Spectre (2015)

2015 - Spectre

Alternate Title - 

PG13 - 148 minutes

Director - Sam Mendes

Stars - Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Lea Sydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Monica Bellucci

Review written: 4.7.17

Finally a new Bond with Spectre! And a great actor like Christoph Waltz plays Blofeld.

Let me start off this 'review' with a short story. My girlfriend and I went to see Spectre in the theater at 10pm. The only Bond movie I had seen theatrically was Casino Royale. I was excited to actually be able to do the review so quickly after release. My girlfriend made it about 12 minutes into the movie before falling asleep. At the 50 minute mark or so I decided to pull the plug on the whole deal. We left the theater and exchanged tickets for something in the future. Hint: we never came back to see Spectre. That was in November 2015, when the movie came out. It is now April 2017, a year and a half later. This movie has been sitting on my iTunes playlist for almost a year and a half. I've started it 4 times or so with the intention of reviewing it. I kept getting interrupted. Then today at 1 in the morning I decided enough was enough and set about to finishing the review. I've never put this much effort into a review before.

• Mexico City - the day of the dead. You’d think that if everyone in the streets put their efforts into fixing up their city it wouldn’t be a polluted wasteland.
• About to bang, Bond goes out the window and he just looks like he’s about to sell me a Heineken.
• Bond fights a retired tennis player in a helicopter in which the pilot can’t ever seem to recover from a simple spin. 
• New James Bond theme song by Sam Smith. I think that’s his name. The movie’s credits look like music video credits while memories play in the background from the previous Daniel Craig movies. Lots of sexy octupusses. Octopussi? Octopuss-es-s’i. Nailed it. We are introduced to Spectre during the opening credits so it’s weird. Good song with cool creepy visuals. Bond is often on fire with women touching him. Is this supposed to be appealing? Burning flesh isn’t sexy. It’s…just not. I think it’s a visual representation of his herpes.
• Boss Who Shall Not Be Named grounds Bond. Tells him he’s no longer allowed to play spy because of what he did to Mexico City. As if Mexico City even noticed all the mayhem he caused.
• Some guy named C is introduced, he doesn't feel too permanent but I’ve been wrong before. Bond then invites Moneypenny over to show her his dick but instead shows her a video where old M tells him to kill Marco Sciarra and attend his funeral.
• I’ve officially started/stopped this movie 4 times over the course of a year. I just drunkely debated with myself (out loud) over which Bond movie has more relevance, Goldeneye or Skyfall. Personally I like Skyfall more. It’s better if you’ve…wait…Bond must still be good…he just climbed off a boat without the help of a chunky British guy….anyway, Skyfall would be easier for non-Bond fans to enjoy but Goldeneye was partially so awesome because it followed a bunch of terrible ones. Even though I personally enjoy the Timothy Dalton movies (he’s my age’s Bond, after all)
• Q shows Bond a car he can’t have and then gives him a watch instead. “One more thing, if you know what I mean…the alarm is rather loud…” Personally, I would ask several follow up questions. Does this goddamn watch explode? What if I want to set the actual alarm? Will my wrist blow up or my whole body? What’s the blast radius of this shit? So many unanswered questions in the name of spy slickness. So, I hate to break it to you but obviously Bond stole the car he wasn’t supposed to have. Bond has a history of being kind of a dick but getting away with it. He also has a history of losing his job due to a policy, having his superiors cover for him anyway, getting the job done and then never mentioning the whole thing at the end of the film. I mean, day… because he’s totally a real person.
• Monica Belucci is a grieving widow or something. Her husband was Mexican? She’s Italian. Maybe I don’t remember the guy because it’s been a year. She lives in a house that is severely open to the elements. Must be a bastard trying to clean that house. She is obviously depressed because she will die soon and Bond uses that depressed leverage to peel off those 50 year old undies. Bond then smells her instead of kissing her. Super awkward because you have to see it twice due to a mirror. Who here will be surprised when she turns out to be in on it? I’d put the odds she’s bad at ….37%.
• Blofeld shows up and he feels like the bad guy from that weird Police Academy movie. My memory might not be serving me well but I seem to remember one of those movies I haven’t seen since 1991 where a shadowy figure gives orders. Did I imagine this?
• A wrestler shows up to thumb in a guy’s eyes in an apparent display of dominance. Blofeld calls out Bond for being there. AWKWARD. 
• Bond escapes from the meeting in his stolen car. Nothing in the car works as its labeled but he knew this already so the joke is null. He hits a missile button but for some reason the homing tracking starts off WAY to the left instead of just in the center. If you’re in a car and shooting backward, START IN THE CENTER. Because obviously.
• This Moneypenny is getting some dick. This is actually important because it means this time he can’t be a total cock tease with her. Although, maybe the original was too and we just didn’t see it. This one might not end up killing Bond and herself in a twisted murder-suicide.
• Bond talks to Richard Harris or something resembling Richard Harris. He asks for more information on where to find Waltz then gives him a gun and I thought he called Bond a kike but he said kite. Would have been strange last words of taking racism to the grave. Oh, he blows his own brains out before Bond robs the corpse.
• We watch Bond have a therapy session with a blonde girl who is revealed to be Richard Harris-ish’s daughter. Bond asks her for information to find “Ameri-Can?” Not sure if that’s how it is spelled but that’s clearly what they’re saying. Bond then attempts to order an alcoholic beverage but it’s a dry, disgusting bar. Q tells Bond that if he doesn’t go back to MI-6, Q and Moneypenny will lose their jobs. Bond is shit-less in his gives toward this information.
• New Bond, new ridiculous chase sequence. The girl is kidnapped and in the back of a truck on a snowy mountain. Remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie from 2014 in which there is a huge snowy mountain apparently JUST outside New York City? Anyway, I have to assume that’s where they are. Bond chases them down in a plane. It loses both wings and both wheels so he has to crash land into the truck. Apparently, the girl’s name is Dr. Swan.
• Dr. Swan is drunk and ranting about her daddy issues. Bond uses this opporunity to rape her, Cosby style. She says no and that she will kill him if he rapes her in her sleep. This is literally what happens. It’s played off as a joke. While she is sleeping, un-raped, Bond almost tortures a small animal and then uses a Heineken brand beer to find out where a secret room is. He punches through a thick wall to reveal a bunker. Dr. Swan wakes up, obviously. She is wearing a silk neglige when she gets over there. She went to sleep in a dress. I think he DID rape her and either changed her outfit out of confusion or because he thought it was nicer. The second option is actually more gross because he has the creepy confidence that she won’t notice or not mention the act to him. Lots of gross avenues to explore there. Don’t get lost exploring them, dear reader. All the possible destinations lead to rape. Like those Choose Your Own Goosebumps book…if every outcome ended with a rape. Looking at the picture of R.L. Stine in the back of the book, it sounds possible.
• The “cocky little bastard” character C is trying to shut down the Double-0 program with his new Skynet type system taking over the world. Does every single Bond movie have a plot line where he’s been disavowed and completely on his own, only to be helped along the way from the shadows by the people he works with?
• While having drinks on a train with Swan, a man kicks the table into Swan’s face. It was hilarious and I kept rewinding it to make sure that was really what I watched. The guy that kicked over the table is the same guy that thumbed in the eyes at the Spectre meeting before. He’s essentially a pitbull that learned to walk on two legs. He fights Bond and it feels very much like the sequences from the Archer episode with the Canadian Mounties. The guy gets taken off the train in a comedic premise. Bond has reached the appropriate level of time to get up in Swan’s guts.
• So Bond is at some compound in the middle of an African desert…for…something? Usually I’m a few scenes behind on the plot with these Bond movies. I’m certain they’ve told me why he’s there but action movies make my eyes glaze over. I know…I’m not very manly. While in his room, Bond looks at a photograph on the wall with some of the worst photoshop I’ve ever seen. Just…terrible.
• Inside a building, Swan and Bond (that should be a tv show name) find a meteorite. It looks like they should find a dying Professor X but a meteorite will do. Blofeld walks up to them. Everything with Spectre is shot so well. It gives me joy-joy feelings.
• So, Bond just told Blofeld that he came there to kill him and Blofeld said he thought he came there to die. So…that’s out in the air now. I guess they’ll just continue with the tour of the campus for some reason. I don’t know. I’ve never understood that. I don’t wax poetically like Bond villains. I’m more pragmatic and hate wasting my time. Just shoot the bastard and be done with it. “I know you’ve destroyed my every plan at world domination but… Bond… I think I’ll explain THIS plot to you too….for some reason….” - Apparently Blofeld is the one that owns this movies version of Skynet so he fucked Bond this time. He also killed all the women in the previous movies.
• Bond gets knocked out being pistol whipped from behind. His brains must have been concussed into a jelly. The only reason his brains haven’t poured out his ears is because the scar tissue built up from absorbing blows keeps them in place. Like a levee for brain goo.
• Apparently, after Bond’s parents died, Blofeld’s dad raised Bond and Blofeld together. Then Blofeld killed his own father. Or something like that. Bond uses this opportunity to take off his watch while his brain is being tortured like his balls were in Casino Royale. So the watch blew up in front of Blofeld and just basically pushed him over in his chair. That’s fine, it’s a tiny watch explosive. But for some reason all of that unlocked the torture device that Bond was in. Why did he know it would? What if it didn’t? The computer could have blown up and the locks remained. That seems more logical. Otherwise your victims/patients are let go if there’s a power hiccup or your computer runs slowly. One software crash and you have to recapture them. Nonsense.
• Guess what? M is still helping Bond. Crazy right? Swan says goodbye to James. She also professed her love for him during the torture scene. His dick must download a computer virus into women that overwrites their emotions. Spoiler alert, it isn’t the only virus he’s pumping into them.
• C has Bond and M kidnapped but it goes wrong. M shows up in C’s office like Bond did in the opening scene of Casino Royale. 
• I love Daniel Craig as Bond but he looks like a 60 year old man’s head was put on a 25 year old body. Choosing the best Bond is the subject of many debates but it’s tricky when it comes to Craig. His movies are just more solid and less ridiculous which makes him look like the obvious choice. I know my least favorite for sure. Roger Moore is my least favorite. Craig is probably my favorite. I just like how he balances the action sequences and sarcasm. Dalton is my second favorite. That’s right…I goddamn said it.
• Blofeld officially has the eye scar. This time it’s way more brutal. Bond is lured into a puzzle straight out Batman: Arkham Asylum. There are a series of chambers, each with picture of a person’s face from a previous movie inside the room. There are also ropes along the ceiling that appear to go into each room. It’s like a goddamn Saw movie. 
• C fell to death. I like ancillary villains in movies like this. When there is only 1 villain it gets boring and feels to much like a 140 minute chase sequence.
• So all that talk about the puzzle and having to choose which one to save and it ends with Bond stumbling upon Swan, saving her and jumping into a net below while Blofeld blows up the building. 
• My opinions on action movies have changed so much over the past decade or so. I used to borderline hate them and judged them way too harshly. But then, the Transformers happened. Avatar. The Avengers. Superhero movies became prominent and took over the box office. Because of that, I really appreciate a movie like Spectre. Yes, it’s an action movie. Bond movies are all action movies. But they aren’t flying around and knocking half a city down. Shit blows up but it’s at least semi-realistic.
• Bond lets Blofeld live after shooting down his helicopter. I actually like when a villain is left alive but still caught. It gets really old when you know you have to just wait to see HOW the villain dies and not IF they die. Obviously, I knew Blofeld wouldn’t die beause he’s Bond’s major villain. He needs to be there. He’s like the Joker of this series.
• Overall, decent flick. I’d say, so far, the Craig-era Bond movies can be ranked from best to worst as: Skyfall, Casino Royale, Spectre, Quantum Of Solace. I really enjoyed every single second Christoph Waltz was on screen. He’s a great villain. Bond only bangs 2 women in this movie which seems low but Craig Bond never really racks up the numbers and to be honest I don’t give a shit about that. He walked off into the sunset with yet another girl so I think we all know the next movie begins with her dying horribly. The end credits said he will be back so we have that to look forward to. I wonder how long Craig can keep this going though. I am rooting for him because he’s interesting but so was Hugh Jackman and he knew enough to walk away while he still could. Pull a Seinfeld if you will. He needs to at least do Bond 25. if only because it means he was Bond for 5 of the 25 Bond movies. That’s a respectable amount.

