Pacific rim - 2013

It was ok to watch once, entertaining enough, but seeing it once is enough. It’s not really an ‘aliens’ movie, it’s more a robot movie, big, huge robots like old Japanese heroes to defend the world. In a way, I saw too little of the robots. I wanted to see more scenes of robots fighting aliens, and ssibly clear scenes where I can actually see something. That’s what I want from this kind of movie but there wasn’t much of that. A bit, yeah, but not ‘really’ good. I saw more of the ugly aliens and a lot more of people talking or yelling.

Plot:

In a few words: aliens invaded our world, we built robots to fight them. Things go down for years until someone chooses to risk it all, a final showdown to stop them forever.

I’ll add details, but I’ll say there’s the jerk that will redeem himself by dying a hero, there’s the obligatory girl to show the world this production is not misogynist and no other reason, there’s a lot of yelling from the two scientists in an attempt to provide comedy, I guess :-/  there’s The Speech because there has to be a big speech in these movies; in a way there’s everything you’d expect from it, but I’d just like them to make a clear decision on what to focus on.

Now details:

At first aliens “entered our world” from “deep beneath the Pacific Ocean”. The Breach is basically “a portal between dimension”. Only one came through and it was enough to cause many many deaths. And then it happened again and again. Four attacks and who knows how many deaths later, people realized “this was not gonna stop”. 

Wow.

So the world acted together “for the sake of the greater good” and “the Jaeger program was born”. 

They built huge robots that were to be controlled by two people. They’d go inside and they’d need to interface with each other and the Jaeger. A neural connection. A mind-meld. Finally, after months, they started winning and winning, “so Jaeger pilots turned into rock stars, danger turned into propaganda, Kaijus into toys” because this is the society we have. So believable.

After seven years, brothers Yancy and Raleigh Becket pilot the Jaeger called Gipsy Danger. This time, they lose and Yancy dies while they were still connected. The Kaijus started adapting, learning, evolving, and the Jaegers kept losing. Raleigh left.

Five years of losing and the world’s powers decided to stop the program. “We will authorize you to take all remaining Jaegers to the last battle station, Hong Kong”, and that’s it.

Funds for eight more months and no more.

To protect people, huge ‘walls of life’ are built, metal walls ‘deemed unbreachable’, yeah, sure.

Raleigh goes around working on these walls when Marshal finds him. “I’ve spent the last six months activating everything I can get my hands on”, because he knows things are bad and still thinks the Jaegers are the answer. He wants Raleigh to pilot his old one. Raleigh is not eager to have another mind-meld but Marshal is sure the world is ending, so “where would you rather die? Here, or in a Jaeger?”

He agrees, of course, and meets Mako Mori, “one of our brightest”, who wants ot be a pilot but Marshal is worried about her emotional state. Of course, she’s a girl…

Her story is rather dragged and takes too long: when she was a little girl, a Kaiju destroyed everything and everyone around her until a Jaeger stopped it, and Marshal was the pilot, so he raised her. Now she follows him, not out of obedience but out of respect.

There are two scientits, Dr Gottlieb who works with numbers and predictions, and Dr Newton Geiszler who works with Kaiju parts, studying their anatomy and stuff. Not caring that he was told not to do it, he “drifts” with a piece of recovered Kaiju brain. 

Truth is, this mad scientist is what went different this time around, he saved the world.

The “Resistance”, as Marshal calls them, sees a new-gen Jaeger with three pilots, triplets, the Wei Tang brothers; Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky pilot another one - no word on their relationship, they could be brother and sister or married, who knows.

Hercules Hansen knew Raleigh already and they respect each other. His co-pilot and son Chuck does not and says out loud what he thinks: that he’s “dead weight”, that Raleigh will slow him down, “he’s a has-been” and of course since there’s a girl the b..ch word appears just because, but cocky as he is, he loses the fist-fight with Raleigh that follows.

