Burl reviews No Time to Die! (2021)

 

With a creak of ancient bones, it’s Burl, here to review the newest James Bond adventure featuring an actor nearly as old as Roger Moore was in his last 007 show, A View To A Kill! Of course the actor I’m talking about is Daniel Craig, well-known for providing the villain’s voice in The Adventures of Tintin, and though he is getting a bit long in the tooth - ha ha, he’s older than me, for gosh sakes! - he’s still a formidable presence and looks decent in formal wear! But it’s probably a good thing that this picture, No Time to Die, is his last outing as the double-naught spy!

In fact he’s already there as the picture begins - happily retired from the spy game, or so he thinks! Ha ha, he’s on perpetual vacation with Dr. Madeline Swann from the previous picture, Spectre, again played by Léa Seydoux from Midnight in Paris and The Grand Budapest Hotel! But an apparent betrayal ends in a car chase and a melancholy parting by train, and will Bond ever learn to love and trust again? Ha ha, persistent musical and dialogue quotes from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service strewn throughout the picture would seem to make this a doomed prospect!

Various events transpire (the picture run 163 minutes, so there’s plenty of time for events to transpire!) which lead to Bond taking up his old job again! There’s a new 007 in MI6’s employ though, a lady in fact, who might be present as a paving of the way for an all-new iteration of the superspy, but they don’t give her all that much to do, nor is she provided with the kind of charisma and hard focus that would have left us with the impression that she was taking up the mantle for future Eon productions! Oh well!

Anyway, the usual gang is still there: M, played by Ralph Fiennes from Spider and Strange Days; Ben Whishaw, the voice of Paddington, as a now less pimply Q; Jeffrey Wright from Only Lovers Left Alive as Felix Leiter; and there’s even a scene for Blofeld, still essayed by Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained! Altogether there’s the feel of a classic rock band at work, reformed in 2021 to play the old hits with some new compositions salted in for the audience to fidget to! But of course it’s the old hits everyone wants to hear, ha ha!

We get a nice scene set in Cuba with a delightful, high-kicking junior agent played by Ana de Armas from Knives Out, and also a scene at a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. party that seems borrowed from toxin-based pictures like Getting Even! Ha ha! Of course there was no end to the borrowing from Bond pictures by Getting Even, so I guess that’s fair enough! And then the whole thing wraps up on the bad guy’s private island, which is nice because we haven’t seen a bad guy with his own private island since maybe The Man with the Golden Gun! (Oh, ha ha, I’m wrong - I think the glooper-faced fellow in Skyfall had his own island, but the climax of the picture wasn’t set there!)

One distinct improvement over Spectre is that, when we get an establishing shot featuring the Tower Bridge, the River Thames, the London Eye, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, they no longer feel it necessary to superimpose the label “London!” Ha ha, thanks for trusting us to recognize the city on our own, filmmakers! Your faith in us is simply awe-inspiring!

The picture looks terrific, as most of the recent Bond outings have, and the action scenes, when they come, are of a reasonably thrilling calibre! There’s a good bit set at a snowy cabin at the beginning of the picture, but later, as the movie enters its third hour, there’s a feeling that the whole thing might be going on a bit too long! Then there’s an ending that I won’t get into, but that isn’t what you might call the traditional Bond ending! It does give us Louis Armstrong warble-croaking “We Have All the Time in the World,” so it’s far from a complete loss!

It tries mightily to be something more than a routine spy adventure and it halfway succeeds! The bad guy’s plan is very rote and not explained very well, and he himself is something of a wet sandwich! The tormented romance between Bond and Swann didn’t affect me in the way the filmmakers clearly hoped it would - maybe I just don’t recall the ins and outs of Spectre clearly enough for that! I went through half the picture thinking she was Blofeld’s daughter, only to realize that she was actually his psychiatrist, which, as the sometime girlfriend of her patient’s arch-enemy, must violate some little-invoked clause in the Book of Headshrinker’s Ethics! Ha ha! In any case, it was a night out at the movies, and no mistake! Since I don’t seem to have picked up any covid in the course of going to see it, I give No Time to Die two slinkys!

Burl reviews GoldenEye! (1995)

 

With a cocktail in one hand and a lady in an evening gown in the other, it’s Burl, here to review a bit of Bondery for you! This was the first of a millennium-ending series with new Bond Pierce Brosnan, whom we know from Dante’s Peak and The World’s End, taking over after Timothy Dalton’s abbreviated but perfectly competent run of two pictures, The Living Daylights and License to Kill! The picture I’m talking about is of course GoldenEye!

The other major newcomer is Judi Dench playing M, who would outlast Brosnan and assume the role until Skyfall! She plays it crabby here, and also is the character used to call out Bond’s superannuated sexism, which was a much remarked-upon aspect of this picture at the time of its original release! (Other characters, including Miss Moneypenny and the main bad guy played by Sean Bean from How to Get Ahead in Advertising, mine this rich vein as well!)

