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Best of 2016 - TV

16) Preacher – I am not familiar with the comic, but thought this was great. Interesting characters and well acted with its weird tone. Looking forward to season 2 whenever it arrives.

15) Mr. Robot- Sooo dark and well acted and twisty. It made the list and I still need to binge the last few episodes.

14) Vice Principles – Danny McBride seemingly doing his usual unhinged, but it turns out he's much more layered than what we are used to. Walton Goggins finally gets a comedy series and like the rest of the supporting cast, shines in the role.

13) Scorpion – Geniuses put in ludicrous situations and must problem solve their way out. Excellent mix of action, comedy and science class.

12) Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – Just as zany as the first season, but with some more emotion. Titus continues to be comedic gold and does well with his more substantial story.

11) Silicon Valley – Mike Judge's HBO series continues to be hilariously eccentric. The whole cast inhabit their characters perfectly, allowing for superb comedic interplay.

10) Last Man on Earth – I don't how it made it to TV, but I'm so glad it did. Forte's brand of humour isn't for everyone, but it is for me.

9) iZombie -  Cool mix of mystery and zombie show from the creator of Veronica Mars. Seeing Liv become a different character each week, while still retaining her essence, is an acting clinic.

8) Wynonna Earp – A badass, sarcastic, lady with a supernatural demon killing gun? Yes please. Add in humour, action and a roster of unique characters, you've got one of the best shows on TV.

7) The Good Place – A comedy about the afterlife that isn't religious at all. With an exceptional ensemble cast led by Kristin Bell, the hilarity just flows. Everyone is perfect in this real world looking cast and hopefully the show continues beyond this initial season.

6) Luke Cage – Marvel's first Netflix show outside Hell's Kitchen continues the high quality of the partnership. The change in perspective and location help keep the franchise from turning formulaic. Great performances and a not so straightforward plot, along with the soundtrack, are just a few of the highlights that make the show so good.

5) Sweet/Vicious – An MTV show about two college girls who team up to distribute vengeance on sex offenders. Great ass kickery and doesn't rely on cliches. I watched the first episode by walking is on the panel at New York Comicon and was hooked by its constant tone shifts and the soundtrack.

4) Daredevil – Season 2 of the Marvel Netflix show added Elektra and the Punisher and both shined. Both additions got complex storylines that allowed the actors to give great performances. The original cast does well with their evolving characters too.

3) Brooklyn Nine-Nine – The best comedy on TV. The large ensemble cast somehow get to be hilarious each episode. It's hard now to pick any stand outs from the cast, because everyone has become so good in their roles. The characters keep evolving and keep the show feeling fresh.

2) Banshee – I'm sad that this show is done, but what an ending. The hardcore brutality of the fight scenes made the show stand out and everyone involved got to kick some ass. The storytelling created a world so full of grey and you loved watching the characters live in it. Seek out and binge this totally underrated show..

1) Stranger Things – With its 80's setting, the multitude of sci-fi influences and its Goonies like cast, it would be pretty hard for me not to love this show. The kids are so good with their characters and the adults are no slouches either. All of its awards are well deserved. It has an awesome story and great acting, but the thing that stands out the most to me is the soundtrack. The vibe that the music gives the show makes it retro and modern at the same time, and it is great enough that I grabbed both volumes of the soundtrack when they came out.

2017 the look ahead:

Into the Badlands

Iron Fist

Defenders

Fargo

more Stranger Things

new iZombie

Punisher (hopefully maybe?)

[kyredperspective]

Best of 2016 - Movies

While not the best year for movies, nonetheless it's list time. The top 6 would be guarantees on any year end list, so with that in mind on with the show.

1. Rogue One – The story, the action, the acting, the Easter eggs, the Donnie Yen, all superb. I'm not sure yet where this falls on the overall Star Wars list yet, but for this year it grabs number one. It was an excellent capper to the year of Disney box office dominance.

2. Deadpool- The most surprising of all the year's superhero flicks, I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The perfect casting helped make it the big ball of crazy fun that it was. Here's hoping to many more instalments of Deadpool's unique adventures.

3. Zootopia-  A Disney adventure that rivals any of the Pixar tales, this was great for adults too. I'm a big fan of buddy cop movies and this belongs alongside the greats, with its perfect mix of action and comedy.

4. Captain America: Civil War- Another year, another great Marvel movie. Arguably the best series going for Marvel, this chapter showed no decline in quality. Some franchises have trouble balancing that many characters without having to introduce some majors, but amazingly everyone gets their time to shine.  

5. Doctor Strange- The trippiest Marvel film yet, proved to be an excellent origin story. The openinig sequence hooks you with its stunning visuals and the entire cast do an excellent job handling the ever shifting tone.

6. Headshot- TIFF Midnight Madness selection, action variety. Plot? Who cares. It's a showcase for Iko Uwais (The Raid) to fight a whole bunch of people. Awesome bloody gruesome fights.

7. Message From The King- An early TIFF view, this is a noirish detective tale starring Chadwick Boseman as a man searching for his sister. Boseman's character is an outsider in LA, having just arrived from South Africa and he must navigate the twisted LA world to seek answers. Well acted with good action and twists.

8. Star Trek Beyond – Simon Pegg's Star Trek is the first of the new series not tied to the originals and is a fun ride. Scotty and Jaylah make an excellent team and the rest of the supporting cast get their due too.

9. Arq- TIFF seen, Netflix produced, Arq was a cool Canadian apocalyptic sci-fi version of Groundhog Day. Not too much else could be said for fear of spoilers, but it's well worth a watch.

10. X-Men: Apocalypse- Needless to say the third instalment of this series is light years better than the third of the last series.

11. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back 12. The Nice Guys 13. London Has Fallen 14. Birth Of The Dragon 15. Below Her Mouth 16. Belko Experiment 17. Goldstone 18. The Limehouse Golem 19. (re)Assignment 20. City of Tiny Lights 21. The Unknown Girl 22. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates 23. The Brothers Grimsby 24. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping 25. Suicide Squad 26. Central Intelligence 27. Independence Day: Resurgence 28. Prevenge 29. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 30. Ride Along 2

I normally don't single out a worst movie, but when one is as bad as Salt & Fire it needs to done. Disappointingly bad.

From just looking at the trailers, 2017 looks to be a superior year to '16 in terms of quality. Here is a chronological list of the films I'm most looking forward to.

1. Underworld: Blood Wars 2. XXX: Return of Xander Cage 3. Lego Batman 4. John Wick 2 5. Fist Fight 6. Logan 7. Trainspotting 2 8. Kong: Skull Island 9. Fate of the Furious 10. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 11. Baywatch 12. POTC: Dead Men Tell No Tales 13. Wonder Woman 14. The Mummy 15. Transformers: The Last Knight 16. Despicable Me 3 17. Spider-Man Homecoming 18. Dunkirk 19. Blade Runner 2049 20. Kingsmen: The Golden Circle 21. Thor: Ragnarok 22. Justice League 23. Star Wars: Episode VIII 24. Jumanji

[kyredperspective]

The Best Movies of 2015

Here we go, 2015 has come to an end and now is the time for looking back and compiling best ofs. This particular best of is for movies, because well movies are my passion. The list is a top 30 one as this was a very good year for movies and not just the independent smaller ones, but also for the blockbuster studio flicks too. TIFF had another great year, but so did non festival fare, hence the lack of TIFF flicks at the very top. Without further ado, the list.

  30: Chappie – Largely forgotten now as it was released early in the year, this was a fun mix of action and sci-fi that barely anyone saw.

29: The Final Girls: A film that deals with the grief over losing a parent that is also a cross between Last Action Hero and your basic camp slasher flick. Mix in a healthy dose of comedy and you have this unique film that was part of TIFF's strong Midnight Madness program.

28: Len and Company: What could have been your typical midlife crisis flick is buoyed by terrific performances by everyone especially star Rhys Ifans. A very good soundtrack enhances this TIFF selection.

27: Disorder: Another TIFF film that crosses up genres, this time a bodyguard action film and a PTSD drama. This french film has great performances by the international cast and some good action and tension to go along with them.

26: 25 April: Here is another TIFF selection and is not the last one in this stretch. This film is an animated telling of soldiers diaries and letters from the Gallipoli battle fought during World War I by mainly Australian and New Zealand forces. This was an excellent capper to my European World Wars tour that I did in the summer.

25: Veteran: More TIFF goodness, this time from Korea. This one is a cop action slash drama in the same genre area as The French Connection, no wonder it was a huge hit in its native country.

24: Victoria: Keeping the TIFF streak alive here is another unique offering, this time from Germany. A genre hopping tale that is told in one take that has excellent performances by all involved. To give more details would spoil the experience of this wild night.

23: The Family Fang: After the hilarity of Bad Words, Jason Bateman returned to, you guessed it, TIFF with a dysfunctional family flick that while isn't as funny as his first one, lets him show a greater acting range. Nicole Kidman and Christopher Walken play a couple of Batemen's kooky family members and all do an excellent job balancing the comedy and drama.

22: Yakuza Apocalypse: TIFF's Midnight Madness + Takeshi Miike = the usual Miike insanity this time in the actionish genre. The fact that Miike was finally at a screening probably has some influence in its ranking.

21: Forsaken: Yep, more TIFF this time from the far away country of Canada. This one stars not one, but two Sutherlands and is in the western genre. Kiefer and Donald play a reconnecting father and son and the film does a good job of playing with the usual western tropes.

20: American Ultra: Didn't know what to expect going into this as I saw and read very little about it and then was surprised by just how crazy it was. It's sleeper spy action crossed with a stoner comedy, which makes for a unique blend of fun.

19: Legend: Aaand back to TIFF with two times the Tom Hardy. Hardy plays gangster twins in London of a few decades ago. The twins could not be any less alike and Hardy's duel performance is outstanding and the rest of the cast does well too.

18: Bang Gang: Part of a newly created TIFF program this was a French coming of age story. In order to deal with their adolescent troubles, a group of French teens decide to start an orgy type club. Everyone involved did great jobs from the composer to the director and the actors.

17: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: While not as good as I'd hoped it would be, Guy Richie gives it enough of his style and action to raise this above the average TV adaptation. The cast does well too in what may not be the best Richie flick, still does its job.

16: SPL 2: Tony Jaa in a Hong Kong action movie that was also a TIFF Midnight Madness selection. As expected, contains awesome action.

15: Ex Machina: Turing test twistiness and a small but excellent cast make this smaller film one of this years standouts.

14: Mr. Right: A Grosse Pointe Blank for Millennials with the always great Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell. There is great chemistry between the two and the mayhem they cause in their romance makes for a fun flick that was a nice pick me up on the last day of TIFF.

13: Sicario: Everyone involved is at the top of their game in this top notch character thriller. My second favourite of TIFF and in most other years this would be a top 5 flick, but this year was just too good.

12: Hardcore: My favourite of TIFF and the Midnight Madness standout is probably the most unique film of the year as it's a POV action flick. The face of the main character is never seen and the action and stunts are just insane. Whenever this comes out, find it and watch it, you will be entertained.

11: Spy: It seems that the partnership between director Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy is the comedy version of Scorsese/ De Niro with this yet another hilarious flick made by the two. Jason Statham gets to show off his underused comedy chops and McCarthy's frequent vicious putdowns make this the best comedy of the year.

10: Spectre: I have to watch this again and either skip the opening song or dub it with the Radiohead version, because I think the song they used may have soured the experience a bit. While not the best Bond flick, the action and the addition of Blofeld and more plot than usual raise it above most of the others.

9: Mission: Impossible- Rogue Nation: This franchise keeps getting better and Tom Cruise's stunts keep getting bigger and crazier. An excellent supporting cast that each gets their moments to shine help create the best entry yet. The airplane sequence alone was worth the price of admission.

8: The Martian: Great book adapted into a great movie, with an award worthy performance by Matt Damon. The humour turns what could have been a downer into an entertaining science fest.

7: Furious 7: Seven movies in and still going strong. The death of Paul Walker put a bit of a dark cloud on things, but a villainous Jason Statham was an excellent addition. There is still a lot of life left in this genre hopping franchise and judging by the massive amounts of money this brought in, I'm not the only one that thinks so.

6: Avengers: Age of Ultron: Marvel's all-star team is back together and trying to prevent another global catastrophe. The addition of a few new characters help keep the team dynamics fresh, without it feeling too bloated.

5: Ant-Man: This was a pleasant surprise after all the preproduction chaos. Edgar Wright leaving was worrisome, but this turned out to be super fun. Michael Pena should be in all Marvel movies from now on.

4: Kingsman: The Secret Service: This one came out of nowhere at the beginning of the year and in this the year of spies, this flick comes out on top. Both full of originality and homages to its genre peers, this is an adventure that leaves you wanting to see more.

3: Jurassic World: A pretty high nostalgia factor needed to be met and overcome and boy did it. Like another film that will appear on this list, Jurassic World serves as an excellent nod to the past and bridge to the future. The dino on dino on dino final fight pretty much guaranteed a high placement on this list.

2: Mad Max: Fury Road: I honestly didn't have high excitement for this until I saw a sizzle reel at Wondercon and then it jumped towards the top of my must see list. Saw this in D-Box and it was an amazing experience that put you closer to the action. A visceral experience for a visceral film.

1: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Just like Jurassic World, this is a nostalgic and a bridge film. Giving us classic characters and then adding such strong new characters, this film deserves all the billions coming its way. The countdown to May 24, 2017 can't move quick enough.

This concludes the look back for 2015 movies, coming soon the look forward.

[kyredperspective]

World War Tours

I recently got back from a trip that I took to Europe to take a tour. Now this was no ordinary tour to see the sights as you go through popular destinations every couple of days as I don't think that any of the places visited would be classified as international tourist destinations. The tour was one that highlighted major areas of interest (especially Canadian interest) of World War One and World War Two in France and Belgium. Although they were bought together, the tour was really two separate ones that each focuses on a different war. Seeing as World Wars tours are not really a mainstream thing to do, at least in this country, one might be wondering what was the motivation behind this. The ultimate goal for this trip was to visit the Juno Beach Centre and see a brick that we had bought as a gift for my paternal grandfather when the centre was being built. The brick is a sort of memorial for him now that he has passed, and to me at least has more impact then a regular grave marker would. The trip consisted of my sister and father as well as myself, but not my mom because she is not that into history and really not that into war history, but that was fine as she was able to dog sit for my sister.