The plan is to go “for the Breach”: Hansen’s Jaeger will carry a “2400 pound thermonuclear warhead” and two other Jaegers are to protect it so they can do it. Gottlieb’s numbers tell him the number of Kaijus will increase and this “increase traffic will force the Breach to stabilize and remain open long enough to get the device through and collapse its structure”.

Mako doesn’t think Raleigh is the right choice because he never follows protocols and takes dangerous risks and yet she’ll be more than happy to pilot together…

Newt does it and is sure these clones are not “just following some sort of animalistic urge”, they’re attacking “under orders”. Newt says that these beings are “colonists”, “they overtake worlds, they just consume them and then they move on to the next, and they’ve been here before in sort of a trial run. It was the dinosaurs”

But back then it was not the right atmosphere for them, too clean, so “they waited it out, and now with ozone depletion, and carbon monoxide, polluted waters, well, we’ve practically terraformed it for them”. He says: “the first wave, that was just the hounds, their sole purpose was to aim for the populated areas and to take out the vermin. Us. The second wave, that is the exterminators, and they will finish the job and hten the new tenants will take possession”.

To know more he’d need “a fresh Kaiju brain” to drift with again, so Marshal sends him looking for Hannibal Chau who runs a black market that deals with Kaiju parts, all their remains are used for something.

… well, I would have thought the government would take those bodies to study them and make every possible experiment they could think of, instead they’re just cut to pieces and sold…

Mako’s first try as a pilot does not go well, she gets lost in the memory of the terrified little girl. Raleigh says that trust is necessary and their drift was strong, but he also had the baggage of his brother’s thoughts and feelings when he died.

The Jaegers are brought onto the various battlefields by being lifted and carried by helicopters… which honestly looks silly, makes them look like toys, dolls moved around, and also looks kinda impossible, I’m no scientist but the Jaegers are huge and must be really heavy, too heavy for eight helicopters to carry around. Yeah, one might say: special metal so the robots are not all that heavy, and also special helicopters ultra mega strong, but still.

Next battle goes badly because the Kaiju has a new weapon and it blasts the “Jaegers’ electrical circuits”, they lose the Hong Kong brothers and the two Russians. The Hansen are saved by Raleigh and Mako because their old Jaeger is not digital like the new ones, “Gipsy’s analog, nuclear”.

Newt finds Hannibal and is there when two Kaijus attack Hong Kong city. Newt: “there’s never been two before” and Hannibal is the one to explain what we’re all wondering: “maybe that’s because nobody ever drifted with one before, eh? Genius! When Jaeger pilots drift, it’s a two-way street”. The connection is set “Both ways! A hive mentality, you said! Maybe those Kaiju are trying to find you” so he tries to hide but they find him… still the battle is won thanks to Gipsy, and Newt waits for Hannibal’s men to find him a brain.

This one Kaiju was pregnant, though, and a ‘little one’ comes out trying to attack, but it gets strangled by the ombelical cord - what about them being clones? Or just the first ones and not these?

It manages to swallow Hannibal before dying… he’ll cut his way out over the ending credits.

Newt and Gottlieb drift together with the baby Kaiju, and understand that the Jaegers need to take a Kaiju with them to get through the Breach. 

Dad’s injured so Chuck goes with Marshal who is dying of radiation poisoning. He makes his Big Speech “today we are canceling the Apocalypse”. Marshal calls Chuck “an egotistical jerk with daddy issues” but they drift ok. Newt takes a helicopter to come warn them (!)

Unlike Chuck, Marshal is one who thinks and wonders why the Kaijus stop attacking as they near the Breach. Gottlieb was right and a third Kaiju comes out, and it’s somehow easy for them all to know it’s a “category 5”, despite it being “the first ever”.

Now, it’s not clear to me why, but for some reason Striker can’t go on so Marshal and Chuck blow up their bomb taking out the Kaiju they have while Gipsy finishes the mission because they are “a walking nuclear reactor”. Gipsy takes “the Kaiju carcass” and head for the Breach. They go down. Short on oxygen, Mako leaves first in a pod while Raleigh sets the explosion manually before ejecting his own pod. 

I liked his words to Mako: “I can finish this alone, all I have to do is fall. Anyone can fall”. 

