Tag: 007

Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

People rag on Lee Tamahori’s 007 effort Die Another Day quite a bit, but.. I really dig it. Look, the James Bond films were always meant to have a silly flair and air of camp to them, dating back to the original 1960’s spy romps with Connery and stretching forth to the cheesy 90’s entries starring Pierce Brosnan, who for my money is the second best Bond, following Daniel Craig’s gritty metamorphosis. Brosnan’s stint as Bond is the most whacked out the franchise has ever gotten, and this one is arguably the craziest of the four, but it’s a way unfairly panned. It’s got gadgets, exotic settings, two sexy Bond babes, a hilariously over the top bad guy, and enough cartoonish action scenes to fuel two movies. What more do you want? Well, obviously people wanted a more grounded, realistic take or the Craig films would never have been green-lit, but that’s besides the point. Every incarnation of 007, from the silliest to the most down to earth, has the right to frolic in a franchise with enough wiggle room for over two dozen entries, so let them have their fun. Brosnan has some picturesque arctic adventures here, and I love when Bond gets to go play in the snow. There’s a North Korean radical (Rick Yune) with a meteor shower of real diamonds embedded in his face, so how’s that for a villain. Halle Berry smokes it up as one of the hottest Bond vixens to date, Jinx Johnson, the image of her emerging from the water in a bikini now burned into the minds and bedsheets of countless viewers who saw this before the dawn of internet porn and broke the rewind button on their remote. Rosamund Pike is the other, an ice queen named Miranda Frost, whose surname accents her initial attitude towards 007 nicely. Judi Dench and John Cleese return as M and Q, at the height of their dry and droll mannerisms. There’s a cool new character played by Michael Madsen too, some CIA bigwig called Damian Falco, who I imagine we would have seen a lot more of had the Brosnan universe continued, which sadly was not to be. Anywho, the reason I picked this one to review today is because it was the most ridiculed 007 film I could think of in the canon, an area that always fascinates me in any franchise. Sure, it’s a laugh in places and so far over the top it soars above the satellite used by the villain to threaten the planet below. But people should really take a step back and examine the art their bandwagon jeers are pointed at, and look for the positives. Visually, this is probably one of, if not the most good looking 007 film ever, thanks to the sweeping Icelandic locations captured by cinematographer David Tattersall. The sight of Brosnan wind surfing down the face of a glacier that’s being melted by a giant space laser beam from aforementioned satellite is inspired, and taken to a whole new level because the guy does all that *in his fucking tuxedo*. Re-read the previous sentence and try and tell me that’s not one of the coolest Bond scenarios you’ve ever pictured. It looks even better in film than it does on paper, too. Give this one another shot, because it’s not even close to being the weakest of the bunch, and I try and discourage such witch hunts in any franchise to begin with. The films are all there to enjoy, so why not leave the negativity fuelled nitpicking stowed in your suitcase and do just that. Die Another Day is a blast.

-Nate Hill

Hey . . . you wrote The Rocketeer: An Interview with Danny Bilson by Kent Hill

by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

I remember a rainy evening long ago when I went with some friends to see The Rocketeer. This was a time when superhero movies were touch and go. We had Dolph Lundgren’s Punisher and Alec Baldwin’s Shadow, Billy Zane’s Phantom and Pamela Anderson’s Barbed Wire. The movie gods had spoiled us with Donner’s Superman and Burton’s Batman – but The Rocketeer, for my money, was a return to form.

Featuring solid direction from Joe Johnston (Alive, Congo, Captain America), a great cast featuring Billy Campbell, Jennifer Connolly, Alan Arkin and the delightfully villainous Timothy Dalton, combined with a beautiful and heroically-sumptuous score from the late/great James Horner – The Rocketeer stayed with me after that rainy night back in the early 90’s, and it’s an experience I find myself going back to again and again.

The film though, was not an easy gig for it’s writers. They began their comic book adaptation of The Rocketeer in 1985. Writing for Disney, the partners were hired and fired several times during the five years of the movie’s development. The two had a rough executive experience, in which scenes were deleted only to be restored years later. The film finally made it to theaters in 1991.

