For Your Eyes Only

For Your Eyes Only opens with a meta-legal in-joke in which Eon, forbidden to use Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE (to whom Kevin McClory held the rights at the time), killed off a "suspicious man in wheelchair" with the bald head, accent and white cat all associated with the character from the early films, making this the James Bond film equivalent of that scene in Friends where Chandler dances in front of Joey saying "not touching, can't get mad, not touching, can't get mad".

Note the neck brace, which strongly implies that if this were Blofeld, this would be a direct sequel to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, not You Only Live Twice or Diamonds Are Forever. However, this is just a man in a wheelchair, what are you talking about?

A fun game you can play is to start the movie at 05:29 and pretend this is just some guy and Bond just murdered him for shits and giggles.

Unfortunately the rest of the movie is played much more straight in an attempt to win back naysayers of the previous film's fantasy elements. More fortunately, there is still an excellent chase in which Bond's gadgeted car is blown up and he has to escape in the Bond Girl's cheery yellow Citroën.

DA-Na-Da-NAA

This is the clear highlight, after which it's all pretty much down-to-earth generic spy action, not terrible, but very whatever. The ski chase goes on too long and the villains are all pretty boring, which casts an ironic light on the hilariously spiteful killing off of not-Blofeld, since his brand of quirks is much missed. The main henchman doesn't even have a gimmick.

Glasses aren't a gimmick.

It's an over-correction that foreshadows the Dalton and Cr**g eras, but it's not too bad, as in addition to the standout sequences mentioned above there is an excellent Bond Girl in Melina, who can't act for shit but has a cool crossbow and shows tits in the Buñuel film That Obscure Object of Desire.

>tfw no gf with crossbow (so she can kill me)

Another nice detail is that General Gogol of the KGB appears briefly as an actual antagonist, although he's nice enough to let Bond live having worked with him previously in The Spy Who Loved Me. General Gogol is such a nice cheery guy you could almost forget he was part of the organisation that murdered countless people and whose gay ops continue to fuck the west to this day.

Imagine this dude reporting to Beria.

This is also the only Bond film to tip its hand regarding its real life context by featuring then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher (played by a lookalike) in its final scene, who gets crank called by a fucking parrot.

R*dditers be like Margaret Thatcher is in the BOND UNIVERSE but what if instead Bond is in THE universe?

Moonraker: a tale of two worlds

Th-th-th-th-that's all folks!

Although Rob Ager disagrees, Moonraker is typically thought of as a weaker Bond flick. I think a lot of that has to do with the incongruous left turn into sci-fantasy and the slapstick sequences involving Jaws. If viewed as a Road Runner cartoon, however, these scenes are much more enjoyable, and the spaceshit offers some more great sets including a Mesoamerican style temple in Brazil (????) from which the rockets launch, and the space station itself, which is #cool.

More interestingly, though, this is the first of two Bonds in which the villain has  been proven right in the intervening decades. You can make the case for based Stromberg and his yearning to be a fish, but Hugo Drax is unequivocally in the right here, and his defeat is a tragedy for the future of Earth.

He did NOTHING wrong.

Drax wants to solve the overpopulation of the planet with a weaponised orchid that only kills humans, while breeding the best human specimens on his space station to take over. To understand the opposition to this plan, you would have to argue for a program of continuing to pollute and destroy the environment, perpetuating bad genes and the problems they cause, and allowing the Disney Star Wars movies to be made. Drax would have spared us all that, allowing for the rewilding of a great deal of our planet and ensuring an aesthetic legacy for the human race.

The laser tag sequence is retro future kino.

Moonraker therefore represents a crossroads in history at which everything went wrong, and it is thematically relevant therefore that this is the movie with the disappearing braces. Everyone who saw this movie growing up remembers the scene in which Jaws meets his diminutive girlfriend, in which they share a smile revealing that they both have metal teeth - in her case, braces.

The fact they push in for a tighter closeup on the second volley definitely feels like it is leading up to that reveal. I believe it, just because I want to.

Everyone, however, apparently remembers wrong, as she has no braces in extant copies of the film. Why would so many people have come up with an identical punchline to the scene if it never happened? Have we, in fact, entered a separate timeline in which the Berenstein Bears are the Berenstain Bears? Well probably not, but the fact we believe we have speaks to a cultural malaise that we all feel, a sense that the world of today isn't quite right in some way. That there's a better way out there in an alternative reality. A world where Drax won, everyone is healthy, beautiful and smart, and you can find a fucking parking space.