It works, the Breach collapses, and helicopters fly to retrieve the pods from the ocean. They both make it of course, and they hug in relief, and there’s no inappropriate kiss, good.

Hercules is now Marshal, “the Breach is sealed” and it’s over.

Nice last scene, forehead to forehead, relief that it’s over, cute picture as well.

Raleigh is Charlie Hunnam

Pentecost (Marshal) is Idris Elba

Mako is Rinko Kikuchi

Gottlieb is Burn Gorman

Herc Hansen is Max Martini

Chuck is Rob Kazinsky

Hannibal Chau is Ron Perlman

Young Mako is Mana Ashida

We have a ghost - 2023

Well… it wasn’t bad, no… but the less absurd thing in this, is that there’s a ghost in the house.

Basically, a house is haunted, so ‘our’ family can buy it really cheap. The youngest son Kevin, who is 16, finds the ghost in the attic, but instead of yelling and running like everybody else, he laughs a bit and makes a video with his phone.

Honestly, the  ghost’s attempt were quite ridiculous. 

This is a ghost that can hug, steal, fight, whatever. Pretty corporeal if you ask me.

The ghost can’t speak and can’t remember his past life, so Kevin cals him Ernest because it’s written on his shirt - bowling shirt?

His older brother Fulton takes his phone without permission and sees the video and shows it immediately to their dad Frank, who appears to be a bit of a loser, always running after the greedy idea of getting to the big money without putting in the work. 

Seeing the video, Frank think only of himself, of his video and online channel getting big, viral, making him lots of money. He does not care about Ernest, and does not think of the consequences. Kevin does not like that.

When Frank’s wife finds out and walks through Ernest, screaming her lungs out when she sees him, they upload that video too, and they become famous, and in no time Frank’s  channel is super popular and he’s selling stuff like Ernest-shirts - identical to his - and whatever. Lots of people start camping outside their house, or trying to get in, upsetting his wife but not Frank who acts happy to be famous.

Kevin talks to Ernest and learns about ghosts on the internet. Nothing in the house triggers any kind of memory. Kevin finds online that a Ernest owned that house 50 years before then left and changed state. His neighbour Joy helps him, because of course she’s good with computers, and it turns out that that Ernest is still alive; a nearby pub has a photo of ghost-Ernest.

Writer Leslie is obsessed with ghosts since seeing one as a child and not being believed by anybody. When the videos become so famous even she learns about them, she makes all the analysis that prove to her the video is the real thing, no movie tricks. So, with her Cia credentials, she goes to their house. She worked in a project to study, find and trap ghosts.

Now Leslie tells them that ghosts are dangerous, that it is a matter of security so she can do whatever she wants and yes, she’ll come back with men and weapons.

But! Kevin took his brother’s car and is driving away with Joy and Ernest, heading 600 miles away to live-Ernest’s house.

Here, live-Ernest tells them his name is really Randy, who lost his mind after his wife died and abandoned his little girl June and disappeared. After that, agents crash in and get Kevin immobilized, and they also have a weapon that works on ghosts so ghost-Ernest can’t help.

Poor ghost-Ernst is put in a shielded cell, mae especially for ghosts so he can’tget out. Since h’s dead, he has no rights, and Cia plans to do whatever they want with him.

Leslie enters to meet him; Ernest is a kind soul, smiles at her and touches her tears. You can see right away she starts feeling bad for him. Nobody is surprised when shortly after that she frees him. He enters a car and a woman drives him back home.

Live-Ernest appears at night, drinking, and enters the house. He also has a gun, and thinks Kevin is onto him, or ‘Randy’ is, or whatever, because they found him… so now he kindly explains the truth to us. The ghost’s real name is indeed Randy. 50 years ago, after Randy’s wife died, her sister took it as a sign. She was Ernest’s wife, and thought her niece needed a mother, so she took the child and Ernest killed Randy in that same house and buried him in the garden - where he will remain, unknown. 