But The Rocketeer isn’t the only picture co-penned by Danny Bilson that I love. There is Eliminators, which he wrote with his career-long collaborator Paul DeMeo (They he met and graduated from California State University, San Bernardino and together formed Pet Fly Productions.) One great tale Danny offered is that Eliminators was a poster before it was a movie. I would kill to have worked like that for the Charles Band stable back in the day. Being handed a title or a poster and being told, “Now go write the movie.”

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Eliminators, Zone Troopers, Arena and Trancers would be written by DeMeo and Bilson, who aside from being a writer, is also a director and producer of movies, television, video games, and comic books. They worked on the video game James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (2003), the television series The Sentinel (1996), Viper (1994, 1996) and The Flash (1990), and issues of the comic book The Flash. Bilson also directed and produced The Sentinel and The Flash.

Danny Bilson was born into the industry, the son of Mona (Weichman) and the director Bruce Bilson (Bewitched, Get Smart, Hogan’s Heroes). But, after college, Danny struggled to break into the movie business, working as an extra while writing screenplays. Bilson and DeMeo produced their first script, Trancers (1985), a noir tale about a time-travelling detective from the future. Five sequels would follow. Bilson debuted as a director for Zone Troopers (1985), co-written by DeMeo, a tale of American World War II soldiers who find an alien spacecraft. Following this, the duo performed the same roles in The Wrong Guys (1988) a comedic spoof of boy scouting.

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Danny and Paul, though the screen has seen their writing credit absent for some time, continue to work. I long for the hour when I see their names up there again, as their collaborative efforts will and always stand, for this cinephile anyway, as an invitation for adventure and excitement. While a Jedi is not meant to crave such things – of my cinema-going prerequisites they are high the list – bordering on essential.

Here he is folks . . . Danny Bilson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi0Et31E7s4

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CASINO ROYALE – A Review by Frank Mengarelli

by Frank Mengarelli, posted in Film Review

CASINO ROYALE created a new dawn in film. Not only was it a swift and needed step away from the loathsome DIE ANOTHER DAY, it also created a template on how to not only reboot a mainstay franchise, but do it with such gravitas and clarity that the franchise itself feels anew and reinvigorated.

Daniel Craig was more or less unknown to the masses. He had appeared in LAYER CAKE, Sam Mendes’ ROAD TO PERDITION, and a handful of small, independent European films. Craig quickly proved his naysayers wrong (including me, who was a staunch lobbyist for Clive Owen).

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Craig’s blonde hair and blue eyes may not have been akin to what James Bond is supposed to look like, but his swagger, attitude, and brutish demeanor brought absolute justice to the biggest standing franchise in film history.

While the film was updated to the current digital age, and reflecting our current pop culture obsession with the addition of Texas Hold’em, the film remained grounded in it’s original source material. Validating every word that Ian Flemming wrote in his 1953 novel.

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While now, the Texas Hold’em arc may seem silly considering the fad has long been removed from ESPN and the mainstream of American culture; essentially that’s what a Bond film is. It had always been a reflection of our present day culture.

Enter into the fold Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffery Wright, Eva Green, Giancarlo Giannini, and Jesper Christensen; the film stayed true to casting an exotic array of worldly cinematic actors, while retaining Judi Dench’s M, GoldenEye’s Martin Campbell and seminal Bond scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade – the film remained grounded within the cinematic world of James Bond whilst taking the franchise in a much needed and welcomed new direction.

