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No Time To Die - James Bond XXV - Fall 2021


Dolfan in NYC

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26 minutes ago, J.H. said:

I think Moore has his good movies and his bad ones. Live & Let Die is a good one and The Spy Who Loved Me. I think For Your Eyes Only is criminally underrated. I mean fuck can you really say Connerey wasn't awful in Diamonds Are Forever or that Thunderball might benefit from beign maybe 20-30 minuts shorter?

I think my major regret is that Lazenby quit before he could really grow into the roll. If nothing else he wasn't afraid of decent stunt work (the belly slide with machinegun at Piz Gloria is probably a top 3 action/stunt for me)

James

I've always thought For Your Eyes Only was generally considered the best Moore film. I've heard that Moore himself objected to the scene where he stomps the car off the cliff, he wanted to drop the dove pin and have that cause the car to fall.

 

I personally think Octopussy is underappreciated. Some of the scenes in India are bad, like the Tarzan yell, but the auction scene and the whole atomic bomb storyline come off really well. 

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2 hours ago, Raziel said:

Lazenby was great, he just had the unfortunate circumstance of following Connery with a Bond with a really depressing ending.  Moore got away with it since Live and Let Die followed the standard formula.  I would've loved to see how Lazenby handled the rightously pissed and looking for revenge Bond in Diamonds.

If I'm remembering it correctly, Eon wanted to stick with Lazenby, but he fell in with a group of hippies who convinced him Bond was passé so he walked. 

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57 minutes ago, Brian Fowler said:

For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved me are great. The rest of Moore's films range from okayish to fucking terrible.

I think you mean from terrible (Moonraker) to batshit insane (i.e. A View To A Kill)

Octopussy has its moments of greatness (i.e. Louis Jordan) to its moments of groan inducing silliness (the entire manhunt in the jungle). It also gave us a cool sidekick in Vijay, who I wish they hadn't offed but sadly Bond sidekicks never fare well

James

 

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I think if any are batshit insane, it's Octopussy. A View to a Kill  is just the flat out worst Bond film. It makes me long for Die Another Day and Diamonds Are Forever.

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3 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

I think if any are batshit insane, it's Octopussy. A View to a Kill  is just the flat out worst Bond film. It makes me long for Die Another Day and Diamonds Are Forever.

Yeah, my vote for worst Bond movie is Moonraker, but A View To A Kill is a close second. 

Zorn's evil plan to corner the microchip market by destroying Silicon Valley by far is one of the dumbest plots in all of Bond villain history.  It is up there in ridiculousness with Goldfinger's plan to irradiate the gold depository in Fort Knox and I absolutely LOVE Goldfinger.

Diamonds Are Forever has Mr. Wint / Mr. Kidd and Bambi / Thumper in it and it is the movie that The Spy Who Shagged Me mostly parodied,

Dr+Evil+Laser.jpg

so I cannot hate it.

Naturally, I also cannot hate on Live & Let Die because Bond gets regularly outwitted by black people until the very end of the film and he only wins because he resorts to being more violent than his adversaries just like in the books.

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Roger Moore is basically what Adam West is to Batman, and whether that's your thing or not depends on the individual. Even at its worst I would say it's not as bad as similar stuff like the Dean Martin movies ruining Matt Helm. Except for maybe the pigeon double-take in Moonraker.

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I think Moore get's unfairly knocked since he had to be the one in Moonraker and View to a Kill, none of the Bond actors could have saved those. If he had more Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only style flicks he'd be ranked way higher.

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Here's the thing about Roger Moore, young Roger Moore was a great Simon Templar; a totally different type of character, Templar was certainly capale of violence, but rarely had to resort to it, he was just the cleverest guy in the room and made that work. Older Roger Moore was a terrible Bond, for the simple reason that Bond is a violent son of a bitch and even in his late thirties Moore looked like he might have trouble in a pillow fight. Just not believable in the role. Of course, being handed shit like Moonraker didn't do him any favors. We actually paid money to see that shit in the theatre, boy, was I pissed off.

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It is interesting that you would bring up The Saint, OSJ.

