My headcanon is that Felix is a Time Lord who keeps regenerating between films. Being a CIA agent is dangerous work!
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MrColdStream doesn’t go for the tired, “it’s a codename” schtick
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Calvin’s going insane, and I love it.
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Yeah the sped up fight scene they were going for a directorial choice to make it all seem faster and more exciting, but it is not an effect that holds up. Not enough for me to really hold it against the movie too much, but it is a bit silly.
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I plan to reflect on it with some letterboxed reading and see what people think! I’m not against my opinion growing in hindsight, though it’ll be tough to avoid the animal stuff. We’ll see, but ending with that and the sped up fight scene was probably an unfortunate double whammy when my pendulum was already swinging back and forth.
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Live and Let Die. Roger is good in his debut. And I think it’s a pretty good Bond film about until J.W. Pepper shows up. Then it gets a little dumb with the whole inflating Kananga, watch with magnets defying the laws of physics (more a complaint throughout), suddenly it’s also a saw which I don’t think was established when M explained it at the beginning unless I forgot or missed it. Not sure I can speak about its depiction of Voodoo culture, I hardly know anything about it. But it does seem like every black character save Toberman’s actor’s character is a bad guy or working with the bad guys. But it’s ok overall plus the best Bond theme, and Solitaire 
.
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And don’t forget the absolute banger of an opening theme from Paul McCartney.
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Indeed
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The Man With the Golden Gun also last night. I think this one is actually pretty good, though it isn’t one of the more popular Bonds. Lee is great as Scaramanga, really a highlight, and I like his lair. And I like the idea that he likes to sort of hunt down other assassins for the challenge. We really didn’t need J.W. to come back, but thankfully he’s not there for too much of it, I guarantee it wasn’t his idea to visit Thailand. The solar power stuff is a little silly, and obviously not how it works, and when they mention “absolute zero must be maintained” it just gets laughable, but I get it, it was the 70s energy crisis. Something to make it a little more topical, or at least relevant to its current times. The biggest mark against this is Mary Goodnight, a strong contender for the worst Bond girl. Unbelievable level of incompetence from her, they’d have even won much earlier if she didn’t for some stupid reason go to Scaramanga’s car and get captured. And then nearly Goldfingers Bond with the sun laser thing. But yeah, I think it’s one of my favorite Roger Moore Bonds, just all around a fun movie, a little silly but not too much like the later ones would become.
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Funny that both of the main Bond ladies in this film are played by Swedes.
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Yeah, I noticed that too. It’s like they got Maud Adams for Andrea Anders and while they were there, said “got anyone else?”
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The Roger Moore era was the golden age for Swedish Bond girls!
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Indeed it was.
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I eyed the comment, but I’m not sure what I’d call the Golden age myself. Connery is easily the best Bond, but does he consistently have the best movies? He’s still got Diamonds and I’m not a huge From Russia fan, so that accounts for a third of his, even if I like the other four quite a bit. Lazenby isn’t my favorite Bond, but his one movie is one of the best, and one movie is hardly an age. Moore I find gets a bit too silly into the 80s but starts off strong. Dalton, Living Daylights is fine but I’m not a big fan of LTK as a Bond movie, more a good action revenge movie. Brosnan I really like his Bond but he’s 1 for 4 on the movies being good. I like 4 out of 5 Craigs (Quantum the fifth and SPECTRE I like less than the others), but they’re really their own kind of thing and not all that typical of Bond in many ways so I can’t exactly call them a golden age.
Maybe my final answer is from about Goldfinger to Golden Gun (let me rewatch Spy before I say if it’s in there too).
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Yes. Yes it is.
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It’s all personal preference isn’t it. 
Roger was my childhood Bond, and as such nostalgia forms a large part of defining it as a personal golden age. But beyond that, I just find his films to be the most entertaining. He was the perfect Bond for this stage of the franchise. The films were not only competing with changing cinematic tastes, they were also competing with their own legacy. So they got, bigger, bolder, more outlandish, and Moore was the perfect calm in the middle of the colourful pyrotechnics and set pieces. The tone may have been camp at times, but he never was…really…just ignore the clown make up. He’s restrained British cool with a raised eyebrow and a one liner.
Tonally, his films are actually quite varied, for instance Eyes Only is light years apart in style and content from the film that immediately preceded it. Yet Roger functions perfectly in both. He doesn’t feel out of place in either a space shuttle or coldly kicking an assassin of a cliff…even if Roger didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the latter.
His era is the perfect pic 'n mix for me. Different shapes and sizes but all a tasty treat.
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Understandable take. And yeah, that’s a good point about Moore being entertaining in all of his films, because he is. Always cool and excellent in all of his, no matter my thoughts on the rest of some of them. I guess my childhood Bond is Brosnan, since even though I’d seen all of them from No to Another Day by the time I was done second grade, it was always GoldenEye that I’d want to rewatch. Didn’t start seeing them as they came out until Casino Royale (I was 10), and Craig being the only one I’ve seen in theaters could be part of why he’s pretty high up my favorites too, being the current Bond for most of my life at this point. To be clear, I don’t think any of the 25 are bad movies, though Die Another Day is close, just some I like more than others.
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Finished Live and Let Die (1954). I think I like this one better than the film. I like the darker tone, there’s no silly stuff like inflating the bad guy, and even better, no J.W. Pepper. Mr. Big is a lot scarier. Leiter getting all kinds of ■■■■■■ up was not on the list of things I expected. I could tell which bits the movie kept and which they changed, and they really are quite different. The final plan to kill Bond and Solitaire (keel hauling them through coral and such to cut them up and then drag them bloody through shark and barracuda infested waters) was a lot more gruesome in the book, making Big truly vile. And they were really close to not making it, guy needs more precise fuses for his bombs. Pacing-wise, I think this one moved along more than Casino did.
I do have some of the same observations about the portrayal of black characters that I did for the movie, and the book does have the hard R make a couple appearances in one chapter and with the O was the default term used throughout (I think that was just standard in the 50s, of course not the term we’d use now, just took some getting used to as I’d already alluded to). Also there was a lot of phonetic spelling of dialogue to make them “sound black” which was frankly just tough to decipher in places.
Next up is Moonraker
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Seems like we’ll have our new Bond by the end of the year. Exciting!
“I would say the end of the year is a good bet. We are being really, really methodical. Having worked with Barbara Broccoli at the studio, I mean, Daniel Craig is a hard act to follow. And it’s got to be something really different that is a stirring and exciting and different.”
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