It's a scholarly analysis of some of the more embarassing moments in Bond movie history. The only tough part was picking just seven lame scenes. I had to leave out the statue on top of the tank bit from Goldeneye and the scene from Octopussy where James dresses like a frickin' clown. However I'm happy to report that Casino Royale has no such embarassing scenes and is pretty much The Shit.
OK, I am working on a proper full-length post that I will try to post later today. I realize I've been slacking and I thank you for your patience and lack of hate emails. Ta!
I agree. Casino Royale was amazing. I'm a huge Bond fan and this one is right at the top. I'm trying to decide if it's my favorite. It's certainly close.
ReplyDeleteI would not have put the statue on the tank from Goldeneye in embarassing moments. It was a kind of funny gag.
But I absolutely would have put Bond in clown suit towards the top of the list. Of course, you could easily find all 7 embarassing moments in just View to a Kill. Snowboarding to Beach Boys. Seducing Grace Jones. Watching a geriatric pushing about 3 hundo jogging around in a leather jacket.
Ah, I beat up on VTAK too much.
Glad you picked the icesurfing scene as number one. When I first saw that, I wasn't even sure that it was supposed to be James Bond there--the digitally created icesurfer didn't look a bit like him. The only thing I could figure was that it was a clip from the Die Another Day video game for the Atari 2600.
ReplyDeleteThe clown suit is hellaworse than the alligator jumping.
ReplyDeleteThe alligator running was kind of bad, but there was definitely worse. You do have to give it credit for being an actual stunt involving an stuntman running across real aligators.
ReplyDeleteExtremely droll. A strong showing from Moore there, one might almost be tempted to characterise him as the gayest Bond on record, if one were given to expressing onself in such imprudent terms.
ReplyDeleteDear Dave,
ReplyDeleteyou rule
Ward
Hey! The cello-sled scene is awesome! Seriously, that's one of my favorite Bond moments, right up there with sking off a cliff with a Union Jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me.
ReplyDeleteOh, and you left out the scene in View to a Kill where Bond makes a quiche.
Other than that, great list.
I was goingh to rag on you for not including the camel doing the double-take in Octopussy, but you included the pigeon doing the double-take, so all is forgiven.
ReplyDeleteI love both the Bond pictures and the Crosby/Hope Road pictures, but their jokes should never cross over.
Interesting note. The alligator jumping failed. I've seen a couple of the Aligators involved (at the Reptile Gardens in N.D.), and they had a long wirte-up about the crazy stunt man who tried the trick, fell in, got bit, got better, tried again, fell in got dead. They had enough footage to put in from before he fell, so they put it in, but the man you see in the scene DIED making it.
ReplyDeleteLook it up, it's true.
I think they told you a fib, man. The stuntman that did the alligator-running stunt was Ross Kananga. The producers liked the guy so much they named the villain after him. He's credited in the movie and the DVD even has a documentary about the stunt. It took him 5 tries but he definitely did NOT get killed.
ReplyDeleteMy anonymous doppelganger has already posted this but I too love the cello tobogganing almost as much as the Spy Who Loved me opening and I also believe that there is something inherently un-Bond about making quiche.
ReplyDeleteOther than that, the list was spot on. The Die Another Day tsunami surfing actually made me cry.
Off to see Casino Royale on Thursday, the prospect of it rocking my world has increased with all the glowing recommendations.
Casino Royale has only been out for a few days now and already it's overrated.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong, I liked it and thought it was great, but it was horribly mislabeled as a "Bond" movie. It felt more like "The Bourne Supremacy" than a Bond movie. It's almost as if they shot it beforehand and then decided call it a James bond film afterwards.
How else would you explain why they tossed out the classic ]elements in favor of some sort of "gritty realism." James Bond doesn't need to be gritty or realistic, they are and always will be escapist pictures, made to take our minds off the real world. Look at "Thunderball" and "Goldfinger", they related to the politics of the time without striving for gritty realism and they did just fine.
I liked Daniel Craig in the lead role. As a short, ugly man it was nice to finally be able to identify with Bond. But this is also a bad thing because I'm not supposed to. Nobody identifies with James Bond. He can fight 20 guys in a tuxedo, he has a car that shoots missiles, he escapes elaborate death traps and foils larger-than-life world domination schemes and he does it all with razor-sharp wit and never loses his his cool through it all. That's why he's an icon. Craig, by comparison, seemed more like an unrefined thug, or an international hitman. That's not Bond.
