BONDage: a 007 Thread in Anticipation of SKYFALL

The Living Daylights was better than anything Pierce Brosnan ever did.

It's just too bad it was followed up by one of the worst Bond films ever made (License to Kill).

Yes and yes. The Living Daylights was fantastic, and Dalton deserves credit as one of the better Bonds for this reason alone.

FTFY

Moonraker preceeded The Living Daylights by almost ten years.

Octopussy was the worst. 007 dressed as a clown during the films climax.

That was an essential spy disguise. Applying clown makeup is one of the first things they teach you in spy school.

In the spirit of the thread, who's your favourite Bond girl?
For me, it's Barbara Bach as Major Anya Amasova:

Solitaire was pretty hot...the only thing I have against her is that she became a medicine woman in the 90s.

Madeline Smith



And, hot damn!

MY 10 FAVORITE BOND GIRLS

Selected entirely for hotness (not importance to the plot) and in no particular order...

1. Honey Ryder/Ursula Andress/Dr. No
The prototypical Bond girl. How'd you like to be on the beach when she comes walking out of the surf?



2. Plenty O'Toole/Lana Wood/Diamonds are Forever
Natalie's little sister has a small but unforgettable role--she gets thrown out a high-rise window into a pool--in an otherwise forgettable Bond outing.



3. Solitaire/Jane Seymour/Live and Let Die
The only virgin in the group (and I guess Bond took care of that). The years roll by, I get older, but Jane Seymour stays gorgeous.



4. Mary Goodnight/Britt Ekland/The Man with the Golden Gun
She functions as a damsel in distress (and her efforts to help Bond nearly get him killed), but, damn, she fine.



5. Anya Amasova/Barbara Bach/The Spy Who Loved Me
Soviet agent XXX, a woman on an equal footing with Bond. Nice touch: she wants to kill Bond for killing her lover.



6. Jenny Flex/Alison Doody/A View to a Kill
A minor henchwoman in the film, she still leaves quite an impression...because she's gorgeous. Doody would go on to later fame as Ilsa in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.



7. Melina Havelock/Carole Bouquet/For Your Eyes Only
Not the most emotive of actresses, Bouquet is nonetheless highly memorable for those intense, mesmerizing eyes. She really is uncommonly beautiful.



8. Xenia Onatopp/Famke Jannsen/Goldeneye
Gorgeous and she crushes men between her thighs while squealing with orgasmic delight. Not such a bad way to go, really.



9. Miranda Frost/Rosamund Pike/Die Another Day
Perhaps my all-time favorite. She's not only an interesting character in a middle-of-the-road picture, she's also strikingly beautiful.



10. Elektra King/Sophie Marceau/The World is Not Enough
Beautiful and duplicitous. And beautiful. Even the world's most ruthless terrorist could be turned by her.

Indeed. Plus, long before Craig came along, his Bond was by far the closest on characterisation to the Fleming novels of all of the pre-Craig Bonds.

I've always had a soft spot for Aki fron You Only Live Twice myself.

:haunt:

I'm also in the process of rewatching the old Bonds with Connery and Moore on Blu-ray (great transfer of 50 year old movies btw). I have always liked 007. I know I have seen them all, multiple times. But it's not easy to keep track of the old ones. Seen from today it's a total blur which movie is about what; they all kind of look the same with very few highs and lows. It's like they had a standard script and just changed the names, locations, action vehicles and quips and got to shooting. That's different from the modern ones which do have a distinctive, more memorable story. IMHO of course... and very much looking forward to SKYFALL!

Sorry, I'm not familiar with these films.

You see, in my world there was a huge gap between 1987's The Living Daylights and 2006's Casino Royale.

Because, of course, no Hollywood producer would be stupid enough to cast a nancy-boy ponce in the role of the greatest superspy in the world.

You forgot to add: Irish and catalogue model.

Next Bond: Michael Fassbender.

If they have any sense (and he agrees to do it).

I see no reason to entertain the idea of a Craig successor.

^ He'll want to move on.

He should do as many movies as Connery or Moore, and then he can stake a claim as best Bond ever. He can't do that on a handful of projects.

Over the summer my wife and I tried rewatching all the Bond movies. Cinemax or one of the other movie channels was showing them all during the month of July, IIRC.

I didn't like them as much as I used to. They're okay, but I kept getting distracted by some of the poor filmmaking errors (jump cuts, prop errors, etc). Nothing that wasn't common to a lot of films of that time, but I somehow expected the Bond movies to be...better...in that regard.

The movies did get better as the series progressed, though.

So the series ends with Craig?

Why?

Idris Elba is who they've spoken to.

Fassbender's too ugly.

Bale.
/thread

The 'strength' of the old Bond movies is that you can dip in and out of them whenever they're on tv. Prior to satellite and digital expansion it used to be a rare event. I think most people's fondness for them is based on recalling highlights from each one - be it gadget, girl, theme or stunt.

Not at all. I meant that it's too early to think about the next Bond. The series should continue until I'm dead, then I won't care. For now, though, I like Craig's portrayal, and I'm not ready yet to see the next guy (or dare I say gal).

I'm that way with old "Doctor Who" (although I enjoy the stories in spite of the obvious errors).

Infamously low budget rubber monsters aside, before I started researching TARDISes it hadn't registered how much the prop changed over the run of the series. Even the change from the 1975 to 1980 prop, it was more like "did they change his scarf?" (They did, but they also did a different TARDIS that looked a LOT different than its predecessor.) Even things like, in "Pyramids of Mars", they have a miniature shot of the TARDIS in space and somehow I never noticed that the plaque on the telephone panel is white, not blue. Now I look at it and wonder how I missed that.

That's a neat story.

Once Benedict Cumdumpster is done with Star Trek and Sherlock, I'd like to see him as the next Bond or at least involved in the franchise in some way. Fassbender would be awesome too.

I actually like Octopussy a lot. That, Spy Who Loved Me and FYEO are the best of the Moore Bond films, IMHO. Just the right mix of danger, humor, weirdness, cheese and action.