Both Frank and Fulton take a bat and go see after they hear a noise. Frank fights him, telling Fulton to protect Kevin. Ok, he’s the youngest. Then Kevin is told to go to mum, so he puts her in a room telling her to stay locked in there! The fight continues until Randy is back to protect Kevin. Really-called-Ernest get thrown out the window by Frank. 

Kevin and Frank take Randy to the sea - the ocean or whatever, where do they live? Anyway, they arrange for him to meet his daughter, now all grown up of course. She should be 54 or something around that.

Then he disappears, having completed everything, every unfinished business. The Cia ‘asks’ kevin what happened to Randy, and then we see that they change house again, to one 5 miles away, because now this house is worth much more so they sold it.

Well, it was nice enough, mostly because of the boy Kevin.

The scene with the tv-medium expecting holograms and then finding a real ghost was fun, they all screamd, both she and the troupe. Incredible that after the video was uploaded without their consent, they didn’t sue them!

Annoying that the only woman in the family was the one who screamed and got put in a room instead of helping. At least she was a good one who cared more about her sons than anything else.

Kevin is Jahi Di’Allo Winston

Ghost Ernest is David Harbour

Frank is Anthony Mackie  (I like the actor but not Frank)

Dr Leslie is Tig Notaro

Judy is Jennifer Coolidge

ITA Un fantasma in casa

Legally blonde 2: Red, white & blonde - 2003

This is nice, but even more sugary and unbelievable than the first. At least the first movie was a bit realistic, it was all about her being smart enough to study law, perfectly possible, but this… is different. This movie is about people in power yielding to her charm and goodness to do the right thing… which is not how politics work, this whole movie is one of the more unrealistic thing I’ve ever seen. Including Alien, because you don’t really know what’s out there, but we do know how are people on this planet.

It sounds naive and silly, but it’s not bad. It’s enjoyable now, but I’m sure as a teenager I would have liked it much more, back when I believed the propaganda that the ones in power actually care about people. I’d have loved the positive message, the optimism, just as I loved “Mr Smith goes to Washington”. I really liked James Stewart and his common-man image, but I also like Reese Witherspoon a lot - and more since knowing that her contract gave her all of Elle’s clothes :-p and shoes, I guess.

Plot in details:

Elle is about to marry her Emmett, and Paulette is happy for her. Margot and Serena came all the way for her. They kind of thought she’ be doing the wife now, but Elle has no intention of leaving her job, she loves being a lawyer, “actually I have this huge annual review coming up, so keep’em crossed, girls, ok?”

She wants her dog’s birth mother to be at the wedding so a private investigator finds her. Elle goes to this place to discover that mum-dog is property of this ‘Versace cosmetic testing facility. Her firm represents the owners so she tries to convince them all that it should be shut down and all the animals freed because it’s unjust. She thinks her job is to fight for what  is just, her boss says their job is to fight for their clients “and their best interests”.

She feels strongly about it, and doesn’t think she can work for people who are ok with hurting human beings if they keep following “the letter of the law”, so she’s fired. Her brilliant future stops here, her boss only wants “serious lawyers”. So Elle goes to Washington with the clear intention to change the law and stop cosmetic testing on animals. Elle knows congresswoman Rudd who personally hires her, “taking up a bill on animal testing in the cosmetic industry”; Rudd’s team thinks it’s a matter of conscience, to “boost our female demographic”. Rudd talks of Elle as “one of the shrewdest legal and political minds of our time”, which doesn’t really go along with her Barbie image all in pink. 

A blonde in pink, they assume she’s an idiot. Why? Because in this world where women listened to propaganda and buried feminism for good, they can only be taken seriously if they dress/act like men, shame on Elle to show all her femininity on the outside instead of keeping it only for dates!

Rudd introduces her as “basically me when I first came to D.C.” The people in the team think of her as stupid or useless anyway.

Elle makes friends with her hotel’s doorman Sidney who suggests she approaches congresswoman Hauser if she wants a hearing for her bill. He starts helping her a lot, but the others still don’t, Grace thinks of her as one of the many idealistic girls who get nowhere because “it takes savvy and street smarts” because “this is Washington politics, not warm fuzzies and kissing booths”.