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GoldenEye: A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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GoldenEye is the very finest hour that Pierce Brosnan had as James Bond, both as a film and in terms of what he gets to do as the character. It’s my third favourite Bond film of all time and stands as one of the most exciting ventures the series has seen to this day. It definitely falls into a campy style, but one that’s removed from that of the original Bond films from way back when, one that’s all its own and decidedly 90’s. It’s also got one of the strongest and classiest villains of the series, a man who is in fact an ex agent himself which was a neat switch up. Brosnan is so photogenic it’s ridiculous,  whether dolled up in the tux or careening through a valley in a fighter jet. He just looks so damn good as Bond, and I sometimes wish he’d gotten a fifth crack at the character. Here we join up with 007 on a mission gone wrong, where he is ambushed and his partner Agent Alec Trevelyan a.k.a. 006 (Sean Bean) is killed, or so he thinks. 006 is in fact alive and well, with a few gnarly facial scars and a new nasty attitude. He puts Bond through a wringer with a diabolical scheme to hijack a Russian nuclear space weapon and do all kinds of lovely things with it. Bond teams up with the survivor of a decimated Russian research centre, a beautiful scientist named Natalya  (Isabella Scorupco) who inevitably ends up in his bed. It’s slick, it’s stylish, it’s sexy and everything a Bond flick needs to be. 006 has a dangerous asset in Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), a lethal assassin whose weapon of choice are her thighs which she employs with the crushing power of two Amazonian pythons. Janssen plays the role with ferocious relish and the kind of enthusiasm that hadn’t been seen in a Bond villainess since Barbara Carrera in Never Say Never Again. Bean plays it ice cold, letting restraint and calculated malice steal the scenes as opposed to flagrant mustache twirling. I always thought he would have made a cracking good 007 as he has so much residual danger to his vibe from playing many heartless bastards in his career, but perhaps in another life. One of my favourite characters to ever hang out in a Bond flick shows up here, a cranky but lovable russian general named Valentin Zukofsky, played by the awesome Robbie Coltrane, an actor who really, really needs to be in more stuff. His few short scenes are the stuff that makes a piece timeless, and I wish we’d gotten to see more Valentin and more Hagrid elsewhere in the franchise. There’s the usual suspects like Judi Dench as M and Desmond Llewellyn as a crusty Q, and a host of other actors including Joe Don Baker, Tchecky Karyo, Minnie Driver and the irritating Alan Cumming who singlehandedly ruins scenes with his hammy preening. The film thunders along with furious energy and nicely paced action sequences, including a chaotic tank chase through the streets of Moscow and a stunner of a climax set atop a giant satellite dish. As Bond films go, you can never go wrong with this one.

SPECTRE – A Review by Frank Mengarelli

by Frank Mengarelli, posted in Film Review

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SPECTRE is the James Bond film that a lot of us have been waiting for: the Daniel Craig film that is his own. I have very much enjoyed the Craig series, but the films have been muddled in each of their own respects. CASINO ROYAL was the unnecessary franchise reboot, QUANTOM OF SOLACE was the adrenaline fueled action film, and SKYFALL was the epic blanket film that absolutely everyone could love. SPECTRE did a brilliant job of building off all the archetypal elements of the previous three Craig films, and made this film as seminal as YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE or ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that this will be a divisive film, especially coming off of SKYFALL. This is a film that a lot of the more recent Daniel Craig Bond fans won’t fully understand. But for those of us who have been waiting for this film, this film excels with everything. The gun barrel sequence opens the film, the cheeky humor, Dave Bautista as the classicly eccentric henchmen, the macho alpha respect Bond has with M, the flirty tension with Miss Moneypenny, Q and his gadget room, a fantastic opening credit sequence, an excellent title sequence, and above all: a be-all-end-all Bond villain.

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The ambiguous timeline of the Bond films as a whole is an interesting beast. The plot points and ending of SKYFALL certainly meshes with the Connery films. Why Bond respects M, why Bond has a flirty affinity for Miss Moneypenny, and now in SPECTRE, we’re given the wonderful homage to the main villain’s secret volcanic base, the inevitable scar over his eye, and why the villain hates Bond so very much.

Director Sam Mendes and screenwriter John Logan walked a fine line with with SPECTRE. They delicately and retroactively connected the previous three Bond films into the heart of SPECTRE, yet they kept true to Bond form by making a contemporary film about global chaos and digital espionage. SPECTRE has made the previous Bond films better, by connecting them in the way the Connery Bond films (including Lazenby’s singular film) were all connected by one thing: a shadow conspiracy.

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There is no doubt, regardless of all the tabloid games that have been played recently, that Daniel Craig will return for at least one more film. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam Mendes returned for the next film as well. Sam Mendes, John Logan and Daniel Craig knew exactly what they were doing and have struck gold with SPECTRE.

Full disclosure: I have owned every Bond film, sans NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, from VHS to Blu Ray, and I will quadruple dip on the 4K Blu Rays next year.

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