Comments on: A Little Respect for Pierce Brosnan

By: mike

mike — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:29:02 +0000

I miss Pierce Brosnon as a Bond :-(

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:11:24 +0000

Pierce Brosnan was a dress up bond. He wore the clothes and had the look but he was by no means a real bond. Not to mention the movies he was in had terrible plots, direction, and special effects. I fell asleep through half of them. They were all disappointments considering I’m a huge Bond fan.. I’ve been quietly waiting for him to fade out of the picture. I think the critics are right on the mark when they say he was sapping the series of its life. Thats why he was replaced. He sucked. Daniel Craig breathes new life into the franchise and I think they did right by picking an original Ian Flemming story. My only question for future movies, where are the sinister bad guys we love to hate that carry over through more than just one movie, or the evil organizations? I miss a lot of that.. what is a nemesis if you simply swap the plot and character alliances 6 times in a movie and kill him off by the end of it. Hopefully they find some new blood that can write this series into a much more intriguing direction. I’m sick of rogue terrorists. Things were so much easier when the cold war was still around to build plots around :)

By: Arthur Bordon

Arthur Bordon — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:51:02 +0000

I commend Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig for portraying the character as envisioned by its creator, Ian Fleming. As a fan of the character, I appreciate their work and I’m sure I share this with all fans of James Bond, the character as opposed to fans of James Bond, the movie series.

By: Arthur Bordon

Arthur Bordon — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:51:02 +0000

By: Ann Vallier

Ann Vallier — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:04:37 +0000

Worst Bond movie ever – please! That title easily goes to “Octopussy”. I liked Moore in the beginning but his time lasted WAY too long. His believability as super-stud plummeted during the 80′s – his age just caught up with him kind of fast.

I would have liked to see Lazenby give it another shot to see what else he could have done with the role. I think Dalton may have been the right choice for the Bond that was played in “Licence” because he did a good nasty Bond. Brosnan would have been good at that one too, but I’m glad he didn’t have to suffer through that plot.

I really had issues with “Die Another Day” because so much of it was so fake – I liked how “real” the Bond stunts used to be and to see them replaced with the horror that CG brings to movies these days was just too sad.

By: Cat Brother

Cat Brother — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:41:17 +0000

I grew up seeing Bond on TV. When my dad took me to ‘The Spy Who Loved Me,’ I must have been about 12, on a guys’ night out, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. That film didn’t age real well, though…
No doubt, Brosnan rebooted the franchise. Nobody’s yet noted, that this was the first meta-Bond, self-referential Bond, in the fashion of Scream. Remember Sean Bean mocking him in the statue graveyard, what, James, no witty remark to cap the scene, and later, did all those martinis you drank dull the memory of all the people you killed for your government?
And that opening sequence – best f’ing ever. I have a good story about it, from a guy who was there at the filming. Apparently, they had to throw life-size dummies off the dam to see how far to make the bungee cable. The dummies kept smashing to pieces against the dam, in what would have been fatal for a real person. A pack of stunt men were hanging out, waiting to see if the stunt could actually be done. THE VERY FIRST TIME they got a dummy to survive to the bottom of the dam, a stunt guy jumped up and said, “Yeah! I’ll do it! Hook me up!” And so it was done. That guy could have been dead as a can of tuna for a number of reasons, but now? Best Bond opening ever.
And I’ll add, Brosnan obviously trained his ass off for that part. I work as a trainer, and was impressed by his physicality.
‘World is Not Enough’ sucked donkey kong, but it was a bad script.
Re the original ‘Casino Royale,’ well, someone’s gotta do it…I will stand up and say, I liked the original ‘Casino Royale’ with David Niven, Woody Allen, Orson Welles (!), Peter Sellars, Deborah Kerr, and Ursual Andress. This may have something to do with first seeing it at age 10, and thinking Ursula was a goddess on earth. I believe I was stoned most other times I saw it. Hey, Netflix it and try it.
A lot of the humor was vaudeville-corny, but a lot was subtle and laugh-out-loud. Like -
SPOILER ALERT! For the book, haven’t seen the new movie -
In the book, Bond is captured by the villain, whom he’s just fleeced in a card game. The villain tortures Bond by tieing him naked in a chair with no bottom, and beating Bond’s balls with a carpet-beater. Not sure I’ll see that one in the new movie. So, in the movie, Orson Welles (who never breaks character once) captures Peter Sellars as Bond, who wakes up in a chair with no bottom. Sellars comments on this, and Welles rather blandly says, “Yes, we’ve been meaning to get that re-upholstered…”
Stuff like that. I say rent it!

By: alkali

alkali — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 21:01:20 +0000

Of the seven Roger Moore Bond films, at least three are pretty good (The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), For Your Eyes Only (1981)) and three are pretty bad (Moonraker (1979), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985)).

The seventh (Live and Let Die (1973)) is pretty entertaining if you can forget about the wildly racist premise (scary Negroes have evil plan to drug our kids).

By: alkali

alkali — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 21:01:20 +0000

The seventh (Live and Let Die (1973)) is pretty entertaining if you can forget about the wildly racist premise (scary Negroes have evil plan to drug our kids).

By: Tor

Tor — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 15:40:48 +0000

Finally saw it last night, and it does feel like a rebirth for the series. I grew up with Moore’s movies, so I admit that I have a soft spot for him, but at the same time, I think Moore’s gadgets represented the pinnacle of Bond gadgetry. Not that they were the most extreme, but they perfectly hit the line between cool and believable. The highpoint being the underwater car. As well as the fact that at the age I saw For Your Eyes Only, the underwater fight scene, as well as the active participation of the ‘helpless female victim’ were hugh plusses for me. I remember always being freaked out by the dude in the Jim Suit… So Moore gets second place because of that, for me.

I really enjoyed Casino Royale, if for no other reason than Bond gets back the charming mysogeny that he lost in the Dalton years, and never really regained under Brosnan. The first time Dalton asked for two rooms (for him and the cellist) made me choke. But what was great was the mysogeny was presented not as a wolf among sheep (see Connery, Lazenby and Moore) but as a bad boy appreciated for being bad. One of the best lines in the movie, IMHO, was:

You don’t have to worry about me, you’re not my type.

What, too smart?

No… you’re single.

Which ended up forshadowing the end of the movie. The lines during the torture scene also seemed very Bond-ish, even though I couldn’t see any of the previous Bonds ever saying them.

In any event, although I did really enjoy Brosnan’s Bond, the tech in those movies was too outlandish for my taste. And a villan with diamonds embedded in his face? Or with a slowly migrating bullet, causing him to act violently? I much prefer the subtlety of one or two bloody tears, with the understated explaination that it was ‘a misaligned tear duct.’ That has more menace to me than the more outlandish motivations/quirks of Brosnan’s villans.

So my ranking, for what it’s worth is:

Connery
Moore
Brosnan
Dalton

With Lazenby and Craig getting high marks, but in my book, you have to play Bond more than once to get on the list.

By: John League

John League — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:54:47 +0000

Whatever one thinks of the various incarnations and misuses of Bond actors, consider the pitiful job the writers (and casting directors) of these movies have done for the villains. Christopher Walken was utterly wasted in A View to a Kill, as was Jonathan Pryce in Tomorrow Never Dies. Then you have Joe Don Baker and Jeroen Krabbe in The Living Daylights? Please.