The Screengrab : herve villechaize

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oh, James Bond, why do we love you so? Batmen and teenage wizards and swashbuckling archaeologists may come and go, but film after film, decade after decade, 007 never dies.

Maybe it’s because the character has no real end or beginning: despite the so-called origin story “reboot” of Daniel Craig’s 2006 Casino Royale, Bond is timeless. Though technically the agent was born sometime between 1918 and 1924 (to Andrew and Monique Delacroix Bond...thank you, Wikipedia!) and went on his first official mission circa 1954 (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang creator Ian Fleming’s literary Royale), Bond movies are always happening right now, reflecting the tastes and mores of their time, from the swingin’ sexist hedonism of the 1960s to the gritty post-Bourne “realism” of the Craig administration.

Bond, after all, is more of a concept than a character, a periodic excuse for hacks and auteurs, Oscar winners and supermodels, giants and dwarves, skiers, skaters, scuba divers, Wayne Newton, Madonna and everyone in between to make big, stylish, international action flicks, swill cocktails and blow stuff up real good, like the Olympics and the Cannes Film Festival crossed with a monster truck rally and New Year's Eve at the Playboy mansion...and who the hell can say no to that?

And so, in honor of the upcoming Quantum of Solace, the supervillains of the top-secret organization SCREENGRAB gathered in their hidden mountaintop fortress to compile a plan for world domination and, while they were at it, the following list of THE BEST & WORST JAMES BOND FILMS OF ALL TIME!!!!!

THE WORST:

10. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

Okay, so I’m in the minority on this one (since Daniel Craig’s superspy debut also appears on our “Best” list)...and it’s not just that I think blonde and Bond don’t mix (because really...who cares?). But, c’mon...after an admittedly righteous parkour chase through Madagascar, the movie spends A LOT of time stuck in the titular casino. Gambling scenes in Bond movies usually last about five minutes, because we all know who’s gonna win...only THIS time, the poker tournament goes on and on and on...and unlike, say, the battle of wits in the similarly high stakes card game in The Sting, Bond here finally wins his tournament by flashing a straight flush. A straight flush! Dude, anybody can win with a straight flush! Winning with a pair of twos...now THAT would have been superspy impressive! So anyhow, with the snoozy foregone conclusion of the trendy Hold ‘Em showdown out of the way, director Martin Campbell lightens the mood with a scene of Craig getting repeatedly smacked in the nuts (possibly to make Pierce Brosnan feel less bad about getting booted from the franchise), and then, the big finale is...a fantastically exciting hovercraft chase? ...a massive secret agent melee aboard a flaming death zeppelin? Nope...the big finale is Bond watching his girlfriend drown. Whee!!! Sorry guys...action, drama and Craig’s scowly killjoy puss may have worked in Munich, but in the 007-verse? Not so much.

9. TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) & THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Pierce Brosnan made four films as Bond. The first, Goldeneye (1995), came out six years after the previous one, and was gratefully accepted by those who had given the series up for dead but couldn't bear the thought of living without it; Brosnan's swan song, the 2003 Die Another Day, is probably the liveliest of his short reign. Tomorrow and World came between them and are what passes for the meat in a thin sandwich. Both were directed by talented but slumming directors (Roger Spottiswoode and Michael Apted, respectively), and both are laden down with sad excuses for romantic foils (Teri Hatcher and Denise Richards) and disappointing villains (Jonathan Pryce as a power-mad media mogul and Robert Carlyle as a notorious terrorist who turns out to be merely the cat's-paw to the true villain, played by Sophie Marceau). Both movies belong -- to the degree that anyone would want them -- to Brosnan's female co-stars, Marceau and Michelle Yeoh. Brought in to supply a teensy taste of the action acrobatics of Hong Kong movies, Yeoh gets to kick up a little dust and show Brosnan up in a few scenes, though it's disappointing that she ends up being turned into a damsel in distress, calling to James for help. The spectacular Marceau is luckier; she starts out wittily pretending to be an imperiled little thing and then gets to blossom in a scene that reveals her to be a sick chick who could throw a scare into Rosa Kleb.

8. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

With his suave, urbane presence, Pierce Brosnan was ideally suited to the role of James Bond, so much so that he was originally offered the role after Moore retired, only to turn it down due to his commitment to Remington Steele. It was Brosnan’s bad luck that by the time he assumed the role, the creative well was beginning to run dry. Never was this more apparent than in his fourth and final 007 vehicle, Die Another Day. Brosnan was just fine, but the movie around him -- yeesh. To begin with, much was made of the presence of recent Oscar-winner Halle Berry as the “good” Bond girl Jinx, but her performance was so bad (witty banter just doesn’t work when it’s over-enunciated, Rudy Ray Moore-style) that the studio-generated hype about a spinoff movie quickly became laughable. And who could forget those villains, eh? You know -- the, uh, English guy who was actually a Korean who got plastic surgery, and the dude with the diamonds in his face. Not exactly Oddjob or Rosa Klebb, that’s for sure. Then there’s the villain’s ice lair (which one reviewer called “Ronald McDonald’s Fortress of Solitude”), and a chase scene involving an invisible car, an idea that’s too silly even in the context of a James Bond movie. The final nails in the coffin are the double contribution of Madonna, who not only contributed the travesty of a title song -- perhaps the series’ worst to date -- but also appeared in a cameo as a British (this was her British phase, remember) fencing instructor, in which she proceeded to suck all the energy out of the room simply by showing up. But don’t cry for Brosnan -- all the money he made from playing 007 has allowed him to appear in films in which his looks and charisma have been put to much more interesting use. Put it another way -- if sitting through Die Another Day was the price we had to pay to get The Matador, it was worth it.

7. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)

The title character -- Scaramanga, the master assassin with the island hideaway, the pet dwarf manservant (Herve Villechaize), and the superfluous nipple -- is played by Christopher Lee, who clearly enjoyed one of his first prominent roles where he didn't have to bite his co-stars on the neck. Lee is the only thing this one has going for it, though; it's a dull son of a bitch. This was Moore's second time out as 007, and he seems to have responded to the discovery that he hadn't been fired after his work in the first one by switching to autopilot. The Bond girls here are Britt Ekland, a once-promising starlet on her way to a career as tabloid and tell-all memoir fodder based on her relationships with Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart, and Maud Adams, who would return to the franchise nine years later to play the title role in Octopussy. (If you'd given the performance that she gives here, you'd want a do-over, too.) And, oh, joy, Clifton James is back as Sheriff J. W. Pepper, an act of hubris on the moviemakers' part that rivals George Lucas' refusal to flush Jar Jar Binks. Even John Barry fell down on the job; he would later say that the score here was "the one I hate the most," though at least the producers declined the title song offered to them by Alice Cooper, thus giving Alice one more thing he has in common with Johnny Cash. For topicality, there's an energy crisis theme, and no movie better illustrates a dwindling of reserves of energy than this one.

6. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

As soon as A View to a Kill hit the street, it was clear that something had to give. So the producers eighty-sixed Roger Moore and attempted a newer, more serious approach to the character. The man chosen to embody that new approach, Timothy Dalton, has been trying to live down the results ever since, but Dalton is a good actor with a handsome shell and a dashing presence, and it's not the worst thing you can say about someone in his position here that he let his contempt for the material show. (After twelve years of Roger Moore, it was kind of reassuring to see someone who had it in him to feel contempt for any material at all.) The producers also scaled back on the harem girls, the feeling being that the age of AIDS demanded a Bond who was at least serially monogamous. The problem is that the villains -- the hedonistic Jeroen Krabbe and the rampaging Joe Don Baker -- now seemed to be the only people having any fun. Then movie may perhaps be most notable for a sequence that plays very strangely today, the one in which Bond, in Afghanistan, lends a helping hand to the heroic, scrappy forces of the Mujahideen.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Seizure" (1974)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: This scare picture is set at the country home of a horror novelist, played by Jonathan Frid, the Barnabas Collins of TV's Dark Shadows. The novelist is having a bunch of friends he despises come over for the weekend so they can all get drunk and recoil from each other in disgust, but this fun time is spoiled by the appearance of three malevolent figures who appear to have sprung from the darkest resources of his own fevered brain: Herve Villechaize as a bossy dwarf named Spider, British screen queen Martine Beswick in silky dominatrix gear (playing a character billed as "Queen of Evil"), and a giant hooded bodybuilder who brought along his enormous ax in case the generator breaks down and some firewood needs a-cuttin'. These worthies proceed to organize the weekend activities, which turn into a series of truth games and tests that result in the steady thinning out of the cast (which includes Mary Woronov, Richard Cox, Christina Pickles, and Troy Donahue). At the end, Frid makes the welcome disovery that this has all been a dream. Then the remaining members of the audience, which has also thinned out somewhat since the opening credits, finds out that, oh, no it wasn't.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: Seizure was the first feature directed by the then-twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Stone, from an original screenplay credited to Stone and Edward Mann, the writer-director of Hallucination Generation, Hot Pants Holiday, and Who Says I Can't Ride a Raindbow!, the only film I know of whose cast includes both Morgan Freeman and Skitch Henderson. Even allowing for its director's youth and inexperience, Seizure reeks of technical incompetence and is very hard to remain focused on. More turgid than scary, it isolates you in a poorly shot dark of night someplace and leaves you stranded there with a bunch of people who are pretty unpleasant in some pretty uninteresting ways. Then it leans on you to feel bad when they're picked off, if only because it serves as a memento mori. It has a gruesome, amateurish sort of integrity: a more cynical hack who cared more about entertainment value than his vision would have gotten a sense of how the characters were coming across and tilted things so that at least the audience could get a chuckle out of seeing the snarling bastards bite the dust.

