Die Another Day

When Die Another Day came out I thought it kind of sucked, but then I watched it again just recently and thought it was OK to pretty good, so maybe our standards were just way higher back in the early 2000s, which is an incredibly depressing thought because that was the era of Dude, Where's My Car. No matter. The 20th James Bond flick in the Eon Productions series was a hit but its reputation, like that of the Moore films, has become exaggerated over time so that you'd think it was pure Adam West Batman camp, when really it's just thinly sliced post-Matrix cheese.

Coldsteel here literally swishes his trenchcoat in slow motion in this scene and it's the funniest thing.

In fact the comparison with the Moore era is apt because films like Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, and Moonraker were all largely inspired by other trends that were popular at the time (blaxploitation, kung fu movies and Star Wars respectively) and so too Die Another Day attempts to adapt just a hint of the style that made the Matrix films a hit, most notably in the bald, trenchcoated henchman Zao, the glowing "sleep mask" thing, the VR training sim, the baddy's scifi robocop suit and the amazingly awful techno-whatever theme song by Madonna.

Coolly, the naked dancers aren't entirely silhouetted in this sequence.

This is one of three major missteps in the film. The second, and most infamous, is the invisible car. To be wantonly fair, the Bond films have always had an eye toward near-future technology. Goldfinger's industrial laser didn't actually exist at the time the film was made, but they were fairly confident such things would be produced soon. Nonetheless the invisible car seemed too farfetched for audiences at the time, and rightly so, and it's a shame because it adds so little to the film it would have been better not to include it, especially since the car is visible for most of the chase scene because nobody wants to watch the baddies chase literally nothing around for twenty minutes, except me because that would have been hilarious.

le funny walk man shows off the invisible car. way out indeed.

The final misstep is the overreliance on forced nostalgia gags that make this one feel like a clip show. There's another diamond-based orbital superweapon, more bright red lasers and another use of the ejector seat (creative and fun though), and callbacks to gags from From Russia With Love, Thunderball and others. I think the writers thought this would seem witty and endearing, but it didn't.

REMAMBER JETPACC?

Nonetheless there are still charms to be found in Die Another Day, such as Bond going briefly awol and the catfight between Halle Berry's Jinx and Gone Girl, which reminds me of the catfight between Diane Lane and the Azn chick from Twin Peaks in the underrated 90s Judge Dredd, in which Josie calls Diane a "bitch" and she replies "Judge Bitch" and headbutts her in the face, which is my favourite thing of all time.

wh*te g*rls btfo, dogs can rest easy again

It sucks that this is how things had to end, but in a way they never really did, because apart from minor details most of these films can be viewed in any order and have no real continuity beyond occasional callbacks. If Bond were one person throughout the Eon series he would have been like 70 by now so this was never even really a series in the continuous sense since, like, You Only Live Twice. In a way that is the charm of Bond. He just saves the world from some goofy baddy every week. No fuss. No gay "universe" shit. If you don't like this one, well, there are twenty more. Now everything sucks.

Final ranking

1. Goldfinger =
2. You Only Live Twice =
3. The Spy Who Loved Me
4. Tomorrow Never Dies
5. The Living Daylights
6. Live and Let Die
7. Doctor No
8. GoldenEye
9. From Russia with Love
10. Thunderball
11. The Man with the Golden Gun
12. The World is Not Enough
13. Never Say Never Again
14. For Your Eyes Only
15. A View to a Kill
16. License to Kill
17. Octopussy
18. Diamonds are Forever
19. Moonraker
20. Die Another Day
21. [strictly bullshit below this line]
22. SPECTRE
23. Sky Fall
24. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
25. Quantum of Sausage
26. Casino Royale
27. ???? whatever they come out with next in currentyear+5

let me know if you agree with my ranking, and i'll change it to spite u

The World Is Not Enough

Spoilers:

1999's The World Is Not Enough was pretty much the average among the average of Bond flicks, treading water well enough but without any standout sequences or moments. The Garbage theme song is nice but the cold open drags on way too long, there's another boring snow-based action scene and the villains suffer from being somewhat three-dimensional, which is always a fat minus in this type of movie.

I tried to redpill you on the manlet question but you didn't listen.

Renard, whom I shall call Bernard, suffers from an unusual affliction: he has a bullet in his head that means he can't feel pain. While this might seem like it would make him very threatening, it would most likely mean he would just die of some infected wound he failed to notice, but let's pretend. Bernard spends the movie angsting about the pain of feeling no pain, making him the series' first emo villain, so it is fortunate that we have a surprise second villain: Elektra, the woman he's ostensibly been stalking.

You need to screen for deformities in MI6 as everyone deformed in James Bond movies is a villain. We don't hash tag need a black James Bond; we hash tag need a hunchback James Bond.

The idea of a sort of Bonnie & Clyde villain couple seems to have potential (the closest we've had is Mr Wint & Mr Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever), but this angle is under-explored in favour of unwanted psychology: we're supposed to sympathise with Bernard as it's evident Elektra is just using him while cucking him with Bond. Boring! There's a simple, correct recipe for a Bond villain, and it's:

• More ham than Razorback

Plus-wise, Goldeneye's Zukovsky puts in a second appearance for some levity and the technological overreach of Die Another Day is foreshadowed with Bond's X-ray vision glasses.