So Elle goes back to herself, and reaches Hauser by going to the same hairdresser (Paulette found it for her). This Hauser has the same sisterhood ring, so they connect through that, of course.

Her Chihuahua Bruiser is male, and he likes another male dog, a Rottweiler. She was trying to reach Stanford Marks too, after Hauser, and of course it’s his Rottweiler. She gets her hearing but of course there are many many people against it. Still, Sid gives her personal information on many congresspeople so she does reach to them and it’s going great, until Rudd herself comes in. She says that she feels she “must withdraw my support for Bruiser’s bill” shocking everyone. Most of all Elle.

Rudd tells Elle that “you were outmaneuvered by Grace”, because “she’s been pushing this Homeowners Incentives bill, this morning she struck a deal. I withdraw my support for Bruiser’s bill, Homeowners Incentives comes to a vote. That was the price, and I paid it”.

Elle sounds really naive here: “that’s all just deals and trades and secrets. That’s not what people want” as if power-people would care about that. Not about real, common people, but this is that kind of movie, isn’t it? Where the good heart can win against politics? As if…

The team - bar Grace - goes to comfort her. They want to go on and try again before she gives up. They become her staff and with Marks and Hauser they file a “discharge petition” - which I had to look up on Google because it sounded negative, but it means to get it out of the Committee and directly to the vote. So a good thing, for them. They need 218 people to sign it; Marks and Hauser already did, so Elle needs to convince 216 more in three weeks. 

She called for her friends to help, Margot and Serena. Paulette too, of course. Paulette offers free fabulous haircuts and gets many votes (she can do hair too? She did nails at first).

The two girls do a cheerleading number with some interns. More votes. Rudd’s big supporter Bob is the one who wanted this bill to fail, and Rudd tells him Elle will never make it, “I will not be outmaneuvered by this silly little blonde”.

Elle believes it’s Grace working against her, and believes all Rudd’s words… until she finally talks with Grace and she understands the truth. They have a face to face. Elle calls the whole sisterhood and soon a sea of girls with their dogs invades Washington. They march, hand out fliers, make all the covers… they get ahead but need 15 more. Grace comes to help, because of course she does, because Elle is so good and pure that she touches hearts.

Grace blackmails Rudd so that Rudd has to let her speak in front of the whole congress. Elle talks about her hair… ending with the need to get involved in the process, to speak one’s voice. They applaud her, and with this end-of-movie speech she gets all the signatures she needed. Rudd signed too, Elle’s bill passed and “bowing to public pressure, test animals across the Country were released”.

Elle and Emmett get married, Paulette’s husband joins her, Sid has Bruiser’s mom now, Reena and Timothy get together, the congress members now talk and snap their fingers like Elle, and she plans to go live in the White House some day…

The end.

Elle Woods is Reese Witherspoon

Congresswoman Rudd is Sally Field

Grace is Regina King

Paulette is Jennifer Coolidge

Stanford Marks is Bruce McGill

Hauser is Dana Ivey

Reena is Mary Lynn Rajskub

Timothy is J. Barton

Sid Post is Bob Newhart

Emmett is Luke Wilson

P.s. Elle and Emmett watch “Mr Smith goes to Washington” *love* of course they do ^_^

ITA una bionda in carriera

Game night - 2018

It is entertaining, but I think when they try too much to come up with switch after switch it sometimes can become a mess… if you are someone like me who wants things to make sense. If you simply accept it then it’s fun.

To me, it was stupid. I enjoyed the first half, then it all went down.

Plot in details:

Annie and Max meet at a pub’s game night, and they’re both super-competitive and game lovers. They get married but can’t have children because he’s too stressed, most of all because his brother Brooks is back. Max does not get along well with Brooks but everyone likes him because he’s successful and charming, they say, but it’s embarrassing when Brooks tells all their friends embarrassing stories of him as a baby and he always wins.