The plot: typical Bondism! The opening involves the double-nought hero infiltrating a Russian weapons facility (ha ha, the fall of the Soviet Union is another update the picture must grapple with) and escaping thanks to a spectacular but frankly impossible stunt! Unfortunately he’s left behind his compadre, Sean Bean’s 006, whom Bond believes to have been killed! But it’s all part of a plot by Bean, in conjunction with a hatchet-faced strongman general played by Gottfried Johns from Fedora and an erotic thigh-killer called Xenia Onatopp (ha ha!) played by Famke Janssen from Taken 2, to take control of a Russian satellite weapon that will shoot electromagnetic rays to wipe out computer systems on Earth! Ha ha, pretty much the usual stuff - I think The Man With the Golden Gun had a similar space weapon in it, for example!

Bond hooks up with a Russian lady played by Izabella Scorupco, and then with Joe Don Baker from Fletch, who’d played a bad guy in The Living Daylights but here is a CIA guy emphatically not named Felix Leiter! There’s a nice tank chase in St. Petersberg and a steam room fight with Onatopp in which Bond burns her bum, and much of the movie seems to be captures and escapes! It all ends in Cuba in and around a big giant radar dish that stands as one of the Bond team’s finest miniature trick effects jobs!

The picture is brisk and fun, the script is occasionally clever (though its understanding of mid-90s geopolitics seems a little shaky), and there are some engaging action sequences! Brosnan acquits himself well and was clearly a solid choice for the role! Unfortunately the picture is burdened with a substandard score and a terrible end-credits song, and the opening credit sequence, also with a mediocre song, is dull and cheeseball! But these are minor afflictions, and the ultimate impression is of a Bond movie solidly somewhere in the upper middle of the pack! I’m beginning to think that Tomorrow Never Dies might have been an improvement on this one, but certainly GoldenEye is still streets ahead of the cornliquors that came later, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day! Ha ha, pee-yew! I give GoldenEye two Canadian admirals!

Burl reviews A View To A Kill! (1985)

Double-0 Burl, reporting for duty! Ha ha, yes, it’s yet another Bond picture today, and indeed yet another Roger Moore Bond picture, and here it was his last: A View to a Kill! And I’m going to say it straight up without any coy talk or beating about the bush: this, friends, is as bad as the famous action franchise ever got! Perhaps the worst thing is that whenever Bond is attacked or is otherwise in peril, he emits a terrified howl entirely unbecoming of a double-naught spy! The movie is leering, insipid and cartoonish in all the worst ways, with the glossy production values here seeming more superficial than ever before or since, and with a star well past his best before date! Ha ha, it’s like Cannon Films made a Bond picture!

We begin with Moore, or rather his stunt double, skiing around on glaciers and down radical slopes, at times on a proto-snowboard and accompanied by “Surfin’ U.S.A.” instead of the John Barry action music! This is truly the depths of nonsensery, a return to the same imbecilic frame of mind that brought us the slide whistle in The Man With the Golden Gun! The ski stunts are impressive, but so obviously the work of doubles not just for Moore, but for the entire crew - it was all second unit stuff of course - that it feels like somebody just threaded up a ten minute Mike Marvin or Willy Bogner short completely separate from and incidental to the spy story we’re putatively enjoying!

From here we move to a plot concerning microchips and horse racing, and our bad guy, Max Zorin, is played by a grinning, blond Christopher Walken, the actor whose face is familiar to us from such productions as The Dead Zone and McBain! Grace Jones from Vamp is wasted in the role of Zorin’s assistant, and we eventually discover that the bad man's nefarious plot has something to do with setting off an earthquake to flood Silicon Valley while he rides around in a big blimp with his name on it, laughing! Along the way Bond's friends are constantly being strangled by someone who pops up in the back seat of whatever car they’re driving, and there’s first a dumb taxi chase in Paris and then a completely superfluous San Francisco fire truck chase scene that I used to think was cool because the bright red of the hook-and-ladder truck made me think of the terrific old TV show Emergency! But now it just seems like another one of this elderly Bond’s many unforced errors, riddled with more of those pathetic, panicky howls as he hangs from the truck as Tanya Roberts drives crazily through the streets of the city!

On the other hand, John Barry contributes a particularly good score here, ha ha, and I quite like the Duran Duran theme song, despite nonsensical lyrics like “Night bugs cover me,” and the most abysmal, thuddingly literal title sequence old Maurice Binder ever came up with! Also it was nice to see Patrick Macnee, of The Howling and Sweet Sixteen and of course a fictional spy in his own right, pop up in the mostly comic role of a dapper horse trainer forced to pretend he's an abused valet! In addition there are many of the usual Bond folks, now superannuated, but it’s still a pleasure to see them, and a feeling both melancholy and relieved to remember that it was for several their last go-round! Yes, Moneypenny, I'm looking at you! And there are some familiar faces to spot around the edges of the picture, like Alison Doody (ha ha!) from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Dolph Lundgren from I Come In Peace!

Well, as you can see I don’t have a lot of love for this picture, but I’ll always have a certain fondness for it, as I do for Octopussy, because, as bad as they both are, I went to see each of them in the theater under pleasant circumstances, with groups of friends on a hot summer’s day! Nevertheless, I can muster only one fishhook butterfly for A View To A Kill! Ha ha!

Burl reviews On Her Majesty's Secret Service! (1969)

Ha ha, this never happened to the other fellow indeed! Yes, it’s Burl again and Bond again, only this time the superspy in question played not by Connery, not by Moore, not by Dalton, Brosnan, or Craig, but by the doughty one-offsman George Lazenby! So yes, of course the picture is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service!