One of the earliest critiques of Moore getting the role was that he made his career playing a hero who used violence as a last resort, so how would he fare playing a hero who traditionally resorted to violence immediately?

If Simon Templar came for you, you were headed to prison.  If James Bond came for you, you were headed to the morgue.

I think that Moore was the best Bond for that phase of the franchise where it was important for Bond movies to differentiate themselves from the regular glut of action movies released at that time.  Bond stayed alive during competitive times by sticking to the Three Gs (Gadgets, Guns, Girls).

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18 minutes ago, J.T. said:

It is interesting that you would bring up The Saint, OSJ.

One of the earliest critiques of Moore getting the role was that he made his career playing a hero who used violence as a last resort, so how would he fare playing a hero who traditionally resorted to violence immediately?

If Simon Templar came for you, you were headed to prison.  If James Bond came for you, you were headed to the morgue.

I think that Moore was the best Bond for that phase of the franchise where it was important for Bond movies to differentiate themselves from the regular glut of action movies released at that time.  Bond stayed alive during competitive times by sticking to the Three Gs (Gadgets, Guns, Girls).

Pretty good analysis, bro. Being a few years older and a rather clever chap myself, I always managed to find my dad's copies of Playboy no matter where they were hidden in the late sixties, when I was ten or eleven. You have the three G's in exactly the wrong order, if the fanboyism that Hefner showed the Bond films and especially the Bond girls is any indication... On the other hand, you have a magazine that had spent close to twenty years trying to sell a lifestyle that absolutely no real person actually lived, and then here you have the film version of racist shit Ian Fleming's spy hero carrying on like he read Playboy as though it were the Bible. An absolutely ridiculous pairing of fictional existences, but Bond was the anti-hippie establishment hero of the sixties for the guys that thought three martini lunches were cool.

As far as The Saint goes, I have every book, every short story ever written and re-read them frequently, witty, engaging stuff. Fleming I can't be bothered with under any circumstance.

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Beyond the the 3 Gs, Moore's movies also were the first ones that almost felt like travelogues. You got the impression they'd pick out locations first and work their way back from there to break a story. 

 

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2 minutes ago, (BP) said:

Beyond the the 3 Gs, Moore's movies also were the first ones that almost felt like travelogues. You got the impression they'd pick out locations first and work their way back from there to break a story. 

It has always been my belief that most Bond films were robbed out of Oscar noms for Best Cinematography.

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Moore was definitely great at the classy stuff. He sold the nice suits and knowing everything about booze and being the guy who wins every game at the casino because he's simply too cool not to win better than any other Bond.

But he was way too old for the action scenes, and he lost that cold-blooded element that makes "gentleman spy" such a compelling character type.

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I want EON to fuck with the casual Bond fan!

Adopt the actual novella of The Spy Who Loved Me. Watch people lose their minds when Bond isn't in he mvoie for 2/3 of it, hell you can even do an action sequence with Bond i nthe beginning with him trying to escape from SPECTRE agents in... CANADA!!

 

 

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5 hours ago, J.H. said:

I want EON to fuck with the casual Bond fan!

Adopt the actual novella of The Spy Who Loved Me. Watch people lose their minds when Bond isn't in he mvoie for 2/3 of it, hell you can even do an action sequence with Bond i nthe beginning with him trying to escape from SPECTRE agents in... CANADA!!

 

 

That would be fun. Although they'd have to create a lot more story.

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On 5/23/2018 at 5:57 PM, J.H. said:

I think Moore has his good movies and his bad ones. Live & Let Die is a good one and The Spy Who Loved Me. I think For Your Eyes Only is criminally underrated. I mean fuck can you really say Connerey wasn't awful in Diamonds Are Forever or that Thunderball might benefit from beign maybe 20-30 minuts shorter?

I think my major regret is that Lazenby quit before he could really grow into the roll. If nothing else he wasn't afraid of decent stunt work (the belly slide with machinegun at Piz Gloria is probably a top 3 action/stunt for me)

James

Live and Let Die is good because it's based on one of the best original Bond novels written by Fleming. I personally am not a fan of Moore as Bond. I didn't care for Connery in Diamonds Are Forever either. However, even Connery is not even close to my favorite version of James Bond. 

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