Review: The Living Daylights Ultimate Edition DVD

I have a bit of a sentimental attachment to The Living Daylights; it's the first of Timothy Dalton's films and I was excited to have a new Bond, despite Roger Moore being the one who introduced me to the character. I felt that Dalton could be my Bond, rather than the Bond I inherited, and I appreciated his approach as Moore's occasional smugness was starting to appear silly to me even as a young teenager. The teaser is still one of my favorites and is a perfect way to introduce Dalton to the audience: an exotic location, a murder, a serious chase without gadgets, and a quick punchline with a pretty lady.

This is the last of the cold war bonds and the 4th in a row for John Glen (the first time anybody's done more than 3 consecutive). The more serious tone works great; there's humor but it's around Bond, but usually not coming from Bond. There's a long-absent grittiness to some of the action, too, such as with the excellent kitchen fight. The audience is clued in to the bad guys' plan early on but Dalton's fine work carries us thru his discovery of it. The move to Afghanistan is unexpected and exciting but on the down side, it's a little embarassing today to see Bond joining up with some of the forerunners of the Taliban in the last reel.

There are some hammy villains in this film, but when you've got Joe Don Baker in your lineup you know you're in good shape. Jeroen Krabbe is great as the series' final "renegade Soviet" and Andreas Wisniewski does fine work that reminds one of Red Grant. The introduction of John Rhys-Davis is welcome and it's too bad he couldn't have shown up in more films. Maryam d'Abo doesn't quite pull her weight and we only get a cameo of Felix Leiter played by John Terry but the first new Moneypenny is well handled by Caroline Bliss. King of Bond composers John Barry shows up as a the orchestra conductor in the final scene, fitting as this was his final Bond score. The music isn't his best but is also special to me, as it was the first Bond sountrack I bought and wore out in my tape deck, with his Pretenders collaboration, Where Has Everybody Gone?, one of my favorites.

Bonus features for the DVD set include the title tune's music video by a-ha (what every 007 fan wanted) and a making-of said music video! There are some deleted scenes but it would be nice if it had some of the alternate takes I've read about, lots of bits where Dalton angrily spits out the jokes rather than forces a smile for them. It's also unfortunate that we don't get a commentary from Dalton but only a few archive interviews of him from the time of the film's release.

Review: The Man With the Golden Gun Ultimate Edition DVD

The Man With the Golden Gun is another weak entry in the series, though it's better than Diamonds Are Forever (both of which were directed by Guy Hamilton). The whole film is slow moving and it feels about an hour longer than it actually is; this is probably due to the lack of many action sequences in the first half of the film (as pointed out by an excellent film critic). I liked it a lot more when I was younger; I recall the title song being my favorite song in the world for a few months back in the 80s. Watching it recently was somewhat less exciting and mostly made me realize that I'd love to live in a house designed by Ken Adam.

It's an unfortunate waste of a decent cast, too. Christopher Lee is menacing enough and the supporting cast includes the amusing Clifton James and stalwart Soon-Tek Oh, both of whose work I always enjoy. The weakest part of the cast is Britt Ekland, tho she fills a bikini like few others. Storywise, there's not much tension as Bond is hunting down a man we think is hunting him. The truth of the matter and its connection to some early dialogue isn't that interesting, really. Truly, the biggest stars of the film are the Asian locations and the sets; both the slanted headquarters and Scaramanga's funhouse are cool and there's some great miniature work for the power station's destruction.

Bonus features include a few different video bits about the spiral car jump, still an amazing stunt. I'm not a huge proponent of creators revising their work years later but I'm not sure why they didn't just erase the slide whistle sound from the car jump, especially since nobody says anything good about it in retrospect.

The commentaries have lots of talk about how the production of this movie discoved the Phang Na area for the rest of the world and how it's all a huge tourist mess now. There's also some good talk about the cast, with many saying that Herve Villechaize was quite the ladies' man when not working. Roger Moore has a commentary to himself, as well, and does a very informative job, making a repeat viewing go a lot easier than it should for this draggy film.

Update (2/23/13): interesting to see this film has the lowest bodycount of all the Bonds and Bond himself only kills one. Come to think of it, he hardly draws his gun.

Review: Diamonds Are Forever Ultimate Edition DVD

Diamonds Are Forever was the first weak James Bond film. There are certainly weaknesses in all of the films before it but this is the first that's weak overall, saved only by an excellent score from John Barry and lots of shots of Las Vegas in 1970, almost making it a time capsule. It already had this quality in the early 80s when I first saw it, as the film has numerous shots of open desert outside the casinos, something my parents made great note of as we visited Vegas a few times around that time.