Casino Royale (1967)

1967 - Casino Royale

Alternate Title - Acid Royale

Approved - 131 minutes

Director - Val Guest, Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, Richard Talmadge

Stars - David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles, Woody Allen

Pretty decent until the last few scenes when it turns into an episode of Adam West's Batman. Some funny parts but mostly boring parts.

Skyfall (2012)

2012 - Skyfall

Alternate Title - Orphan Issues Ranch - OR - Tragic Backstory Manner.

PG13 - 143 minutes

Director - Sam Mendes

Actors - Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Naomie Harris, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney

Review written: 10.8.2015

Can’t believe I’ve put off this movie for 3 years already. Especially considering that I really wanted to watch this in theaters but never got around to it. I wanted to watch Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace again before heading to the theater but never quite made it. But I’m not making that mistake again! That’s why I’m watching all 3 Daniel Craig Bond movies in one day, so I can go watch Spectre with the right frame of mind. Not that it would actually matter but still… Also, I love Javier Bardem so this will be fun. Here goes:

• Starts off with a random sequence, obviously. I also notice another Bond movie trope: he will exit a building and immediately someone will stop the car and pick him up. Do they just circle the building over and over until he comes out or is everyone on the same mental wavelength that Bond is? It’s fucking weird. I love when Bond chases someone through the alleyways and staircases of some third world shithole without any respect for the citizens. Dirt bike chase on the roof of the Grand Bizarre? Fuck it. Why not? Bond hits a bridge to land on the train, he does but the bike does not. They have a cut-away shot of the bike landing in the dirt….fucking why do I need to see that? During the train sequence I’m starting to see that Daniel Craig is getting too old for Bond. He just looks tired and disinterested. Looks like he hasn’t slept in a few days. Close-up of Bond’s watch made me remember that they did watch ads for this movie. Christ… Eve (Bond’s partner) goes to shoot the man Bond is chasing but shoots Bond instead. He falls way too far into water.
• The scene is almost over and I can smell the Adele song coming. Here it is! I actually do think this is a pretty good song, especially for a Bond song. It does however suffer from something a few Bond songs suffer from: the title is in the song and it doesn’t make sense. Moonraker is the prime example of this. She does say “Let the sky fall…” But then says “At Skyfall.” So she does her best to make it make sense. The title sequence is pretty badass because it’s blood in the water themed because that’s where we last left Bond. It also does a Rorschach test theme that goes into Bond’s grave. Very excited to see Thomas Newman’s name in the credits. Especially considering that I’m pretty sure I saw a swastika again in the credits. (See my Quantum Of Solace review)

• I’m remember the last time Bond “died” when he was folded into a bed and shot. Then they put his casket in water and he was picked up in a submarine. I hope this time it isn’t as stupid. I have a feeling it won’t be because we’re in good hands with Sam Mendes.
• Ralph Fiennes is Gareth Mallory and he is basically forcing M to retire. I’m just curious as to why Dench was M for the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies and then later when they rebooted Bond with Daniel Craig she plays an older version of M because that’s how time works. It’s confusing why they have the same M. It’s not like they made a joke out of it like they did in Wet Hot American Summer. At any rate, her office is blown up and a bunch of people are killed.
• Bond really is reminding me of Sterling Archer in this movie. Which is weird because Archer was made as an over-the-top spoof of Bond. Bond is literally fucking, then drinking a Heineken in bed (the second advertisement if you’re paying attention.) Then Bond takes shots with a scorpion on his hand. 
• I can’t tell if they made Bond a drunk early in the movie as an attempt to cover up Craig’s aging or if it is just really good make-up. There is a random training montage in which Bond is briefed. Bond also forgot how to shoot a gun somehow. How fucking long was he away for? While doing a word association with a shrink, Bond is asked to say the first word he thinks of for Skyfall. He doesn’t do it. The fuck is it? Bond then pulls out metal from a wound to be analyzed. I thought he was just a cutter gone mental on account of the booze withdrawal. Maybe I’m still right.
• Ralph Fiennes tells Bond that being a field agent is a young man’s game. Fuck me if these two actors don’t look exactly the same age. One just happens to be in great shape. I looked it up and Ralph is only 6 years older than Craig. Un-fucking-believable. I thought I was exaggerating but turns out I wasn’t at all.
• We have a new Q! I had a feeling in Quantum that they didn’t really want to set up that boring dude as Q. Skyfall Q feels more like the Riddler from the Gotham TV show than the old dude from the original series. Were they aiming for the Doctor Who crowd with him? Because I have to admit…I know nothing of Doctor Who. Either I just hit an awesome reference nail on the head or I’m way off. Either way I don’t give a shit. 
• Shanghai, China: So, when I write my books I listen to a lot of Thomas Newman soundtracks. Mostly The Shawshank Redemption and the ones like that. But I also have the Skyfall soundtrack on there. I was writing and decided to listen to it and let me tell you, it’s not fun on its own. It’s very distracting without an action movie to accompany it. Listening to it during the movie is way easier than just alone. Oh, and Bond just grabbed the bottom of an elevator and held on for the entire way up a building. This means he has super human strength. He could barely even do pull-ups in the testing montage earlier. Maybe the real Bond died and this is cyborg Bond? When Bond catches back up to the dude he was following on the elevator, it feels more like Underworld meets Blade Runner than a Bond movie. It must be holy goddamned irritating to live in Shanghai because there are constant bright-ass neon lights constantly flashing through your windows. It all leads to the typical Bond “who are you working for” death scene.
• Whoever stole the names of agents is releasing them on YouTube 5 at a time every week. Bond finds out while shaving off that stupid fucking facial hair he’s had since he was Archer-ing around. What follows is a very sensual shaving experience between Bond and Eve. She calls him an old dog after the shave. So let me get this right… Bond went from fresh rookie in 2006 to old dog in 2012. Shit, being a secret agent is like being the president. You age at such an accelerated rate. Hardly seems worth it. Makes me wonder if he’s doing Bond throughout the years while the other movies would be chronologically shuffled in between them. Like between Casino Royale and this one, the rest of the movies took place. This is of course if you don’t assume the “Bond is just a codename for multiple agents” theory is correct. Personally, I do. Even if I do have to ignore the grave visiting scene that destroys this theory.
• Bond meets Severine at a casino and they both can tell exactly what type of gun the other person has on below their clothes. No. Just no. Turns out she’s in a sex-trade. Bond claims he knows when a woman is afraid but is pretending not to be. That’s a very rapey statement. Bond wants to meet her boss. Who I fucking hope is Javier Bardem, I’m sick of waiting for him. It’s 62 minutes into the movie and he’s still not in it. 
• Women beware, lock your fucking doors or Bond will sneak in and shower fuck you. They barely even set up the sexual chemistry between him and Severine but sure enough, he’s inside her. 
• Severine tells Bond that Silva told everyone on an island that there was a chemical leak so it was evacuated. He’s a real tough guy. Javier is here finally! And he has goofy blonde hair. He tells a haunting story about rats in an oil drum as he walks toward the camera. It’s an awesome scene. Silva was an agent back in the day. He tells Bond that M (he calls her “mommy”, supporting my previous theory) lied to Bond about being ready to go back into the field. Silva starts touching Bond a lot and it’s fucking hilarious and unexpected.
• Afterward, Silva makes Bond shoot a shot glass off of Severine’s head in the courtyard. It’s an awesome scene. Silva kills the girl and then Bond takes out all the men and captures Silva with backup. But… why not do all that before he shot the girl? He just let her die, pretty much. What a dick.
• M and Silva share a Hannibal Lector scene when Silva is in a glass prison. Silva claims that M betrayed him, leading to his capture and torture. He tried to kill himself with a cyanid capsule. He says “Life clung to me like a disease.” Amazing line. He shows M what the pill did to his face by removing a large section of his upper jaw. It’s super fucked up looking. His name was really Tiago Rodriguez and M gave him up to get 6 agents back after he went too far with hacking. I don’t really care about any of that because he’s awesome without a backstory. Just like Hannibal, Silva breaks out after hacking into MI6’s computer and opening the doors. Bond tracks him and Silva has cops working for him. The fuck is Skyfall? Seriously. I keep remember the title of the movie and wondering why they haven’t gone near it again. This whole movie is about the old vs. new way of doing spy work. Espionage vs. computers. Is that Skyfall??
• Silva blows up part of the underground tunnel to make a train kill Bond. It’s pretty badass. When Silva gets into a cop car and starts loading guns it became very apparent to me that this particular Bond movie is The Dark Knight of Bond movies. Silva is the Joker. He’s doing everything in the same way as Heath Ledger’s Joker. Awwww…..M’s husband whose back we saw in Casino Royale, died. She then reads a poem and even that’s like The Dark Knight closing where Gordon reads at Harvey’s funeral. 
• Holy shit, Ralph Fiennes just saved M and got shot in the process. I thought for sure that he was going to be a bad guy, since they already used Sean Bean in Goldeneye. 
• Being American, whenever they are casually driving around in England, even at a casual pace I think it’s a car chase scene because I keep thinking they are on the wrong side of the road. Obviously I know they aren’t but there is a second or two where my heart beats a little faster.
• Tanner’s character just drank a Heineken. He works for the government and is officially on the clock. But he drank a fucking Heineken. Christ, movie, really?
• We finally got some Bond backstory. Bond grew up in the country before his parents died. Did Skyfall kill them? Did something fall from he sky to land on his parents? Were they so scared the sky would fall like chicken little that they lived in fear and ultimately killed themselves? What is Skyfall? Holy shit…they just showed what Skyfall is! It’s a house. They also finally showed Albert Finney (Kincade). He calls M, Emma. That finally answers the joke from Casino Royale about M standing for her name. And also, apparently his name really is James Bond as his Father was A. Bond. So that kills the different agents using the same codename. 
• Kincade, M and Bond rig the house like Kevin McCallister because all they have between the three of them is an old shotgun. Meanwhile, a dozen men show up with machine guns. This plot could be resolved if they just shoot all their guns through the house and call it a day. They are all taken out one by one in Home Alone fashion.
• Silva approaches in a helicopter like Apocalypse Now. M and Kincade go into a cupboard down to an underground tunnel. M is bleeding and it was obvious she got shot before so it wasn’t a surprise at all. Bond blows up the house and it causes the helicopter to crash. Silva looks fucking amazingly terrified when watching this. As far as houses exploding in movies it’s one of the better ones. Better than Timecop. That’s apparently the benchmark of explosion quality that I’m working with.
• A better name for Skyfall would be Orphan Issues Ranch. Or Tragic Backstory Manner.
• Bond is standing above the moors with one of Silva’s men and he makes the man shoot them through the ice. That’s all fine and good except it’s not nearly cold enough outside for there to be a thick ice layer over that water. There isn’t even snow on the ground but the moor is iced over? Sure, you can kinda see their breath but it looks like October at the latest. That water has no business being frozen over. 
• Starting to realize this is about more than just revenge for Silva. He clearly has mommy issues with more than just M, but he’s taking them out on her. Unfair, dude. He puts a gun to M’s head and his head next to hers and asks that she free them both. Then Bond being the puss he is, literally stabs him in the back. 
• M’s dying words are, “I did get one thing right…” The fuck? Did she mean trusting Bond? What a depressing thing to say. I feel like they set up her husband’s death earlier so that it was okay for her to die now. I had a feeling she wasn’t going to live through this one.
• I also get the feeling that Eve will be the new Moneypenny. If she isn’t then I’m confused as to what they’re setting up with Eve declining going back out into the field. Holy shit, the second I finished writing that she introduced herself as Eve Moneypenny. I only knew her as Eve because IMDb lists her as Eve. This also makes Ralph Fiennes the new M it seems. Which means as of now we have a new M, Q and Moneypenny. With the next moving having Spectre, it feels like it’s catching up to the previous movies. 
• One last thought before the summary: I stated before that his name actually is James Bond. But if he’s the FIRST James Bond then it could make sense that the Bond name could be a codename in honor of the original. It’s a longshot but I like to see it this way. To hell with proof and common sense. Plus, this means Moneypenny gets very white over the course of her career with MI6. Maybe her successor is white and keeps the same name just like Bonds do? Maybe. Fuck it, who knows?
• Overall, hate to say it… This is my favorite Bond movie to date. It managed to surpass Goldeneye and I didn’t think that was possible. I know people will disagree with me on this but I don’t care. It was the first Bond movie in a while that had a very clear plot and didn’t stray away from it for any amount of time. Quantum was all over the place and was about almost nothing, Casino Royale was great but a large section was just poker. Skyfall has a ton of stuff I loved, an amazing villain with a clear agenda, backstory on Bond finally, great action sequences and it both wrapped up the movie and set-up the future of the franchise perfectly. I’m officially pumped to go see Spectre in the theater now.