So as a movie, it succeeded. As a Bond movie, not even close.
Four out of the seven moments involved Roger Moore. Coincidence? I think not.
ReplyDeleteAs for Casino Royale failing as a Bond movie, well, there's something that needs to be acknowledged about the Bond films, and that is that they're, for the most part, really (really) dumb action movies. Sometimes they're also very fun and a few of them (like From Russia With Love) are good movies, period.
The book Casino Royale is a lot grittier and features a much younger, dumber Bond than the movies portray, and personally I like that more than, say, almost everything that happened during the Moore years except the glorious advent of Jaws.
Sometimes it's a lot more suspensful and interesting to see a critical card game between desperate men than apocalyptic missiles of doom get intercepted in the upper atmosphere. I mean, come on, you KNOW the missiles are gonna get blowed up. Yes, I'm picking on Moonraker. No way are they releasing a Bond film where he screws up and the armageddon goes down. But a card game? There's a lot more leeway given in a smaller event like that.
Anyway.
I don't care what anyone says. Casino Royale rocks! How can you not like David Niven? And that Peter Sellers didn't hurt either.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Dave and Chris.
ReplyDeleteJonah, you are forgetting/ignorant of the fact that the movie was largely based on Ian 'The Man' Fleming's first friggin Bond book. Therefore, your opinion sucks.
For me, the worst Bond moment that's not on the list is the last line of Moonraker, where Bond is having antigrav sex with Lois Chiles, and Q says, "I think he's attempting reentry, sir."
ReplyDeleteJESUS CHRIST THAT'S A LAME PUN!!! I mean, Even Desmond Llewellyn can't pull that off right! And coming off one of the silliest Bond movies ever (and that's saying something) it makes it even worse.
Great article, Dave, full of the sarcastic Campbelly goodness we've enjoyed these past two years.
You forgot the worst scene in Octopussy - when Bond and Q assault the villains impregnable Afghan mountain fortress in a jaunty Union Jack hot-air balloon. And to think that "Flashman" author George MacDonald Fraser wrote the script...
ReplyDeleteSongino said it. The books are an excellent read if pulp adventure spy fiction is 'your thing.'
ReplyDeleteThe lamest Bond scene was the one where he kissed the lady. Gross!!
ReplyDeleteVTAK does have a couple of things going for it. One is the Duran Duran theme song, one of the series' strongest later entries. The other is the way that, right after Walken doubles crosses Grace Jones, she instantaneously turns from Mysterious Deadly Exotic Negress into Pissed-Off American Black Chick. It's about the only thing in that movie that put a smile on my face. The rest is wretched, particularly the climax atop the Golden Gate Bridge, which had special effects that made the end of X-Men III look like an IMAX documentary.
ReplyDeleteAnother terrible scene is from the insufficiently-hated Diamonds Are Forever (Sean Connery in full "where's my paycheck?" mode! Swishy gay assassins! Sausage peddler Jimmy Dean as Howard Hughes! A woman named "Plenty O'Toole"!), when Bond escapes the bad guys' lair in a spectacularly retarded looking "Moon Buggy". I don't think the series ever really recovered.
I'm with fredtb... I'm a huge Bond fan, but I couldn't hate Moonraker more if it kicked my dog. It's the John Mayer of Bond movies.
ReplyDeleteStill, having declared my hate for Moonraker, to dan coyle... I see your "I think he's attempting reentry, sir" and raise you a "I thought Christmas only comes once a year" from "The World Is Not Enough." Awful. Just awful.
Great article Dave. Congrats.
I'm not going to do some kind of books vs. movies thing here, but the most disappointing thing about Moonraker is that it's just an Ian Fleming title with some post-Star Wars outer space junk plot. I don't care if a movie ignores its so-called source material so long as the movie is still fun. Moonraker is not fun.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think I'm gonna stand up for Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd. I think they're sufficiently goofy and funny enough in the film to be worthwhile. Homosexual dandy assassins murdering geriatric diamond smugglers? Sign me up. Besides, take them out and you're left with a film highlighted only by the presence of Sean Connery and his hiding of a tape in Jill St. John's underoos.
mcgone: Jesus, I think being reminded of that line gave me a seizure.