A couple of years ago was when this trip was conceived and after some Google searching I came across a company called Spirit Of Remembrance and the fact that they do country specific tours. Other than Canada they also do tours for the US, Australia and New Zealand, and the UK, but Canada is what I wanted and luckily they did it. I don't know what the usual size for the tour is but on the first leg it was just six of us and on the second leg we did a three for one swap and ended up with just four. The second tour could not have been profitable so many thanks goes out to the company for not cancelling it and allowing us to reach our goal.

Some background on my family as far as the World Wars go is needed to highlight just how the choice of guide impacted the tour and made it far better than expected. I only got to know one great-grandparent and he was my paternal grandfather's father and while he didn't make it over to Europe for the fighting he did enlist and start training. The war ended before his training finished and the branch that he enlisted in was the RAF. Now fast forward to WWII and both my grandfathers have enlisted and both are with the RCAF, one in the air and one on the ground. During the tour I remembered that a great uncle had served and never made it back and so we messaged my mom for info and lo and behold he too was RCAF, but he was shot down over North Africa and his grave is there too. So why all this RCAF/RAF mentioning? Well the tour guide Robert Gallagher turned out to be a RAF veteran who spent some time serving in Canada and with all this air force DNA in me, made him the perfect tour guide. Robert retired in France but was originally from Northern Ireland and with his knowledge of the history and his great sense of humour this combination made him probably the best tour guide I shall ever have.

The first tour originated in Lille, France, but not for any historical reason just that it is a major train hub that is easy to get to from the Paris airport. Lille also happens to be pretty close to Ypres, Belgium which has major Canadian WWI significance. This area of Belgium is known as Flanders and anyone who has ever been to a Remembrance Day ceremony should know the significance of that name. While in the Ypres area some of the places visited were Essex Farm, Vancouver Corner, The Menin Gate, Tyne Cot Cemetery, and the both the Flanders Field and Passchendaele museums. Essex farm is where the poem “In Flanders Fields” was written and Vancouver Corner has a beautiful memorial to Canadian soldiers. The Menin Gate is an old entrance to the town of Ypres that was turned into a memorial to all the missing Commonwealth soldiers that vanished defending the area. The last post ceremony is preformed every night to honour those missing soldiers and has been done for more than 85 years, save the years of occupation during WWII. It really is an amazing sight and just seeing the amount of names inscribed on the memorial is awe inspiring and gives you something tangible to see just how much sacrifice there was during WWI. A quick Google search tells me that there are more than 54000 names on the memorial and that there was just enough room for up to August 1917, more than a year before the war would end. Tyne Cot Cemetery is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world and contains the remaining names from the Menin Gate Memorial (more than 33000 of them). There are almost 12000 graves in this cemetery and it also contains a couple German pillboxes leftover from the fighting. Just seeing that many graves, almost 1000 being Canadian, is a very humbling experience.

After leaving Belgium for France two very important memorials were visited with one being on Canada Day for an extra special ceremony. The first memorial visited was Vimy Ridge which has over 11000 names of Canadian missing and the memorial was breathtaking. Personally I like the design at Vancouver Corner better, but it is still a beautiful memorial. The height of the memorial is imposing and it is in the middle of a large park so that is the focal point. Mother Canada is the central figure and one should search for images of the memorial because words alone can not do it justice. A large portion of the park is still riddled with unexploded ordinance so it is fenced off. Adjacent to the memorial is an area that has trenches and tunnels and a small museum that can be explored and also contains the massive craters left when several mines were exploded. The mines were set off just before the attack and aided in one of Canada's biggest victories and contributions to the WWI effort. The lessons of the importance of timing were learned at the other memorial Beaumont Hamel which is the site where the Battle of the Somme started on July 1, 1916. The memorial is for the Newfoundlanders who served in WW1 as they were not part of Canada and had their own regiment in the war. The significance of the location is that they were almost wiped out due to horrible timing of a mine blast and poor leadership above them. The heavy losses incurred coupled with their bravery earned them their own memorial at this location. The ceremony was attended by a pretty good crowd and there were dignitaries from around the world, but the representation from the Canadian government was severely lacking. There were some politicians from Newfoundland, however and the (un)official Premier of Newfoundland Alan Doyle performed at the ceremony. It was a very moving tribute to an aspect of this country's history that I knew nothing about beforehand. July 1st was probably the hottest day France has seen for many years, but losing almost all the water in my body was a small price to pay for attendance.

The final day of the WWI tour was spent looking at where the war started and the ending line on November 11, 1918 and also visiting the grave of the Canadian soldier who is believed to be the final soldier killed in action. The soldier was shot mere moments before the armistice. The ending line and where the first fighting took place are on signs that are almost directly across the street from each other, in a weird coincidence. The next destination was back to Lille for the tour switch over.

The WWII tour had many highlights, but I will just focus on the two big ones Dieppe and Juno Beach. This focus allows for a good contrast of a battle that went horribly wrong and one that was a great history changing success. Dieppe was the first location visited and it was the site of the catastrophe. Reading about the locale in books is one thing, but actually being there on the beach where so many Canadians lost their lives gives you mixed emotions. There is the sadness at the lives lost and then there is rage for the people that sent them there. The beach consists of small stones so any movement on it either by man or machine is a tricky procedure and add to that is that on either side of the beach are cliffs that overlook the area giving anyone defending the area a distinct tactical advantage. Hearing Robert describe just what happened to the Canadians and the small pockets of men from other countries, in the area just was heartbreaking. The main Canadian memorial is a small park pretty close to the beach that though not big in size, is still a sight to see. In a welcome coincidence the memorial was visible from my hotel room, which added to the atmosphere.

For the invasions on D-Day the lessons learned from the Dieppe boondoggle came in handy. Basically everything that was done during Dieppe do the opposite, which resulted in a successful landing. While Omaha beach was visited briefly, the main reason for the whole trip was Juno beach and that was the one given to the Canadians to attack. The weather the morning we went was cool and rainy, which thankfully kept the beachgoers away giving us Canadians a little privacy. The beach itself is still a public, working beach, whereas the Juno Beach Centre is behind the beach where the German positions would have been. Outside the Centre there is a couple preserved German bunkers that were part of the coastal defence network and while on a tour you get to go inside. The Juno Beach Centre itself holds the museum and exhibits that are not just about D-Day but about all the Canadian involvement in WWII. The feeling in this are is more of gratitude and humbleness being around a place of triumph and sacrifice. There is a spot just outside the Centre that has a bunch of similar structures huddled together and that is where the bricks that people or organizations had bought are displayed. We found my Grandfather's brick and Robert took our picture for us and also for himself. I don't know if it was because of the weather or just that more people are focused on the American involvement, but the crowd difference between Omaha and Juno was astronomical. The Juno morning was rainy whereas by the time we got to Omaha it was a bright sunny day. There was other stuff visited after Juno, but for me at least those places don't have as much significance. We concluded the tour at a train station to extend our vacation in Paris and later Amsterdam where more traditional tourist stuff was done.

These tours really put a lot of things in perspective and I highly recommend that anyone who goes to France on vacation, to visit at least one significant Canadian memorial while they are there or maybe make your own tour of them. There was plenty of British schoolkids spotted along the way participating in what I can only guess as class trips. These kids are getting something that unfortunately Canadian kids can't and that is a sense of the sacrifice that previous generations made to make the lives of the following generations better. Reading about it in books is one thing, but until you see these places there is nothing tangible to give you the right perspective. As the distance between the world wars and the now increases there is more of a need to find a way to get Canadian kids over there so that they can better pass on the lessons learned from these Canadian heroes.

That about wraps up the WW tours write-up, but before you logoff thinking it was just memorial after memorial after museum after cemetery there was plenty of good food and drink had during the trip. There was even a Passchendaele beer that was actually pretty good, but stories of these aspects of the trip will have to wait until later (or more probable never). So again many thanks to Spirit of Remembrance and our guide Robert Gallagher for organizing such a life altering experience.

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Skyfall

Title: Skyfall

Year: 2012

Bond: Daniel Craig

Director: Sam Mendes

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 3

As of this moment Skyfall is the most financially successful 007 adventure and there's a good reason, it is a great movie. With the four year gap, it looks like everyone was able to take their time and make sure that all aspects of the film are in good shape before putting it out there. The gap was mostly due to MGM's bankruptcy, so thank you MGM's accountants. This is also a big transition film that looks to the past to help the franchise move forward. Where other Bond films failed when trying to link with the past, this one is the poster child for how to do it right. Circumstances made it so I watched it twice within the first couple weeks of release and there was no dropoff in quality upon second viewing.

The plot of the movie is someone has stolen a list of all the undercover operatives for the NATO countries and is using it to torment M. Bond must find who is behind everything and also protect M. M is in the movie almost as much as Bond, which is unique for the series, but it works well. When 007 and M are forced together for the final part of the movie it shines a light on their excellent chemistry and dynamic together. There is a lot of plot and twists and turns in this one making it one of the longest adventures, but you don't feel it at all, time just speeds by.

It is hard to have a great Bond film without a great villain and this one is no exception. Javier Bardem who memorably played the villain in No Country For Old Men, plays Silva in this one. Silva has some henchmen, but they are all really just interchangeable bodies as none really do anything, but that is fine because this is all about Silva. Silva used to work with M in Hong Kong until he was captured by the Chinese and he blames M for everything that happened to him, including his cyanide capsule only disfiguring him instead of killing him. Silva's presence is felt throughout the movie, but we don't actually meet him until about halfway though. Once we meet him he is rarely off the screen and Bardem regularly steals every scene he is in. Judi Dench as M, Bardem and Craig are all at the top of their game and this probably has the best acting of the series. Silva's plans are so convoluted and destructive and he is able to maximize the terror from his plans. His efforts to take out M wreak havoc on London and allows London to be a location the most it has ever been in the franchise. In the Bond universe it is probably the most minimalist objective, but it also has the biggest impact on the series. His portrayal of Silva proves that should he ever want to, Bardem would make a fine Joker, as you can see qualities that are very similar between them. There is an assassin that Bond must handle in the first half of the movie in his efforts to track down the person who turns out to be Silva, but really this movie as far as villainy goes is just a one man show. Silva is very hands on as far as the killing goes, but the only aspect missing is the knock down thrown down fight between him and Bond and unfortunately it never happens. Bond literally stabs him in the back, but Silva really deserved it for what he did to Bond's house and car and probably for killing scores of people too, but especially for what happens to the car.

Bond has four female companions in this one and only half survive. He gets a tropical girlfriend when everyone thinks he is dead at the beginning and she becomes the first person to score with 007 and survive. The pre-credits action have Bond teamed up with Naomie Harris' Eve, who ends up shooting him (oops), but all is forgiven as she continues to help him at points throughout the rest of the film. Eve makes it to the end alive due to probably not sleeping with Bond, though it looked like he wanted to, but let's be real here, he always wants to. Eve has a last name and we find it out at the end when they finally introduce themselves to each other. In a move that proves that the series is transitioning back into the formulas, we finally have our Moneypenny. Eve's last name is Moneypenny, and this one can take care of herself. I guess Moneypenny's role in this new era is assistant/last line of defence and there's nothing wrong with that job title. Severine is a character that 007 meets after he has dispatched the assassin and is following the money trail. She is able to take Bond to meet her boss (Silva as it turns out) who she wants Bond to kill. Her boss is based on a cool real deserted island city near Japan, but Silva is none to pleased with her and ultimately kills her. On the boat trip to the island Severine and Bond do sleep together, thus sealing her fate. That is it for Bond sex and were are only halfway though the movie. The fourth and final female companion is none other than M and if you are keeping track of the math, it means she is doomed. Here we are with more transition, M is ultimately killed in the final battle and that ends an era that started with GoldenEye, with Dame Judi Dench as M. Ralph Fiennes as Gareth Mallory ultimately succeeds as M. But back to the other M. Dench's M handles herself well in the setting of traps for the final standoff, but it is her not so good gun skills that prove to be her downfall. It is not a quick death and it is one that will be felt for quite awhile and her interactions with Bond at the end were quite touching.

Another sign of transition is that we now have a Q! This Q is quite a bit younger than Bond but still gets to utter phrases that we always hear from Q. The only gadgets 007 gets is a tracker that proves useful in the initial capture of Silva, and a gun programmed to Bond's hand. The gun never gets fired, but the fact that it was personalized saves Bond's life, at least until Q learns of its loss. Another familiar aspect of the franchise that was missing from the Craig films was the tricked out Bond car and we kind of get that here. It is not a new car that we see Bond driving, but in a welcome nod to the past, the car that 007 gets to use in action is an Aston Martin DB5 and more specifically the DB5 that was from Goldfinger. When I saw this in theatres, the car got applause and that is how you showcase the past, make it organic and event worthy. There is a bit of humour between 007 and M in the car where Bond threatens to use the ejector button and acts as a good showcase for their dynamic. Silva has the car blown up after it took out some of his men and I bet there was many people in the audience with some moisture in their eyes. The song is also a good link to the past as Adele has created the perfect throwback song. It is a great mix of old and new and it's Oscar is well deserved.

The action starts off right away with the pre-credits sequence. Bond arrives on the scene where the hard drive containing the undercover list has just been stolen and must give chase to the perpetrator. Eve picks him up and the start a car chase that becomes a motorcycle chase that becomes a fight on top of a train. Each of the chases are action and stunt packed and the way Bond eventually gets onto the train is outstanding. The sequence ends with Bond getting shot for the second time in the space of a few minutes, this time by Eve and falling into a river presumed dead. After a bunch of recovery time, Bond is back at it and gets a second chance at the assassin that he was chasing at the beginning. The fight between the two is not a long one, but the fall the assassin makes off the building in Shanghai is. Next stop for some fisticuffs is a Macau casino where 007 beats down some dudes trying to kill him and the fight ends with the last remaining guy being dragged away by a Komodo Dragon. All of the next action sequences involve Silva, because now we have finally met him. Silva's escape from custody leads to an exciting foot chase that gives way to a subway crash and then ends in a gunfight. The gunfight is during a government session where M is testifying and during it we get to see the eventual M successor in action. Bond sort of kidnaps M after that and takes her to his boyhood home to hideout and wait for the final showdown. The initial battle takes place inside the house and thee house was booby trapped Home Alone style before hand. Once the traps are set off it becomes all gunplay at least until Silva arrives in his helicopter. Most of the helicopter henchmen are taken out when Bond blows up his house, but Silva survives the blast. The final meeting between the three main players 007, M , and Silva takes place in a church that M had escaped from the house to. Of the three the only one to walk out alive is Bond, but the interactions between them before it all ends is great stuff.