After a game night at Max and Annie’s house, Brooks wins and invites them all to his place for the next game night. Brooks wants something special: one of them will be taken and the others will have to find him/her before he/she gets murdered. Not any murder mystery party, he found a company that “do it super real”, with legit actors. They won’t “know what’s real and what’s fake”.

An Fbi agent comes to warn them then two men break down the door and when Brooks complains they fight him. Everyone just watches the show. Brooks is bound and taken. They got some clues from the ‘agent’. Max and Annie cheat and follow his phone’s signal. They find him and Annie uses what she thinks is a fake gun to confront them all.

Ryan usually dates dumb bimbos, so to win he brought a smart woman this time, and now he’s the one who sounds dumb.

They go to the game company and Ryan tries to bribe the woman there with 10$, raising to 15 and then 16… because he only has 17$ on him. Back home, the real actors appear. The fake fbi agent is Ron who phones the company so now four of the six players know Brooks was taken by real criminals.

Brooks confesses to Max he’s actually a smuggler who “made a mistake” selling stuff for himself. They manage to escape, but Annie shot Max’s arm. That it was a real gun convinced them.

To let them get to safety, Brooks jumps out of the car and is taken. Annie tells here friends not to talk to the police and then watches a tutorial on how to take bullets out of one’s arm… until they realize there’s an exit hole, so she sews his arm.

Since he divorced their friend Debbie, they’ve been avoiding cop Gary at all costs but now they need his computer. Max gets the information he needs to get the fabergé egg he needs to exchange for his brother, but he bleeds onto the white carpet and onto the white dog, and when he tries to clean he makes a disaster, spraying blood everywhere, so he calls the others and they run away.

They go to this rich guy’s house where there’s bets on a fight club… 

They should concentrate on finding what they need instead they keep talking about their own problems. Max is not really sure he wants children because he thinks it would stop him having fun. Michelle and Kevin keep fighting about who was the celebrity she slept with the time they were on a break (yeah) and it turns out she thought he was Denzel Washington but it was just a guy who vaguely resembled him, so they’re fine again :-/

Ryan stops to watch the guys fighting and happens to see the egg and grabs it, but they see him so he runs. They start passing it as in American football until they all manage to escape (…yeah).

They accidentally break the egg but it was a fake, what matters is some list inside it. They go to the exchange where Brooks makes his speech on how Max was always better and more successful, why he’s cheated all his life and that’s how he won all games against him. 

Now, the story as we see it, comments at the end:

Just as the order to kill them all came, so did a police car: Gary, of course, who is a good cop and a good shot, but they keep him talking instead of checking the bad guys are dead, so he gets shot too, but it was all Gary’s plan for a fun game night. It was all fake - Annie used Brooks gun, it had real bullets - but Brooks talked about true things, and the list is a witness protection list. So now real bad guys arrive and shoot Gary for real and take Brooks away again. Max takes Brooks fast car and they stop the plane from taking off. Then Max gets stabbed in his injured arm and he still fights the bad guy and almost wins. Annie helps again, saving him… and now Brooks says it all went according to his plans, because he’s an idiot, it was not, it would be awful since Annie just saw a man die for real, sucked into the plane’s engine.

Three months later Annie is pregnant, and there are masked people outside…

Stupid movie, it became a mess at some point. So Gary used real criminals to get himself into the game and appear like a hero, but then the boss came and shot him injuring him for real…

And the scene at the airport was real, against real criminals, but then Brooks tried again to cheat saying it was all his plan so Max did not save his life for real…

And at the end they tell us that Brooks sold the list on the black market… and the fact that he sent a bit of money to them all warning them should make it ok…

This is all stupid, it’s just a low-toy-movie that aims to entertain those who do not think too much on what they’re watching… 

Could Gary know all the details about the egg and the list? Brooks told us about the egg and the Bulgarian and all the bad guys. If the guys that took Brooks and wanted the egg were part of Gary’s plan (they didn’t really hurt him, when they shot him it was just ketchup not real blood), then they were not really interested in the egg/list? If Gary did his research and paid some criminals to take them there so he could arrive and play the hero and save them all, how could he not know about the Bulgarian? 