Now, I’m not so sure I’d have watched this movie in July had I remembered it was a Christmas picture, but there you are! It’s not one of your more action-packed outings, to be sure, but, ha ha, Lazenby’s not the only novelty here, because the picture tries a bunch of new things! Because it’s the late 1960s, we get some elliptical editing and other New Hollywood movie tricks, particularly in the fight scenes! I enjoyed this, though to contemporary audiences it may well have seemed like the kind of blender-editing which makes Quantum of Solace such a chore to sit through!

He does some garden-variety spy stuff, like when he sneaks into an office to steal some documents! But he doesn’t just snatch the papers, nor photograph them with a little spy camera, no: he has a buddy dress up like a construction worker, then place a large case into a crane bucket so it can be hefted up the side of a building to the fifth floor where Bond is! The case contains a device which proves to be an enormous photocopier, ha ha - state-of-the-art equipment for any spy in 1969, I’m sure!

Of course it all ends up in Blofeld’s mountaintop allergy clinic on Christmas, ha ha! Blofeld even has a tree and gives out neatly-wrapped gifts! And here, the perennial villain is played by Kojack himself, Telly Savalas, whom we know so well from his equally sinister appearance in Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil! Ha ha, Blojack! And what’s great about this iteration of the super-villain is that he gets a lot more personally involved in the battle against Bond than we see in other pictures! He’s not just sitting in a chair and stroking his pussy this time, no sir!

The big question is: how’s Lazenby? Well, he’s demonstrably no Connery! He’s matey and cavalier, and seems equally uncomfortable doing the action as he does in the long section at the allergy clinic during which he must wear a kilt and pretend to have no interest in the beautiful ladies who abound there! And in the end he’s not really an actor, nor does he claim to be! But for all that I didn’t mind him - certainly I prefer him to Moore in his smarmier moments! And the movie Lazenby has going on around him is, while not exactly action-packed, interesting and solid enough to raise him up to a quite acceptable level!

And the movie sticks the landing, emotionally speaking! This is perhaps the only Bond picture which ends with the superspy sobbing instead of snogging, and it makes for a genuinely affecting conclusion! Diana Rigg, who plays Mrs. Bond, and whom we know so well from Theatre of Blood, is quite believable as the woman Bond would want to settle down with, and Gabriele Ferzetti, who was Sandro in L’ Avventura, is terrific as her friendly gangster dad! I give On Her Majesty’s Secret Service two and a half purple parcels!

Burl reviews The Man with the Golden Gun! (1974)

The name is Burl, James Burl! No, ha ha, my name’s just plain Burl, but I am here with a review of another Bond picture for you! It’s another Roger Moore one, in fact, and while I’m a great fan of Roger Moore as a person (so far as I know about him, which isn’t much) and as an actor in pictures like ffolkes, but I’ve always thought he was a terrible Bond! He looked wrong, somehow - he was good-looking, sure, but in the wrong way! There’s not a part of him that’s a brawler!

The plot begins when a golden bullet inscribed with 007 is sent to MI6, but though a threat to his life seems clearly implied and his bosses are concerned, Bond, well used to gold-obsessed villains, is not himself for one moment daunted! He sets out to find the notorious assassin Scaramanga, known for his deadly aim, his golden bullets, his one million dollar fee, and his unbroken record of success! Scaramanga is thankfully played by Christopher Lee from Nothing But the Night, and, lucky are we once again, he has a midget manservant called Nick-Nack played by Hervé Villachaize from Seizure and Forbidden Zone! Ha ha, and these fellows enjoy nothing more than to invite other assassins to their special Chinese island and stick them in a sort of funhouse-shooting gallery they’ve created!

To give the story the global stakes Bond viewers are used to, we get something about some kind of solar energy device, but all that is clearly appended to what the writers hoped would be a thrilling mano-a-mano between two steely-eyed, evenly-matched killers! Except they forgot that Moore was still their Bond, so the steely-eyed bit was out; and they undercut their villain by revealing halfway through the picture that he hadn’t initiated the conflict after all, and had no real interest in a contest with Bond until he suddenly is at the end!

In some ways it’s the sleaziest of the Bond pictures, or at least one of the most risqué! There are lasciviously-shot scenes at a strip club called Bottoms Up, and Benny Hill himself might have written some of the double entendres, ha ha! Even the theme song, sung by Lulu, contains more leering innuendo than usual! It’s more sexist, too, with an inept and bumbling British Intelligence agent named Mary Goodnight, played by Britt Ekland from Endless Night and Fraternity Vacation, forever being kidnapped and pressing the wrong buttons with her bikini-clad bum! Maud Adams, who we know from The Christian Licorice Store, and who tangled with Bond again almost a decade later in Octopussy, at least seems a little more intelligent, and for this she is repeatedly raped by Scaramanga, and later dismissively killed by him!

To make matters worse, Clifton James from Juggernaut shows up playing the same Roscoe P. Coltrane-type he was in Live and Let Die! (James is a good actor; it’s the character who’s intolerable!) The action is set in China and Thailand, so this baccy-chawing cracker ought to have been the last person we had to worry about, ha ha! He’s involved in one of the greatest stunts in the entire Bond series, the corkscrew jump, which the filmmakers shot blandly, and to which they idiotically added a slide whistle sound effect!