Quantum Of Solace (2008)

2008 - Quantum Of Solace

Alternate Title - Quantum Of Plot

PG13 - 106 minutes

Director - Marc Forster

Stars - Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright

Review written: 10.8.2015  

Prologue: I saw this movie once a year or so after it was released. Didn’t find anything to love about it. Didn’t hate it, just instantly forgot everything about it. I thought the title was stupid and so was the water monopoly plot. That’s really all I remember about it so this will really be an almost fresh viewing this time around. Here goes…:

• This movie starts out like most Bond movies, he’s involved in an unexplained action sequence that will probably be loosely tied into the rest of the movie. It’s a really well done car chase sequence. It’s no Ronin but it’ll do. I feel like this scene is to make-up for all the people that complained about the lack of action in Casino Royale. God forbid you spend a Bond reboot getting to know the main character. Twist…This chase sequence ties it to the LAST Bond movie not this one exactly. He has Mr. White in the trunk, who he kidnapped at the end of Casino Royale.
• The theme song is boring for the most part. Don’t know if I’ve ever heard it outside of watching the movie the first time. The credit sequence is also boring for the most part. Lot’s of deserts being turned into naked ladies. Then a global grid covers the screen and I’m pretty sure the feet of the women makes a swastika.

• Jack White and Alicia Keys made the theme song. I literally didn’t know who it was until there was a credit for it. It’s not horrible, just forgettable. 
• Siena, Italy: Bond turns White over to M and someone calls her Ma’am. Said it more like Mum though. I guess she’s the mother of the agency? But then why is M later a man? Does it stand for Man later? Confusing.
• Daniel Craig looks like a sun burned Alfred E. Neuman from Mad Magazine with straw hair.
• Mr. White delivers the line made for the trailer. “The first thing you should know about us is that we have people everywhere…” Cut to a man killing agents and M falls down. This all leads to Bond chasing White through a crowded festival and if there’s one thing I hate in action movies it’s super tight shots with fast movements. The kind of shots where you really can’t tell what the fuck is happening. I know why they do it, to create a sense of panic and chaos but all it does it make me tune out until I can actually see their fucking movie. Braveheart is an awesome movie but it’s super guilty of this. It’s really a shame because when you can actually make sense of the action in this movie so far, it’s pretty awesome work from the stunt coordinators. The entire sequence I thought he was chasing White but it was chasing the dude that was working for White. I had to rewind to find out that White got shot when it all started. I debated rewriting this all but said fuck it because it’s the movies fault. I’m flawless.
• Pretty sure they introduced the new Q but didn’t feel like really letting us know about it. Maybe they decided not to have him be Q after seeing his boring performance. Not sure. Don’t care. He leads Bond to a dude that is handling traced money from Le Chiffre. I like how much they are tying this movie to the previous one. That’s one thing I felt was lacking from all previous Bond movies. I get that they can all stand on their own but I feel if you’re going to do a series why not tie them together with overarching storylines like a TV series? 
• Bond immediately kills another dude that he’s following. This Bond is a fucking psycho and will kill anyone without a second thought.
• Camille picks him up in a Fiat, not exactly a Bond car. Seeing her face scares me because she was in both video game movie abortions Max Payne and Hitman. She works for Dominic Green, who I assume is the main villain of this flick. Everyone in this movie is overly tan with weird puppet hair. 
• Rory Kinnear is in this movie. That shouldn’t be anything special but it’s funny to see him be serious after I watched him fuck a pig in Black Mirror. Go watch it. It’s fucked up.
• Dominic Greene trades away his woman to General Medrano in part of a deal so that Greene gets a huge chunk of useless desert. Or so we think… Either way, I’ve tried to trade girlfriends for shit before and it never goes as smoothly as it did in this movie. It leads to the best boat chase sequence since Face/Off. That sounds like a joke but the boat chase in Face/Off was pretty awesome. Another one that goes on the list is the chase from The Man From Uncle movie.
• What this movie lacks in plot and interesting characters, it makes up for in well done action sequences and music. They blend in new styles of music with the old Bond themes flawlessly. 
• Jeffrey Wright and David Harbour are both with the CIA, tracking Greene. They make a deal with Greene that they will stop a coup in exchange for any oil that Greene finds. Greene also asks them to kill Bond for him. So, just so we’re all on the same page, everyone in the entire cast except for Camille now knows that Bond is a British secret agent. Secret agent. Secret… everyone knows.
• While looking at Greene’s face I can’t help but think that they purposely chose an actor that was as equally attractively ugly as Daniel Craig. No way was this a coincidence. They’re both the same. I can’t tell if they’re ugly dudes that happen to look good or attractive dudes that have ugly features. Either way it’s a marvel of casting.
• While watching the opera sequence I can’t help but yearn for a Bond movie that takes place in Des Moines, Iowa or Duluth, Minnesota, or Saskatchewan, Canada. Someplace fucking boring and just see what they can do with what they have.
• M had an entire conversation with Bond while she was getting ready for a bath. I was scared that she would actually get in the bath during the conversation. Not to say that Judi Dench isn’t an attractive lady, I just don’t wanna see her all soapy and wet.
• Talamone, Italy: turns out Mathis was innocent. Bond pulls him in for “one last job” basically. We all know how that ends up in movies. I don’t expect Mathis to get back to his trophy wife. Later Mathis reveals that he is a pill-popping sad sack of shit and Bond is an alcoholic.
• There is an agent with strawberry blonde hair named…Strawberry Fields. It’s been a while since we’ve had a stupid female name in a Bond movie. Christmas Jones is the last one I can think of. Although, Halle Berry as Jinx Johnson was pretty stupid too. Bond fucks her off screen with seemingly no resistance. He’s already too good at it.
• This movie reminds me of the Timothy Dalton Bond movies. Nothing much is happening, a lot of the scenes are one-on-one conversations between characters in which they discuss the plot that isn’t happening and a man threatens a woman, then cut to an action sequence, Bond is a psycho, South American plot and the movie moves slowly but somehow isn’t bad. It won’t be memorable but it still isn’t terrible.
• Jeffrey Wright looks like he’s on painkillers in this movie. So far he’s only sat in chairs and looked disinterested in everything. Maybe he raided Mathis’ pill collection. Maybe he did that when Mathis was killed because he’s in Bond’s trunk somehow. Bond uses him as a shield because he’s a dick. Turns out Mathis was actually alive but Bond didn’t bother to check because he’s a selfish dick. He actually gets Mathis killed. This is only the beginning of a series of dick moves by Bond. Bond kills the cops after using Mathis’ body as a shield, then he stands around in the alley as Mathis dies, then Bond literally throw Mathis’ body into the fucking trash and robs his corpse of like $40.
• Long airplane sequence that makes the one from Temple Of Doom look even worse than it already was. As enjoyable as it is, it was so over the top. 
• Greene is gathering all these heads of major companies and it’s starting to feel like this is “1% The Movie”. 
• Camille is really after General Medrano because he killed her father, raped her mother and sister, strangled them in front of her and then burned the house down. It is such a sad story that just keeps upping the ante on itself. “Then he pissed on the ashes of the house, had the ashes bottled and sold them as a cure for cancer to my grandmother, who then died of that cancer. When my grandfather found out the news of her death, he died of a heart attack. Then when we buried him, my cousin was a pallbearer and fell into the grave, the casket fell on top of him, crushing him. Two more cousins died trying to die him out. Soon, we were having funerals for people that died during the previous funeral. The cycle is still happening to this day. So yeah, I’m pretty pissed at Medrano.”
• Bond and Camille find an underground river and now they know that Greene is really after the water supply. They show a sad montage of thirsty locals before boarding a bus. Poor people are gross. Let’s get back to watching rich snobs play high-stakes poker and fucking models. Poor? Icky!
• Bond gets back to non-poor civilization and is all muddy and gross from the trip but I feel like that’s what he should actually look like. That’s how Daniel Craig showed up to set. M is there with an oil soaked dead girl on a bed that reference the dead girl in gold from Goldfinger. Bond escapes from custody and this is what makes Daniel Craig so good as Bond. He can pull off the charming side and he can pull off the smooth guy in an action sequence better than any Bond before him. 
• This is a shorter Bond movie and I still felt like it should have ended by now. But I looked down and there was exactly 20 minutes left. This movie drags its feet a little too much at certain points.
• The second Medrano takes over as dictator of Bolivia, he signs the land over to Greene and is blackmailed instantly by Greene because he owns 60% of Bolivia’s water supply. Yes…this movie is about water. Medrano gets over his anger by just flat-out raping a girl the second he gets some free time. Dude really loves to rape. It’s always nice to see someone be passionate about their hobby. Then he tries to kill/rape Camille. He’s like the Michael Jordan of rape. Just can’t be stopped. Wait…his two on screen rapes didn’t pan out… he’s the John Stockton of rape…
• Camille kills Medrano while Bond holds Greene over a ledge by just his hair. The entire place erupts into fire for some reason. Leading me to believe that every rape Medrano performs must lead to arson. It’s his finishing move even from beyond the grave. Instead of fleeing the fire, Bond and Camille just sit in the middle of an on fire building. Severely stupid. They should be dead. 
• Instead of killing Greene, Bond drops him off in the middle of the desert with a can of motor oil. I wish we could see the scene where he chugs it like the big dude in Over The Top.
• Camille tells Bond, “I wish I could set you free. But your prison is in there…” And she points at his head. Stupid. Bond seems angry when he’s fighting but not that horribly damaged. He didn’t even get to fuck Camille. What a shame.
• M is surprised, almost amazed that Bond didn’t kill a dude at the end. This should be a clue to her that he’s unfit for duty. She tells Bond that they found Greene in the Bolivia desert with oil in his stomach and two bullets in his head. I really want to see what the fuck happened there.
• Overall, decent Bond movie. Not a whole lot of plot happening at any given time. You never really get a sense of the evil that the villain is supposedly perpetrating. It’s more an implied sense of economic collapse in an already unstable area of the world. That’s a fine plot in a Bond book but it’s lackluster to see it actually happening. Looking back, I’m already forgetting shit from this movie. I don’t remember what happened to Strawberry Fields. (Was she the one drowned in oil?) I can’t remember how the whole thing with Jeffrey Wright ended. I think he just wasn’t in the movie anymore. This movie is decent but suffers from being very very slippery in the memory bank.

Casino Royale (2006)

2006 - Casino Royale

Alternate Title - James Bond In The World Series Of Poker. With Special Guest: Parkour.

PG13 - 144 minutes

Director - Martin Campbell

Stars - Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright

Review written: 10.8.2015

Casino Royale is the only Bond movie I’ve ever seen in theater to date. It has been over 2 years since I’ve written a Bond review. Because of the written Bond reviews, I switched into doing podcasts movie reviews so sorry for the delay. Specre opened this week and I wanted to go see it in theaters so I figured I’d get caught up considering I haven’t seen Casino Royale in years, had only seen Quantum Of Solace once and hadn't seen Skyfall yet. 