WHY IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: A lot of major directors have a Seizure, or a Dementia 13 or a Boxcar Bertha, near the beginning of their resumes. Working on a piece of shlock is probably a good way for an untested new talent to learn the basic moves he'll need to master to make the movies he really cares about. What's embarrassing about Seizure is that it gives you the feeling that Stone really cared about it, or at least that he thought he could use it impress people not just with his (then non-existent, from the look of it) abilities as a filmmaker but with his creativity and the quality of his mind. The movie is not fun in a way that screams out "misguided artistic aspirations." The sub-Twilight Zone "Is it all a dream?" stuff seems meant to pass for the kind of illusion vs. reality gamesmanship then all the rage in bad student films, and the character dynamics suggest the work of someone who'd seen a bunch of Antonioni flicks in college and had concluded that what was supposed to be so great about them was that they were full of rich bores treating each other badly. In any case, Seizure was too little seen to do Stone's career much damage, but then it may not have been produced with the intention that it would ever be seen at all. Rumors persist that the production was actually funded by organized crime figures as part of a money laundering operation, something that neither Tony Montana nor Gordon Gekko ever stooped to.

Part of a becoming an artist is learning what you're not good at, which is why the existence of Seizure became a thousand times more embarrassing seven years later, when Stone, now a Hollywood player after winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978), attempted for the second time to launch himself as a writer-director, and once again chose to do so in the ill-fitting garb of a Master of Horror. The Hand (1981), Stone's first big studio job as a director, stars Michael Caine as a cartoonist who loses his drawing hand in a grisly car accident, with his nagging soon-to-be-ex-wife (Andrea Marcovicci) at the wheel. His marriage disintegrating, his career over, Caine takes a teaching gig and settles into his bachelor life at a house in the woods, where he is plagued by dreams of his diembodied hand committing a string of murders--murders that actually take place, though the film teases you about whether this is actually the work of a monster hand possessed by the revenging fury of its former owner, or if Caine has simply gone batshit. Once again, Stone seems to be taken with the horror genre mainly because of the excuse it gives him to fuck around with what's "real" and what's "unreal", this time in the form of a psychological thriller that may be taking place partly inside the head of a madman.

Maladroit though it is, The Hand much more clearly anticipates the movies that Stone would go on to make when--third time's a charm!--he reinvented himself yet again as a political filmmaker with 1986's Salvador and Platoon. You can see Stone in its overwrought hysteria and also its ugly misogyny, which Stone tries to pass off as the governing personality trait of the hateful, one-pawed protagonist, who starts out as an unpleasant bloke and steadily becomes so repellant that not even Caine can get us to identify with him or feel for him much. (There's also a nod to Stone's mystical macho side and his next project--the screenplay for John Milius's Conan thr Barbarian (1982)--in the glimpses we see of the cartoonist's work, which is a sinewy swords-and-sorcery adventure strip about a muscular fellow called Mandro. In the original novel that Stone adapted for the screenplay--Marc Brendel's The Lizard's Tail, a much better and more subtle piece of work than the movie--the cartoonist was a Jules Feiffer-style satirist.) And even though he got to work with a professional crew this time and turned out a much more polished piece of goods than Seizure, Stone found out the hard way that the technology for showing disembodied hands strangling pop-eyed actors was still very much as the MST3K stage. (One of those strangled is none other than Oliver Stone himself, making a cameo appearance as a drunken bum who falls prey to the monster, and in the process paying homage to Larry Hagman, who made a similar cameo in the 1972 film he directed, Son of Blob.) Tha Hand, which actually earned a few kind reviews, did just well enough at the box office to send Stone back to writing screenplays until it was time for him to find himself yet again, this time as a righteous auteur with a camera in one hand and a copy of Mother Jones in the other. That was the incarnation that stuck, but in the many years since, he hasn't attempted another horror movie, unless W. counts.