It’s all pretty terrible! There’s not much action and precious little style, and for Guy Hamilton, usually one of the more reliable Bond directors, it represents a calamitous drop in quality from the heights of Goldfinger! On the other hand there are some lovely locations, some decent trick effects, and Lee does his best with the character he was given! None of this is enough to save it, I’m afraid, so I give The Man with the Golden Gun only one fake nipple!

Burl reviews Tomorrow Never Dies! (1997)

Hi there, it’s Burl, shaken but not stirred! Yes, I thought I might give you a little review of yet another James Bond picture, this one featuring not Sean Connery from You Only Live Twice; not Roger Moore from Moonraker; not Timothy Dalton from The Living Daylights nor Daniel Craig from Spectre, but Pierce Brosnan, an actor we know from Dante’s Peak and The World’s End! Ha ha, the picture, his second appearance in the role, is Tomorrow Never Dies!

The plot is pretty boilerplate Bond! We’ve got a Rupert Murdoch-type media mogul played by Jonathan Pryce from Brazil, who’s got the following: a gizmo which fools ships into misapprehending their location; a stealth ship that can’t be detected by radar, sonar or other means; a big extendable drill that can bore through ship hulls and cause crazy chaos; and a number of henchmen and subcontractors, played by the likes of Ricky Jay from Boogie Nights, Götz Otto from Iron Sky, and Vincent Schiavelli from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai! Pryce’s plan is to use his toys to foment war between Great Britain and China, and then be on the front lines with his reportage! Ha ha!

Bond comes on the scene fairly quickly, rekindling a romance with Teri Hatcher from Tango & Cash and then teaming up with a fast-action lady played by Michelle Yeoh from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon! Ha ha, Yeoh is a terrific partner to Bond in this one, and it would have been nice to have her be a repeating character! Strangely, as happened in the first Brosnan Bond, GoldenEye, an American CIA agent shows up to help out, but for some reason it isn’t Felix Leiter! No, it’s a crude-talkin’ Texan played by Joe Don Baker from Fletch! Why didn’t they still have Baker play him, but simply make him Leiter instead of “Wade?” Ha ha, who knows; and to make things even more complicated, Baker played a bad guy in The Living Daylights!

The action moves along at a fair clip - at 119 minutes, for a modern Bond picture it’s really quite slim! There are a couple of fun scenes, like the one in the parking garage with the remote control car which Bond drives from the back seat, or the motorcycle-helicopter chase, and all of this is reasonably well-handled by Roger Spottiswoode, who also brought us Terror Train, ha ha; but Pryce’s character is a weak villain (ha ha, that’s why he gets so many henchpeople, I guess!) and there are a few hints of the poor writing and extreme silliness which would infect the second and last two Brosnan efforts, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day!

Mostly it seems like a construction on which to hang a few quips and some observations about the media-driven, post-O.J. world we lived in back in 1997! (Ha ha, in fact, these days it feels slightly prescient!) Really, the best thing about it is that, Citizen Kane callbacks aside, it doesn’t try too hard to be anything but a simple-minded Bond picture! I give Tomorrow Never Dies two bossyboots car voices!

Burl reviews Never Say Never Again! (1983)

Doo-doot-de-doo, ha ha ha! It’s Burl here with a little off-piste Bond for you! Yes, it’s Never Say Never Again, Sean Connery’s big return to the role after a decade of watching Roger Moore make movies like Live and Let Die and Moonraker! It was made by another company than usual, so they couldn’t use the theme or the same actors to play M, Q and Moneypenny! Ha ha, the worst thing is not using John Barry’s great action music and choosing to replace Barry not with James Horner or Jerry Goldsmith or someone who made sense, but with Michel Legrand, a composer forever tilting at the windmills of your heart! He’s not the first one to try ruining a Bond movie with an elevator jazz score, but it hurts a little more because the movie is otherwise decent!

Or anyway it’s decent compared to the contemporaneous Moore ones! Now Connery is a little older here, sure, but he’s in fine shape! He does tread the line between confident relaxing and lazy coasting at times; on the other hand one can’t deny that he delivers the quips better than ever! And for gosh sakes, he’s Sean Connery, who can kick around leprechauns while growling “Get away from me, you bashtards,” and still seem like a heck of a guy!

The plot of Never Say Never Again is really just Thunderball with more video games and (marginally) fewer high colonics! Bond’s fitness is in question by a particularly priggish M, so he’s bundled off to a special clinic! Trouble comes right after Bond does, and soon a hulking beardo is chucking him around the room! This all leads to missiles under the sea and an entertaining, smile-based performance from Klaus Maria Brandauer as the bad guy, Largo! Along with Skyfall and maybe one or two others, this is one of the few Bond pictures with a straight-up insane man as a heavy! It’s too bad we don’t get more of Max Von Sydow as Blofeld, but you can’t have everything! At least we get Barbara Carrera as the kill-crazy Fatima Blush!

