random question, but I have read online that Safin was mentioned in Spectre (the film), before appearing proper in No Time to Die. Where was Safin first mentioned though? What was the line/dialogue? I've seen Spectre twice and I never noticed that before.
Well, not by name surely. Only perhaps the time Swann refers to the assassin sent to kill her father Mr White - no real detail given however.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Oh, okay, that must've been it then. It was an indirect mention. Still though, does anyone remember exactly what she said? Which scene was it?
"A man once came to our house to kill my father. He didn't know I was upstairs playing in my bedroom, or that Papa kept a Beretta 9mm under the sink with the bleach. That's why I hate guns."
On the train heading for Blofeld's place.
Thanks! 😊
I could have gone to my local Vue and caught this on the big screen, but as it's IMO a minor entry in the Bond canon, I didn't see why I needed to shell out hard earned cash when ITV was handily repeating it for me at almost the same time:
Licence to Kill isn't a bad film; no Bond film is a bad film, there are just good Bond movies and bad Bond movies. However, the tone of this one is completely off from the get go and never shifts from its insane veering of revenge to humour to romance to intrigue to action hero. About the only thing missing is some actual espionage. That's done by some Hong Kong narcotics guys who get killed off midway. Bond is oblivious to everyone and their motives and makes a right hash up of his personal assassination attempt. It doesn't help that his two most reliable assistants, the villain's mistress and a CIA plant, don't ever tell him what they know until it's all too late.
I hate the opening PTS of this film. The whole wedding thing is sentimental and rubbish. Della would have walked from the altar. Leiter acts a twit. Bond is the world's worst best man. The DEA sends one helicopter, two agents and a couple of wedding guests to apprehend South America's most notorious drugs lord. Meanwhile said drug lord is whipping his adulterous mistress [can a mistress be adulterous?] and she appears to enjoy it. More hijinks in planes. A parachute jump. Everyone loves Bond and Leiter and the credits cut in. Maurice Binder was well past his prime by now and these credits are just dull dull dull. No need to get excited about silhouetted nipples like we did in the seventies. I could pop down the video show and hire an XXX movie for something more revealing than that.
It doesn't get any better for the first hour. Timothy Dalton smokes a lot [hurrah!] and looks grim faced. There are moments in this movie when I can almost see Daniel Craig itching to escape like a baby Alien trapped in Dalton's stomach. The scene at the airport for instance where Bond learns Sanchez has escaped; or the brief skit at Krest's marine warehouse where he's obviously suspicious; the dalliance with Lupe on the Wavekrest. Overall though, Dalton is simply glum and often seems to be inhabiting a completely different film. No, scratch that: he's in the right film, it's everyone else who's got it wrong, being either too offhandedly silly or too damn serious. This is a screenplay issue. It's a dud. I can't explain how many times I cringe hearing the dialogue in this one. The addition of a few swear words perks it up, but without a decent screenwriter, your characters will appear shallow and nonsensical. So, there they are. Bond becomes an obsessive avenging killer. Sanchez is a psycho with deep pockets. Truman Lodge is a high flying money obsessed accountant. Killifer a self-centred CIA stooge. Leiter an imbecile. Della an unfortunate. Lupe a whore. Pam is easily pleased. The only one who comes out of this with stars is Q, that's for Desmond Llewelyn's comic timing. Well, in fairness, Robert Davi is a great bad guy, but he's a one-dimensional bad guy.
Things pick up in the unreal Isthmus City, but the film is already stretching two Ian Fleming scenes to breaking point and it has to branch out somewhere. At this point, I'm more interested in Lupe and the idea of betrayal within, perhaps for love. But Pam Bouvier keeps sticking her nose and ever erect nipples into the plot and distracting Bond from exactly the sort of woman Ian Fleming usually has him falling for: someone who needs rescuing and whose past is creeping up on her. Pam is a virtual saint. "Bless you, my child!"
Oh, yes, Wayne Newton as Joe Butcher. A cute angle this which I enjoy. A little deception to sell drugs via a religious fund raising sanctuary. Now that has legs. So does Carey Lowell. And Talisa Soto. But only one has nipples. Benicio del Toro is great in a minor role as a henchman. He needed more screen time. Others should have bitten the dust, like El Presidente. It proceeds quite swiftly and when Bond and Sanchez share a couple of 1-2-1s, the tension increases in spades. Much like Bond's $10,000 chips at the casino. You sense two actors who really understand their game, but are being hamstrung by the product and corporation surrounding them. The plot resolves itself at a strange meditation centre, which looks odd even for James Bond. The exteriors are a real location. The studio sets look too small. And I kept asking myself why all the Chinese drug barons carry suitcases. Bond almost carps it, but he's sown the seeds of doubt in the villain's mind and once Sanchez is out of control, it's a recipe for mayhem. So it proves. There are some nasty murders and a crazy petrol tanker chase at the film's climax.