So it may not be the most action packed of the franchise, both in and out of the bedroom, but the acting and the story more than make up for it. The introductions of Craig's Moneypenny and Q as well as a new M, make for the first Craig Bond movie that feels like it completely belongs in the franchise. After the next 50 years when they are doing the Bond 100 celebrations this film will still be ranked near the top and looked at as a great milestone for the series.

The top of the mountain has been reached with the final third being a lot tougher than the first, but that is the way some mountains go. An excellent journey that is well worth it and I recommend it to any film fans out there as a good way to track film making throughout the decades.

James Bond will return sometime with: SPECTRE

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Quantum Of Solace

Title: Quantum Of Solace

Year: 2008

Bond: Daniel Craig

Director: Marc Forster

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 18

So now we are up to Daniel Craig's second 007 adventure and unfortunately it is not as good as the first. Reading up on the events that occurred during production, it looks like the biggest offenders are the writer's strike and the fact that the director was not a fan of Bond. Getting an outsider to do a film can either go very well or very wrong and unfortunately it turned out to be the latter. The film has an exciting beginning third and then lags for awhile before the explosive ending. The film is also much shorter than the other 007 pictures and even at the length it is, it sometimes feels a bit long.

The plot is right after the events of Casino Royale, Bond brings the kidnapped Mr. White to an Italian safehouse for interrogation. White notifies them of the existence of a powerful organization, before activating a sleeper agent to aide his escape. Now Bond must investigate this organization to find out who just tried to kill M and also who was really behind Vesper's death.

The investigation eventually leads Bond to the main villain of this story, one Dominic Greene. Other members of the organization now known to be called Quantum are also discovered including a powerful adviser to the PM, but that storyline is never really pursued. Greene wants to overthrow the government in Bolivia so that Quantum will own the counties water rights, an odd aspiration but OK. Greene has a exiled General waiting to run the country in his pocket, so all that is left to do is to start a protest/coup. The unrest is being fuelled by a drought, which has be caused by Quantum cutting off water supplies. After Mr. White's escape we see him one other time at a weird Quantum meeting during some opera. I'm sure there are supposed to be parallels between the opera and the plot of the film, but I don't know opera and I'm sure most of the audience for a Bond film doesn't either. When doing something like that to show how smart you are, it comes off as pretentious, which is the opposite of what you want for a Bond film. Know your audience keep arthouse stuff like that in an arthouse movie. OK enough of that, back to Greene. Greene as the big bad just doesn't make for an exciting movie. He is so bland and when you show that he is just another cog in the machine and then do nothing else with the machine, it makes your main villain more inconsequential. An inconsequential main bad guy does not make for a good movie. We don't even see Greene die, we are just told that he was found with a couple bullets in his head and a stomach full of oil. The oil was courtesy of 007 because Greene had killed an agent and covered her in oil so Bond wanted some revenge for her. Speaking of revenge, at the end of the movie Bond has a chance to get some for Vesper. The reason Vesper turned was because Quantum said they had kidnapped her boyfriend and were going to kill him unless she cooperated. Turns out the boyfriend was a Quantum agent and was about to pull the scam again, 007 didn't kill him though so one assumes the guy talked later.

The agent that Greene killed was the only woman 007 hooked up with in the movie. She said her name was Fields and she was played by Gemma Arterton. Fields seemed competent enough for a woman that M described as being a office clerk. It was a small part for Gemma but it was done well and even if she wasn't found dead covered in oil it would have been memorable. The main female in this movie is Camille, a woman who is after the exiled General who murdered her family and left her in her burning house scarring her both physically and emotionally. Camille is played by Olga Kurylenko and she is portrayed as having an almost terminator like character, she will do anything to accomplish her goal. Camille is first seen by 007 when he gets into her car and discovers that the identity that he just stole of a man he killed is that of a hitman hired to kill her. She gets away from Bond and confronts Greene about trying to have her killed. It seems that she is using Greene to get to the General and then Greene gives her to the General as a gift. The General is about to take her to his yacht to be killed, but that is when Bond kind of rescues her. After ditching her in Haiti, Bond eventually makes his way to Bolivia on Greene's trail and lo and behold Camille shows up again, still on her revenge mission. Once that meeting occurs the two are almost inseparable and at the end she accomplishes her task. Once her mission is complete Olga gives a good performance of a person breaking down, because while she was killing the General, the hotel room caught on fire. The fire, it looks like has given Camille a panic attack turning her into that trapped child again. Bond comes to her rescue emotionally at first and then when a method of escape presented itself, physically. If it were not for the hotel room breakdown the Camille character would have been rather one dimensional, so I'm glad they were able to give her some depth without turning her into a typical damsel in distress. So overall the female companionship was fine, not the best in the franchise, but also in no way a detriment to the film.

The action scenes are really the only reason this film almost works and most of them are at the beginning. The pre-credits sequence a cool car chase that brings Mr. White to the safehouse, it seems someone wants him back. There's no gadgetry in these cars just lots of guns and crashes. This chase does the franchise proud. The next bit of action is a foot chase between Bond and the sleeper agent that allowed Mr. White to escape. The chase is through catacombs, on rooftops, and then finally into a church undergoing renovations. The fight leaves Bond bloodied and the other guy dead. Following some money is what brings Bond to his next fight in Haiti, that of the hitman that is after Camille. That fight is short but vicious, again leaving Bond bloodied and the other guy dead. One of the best things about Craig's 007 is that he gets physical, really physical and that they are not afraid to show him battle damaged. After that there is a skirmish or two but nothing big. It is this part of the movie that has the weird opera and stuff, it just seems to drag. OK final fight time. The battle royale takes place at a hotel that unfortunately uses fuel cells to power it. I say unfortunately because someone crashes their car into them and it causes the whole hotel to go up in flames. This is where Camille gets her revenge and her fight is pretty good, lots of back and forth stuff. Greene's fight with Bond is OK, I'm just surprised he put up a fight seeing as the big bads rarely do.

Jeffrey Wright returns as Felix to kind of help Bond, but he is conflicted because his bosses at the CIA want to get in bed with Greene because he has promised them Oil. Mathis also returns from Casino Royale, but doesn't live for very long adding to the high ally body count that Craig has had so far. In an awesome Canadian playing a Canadian cameo at the end Stana Katic of TV's Castle is the agent that Vesper's former boyfriend is trying to entrap. The character is so Canadian she even says thank you as 007 lets her leave.

The song has grown on me so I now consider it as a highlight of the film and a reason to like it. I wonder what the film would have been if not for the double impact of a writers strike and an outsider director. Oh well I guess it could have been a lot worse if not for the great acting and when it appeared, the great action. And thus ends Craig's second 007 adventure, not a great one, but a decent one.

Craig trail is about to end! We are now steps away from the summit. So close, one more film to go.

James Bond will return in: Skyfall

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Casino Royale

Title: Casino Royale

Year: 2006

Bond: Daniel Craig

Director: Martin Campbell

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 7

Casino Royale is the first appearance of Daniel Craig's James Bond and it makes for an excellent debut.When compared to the film that preceded it, Die Another Day, this film feels like it is in a totally different genre and that is a good thing. Where Die Another Day went deep into sci-fi territory, Casino Royale stays completely grounded while still feeling like a 007 adventure. The pre-credits sequence is still here, the gun barrel opening still exists followed although this time it precedes the song, and there is still a whole lot of stunts to be seen. This film takes Bond back to his roots, quite literally in fact. Craig's Bond has elements of the Connery and Dalton Bonds in him, but with a lot more physical activity. Craig's Bond also shows a sensitive side to the character that has never really been seen before and it lets us see the creation of the hard ass, don't really let anyone in persona that we associate with the Bond character over the years. Innuendo and other quips are kept to the minimum amount, keeping the character quite dark and hard edged. These qualities are also found in the Connery and Dalton Bonds but not close to this level, but that is exactly what the character needed at the time after Die Another Day and the Bourne movies. The grittiness and realism of Jason Bourne's adventures threatened to overshadow the Bond films, so this correction back to the core of what Bond is, was definitely a good thing.

The taking us back to the roots went right back to the beginning of 007 with the pre-credits sequence. This relatively short sequence shows us what it takes to achieve double O status, namely two kills. The sequence is entirely in black and white and ends with the gun barrel turn and shoot that we are used to seeing. The new placement of the gun barrel scene was well done, giving a nice mix of continuity and reboot. After seeing Bond earn his double O status we get to see this Bond in some real action, with a chase of a bomber through the streets of a Madagascar city. Most of the chase is through a construction site with Bond and his quarry climbing cranes, jumping through buildings, and a whole bunch of other stuntwork. The influence of Parkour is heavy on this chase sequence, especially with Bond's quarry. The Parkour gives the chase a heightened sense of danger and makes the action much better and keeps the pace nice and quick. After a brief pitstop in the Bahamas, the next action sequence takes place at the Miami airport where 007 must stop another bomber (Bond killed the first one) from blowing up an airplane that is just being unveiled. Here we get to see 007 fighting his way into a tanker truck while it destroys much of what's around it. This is another good piece of action with all of the stunts and destruction and 007 saving the day. The fact that the bombing failed leads the villain to create a super exclusive poker game with a ten million dollar buy in, so that he can recoup his losses from some bad stock market gambling. This means that most of the next chunk of action takes place at the poker table. The only fighting that happens during the game is when an African warlord tries to take out Bond and he must defend himself. The next big sequence takes place towards the end where 007 is fighting to get back the poker winnings against some thugs, while everyone in inside a house sinking into the canals of Venice. That fight is a good mix of gunplay, hand to hand, and using whatever objects are within reach. What all of these fights have in common is the absence of gadgetry. This welcome genre shift has for now taken them all away. The lack of gadgets makes for a more visceral experience for all of the action scenes and that is what 007 needed in a post Bourne world.

Female companionship for this adventure is pretty light, one make out session with one woman and then towards the end he finally hooks up another. The woman he makes out with is the wife of a man he is trying to get information on and as soon as he got some intel he split leaving her before things could go further. She was later killed, but it really wasn't Bonds fault it was more her late husband's. Vesper Lynd played by Eva Green is the second female companion and she is in charge of the money that must be staked at the poker game. She starts of with the same cold exterior as Bond, but eventually each wears the other down and they fall in love. Unbeknownst to Bond, Vesper is playing both sides and has to cut a deal to save Bond's life. This deal unfortunately leads to the fight in the Venice sinking house and she loses her life. So as far as female companions go Vesper is pretty good. There is not much that she has to do, but when the going gets tough like when the African Warlord came attacking or starting Bond's heart after he was poisoned, she steps up and does what she can. She is never placed as a damsel in distress and that is also worth a couple points. Eva's arc as Vesper is very well done, it's just unfortunate that she ultimately killed herself. The deaths of both females, especially Vesper, helps shape the Bond persona into what we are familiar with. As a new double O he allowed himself to fall in love, when all that got him is pain and now with the two deaths he gets a hard shell around his heart for emotional protection. This hard shell is what we've come to expect with 007.

The villainy in this adventure is abundant and there really isn't a big boss. Le Chiffre as played by Mads Mikkelsen is the money man for a large criminal organization, but he also handles the money for lesser criminals like African warlords. Le Chiffre planned to blow up that plane so that a certain stock would tumble, making him a lot of money. The thing is that he is not gambling with his own money, he is doing it with his clients money. When Bond foils the bombing it makes a lot of people angry at Le Chiffre. There was a few hired hands under Le Chiffre, but 007 eliminated them on his way up the foodchain to dismantle the plot. The only other villain we see is a Mr. White who also works for the organization that Le Chiffre does the money for. It is ultimately Mr. White that kills Le Chiffre when he becomes untrustworthy with all the money losing. Mr. White also saves Bond's life, because Le Chiffre is killed during an extremely painful torture session where he was really doing some damage to 007 balls. The place where Le Chiffre does the most damage is the poker table and as such that is where we see the most of him. The villains in this adventure are not the grandiose in your face kind that we are used to in the franchise, no these are more like regular criminals. 007 never even gets to fight either of the two main baddies, just the dozen or so underlings that try to get in the way and end up paying with their lives.

Bond gets help from Jeffrey Wright's Felix Lighter and also his local contact Mathis. At the end Bond thinks Mathis is a double agent, when really it was Vesper, but the issue never really gets resolved in this one. Felix returns for his first appearance since License to Kill and it is the first time in an official movie that he is played by visible minority. Felix washes out of the game, but his biggest contribution is staking the five million dollar re-buy in after Bond busts out initially.

The fact that a poker game is central to the plot doesn't diminish this film at all. Enough action and tension is mixed into the game to keep it interesting and that helps keep the film as an excellent one. The realism and grittiness are two of the things that get this one ranked so highly with me. Another big reason is the relationship between Vesper and Bond, even though it is doomed, it still is very well done. The abundance of action in the first half helps offset the weak main villainy. If it weren't for the ball busting scene Le Chiffre would not have been very memorable, so that scene saves him and maybe even the movie's high ranking. Probably another reason why I like this one so much is that it came after Die Another Day, which was not very good, so anything that came after would look that much better by comparison.

The short Craig trail is almost done, just a tiny bit more until the summit.

James Bond will return in: Quantum Of Solace

[kyredperspective]

Jurassic World: The Review

So the coffee is in hand and a little mood music is put on and now it's time to jot down a few thoughts about the film that I saw last night Jurassic World. I have tried to keep the following as spoiler free as possible so enjoy.

Jurassic Park is one of my favourite movies (currently ranked #23 on Flickchart) and as an FYI the mood music I just put on is the amazing score to Jurassic Park by John Williams. Back in the summer of '93 when Park came out I was the ripe old age of 11, which might just have been in the target age for the film. My sister was 9 and was apparently so traumatized that it took her around 20 years to watch the film in its entirety again. According to my recollections, I saw the film while on a massive car trip down to Florida that occupied most of summer vacation and the fact that seeing the movie is one of the fondest and sharpest memories of that trip, speaks to its magic. Hopefully those memories are real and I'm not just Brian Williamsing the whole situation. With all of this nostalgia in my head how is Jurassic World going to compete? The answer is by using this nostalgia to its advantage.

The film is riddled with nods to the franchise's past. I'll only spoil one and it's not really a spoiler as the movie actually points it out to everyone like it is the first clue to a treasure hunt. Jake Johnson's character has come to work in an original Jurassic Park T-shirt and people don't like him wearing it because it symbolizes a tragedy where many people died. Foreshadowing perhaps? The other tie to the past that I can mention without spoiling key events is the score. John Williams original Jurassic Park theme is played throughout the film and the new music composed for this one blends seamlessly with it. Williams is not the composer for this new music, but his style is all over it and when you model your score after perhaps one of the greatest composers of all time and succeed the film is much better for it. Hearing the original theme puts me back into the headspace of that 11 year old and it makes me enjoy this experience even more.