There’s some okay action, but not that much of it! Kim Basigner’s buttocks make a featured appearance; Bond sleeps with so many ladies that it’s as if he’s trying to make up for a decade of inaction; and there’s a super motorcycle that doesn’t do much besides make a few rocket-powered leaps! Ha ha, it doesn’t even seem all that fast, and Bond falls into traps so easily while riding it! And I have to say the final confrontation below the sea is a little underwhelming too! But at least there’s much less boring scuba fights than there are in Thunderball! Ha ha, I like Thunderball, but that stuff really drags it down!

On balance it’s an okay slice of Elderly Action, but it looks better than it is if you put it beside movies like Octopussy, which everyone did because they were the two rival Bond pictures that came out in the same year! I’m overrating it, I know, but, if only for the moment in which one of Q’s devices doesn’t work all that well, which in real life would happen all the time, I’m going to give Never Say Never Again two exploding femme fatales!

Burl reviews Live and Let Die! (1973)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, plain Burl, here to shake and stir you with a James Bond movie review! This one is Live and Let Die, which I believe was the debut of Sir Roger Moore in the superspy role; and frankly, with this one as the first, I wonder how Sir Roger lasted as long in the part as he did! How did he even get to Moonraker? The only thing longer in the part than he was, by the time he was done, was his tooth! Ha ha!

Well, maybe that’s not a very good joke! But neither is this a very good movie! I used to think kindly upon it, it being buoyed in my memory by the voodoo elements of the plot and the crude scarecrows that frightened me so much as a youth! I was and am a horror movie fellow, so those things attracted me! But they’re just not as scary now, and the movie is consequently less entertaining!

I think I’ve nailed down what it is that makes Moore my least favourite Bond: he just can’t deliver the smarmy lines without seeming smarmy himself! And I don’t necessarily think this is Moore’s fault; to the contrary, I think it might be to his credit! Maybe, being a gentleman, he just wasn’t able to inhabit that aspect (as written by the 70s-era screenwriters) of Bond’s character! This level of strutting sexism was cartoonish even then, and it would take a real true believer to sell this stuff in earnest!

Another thing: The picture’s bad guy, Yaphet “Eye of the Tiger” Kotto , at one point accuses Bond of being a poor loser, and do you know what? He is! Every time a lady gets an ERA-era zinger over on him, Bond pulls a sour face and immediately tries to reinstate his masculine superiority by some petty act of revenge! And indeed he does come across as something of a dunder-klumpen whenever things don’t go his way!

The female lead here is Domino, played by Jane Seymour from Lassiter, who reads Tarot cards and indeed seems to have some kind of supernatural power! About the best bit in the picture, cinematically speaking, is the cross-cutting between Bond’s flight to New York and Domino’s totally accurate prognostications of his visit and what it will bring! I guess it’s the only time this series ever trafficked in the uncanny, and it’s one of the few distinguishing aspects of the picture!

Another such aspect is the great gallery of distinctive black actors, like Julius Harris and Geoffrey Holder and Gloria Hendry and Earl Jolly Brown! And, ha ha, not to mention the terrific Kotto! They help the picture mightily, despite the sour tastes of colonial-era racism that occasionally intrude! And too bad that Southern-fired sheriff had to be shoehorned into the already too-long bayou boat chase, calling people “Boy-y-y-y” like some hick Angus Scrimm! And it was this same ‘baccy-spitting ultramaroon whom they decided to bring back in the next installment, The Man With the Golden Gun, even though they had a perfectly good stinger at the end of this one: Geoffrey Holder, sitting on the front of the train and laughing his uncola laugh! Ha ha! So why not bring Holder back, at least for the pre-credit sequence in the follow-up?

Well, that wasn’t what they chose to do, but at least they hired Christopher Lee and put an extra nipple on him, ha ha! Anyway, Live and Let Die gives us Bond on the trail of a heroin smuggler who’s been killing the agents previously on his trail, and who has grander plans than the usual drug lord, and uses voodoo trappings as well as murder to spook people away from getting too close! We get action in New York, some fictional Caribbean country, New Orleans, and the bayous of ‘weeziana, which is where that sheriff comes in! None of it’s terribly exciting, and though there are some okay moments here and there, and a unique, if silly, demise for the bad guy, I can give this nought but one and a half inflating leather sofas!

Burl reviews Spectre! (2015)

Ha ha and haberdashery, it’s Burl here to review the newest Bond picture, Spectre! This one has the same director as Skyfall, and is a direct follow-up to that movie! In fact, it aims to tie together the last bundle of Bond pictures, but isn’t able to do so without adding in a strong measure of goofiness!

Goofiness is certainly something Bond viewers have seen before, but never has it been so unintentional! The picture opens with Bond, still being played by Daniel “The Adventures of Tintin” Craig, on personal assignment in Mexico City! He’s got a fellow with a little ponytail in his crosshairs, and when you see that ponytail it doesn’t matter what Bond’s reasons for killing him are, because the ponytail is reason enough! Ha ha!