Look. I didn't dislike it. I wonder, though, if a new director might have been required. John Glen had done decent work on FYEO, but he was treading water ever since and his touch is seriously heavy handed here. He isn't helped by the script, sure, but even so. My lasting memory is Dalton's shocked expression as he's almost impaled on a marlin spike during the Barrelhead Bar fight. Saturday morning cartoons spring to mind. Dear oh me...
Thanks for your observations on LTK, @chrisno1 For reasons you know about - https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1047555#Comment_1047555 - I can't quite count LTK as 'the last Bond film I've seen'. Not until tomorrow evening, anyway. Right now, it's the last Bond film of which I've seen two thirds!
I mostly disagree with you about LTK. For me, it's a gem of a movie. Yes, there are flaws, but to my mind it had the most engrossing story of any Bond film for years. At times, it reminds me of what it feels like when watching FRWL, an absolute classic, despite the differences of period and milieu. I'd certainly rate it as the best of John Glen's entries in the series, over and above FYEO.
That said, as with any Bond film - perhaps particularly the Glen ones - I don't think commercial TV serves it well as a viewing context.
Of course, it's fine to disagree; part of the enjoyment of this site is in reading others' opinions and getting different takes on things! I've now expanded my own review of LTK to one character short of the maximum permitted for a single post: the link's in the above link!
I also last watched LTK on Itv on Saturday.
I think @chrisno1 summed it up quite well but other observations I might add are Milton Krest has one of the most gruesome Bond deaths in the franchise. 'You earned it, you keep it, Old Buddy' is one of my favourite Bond quotes and finally, Timothy dalton looks super hot in a wet suit.
Part of the fun of reading other posters reviews is seeing how different we are when we see a film. For me, LTK is the best Bond outside of the original 6 from the 60’s. It was something different and Timothy Dalton is the closest anyone has got to portraying the Bond of the books. So whilst I disagree with most of what @chrisno1 wrote, it is interesting to see, from my point of view, how he gets it all wrong 😁😉
I might agree with @chrisno1 in terms of the film's quality and the scripts like some dialogues that didn't land off well to me "I love James so much" everyone?
Opposite for me is I didn't liked Wayne Newton and the whole Olympatec Meditation Institute lair like building, it's kinda bit weird for me.
It also felt like a TV Movie akin to Miami Vice and Lethal Weapon or Heck even Die Hard!
Also some of the comic things in this movie was felt out of place like the toothpaste gadget, Q and his broom camera, the camera that Pam used to captured Bond and Q's skeletons, it felt out of place.
The movie itself I was not a fan of, the thing that I liked about it were Timothy Dalton, his chemistry with Carey Lowell and Robert Davi (the actor himself, not the character).
The rest, I'm pretty mixed.
I agree, I also didn't liked the wedding scene in the PTS, though the stunts that they made on that scene was great.
But this film was definitely an improvement over TLD for me which had the weak villains, inconsistent and muddled plot and where Dalton didn't quite fit in because that film had the left offs of Roger Moore and some remnants of Brosnan (as he was originally intended for the role).
I saw LTK in an Odeon cinema last night - the whole of it; no technical issues, this time! - and the film just keeps going up in my estimation. It's a gripping, absorbing movie. Glen's direction is busy, full of classy touches, and there are many brilliant notes in performance throughout.
Even though it sought in its day to break the mould in some respects, LTK exudes a fine-grained sense of engagement with all that has gone before. I'd go so far as to say that LTK is the last of the classic Bond films, the final apple to fall from Broccoli's original tree. Certainly there was a long hiatus between LTK and GE, with some long-standing contributors to the series either passing away or ending their involvement during that interim, Richard Maibaum among them.
Much as I'm entertained by Martin Campbell's two entries in the series, by TND, TWINE and many elements in all other subsequent Bond films, the Brosnan and Craig films feel to me increasingly like 'post-Bond' Bond movies, repeatedly toying with an idea that Bond is out of (his) time and eventually (during the new millenium) evolving into 'fan fiction on film'.
Re your other review of LTK and how it narrowly got ahead of a real-life terrorist attack on an airliner, its successor GoldenEye had a similar lucky escape. I have to say I felt uneasy about Xenia Onnatopp's sadistic machine gunning of civilians, not to mention its preceding scene that evoked the recent Schindler's List - personnel being timed and tested, but how much worse had it been delayed by a few months, when the Dunblane gun massacre occurred - no way would that scene have gone across well in the UK.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yes, the risks of sailing close to the wind when it comes to edgy topicality, or of ratcheting up the violence of a villain's evil deeds to establish their villainy.