A fun gag would have been to have Bond wander around perving on chicks for four or five straight minutes of screentime, but that might have been too avant-garde for the studio at that time.

World also manages to foreshadow K's comedy of errors from the Cr**g flicks, as for all her trash talk she manages to get herself captured by Elektra's goons. Wahmen: 0, gamers: 1.

Before and after assaulting the wait staff @ TGI Fridays

Finally we would be remiss not to bring up Doctor Christmas Jones, a perfect example of doing it right whose improbable name is nothing but an hour-length setup for a joke from which it was clearly reverse-engineered.

00: 55:59

01:59:05

Beckies h8 this character because how very dare they cast a hot Stacy with big fake tits as a nuclear scientist? I say they didn't go far enough. In the Berenstein reboot, everyone is a hot chick including Bond, M, Q, faceless goons #1 through #700, the director, the gaffer, and the audience. Stacies rise up!

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2!!!

There are two types of people in this world: those who think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the late Tobe Hooper's greatest masterpiece, and those who have seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

The Breakfast Club knockoff poster is a clue that this is going to be on another level.

Where 1 was frankly restrained for a movie called "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", 2 lives up to the derangement implied in such an ostentatious title, opening with a high speed car chase in the middle of which Leatherface slices up these two fratbois' car.

Everything better on a moving vehicle.

Hearing their death screams as the fratbois' final moments are recorded on her radio show, Final Girl Stretch (played by Caroline Williams and her legs) decides to team up with Lieutenant Lefty Enright, a based Texas lawman played by Dennis Hopper in the same year he won acclaim for his role in Blue Velvet. Together they will set a trap for the murderous family of cannibals.

Hopper has a rather condensed arc in which he learns the very important lesson that to defeat a chainsaw-wielding killer you must yourself learn the art of the chainsaw. To this end we get to witness him shopping for chainsaws, which he tries out in an excellent scene by going apeshit on a log.

You fuck that log up Denny.

The movie then bravely dispenses with the customary second act and launches straight into an extended climactic sequence that takes up like two thirds of the runtime. This dude who I think is named "Chop Top" but is referred to at one point as "Chrome Dome" due to the metal plate in his head, breaks into the radio station and chases Stretch around with the questionable assistance of Leatherface.

This scene kind of goes on too long but it has a nice uneasy mood about it so paradoxically it works.

Leatherface corners Stretch who basically offers to fuck him if he'll spare her life, which Leatherface (whose IQ, to be charitable, might be in the 60s) seems to weigh up for a while. This scene is an hysterically funny satire of the film criticism cliché that killers' weapons constitute a phallic substitute, with Stretch basically grinding her crotch on Leatherface's chainsaw. Had the scene gone on a little longer this might not have been a Texas Chainsaw sequel, but a Pumpkin one.

This is what film critics actually believe.

However Leatherface is then called away to the family residence and Stretch, whom he neglected to kill, follows him there, only to become trapped in the family's lair: an abandoned theme park, which is one of my favourite movie sets.

Thank you Tobe, very kino!

Stretch meets Leatherface again, who's kind enough to give her a skin mask of her own, fresh from her station assistant, which she doesn't seem to appreciate too much.

Bride of Leatherface

Naturally she winds up at the famous family dinner table and the old grampa gets wheeled out to try and crack her head, at which he fails consistently, giving Lieutenant Enright time to show up and engage Leatherface in a chainsaw duel.

This is a correct use of the medium.

Tomorrow Never Dies

The last favourite of mine to be released, Tomorrow Never Dies is the underacknowledged masterpiece of the Architect's oeuvre. In this prescient movie, James Bond must defeat the most evil and loathsome enemy of his long and storied career: a news network.

IDK if these graphics look dated in the States. In the UK news still looks like this crap.

Elliott Carver, who is the most fun villain since Christopher Walken if not Jaws, plans to start a war between China and the United Kingdom, to crown a career spent fabricating news stories like CNN on vitamins (not steroids, let's not get carried away here).

The look of an absolute lunatic who takes great pride in his work.

While the geopolitical balance might be way off, everything else about this scenario is dead on for today. Carver's dorkish megalomania is far more interesting than the fairly humourless villains of License and GoldenEye. It's easy to imagine him today tweeting pseudo-messianic banalities of the "orange man bad #resist" variety, inventing 8-year-old sons to provide him with profound soundbites on why antivax is worse than murder (but murderers are Good, Actually) and conspiring with the Zuccs and Jaccs of the world to save us peasants from our own stupidity and bigotry.

"So then I said to him, 'you know who else didn't like The Last Jedi? Mussolini.' And then everybody clapped."

Is trying to start war with China such a stretch? Well now it is, but just China specifically. Consider that the real-life mass media basically started a still ongoing race war off the back of such fabrications as "hands up don't shoot". This James Bond movie nailed the problem with the 21st Century better than any thinkpiece. Besides which, it was just entertaining as hell.

The prog rock acid trip visuals in the opening credits are strangely on point while being totally irrelevant to the movie.

Michelle Yeoh is Wai Lin, the Bond Girl, who is a Chinese agent. Sadly he doesn't sass off to her about Tiananmen Square (Moore's Bond zinged Major Triple X about the Gulag) but they have a fun dynamic anyway and spend a chunk of the film riding a motorcycle while handcuffed, which calls to mind the logistics of The Chase's sex scene in a moving car. The Chase was good as hell.

Everything better on moving vehicles.