After some swooping helicopter excitement and a ho-hum opening credits sequence (I liked the octopus, don’t get me wrong, but the song was a real snoozer, and the rest Binder-lite!), we get several scenes of Bond being yelled at by his boss, M (now embodied by Ralph “The Grand Budapest Hotel” Fiennes). Bond goes rogue in order to follow up clues and effect the last wishes of the previous M, and he finds himself making sweet love to beautiful ladies and on the run from a bulky henchman who recalls not so much Jaws as Tor Johnson! (Ha ha, and the fight Bond has with this manmountain later in the picture, on a curiously deserted train, ends with a gag stolen wholesale from the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou!)

There’s an alpine clinic of course, and a crazy chase where Bond secures himself an airplane seemingly out of nowhere; and another chase in Rome that’s kind of subdued in a way; and a scene where Bond gets bits drilled out of his brain! Ha ha! And the lovely Léa Seydoux, well-known from Midnight in Paris, turns up as Madeline, the doctor-daughter of a previous bad guy!

It all leads, of course, to S.P.E.C.T.R.E., the criminal organization led by, of course, the cat-stroking madman Blofeld, played by Christoph “Inglorious Bastards” Waltz! Bond and Madeline are on their own against him for a while, there in the desert, but eventually the double-naught spy hooks up with Q (Ben Whishaw from Paddington) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris from Ninja Assassin) and even M, and they form a team meant, I suppose, to recall the gang from the Mission Impossible pictures! Ha ha, teams are so popular now in pictures! Well, I guess it’s a fad!

The movie goes on longer than I thought it would, and it seemed for a while as if they’d accidentally kept making the movie past the end of this one and into the next picture in the series! And there’s a revelation nearer to the end, and this counts probably as a spoiler for those of you concerned about such things, that Bond and Blofeld are virtually step-brothers, and old Blofie has daddy issues; this, we discover, is what originally set him on a criminal path! This is silly and goofy and adds exactly nothing to the story! I guess they feel they have to add some backstory and gravitas, because that’s another current trend in big-budget action, but let me be the one to say it: not necessary!

There’s a hideout and a big explosion, but then another act’s worth of adventure and intrigue after that! Ha ha, this last section is introduced with a panoramic shot showing the River Thames, the Tower Bridge, Big Ben and the London Eye, accompanied by a title at the bottom of the screen explaining that this particular city is called LONDON! Ha ha, thanks – never would have known it otherwise!

But anyway, this is not the best Bond picture going (not with Moonraker still in existence, ha ha!) but it’s not the worst either (see previous parenthetical comment)! It’s got some excitement, some goofiness and some goofy excitement, and plenty of exquisite styling, and so it qualifies as a night out! I’m going to give Spectre two articulated head drills and a big ha ha! Ha ha!

Burl reviews For Your Eyes Only! (1981)

Ha ha, Burl here! It’s not a very controversial position, but Roger Moore has always been my least favourite Bond! (I’ve liked him elsewhere though, like in ffolkes! Ha ha, ffolkes!) However, his were the ones I sort of came of age with, as it were, so there’s still plenty of extratextual enjoyment for a guy like me! I’ve always thought of For Your Eyes Only as the “good” late-Moore, even though Octopussy is the one of which I am truly fondest, the Walken/Jones evil team and their blimp in A View To A Kill notwithstanding!

But it was For Your Eyes Only I recently rewatched, and though it wasn’t quite as serious-minded as I remembered, it was hardly the gagfest that was its immediate antecedent, Moonraker! I remembered it better through its Mad Magazine parody than through the movie itself! But it wasn’t a standout in any way, just one of the acceptably decent ones in the middle of the pack!

It opens with a pretty good remote-control helicopter scene, then shows us the fate of a British spy ship which pulls a mine up in its fishing nets! Ha ha, boom, and the McGarnigle of this film, The ATAC System! Everyone wants The ATAC System, and it seems that a beautiful lady’s parents are killed about it, and then she, being half Greek, is seeking vengeance as Bond is trying to beat a legion of swarthy Greek toughs and an East German supermen to the prize, The ATAC System!

Lynn Holly-Johnson from Alien Predators is a childlike figure skater who develops an old-man crush on Bond! Julian Glover from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the initially friendly fellow who may be more nefarious than he appears! And Michael Gothard from Lifeforce (a picture I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed for you yet) is skulking around everywhere, wearing little glasses and causing mischief, and eventually meeting a curiously satisfying fate! And Bond’s ally in the last third of the picture is Topol, whom we know from Flash Gordon, deedle-deedle-dum, and who munches incessantly on some kind of nuts through every one of his scenes!

It’s on the whole pretty simple for a Bond movie, and unusually unambitious! But that works in its favor too – the stakes are mentioned at one point, and while they weren’t low (bad guys could use The ATAC System to shoot off the UK sub fleet’s own missiles at her own cities!) they are not worried over, or even mentioned, thereafter! It’s kind of nice, especially for this period, that the very planet itself isn’t in danger, and that whatever the case nobody was much worried about it! Ha ha!

It was John Glen’s first movie as a director, ha ha, and that must have been a bit of a trial by fire! It’s a pretty big picture to start off with, and maybe that’s why the results are a bit workaday! It’s certainly better than many of the movies, but it doesn’t take many risks either, and so its failures are not spectacular! The scene on the mountainside is pretty good, though spatially it didn’t make much sense! Well, ha ha, it’s Bond, what can you do! I guess after some thought, and taking into consideration that it never subjects us to that Southern sheriff guy, I’m going to award For Your Eyes Only one and a half yellow Citröens!