On a death and gore and scare level World is on par with Park, so don't go in expecting to see some dude being ripped apart by Raptors with chunks of flesh being strewn about. That's not to say that people don't get eaten, but usually the kill is off screen. Will kids get scared? Yep, but on an acceptable level because really this film is for them or at least the older ones, just like Park was. Adults may get frightened as well, as I heard a guy behind me chanting “It's just a movie” to either calm himself down or the girl beside him. As long as you go in with the right expectations, this aspect of the film experience will be satisfying.

Colin Trevorrow who made the disappointingly underseen, but great Safety Not Guaranteed, is the director doing his best channelling of Spielberg and Michael Giacchino has the immense task of filling Williams' shoes. Both are up to the task and complete their missions perfectly. Trevorrow starts with the new story and as the film progresses shows us more and more stuff from Park, putting us in the right frame of mind for the final battle. By the end of this sequence tears of joy were upon my cheeks and through all of the Easter Eggs and other references to Jurassic Park that had been building throughout the film, I had been put back into the headspace of that 11 year old watching Park for the first time. I'm sure those of us that did not see Jurassic Park around that age or maybe not at all will enjoy themselves, but probably not on that extra level that I did. The nostalgia factor cranks this experience to 11 and Trevorrow deserves a whole lot of credit for how he was able to manipulate it and use it to his advantage. With its use of the original Park theme, the score will probably be disqualified for some award and that is a shame, because it is an excellent one and is a worthy successor to Park's score.

All of the actors did great, but not enough to displace Park's cast in my brain, but they've had 22 years to cement themselves in there so that's not a bad thing. It seems as though the kids weren't kicked around as much and the danger factor for the leads in this one was reduced a bunch, but the side characters? Well those were eliminated by the score so it all balances out as far as carnage goes.

The main stars again were the dinosaurs, old and new. The main star is a new genetically engineered species that is the primary source of everyone's terror. Indominus Rex is the name of the new species and that's all you'll get from me about it other than the fact that like all great villains, it is a killing machine. We all know the Velociraptors are featured heavily and they have themselves a really interesting story arc that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Again no spoilers, but the Raptors almost steal the show. You get to see a whole lot more species old and new and yes there is an unfortunate goat again. This is not the kind of movie you go to just because it stars Chris Pratt, it is all about the dinosaurs and on that point it is mostly a success. The only quibble is that everything appears to be CGI so the film loses a little lustre without the magic of Stan Winston's creature shop, but that is a minor quibble and most people probably won't even notice.

At the end of the year this will most likely be in my top ten and on my all time list it is just outside my top fifty. The only release this year that ranks above it is Mad Max: Fury Road, so that means as of now it is #2 for the year. So go see this movie if you love Jurassic Park, don't be scared it won't tarnish Park's legacy. For those few individuals who have yet to see Jurassic Park, your enjoyment of the film will not be greatly diminished and a great time will still be had. I give it many Raptor claws up.

As a sidenote, I saw Jurassic World in Imax 3D (everything was great and well worth the surcharge, or the thousand Scene points) and before the movie there was a bunch of Ant-Man footage. This footage featured a lot of Michael Pena and he very well might steal that movie, but we'll have to wait and see about that.

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Die Another Day

Title: Die Another Day

Year: 2002

Bond: Pierce Brosnan

Director: Lee Tamahori

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 22

It's come to this another James Bond clip show. After the credits this 007 adventure becomes a weird mashup of previously seen scenarios and deep into sci-fi gadgetry. OK, Bond has always had an element of the sci-fi for his gadgets, but for the most part they have been in the immediate realm of possibility. This movies goes out of that realm for too many things and makes everything not seem real. There are really good sequences in this film, but it is the recycling and some odd direction techniques that bring this movie down. Also it seems Bond and whatever female is talking to him can only communicate in sexual innuendo, which is fine for a couple lines per movie, but not for entire conversations.

The plot involves Bonds unofficial investigation of Gustav Graves , who he is put on to when he tries to assassinate a North Korean terrorist the tried to kill before. The terrorist, Zao, was part of the pre-credits sequence, making this the rare Bond film that has the pre-credits sequence tie directly with the plot after it. Graves as it turns out, has developed a satellite he calls Icarus that can provide sunlight to areas at night, but can also be intensified to dangerous levels of heat. The satellite is planned to be used to de-mine the North and South Korean border so that North Korea can invade the South. This newly unified Korean peninsula would then presumably be lead by Graves.

Probably due to the events that happen before the credits, Bond is limited to two female companions in this film. The first woman is Jinx who Bond meets in Cuba while on the trail of Zao. Jinx turns out to be an American agent who is also after Zao, but Bond does not discover that until after he sleeps with her. Halle Berry plays Jinx and does a good job with the action scenes, but it's the talking parts that are her problem. Berry is not at fault for her lines, it is just a sub par script. Most of her scenes are with Bond and as stated before most of those interactions are just non stop innuendo. Like what has happened before in previous 007 adventures, Jinx and 007 eventually team up to save the day. Even though Bond is limited to two females this film, he still gets his three love scenes as he is in bed with Jinx at the end. The second female companion is more complicated. Miranda Frost as played by Rosamund Pike is at first a fellow British agent but is then revealed to be working for Graves. Pike plays Frost well, it is just that she is not given that much to do. Her sleeping with Bond was just a sort of let's see what all the fuss is about with this guy, which you can't fault her for as 007 does have quite the reputation. It is almost right after the bedding that Frost's evil streak is revealed, but nothing really comes of it and it only serves to set her up to die. As a villain Frost's worst deeds are done off screen in that the only evil thing she does is act as a mole for Graves. She does not kill anyone and her purpose in the film I think is so that Jinx can have a boss fight just like Bond. The fight between Jinx and Frost is one of the few highlights of the flick, and it is done mostly with swords. Frost was a Gold Medal winner at the Olympics in fencing due to a staged by Graves overdose of the actual winner, so at swordplay she holds the advantage. The fight was well staged and exciting and in the Bond tradition, taunting before a kill results in your own downfall. Jinx gets a few action sequences with the first one happening right after sleeping with Bond. While searching for Zao at a Cuban hospital she is also tasked with shutting the place down. Unbeknownst to her Bond has found Zao and is trying to kill him but lets him get away which results in both of them somewhat failing their missions. A CGI cliff dive allows her to escape the hospital. The second bit of action for her happens at about the same time Bond is sleeping with Miranda. Jinx sneaks into a restricted part of Graves' Icelandic Ice hotel to find out just what is going on. Her efforts are in vain however as she is captured and almost turned into a damsel in distress, but she narrowly avoids it by saving Bond's life while he is trying to save hers. She saves Bond by firing a laser through the back of a dudes head and out of his mouth in a cool scene. So overall the performances of both Halle and Rosamund were good for what they were given, it was just the script that let them down.

Bond's action as usual starts before the credits. The pre-credits sequence has 007 surfing into North Korea so that he can impersonate a diamond smuggler that is doing business with a corrupt North Korean officer. The officer is the target of the operation and it is Bond's job to assassinate this Colonel Moon. Things go awry when Moon is tipped off to Bond's actual identity (Frost's doing) and in order to escape a firing squad 007 blows up the case of diamonds and some are actually embedded into Zao's face. Zao is Moon's friend and number two guy. This leads to Bond chasing Moon through a minefield, but it's OK they both have hovercraft. The hovercraft chase is an exciting one and is one of the better chase sequences in the series. The chase ends with Moon going over a cliff and presumably dying and then Bond gets to make a pun. End of sequence, right? Nope. In a twist that should have been the setup of a far better film, Bond gets captured by Moon's father and then is tortured throughout the credits. After some time Bond is exchanged for Zao and this leaves 007 on the outs with his agency as they thought he was leaking intel. The desire to prove his innocence is what drives Bond to seek out Zao and find the leak and his being on the outside is what allows him to investigate Graves. During his initial encounter with Graves, he and Graves have a pretty vicious swordfight that damages pretty severely the club that contained it. That swordfight was pretty entertaining, but the drawback to it was that it included a Madonna cameo that unfortunately had lines with Bond that were full of, you guessed it, innuendo. The swordfight results in an invitation from Graves for Bond to visit him in Iceland for the unveiling of Icarus. It is in Iceland that we get to see the new Bond car in action and for the most part it is pretty cool, but not it's main feature. The main feature of this car is that it can turn invisible and unfortunately that crosses the line too far into sci-fi for a Bond movie. Bond's car gets into a chase with Zao's car and because both are tricked out, it becomes a very good car chase. The chase destroys much of the ice hotel and has good scenes of both cars countering all the weaponry being used. The chase ends with Zao speeding past the now invisible Bond car and into the water below. Bond then shoots down a giant ice chandelier and sends it onto a water treading Zao, killing him. The next bit of action is the final fight and it takes place on a giant airplane. After the stereotypical decompression sucks away most of the players (including a henchman with a penis head haircut just like Danny McBride's servant in Your Highness), it is time for Bond and Gustav to throw down. Their fight is not as good as Jinx and Frost's, but Gustav puts up more of a fight than most other big baddies. Gustav makes the same mistake as Frost and mocks Bond instead of escaping and that allows 007 to send him through the jet's engine. The escape from the doomed plane is fine, as it involves trying to start a helicopter that was pushed out the back of the plane right before the plane exploded. They start the helicopter just in time and find a nice isolated cabin so that they can have sex on top of diamonds. Aren't diamonds sharp? You'd think that laying on top of hundreds of diamonds and putting constant pressure on them would be mighty painful but that kind of logic is pushed aside.

Most of the villainy has been explained above but the other big twist of the movie is that Colonel Moon did not die at the beginning as thought, but instead underwent DNA replacement therapy to become Gustav Graves. The DNA replacement stuff is another thing that is too far into sci-fi for a Bond movie. It seems that the more sci-fi that is pumped into a Bond movie, the less enjoyment there is to have. Don't get me wrong, I love sci-fi, it is just that it is not the right genre for a 007 movie to be in. Yes you go into a Bond movie willing to suspend some belief, but not on the scale that this movie wants you to. Most of a Bond adventure should be within the current realm of possibility, so that the adventures can be grounded and believable to a point. This is probably the most CGI heavy of the franchise and unfortunately it takes away from the believability of the picture. Stunts that used to have a person do it now can be done on a computer and that leads to bigger things but when the CGI is this noticeable, not better things. There are also a few instances where the director tried to add a layer of cool to the film by slowing the action down and panning. This works for action films that are not Bond films like Face/Off and The Matrix, but it feels very out of place with the expectations of a Bond film. Other than those moments and the overuse of CGI, the director did a pretty good job with the non verbal aspect of the film and seeing as he is not one of the writers, that is not his problem.

I mentioned at the beginning that there is a lot recycling in this film and here is a list of instances that I can remember and what Bond film that they are from:

Space Laser- Diamonds Are Forever

Agent team up after antagonism- The Spy Who Loved Me, Tomorrow Never Dies

Female on good side who is really bad- The World Is Not Enough

Jinx emerging from the water – Dr. No

Laser Watch- GoldenEye

mini underwater breathing apparatus – Thunderball

laser death on table- Goldfinger

There are probably more instances but that is all I can remember for now. The agent team up is probably closer to The Spy Who Loved Me with the double doing it, but now that's going into too much detail. At one point of the movie Bond is lead to a storage facility where all the previous gadgetry from the films is stored, including stuff from the opposing side. It is cool to see all that, but in a movie with so much recycling it was not a good idea to alert the audience of the history. This room is where Bond meets up with the new Q who is now played by John Cleese, who is great in his unfortunately only appearance as the character.

Almost forgot about the virtual reality training machine that is reminiscent of the Holodeck in the Star Trek universe. In yet another instance of this film going to far into sci-fi, this machine is used to train Bond after he gets back from North Korea. The sequence serves no purpose in the movie other than to add a bit of tension when you think headquarters is being attacked and then it turns out to be just the trainer. The machine is also somehow a pleasure model as Moneypenny uses it towards the end to finally have sex with 007, which just seems out of place, but good on her for finding an alternate use for the machine.

So the bad script, the over reliance on CGI, the recycling, and the step too far sci-fi bring down what could have been a pretty great Bond film after that initial great opening. Also Madonna's song is terrible, but that is like a rancid cherry on top of a poop sundae. All the actors were fine and the villains were OK too, but the great action scenes alone were not enough to save this one. The action scenes did however put this film as the best of the clip show Bonds, the other two of which occupy the two spots below this one on the list. Funny how the films that borrowed the most from the films that came before them are the ones at the bottom of the rankings. For reference the two films below this one are Moonraker followed by On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

That does it for the Brosnan path and now we are on the final trail to the top. So close to the end and the summit is almost upon us.

James Bond will return in: Casino Royale

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: The World Is Not Enough

Title: The World Is Not Enough

Year: 1999

Bond: Pierce Brosnan

Director: Michael Apted

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 20

By sheer coincidence the 20th Bond film I have watched (19th official) ranks 20th on the list. That's not to say that this is a bad movie, it's just that it is not a very good one. In my rankings of the films this one could be classified as good or decent, but not one that can compare with the upper echelon films. There is plenty to like in this movie, just not very much to love.

The plot to The World Is Not Enough is not your typical Bond story, this is one that actually has a twist. After events that happen before the credits, 007 is sent to protect Elektra King, the daughter of a recently murdered oil baron and friend of M. A terrorist that once kidnapped Elektra is believed to be behind the murder and thus they believe his next target is Elektra. The bodyguard role shifts as true plans are revealed and Bond must help to stop a nuclear blast that would destroy Istanbul. With the big twist of the plot this film wants to be more character driven, but unfortunately the characters are not the most interesting people.

