The Best of BOND; Let's get this over with

I never voted in the previous megathread. Tremble before my votes now.

Pleasant surprise today:

I recently did some minor consulting work for a client (who is a casual Bond fan, which we talked about), and they're apparently happy with my input, because I received this from them in the mail today, along with a bottle of Blackwell rum...


I don't have any full one-sheet-size Bond posters aside from a NTTD one, so I'm excited to start growing that part of my collection.

I remember some neighbor had left that framed outside next to a garbage bin, so my friend took that into his apartment to save it.

Good rescue!

Happy 69th birthday to Pierce Brosnan!

Surprised by how much I like this minimalist gunbarrel-inspired t-shirt design for the 60th...

https://usa.007store.com/collections/james-bond-new-arrivals

This arrived in the mail today.

I’ll report back once I’ve had time to read it. It’s a pretty slim book, only about 270 pages (Fleming-sized!), so it shouldn’t take long to get through.

My mom is a district manager for Barnes and Noble so I got her to reserve a hardback for me. Gonna pick it up when I visit her soon.

A good tribute/brief history for Rodger Moore



I hope Moore was only joking when he referred to himself as a subpar actor. He did have good dramatic moments in his run as Bond. He has two great ones in TSWLM. When Anya brings up Tracy and later when he makes no apologies for killing Anya's boyfriend. Another poster pointed out two message boards ago, Moore has a look of rage in LALD when he finds out someone called themselves Mrs Bond. Finally delivering all those grade A quips couldn't have been as easy as he made it look.

The video does refer to Moonraker as a low point. IMO it's an upper middle point.

Moore was a good actor.

THE MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF is a must-see.

Moore was very self deprecating but that was part of his charm. He treated show business as a lark, something to laugh at yourself in the mirror.

I have With A Mind To Kill sitting beside my bed now, but first I plan on finishing the two Warren Ellis-penned Bond comic runs that I picked up in hardback recently (Vargr and Eidolon).

Great discussion here:

All Bond films except for SP and NTTD have just dropped on Prime.

I watched that OHMSS video earlier today. It was a great discussion, but I do have a minor nitpick, they didn't talk about how cool it was that Tracy is driving during the big car chase.

This is one of the few Gardner books I can claim to have completely enjoyed, so I was entertained by this:

If EON ever does dip into non-Fleming source material, this novel's basic hook is a good one.

Meanwhile, I've only had time to make it a couple of chapters into WITH A MIND TO KILL, but it's good so far. Evokes Fleming without imitating him.

I cannot stand David Zaritsky, so I'll have to pass on that OHMSS video.

Calvin Dyson, however, is great. I didn't even know he was reviewing the Gardner books, so that's a pleasant surprise.

Stockslivevan wrote:

All Bond films except for SP and NTTD have just dropped on Prime.

And now NO TIME TO DIE has been added on Prime.

Threw on THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH tonight while getting some work done.

Yes, it doesn’t fully land the emotional arc it's attempting for Bond and Elektra, and yes, Dr. Christmas Jones is an unconvincing character (though Denise Richards really doesn’t deserve the blame for that), but this is a well-put-together picture. It often looks very classy, its ambitions are interesting and admirable (even if, again, it doesn’t get the maximum result out of that stuff), and the action is uniformly pretty good. Underrated title song, too.

More than anything, though, I just find the general vibe of the movie to be enjoyable, and I think I’m at a point now of liking this entry more than I ever have before. A fine “middle of the road” Bond installment, and the second-best of Brosnan’s tenure.

Just watched The Living Daylights and License to Kill back to back.

The Living Daylights I find to be a bit dull after the opening sequence, with the exception being the car chase into Switzerland.

License to Kill will always be the superior Dalton Bond outing for me.

Lean, mean, and showing off exactly what Bond was made for. Hardened to the core and ruthless as much as he is charming. There could be a case made that if this came out today, it MAY even score an R rating.

Fun from beginning to end.

The head explosion probably wouldn't fly in PG-13 today. Not as shot in LTK, anyway.

Belloq87 wrote:

The head explosion probably wouldn't fly in PG-13 today.  Not as shot in LTK, anyway.

And I noticed for the first time chunks of Benecio del Toro flying up before he gets totally pulled down into the spinning teeth.

Del Toro being weird is one of the reasons I now like LTK. There are Bond movies I like more, but I do think it's a good entry in the franchise.

LTK has one of the best villain groupings of the whole franchise, with Davi, BDT, Zerbe, McGill, and Newton.

Belloq87 wrote:

The head explosion probably wouldn't fly in PG-13 today.  Not as shot in LTK, anyway.

It didn’t fly in 1989 either. LTK received cuts so that it could secure a PG-13 rating. The uncut version of LTK was not available until the 2006 Ultimate Edition DVD, which has since become the only version available.