The Spy Who Loved Me

When you think of the classic Bond formula, there are three instalments that jump to mind.

weeee

Goldfinger had the best combo of villain and henchman, the most famous car, and a particularly inventive scheme. You Only Live Twice had the best sets and setpieces and the best Blofeld. The Spy Who Loved Me has the best Bond girl, and the biggest guy for you.

This is the only smile I want to protect.

As Goldfinger and Classic Blofeld are the Platonic form of the Bond villain, so Major Anya Amasova, Agent Triple X (lol), is the Platonic form of the Bond girl: her codename is an allusion to secks, she is a Russian spy (despite her accent), has an adversarial relationship with Bond but ultimately falls for the Big British Cocc, and has her cleavage on display for almost the entire movie.

>tfw no cleavagey russian agent gf with enormous fuck-me eyes 24/7

She even pimp slaps some guy for knocking off her hat.

"Yo bitch you did NOT just knock my good hat" - KGB Agent Triple X

Bond and Anya first compete, and then team up, to recover a microfilm that leads them to the secret of who has been hijacking submarines in an aquatic rehash of the plot of You Only Live Twice. It's Karl Stromberg, the most based Bond villain in the entire series, whose plan is to exterminate all life on land so he can rule the world from the oceans, which is now also my plan.

>tfw no comfy aquarium lair

Unfortunately Karl doesn't get much screentime (he was a last minute substitution for Blofeld), but he gives a cool speech about his underwater world, has webbed fingers, and captures Major Anya at the end presumably because he realises belatedly that he will need at least one woman with whom to repopulate the planet with his Innsmouth progeny.

IDK what this big bony looking thing on the right is but it kind of looks like a giant foot which raises way too many questions.

No matter, because this is also the one with Jaws, the invincible henchman who is a tough tie with Oddjob for the henchman crown. Every scene with Jaws is great and the movie gives him the rare distinction of surviving, something only Blofeld and Knick Knack got to do in previous films, though it looks like it will be a long swim to shore.

Jaws mauls a shark to death to escape. Given that this came out two years after Spielberg's Jaws, this seems like an hilarious middle finger to Spielberg for no discernible reason.

Another highlight is the big sub pen battle which seems like an intentional update of the volcano base battle from YOLT, and which I might even prefer slightly for action, since it seems a bit more chaotic and tense. The villains get a surprisingly high number of kills so for a moment there it actually looks like it could go either way. This is followed by a rare moment of actual suspense in which Bond has to defuse a nuke or something. Then he gets Karl's submarines to nuke each other.

>tfw no giant submarine pen to blow up

The question of whether this, Goldfinger or YOLT is the greatest and best Bondkino will likely never be resolved, as they each have certain strengths that the others lack. The Spy Who Loved Me has the edge in main Bond girl, henchman and car that turns into a submarine, but lacks some of the dreaminess and the kino music of the others, and has a slightly weaker (though still kino) mastermind. Regardless, the takeaway is that the best films aren't the ones that try to break away from the formula, but which play it with the most conviction and bravado.

The Man With The Golden Gun

Having fought blaxploitation Voodoo gangsters in Live And Let Die, James Bond returned to more grounded and sensible territory by facing off against a man with three nipples, a flying car, a lazer tag fetish dungeon, sumo wrestler bodyguards and a midget whom he recklessly incentivises to betray him.

This is probably the only Bond flicc to be briefly and bizarrely inspired by the aesthetics of psychedelia and German Expressionism.

The MI6 headquarters in a capsized ship gives us some underappreciated sets.

Christopher Lee is always a great baddy and Knick Knack a great henchman, and their island lair is cool enough that the less sensical elements of the story may be overlooked entirely, if you're high enough or in a really good mood, making this average out to a fun time. Britt Ekland from The Wicker Man plays an especially inept Bond girl, and possibly the best stunt in the entire series takes place in which Bond jumps a river in a car, turning 360 degrees in the air and coming to land safely, to the accompaniment of a cartoon slide whistle. At least it wasn't the Benny Hill theme.

We are forced to question, however, why Bond attempts to free himself from a sumo goon by grabbing his asscheeks with both hands. Perhaps this is a martial art that baka gaijins like myself have yet to hear of.

????