So what went wrong with this one? In the filmmaker's commentary, the screenwriter says it was the big car chase on the nighttime streets of Vegas happening in the middle of the film, which served as an early climax as it overshadowed the oil rig battle at the end. While that certainly was well done, there are other problems that are more serious. First of all, casting as the main villain a guy with no f-ing neck who not only wasn't very menacing (or even bald, like the previous Blofelds) but appeared as a good guy just 4 years prior. Connery gave the part the absolute minimum it required and the female lead was poorly written and played by a lesser actor. Series-wise, it seems to have no connection with the drama of the preceding film's end; Connery doesn't play the search for Blofeld as a man out for revenge as much as a cop who's eager to solve a case.

There are plenty of positives to this movie, with the elevator fight at the top of the list. Jimmy Dean was amusing and, unlike some, I never had problems with the henchmen Wint and Kidd, tho their homosexuality was creepily portrayed. And so nice to see Crispin Glover's father in the role of Wint, one can certainly see some of Crispin in him. There's a nice reveal of multiple Blofelds and a decent set of investigation by Bond to figure out what the smuggled diamonds are being used for. Again, great sets by Ken Adam and even one he didn't design, a real house I'd love to live in.

The DVD has another commentary from director Guy Hamilton and even includes a deleted scenes with Sammy Davis Jr., which would have been a rare celebrity cameo in a Bond film. The making-of material is quite candid, even mentioning the obvious crowds watching the Fremont Street chase and the "fixed" blooper at the end of the chase.

Review: Goldfinger Ultimate Edition DVD

Goldfinger is considered by many to be the best Bond film, a claim that's tough to argue against. It's probably the best Bond to show somebody who's never seen one, but so much of this film has shown up in other movies they've probably seen it already. This was the 2nd bond film I ever saw; my mother rented it from the video store up the street a few days after I saw Moonraker at that slumber party back in 1982. I was a bit thrown off by the different actor playing Bond but Connery won me over pretty quickly and it's still one of my favorites.

Looking at it almost 30 years later, it's interesting to see what's not part of this film. We don't get some of the big Bond tropes, like the bad guy doesn't have a secret base and not really any exotic locations, although Fort Knox is a fairly unique place. We do see Bond steal the villian's woman, win over a bad lady to goodness (and a suggested lesbian, at that), and has the exotic henchman who will not be matched for about 12 years. The story actually has some mystery, which is missing from many of the Bond films, and we also have maybe the best line of all the Bond movies.

The Ultimate Edition DVD looks great, giving us a great view of Ken Adam's awesome sets and includes a good commentary by director Guy Hamilton. There's a nice feature about the merch that came out after the movie

One plot point that annoys me: why does Goldfinger reveal his plan to the room full of hoods and then kill them? Sure, it's a way for Bond (in hiding) to learn the plan but the obviousness of it is the only flaw in the plot.

Chris Blackwell: The Missing Link

I like finding connections between different, seemingly unrelated parts of my life. Like when one of my favorite singers does an album with a basis in mathematics, something that's always been friendly to me.

In my consumption of the James Bond Ultimate Edition DVDs, I've enjoyed watching the supplementary material on Ian Fleming. It turns out that Fleming, the creator of my childhood hero, had a longtime mistress named Blanche Lindo. Blanche Lindo was the mother (not via Fleming) of one Chris Blackwell, who grew up to be a successful record producer and also scouted locations for the first Bond film, Dr. No. In the early 90s, he provided the financial backing to start a label called Axiom with a producer named Bill Laswell. The label's output, especially, Praxis' first album, was some of my favorite music of the early 90s and I'm still a huge fan of Laswell's work. Cool to see a connection between my obsessions of the 80s and the 90s.

And lately when I drive thru my town, I see a new optomotrist's office called Golden Eye.

The James Bond Ultimate Edition DVDs

In early February of 1982 I went to a friend's slumber/birthday party and we watched some movies. One of them was Moonraker, which had been recently released on video, and my mind was blown. The next week I had rented Goldfinger and For Your Eyes Only from the video store up the street and I was seriously hooked. The next year I saw Octopussy in the cinema and began my collection of books about the Bond movies, making it one of my first areas of expertise.

My VHS tapes of ABC's broadcasts of the 007 films have been watched over and over to the point I know these films in great detail. When they originally came out on DVD about 10 years ago, I got each movie and eventually upgraded to the 2-disk Ultimate Editions that came out in 2007. I'm finally getting around to watching these editions and will be posting my thoughts on all 20 of the films in the Ultimate Edition sets, so they won't be in chronological order.