There are three female companions again for this Bond like it was following a sort of formula. The first woman is a doctor that is in charge of seeing if Bond is fit for duty after the events of before the credits. Naturally Bond's method of convincing her of his fitness is to sleep with her. It works he is declared fit. The third woman is a nuclear physicist by the name of Dr. Christmas Jones and she slips into the role of Bond's sort of sidekick throughout the last part of the movie. Denise Richards plays Dr. Jones and for whatever reason the role just doesn't seem to fit her properly. She is not the worst person ever to accompany Bond, though I've never done a list of those so she might actually be the worst. The performance doesn't scream worst ever, just that it's not all that good. It's not really her fault, there just isn't a lot for her character to do other than diffuse one bomb and do a whole lot of running away from bullets. The first time we see Dr. Jones she is wearing an outfit that evokes Lara Croft the character from Tomb Raider, a kick ass heroine who is no stranger to action. The outfit makes it seem like Christmas is going to be this type of character, but sadly she is mainly just along for the ride. That's not to say she doesn't do anything heroic or cool, it's just that the only time she does anything like that there is no one on the opposition around. She is able to hotwire a blast door open, but it really only helps Bond in the end and does nothing for her. The only time the character is allowed to shine is during a bomb diffusing sequence in an oil pipeline, but that's only a couple minutes long. During the final showdown of the movie her role is just to push a button or two and get slapped down by the final villain. Not the greatest role for a Bond film female, but I guess it could have been worse, at least they didn't make her a damsel in distress or kill her.

So here comes the twist, the second female companion is Elektra and she is also as it turns out, the film's mail villain. The terrorist that everyone thought was behind the murders and everything, was only doing it under orders from Elektra. Renard is the name of the terrorist and when he kidnapped her years back instead of him turning her to his agenda, she turned him. Robert Carlyle portrays Renard and unfortunately for him the character has a bullet in his brain making it so he can't feel anything. I say unfortunately because this lack of feeling apparently means physically and emotionally and this means almost his entire performance is done with the same lack of emotional tone and it becomes kind of robotic. It's an interesting choice and would have definitely worked better if Sophie Marceau's Elektra didn't suffer from the same lack of emotion. Two dour villains does not a Bond film make. Elektra has convinced Renard to blow up Istanbul so that her oil pipeline will defeat all the competing ones and that combined with a little revenge seeking on her part is the genesis of the plot. Not the most dire of situations until you add the nuke and the fact that the person she is seeking the revenge on is M. The plot is a good twist on the rich crazy baddie scenario, but it would have been a lot better if the characters were flushed out a bunch more. Renard meets his end by a plutonium rod through the chest is a scene that is pretty similar to Travolta's death scene in Broken Arrow. Elektra is put down rather coldly by Bond with a bullet to the chest at point blank range with her being unarmed.

The longest action sequence is part of what has to be the longest pre-credits sequence in the series. The film opens with Bond at a Swiss bank in Spain collecting a big case of money and after a brief skirmish he must sort of rappel down the building using a semiconscious dude as an anchor. The action picks up at headquarters when the money explodes killing Elektra's dad and Bond borrows a boat from Q's lab to chase down an assassin waiting to make sure the blast took out its intended target. The boat chase through the Thames is the highlight of the film, which is not a good thing when it takes place before the credits. The chase ends with the cornered assassin blowing herself up in a hot air balloon and an narrowly escaping Bond tumbling down the roof of the Millennium dome. The fall injures 007's shoulder, thus the doctor clearance is needed. A pretty good skier versus aerial snowmobile chase occurs during Bond's bodyguard phase and once the defeated snowmobiles explode, the ensuing avalanche creates the need for Bond to use his most interesting gadget of the film, his jacket. With the pull of a cord the jacket inflates a cocoon that envelopes the wearer and whoever is beside them to protect them from the falling snow. It is a jacket that if real would probably save a lot of lives. There is a small bit of action when Bond meets Renard and Christmas during the theft of the nuke and then another short bomb diffusing scene before the next action setpiece. Bond is in the process of obtaining information from a character that we first met in GoldenEye, when the caviar factory they are in comes under attack from helicopters that have spinning razors underneath them for forestry work. Robbie Coltrane returns as Valentin the crime boss introduced in GoldenEye, but this time his role is much larger. The fight at Valentin's factory has one of the shortest Bond car sequences in the series, as 007 only gets to fire a single missile with it before it gets cut in half by the remaining helicopter. Valentin rescues Bond when he is captured later, but it costs him his life. It is right after this rescue that Bond eliminates Elektra and also saves M along the way. The final showdown in a submarine happens right after that, but as far as finales go it is far from being the best. Renard is trying to add plutonium to the sub's reactor which would trigger the nuclear explosion,and 007 must stop him. Christmas is on the sub too, but really doesn't contribute much to the operation. So in the end Renard dies and Bond gets to make Christmas puns as he has his victory sex.

On a sad note this was Desmond Llewelyn's last appearance as Q, as he passed away after the film was made. Coincidentally his replacement was introduced in this film played by John Cleese as a member of Q's team who 007 nicknames R.

The reasons for the low ranking are explained above and I think I got to them all. The title song by Garbage is one of my favourites and if the quality of the film was based on the quality of the title song then this film would be near the top, but alas it is not.

Brosnan trail is almost done with one more to go before the last trail is upon us.

James Bond will return in: Die Another Day

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Tomorrow Never Dies

Title: Tomorrow Never Dies

Year: 1997

Bond: Pierce Brosnan

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 14

Tomorrow Never Dies is the second Brosnan Bond movie in the series and even though it is no where near as good as the previous film GoldenEye, it is still a pretty good movie. Where GoldenEye included a lot of elements unseen in the franchise before, Tomorrow Never Dies is a more traditional type of Bond film. Traditional Bond ingredients like the tricked out car, the world in peril from a rich crazy dude, the female agent team up, the hookup with a doomed woman, the hulking main henchman, and the Southeast Asia road trip make up the majority of this adventure, with a few new twists mixed in.

The plot of this 007 film is initially a detective Bond one. A British naval ship has sunk of the coast of China and in the encounter a Chinese fighter was shot down. Each country is blaming the other for the incident and adding fuel to the fire is that all the survivors of the sinking were promptly gunned down in the water. The British military is screaming for blood and in order to prevent a major war from happening Bond must figure out what is really going on. No pressure. The only lead is a mysterious signal that might have interfered with the ship's GPS, that originated from a Carver Media building . It does not take very long for the villain to reveal themselves to Bond and that is when Bond switches from detective to kick ass agent. Once in agent mode 007 is able to dispatch minions on his way to stopping the crisis.

The main villain is Elliot Carver as played by Jonathan Pryce who is known for being Governor Swann in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the President in the GI Joe films and is now on Game of Thrones. Carver is a media baron in the vain of Rupert Murdoch, whose influence is spread through his newspapers and TV channels, but in his search for more money and power has decided a war between China and Britain is what he needs to gain entry into the lucrative Chinese market. With his stealth boat he was the one that sent the British ship below and also shot down the Chinese plane. In order to get the war stared he also stole a missile off the British wreck in order to frame them for the destruction. As a Bond villain Carver is OK. He does rise above the other rich crazies by actually getting his hands dirty by killing a minion himself, but his final showdown with Bond was typical for the type in that is was not much of a fight and it ended in his death. Of the rich crazies Carver is near the top in quality, but any adventure with that type of villain suffers in quality maybe because the type is not very relatable. The world in peril villain has really only worked well in the franchise when there is an organization behind it or there is a memorable henchman to shine where the leader does not. This adventure unfortunately does not really have that henchman. Stamper is Carver's number one henchman and is a middle range one, not entirely forgettable, but also not very memorable. Stamper is a physically imposing type of villain, who is more brawn than brains. Most of the work against Bond is left to lesser henchmen, while Stamper observes from the sidelines. 007 and Stamper don't actually make real physical contact until their final fight and though a decent fight, it does not really stand out in the franchise. The deaths of Carver and Stamper are original ones for the series and they do actually stand out. Carver meets his end by a machine that has spinners that can tear through a ship, but in this case tears through him and Stamper gets trapped behind a missile that is about to launch and gets his leg burned away before being blown up along with the missile. The standout villain is a Dr. Kaufman, who is in only one scene but with the performance, steals it. Kaufman kills someone close to Bond and is in the process of framing Bond for the crime. It is the banter between him and 007 that makes him memorable. It is an interesting mix of menace and comedy and is a highlight of the film.

The role of doomed female companion Paris is played by Teri Hatcher, who portrayed a woman who is currently married to Carver, but also used to be involved with Bond. It is the prior relationship with Bond that is the cause of her death more than anything else, because Carver is the very jealous type. Paris actually sought Bond out for their final encounter so this time it really wasn't directly Bond's fault that she was killed, but it did allow us to see, albeit briefly, a Bond in mourning. 007's first female companion of the film was at the beginning when Bond was trying to learn Danish through the exchange of fluids with a Danish professor. The main female companion is the fellow agent in the adventure, this time the agent's country is China. Wai Lin is played by Michelle Yeoh so you know this agent can take care of herself. Before circumstances force them to team up, Wai Lin is seen multiple times by 007 during their concurrent investigations, usually doing things just a little bit better than Bond. Through most of the second half of the movie, Wai Lin and Bond work side by side and the stunt work never suffers. A lot of the stunts that you would normally see 007 do by himself are in this film done together. The only blemish on the character is towards the end of the film Wai Lin is captured and then placed in the damsel in distress mode and Bond must come to her rescue.

The pre-credits sequence in this film is an action one again, but not a big stunt one. In this sequence 007 is observing a terrorist bazaar when a missile strike against it is ordered. When nuclear tipped missiles are discovered on an aircraft at the bazaar, Bond is in a race against the airstrike to get that plane away from the blast. Before taking off in his captured aircraft Bond uses it to destroy half the bazaar to aid in his getaway. A petty cool dogfight with another aircraft ensues with 007 piloting the aircraft with his knees, due to his copilot trying to strangle him from behind. Even without the big memorable stunt, the sequence is one of the better ones of the franchise. The next Bond involved action is at a Carver party when Carver sees Bond talking to Paris and Carver sicks his goons on Bond. Needless to say 007 wipes the floor with them. A penetration of a Carver building in search of evidence leads to the next bit of action when the incursion is discovered and Bond must escape. Many minions are dispatched in the escape. The next action setpiece is not one with 007 by himself, but also involves Wai Lin. The duo are captured and in a daring escape travel halfway down a highrise using a giant poster as a method of transport. Once of the building a chase between a helicopter, cars, and a motorcycle ensues with the duo on the bike. Many cars are wrecked and eventually the copter too, but that is not the end of it. Thinking she is now safe Wai Lin ditches Bond, but there are thugs waiting for her at her safehouse. Bond catches up to her and takes care of the lookouts but the rest of the dudes are all hers and she eliminates them pretty coolly, which is what you would expect with Michelle Yeoh. The final fight is on the stealth boat as Bond and Wai Lin set out to disable it and make it visible to radar so the British and Chinese will fight it instead of each other. Many lowly henchman are dispatched as each of the duo work their way through the ship before the final fights with Carver and Stamper.

Almost forgot about a first for Brosnan's Bond, he gets to actually use his tricked out car this film. The car comes with the usual missiles, tire mines, and bulletproof windows, but this one has a modern twist that puts Bond more into the realm of sci-fi. This car can be operated by using his phone as a remote control sort of like a video game. Poor car ends up being remotely driven off the roof of a parking structure, probably angering Q to no end.

So the overall story is an interesting one and the pairing of Brosnan and Yeoh make for a great team, but the main thing keeping this film in the pretty good category rather than the great is the lack of a really memorable villain, save Dr. Kaufman. The need of a great villain is usually hard to overcome in a good vs evil kind of movie. The song by Sheryl Crow is just like the movie, a pretty good middle of the list type one, not unpleasant, but also doesn't leap to the brain when thinking of great Bond themes. In the grand scheme of things top fifteen ain't so bad.

Brosnan trail is now halfway complete as the summit draws ever closer.

James Bond will return in: The World Is Not Enough

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: GoldenEye

Title: GoldenEye

Year: 1995

Bond: Pierce Brosnan

Director: Martin Campbell

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 1

GoldenEye is my theatrical introduction to the world of 007 and with the introduction it gave I don't know if it will ever get knocked off the top of the list. Adding to its mystique is the N64 game that followed it and it is widely considered one of the greatest games of all time. So many hours were put into this game, that it is now intertwined with the movie in my brain. Specific scenes in the movie put flashes of playing those scenes in the game and certain settings produce multiplayer level flashbacks. Being able to play through what was at the time one of my all time favourite movies (still top 20) just cemented the awesome into my adolescent brain and I think it's permanent.

Due to a bunch of lawyers doing their thing there was a six year gap in between films and in that time Timothy Dalton left the franchise. This lead to a second chance opportunity for Pierce Brosnan to get the part. Brosnan was up for the role to take over for Moore, but Remington Steele prevented that from happening. GoldenEye is a mix of old and new and Brosnan's Bond is perfectly suited for it. His Bond is a mix of Connery's love of the hand to hand combat, Moore's love of the non stop wit and Dalton's intensity. Being able to bring all this to the table means it was a good thing that he had to wait awhile before getting the role, as the experience shows. Normally it takes a movie to settle into the role, but he got it right out of the gate.

The plot standard detective Bond, as he must figure out the circumstances around an EMP detonation that took out a Russian research facility. It is a plot that he just stumbled upon while he was off undergoing an evaluation, sort of like Thunderball, in that important clues are known by Bond even before anyone knows there is a mystery to solve. It is while in Monte Carlo that 007 meets a woman that he finds suspicious, and when his suspicions are confirmed he stars to investigate her and in doing so witnesses a helicopter theft. It was no ordinary helicopter, this was a cutting edge stealth copter that is resistant to an EMP. Investigation over so back to base for 007 and then on to something else, or so he thought. Seems the stolen copter was involved in the destruction of the Russian facility and the dangerous method of the destruction means Bond is on the case.

Besides Monaco and London, 007 travels to another couple of continents in his efforts to stop the plot. Stop number one is the scene of the crime, or at least the country in which it occurred, Russia. St. Petersburg is Bond's point of entry into the country and really the only place he goes to in Russia. It is here that Bond learns the identity of the person behind the whole operation and also has maybe the greatest chase sequence in Bond movie history. After letting the baddies get away, Bond tracks them to Cuba and in a jungle part of the county is where the final fight occurs.