• This one starts out by pretending to be classy, Columbia Pictures logo is in black and white and so is the opening scene of the movie. Bond has a gun on some dude and it sounds like it’s Bond’s first rodeo. Bond describes how he killed the contact and it’s man-on-man action in a bathroom. Sexy. Then Bond shoots the dude after they complete each other sentences. Adorable. Then it cuts back to Bond shooting the first dude and it’s the Bond shooting at the camera thingy. 
• Cue the theme song by Audioslave. Awesome song. Even better opening credit sequence with cutout shadows and poker cards everywhere.
• Mbale, Uganda - a pinball dictator wants guns from one eye dude Le Chiffre.
• After being teamed with the most obvious agents of all time, Bond gets into a parkour chase with an apparent mutant. Is this the Bond Vs. X-Men crossover that people have been demanding for decades? Looking back, this movie has everything 2006 was completely about, parkour and Texas Hold ‘Em Poker. Bond has amazing knowledge of how construction equipment works, I feel like it would have to be easier if he just let the dude climb up really high and just waited for him on ground level. Maybe just tossed rocks at him until he finally came down. Bond’s stunt double’s hair is clearly 3 inches longer than that of Daniel Craig. Bond finds ELLIPSIS in a Nokia phone that is hilariously out of date already. Bond movies always start with a mission that isn’t explained but is somehow tied to the rest of the movie.
• Le Chiffre cries blood like a bitch. He is also impossibly good at math. 
• Dame Judi Dench is M and she’s super pissed that Bond killed the bomb making mutant at the embassy in the beginning. (After writing this, I went back and looked. Completely forgot that Dench was M in all the Pierce Brosnan movies. It really has been a while since I’ve seen them.)
• Nassau, Bahamas - Every entrance Bond does in this movie is straight out of one of his Heineken commercials. Obviously the commercials are spoofing the movies but watching him enter frame makes me thirsty and angry that I’m sober. After embassy, Bond has a phobia of cameras, almost OCD about them. Bond parks a car after being mistaken for a valet. Crashes a Land Rover into a Jaguar just so he can get into he building. Not worth it. 
• Has to be something very poignant about three black kids chasing after a white lady on a white horse to her mansion. Once she got off the horse I realized she was hispanic. The meaning behind the scene is a little more muddy now. Hey! It’s that super sexy scene where Daniel Craig walks out of the water in tiny underwear. And you try to pretend that he’s not like 52 here.
• Bond loves terrorizing M because he hacked into her account to look up info on Dimitrios. When she is contacted, M is in bed with some hairy, fat dude. Probably not a prostitute. Probably her husband. But I must confess, I love the idea of M cruising the local bar scene in an attempt to pick up some bear strange. At any rate: Bond plays a random game against Dimitrios and wins his Jaguar. He then takes the car for a stroll with Dimitrios’ woman, Solange, the girl that rode the horse earlier. Cut immediately to her riding Bond’s white horse as well. Dimitrios works with Le Chiffre, didn’t see that coming. 
• Suddenly we are in Miami despite not seeing a plane or boat trip. I know they’re close but they do require some travel considering they are separated by the fucking ocean. While at a dead body exhibit, Bond follows Dimitrios and is immediately caught. For being the worst best spy he sure gets caught all the goddamn time. Doesn’t matter because he stabs Dimitrios in the stomach and stars over by following Ellipsis instead. Bond is such a failure, the new guy also knows he’s being followed by Bond. Bond is such an amateur. It’s amazing that he lives long enough to get involved in the other adventures, assuming this is a prequel to the rest. At this point I’m fairly certain that’s what the message of the opening scene was. Anyway, the second dude wants to blow up a plane at the Miami Airport. Bond is chasing the dude and by the time they reach the plane they are both insanely sweaty which personally, I found amazing because Miami is a humid hell that will drain you of all fluids. I lived there for a whole two months and found it miserable. The city could use a plane blowing up, it would get their mind off of the goddamn humidity. Bond saves the plane and blows up a dude using some hiking equipment or something.
• Bond’s dick is poisonous in a few ways. If the disease doesn’t kill you, someone else will because everyone he fucks gets killed in a brutal fashion. For instance, he fucked Solange and she got killed in a hammock. 
• M puts a tracking device inside Bond’s arm and sets up the rest of the movie by telling Bond that he’s to join a poker game in Montenegro to compete against Le Chiffre. On a train he meets Vesper Lynd who tells him that if he loses the poker game, the government will have directly sponsored terrorists. Makes sense, I would actually love to see that movie. 
• I notice that everyone in this movie parks their car while still going 40 miles an hour.
• The movie just turned into an episode of The World Series Of Poker. Daniel Craig keeps making moves on Eva Green and I can’t tell if she is lucky or she’s a brave actress. He’s attractive for the most part but I can’t quite put my finger on why or how. Sometimes he’s a good looking dude but other times he seems to be a raisin on legs. His face looks like when your fingers are in water too long and they start to prune. He’s only 38 here, not 52 like I said before but he looks like he was raised by a chainsaw.
• After playing poker for 4 hours, Le Chiffre is attacked by the Uganda dudes over the money he lost from not blowing up the airplane. It’s awesome to see a villain that isn’t in control. In fact, he’s choked out like a total puss. And I totally get that the black dude is an African warlord but having him still use a machete to chop off a girls arm seems totally stereotypical. Did he travel with he machete all the way from Uganda or did he stop in Montenegro to get a fresh one? There are just too many questions. Either way it was pointless because Bond kills his ass before he can actually chop off any limbs. Afterwards Bond looks in the mirror and I’m wondering what happened to the cuts on his face from the plane scene.
• After going all out, Jeffery Wright buys Bond back in if the CIA can bring in Le Chiffre. This seems like treason. When he gets back, Bond is instantly roofed and runs around like DiCaprio in The Wolf Of Wall Street. Bond then dies. Literally fucking dies. It’s only by luck that Vesper shows up to save him.
• Bond dismantles the entire table with a straight flush. I’m just glad it wasn’t the stupid 4 aces or royal flush that most poker movies do. Plus they didn’t do the reveal in slow motion so it was appreciated. 
• The poker is all over and there is still 40 fucking minutes. Vesper is kidnapped, apparently by Snidely Whiplash because Bond chases them but finds her bound in the middle of the road. He swerves and crashes, Le Chiffre captures him because Mathis is his friend. Next comes everyone’s favorite testicle torture scene. Some dude just shows up and shoots Le Chiffre in the fucking head. Guess Bond is going to get around to that after all.
• Weird scenes with Bond in a chair, apparently in heaven. Mathis is taxed. Bond seems like he’s crippled. After transferring the money to MI6, he bones Vesper. Bond loves starting in a half guard, with one of his legs over the woman’s. It’s strange.
• Bond is ready to quit for love. This affirms that this one is a prequel because Bond hates women two seconds after shooting. And I don’t mean his gun. 
• M calls Bond to tell him that the treasury department still hasn’t received the 120 million. He checks Vesper’s phone like an untrusting girlfriend and finds a text saying to meet in 30 minutes. He then follows her like he deserves a restraining order. Love the scenes when Bond is sure she betrayed him and he just stops giving a fuck if he gets shot. 
• You’d think a town as old as Venice would have an entire building held up with more than just a two tank air balloon. I mean… after Bond shoots it we see a broken Heineken bottle. What if that bottle fell from the elevator and pierced the tank? It would just destroy the entire building because someone was getting an afternoon buzz on? That’s irresponsible. 
• Vesper kills herself after Bond kills a dude with a nail gun. The way she screams for air and reaches for Bond is pretty brutal. In fact, it’s the most brutal death in the movie and it wasn’t even violent at all. After freeing her from the elevator, Bond gives her mouth to mouth which turns into a weird kissing. He goes back to the body before the camera cuts so I’m not sure which base he gets to before it’s all said and done.
• Bond calls Vesper a bitch while talking to M. He’s cold. Now the mystery is who was behind it all? Well kinda, they tell us it’s Mr. White. Like fucking Clue, it’s Mr. White. 
• All in all, this is my second favorite Bond movie after Goldeneye. Which means my two favorite movies are both the first movies by new Bonds. Daniel Craig makes for a good bond, I was on board the second they announced him. Nowadays, the rumor for the next Bond is Idris Elba, a rumor that I’m 100% on board with. That man is smooth as fuck. The only reason it probably won’t happen is that he’s only 4 years younger than Daniel Craig so what’s the point? Bet you thought I was going to say the downside is that he’s black, didn’t you? You assholes.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

2014 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Alternate Title - TMNT Save Gotham

PG13 - 101 minutes.

Director - Jonathan Liebesman

Stars - Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, CGI monsters.

Huge fan of the cartoon, toys and movies as a kid. Although I hated the third movie due to the pointless time travel and it killed my passion for all things turtle. So, when I heard this movie was coming out I had two feelings; one of "stop remaking sacred shit" and another of nostalgia. I completely skipped the TMNT CGI nightmare from 2007 so I assumed I would skip this one as well. I seriously avoided everything about this movie. I didn't look it up on IMDb (which is rare), I didn't watch a trailer and I didn't ask anyone how they liked it if I knew they had already seen it. I seriously didn't give a shit about it. Now that that's out of the way; I thought Michael Bay directed it. Like I said, I didn't look it up but I heard his name and assumed he was directing. With that being said, I watched the whole movie and didn't realize until the end credits that it wasn't Michael Bay in the director's chair. So, that means the movie actually won me over despite my anti-Michael Bay stance in life. It wasn't amazing by any means but it was enjoyable.

Pros:

• The CGI turtles look and sound good. Nothing about them bothered me. When April first meets Splinter, the eyelines don't match up but it was momentary. They sound just like they always have. Don is a dork, Leo sounds like and is the leader, Mike is a surfer dude that serves as comedic relief and Raph is and has always been just an Italian gangster from Brooklyn. 
• It's a well made movie. Coming from a directing standpoint, it's well done. 

Cons:

• The story is fairly terrible. 
• Everything is convenient. April just happened to be the one that took care of and named the turtles when she was a teenager. I hate when huge movies set in major cities have a convenient plot that happens to completely revolve around a half dozen characters. In real life people play minor parts and discover shit as life unfolds. In this movie, April just happens to know everything already, but conveniently forgot until she sees the turtles all grown up. I know it was a comic reference but why make her the one that named them? I had zero problem with her just being a hard-edged news journalist out to make a name for herself. I didn't need to have her be a part of the backstory. It's a huge city with lots of people that aren't our main characters. 
• Evil....just cause. The plot is that Sacks wants to release a virus on NYC and then supply the antidote to the government so he can be even more filthy rich. He's already very rich. He has a huge house in the mountains that for some reason overlook NYC in this movie. Shredder is his master for some reason. This is again for some reason told to us passingly via a conversation between April and Sacks. It's all too obvious that he's talking about Shredder. 
• Why is the largest mountain in the world located in NYC in this movie?
• Megan Fox is the worst actress in the world. She has Eli Manning disease in this movie. She cannot breathe out of her nose whatsoever. I was getting so angry watching that mouth-breathing dummy as she casually watched the turtles and Splinter get demolished by the Foot Clan and Shredder. She didn't react to anything because everything was CG. She managed to breathe over the entire hip-hop soundtrack to this movie.
• It's just fucking lazy writing. Want to know how the turtles become ninjas? Splinter found a book in the sewer and said, "Why the fuck not." That's it. He trained them to become ninja masters because they were bored and wanted to see the outside world. 
• Splinter looks like a slimy turd. He's gross looking and has huge, bulging eyes. It's distracting as all hell during close-ups of him. 

Overall, despite my list of cons heavily outweighing the pros list; I actually enjoyed the movie. It was decent. It has brutal violence for a kid's movie. The world the turtles inhabit got Nolan's Gotham treatment. It's a brutal world and the Foot Clan aren't just clumsy criminals. They're fucking terrorists that act more like they belong on The Dark Knight alongside the Joker than in a kid's movie. 

I gave it a 6/10. 

The Lord Of The Rings (Trilogy)

Boring. I don’t see why these are so popular. I’ve always called this series the equivalent of going on a boy scout hike. It’s 11 hours of people moving left to right. Re-watch these and you’ll see what I mean. 

I bet that pit of fire was 2 ½ miles away from Frodo’s village but path they took made it 200 miles of walking. I bet there was a path through the woods that led directly to that fire. The movie should have been fifteen minutes long. If I directed this series it would be the following scenes.


My version would be a tragic romance like Romeo and Juliet. Frodo dies of AIDS and the ring was just a mere engagement ring for Sam that the land they live in forbids. Let’s call their land…Alabama. The people in Alabama beat the shit out of them for being gay and force Frodo to destroy the ring in a far off fire so Frodo does the smart thing and passes the task to a damn bird who can fly, so Frodo doesn’t have to walk for days and days. Then he inexplicably dies of elf aids as you saw. Then the last frame is me pissing on a stack of J.R.R. Tolkien books.