Burl reviews The Living Daylights! (1987)

Burl here, neither shaken nor stirred at the moment, ha ha! Yes, I’m here to review a Bond picture for you: one that sits in that hazy netherworld between crazy nussbaums like You Only Live Twice and the newer, more serious pictures like Skyfall! Under discussion today is one of the two Timothy Dalton movies: The Living Daylights, which, when I began watching it just the other day, I was astonished to discover I had never seen before!

Ha ha, it’s not often you find yourself watching a Bond movie for the first time! I’m pleased to report that it was quite a good one, too! Dalton, whom we know from his work in Looney Tunes: Back In Action, made a pretty solid Bond, I think! The picture begins on Gibraltar, with an 00 exercise that goes terribly wrong when an assassin takes out two of the double-noughts before Bond turns the tables and prosecutes an exciting car chase down the precarious roads! Of course Bond sends the baddie hurtling off a cliff, then parachutes down onto the yacht of a beautiful lady, and then bam! Opening credits, one of the chintzier-looking sets in the series!

The plot is pretty weak, I’m sorry to report – there’s a plot to kill spies, some diamond smuggling, a fake defector and some shady arms dealing, and somehow all of that is connected, but just exactly how never matters much! But all the stuff surrounding that is good, like that opening scene, and the bit where a tall, murderous  blond goon played by Andreas Wisniewski of Die Hard sets off a ridiculous trap involving a killer automatic door! There’s also a great scene where the goon kills a milkman and infiltrates a rather shoddily-guarded enclave! Bond always seems to be turning up at these locations too late to do anything, ha ha!

The other baddies are a jocular general played by Jeroen Krabbé from all those Verhoeven pictures, and a crazy, war-mongering pseudo-military man essayed by the great Joe Don Baker, whom we of course remember from Fletch! The main lady is well-played by Maryam “Xtro” D’Abo, and naturally John Rhys-Davies, known from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, appears as a Soviet general! Felix Leiter appears, this time played by John Terry, of Full Metal Jacket and Hotwire fame, rather than by Rik Van Nutter, who was probably my favourite Leiter, ha ha! And two stalwarts appear, both I think for the last time in the Bond series: Geoffrey Keen (who was in Moonraker, among others) and Walter Gotell, whom we may recall from Endless Night as well as many Bonds!

As I say, Dalton makes a fair Bond, though he doesn’t exhibit much of a personality! He gets a few quips and displays emotions, but little of it sticks! I’m inclined to think this is less Dalton’s fault than a simple lack of chemistry between him and the house style he’s meant to be a part of! But at the same time, he’s a better JB than Roger Moore, at least for my money!

It was an enjoyable picture, and all the more for me because I’d not seen it before! Certainly it was a major step up from A View To A Kill and Octopussy and the other nonsense movies that immediately preceded it! I call The Living Daylights enjoyable, and I give it two and a half rage-popped balloons!

Burl reviews Moonraker! (1979)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, neither shaken nor stirred! I just watched a James Bond picture, and it was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, because it was the first Bond picture I ever saw in the movie theatre! I was pretty young, and I recall it being a big deal at the time to go see such an adult movie!

Well, ha ha, it doesn’t look so adult now, except for Roger Moore, who looks a zillion years old! I mean, Daniel Craig is not looking like the springiest of chickens in Skyfall, but he’s got pep that Moore – as much as I appreciate him as a performer in pictures like ffolkes – never had! (I’ve never seen him as Simon Templar, the Spirit, and maybe it would cause a reappraisal if I did!)

It doesn’t help matters that he’s trapped in what I think might be the worst Bond picture ever made, or what would be the worst if not for Die Another Day! It’s much worse even than You Only Live Twice, which as you’ll recall had Sean Connery slathered in silly Coppertone makeup half the time! Moonraker starts well though, with a fairly thrilling skydive sequence in which Bond, ejected from a plane without a chute, zooms after the bad guy in order to claim his chute from him! But along whizzes Jaws, the silver-dentured giant, who ends up landing in a circus tent!

This impossible landing signals what’s to come! Ha ha, it’s goofy antics from Jaws, who finds romance with a Brazillian lady glasses-nerd; and even from Bond, who transforms his Venetian gondola into a motor-car and causes people, pigeons and dogs to do comedy double-takes complete with musical accompaniment! While all this is going on, Bond is doing his sexual maniac schtick, pulling open the robe-ties of his various female contacts! To Moore’s credit, beneath the leer he seems as put off by this ungentlemanly behaviour as anyone!

Eventually of course it all ends up in orbit, on a space station from which the bad-guy Drax is staging his nefarious plan to wipe out all of humanity and start again with his genetically (and racially?) pure specimens! Jaws turns good during this climactic encounter, belying all we’d previously known of his character! And the action somewhat recalls that of the climax of Thunderball, which is a good picture except for all the  s-l-o-w-w-w   m-o-t-i-o-n-n-n  underwater stuff! Here it’s zero gravity, and just as slow and boring! And let’s just say that the movie doesn’t put quite the same value on orbital verisimilitude as a picture like, say, Gravity!