OK the reveal of the big bad is supposed to be a kind of twist, but all promotional material for the film revealed the twist, so the reveal loses its lustre, but that doesn't affect the film's quality at all. In a pre-credits flashback sequence 007 believes that the mission he is carrying out has cost 006 his life, but as it turns out 006 is alive and quite evil. 006 is Alec Trevelyan and is played perfectly by Sean Bean. Alec has no special appendages, or gadgets or anything else to make him more than human. He is just a man. A man that has faked his own death and turned to the criminal side of things to get revenge on the country that caused the death of his family and fellow Cossack in the aftermath of World War II. It is as if James Bond just decided to become a criminal kingpin and it is this fact that gives the film more realism than the typical bad guy that wants to rain down destruction upon the world, would. The fact that Alec has all the skills and training that Bond has, makes him probably the most formidable big baddie that Bond has ever faced. Taking on Alec if he was alone would be hard enough, but the former 006 has surrounded himself with some other villainy that is top notch. Alec's inside man in the Russian government is the head of Space Division, a General Ourumov that has a history with 007 and it isn't a pleasant one. The man recruited to help steal and run the EMP weapon known as GoldenEye is a programmer on the project named Boris Grishenko, with another perfect performance this time by Alan Cumming. Boris is the sort of comic relief character, but that doesn't mean he is incompetent, it is quite the opposite really, it is that he is extremely cocky. It is out of this cockiness that the humour comes out. When one keeps shouting “I am invincible!” after getting away with something, you know things are going to end badly. No Baron Samedi or Jaws type getaway for Boris, but his death is very memorable. In the history of 007 adventures there is a tradition of number twos stealing the show and this one is no exception. Ex Soviet fighter pilot Xenia Onatopp is one of the top henchpeople of all time, with her strong um personality and the psychopathic weird sexual thrill she gets out of killing. Xenia has no problem with gunning down unarmed nerd types or soldiers, but it seems her preferred method of snuffing out the life of someone, is to choke them with her thighs. She wraps her thighs around the victim's midsection and then it's lights out. One dude she killed towards the beginning of the film in order to get his ID pass died by thighs and he died with a giant smile on his face. It was like death by snoo-snoo if you were in the Futurama universe. Xenia is played by Famke Janssen who later played Jean Grey in the X-Men films and is yet another perfect performance in a film stacked with them. Each villain gets a time to shine and this is one of the few times where 007 gets to face off with the big bad and it actually be a good fight. Usually the head honcho goes down without Bond even taking a hit, but Alec gives Bond everything he can handle. Bond takes an emotional beating as well as the physical one and that is the sign of great villainy. The sum of these villains is probably greater than that of any of the other films and that is one of the many reasons why this film is my favourite 007 adventure.

The main female companion is also pretty strong in this film even though she spends a great deal of time out of her element. There is a hookup with a woman sent to evaluate Bond towards the beginning of the film, but the woman that spends the most time with Bond is Natalya Simonova. Natalya is a programmer at the facility that gets destroyed and Bond seeks her out as she is a witness to who did it. Bond and Natalya do eventually meet, but it is only after Alec lays a trap for 007, captures him and places him and Natalya into the stolen chopper that is about to be blown up. Bond and Natalya escape (duh) and from that point on are almost inseparable. Natalya showed some quick thinking and guts in her efforts to survive and escape the attack on her workplace, but she made the mistake of trusting Boris and that is how she wound up in the chopper. She is briefly captured again, but really just through inexperience and bad luck. After that capture Natalya never again loses her cool and in fact steps up and is a vital part in the mission's success. It is her computer skills that first locate where Alec and his people have gone, and then they also help stop a satellite from unleashing the weapon that destroyed her workplace, onto London. The second capture is a turning point for her in that she stops being someone that is along for the ride and becomes someone actually shaping the outcome, a partner to 007. Natalya is a worthy successor to Carey Lowell's character of the previous Bond adventure and definitely not a damsel in distress. Izabella Scorupco played Natalya and went on to be in Reign of Fire, a film that had no weak lead characters. Bond does briefly lock pelvises with Xenia, but she is trying her thigh choke at the time so nothing really came of it.

The action starts right from the opening scene in the pre-credits sequence, with an epic bungee jump off a dam to penetrate a Russian base. No CGI double for that stuntman, he actually did it. 007 meets up with 006 in what is I think supposed to be 1989, so just at the end of the cold war. Their mission is to destroy the base, but things go awry when 006 is supposedly killed. It looks like the mission had been compromised and there is a small army waiting for the agents. After 006 is killed Bond narrowly escapes by driving a motorcycle off a cliff and free fall chasing a pilotless airplane. Bond does not have a parachute so his only means of survival is to get the plane. He does catch it, meaning that the pre-credits sequence begins with a crazy ass manoeuvre and also ends the same way. There is sort of a car race that opens the film after the credits between Bond and a woman who we later learn in Xenia. The race does get pretty hairy at times, which freaks Bond's passenger out, but at the end it gets him laid so I guess it was a multilayered action sequence. The destruction of the Russian facility where Natalya works was pretty neat with the plane crashes and stuff. There were multiple explosions and a couple jump scares, and in the end Natalya survives after going through an extremely stressful series of events. The next big action sequence occurs after the helicopter escape that introduces Bond and Natalya. After and interrogation that goes wrong, Bond and Natalya must escape a Russian compound, but unfortunately only Bond escapes. 007 sees Natalya being loaded into Ourumov's car and must acquire a vehicle in which to give chase, and this leads to probably my all time favourite car chase of any film. The vehicle that Bond chooses is not something that is compact and manoeuvrable like a motorcycle or something inconspicuous like an ordinary car, no Bond chooses a tank. 007 fulfills many a highway driver's fantasy by cruising around a city in the heaviest of military vehicles. Needless to say there is a lot of public destruction along the way, but in the end Bond is just a bit too late to catch is quarry. No police officers are actually harmed in the chase as the director goes out of his way to show, but their cars are not so lucky. Bond arrives just in time to see Natalya being lead on to an armoured train, which would have been impossible to stop had he not stolen the tank. Turns out the tank is armed as Bond helps derail the train by placing the tank in front of it and shooting a shot right into it, setting it aflame. In the brief rescue skirmish on the train Ourumov loses his life to an AK. The next action sequence is also the last one and it is the entirety of the time spent in Cuba. It starts off with Bond and Natalya's plane being shot down and that leads to a confrontation with Xenia. Xenia loses, dies pretty horribly and gets a Bond witticism eulogy, which allows Natalya and Bond to storm the Cuban base that Alec is using to fire GoldenEye again. The get captured again, but that leads to Boris inadvertently setting off a pen grenade and this leads the base to its destruction. A great fight between the 00s is performed high up on the satellite dish components that has a lot of punches thrown and leaves them both bloodied. The fight ends with Alec being thrown of the dish and falling many stories to the ground below, he somehow survives, though probably not for long even if the dish components didn't blow up and land on his screaming self. The last remaining villain is Boris and through all the destruction he somehow lives, but then he makes the mistake of uttering his “I am invincible!” catchphrase, which causes liquid nitrogen tanks to explode and freezes him in a ridiculous death pose.

In the change over to the new Bond the only character that has the same actor is Q. Q is only seen in his lab this time, so no road trip Q. Joe Don Baker who was last seen fighting Timothy Dalton's 007 comes back, but this time as Bond's CIA contact, but not Felix. We also get a new Moneypenny and a new M. The banter with Moneypenny is the same as with Connery's Bond, but keeps it modern as well. The new M is played by Judi Dench making it the first time M has been a woman. Nothing is lost in the change of sexes for the character, so it is a non issue. Not much time is spent at headquarters so Bond's interaction time with M and Moneypenny is pretty limited.

There are some Canadian connections with this adventure. The first is the poor Admiral that gets thigh choked to death. When the ID card is stolen we see that the nationality of the now deceased is Canadian. The other Canadian mention is when Natalya is tracing Boris' location and among the list of cities that are mentioned during the trace path is Toronto. It is too bad that Boris was not hiding there because Bond in Toronto would have been awesome.

So it is the sum of the story, the action, the performances and the music that is the reason why I love the film so much. The fact that the game spinoff was so good as well only expands this love. The title song sung by Tina Turner is a great throwback piece, hearkening to the era of Shirley Bassey. As this is my all time favourite Bond film it means that it can only go downhill from here for Brosnan, but oh what a beginning. Every time I watch the movie it gives me the urge to replay the game, but it has been far too long since that has happened, maybe it will occur soon.

The Brosnan trail has just been started, but the summit is starting to come into focus.

James Bond will return in: Tomorrow Never Dies

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Licence To Kill

Title: License To Kill

Year: 1989

Bond: Timothy Dalton

Director: John Glen

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 10

License To Kill is probably the least Bond like of all the films and that's most likely why my affinity for it grows with every year. This film plays more like a revenge thriller than a straightforward 007 adventure. When comparing in tone and action with cinema of the last couple years, the film has more in common with John Wick and The Equalizer than with the recent spy films. Minions usually get beat up a bit, but most likely survive, but this Bond cuts a swath through them with the survivors being the exception rather than the rule. I have a feeling as I get older License To Kill will move up in the list, because its themes and their presentation are timeless. There is only a few gadgets, which keeps the action nicely grounded in as much realism as you can expect in the genre.

The plot is 007 wants to find and kill a drug lord that maimed his friend CIA Felix and killed Felix's wife all on their wedding night. This being an unsanctioned mission means Bond has no more government protection, but also he no longer must play by their rules, Bond has gone rogue. Rogue 007 results in some pretty gruesome kills on both sides, the likes of which I don't think we have seen again in the franchise. This is Bond at his darkest and it's a shame that Dalton didn't get to continue with the franchise. The weird coincidence of final 007 appearances being the most American continues here as most of the players involved are American and a bunch of the action takes place in Florida as well as a fictional country.

Female companionship is important in this one as Bond has a kind of female partner throughout the adventure. Carey Lowell plays Pam Bouvier, a military pilot who was working undercover for Felix and once her cover gets blown, starts working with Bond. Apart from a couple jealous girl type moments, Pam is a pretty strong character who saves Bond life on more than one occasion. She can handle herself in a fight and doesn't shy away from the gunplay. She even makes the first move on Bond, which kind of makes them the perfect couple. With this being the last Bond adventure for Dalton, it's nice to imagine them still together ruining some criminals life, because 007 is not reinstated at the end so conceivably they could go freelance. Bond tries to send Pam away several times, but she always refuses and end up saving his ass later. The other companion is the drug lord's girlfriend, who tries to secure her freedom and his cooperation in obtaining it, by sleeping with Bond. The last man that she tried this method with got his heart cut out and was the catalyst for the whole movie as it lead to the drug lord's capture and subsequent escape. The capture was by Felix, with an assist by Bond, who was heading up the hunt for the drug lord. The girlfriend, Lupe, is really just a woman trying to escape her past and an abusive relationship, so even though she is not on the good team, she is not a bad person. She helps Bond when she can, but mostly covertly as her skillset doesn't allow for more of the physical dangerous type stuff. So this film is damsel in distress free, which is always a good thing. In fact the only person who gets tied up is Bond, so for a scene Bond is the damsel in distress needing a rescue.

The drug lord Sanchez is played awesomely by Robert Davi (one of the Fratelli brothers in Goonies amongst dozens of other credits) and rules his empire with an iron fist. His most vicious lieutenant Dario is played by a super young Benicio Del Toro and even though it is one of his first roles, he is quite adept at playing the psychopath. Dario is the one that cuts out the unfortunate dude's heart and shows relish at the thought of carrying out the task. There is a money nerd, a dude with weird plastic surgery, a head of security, and a TV preacher type guy that round out the main characters in the drug organization. The preacher type guy is played by Wayne Newton and as the sort of comic relief does a surprisingly good job. Newton's character is the only one that survives and that's good for him, because most of the ends for the rest of the crew are not pleasant. Sanchez does most of the killing himself with the money nerd getting some bullets to the chest, the security guy being run through by a forklift, and the dude with the weird plastic surgery got his head exploded. The head explosion was due to a decompression chamber incident that was the result of Sanchez suspecting him of stealing a bunch of money. Bond was the actual thief and set up surgery dude to take the fall. Dario was shot by Pam and dragged into some sort of grinding machine by Bond, making it a very painful and bloody death. Sanchez was set on fire by Bond using his best man gift from Felix, and since Sanchez was covered in gasoline and standing by a leaking gas truck, he caused quite the burning man explosion. The method of ignition is apt for Sanchez, because he is the one who went after Felix and used sharks to maim him. The shark torture scene was pretty intense too, and the shark might not have gotten a whole dude to eat then, but they did soon after. The man who betrayed his job and helped Sanchez escape custody, got to be the shark's meal after Bond sends him into the water with his payoff.

The big action setpieces that are interspersed throughout the vengeance are what keeps this being a Bond movie rather than a normal revenge tale. The pre-credits sequence is the capture of Sanchez and it involves Bond dangling from a Coast Guard chopper and tying a line to Sanchez's airplane to trap it. Bond and Felix then jump from the chopper and parachute down to the wedding. It a pretty cool stunt sequence and you see enough of Timothy Dalton that it becomes more believable, physics be damned. Bond dispatches minions for awhile then comes across a money for drugs exchange and this leads to the next crazy ass stunt sequence. Bond disrupts the exchange and destroys a lot of the drugs, but is almost caught. In the underwater fight that ensues 007 uses a speargun that he takes off a dude, to shoot the seaplane that is trying to take off with the money. By using the speargun as a handle Bond then proceeds to water ski behind the plane as it's taking off. Once it is in the air Bond eventually takes over the plane by sending the two pilots out the doors and into the air beyond, without their parachutes of course. This allows Bond to fly away with a few million in cash that will help fund his personal mission. Somehow Bond gets Sanchez to trust him and then Sanchez takes him to the main drug factory, the hub of the operation. Bond starts a fire which leads to the final fight. After dispatching Dario, Bond and Pam chase down trucks that are carrying a gas and drug mixture. They chase them down using a plane. Bond must get from the plane to a truck and then take that truck over. This all occurs on a winding hillside road and results in multiple crashes, explosions and trick truck driving. The chase ends with the Sanchez human torch.

Appearing multiple times throughout Bond's time in the fictional place of Isthmus, is Q. This is probably the most screen time the character has ever had and he does it all away from home. Not only do we get on location Q, but we also get helper on the mission Q, and even Q in disguise! M appears a couple times, once to do the old badge and gun routine, and the second time he has a conversation with Moneypenny in her only appearance. Instead of having to witness Bond scoring in the end by camera, this time Q gets to do it in person.

The darkness that Dalton brings to the character doubled with the darkness of the plot is what ultimately brings its ranking up so high, and possibly in the future even higher. The top ten Bond films are the elite ones that bring something new and memorable to the franchise and the thing that this one brings is its sheer brutality. This may have spelled the end for Timothy Dalton's Bond (thank you lawyers :( ), but most of me is OK with that because most likely it was all downhill from here.