If you've seen Clerks 2 there’s an impression of this trilogy and it sums it up nicely. It’s the longest filmed nature walk of all time. These movies even made war boring. I didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t give a shit about any of the characters. The ‘men’ in this movie all looked like women. Orlando Bloom looks like a cute mouse and that’s not manly. I thought he and Viggo Mortensen were going to make out at the end of every scene. It was like watching Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer in Top Gun. Put these four movies in a multi-disc DVD player, turn off the sound and put techno music in the background and you’d invite some big leather covered gay guys over. It would be like watching 13 hours of the opening scenes of gay porn before they have sex. Not that I’m an expert on gay porn or anything…….. Moving on…

    So 11 hours into the making and Frodo hasn’t done shit but hallucinate. Sam has been saving his ass every step of the way. Suddenly the ring is gone. They talked about throwing it in a fire for 11 hours and then they did, whoa, my heart won’t stop racing from surprise. Does anyone lift Sam up on their shoulders? No. They say ‘fuck you, Sam.” Frodo goes off on the boat and leaves Sam behind. Sam should track him down and murder him, eat his heart for strength like ancient warriors did and take his place on the boat. Sam was the real hero. Although given the homoerotic feel of the film and especially on that boat, maybe it’s best he stays off the boat. Unless he wants 2 inches of dwarf wang for good measure. 

    Just so you know. Elves are boring. Magic is boring. Spells are boring. Swords are boring. Traveling on screen is boring. Wizards are boring. Fake languages are boring. Rings are boring. Even the evil in this movie was boring. 682 minutes of boring.

*Ditto for The Hobbit trilogy whenever that shit wraps up.

I originally wrote all of this in 2007 or so after watching them all a couple of times. I've grown since then and now with the technology of bluray; I've rewatched them all in glorious HD. To be honest, much better this time around. Still way too fucking long for anyone to possibly enjoy. Maybe that's because I watched the extended versions. These movies are decent but not worth raving about as if they were orgasm inducing cinema.

The Messengers (2007)

The Messengers (2007) 

Review From 2007 (Taken From 100 Things That Will Burn In Hell)

Alternate Title - The Full House On Haunted Hill

PG-13 - 91 Minutes

Directors - Danny Pang, Oxide Pang

Stars - Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Anne Miller, John Corbett

If you haven’t seen this movie it won’t matter. Milk can be spoiled but shit can’t be. 

One thing I learned from this movie is that it’s possible to have an hour of a half of random scenes and then five minutes at the end that attempts to clean up the shit that was the film. It’s bullshit to put all the weight of the film on the last five minutes. The ending shouldn’t be the janitor for the film. Distribute the weight a little. If you want to have a surprise ending then do more hinting so it’s justified when it happens.

This movie should have been shown on the Fox Family Channel and not in theaters. It was like an episode of Full House. Only the house is slightly haunted. After every action scene they have a sit down and talk about their feelings about the last scene. Every time someone in the movie left the room for something I was hoping they would come back with the script and the movie could get back to being about ghosts. It felt like all the actors were adlibbing all the dialogue. 

I don’t believe the ghosts arms in this movie were ghosts at all. This is my theory;

Fifteen minutes into the movieb everyone is wondering what crows have to do with the ghosts in the story. After the credits everyone was still wondering. Who needs answers when you can just have pointless ‘scares’? Other than the relation between crows and the dead in mythology there is no concrete connection made in the film. The dead boy in the film drew crows but that’s an extremely loose connection. Maybe if the dead kid drew a plot then a plot would have been present in the movie. However, he pointlessly drew crows. I wouldn't say this movie had plot holes because a prerequisite of having holes in your plot is that there has to be a plot in the first place. Can’t cut holes in a hole.

Also if you wanted to know if it’s possible to survive when a pitchfork goes right through your chest, apparently it is. One hole through a human chest… sure it’s possible to live. But three holes is pushing it. Personally, I have a heart and a pair of lungs. Maybe Dylan McDermott’s character is the only human on the planet without organs. They were afraid to kill any character. Why bother making a horror movie if nobody dies? I don’t hesitate to say that Casper was a more richly nuance and frightening ghost film. 

Lesson learned; don’t see a movie directed by brothers if one of them is honestly named Oxide. Danny and Oxide Peng, no joke.

2nd lesson learned; tickets will sell if you put an attractive, jailbait girl on screen and just let the camera find her ass in every scene. Unless Danny DeVito was holding the camera there’s no reason to have the camera at her ass level for 84 minutes. This movie couldn't even hold up for an hour and a half. This movie was like a glass house and every minute was another rock thrown at it. Only the rocks are really boring.

What the fuck has happened to the horror genre? It’s no longer about creating icons of terror but rather about cheap thrills. Freddy Kruger barely jumped out at the main character. He taunted them slowly and that was way creepier than popping out at the screen. It’s like they’re getting ready for all movies to be 3-D by having the ghost pop out at the screen. The last horror movie icon was the Leprechaun and that was in 1993. Over 20 years ago. I’d count the killer from Scream but it was more than one killer so it doesn't count. There’s a reason icons are gone. All horror movies are now about cheap thrills and not about trying to leave the audience impacted. People had and still have nightmares about Freddy Kruger. Nobody has one about some shitty ghost movie anymore. Stop producing horror movies, Sam Raimi. Stick with making shitty Spiderman sequels. 

I did rather enjoy when the movie ended and the lights came up and I got to see everyone’s pissed off face. Sadly that was the best part of the movie and it wasn't even on screen. One thing The Messengers will never cause;



Unless it’s someone so happy that the movie is finally over.

The World Is Not Enough (1999)

1999 - The World Is Not Enough

Alternate Title - A Pipeline Is Apparently Too Much

PG13 - 128 minutes

Director - Michael Apted

Stars - Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards, Judi Dench, John Cleese

    This one opens up with Bond beating up some bankers and retrieving a briefcase of money. Once back at the home base, Bond hands the money over to a man who is then blown the fuck up which is the first time we see the MI6 building being attacked. Usually the scenes at the building are briefings, sarcasm, gadget show-and-tell and reckless sexual harassment between Bond and Moneypenny. We see that a girl on a small boat in the river is the one that blew him up and since this is a Bond movie it can only lead to a boat chase. Boat chases are ALWAYS fucking boring to me. I’ve shared my hatred for movies on water but this one isn’t horrible UNTIL it goes on land. That’s right, the high-tech boat that he drives and also drive fairly well on land. Once back on water Bond uses missiles to blow up her boat but not before she jumps on land and immediately boards a hot air balloon which made me literally laugh out loud. Bond ramps her boat and flies out of the driver’s seat and grabs the rope and pleads for her to give up. He tells her that he can keep her save. She says, “Not from him,” and shoots the tanks, causing the balloon to blow up. It’s perfect Bond because it was a great sequence ruined by over-the-top attempts at humor. 

    After dropping from the hot air balloon, Bond is told that he can’t return to work until he is cleared by the doctor; who is, a hot blonde. Seriously? Why does MI6 keep surrounding Bond with women that he can bone? Isn’t that pretty much all he does on the field? He fucks the doctor for a clean bill of health. M didn’t see this happening? She hires a sexy-ass blonde doctor. She hired Bond and his penis. Put the two together in a room and guess what will happen. 

    This movie officially introduces R whom will be replacing Q for the next couple of movies. This is because the actor that has played Q since 1963 must have known that he would be dying and agreed to an on-screen replacement. R is played by John Cleese which is strange to see. When Q says goodbye to Bond he literally lowers himself out of the screen on a mini-elevator while staring up at Bond. It’s hilarious. At least, it is until you remember that he dies in real life shortly after the movie.

    We are introduced to the villain; Renard. Rather, a floating 3-D hologram of his head in which you can see that a bullet is lodged in his head. Everyone in the room explains to Bond that the bullet will slowly kill him but in the meantime it’s basically making him immortal. He is losing emotions and feels no pain.

    While following the daughter of the man that blew up, Elektra King, Bond gets involved in something else he loves to do; get shot at whilst downhill skiing. This time they are in weird planes with detachable parachutes so once they get sick of flying they simply become snowmobiles. As you would expect, they explode to hell if they even touch a tree. This is the first time in a Bond movie where one of the women reacts the way a normal person would after a ton of gunfire and explosions, she panics and freaks out. Not in an annoying way but in a realistic way that the series has completely ignored until now. 

    When we are finally introduced to Renard; he comes out of a cave surrounded by fire and his only act to show his power is the ability to hold on to burning hot rocks. 

    Here’s something that isn’t possible. Denise Richards plays a physicist. Her name is Christmas Jones. All of this is incredibly stupid. A man tells Bond that she’s totally a lesbian, however knowing Bond’s history with lesbians; she’s not safe. Hopefully she doesn’t wander into any barns later.

    After Renard steals a nuclear bomb, he puts it in King’s pipeline so that it will blow up both the pipeline and the oil reserve. Bond reveals to M that he thinks King is working with Renard. After some terrible acting by Denise Richards, they decide that the best option is to send Christmas and Bond in after it. They discover that it isn’t nuclear after all and decide to let it blow up so that King thinks that they are both dead. Then, for seemingly no reason King reveals to M that she is evil and wanted Bond dead. I don’t know why she didn’t continue playing both sides at this point but whatever, hopefully it pays off. Wait, it immediately didn’t pay off. She kidnapped M as a gift for Renard. Fucking weak. 

    While visiting Valentin, to ask why he’s working for King, out of nowhere they are attacked by a helicopter that carries long saw blades that they previously showed cutting down trees so that they can build the pipeline. This time the blades slice the shit out of Valentin’s factory. It’s a really well done sequence as the stacked blades chase Bond down the piers, slicing them apart behind him. 

    Well, they almost made it a whole Bond movie without a submarine. However, 1 hour and 37 minutes in they show the obligatory mechanical sea-creature. Bond gets on the submarine so that he can stop Renard from blowing shit up. This results in a fist fight in which Renard clearly shows pain when he is punched. Both Renard and King are killed in such unsatisfying ways that they aren’t even worth mentioning. Basically the entire ending was conceived to get Denise Richards soaking wet in a white cotton shirt. After getting to safety, Bond and Christmas fuck. She’s a lesbian. She has stated it clearly yet whilst fucking Bond gets off the quip, “I thought Christmas only came once a year.” That’s the last line of a Bond movie. I shit you not. What’s the point of making the character a lesbian if she’s going to bang him anyway. That’s just horribly insulting to lesbians and unnecessary as a plot point. 

    Overall, it’s okay. Nothing special. The first half was way better than the second half. Renard could have been an awesome villain but he really had nothing to do in this movie. It felt like he was in about 5 scenes and had maybe 12 lines of dialogue. Such little attention is given to his freakish nature when fighting with Bond. When they stated that a bullet was lodged in his head, and it would inevitably follow a certain path that would lead to his death, I was hoping that his death would consist of Bond setting up a high powered magnet behind him so that the bullet was pulled through his brain quickly. Sort of like the ending of X-Men: First Class with the coin. This movie just didn’t stay together enough for me. 

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

1997 - Tomorrow Never Dies

Alternate Title - Tomorrow Is Just A Newspaper

PG13 - 119 minutes

Director - Roger Spottiswoode

Stars - Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, Michelle Yeoh, Teri Hatcher, Joe Don Baker, Judi Dench

    The movie opens with a scene where the most obvious spy camera is watching a Russian missile exchange. The people in the exchange are surrounded by white snow but Bond has set up the blackest camera to watch them and it’s pretty close. Everyone should have seen it. The military decides to blow the place up and Bond must escape via a jet containing nuclear weapons. Of course, since this is an action movie, there must be a time limit for him to escape. Will he escape? Will he make it in time? What? Of course he fucking will. It’s James Bond and it’s the opening scene. He’s basically the one character in all of cinema history that is guaranteed to live through the movie. He has the opposite fate that every actor that plays Jesus has. They’re not going to kill Bond when they have a franchise to run. They should have given him other stakes than his life to play with in that sequence. Like escorting someone important out of there. At any rate the movie rips off Top Gun after Bond escapes. Cue the shitty song and weird metal women dancing around.