Michael Moore's "Slacker Uprising"

Did you know that Michael Moore did a direct-to-download movie called Slacker Uprising? It's still available for free from the director and based on that price and what I've enjoyed from Moore in the past I got it a few years ago and recently got around to watching it. It took me back to those heady days of 2004 when those of us to the left thought we could make GW Bush a single-term president and it's easy to see how the "uprising" the title describes just continued to rise and eventually elect Obama in 2008.

However, events since then have served to make this film interesting self-indictment of Moore. Most of what we see of Moore in this film show him trying to raise voter participation rates among college students and the opposition he got from political opponents. Aside from that, we see a lot of his speeches at colleges where he talks about evil warmonger Bush and how we have to end these stupid wars and why we need to treat our troops right and bring them all home now. Hearing this talk in 2011, one has to wonder why Moore isn't speaking about warmonger Obama the same way as all these claims apply equally to him. A low point is reached when Moore brings Roseanne Barr on stage to make jokes about how Bush is running up the deficit. It's nice that Moore put these issues up front in his campaign but would have been nicer if he hadn't given up on them.

Goat report, 8/18/10

You want to get that movie made with the actor you want? Send your prospective star some goats!

Comments > Articles

It was great to see the Onion AV Club fully come to terms with what their articles do best: provide a place for comments that are more entertaining to read than the article, such as quote Robocop and other Peter Weller films.

I've read a lot of their TV reviews lately and while the columnists are very good writers, many of the comments are just as well done, albeit more brief. I learned a great deal from the comments to reviews of The Prisoner and Lost was also good, tho both shows are tough for a simple article-sized review given their many influences.

Lately the reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation spawn comment threads by people who, like me, watched the show as teens and have reflections on the show, the Trek franchise, and life in the late 80s. Outside of the TV reviews, it's nice to see an article about a bad movie's DVD commentary turn into a discussion of DVD commentaries that are better than their movies.

The sports site Deadspin has been aware of the power of good comments for some time and can sometimes be the funniest site on the web just based on the high level of hilarious commentary its readers provide. It reminds me a little of Jim Rome's radio show in that both are really comedy based, but it requires a great deal of specific background knowledge (being a sports fan) to get all of the jokes. If you like comedy, I'd suggest getting into sports more; it's just another set of data.

Goat report, 8/28/09

As previously forecast, George Clooney is staring at goats!

More eco-driving

An update about my progress with eco-driving. The last few days I've been really driving like a granny and never letting the RPMs get past 2000 and the results are great. I haven't gone under 35 mpg for my morning commute and almost finished above 41 mpg this morning. I may have upset a few of the cars behind me with my snail's pace; alas.

This information is probably a bit of a surprise to those reading this who've ridden in a car I drove. Upon getting my driver's license at 16 I was called upon for a good deal of driving by friends and they agreed that my first driving instructor was James Bond. I did tone my driving down over the years and usually just move the speed of traffic, which can be quite fast in CA or NJ.

The biggest change in my commute is that it takes much more time. But this isn't so bad; way back in the 90s when I transferred colleges, my commute time was cut in half. My morning ritual of hearing a whole side of a 90-minute tape was gone as it sometimes only took 20 minutes to get to school. So I will spend more time in my car now but that allows me a few more minutes of shuffling.

Required reading

...post-Oscars: Go Fug Yourself. Ah, Renee Zellwegger as a von Trapp son....

Jefito lives!

A couple of years ago I came across a music blog run by a fella calling himself Jefito. A few months back it fell off the map (probably due to all the bootlegs he'd begun to post there) and he'sfinally resurfaced with Popdose. He's brought a bunch of friends along (maybe hoping to spread out culpability) and while he's doing more streaming mp3s, rather than tempting me to fill up my hard drive w/ downloads, the same sharp eye is focused on pop culture. He's still running some of the same great features, like the Cassingle Vault (you know you want to hear Chynna Phillips' solo attempt) and Chart Attack (relive the hits of the 80s and 90s!) but I was surprised to see a decent article on torture porn.

Random trailers

Finally got some free time lately to go back to one of my favorite pastimes of yore: perusing movie trailers.

- Juno is most remarkable to me because it includes a song by The Moldy Peaches, an amusing outfit I saw in New York (opening for Cibo Matto) many years ago.

- King Corn looks like a movie Ms Goat would enjoy, given her avoidance of all things with high fructose corn syrup. It appears to have smart things to say about American farm policy.