So the all too brief Dalton trail is now complete, with the next trail now upon us. The path to the top just has two trails left and the peak is starting to become visible.

James Bond will return in: GoldenEye

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: The Living Daylights

Title: The Living Daylights

Year: 1987

Bond: Timothy Dalton

Director: John Glen

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 17

As I get older, my appreciation of the Dalton Bond films grows. As a much darker 007 to that of Roger Moore's, I just wasn't ready for that kind of Bond when they came out. Being only single digits in age probably had a lot to do with it. Whenever a Bond adventure was on TV it was usually Connery or Moore so my exposure to Dalton was very limited, until they started to come out on DVD. The fact that there were only two Dalton films also meant you had to be in the right place at the right time whenever a channel would do a marathon and usually I wasn't. I might have gotten a glimpse of Dalton Bond on the big screen at a drive in, but that was as close as I got until much later and after I had been exposed to the next Bond actor. Dalton's Bond isn't devoid of humour, but shows it very infrequently. The lack of playing everything for laughs allows for more emotions to be shown, especially anger. Anger is the emotion for this Bond that stands out the most and because of it, we connect with Dalton's Bond more than Moore's. So welcome to the world of 007 Mr. Dalton, too bad your stay was brief.

The plot of Dalton's initial foray into Bond is one that gears more towards that of a thriller than that of a traditional Bond film. In The Living Daylights, after some initial human smuggling and then having said human kidnapped back, Bond is ordered to assassinate a high ranking Soviet official. It is an order that Bond feels is too hasty and 007 must figure out all the political intrigue and twists before carrying out the order. At the same time someone is killing British spies and that is the reason given to kill the Soviet. In search of the truth, Bond creates an adventure that is among the most globe trotting. So there's no eccentric billionaire trying to destroy the world in this one, just a couple of criminals in search of more money and power.

As I said before there a lot of globe trotting in this one so lets look at where 007 visits in this adventure. The film starts with Bond parachuting into a base in Gibraltar in a pre-credits sequence that is stunt heavy and has a slight tie-in to the rest of the picture. The human smuggling comes next and it is from Czechoslovakia that Bond must grab the individual. The end point is England, but a brief stopover in Austria is needed to catch a ride with a waiting Harrier. Unfortunately Bond doesn't get to fly in it, just the human package. The way Bond got his man over the border is quite interesting as it involved using an oil pipeline and a capsule type thing. Once the human cargo was kidnapped from England, Austria and Czechoslovakia were visited again as Bond was hunting for his quarry. The trail eventually leads Bond to Morocco and then from there (against his will) to Afghanistan. Afghanistan in the 80s is a weird setting now because of the Mujahideen that was there fighting the Soviets. The Mujahideen gave birth to Al-Qaeda and all films that have the hero helping them seem kind of tainted because of it. The villainy in this film is split between four characters, with two being villains right from their first appearance and the other two flip flopping between good and bad halfway through the film. The first villain we meet is some Aryan looking assassin that we later learn is the muscle for the films co-baddie. The assassin kills several agents throughout the movie and is the driving force in the, as it turns out, fake kidnapping. General Koskov is the defector who at the beginning is smuggled across the border and before he is kidnapped gives the British info on a plan to kill their agents by another Soviet, General Pushkin. Pushkin is the target of Bond's assassination order. So Pushkin is the initial main baddie, but it turns out that the info given was false and that in actuality Koskov is the bad dude. Koskov is working with an arms dealer named Whitaker in a scheme that is bilking the Soviets out of a lot of money. Whitaker is played by Joe Don Baker who would reappear in another incarnation with another Bond. Pushkin as played by John Rhys-Davies (Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Treebeard/Gimli in the Lord of the Rings series) is the only hurdle to getting away with the scheme so that's why he is set up with the assassinations. Everyone does a good job with what they are given, but because the stakes are so low the film doesn't have the same gravitas we are used to and that hurts it's ranking. Memorable villains is what usually makes for a great Bond film and unfortunately these guys don't stand out.

The action scenes are very good in this one and with the actor visibly doing a lot it makes up for some of what is lacking on the villain side. The pre-credits sequence has Bond parachuting, jumping onto a speeding jeep, fighting its occupant and then parachuting out the back of it as it plummets towards the water below. Some of the stunts are actually done by Dalton which allows for it to be more believable, as they don't have to continually hide his face or use projection. The defection and subsequent kidnapping sequences don't have much action for 007, though the kidnapping one does have exploding milk bottles. During Bond's investigation he meets up with Koskov's girlfriend and must escape Czechoslovakia with her, this allows for him to use his new Aston Martin. The car chase allows for Bond to show off all the equipment stored in his car. There's a laser that cuts cars in half, missiles from the front, skies for when you get a flat in snow, spikes for traction and of course rocket boost for those times you need to jump. The car doesn't survive the jump unfortunately, so it must self destruct ending the fun. The race to the border ends with a downhill chase using a cello case as a toboggan resulting in a rare witticism at the border crossing. The airbase storming sequence with the aid of the Mujahideen is pretty much the final battle and even though it does not result in the ending of the main baddies, it is pretty exciting. The best part of the battle has Bond dangling out the back of a cargo plane on a net full of opium packages fighting the Aryan looking assassin, while one of the packages is loaded with explosives and is counting down to explosion time. The assassin does not survive the flight, but neither does the plane, because of the old shot gas tank routine. The next bit of action is an all too brief encounter with Whitaker that leaves him dead and Koskov arrested by Pushkin. The lack of a real fight with Whitaker and the fact that there is no fight with Koskov are probably what hurts the film the most. Weak villains with weak resolutions make for weaker films. The leader of the Mujahideen interestingly enough went on to play the main nemesis in True Lies.

Bond gets only two female companions in this adventure and the first one is right before the credits. While Bond is parachuting away from the plummeting jeep, there is a woman on a yacht complaining to her friend on the phone about how hard it is to meet a good guy where she is, cue 007 landing on her boat to fulfill her needs. Kara Milovy is female companion number two, but starts off as Koskov's girlfriend, but once she learns the truth she is fully on team Bond. Kara is a cellist, so she is out of her element throughout most of the film, but becomes a bit of a badass towards the end. The first time we see her she has a sniper rifle trained on Koskov as part of his defection scheme, but as Bond notices, she is not real comfortable in this role. Up until Afghanistan she is mostly just a fish out of water passenger in the adventures, but thankfully not a screaming damsel in distress type. As far as female companions go Kara is better than most, even though she does not possess many skills that Bond needs. She makes up for the lack of relevant skills by keeping care of herself and not really bumbling the tasks she is given. Unfortunately Kara is not memorable enough to lift the film any higher in the rankings, but that's the case in most of the categories.

The film is pretty good and average, but without anything that really stands out and that is why it ranks where it is. The theme is by Ah-Ha (80s classic Take On Me) and they do a good job with it. Duran Duran's previous theme overshadows this one, but compared to the rest of the songs it is better than most. The interactions with the new Moneypenny were also pretty weird.

One film in and we are already halfway through Dalton trail, but we are about to enter the final third of the trail. Still a ways to go till the summit.

James Bond will return in: License To Kill

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: A View To A Kill

Title: A View To A Kill

Year: 1985

Bond: Roger Moore

Director: John Glen

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 16

A View To A Kill marks the seventh and final Roger Moore 007 adventure and he goes out with a pretty good one. The film has all the usual Bond highlights like the crazy stunts, the chases, and the women, but not a lot of Roger Moore in action. The lack of action scenes with Moore is probably due to his age at the time, he was getting pretty old, at least in spy years. This film is probably neck and neck with Diamonds Are Forever in being the most American Bond film. Odd coincidence that both films are the actors official Bond swan songs. The climax of both films take place in the western part of America, they both have American final female companions, Bond gets American CIA help in both, and also both baddies have mainly American henchmen. The difference in the end is Diamonds has Blofeld as its main baddie and Kill has a multinational test tube baby that speaks with an American accent, so the edge in Americanism goes to Kill.

The plot of A View To A Kill is sort of a scaled down version of insane rich guy wants to destroy the world. Instead of the world he just wants to destroy Silicon Valley. Max Zorin is the rich guy in question and by taking out Silicon Valley he would be able to corner the worlds microchip market. As fiendish plots go it's not the biggest, but it is a lot for just a business move. What leads Bond to Zorin is he recovers a microchip off the corpse of a fellow double o in Russia, and it is a perfect match for a top secret EMP proof chip that was being developed for Britain's defence. The chip's manufacturer was just purchased by Zorin Industries, so immediately Bond is suspicious, thus begins his chase of Zorin around the world.

Max Zorin is played by Christopher Walken and he brings his usual tics to the role, but they fit it well. Looking at his IMDB credits, I don't see an obvious villain role before this one, so I guess we have the Bond producers to thank for all the iconic villainy that followed. The character we are told is born of a science experiment done during Nazi rule in World War II and they try to give Zorin that Aryan look, with the blond hair and all that. Zorin's scientist father was scooped up by the KGB and so Zorin starts of as a KGB agent, but when they learn of his plans and object, he severs all ties with them. He is supposedly the lone survivor of the experiment that gave people super intelligence through steroids in utero, but the side effect was it turned the subjects into psychotics. This side effect is in full display when Zorin is gleefully gunning down miners that were, up to the bullet rain, working for him. So overall Walken does a very good job at being a Bond villain, he may not be physically imposing, but you know he will kill you at the drop of a hat. Most of Zorin's main team of henchmen are actually henchwomen, and their leader is May Day portrayed by Grace Jones. May Day is the muscle in Zorin's crew and she shows it by killing off three of Bond's allies. Her first kill is a French detective, then she kills Bond's undercover partner, and then finally she kills Bond's CIA contact. This film probably has the highest named character body count, with all of the people that cease to live. May Day is Zorin's training partner and lover and it is the latter role that comes in to play when Zorin double crosses her. The same situation that allows Zorin to gun down all those miners also kills May Day's two female colleagues and also almost kills her, thus making her one of the few baddies that comes over to the side of good in a 007 flick. The near death experience gives her the realization that Zorin does not love her and that then gives her the strength and fury to sacrifice herself to save the day and thwart Zorin. Yes she did sleep with Bond at one point in the movie, but his supposed magic penis was not the thing that pushed her into joining the side of good, it was just scorned lover. Grace Jones played the part very well, and she stands out from Walken which is quite an accomplishment. Zorin also has his Nazi creator and a dude with a scar on his face that is I guess is part of his security team, always with him, but like everyone else around Zorin they die. I mention them together because they die together, outliving Zorin by just a minute or two before succumbing to the effects of being to close to a bundle of dynamite that is in the process of exploding.

There is a bunch of action sequences in this one, but unfortunately none can be considered great. The film starts of with what must be Roger Moore's favourite pastime from the amount of times it has appeared in his films, skiing. The twist this time is that after losing his skies and the snowmobile he's on Bond resorts to using a snowmobile tread to snowboard. Snowboarding Bond is a new one and would be cool if not for the horrible soundtrack they use over it. Instead of the Bond theme or some other action type beat, they use California Girls by The Beach Boys. That song takes the tone from serious action to goofy shenanigans, surprised the Benny Hill theme wasn't next. I know Roger Moore is supposed to be the lighter Bond, but that was too much. The endpoint of this pre-credits sequence was a pretty cool iceberg boat that Bond uses for his getaway. The hunt for info on Zorin leads Bond to Paris and a meeting with the soon to die French detective. The meeting is in the Eiffel Tower and this location causes a pretty cool escape by the killer, she parachutes off the tower and eventually lands in a boat. Seeing that they actually had a guy jump off the tower ups the cool factor to the sequence. Chasing the parachute makes Bond steal a car, but for comedic effect he keeps losing parts of the car and before long he is just left with the front bottom part. The disintegrating car is fine, mostly because it's pretty brief so it doesn't get the chance to move into pure comedy territory. The next bit of action involves Bond and his undercover partner against two minions who were probably chosen last in the minion draft. Bond's partner is somehow older than he is, so two schlubs were needed to make the fight somewhat believable. Defiantly not one of the better fights in the Bond franchise. 007's next brush with the bad guys has him taking on a group of henchmen with a shotgun full of rocksalt, while defending a woman. The woman helps him out and they somehow disarm all the guys, but all the henchmen escape unscathed, which is weird for the series. The best action sequence of the film is the next one and it involves the escape from a burning building and the theft of a firetruck. Bond and a female companion were left in an escapable situation by Zorin and while fleeing the burning building that was to be their tomb, they run afoul of the law. Bond in order to free himself of the SFPD, steals a firetruck and leads them on a police chase. There are a few scenes of 007 dangling from the ladder and taking out stuff, but this part seems pretty tame when compared to a similar sequence in Con Air, but I digress. The chase ends memorably with the firetruck jumping an opening bridge while the police cars do not fare too well. The police cars end up skidding back down the side they failed to scale and get mashed up pretty good. The final fight takes place on the Golden Gate Bridge because Bond was hanging off one of the mooring lines to Zorin's escape blimp and Zorin thought the bridge would be a good place to knock him off. Doesn't go according to plan as Bond uses the line to anchor the blimp to the bridge. The battle between Zorin and Bond is OK, nothing special other than the setting, which is way on top of the bridge. Zorin eventually falls to his death and Bond causes the blimp to explode so that gets rid of everybody. Baddies scrambling to get rid of explosives before they blow is always fun to watch in an action movie. All the locales visited by Bond have a bit of action in them, Russia at the beginning, France in the middle and Bay area California at the end.

I don't know if it is because Moore saw the unofficial 007 adventure that had Connery with four women and demanded he have the same, but Bond has four female companions in this one. In the pre-credits sequence his getaway iceberg also contains a copilot, so there is lady number one. May Day is companion number two, but we already know all about her. During a sort of info gathering mission to Zorin's oil pumps, Bond runs into two KGB agents spying on Zorin. A mishap with a turbine that Bond must escape from alerts Zorin's people to the presence of one of the KGB people and it does not end well for him. The other agent escapes though and Bond escapes with her and of course this leads to sex. The final companion is a woman who is suing Zorin over an oil company that she feels he took over illegally, needless to say this gives her a target on her back. She is the owner of the shotgun full of rocksalt in that fight explained earlier. Tanya Roberts plays Stacey Sutton the woman that Zorin is out to get. Tanya is best know to people of my generation as Donna's mom on That 70's Show. Thankfully this is not the same type of character, because that would annoying really fast. Stacey is an former oil exec who with her geologist degree now works for the government. She alternates between fighting for herself and screaming in terror, which creates a weird mix of damsel in distress and someone who can take care of herself. The assertive personality is more prevalent, so on the whole it's a good character. Poor Q must watch Bond have sex again at the end, and this time it is with Stacey.