    Yay! Another Bond movie that starts with a ship and a submarine. Basically the ship is a British ship that is supposedly 11 miles off of the Chinese coast so Chinese jets are warning the boat that if they do not surrender they will be attacked. The bad guys are aboard a black submarine, all wearing black. They send this teeth covered metal thing toward the ship so that the people aboard the ship think that the Chinese attacked them. The ship starts to sink but before they abandon ship they send a missile to blow up one of the jets. They then shoot the shit out of the survivors from the ship. They basically tricked everyone into starting a naval war. During this scene we are introduced to Elliot Carver who is an evil media mogul. He basically is an evil Steve Jobs. He wants to start a war between China and the UK so that he can have the exclusive media rights to the story. I’m willing to bet that Bond is totally cool with the plan and is going to ignore it.

    There’s a delightful scene in which Bond and Q role-play. Bond needs to pickup a rental car in Germany and Q pretends to be working at Avis and makes him fill out the paperwork. Of course, it’s a gadget car instead of a regular car. I don’t know why they had to go through all of this trouble to just give him a car. This leads to all sorts of unanswered questions. Did Q have to go undercover as an Avis employee for a few months in order to work on his cover? Did he simply steal a red vest? Did he kill the person that was wearing said red vest? Why didn’t they just have Q pull up to the curb at the airport and give him the fucking keys? They went so far out of their way for a half-joke of Bond staring at the red vest and trying not to laugh. 

    Bond has to use Carter’s wife, Paris to get information about Carter. Despite being married she decides to bang Bond in under a second. This leads to Carter sending Paris to get information out of Bond which results in Bond having to have sex with the emotionless face of Lois Lane. Carter finds out that his wife previously knew Bond more than she let on. Lois Lane gives Bond information about Carver. Bond gives her nothing to work with. It’s a web of….rumors? I’m not sure what the hell happened. 

    One thing I love about Brosnan as Bond is the dude looks good while shooting a gun. He just appears to have more experience using firearms than the previous guys. It’s even evident in his opening sequence with that weird gun/eye thing that they all shoot and turns red. Roger Moore wasn’t even aiming at the camera when he fired, hitting nothing. But Brosnan shoots right at your goddamn eyes and they even added an awesome gunshot noise that matches how dead you should be if it were real. The only downside is that he’s always giving a smirk like, “Can you believe this shit?” Timothy Dalton was always serious and Brosnan is the flipside of that coin. Even when Bond finds the body of Paris he handles it like it’s a goddamn joke. This is, of course, before he makes out with her dead neck some more. Super creepy.

    Bond does a wicked Halo jump from a jet which is just basically throwing yourself out of the plane with an oxygen tank and landing in the water after using your parachute for less than a second just before you hit the water. How anyone has ever survived it is beyond me. Personally, the Vietnamese would have found my body, wrapped in the parachute and floating just off the coast. He does this just over where the ship from the beginning crashed. When he gets inside the ship he finds that the girl, Wai Lin is already in there. I haven’t introduced her yet but the movie sure as shit has. She’s basically a random Chinese girl that keeps showing up to fuck up Bond’s plans. They are both captured by Carter’s henchmen and taken to his building. Once there, Carter tells them that words are the new weapon and that he will control the world with his news network. This is not how reality works. At any rate, Carter is 50 in this movie. What’s the fucking point of it at this age? His maximum range of power would be 20-25 years and most of that will be really shitty years because of his age. I never understand elderly villains. If it hasn’t happened by the time you’re in retirement years then just give up, dude. It’s not happening. You blew it.

    It was starting to become painfully obvious that Wai Lin is Bond with a vagina. Jenny Bond? Jamilina Bondella? Janelle Boobs? These are starting to stray away from the original name. She has all sorts of gadgets and Bond looks at her like he finally understands that women are actually people instead of warm holes he can put his penis in. The next scene is them boarding the weird submarine from the beginning that looks like a floating building. They exchange dialogue about their plan in the most unnecessary fashion. They both know what they are doing. Undoubtedly they talked about it on the drive over. Yet, as we watch they both give specifics to each other when they both know the fucking information already. I hate lazy exposition. It gets worse when we cut to inside the submarine and Carter again tells us his evil plan. He informs them again that confusion will lead the UK and China to fight and he will be telling everyone on his privately controlled media network. This is about the fourth time he has told us. We fucking get it. Although, another theory is that maybe he’s starting to go senile. If that’s the case, cut those 20-25 years of ruling the media down to about 4 months. At the end of that time he won’t remember that he even has an empire. Instead he will think everyone he talks to is his family from long ago. He then seriously tells us the plot again. That makes twice…in the same scene. He’s losing his shit at an accelerating rate.

    Once he thoroughly ruins the submarine’s resale value, Bond kills Carter by using the strange teeth covered torpedo thing from the beginning which would have turned Carter into a stain on the floor of the sub. The henchman dies because he’s too stupid to know that if the side of your shoe is stuck by something, you can still remove your foot from the shoe. At the end, Bond chooses to bone Wai Lin on a floating piece of submarine instead of being rescued by a British ship. Dude, you’re in the South Asian Sea. Get the fuck out of there. You can fuck on the boat!

    Overall, it was decent. It was one of the shortest in the series which is good because it barely had enough plot to even fill the time it had. I liked it because it wasn’t about a villain with plans to blow up the world for some shitty reason. It was just about a guy that wanted to run his own news network and he liked to remind everyone about that fact about every 20 minutes or so. I’d say it’s worth watching but you never get a feel for anyone or anything in the movie. The only two character with enough screen time are Bond and Carter and they only talk about one thing; pussy and running a media empire. I’ll let you guess which one is which.

Dr. No (1962)

1962 - Dr. No

Alternate Title - Dr. No-thing To Do

PG - 110 minutes

Director - Terence Young

Stars - Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Bernard Lee

    The first official Bond movie. It opens with the signature Bond shooting at the camera but in this version Bond would have clearly missed the gunman because the gun goes off well before he has a decent shot. In all reality Bond would be dead before this movie even started. This transitions into a seizure-inducing opening credit sequences consisting of flashing polka dots which turn into dancing women. The very next scene is three hit-men pretending to be blind while the song “Three Blind Mice” plays. 

    Very early on Bond is treated like a bitch by M when he takes Bond’s gun away and forces him to use a different one. He mentions that Bond just spent 6 months in the hospital because his last gun jammed on him in a mission. So far he’s not seeming too bad-ass. 

    I’m not going to go into plot specifics because the plot isn’t that interesting for the most part. One thing I did notice is that the makers of Bond movies are obsessed with getting non-English speaking foreigners to fill major roles only to dub their lines into English. This plan worked well with the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns because he actually shot his movies in Italy, but these movies were primarily shot in England so why not just find someone that speaks English already? 

    An hour and a half in, Bond finally meets the villain, Dr. No. He’s the most calm villain I’ve ever seen. He looks like a robot with a human head as he moves. His hands are literally metal and can crush shit like a trash compactor. When he speaks he barely opens his mouth and gives no facial expression. It reminded me of when people cut holes in pictures of people’s faces and talk through the hole. 

    Twenty minutes later and the movie is over and all Bond did to foil the villain’s plan was turn a “danger level” wheel to the right a few times. Unless you count the minutes he spent walking around awkwardly in a radiation suit pretending to be Chang, a guy he knocked out. In all seriousness, all Bond did was turn the wheel and punch a dude to get Dr. No to abandon his entire plan. Then he kicks Dr. No into the radiation water. End movie.

    Overall it is a decent Bond movie. I know I didn’t speak much for the plot but for the budget they had and all the locations it required, they couldn’t really afford to do much with it. I don’t mind a simple storyline as long as it’s executed properly which this movie is. I have a real appreciation for 60’s movies and this one was ahead of its time. However I feel like if I was watching this on opening day in 1962, I would have said, “Beh, that was decent. I don’t see this becoming anything special.” I would have been wrong. I would have also been shot the next year in Dallas because if I were alive back in the 60’s I would have been Kennedy because I’m fucking awesome. 

From Russia With Love (1963)

1963 - From Russia With Love

Alternate Title - We Bought A Train

PG - 115 minutes

Director - Terence Young

Stars - Sean Connery, Robert Shaw, Lotte Lenya

    This movie begins with a training scene in which Bond is killed. However it is revealed that it was only a man with a Bond mask. Let it be known that before the man is killed he looks exactly like Sean Connery and then when they take the mask of he looks like a melted pile of wax. Evidently 1960’s mask technology is either horrible or so advanced that the mask itself falls apart when the person wearing it dies. It must be stage one of the technology used in the Mission Impossible movies. 

    Possibly my favorite phrase of any Bond movie is in this one. We see that Spectre is yet again the antagonists. Klebb, an ex-member of the KGB that has defected to Spectre lands in a helicopter and is greeted with, “Welcome to Spectre island!” I sure hope they don’t put that shit on maps because it just makes a shortcut for James Bond. 

    The first shot we see of Bond is pretty much his balls as he’s splaying in a canoe in Larry Bird length swim trunks. After seeing all of these movies I just want an ugly girl to play his love interest. Seriously, every single girl he meets is supermodel hot and he gives that “I’m getting my dick in this” look. I don’t know about you but most of the women I see on a daily basis aren’t someone I want my dick in. Especially in Bond’s cavalier raw-dog style. 

    Moneypenny. She’s in every Bond movie from 1962 until 1985 and every single time we see her she’s dripping buckets over the idea of Bond taking her out. I think these are his biggest asshole moments in any of the movies. Instead of telling her she’s too homely for some Bond-ing (a phrase I’m starting for unprotected sex) he convinces her that she is the only girl he thinks about. He drags her in just long enough each scene that she won’t dare get her own life before the next time she sees him. This is the equivalent of when a boyfriend/girlfriend breaks up with you but keeps coming around for just the right amount of time that you think it will all work out and that you shouldn’t commit to moving on. So, Moneypenny sits at that desk, smoking and wasting away 23 years of her life while the love of her sad life shape-shifts and bangs dozens of girls every year. I wish she had her own spin-off series where it’s just her drinking alone in her apartment filled with cats and pictures of James Bond on the walls while she’s trying to keep her shit together as images of Bond nailing another model clutter her head. In any reality the reason she didn’t continue into the Dalton years is because that character hung herself in her closet while gripping a signed photo of Bond. Is this dark enough for you? Because Bond could have prevented this in those 23 years by simply saying to her, “You know, Moneypenny….you’re just gross and aging at rate that I don’t prefer. Plus you smell like cats. Well, I’m going to get my dick wet in an exotic locale.”

    There is a 12 second establishing shot of Istanbul. This might not sound that crazy but 12 seconds is a really long time to be looking at a building. Did the producers feel that the longer we see it the more we will believe that the interior shots were actually filmed there?

    This movie proved me wrong. All those times I said, “There is no way I could get sick of gypsies in a movie.” Don’t I feel like a fool? Just after the gypsy scenes there is a scene where the bad guys watch and film Bond fuck a girl through one-way glass. Not only are they evil, they’re voyeurs. Personally, this made me like the bad guys more because I’d totally watch Bond fuck from inches away. What better way to learn?

    The next 31 minutes of this movie is on a train. That’s a third of the movie in which nothing much happens other than disposing of a henchman. Don’t get me wrong here, it wasn’t unbearable but it was about 20 minutes longer than I wanted to be on that train. If I’m going to be on a train for half an hour I at least want to end up two counties away, having successfully evaded the police instead of in the same chair staring angrily at a screen. 

    They finally get off the train immediately rip-off North By Northwest when James is chased by a helicopter. Bond himself looks like he’s in a Monty Python sketch more than an action movie. 

    Yet another Bond cliché in this movie. The villain presses a button and IMMEDIATELY a henchman opens the door and walks in like he’s the next guest on the Spectre Tonight Show. A show undoubtedly filmed on Spectre Island, of course. Do these henchman have such specific duties that Spectre can afford to have someone stand outside the door with this hand on the doorknob in case a button is pushed? What a boring fucking job. Spectre better have some amazing benefits to make that job worth going to and risking your life. At least a good dental/vision package. 

    The movie ends with the female Spectre agent, Klebb, being shot, having an intense orgasm and then dying. Cut to Bond on a boat with a hot girl, throwing the James Bond porno into the water. Thus denying the world one of the first celebrity sex-tapes. 

    Overall it’s a pretty decent Bond movie. It had way more going on than the first one did. Another thing that’s awesome at the same time it’s dull is that they were clearly trying to stretch out the Spectre storyline so you never really got to feel like he was going to bring them down at any point. It’s great as an idea but when you’re watching it you want him to take on Number One and get him to show his goddamn face already. 

