The Screengrab : matthew barney

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

8. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)

One of the biggest hits and best-received films in the series, and deservedly so, even though it's now underrated, partly because of the sequence in which Sean Connery, as Bond, is supposed to pass for Japanese by means of eye makeup and a modified Beatles wig. Actually, the location shooting is a pretty good commercial for Japan, and in Connery's last appearance as Bond before his first official retirement from the role, his relationship with the Bond girls is sweeter-spirited than ever before. Roald Dahl did the script, which has some nifty lines, and Little Nellie may be the niftiest of Bond's gadgets to date. This is the first in the so-called "Blofeld" trilogy and the first film that lets us get an actual good look at the SPECTRE uber-baddie. Here, he is played by Donald Pleasance with a scar, an accent, and a pussycat; only the pussycat would be adopted by any of the actors who would pick up the role in the films to come.

7. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

Although some felt it went too far over the top with its invisible car and ice palace and whatnot, Die Another Day, after three bland and disappointing efforts by Pierce Brosnan, was not only the best James Bond picture in years at the time of its release, but also a reminder of how much fun Hollywood blockbusters can be when they're smart, cool and light on their feet. Filled with clever 40th Anniversary references to past 007 adventures, Brosnan’s special agent swansong featured no bimbo nuclear physicists, but rather a taut, ripping yarn with some dark, topical undertones (a North Korean villain, the capture and brutal imprisonment of our hero in the opening minutes of the film, a bizarre opening title sequence featuring sexy girls and, uh, “enhanced interrogation” techniques), as well as a pretty cool old-school evil henchman (the diamond-faced Mr. Kil!), the best Moneypenny scene ever, a wicked pissah ice field car chase (with not one but two fully-loaded, weapon-packed spy cars) and a creepy CGI character that looked unnervingly like Madonna. (As for Halle Berry’s performance as Jinx, well...let’s just say it fell somewhere between Oscar-worthy and Denise Richards.)

6. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981)

Arguably the best 007 movie of the Roger Moore era (and, this being the Screengrab, there probably will be plenty of argument), For Your Eyes Only scores on numerous counts: (1) not the best theme song ever, but certainly more hummable and memorable than, say, “Tomorrow Never Dies” or “You Know My Name” (Huh? What? Exactly!) (2) but definitely one of the best chase scenes ever, featuring skis and motorcycles on a bobsled track (!!!!) (3) the pre-credits death of Blofeld! (4) a relatively coherent, relatively un-winky storyline, including perfectly respectable performances by Topol, Julian Glover and Carole Bouquet as the lethal, crossbow-wielding Bond babe Melina Havelock (5) again...crossbows!!! (6) a breathtaking ascent up a pants-shittingly scary mountain followed by one of the all-time great bad guy fortress battles (7) an uncharacteristically ambiguous ending where Bond doesn’t exactly lose but doesn’t exactly win either, and finally (8) for all the abuse he gets for being old and cheesy and not Sean Connery, Moore was nevertheless the James Bond of my formative moviegoing years -– my Bond -– and these, in my opinion, were his finest two hours.

5. DR. NO (1962)

The first James Bond movie. (Though the first screen version of Bond appears in a 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale, in which Barry Nelson, as "Jimmy Bond", goes up against Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre -- part of it can be found on the DVD of the 1967 Casino Royale adaptation. The TV show was supposed to be the first of a series of small-screen productions for which Ian Fleming actually whipped up a number of original story outlines, but nothing came of it.) Looking at Dr. No today, it's remarkable how many of the key personnel were in place from the start: the director, Terence Young (who also did From Russia with Love and Thunderball, and, more importantly, the editor Peter R. Hunt and the production designer Ken Adam, the composer John Barry, Bernard Lee as M and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny, and of course the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli. (They would produce the films jointly until 1975, when Saltzman dropped out; after Broccoli died in 1996, his daughter Barabara took over the franchise.) The screenplay is credited to Richard Maibaum, who would work on another dozen Bond movies as well as another lavish Cubby Broccoli production based on Ian Fleming material, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (The script reportedly also included significant contributions from the playwight-screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, who asked that his name not be included in the credits. Oddly enough, he had no problem with his name being included in the credits of the 1967 Casino Royale.) The movie also introduced several of the gimmicks and gambits that would define the series, not the least of which was the way it managed to simultaneously stroke and defuse the audience's Cold War tensions by introducing the sinister organization, SPECTRE, which, it was explained, was always trying to start some shit between the East and the West; presumably, if James Bond could ever wipe these bozos out once and for all, the East and the West could just ignore each other while quietly going about their business. The list of potential screen Bonds reportedly considered is said to have included Cary Grant, James Mason, David Niven (later the star of Casino Royale), and a twenty-eight-year-old male model named Peter Anthony who was selected the winner of a talent contest the producers threw for the sake of the publicity, and also maybe because they didn't have any better ideas. Sean Connery, who could just barely act at this stage of his career, is said to have given an audition that wowed the filmmakers, not with his technique or talent but rather with an undefinable but undeniable quality that clearly marked him as having been put on this Earth to play the part. Another look at the movie suggests that the quality might be defined thusly: he radiated the insolent, arrogant confidence that Bond was supposed to have by virtue of his class and superior breeding, yet at the same time was such a rough hewn bruiser of a male animal that the sheer power of his presence beat the snobbery out of that conception. And he looked good in a tux. The movie also starred the twenty-six-year-old Swiss actress Ursula Andress as the shell-collecting, knife-wielding heroine Honey Ryder, and here the filmmakers' genius may show through even more than it does in the casting of Connery. At the time, Andress' English was in such a sorry state that she required dubbing by two other women, Nikki van der Zyl to provide her speaking voice, and Diana Coupland for her singing. Clearly, it was worth it to get that iconic image of Andress emerging from the surf like Venus reporting for duty on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover shoot. As Matthew Barney, who cast Andress in his 1997 Cremaster 5, has said, that scene represented the birth of a new kind of female sex symbol, doll-faced and curvaceous but in an athletic, physically assertive way. That's why there may be no better way of appreciating the seismic effect that the Bond films had on the culture at large than to go back and read some of the original reviews of Dr. No and goggle at how many (male) critics expressed their bewilderment at why that awful butch creature had been allowed into the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007)