I was rather enjoying it until Gary said it was his plan: from then on it becomes a mess. There had been a moment when I was sure Gary would be the one to rescue them after noticing the blood mess Max made of his room and dog, it would have been a good story; of course the rescue could not have been so quick as his fake rescue was, it would have taken longer and be more elaborate and involve them too, and it would have been good.

This way, one wonders why a real cop like him didn’t know or didn’t worry about a big bad guy like the Bulgarian, or how could he know about the egg/list, because if he didn’t then why those guys kept asking for it and how come he didn’t wonder on Max’s research on his computer…

And if the guys who took him were Gary’s plan, how could the Bulgarian get there at the right time?

I also wonder about Gary not being worried at all about finding blood all over his room, he did see it, he said so, and it didn’t worry him? 

ITA Game night indovina chi muore stasera?

Identity thief - 2013

I didn’t like it much… it can be funny and entertaining but I’m not really in that loud and silly kind of humour anymore. It’s not a bad movie at all, mind you, but for me once it’s enough.

Plot in details:

Sandy Patterson falls for the trick and gives all his personal information ot a woman on the phone, who steals his identity. She uses his money to drink a lot and buy everyone drinks. There’s a disgusting vomiting scene.

The real Sandy is not rich, he has a normal job as an accountant and has a family, two daughters and a child on the way. He gets even arrested, and when they see her mugshot they free him, but can’t do anything about her identity stealing. Still, there’s more so his life is still on the line, because he’s almost ruined. A friend who started his own firm offers him a good job, but he’d have to fire him if things don’t right themselves. This Daniel gives him a week so he goes to Florida to get her and bring her home, because that’s the only way they can arrest her…

He saw her picture, her height, so he thinks it’ll be easy, but she fights back, a lot. When other people come looking for her and they escape together, she can’t outrun him so she accepts to let him drive her to Denver. Because of course they can’t get on a plane with the same name.

They stoop to eat and she starts crying saying lies, he says nothing, so the waitress believes her, and they go on like that. She finds a man and brings him to their motel room. She wanted to drug him but he says sweet things so she doesn’t and they have sex, she takes his wallet and plans to run away, but his daughter calls, so she cries and comes back. Problem is, there are dangerous people after her. A man takes her away in a van so Sandy goes after them. A crazy car drive then their renta car is destroyed so they use his van, which breaks down too. A snake bites him but it seems to have no consequence; there’s no bus for three days though, so he’s run out of time… but he still has some money in his socks so he buys a car and they drive away. They have no more money for gas or anything so they compromise and he gives her the name of her old boss. She usesher card-burner but now she’s got money she wants a suite and stuff. She says she doesn’t know her real name because she was abandoned at a police station and “I had six of them by the time I was through foster care”

… come on, really? Is this possible? A child, any person should be given a name for their ID, how could she not have any ID? Or in America it’s so easy to change ID, simply go and ask documents for the name you choose? Or it is so easy only for an adult to get different documents for a minor? …

They get arrested for fraud but the guy of the van goes after them. She breaks down the car window with fist and feet. That guy runs her over but she’s good to go. The van guy is arrested, like the other two people after them. 

They finally get home so she meets his family.

Now they all sort of like her, think she’s not a bad person, and don’t really want to turn her in. 

She’s already gone in the morning anyway. But she did it herself, he didn’t want to turn her in but she gave a confession, voluntarily, “she took responsibility for everything that happened” so “you got your good name back”.

She ‘snuck away’ alone that morning “because I knew you weren’t gonna turn me iin. And this was the right thing”.

He has his life and job back.

A year later they take the new baby to visit Diana in prison, like they often do. He finds her real name through her fingerprints or something, and she’s Dawn… so she did have one but nobody told her, they just kept giving her new ones???

They help her with studies and they’ll see her whenever she gets out.