Goldfinger (1964)

1964 - Goldfinger

Alternate Title - Goldfingering

PG - 110 minutes

Director - Guy Hamilton

Stars - Sean Connery, Gert Frobe, Honor Blackman

    In this installment, Bond is after Goldfinger. In a scene in Miami Beach, Goldfinger is playing cards in a courtyard and cheating. A girl is watching him with a telescope and telling him over a radio what cards the other man has. Goldfinger is using the most obvious wire in the history of wires. It’s like a secret service wire but despite their name they aren’t trying to hide their wires. Bond takes over the radio and tells Goldfinger to lose the game. He does and Goldfinger snaps a pencil. Bond should be scared if this showdown turns into a pencil snapping competition. It should also be noted that Goldfinger looks like a fucking mess. He looks like a bus driver more than a villain. 

    Bond adds more fuel to the fire inside the shaky mind of Moneypenny when he kisses her on the cheek. She gets a scene in every movie. Seriously, she’s just a fucking secretary and we have to watch her eye-bang Bond for three minutes every couple of years or so. 

    The next 8 minutes of precious screen time are on a golf course which makes for some gripping cinema. Golf is regarded as one of the most boring sports to watch. Bond movies are regarded as some of the most exciting and action-packed movies to watch. It’s like the Odd Couple of movie scenes. The equivalent would be having a bad-ass car chase scene in the middle of Sophie’s Choice. 

    After a bunch of sneaking around, Bond is captured and we are given the greatest Bond scene of all time: the laser-crotch showdown. Most of the villain’s capture plans are lame and non-threatening but this one is actually scary to watch as a male. Instead of letting Bond get slowly sliced in half, Goldfinger releases him with this testicles intact. Goldfinger then chauffeurs Bond around the planet like a trophy wife. We then watch as Goldfinger’s house flips around and every surface spins and displays a map or control panel. He reveals his plan which is to gas Fort Knox and steal all of the gold. 

    Later, Goldfinger, Bond and the lesbian Pussy Galore are all sitting around a table, discussing the plot and sipping drinks as if they haven’t been trying to kill each other the entire movie thus far. Goldfinger’s plan is to destroy all of the gold so that the value of his gold increases tenfold. This plot only works during the gold standard which we have since abandoned. Not to mention that after the theft the United States could have simply abandoned the gold standard on the spot. Goldfinger leaves the scene so Bond and Pussy Galore can walk to a barn for a good fashion raping. Wait, what? Yes, Pussy is clearly a lesbian. In the book she is. In this movie she is. Her name is Pussy for Christ’s sake. Bond whips her around a few times and they semi-kung-fu fight before Bond just flat out rapes her. She says she’s not interested and fights him off for minutes before finally just accepting her fate. What part of this isn’t rape? I didn’t see her as ‘playing hard to get.’ I saw her as a rape victim. But it’s Bond so she goes on with her life. 

    After Bond foils Goldfinger’s plan, the good guys show up and help. They ask why Pussy called them in and Bond says, “I must have appealed to her maternal instincts.” Yeah, nice try Bond. I know Stockholm Syndrome when I see it. 

    Overall it’s an awesome Bond movie. Bond literally rapes his way to safety. Goldfinger is an awesome villain despite not looking or acting like one. He has some awesome one-liners and you really believe he means them even though he does what every Bond villain does which is let Bond go every time he gets captured. 

Thunderball (1965)

1965 - Thunderball

Alternate Title - Waterballs

PG - 130 minutes

Director - Terence Young

Stars - Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi

    This movie opens with Bond punching a cross dresser which turns into the most sloppy fight scene in movie history. Bond escapes the scene using a jetpack instead of a simple rope because everything he does has to be severely unnecessary. 

    Spectre is again the villain in this movie. They immediately make their presence known in the movie by having basically the equivalent of a corporate Monday morning meeting where they discuss new ideas and personnel issues. Bond should be careful, they appear to be fairly organized. 

    Most of this movie takes place underwater so you know it has to be exciting. Nothing screams action like this calm water setting. The main villain, Largo crashes a jet and steals a suitcase of bomb fuses from it before covering it with a net disguise so nobody can see it. 

    It should be noted that I had reached the halfway point of the movie and this is all the plot development that has happened. There are several scenes in this movie in which Bond just casually chats with other characters that go nowhere. 

    Yet another movie where Bond just hangs out with the villain as if they were best buds. I’m starting to think he gets off on the attention. 

    Bond finds the crashed jet and this all leads to an epic underwater war where men are literally shooting each other with harpoons and using knives to cut the tubes to their enemies oxygen tanks. I don’t get it. Not the scene but the idea of this being exciting. Half of the scene you can’t even see because of bubbles so what your left with is slow motion swim-fighting.

    I like Largo as a villain but he really had nothing to do in this movie. He is only in a few scenes and then he dies in the lamest way when he is harpooned in his back before his boat crashes. What a waste of a decent villain. Bond and the girl are then sky hooked out of the ocean in a scene later used in The Dark Knight. I’ll let you guess which one of these movies executed the idea better.

    Overall, I would not recommend this one. It’s just boring. Maybe it was my hatred for movies with aquatic settings or maybe it was the fact that nothing fucking happened for 2 hours and ten minutes. Half of the time Connery is in short-shorts and you swear you’re just staring at his balls and ass-cheeks. Ocean movies are just BORING. There are only like 4 ways to die in them so it gets repetitive. Every bad guy that dies is from the following options; their oxygen tank tube is cut, they are harpooned, they are blown up underwater which means no explosion or anything cool or Bond just punches them in the face to death, apparently. 

You Only Live Twice (1967)

1967 - You Only Live Twice

Alternate Title - Only Zombies Live Twice

PG - 117 minutes

Director - Lewis Gilbert

Stars - Sean Connery, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama, Donald Pleasence

    A vagina space shuttle abducts a NASA space shuttle. Cue the Bond theme. 

    Why does every girl that Bond has sex with have to wait until after she’s done riding his hog to call in her bosses to kill him? We first see Bond rolling over post-coitus with a woman in China. She pushes a button that makes the bed fly up into the wall with Bond inside. I laughed because I pictured the process of the bad guys spending hours and a ton of money building a folding bed that can hold a man’s weight. Men come in and shoot the bed a thousand times and simply walk the fuck away without checking to see if they were successful. Out of nowhere police show up and pronounce him dead which is all part of a rouse to fool someone that Bond is dead for some reason. They drop his body into the ocean where he is taken in by a submarine and is shown to be alive so that the title of the movie isn’t complete nonsense. Bond is sent to Japan where in under fifteen seconds in the county is recognized. Why waste the time faking his death? No matter where he goes he’s constantly being recognized by everyone. For being a secret agent his face and presence is never a fucking secret. He might as well have a goddamn nametag on and a baseball hat that says ‘Bond’. 

    This movie is full of rich white men pretending to be Japanese. Regardless of the fact that much of Japan is just as modernized as the states are, every white guy in this movie is dead set on having a traditional Japanese lifestyle. 

    Anyway, a bunch of shit happens that isn’t that interesting until Q brings in a bunch of briefcases full of parts and builds Bond a giant toy helicopter. (Picture on the poster) Bond flies this little son of a bitch all over the countryside with no apparent goal. He sees a volcano that appears to have a lake inside of it until previously mentioned vagina space shuttle comes back to earth, the volcano opens up and the shuttle lands inside of it. BAM! Secret base of evil. 

    After this it becomes a list of go-to Bond jokes. The villain has a pet cat and a pool of piranhas. He presses buttons and sends people to their deaths. His henchmen are numbered instead of named. Basically this movie is the reason the Austin Powers franchise exists. I actually like Spectre as a villain instead of some of the lame one-off villains of later Bond movies. It’s a shame they couldn’t stick with it because of a lawsuit. 

    There is a scene in this movie where they literally turn Bond into a stereotypical Japanese man through a complete makeover. I wish I made that up but it totally happens. He looks more like Spock than a Japanese man. He towers over the rest of the men as a clearly 6’2” white dude. The purpose of the makeover isn’t explained. The best I can assume is they wanted to see how much they could get away with on the dumb white guy in the village. 

    Donald Pleasence (Blofeld) is an awesome villain but falls for the rouse that most Bond villains fall for: he gives Bond his gadgets by mistake. Make that two mistakes: he doesn’t kill Bond but instead teases him for 20 minutes about how he’s going to enjoy killing him. Hey fuck-head, shoot him in the goddamn head right now and save yourself some classic Bond shenanigans. 

    An epic war breaks out at the Spectre volcano base while a nuke rocket is heading for the USA to be pinned on the Russians. Blofeld keeps bringing Bond along from room to room while he explains his plan which makes you feel sad for Blofeld. It seems more like he’s lonely than evil. Like he uses evil to express his feelings instead of his words. 

    Blofeld pulls a switch that of course exists which blows up his own lair. If you were building a base of operations would you seriously put in a self-destruct option? What the fuck for? What possible outcome would warrant the necessity for that kind of insurance policy? 

    Overall it’s a pretty enjoyable Bond movie. If you’re looking for one to get into and all you know is Austin Powers jokes then this is the starting point for you. Also if you’re into the idea of Bond but find him too white for your tastes then this movie has your racist name written all over it. 

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

1969 - On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Alternate Title - On His Widowed Mental Breakdown

PG - 142 minutes

Director - Peter R. Hunt

Stars - George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas

    Move over, Sean Connery. Let this goofy bastard play the part for once. This felt like a make-a-wish foundation granted to a special boy that wanted to play Bond. It would explain why we never see him again in the franchise. 

    This movie starts so detached from what we know Bond to be. He spots a woman trying to kill herself by wandering out to sea and Bond saves her. This scene looks more like an Old Spice ad than a movie. Just so that it’s said once, the famous, “This never happened to the other fellow” line is fucking stupid. It isn’t clever and it isn’t funny. He’s wearing a stupid shit-eating grin the entire line as if he just couldn’t contain himself while spitting out that hilarious joke. 

    Bond slaps a woman and she’s instantly horny for him. His slap must be an aphrodisiac because it happens a few times in the series. I’ve tried that in my life and it only results in domestic abuse charges and a record. 

    Bond quits his job for all of two minutes before going on vacation. M is an icy prick towards the new man playing Bond which makes you wonder if M hates special people. There is then a dating montage of Bond and a girl which feels out of place in a Bond movie. He’s proven himself more of a bang ‘em and leave ‘em at all cost type of man and here he is legitimately dating a woman. 

    The villain, Blofeld, wants to control or destroy the economy of the world and is doing so from the Swiss Alps between sessions of curling and bobsledding. The movie from here on is mostly shots of Bond superimposed over snowy settings to show that he’s a world-class skier. He survives an avalanche in typical Bond fashion; pure fucking luck. 

    Bond later returns to the mountains for more snowy action. The villain escapes the fortress and they then literally get involved in a bobsledding chase (a sentence I never thought I would write in my lifetime). During the chase a grenade blows up in Bond’s face and not only does he not explode into bits but it actually helps him in the chase. He is thrown off of the bobsled and cuts off the villain enough that he jumps onto his bobsled and they fistfight. Is it the same power that gives him aphrodisiac hands as the one that makes his body explosion-proof? How he kills the villain was then later reused at the end of Speed where Keanu Reeves pushes Dennis Hopper’s head up and removes it with a light. In this movie he pushes the villain up and he gets caught in a tree. Not as exciting but it was pretty cool. Although, maybe I thought it was so cool because this was the exact moment the bobsledding sequence ended. 

    Cut to: BOND WEDDING. That’s right. Bond gets fucking married. Moneypenny is in attendance and she looks like her life just ended. She will have to find someone else to pointlessly obsess over for the next 20 years. Q gives a short speech to Bond at the wedding that felt like ‘the sex talk’ parents give to their sons. I expected him to hand Bond a condom and tell him about STD’s. As if  he wasn’t riddled with them anyway. 

    After being married for all of twenty real-time minutes, Bond pulls over to remove all of the wedding bullshit that people put on cars. He probably should have waited because a car shows up with Blofeld (in a neck brace) and shoots the shit out of the car and his new wife. She is fucking dead. Already. 