On the plus side, many of the stunts and trick effects are actually pretty good! I recalled them as being shabby and fake, no more convincing than a television ad for Space Lego, but I was wrong! There’s plenty of great miniature work, and the John Barry score lends it an almost Kubrickian beauty at moments!

Otherwise it’s pretty dire, and unless you’re trying to entertain a child, almost any Bond picture would prove a better evening’s entertainment than this one! I’m going to give Moonraker one and a half super-speed centrifuges!  

Burl reviews Skyfall! (2012)

Hi, it’s Burl here, just plain Burl, to review a new James Bond picture! Ha ha, they’ve been making these things since 1962, and they’re finally coming close to getting them right! No, I’m joking you, friends – some of my very favourite Bond pictures come from those early days, back when they were making pictures like Goldfinger, From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service! Those ones are all pretty good, and then of course we can’t go and forget Mr. Wynt and Mr. Kydd!

The spirit of Misters Wynt and Kydd actually resurfaces in this new effort, in the person of bad guy Javier Bardem! It’s the third go round for the blond Bond, and he’s more crinkle-eyed here than ever! His great nemesis, Bardem, is a fey ex-agent with a deflatable face who seems to have the tools at his disposal for some grand world-beating scheme - namely, a bunch of computers and his own island - but uses them more for personal reasons! (This tends to undercut the hugeness of the stakes involved, frankly, but the movie is more personally than professionally inclined across the board, so I guess it’s to be expected!)

The real story is between Bond and his boss, the lady M! There’s so much going on with her in fact, and so many scenes of her staring mournfully out a window, that the end of the picture comes as no real surprise! And Judi Dench is getting on, after all – but of course we’re talking about a series of films which allowed Roger Moore to play the part until at least 1985! Superannuation means nothing to them, ha ha! But here, with the lady M, they decided to nip it in the bud! After all, by the time the next picture gets made, Dame Judi will be in her mid-nineties!

Of course we get some spectacular exotic locations, and there are some lovely ladies with whom Bond has sexual intercourse, and there’s even a scene with a monster, sort of! There are a couple of marvelous action scenes, though not as many as in most Bond pictures, and a little touch of kung-fu as well! And then, at the end, at the Scottish climax, we get Albert Finney as Groundskeeper Willie, who repeatedly calls Dame Judi’s character “Emma!” Ha ha!

Altogether it’s no more than a solid spy action picture, but it’s a top-flight example of same! Quite a few things don’t make sense, and other things are just dumb, but when you compare this picture to, say, Moonraker, you realize how bad it could have been! It’s also beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins, especially the Scottish scenes, and that helps the movie out a lot! I’m going to give Skyfall three Komodo dragons!

Burl reviews You Only Live Twice! (1967)

Hi, it’s Burl here with a review of a James Bond movie, namely 1967’s pen-penultimate Connery adventure, You Only Live Twice! This is probably the worst of the 1960s Bond movies, I’m sorry to say, and nearly the worst of the Connery pictures, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that bad! Ha ha, when you’re in competition with the likes of Goldfinger, From Russia With Love and Thunderball, there’s no shame in coming up short!

I watched the movie again because, as a part of my self-imposed summer reading program, I just recently finally read the book! And hoo-boy, is it a weird one! It starts with Bond engaged in a high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors; then flashes back to describe how depressed and incompetent Bond had become after the death of his wife Tracy at the hands of the notorious Blofeld! So M gives him a mission in Japan, where Bond discovers that none other than Blofeld himself has set up a castle with a garden of every poisonous plant, animal and fish he can find! When Bond is captured, he’s placed on a torture-toilet that is equipped to send boiling mud up his inner rectus! He escapes from that one and manages to give old Blofeld a pretty stiff neck-twist, but then gets bonked on the head and comes to believe he’s a Japanese pearl fisherman! The book ends with him still firmly believing that, but planning a trip to Vladivostok anyway! Altogether a weird one!

The movie, which was adapted by none other than my favourite childhood writer Roald Dahl, is much more conventional! They keep Blofeld being in Japan, and they keep the piranha fish and some of the character names, but that’s about it! Actually, they also keep one of the dumbest and least-cinematic aspects of the book also: the idea that James Bond could be convincingly transformed into an itinerant Japanese labourer by the liberal application of tanning jelly and the donning of a goofy blouse! Ha ha, it doesn’t work for a second on the page or the screen, no big surprise!

So it seems Blofeld is planning to start World War III by pretending that the Russians and the Americans are eating each others’ spacecraft! Left unexplained is exactly how the B man thinks he’ll escape Armageddon, and what he plans to do among the smoking ruins if he does; but I guess he is after all supposed to be a bit crackers! Bond, having gained ninja skills in a matter of days, manages to impregnate Blofeld’s impregnable volcano fortress, where he comes this close to being shot into space! I’d say this movie in combination with Moonraker represents convincing evidence that James Bond and space travel simply do not mix!

Anyway, it all ends with a gun battle, a number of small explosions and then some really big ones! Ha ha, that’s not a bad way to end things in a Bond movie I guess, but I did hope for something better from Dahl, whose Henry Sugar story fascinated me in my youth! Still, it’s a James Bond movie and has some of the usual great elements in it, so I give it two pointless minicopters!