- a while back I saw the trailers for Away From Her and The Savages and began to feel the pain of what appears to be the start of many years of baby boomers whining about being seniors.

Trailer: Southland Tales

I've fallen off my trailer watching in the past year. Where I used to be incredibly up to date w/ everything that was buzzing around the web, I just haven't had time to watch many trailers and have a lot piled up. I made the time to watch the trailer for Southland Tales, the upcoming movie from Richard Kelly.

I'm very interested in this movie now, and not just because I enjoyed Donnie Darko and this seems to be in the same vein. I love how the trailer doesn't give the average moviegoer an idea of the plot arc. Just what is going on in this movie? My best guess is something along the lines of the twist at the end of The Man in the High Castle, but that could be just me reading one of my favorite stories into the disjointed scenes in the trailer.

Great idea: American Foreign Legion

It may be so silly that Stephen Colbert suggests it, but I think there is much merit to the idea of an American Foreign Legion. People do want to come to America to earn money but many American citizens don't want them to 'take our jobs'. By fighting for this country they'd earn the respect of most conservatives and liberals by proving they believe in both the cause of freedom and the need to emigrate legally. Hey, even let their sacrifice pay for their immediate family! I'm pleased to find that many agree with this idea so it may just be a matter of time. The fact that one of the first Iraq War casualties was not a citizen doesn't hurt, either.

And try as I might, I can't make a smooth transition to a reference to the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Legionnaire.

Ronin movie?

Learned today at Ain't It Cool that Frank Miller's Ronin is on the way to becoming a movie. I just re-read this last month and couldn't help thinking that it would probably be in the pipeline soon. One of the things I like about the story is that it includes a character who doubts his identity, a plot-genre I recently realized I'm a big sucker for; Total Recall is a great example of this. Hopefully that won't be excised from the Ronin story, else it turns into just another sci-fi action flick.

B for Blue Eyed

I saw an amazing documentary recently about the incredible work of a lady named Jane Elliott. The video was called Blue Eyed and it's one of those rare ones that I think everyone should see. I don't mean this in the sense of 'you'll really enjoy this' but more like 'everybody should be forced to sit down and watch this'. It's about a race-relations workshop she's been doing for about 40 years and shows one of the workshops taking place. The video also explores Ms. Elliott's life and the problems she ran into when she first started doing this in the elementary school class she taught back in the 60s. Of course most of her neighbors didn't take to it very well but that didn't stop her, thankfully.

The workshop (which she'll do for you!) starts when she divides up her participants into two groups based on eye color and then gives one of the groups specific directions on how to treat the other group. For instance, she'll tell the brown eyed that blue eyed people aren't as smart and they won't do very well on the test she'll give everybody, right after she gives the brown eyed people the answers. The process recreates the experience of racism in society but now it's (generally) different people who get to be the oppressors and the oppressed. Afterwards there's a discussion period where people talk about how they felt being discriminated against, such as being told they weren't as smart as those with different colored eyes. And of course the African Americans in the workshop point out that those feelings are similar to what they feel every day.

When people usually talk about 'white guilt' it involves slavery, something I've never been able to muster up the guilt for as I've never owned slaves (still trying to train those rabbits, however). While that was certainly a horrible crime against humanity, the fact is that whites should feel guilt about their ongoing complicity in the current racial climate, where nonwhite ethnicities feel inferior due to numerous subtle cultural traditions.

The more I thought about the video the more I was reminded of V for Vendetta. A good friend had a problem with the movie based on the fact that V actually tortures Evey to help 'free her'. This is something I never considered in all the years I've been rereading V for Vendetta: is it ok to torture somebody in order to teach them something very important? I never considered V's actions wrong and seeing Blue Eyed reinforces the fact that there are some things you can only learn through experience. Just as V has to torture Evey to make her the type of person who can replace him and stand up to the government, people don't really understand racism until they experience it. While I still feel I've learned a lot thru viewing 'Blue Eyed', I hope to take part in the actual workshop someday.

Goat report, 2/2/07

God is a Goat, a look at the very intriguing and compelling Pan's Labyrinth.

Free music - Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?

It's the holiday season and this is a holiday song I like a lot but most people haven't heard. It's from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the only James Bond movie to take place during the Christmas season. Ms Goat doesn't care for it but I enjoy the chord changes so much that I can stand the corny children's chorus la-la-ing along in the background. Tell me, Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? (3.1 M mp3).

2/17 Update: File has been taken down. Maybe you can find it elsewhere.