    Bond loses his shit after she is shot. A cop pulls up to the car on a motorcycle and Bond says while holding her, “It’s alright. It’s quite alright, really. She’s having a rest. We’ll carry on soon. It’s no hurry you see, we have all the time in the world…” END OF MOVIE.

    Overall, it was a good movie. A bit too much skiing for my tastes but it didn’t subtract from anything else. Lots of action and a rare peek into Bond’s feelings. Sure the feelings were horrible and they were borderline insanity as Bond loses his wife but it was interesting. I wouldn’t assume Bond would recover from his trauma and maybe that’s why Connery comes back in the next one. Lazenby’s version of Bond is locked in a padded room somewhere on the Queen’s dime. Or quid. Or whatever the translation of that idiom would be in England. 

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

1971 - Diamonds Are Forever

Alternate Title - Downtimes Are Forever

PG - 120 minutes

Director - Guy Hamilton

Stars - Sean Connery, Jill St. John, Charles Gray

    Forget that last guy, Sean Connery is back! The movie immediately opens with Bond beating the shit out of people while asking about Blofeld. He chokes a woman with her own bikini like gentlemen do. He’s clearly pissed about his wife being murdered. He tracks Blofeld down and tosses him into boiling pudding. 

    Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint are the franchises first gay couple. I mean, they don’t fuck or anything but they’re clearly together as more than just business partners. They finish each others sentences. They hold hands. Get it yet? 

    Bond is excited that he gets to go to South Africa and bummed the fuck out when M tells him he’s going to Holland instead. In what dimension would someone prefer South Africa over Holland? Especially a vagina-sseur such as Bond. I swear, he won’t rest until he overdoses on AIDS. 

    This movie also stars Jill St. John’s tits. James Bond is pretending to be Peter Franks and gets in a fight and kills a man in which he pretends is James Bond. I need a flowchart. 

    The movie then devolves into a needlessly uninteresting casino/circus scene. An elephant pulls a slot handle, wins and screams in excitement. This whole scene is insanity. Jill St. John’s tits just walk around and play boring carnival games and visiting droll attractions. She doesn’t even pretend like she’s having fun during any of this. She lets you know the entire time that she’s fucking bored and so should we. I seriously have no idea why any of this shit happened other than the producer’s owed a favor to the circus promoters. 

    Jill St. John’s tits then go and find Bond sitting in a patio chair, reading a book while a girl is dead in the pool. He slaps Jill St. John’s tits in the face and she reveals that she actually doesn’t know who he is. I seriously don’t remember another time where someone didn’t know he was Bond. His disguises never work except on her. 

    Bond finds himself stuck in what appears to be Blofeld’s personal jerk-off room. It’s a tiny room with lots of phones and television screens. They didn’t show any lotion or tissue but I suppose that’s because Blofeld is a tidy man. 

    Blofeld is essentially making clones for the same reason that Saddam Hussein did. He is making clones that have voice boxes that can replicate other voices. 

    Later, Bond gets into a fight with several women in bikinis named after Disney characters. It’s pure insanity. They do cartwheels and kick him in the chest while he just stands there waiting for it. Eventually they end up in the pool and he pretty much attempts to drown them even after back-up arrives. 

    The insanity escalates as there is seriously a scene in this movie where Jill St. John’s tits get pushed into a car where Blofeld is holding a cat. That’s not the insane part. The insane part is that Blofeld is head-to-toe in drag. Lipstick. Eye-shadow. Blush. I shit you not. 

    Blofeld’s plan involves getting satellites to shoot lasers at shit to blow it up. Out of all the Bond movies I’ve seen, he appears to have one of the few plans that is actually threatening. Bond tracks him down after learning that the entire satellite control is on a cassette tape. Bond is hanging out with Blofeld and it is revealed that Jill St. John’s tits have betrayed Bond and are working with Blofeld now. Bond switches out the control cassette and calls Jill St. John’s tit’s a bitch and violates her ass with the cassette tape. She isn’t really evil so she switches out the tapes and tells Bond about it like a child trying to please an older brother. However she ruined Bond’s plan. Well, fuck it because a bunch of helicopters show up and shoot the shit out of Blofeld’s lair. Shit blows up but you won’t care.

    Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint come back and pretend to be serving them a sweet meal. It should be noted that Mr. Kidd is basically David Crosby. Bond kills them both and Jill St. John’s tits makes a final joke. Cut to a song that Kanye West ruined. 

    Overall, it’s a decent Bond movie. It’s overly long and hangs too long on the boring moments. Great moments are fleeting. Much of the movie felt like filler because the movie was too short. This all makes it sound like a bad movie but the parts that are enjoyable make up for all of the lulls. 

Live And Let Die (1973)

1973 - Live And Let Die

Alternate Title - Live Racist And Let Me Die

PG - 121 minutes

Director - Guy Hamilton

Stars - Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto, Jane Seymour

    A man stands on a New Orleans sidewalk as a funeral procession slowly gets closer to him. He asks whose funeral it is and a man says “yours” and stabs him. The men carrying the casket then walk over him and somehow get him into the casket without opening it. It then turns into a wild fucking funeral as all the people walking start to dance. Nevermind the fact that this means 40 people are in on this murder. They can’t all be cool with this can they? All of the people in this scene are black except the man they kill. While these black people are dancing they immediately cut to a crazy black tribe in the Caribbean killing another boring white dude. Were the makers of this film trying to say that all black people are crazy, uncivilized people? That black people just want to kill white people? Is this an analogy for the decay of white power? I can’t say if any of these were on purpose but the rest of the movie doesn’t exactly negate this. 

    This movie is full of blatant 70’s racism. It’s an insane mix of blacksploitation and Bond. If you love tarot card reading, this is the Bond movie for you. Mr. Big is the villain in this movie and of course he lives in South Ghettosville. Just kidding, it’s Harlem, but they might as well have called it that. All of his henchmen dress like New York City pimps.

    Mr. Big later rips off of a rubber face. It’s seriously the worst rubber face I’ve ever seen. It was basically a rubber face of his actual face. It was one of the most pointless things I’ve ever seen. 

    Bond escapes a swamp full of gators by hopping from one to another like a Loony Toons character. He was of course put there by three evil black men. There seriously isn’t a black character in this movie that isn’t introduced and then immediately does something evil. 

    We are then introduced to the racist, southern Sheriff Pepper. He does not belong in this movie series. It turns into a bayou boat chase for the next FOREVER. It simply doesn’t feel like it’s going to end. 

    At the end they replay the scene in From Russia With Love when Bond throws the guy out of a train window. But this time the guy has a hook for a hand and is black. Then they cut to an exterior shot of the train in which a black man is dressed in voodoo makeup and clothing and starts to laugh maniacally. Seriously, it’s all-around racist.

    Overall, it’s racist. I really wish I had more to say about the plot and specific scenes but this movie reads like bullet points of racist moments. This movie must have been responsible for so many new Klan memberships in the same way that Fight Club was responsible for a bunch of backyard fight videos. 

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

1974 - The Man With The Golden Gun

Alternate Title - The Man That Owned A Midget

PG - 125 minutes

Director - Guy Hamilton

Stars - Roger Moore, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland

    The first introduction to the villain, Scaramanga is a close-up of his three nipples. A minute into this movie and I’m already hard. It then turns into Scaramanga and a hit-man trying to kill each other while a midget watches and laughs at his boss, Scaramanga. The scene basically turns into a carnival fun-house with flashing lights and scary skeletons popping out at the hit-man as he wanders through in the dark. Scaramanga and his midget appear to be into a very kinky game of lethal foreplay. He kills the hit-man with his golden gun and shoots the fingers off of a mannequin version of Bond that clearly isn’t Roger Moore standing there, shaking and pretending to be a mannequin. Clearly.

    Bond is led to believe that Scaramanga has a hit out on him. The exact way that Bond tracks him down is that all of his bullets are made of gold. It’s fairly easy to track once he finds out who makes them for Scaramanga. It seems to me that if he used regular untraceable bullets that it would be almost impossible for Bond or anyone else to track him down. That’s pretty much the first rule if you want to be a career criminal; avoid doing anything that raises suspicion. 

    While tracking down the bullet, Bond assaults a woman by twisting her arm up to her head and threatening to break it if she doesn’t give up Scaramanga. Eventually this leads to a sunken ship where for some fucking reason M is using as a headquarters. Despite having an entire sect to run, M and Q are ALWAYS within twenty minutes of Bond. It’s as if they don’t have other agents to keep track of. Or paperwork. Or bosses to report to. They seriously just appear to follow Bond around on the off-chance he might need a good talking-to. 

    Bond winds up at a kung-fu school and beats the shit out of all of the students. He then is on a boat while a child tries to sell him a wooden elephant. The kid is like the most high-pressure car salesman ever. But a salesman that is horrible as he keeps lowering the price. Apparently Bond hates him so he shoves him overboard. 

    If you thought we were done with Sheriff Pepper you were wrong. For absolutely no reason other than (failed) comic relief, he shows up in Asia where Bond happens to be causing a ruckus. Pepper shouts out horribly racist shit at the locals and declares that he is a democrat to his wife. I bet. I bet the angry, racist southern sheriff is a democrat. Seems logical. 

    Later in the movie Bond is about to nail his partner, Goodnight when Scaramanga’s right-hand woman, Andrea walks into the room. Instead of just telling her that Goodnight is there he decides to do the old sitcom rouse of hiding her awkwardly while Andrea isn’t looking. They both sit on the fucking bed while Goodnight is under the blankets as if she wouldn’t notice the giant human-sized lump in the sheets. When he hides Goodnight in the closet he proceeds to bang the living shit out of Andrea while Goodnight is forced to listen to the entire fuck-fest. After Andrea leaves he lets Goodnight out of the closet and for some unknown reason Goodnight storms out. I can’t imagine why. It should be noted that Goodnight is super hot and Andrea is by all accounts a cougar at best. However, from Roger Moore’s perspective it must be because they are basically the same age. When Connery was Bond they surrounded him with 20-30 year old girls that seemed natural. But when Moore took over they needed to surround him with cougars in an apparent effort to make him look younger. 

    I’ll say one thing about Bond entering the 1970’s, it meant that car chases were mandatory about every twenty minutes or so. In this one he gets into a chase with Sheriff Pepper in the car and it turns into a fucking Dukes Of Hazard episode. They are in the car and must ramp over a small river using a loop-to-loop from a childhood car track. The ramp is made of wood and it flips the car over 360 degrees while a literal slide whistle gives it soundtrack. It’s fucking stupid. Especially in the middle of this mostly serious movie. Then Scaramanga hooks his car up to a set of plane wings and flies the fuck out of the scene while Pepper chews tobacco and yells racist shit (pointy-heads) at the local police. 

    When he eventually tracks down Scaramanga, he shows Bond his new toy which is a solar-powered laser gun used to blow up things for fun, apparently. Later Bond and Scaramanga are repeating the opening scene where the hit-man died. Bond threatens to kill the midget like a fucking man does. Quickly it turns into the fun-house again and Bond repeats everything that the hit-man did. However, Bond isn’t your ordinary duck so he climbs below the set and sneaks away. Bond disguises himself as the previously mentioned mannequin Bond and shoots Scaramanga. Seriously, all of his downfall is predicated on the fact that his methods are dangerously stupid.

    Goodnight pushes a man into a vat and this causes everything on the island to overheat and explode. Bond and Goodnight sail to safety. Or did they? Because the midget is hiding on the boat. Bond gets the best of the midget and kills him….er….no, he just hangs him on top of the sailboat mast. Leaves him to die I guess. 

    Overall, this is one of the best Bond movies out there. It would have been a lot better if they didn’t bring back racist Sheriff Pepper. Scaramanga is a pretty good villain despite doing almost nothing that was evil. He seriously just talked slowly and killed hit-men. He wasn’t even the one that sent the threat to Bond at the beginning. It was Andrea. Scaramanga was just a dude with a laser at the point when Bond killed him. Sure, he might have done something evil with the laser later but we didn’t get to see it. At any rate, he’s fucking dead. Just like all villains end up, oh wait, unless they’re midgets. That’s the only way to survive a Bond movie if you’re evil. Midgets just end up on top of a boat while they roast in the sun and die of dehydration. Maybe it would have been more humane to just shoot the prick.