Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

13. OCTOPUSSY (1983)

Okay, to be honest, I’m the only one at Screengrab who voted for Octopussy as one of the best James Bond films of all time. But even though it’s been a long time since I saw it, I’m pretty sure I can safely stand by my vote. First of all...it’s frickin’ called OCTOPUSSY! Newspapers and TV stations across the United States (in the Age of Reagan, no less!) had to advertise what sounds like the dirtiest, freakiest porn flick of all time...how great is that? And to think many of those same newspapers and TV stations balked at revealing the full title of Zack and Miri...I only regret the MoviePhone Guy wasn’t around back then to say, “You’ve selected...Octopussy!” My friends and I would have called twenty times a day! Uh...but I digress. So anyway, aside from that bitchen title, the film also featured a pretty cool, well-paced story featuring an elephant chase, knife-throwing circus performers, a sweet fight on the wings of an airborne jet and a weird lady cult of acrobatic assassins. True, Roger Moore was really showing his age (and would retire after his next Bond adventure, the dreadful View To A Kill), and sure, the movie is goofy as hell...but, for me at least, goofy more often than not equals fine entertainment value.

12. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)

The apotheosis of Roger Moore; as you might expect, the secret was to build a hell of a show around the smirking old thing and give him something to react to. After the comparatively low-tech Man with the Golden Gun and the ugly-looking Live and Let Die, the producers decided to kick out the jams a little, and Ken Adam, the legendary production designer who'd worked on most of the Bond films of the 1960s and '70s, was encouraged to just go nuts. In addition to the sets, the movie boasts perhaps the most succulent and wittiest of the Bond babes -- Barbara Bach, a.k.a. Mrs. Ringo -- as well as a villain for the ages in Richard Kiel's hard-to-finish-off Jaws, and even a theme song (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and performed by Carly Simon) that you can still hear on the radio without throwing up in your mouth hardly at all.

11. LICENSE TO KILL (1989)

Timothy Dalton never got much love as James Bond, and with good reason: his interpretation of 007 was humorless and constipated, and one of his two at-bats in the role was 1987’s snoozer The Living Daylights, one of the dullest Bond films in the entire series. And while License to Kill played more like a feature-length Miami Vice episode than a spy caper, it was nevertheless a pretty good action movie. The villain (Robert Davi’s evil drug lord Sanchez -- based, at least according to Wikipedia, on real-life supervillain Pablo Escobar) gets his goons to feed ageless, indestructible CIA agent Felix Leiter to a shark (after raping and killing the poor bastard’s wife on their wedding night...a plot twist WAY too dark for any Bond film to carry), after which Dalton’s character goes rogue, resigning from M16 to get himself some payback. Once it gets past the gruesome downer of a set-up, however, the film introduces Carey Lowell as drug courier and CIA informant Pam Bouvier, one of the smartest, most charismatic “Bond girls” of all time, then continues to improves with a compelling cat-and-mouse battle of wits between Sanchez and Bond, featuring a peculiar Wayne Newton cameo (as a shady televangelist!) and climaxing with the best tanker truck chase this side of The Road Warrior.

10. LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

Granted, this is something of a nostalgic choice. As I mentioned in the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs list a couple of weeks ago, Live and Let Die was the first Bond movie I ever saw, and it took many years for me to get over the idea that Roger Moore was the 007. I'm aware that almost anything positive I say about the movie can also be held against it. For example, I could give it credit for having the most racially diverse cast in the series, but then I'd have to admit that some of the characters do not represent the most, er, enlightened portrayal of African-Americans on film. My theory is this: after the failure of George Lazenby, the producers weren't taking any chances in launching their new Bond, so they raided American cinema for all the trendiest action movie trimmings. The story pits Bond against a voodoo-dabbling heroin magnate and his Harlem drug ring, a convenient excuse to plunder the then-hot blaxploitation pictures for wild afros, gaudy cars and the latest in jive talk. When the action shifts to the American South, the movie just as shamelessly embraces the gators, speedboats and cottonmouth drawls of hixploitation. It almost turns into Smokey and the Bandit for awhile, with the arrival of peckerwood Sheriff Pepper. I can understand how the purists would object to all this, but I've always gotten a kick out of the voodoo vibe, Yaphet Kotto as the exploding villain Kananga, luscious Jane Seymour as the fortune teller Solitaire and Roger Moore running across a bunch of crocodiles.

9. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

For all its continued bankability, the Bond series was in a creative rut after four decades. Given the self-parody of the late Moore adventures, the lean Dalton years, and the diminishing returns of the Brosnan movies, how could the producers of the Bond films rejuvenate their cash cow? Why, with a reboot, of course! And what better way to do so than to double back and adapt Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel in the process? A new take on the series would require a new leading man, and Daniel Craig was just the man for the job -- younger, leaner, and meaner, here was a guy with bigger things to worry about than how his martinis were made. Casino Royale makes it clear from the outset that this is a whole new ballgame, when we first see Craig’s Bond undertaking the missions that earned him his license to kill -- filmed in stark black and white, no less. And through Craig’s steely blue eyes, we experience a fresh take on the usual Bond story -- no nifty gadgets, no villains bent on world domination, and no convoluted methods of torture (in a decidedly lo-fi touch, the captured Bond gets whacked in the tenders with a knotted rope). Of course, the action scenes are still pretty kickass, especially an early parkour-style foot chase. But what really makes Casino Royale special is Craig’s relationship with Vesper Lynd, played by the luscious Eva Green. Vesper is Bond’s equal in many ways, and the closest the character has come to finding his match since Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And this makes her eventual betrayal all the more effective -- not simply because of how much it messes our hero up, but also the lengths to which he must go to steel himself against the pain in the future. Essentially, Casino Royale finds James Bond becoming the 007 we all know, and when he finally states his name at the end of the film, we have no trouble believing him.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Forgotten Films: "Caveman" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The new release 10,000 B.C. revives a genre that some of us thought was long past reviving, the dawn-of-man cave people melodrama. The new movie's director, Roland Emmerich, is a technophile size freak who probably thinks that the latest developments in computer animation and other special effects make it a great time to visualize a chaotic, untamed planet overrun with strange forms of wildlife threatening actors who are modeling proposed hair styles for Rob Zombie — though my recollection is that, in the past, the whole point of these movies was to showcase a rising performer (such as Victor Mature, star of the 1940 One Million B.C., or Raquel Welch, star of its 1966 remake) who seems made to be photographed wearing a loincloth. Anyway, this genre received its knockout blow more than twenty-five years ago, in Caveman, filmed in Mexico by the director Carl Gottlieb, who also co-wrote the script with Rudy DeLuca. Gottlieb is a well-travelled show business jack-of-all-trades whose career includes a stint with the '60s improv-comedy troupe the Committee, various acting gigs, and partial authorship of the script of Jaws (as well as full authorship of its making-of book). Gottlieb made his film directing debut with the 1977 Steve Martin short The Absent-Minded Waiter, but Caveman was his first time behind the camera on a feature film. It remains his only feature, maybe because he's yet to find a project that might count as a worthy follow-up to directing a cast, all speaking "prehistoric" gibberish, that included Ringo Starr, John Matuszak, and a stoned Tyrannosaurus rex.

Ringo plays Atouk, the sad-sack misfit of a tribe of cave folk led by — or, rather, bullied and pushed around by — Tonda, played by the towering, fiercely bearded Matuszak. Atouk graduates from loser to outcast when he enrages Tonda by lusting after the big guy's lady, Barbara Bach. (This was the movie where Ringo and Bach met. They were married before it was released to theaters, and in a month they'll be celebrating their twenty-seventh anniversary. Tip your hats, people.) The resourceful Ringo takes advantage of his new freedom to assemble his own rival tribe, which includes Dennis Quaid, Carl Lumbly, the great Jack Gilford and, as Gilford's daughter and Ringo's eventual love interest, a very charming, pre-Cheers Shelley Long. He also discovers fire, music, advanced weaponry, and the pleasures of standing upright. (He proceeds to convert his friends, grabbing them from behind as if administering the Heimlich maneuver and yanking their spines straight to the accompaniment of a terrific cracking noise.) The whole thing has a playful, friendly quality, and the good guys are pretty close to irresistable. The bad guys are no slouches themselves; the late Matuszak gets to demonstrate an all-out slapstick aplomb that Hollywood seldom bothered to tap during his acting career, and Bach, strutting about in her fur bikini, was accurately described by one reviewer, Michael Sragow, as looking like a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life. Mixed in among the people are a quartet of stop-motion dinosaurs, including the aforementioned T-rex, who are very ready for their close-ups. Will 10,000 B.C. reveal that its makers have learned anything from Ringo and company? It remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that if Roland Emmerich understood anything about the appeal of stop-motion dinosaurs, he never would have made Godzilla.

The Screengrab : barbara bach

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Three)

Forgotten Films: "Caveman" (1981)