Saw a fair bit of GoldenEye on ITV HD last night, the print was very good. The look and camera angles of the film just work for me, it has. a polished feel to it. All this is in contrast to the poor attempt at humour throughout - not so much one-liners as non-liners. It reminds me of what TV personality Barry Took wrote about one dodgy Dennis Waterman comedy, it wasn't so much written by humorists as 'cheerfulists' - characters making would-be amusing comments that aren't actually funny, just perky. There's an awful running joke between Bond and Natalya that goes 'I'm fine, thanks for asking!' which doesn't quite work anyway because the chemistry just isn't there, they are not actually on screen that much, other lines provoke a 'huh?' such as Treveleyn's boast that he and Bond share everything - but again, she and Bond aren't actually an item at that point, they've just met, so it doesn't mean much or even make sense. The reunion between Bond and 006 at Statue Park just doesn't work for me, a load of dialogue shoehorned in without pausing for breath... Or, before that, Valentin excusing the shooting of the Cossacks by saying they are a 'cruel race'... really? Well that's okay then. Just two years after Schindler's List... very odd though I understand the Severniya massacre was thankfully trimmed down for the TV version.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I saw GE this weekend at the cinema and my own thoughts are here:
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1047861#Comment_1047861
Ditto. Very much enjoyed it. I agree with @Napoleon Plural that the humour is a bit leaden in places and the romance doesn't work. Some scenes could and should have been ditched. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Very impressive on the big screen in Croydon.
Notwithstanding your and Shady Tree's enjoyable reviews on the other page, the film is crap. 😃
I'm reminded of how 006 keeps saying, I've got the better of you, Bond, admit it! This even happens after Bond has single-handedly - okay, with help from Natalya - dismantled his entire operation and it's in rubble.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Trevelyan says "I was always better!" when he thinks he's beaten Bond in the toughest bout of hand-to-hand combat seen in a Bond picture since Connery (though the scrap between Necros and Green Four in TLD comes close!) The fact that Trevelyan's plot to send London back to the Dark Ages has already come to nothing seems beside the point, to him, after such a full-on punch-up!
As Bond picks up Natalya and carries her - somewhat unnecessarily towards a waiting chopper (!) and The Experience of Love kicks in - you can hear just under the whirr of the blades a muffled voice shouting - Bean's Yorkshire accent giving itself away at times like this - 'I faked every orgasm!!!'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I couldn’t agree more - GE is the worst Bond film ever made. Brosnan looks like he’s PRETENDING to be James Bond.
It's called acting? 🤔
🙂🙂🙂
No it’s not acting, it’s someone who thinks he can act as James Bond but has no idea of how to do it 🙂
I'll give you that when Trevelyan gets angry with Boris and Natalya after she's changed the access codes, Bean's Yorkshire accent comes through slightly (changing the accent codes?): "Deal with it!/ Then get on with it!/ Tell him, now!"
As anyone who's walked through the centre of Sheffield on a Saturday night might understand, Trevelyan's evident usefulness in hand-to-hand combat hardly comes as a surprise!
I watched Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only today. Introduced my 7 year old to Bond. Told my daughter I met Richard Kiel (Jaws) at a convention once. She told me not to meet him again, because he bites.
We had a good time though.
Goldeneye on Monday.
It's a funny thing that happens sometimes. You notice something, that you realize was always there, but you never noticed it before even though you've seen it tens of times before!
For me it came with a question: M:"Would you care for a drink?" JB:"Thank you, your predecessor kept some cognac on the.." M:"I prefer bourbon!" M then proceeds to pour for herself and Bond some Tennessee sourmash on the rocks.
That's when it hit me! Before I knew it, I was thinking "now why would you do that?".... Why would M deny cognac/brandy from Bond, even though there are those two crystal decanters right there behind her head on the self. 2 decanters, 2 different hues of amber liquid. For a some one who enjoys whisky/whiskey/cognac, it's obvious; she does have cognac! Well brandy of some sorts at least. And proper whisky. She can swig all that Jack Daniels rot gut all she wants, but why deny Bond his bidding?
The more I watch Judy Dench as M, the more she comes of as this petty, micromanaging, two-bit office Hitler. IF wrote, that M was someone Bond loved and respected, I don't see JDs M as some one that her senior employees would respect.
-Mr Arlington Beech
The evil queen of whiskey, perhaps.
Evil queen of tumblers! 😄
Roger Moore 1927-2017