So the main reason that this ranks below most of the other Bond films for me is the lack of actual fighting and stunt work for Moore. I guess because of his age and the type of Bond that he is, the focus was more on the stuntmen and the humour rather than the action that the actor can participate in. The story is good and the villains are well played, but I'm sure if the comedy was taken down a couple notches the film would rise a bit up the ranks. The complaints keep this in the good Bond category and not in the great one, but it is still a really enjoyable film. In my rankings this is right in the middle for the Roger Moore adventures and that seems apt. Song wise though, this one is close to the top. Duran Duran's song is still gets radio play and a lot of people that hear it probably don't even know it was made for a film. Defiantly a top five song for me, maybe top three or even one. I should at the end rank the songs too. Also Dolph Lundgren's first credit is this film, giving it a tiny piece of his awesome.

We say goodbye to the Moore trail now and venture off on to a short one, but we are almost into the last third of the climb. The peak is not visible yet, but we're getting there.

James Bond will return in: The Living Daylights

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Never Say Never Again

Title: Never Say Never Again

Year: 1983 (Oct)

Bond: Sean Connery

Director: Irvin Kershner

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 15

What happens when you combine the forces of Francis Ford Coppola's brother in law, the director of The Empire Strikes Back, and an actor who has not played his career defining character in 12 years? You get the renegade Bond film Never Say Never Again. Born from lawyering over the book Thunderball, this 007 adventure is itself a loose remake/adaptation of the movie and novel. By paying Sean Connery loads of money and giving him creative control of the project, the filmmakers secured themselves the return of the greatest James Bond. Even though this is a Bond film, there are several differences between this one and the main series. Right off the top there is no gun barrel opening, nor a pre-credits sequence. There is a song, but it is playing over what should have been the pre-credits sequence. The music used also gives the movie a different feel, probably due to the inability to use the regular Bond themes. They also give Q a name and a nickname, I guess to set him apart from the other Q. Besides the appearance of Q, other characters we are familiar with make their token appearances. M (who is kind of a douche), Miss Moneypenny, Felix Lighter ( played by Bernie Casey, making it the first time the character was played by a minority), and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. There are some similar character names to the original adaptation, but they are mostly referred to by the different name so this film succeeds in adequately differentiating itself from Thunderball.

The trigger to the plot remains the theft of nuclear weapons, but the manner in which they are stolen differs somewhat. Instead of a NATO pilot being replaced by a double, an American pilot is hooked on heroin and has eye surgery to give him the same eye makeup of the President. Contact between Bond and the pilot is still made at a spa, and the incident does give Bond the clues he needs to start his bomb search. Once the action leaves the spa the big similarities between the films end. The places that Bond goes to and the gadgets he uses on his adventure are almost totally new. Instead of most of the action taking place in the Bahamas, this time it is mostly in France followed by a brief stop in northern Africa and the climax somewhere in the Middle East. The plan for one of the nukes is to detonate it underneath an oil field and they hope it will cause a chain reaction to take out multiple oil deposits with it. There is a bit of underwater action, but most of the final fight takes place in some sort of underground chamber that allowed everyone to discard the breathing equipment. The north African location was an old fortress that was used for a weird auction of the main villain's girlfriend (or I guess ex now).

While Blofeld is the leader of SPECTRE the focus of the film is two of his underlings and they are perhaps two of the most insane villains Bond has ever seen. If this was the DC universe Maximilian Largo and Fatima Blush would be residents of Arkham Asylum and would fit in nicely with the likes of the Joker. Max von Sydow is wasted as Blofeld as he has very little screentime. All he does is threaten the world and then essentially disappears from the movie. You don't really notice his absence though, and it's because of Barbara Carrera's performance of Fatima. Her performance was so good that it was nominated for a Golden Globe which for a Bond movie is quite unheard of. Fatima is a woman who likes to toy with her victim, before devouring them. If there was anyone that could be adequately compared to the previously mentioned Joker, Fatima would be it. Unfortunately for her, she sets her sights on Bond and despite several vastly different attempts, she (of course) ultimately fails, costing her her life. Death by RPG pen is a pretty unique way to go though. If it weren't for Fatima, Maximilian's brand of crazy would stand out more, but as it is he's still pretty terrifying. Where Fatima is the more fun loving crazy, Maximilian is the rage bomb about to explode kind. From threatening to cut his girlfriend's throat if she ever left him, to eventually auctioning her off to North African tribesmen, Maximilian is all about the power, how to get it and how to keep it. His persona is best explained in his video game battle with Bond. It isn't just an ordinary video game, it is one that dishes out pain to the users as they battle for world domination. Witnessing 007 master a video game, no matter how 80s cheese the graphics were, is quite a treat. The match between the two allows everyone to witness the real personality of Maximilian as he begins to lose to Bond. You've heard of let the Wookie win? Well I think even Chewie would concede victory to this dude. Crazy doesn't defend against a speargun to the chest however, so Maximilian meets his end at the hands of his scorned girlfriend. Apparently women don't like it when you threaten their life, try to auction them off, and have their brother killed.

Bond has the companionship of four different women in this adventure, with three of the four being overlaps with Thunderball. Just like in the original film, Bond sleeps with his attendant at the spa. Fatima also slices off a piece of 007, mirroring her Thunderball counterpart. Domino, the sister of the used American serviceman and girlfriend of Maximilian, winds up at the end with Bond, just like her namesake in Thunderball. Domino's arc is mostly that of an ordinary girl who finds herself in a Bond adventure. She is used by 007 to mostly antagonize Maximilian, before the villain finally snaps and then Domino's life is in danger. She isn't able to do much to save her life, and it appears as though she is just a passenger in the adventure, that is until the end. The fact that it is her spear that kills Maximilian, raises her above the basic damsel in distress role. The new companion in the adventure is just a woman Bond meets and flirts with at the docks, before being fished out of the water by her a bit later on. Bond literally winds up on her fishing hook after being stranded in the open water after a Fatima attempt on his life. She saves Bond's life again when they choose her room for a sexcapade and Fatima blows up Bond's. This is one of the films that one of 007's non villainous companions doesn't wind up dead. A female agent is killed by Fatima, but her interactions with Bond were few and being an agent was well aware of the dangers.

The movie opens with what was probably meant to be a pre-credits sequence with 007 raiding a villa in what turns out to be a training mission. Training or not, it was still pretty cool to see Bond burst through a window with guns a blazing. An assassin sent to kill Bond at the spa provides the hand to hand combat portion of the film and it's a weird fight. Bond being an older chap is overmatched by the behemoth sent after him and the fight destroys every room they enter. Loose items are made into weapons and the item that finally finishes off the assassin in a jar of Bond's own urine. The gross liquid is thrown into the attacker's eyes and makes him crash into a shelf giving him a back full of glass. Instead of a tricked out car, Bond gets a motorbike in this one. The bike gives us a bit of a twist on the car chase with its weapons and rocket boost. The chase is also interesting because it starts off with Bond doing the chasing and switches it later into him being the one who is chased. Action pieces other than the final firefight are the escape from the African fortress, and a fight with some sharks.

This film would not have been the quality it was, if not for the power of Sean Connery. Yes most of the other performances were good, but the shackles put on the story by all the lawyering made it a sort of hodgepodge film. Connery is the glue that binds it all together and his aging Bond is played to perfection. The comic relief character is another reason why I like this movie. The person sent to meet Bond in the Bahamas is a bumbling embassy worker played by Mr. Bean himself, Rowan Atkinson. I wonder he used his experiences with Bond as fodder for his Johnny English character. So while not the best Connery 007 film, it is better than a good chunk of the other Bond films.

The unofficial detour is done and now it's back to the Moore trail as the end of that draws near.

 James Bond will return in: A View To A Kill

[kyredperspective]

Double O-Athon: Octopussy

Title: Octopussy

Year: 1983 (June)

Bond: Roger Moore

Director: John Glen

Flickchart Bond Ranking: 21

1983 was a weird year because of the fact that there was two 007 films that year. Octopussy, the sixth Roger Moore Bond film, was the first to premiere. It has a new M, even though he is never addressed as such, because the previous one, Bernard Lee, had passed away. The film also makes us think that Lois Maxwell's Moneypenny is also on the way out, by giving her a much younger assistant, whom we see before Moneypenny. With Roger Moore getting older and the stunts in this one being so big, the doubling for Roger in this one gets pretty obvious. When it gets this easy to notice that the star of the film isn't in the scene, it puts a damper on an otherwise good action scene. Really all the film has is its action scenes, because the in between stuff was not really that good.

The plot has to do with Bond being on the trail of a Faberge Egg and why 009 was killed for it. This leads him to smuggling ring, that itself is being used to detonate a nuclear weapon in a US Army base. The main mission of the blast is so that a renegade USSR general can invade most of Eastern Europe. When you have a low stakes plot (at least the first 2/3 of it) it becomes all about the journey and the characters. Both are only OK in this film.

There is no real number one villain in Octopussy, just three people in a smuggling ring that has two of them really screwing over the third. There is the Soviet general, an Afghan national living in India, and the leader of the smuggling operation Octopussy. General Orlov and Kamal are the ones that are double crossing Octopussy, and any killing done is shown to be by their minions and not Octopussy's. This leads to Orlov and Kamal being pushed as the true villains and us being made to sympathize with Octopussy, who is just a normal criminal not a maniacal mass murdering one. This lack of a true villain and mostly forgettable henchmen is what probably hurts this film the most. Kamal's number two guy is a tall Sikh named Gobinda, that is supposed to be reminiscent of Jaws, but can't really live up to that standard. Of all the baddies, I think it's Gobinda that has the most screen time and that's fine seeing as he is really the only one with any menace. There are a couple of knife throwing brothers that could have been cool, but are just so inept and die way too easily to be considered good villain material, even though they did kill 009. A gang hired to kill Bond shows more menace in their few minutes of screen time then the big bosses do in the entire movie. The gang not only takes out Bond's in country help, but they also try a pretty ballsy invasion of an island castle in search of Bond. They almost get Bond, but the crocodile chooses the last member of the gang to eat, instead of Bond. One member stands out, as he has a sort of giant yo-yo weapon using saw blades. It's a pretty cool weapon, but I think it was him that became the croc's lunch. This film is odd because Bond doesn't kill either villain. He dispatches the main henchmen alright, but not the big guys. General Orlov gets gunned down stupidly trying to run across the border between the Berlins and Kamal dies because he is a terrible pilot.

There are a lot of females in this one, because Octopussy's employees are all female. The island castle is a sort of training ground for the women, who are able to perform all sorts of acrobatics because Octopussy's cover business is a travelling circus. One of Octopussy's top women is sent to retrieve something from Bond and in the process becomes his first companion of the movie. Bond to her was just a means to an end, albeit a most likely more pleasurable means than most. Octopussy herself is Bond's second lady and it happens by mutual attraction more than anything else. Maud Adams plays Octopussy and it is not the first time she has lain with Bond. She previously played Scaramanga's scheming girlfriend in The Man With The Golden Gun. In the final battle action sequence it is the women that do all the work. Kamal's compound is overrun with Octopussy's girls because she wants revenge for their doublecross. Bond pretty much does nothing but swoop in with his balloon at the last minute to go after Kamal and save Octopussy, who has gone from leader of an impressive army of women, to a damsel in distress. Q actually takes out a dude using the balloon's basket and becomes the object of affection for a bunch of the women in a more humorous part of the fight.

The action scenes are what keeps this 007 adventure in the OK category and not falling down to the disappointing class. The first scene is the pre-credits sequence though it has nothing to do with the plot of the film. Bond must blow up some foreign weaponry with some c4, but he gets captured instead. He then escapes, of course, and must complete the mission using plan B. Plan B is a mini jet and he uses the enemy's own missile against them. The flying and evading of the missile looked pretty cool, especially when he flew through the hanger that he was supposed to blow up. The missile tried to follow his route through the hanger, but it failed, blowing the hanger up. Mission complete. Thankfully this movie was boat chase free and the car chase it did have was an original one. Since the chase happened in India, instead of using normal size cars, the main participants were all in those tiny scooter type cars. It was a nice twist that made the chase feel fresher than if it had been with normal cars. Next bit of action was Bond evading Gobinda on top of and on the sides of a train. It was this sequence and the final one that was mostly Roger Moore free and it isn't that hard to tell. 007 doesn't really accomplish much on the train other then getting thrown off of it by one of the knife throwing brothers. Needless to say the knife guy does not last very long after that. The reason Bond wanted on that train so bad is that it is carrying a live nuclear bomb on it that is set to go off in a few hours. Bond steals a car and leads a brief police chase onto the army base. Disguised as a clown Bond saves the day by disarming the nuke. Hero clown just doesn't have a good ring to it. After the ladies kicking ass siege is the final action sequence. 007 jumps onto an airplane and rides it as it is flying. The scene is similar to the one in the new Mission Impossible trailers with Tom Cruise hanging on to the side of the plane, except that it really is Tom Cruise in that one and not an obvious stunt double. Bond rips out some wires forcing an engine to stop after some twisty flying failed to knock him off. The sabotage forces Gobinda to exit the plane, attempt to fight, and then get struck in the face with an aerial, sending him tumbling to his death. Bond then inexplicably forces the plane to land by just briefly pushing down on the elevators. The brief landing gives Bond the chance to grab Octopussy and jump out of the plane before it continues off a cliff and circles into the ground below. Post fight the plane sequence was pretty bad.

India provides most of the backdrop to the action, with East and West Germany and as usual London being the other locales visited after the credits. India gives us a bunch of animal shots, especially during a sequence where Bond is being hunted. He interacts with elephants, a snake, a croc, and a tiger all trying to add to the danger that doesn't really amount to anything. The German visit gives us a glimpse of what life was like before the wall came down, so it makes for an interesting time capsule.

So beyond the cruddy villainy and the stuntman heavy action scenes, the biggest weakness of the film is its humour. Too much of it is played for comedy and it pushes it out of the genre that Bond is supposed to thrive in. If you think Chewie doing the Tarzan yell was awful, just wait until you hear Bond do it. These kind of cheesy sound effects happen too many times, and they really don't belong in a 007 picture. The overall feel of the movie is why this Bond movie ranks so low with me. Like almost all the Bond flicks though, it is still worth watching.

The Moore trail only has a tiny bit more to go, but what is this detour?

 James Bond will return in: Never Say Never Again