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Norman Mailer's death on November 10, at the age of eighty-four, was a great blow to American letters, and also to film lovers, robbing us as it did of a major literary artist whose relationship to the movies was just about unique. Mailer always said that he was seduced into writing by the novels of James T. Farrell, and he claimed Ernest Hemingway as a personal hero. Both Hemingway and Farrell reacted to the new primacy of movies by stripping their writing down, but Mailer wasn't really quite of that school. His style was sometimes downright baroque, and he loved to delve deep into the psyches of his characters, of real people, of himself and the events in which he was taking part. Nor did he have much truck with the common attitude among literary figures of his era that the movies were the enemy. Mailer loved the novel as a form and feared that it might be dying out, but he tried to keep it alive by writing as if he were making a movie on the page. And he went about that goal not cynically or opportunistically but whole-heartedly.

Mailer loved the pulpy immediacy of movies and envied them for their ability to insinuate themselves in modern audience's consciousness and place their stamp on society. At the same time, he deplored the unadventurousness of mainstream Hollywood fare of the 1950s and early 1960s, the period when he was making his name and finding his voice as a writer. In his novels An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam? and also in the great journalistic works in which he cast himself as reporter-hero, Mailer wrote the movies that he thought American filmmakers should have been making: unpredictable, crazy, symbolically charged and determined to grapple with current events and the deeper concerns of the country. Years later, in his awesome The Executioner's Song, he shifted gears and created the ultimate docudrama of post-sixties America, epic in scope, spare in style and altogether emotionally confounding. To read the books and then compare them with the movies that Hollywood did make of The Naked and the Dead and An American Dream is to see just how inadequate Hollywood would have been to make good on Mailer's ideas, even if it had wanted to take him up on it. To see the 1982 TV movie version of The Executioner's Song, starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore, and adapted for the small screen by Mailer himself, is to see that Mailer himself had better ideas about what movies ought to be than he had about how to make them.

That was already clear from the movies that Mailer made himself in the sixties — Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970). These were edited down from hours and hours of unshaped improvisations with Mailer, who plays the lead in all three, and his actor buddies and various other celebrities taking off from a vague situation (a buncha gangsters hanging out, a buncha cops hanging out. . .) and saying and doing whatever comes into their heads. The proudest moment in all these hours of celluloid comes at the end of Maidstone, in which cast member Rip Torn, feeling unfulfilled at the end of the shoot, attacks a surprised Mailer with a hammer after everyone else thought the film had wrapped; the two men end up tussling on the grass while Mailer's children, with whom he had been shooting home movies with leftover film stock, can be heard crying off-camera.

These movies were based on Mailer's theory about bringing an exciting new level of "reality" to movies, a theory that he explicated in such essays as "Some Dirt in the Talk" and "A Course in Film-Making," and also in his essay on Brando and Last Tango in Paris. When Mailer's long-unavailable films were brought back for a special retrospective screening in New York this past summer, Gerald Howard called Maidstone "a video transmission from the faraway Planet '60s — a civilization in the throes of a crackup" and described the agony of waiting so long to see it after reading the "extraordinary essay" about its making. The fact that the film is unwatchable, to Howard, was kind of beside the point. That the essays Mailer wrote about what he was trying to do as a filmmaker are so much more vibrant and intellectually thrilling than what he did, is not just an example of empty hype. They're proof not that he wasn't onto something but that he was a writer, not a filmmaker. The essays will outlast the movies, and some distant future generation may feel disappointed if nobody finally cares enough to preserve the last prints of his beloved eyesores.

Mailer also gave scattered appearances in other people's films, playing Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981) and Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 (1999). He had a celebrated dust-up on The Dick Cavett Show and once brought his comedy stylings to the set of Gilmore Girls.

He also wrote scripts for TV movies about Robert Hansson and the O.J. Simpson trial, to be directed by his friend Lawrence Schiller. He contributed sound bites to documentary features on James Toback, the romance of Greenwich Village, the exploitation of 9/11, the Ali-Foreman fight, and Deep Throat. He contracted to write and star, with his actress daughter Kate, in an updated version of King Lear (with a Mafia setting, and with Norman to play "Don Learo") that was to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard and financed by Golan-Globus productions. Mailer apparently decided that this was too much even for him and fled the set, with his daughter in tow, after one day of shooting, though Godard went ahead and finished the film, or finished something anyway, with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. If Mailer made a public ass of himself and worse on more than one occasion, so did a lot of other people who didn't also manage to dash off The Armies of the Night. You will be missed, sir.

— Phil Nugent