ReplyDeleteCompletely seriously? In my humble opinion, the clown makeup should get way more respect. The entire 20 minutes in Octopussy, from where he finds out that the jewels have been switched with an atom bomb, till the moment that goon come out of the cannon and says "Now?" is one of the most imaginative, well-written, well-done and James-Bondy scenes in Roger Moore's entire tenure. Picture Cary Grant doing that entire sequence in a Hitchcock movie and it becomes genius. It's a well-constructed race-against-the-clock chase scene that spoofs race-against-the-clock chase scenes in a series that is famous for the juxtaposition of tension and humor. I'm just sayin' is all.
ReplyDeleteGreat article, Dave. My list might differ (tying Herve to the mast, Jill St. John switching the tapes) but these choices are unassailable. The real kicker, though, is that the "Die Another Day" DVD has an entire featurette about the cgi "wizards" who made the iceberg surfing scene. They keep beaming and saying, "Nobody thought we could pull it off convincingly!" My jaw hit the floor. They have no idea how badly it turned out. The poor deluded fools. Watch it. You'll cry.
ReplyDelete"Casino Royale" is a great flick. My understanding is that the story is at the very beginning of the Bond saga, so he's not supposed to be ultra smooth yet. Also, I don't believe the gadgets are really a part of the story yet.
ReplyDeleteDaniel Craig brings a toughness to the role that was sadly lacking in Moore and Brosnan. I really thought that added a lot to the movie.
As far as goofy scenes, I gotta go with the clown. Moore just looks ridiculous.
Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones has got to be the single most ridiculous character in the entire series. An actress who's barely believable as a high school graduate, with a name contrived merely for that one incredibly lame line.
ReplyDeleteYou picked the corkscrew jump as one of the worst moments? Jesus, Dave, put down the crack pipe.
ReplyDeleteOkay, the corkscrew jump, while maybe lame in the story & with slidewhistle & all, was abso-frickin-lutly awesome! They did this:
ReplyDeleteWithout CG
Without Computers
Without a decent car
On the first take.
I'll put THAT up against any other car stunt in the history of cinema.
Dave may I recommend just focusing on MOONRAKER. The film has enough trash within to satisfy all.
ReplyDeleteTheres the gondola that rides through the square while the pigeon does a double take...
There's Jaws and the buxom freckled girl with the bad teeth.
There's the absurd battle in space...
There's the Bond riding over the hill in a goucho outfit to the theme from the Magnificent Seven.....
And all within one film!!!! I own all of the Bond films, but I refuse to own Moonraker.
How about the four-minute long farting scene in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Everyone just sits around uncomfortably while Bond farts. No dialogue, just lots of fart sounds. It culminates with Blofeld shouting, "Pee-YEW!" and Bond chuckling to himself.
ReplyDeleteWorst Bond scene ever.
I just saw GoldenEye. The tank bit was the only good part.
ReplyDeleteThe alligator bit is awesome!
ReplyDelete"You Only Live Twice" is the best Bond movie. I can't believe you singled out Connery as a Japanese man when there are so many other lame Bond scenes.
"The Man With the Golden Gun" rocks! Totally!
The clown scene from "Octopussy"? What is wrong with you?
You could pick 7 lame scenes from "Moonraker" or "Die Another Day" ... or both ... and most of the stuff you mentioned in your Cracked list wouldn't even be close.
Great blog ... but I have to disagree with your Bond assessment.
And I also have to ask if you've ever seen the TV version of "Casino Royale" from 1954 with Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre. It's not that great but you'll laugh. And you'll also know how to play baccarat.
The Tank was awesome.
ReplyDeleteDave you made a mistake.
SOLID-it was the shit.
ReplyDeleteYou're kidding. Right? You were embarrassed by Bond dressed as a clown, so that he could infiltrate an Air Force base hosting a circus in order to stop a nuclear bomb from exploding?
ReplyDeleteOh for God's sake! Aren't you being a little shallow?
And yes, Bond trying to disguise himself as a Japanese man has to be the worst for me.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, while I can't fault any of your logic on Moonraker, I love the film.
ReplyDeleteIt's pure camp, and everybody in it knows it. If you don't try to shove it in as a James Bond film, and just sit back and enjoy it, it's great brain candy.
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