Sandy is Jason Bateman

Diana is Melissa McCarthy

Cornish is Jon Favreau

Trish is Amanda Peet

Daniel is John Cho

Skiptracer is Robert Patrick

ITA Io sono tu

3000 years of longing - 2022

Visually very nice, the story is quite common in the way that it has the obvious ‘beauty and the beast I let her go because I love her’ kind of ending, but still it’s nice that the main character is different, true to herself, and there’s a nice epilogue.

I must say to mind the title, because it is relevant. He kept longing for freedom for 3000 years, so it’s not easy or right to judge him for not caring what his wishes can cause. It is also quite touching, like Zefir’s story is heartbreaking, luckily they don’t dwell too much, he just narrates the story and move on, but it still touches you deep, especially as a woman. 

It’s not clear to me why Alithea kept seeing other Djinns while  in Instanbul before she found the small bottle with her Djinn, what’s up with that? Hallucinations? It’s a bit weird, I don’t get it. 

Anyway, Alithea is a scholar (narratology, I didn’t even know one could make a living out of it). One day, in a shop in Instanbul, she’s attracted by a small bottle. She cleans it and opens it in her hotel room and a Djinn comes out. He says he’s been trapped for a long long time and he needs her to express there wishes to free him. But they must be real wishes: she tries to wish for a cup of tea and stuff like that, safe wishes, but it won’t work. 

Thing is, she’s an intellectual, content with her life, and she knows how these stories usually go, there’s always a trick somewhere, so he tells her his story starting when he was free: he loved the Queen of Sheba, they were also somehow related, but she didn’t love him. King Solomon had some magic powers that allowed him to pass all her tests and win her over, and he got rid of our Djinn by trapping him in a bottle, that a bird threw at sea. Many years later Gulten finds it. She’s a young slave dreaming of the handsome prince Mustafa, so she wished for him to want her, and then to get pregnant, and she let everybody know she carried his child. The king’s favourite woman wants the throne for her own children, so she makes him believe that Mustafa is plotting againt him, so Suleiman has both his son and Gulten killed. She never expressed her third wish, so he could not be free, he simply became invisible, kind of faded away, but kept trying to lure someone to the bottle.

He almost succeeded with Prince Murad, but he was too young and couldn’t lift the heavy stone hiding it. Murad grew up, went to war and became hardened, blood thirsty. His mother kept him drunk for a while, then had people tell him stories, but they were all killed because he wasn’t interested. Then a man succeeded, and Murad grew so very fond of him that when eventually he died Murad’s grief was too much. The Djinn tried again to lure him to the bottle, but Murad was too weak to even get in the room.

Alithea questions if he cared at all what such a man could wish for, but no, the djinn only cared about his freedom.

After Murad died, his mother put his brother on the throne; Ibrahim loved his harem of overweight women, and his favourite one was free to walk everywhere - totally naked, for some reason…

So the djinn lured her in the room, she slipped and fell on the stone, breaking it, and thus finding the bottle. Desperate, the djinn appeared and began pressuring her for one wish, but she didn’t trust him so she wished for him to be imprisoned again. 

Back to square one, in a bottle at sea.

Some time later, in Turkey, the bottle is found inside a fish. A merchant gave it to his young wife - who became his wife at 12 years old and spent her life in her room, where she had to satisfy him whenever he so chose.

This Zefir was a genius, an inventor, a visionary like Leonardo, but as a woman nobody knew about it. Still, she asked for knowledge. She craved all knowledge, her brain could never rest, it seems, but the djinn grew to love her and stopped her from making a third wish because he didn’t want to leave her. She grew more and more frustrated until her brain snapped and she wished to forget she had ever met him, and she did.

Alithea is moved by this story, and finds herself wishing for something that might be too much to ask. She wants him to love her like he loved Zefir, and so he tries. He goes with her to London, where he lives in her house, visits her at work or goes around learning everything about this new world so different from what he once knew. But things can’t go on like this, because his nature is electromagnetic and London is not good for him. 

When Alithea finds him so weak, sort of like a statue turning to dust, she uses her second wish so that he can talk to her. He tries to go on but she understands now; she thanks him for trying but love can’t be magicked, and she apologizes for her first wish. Her third and final one is for him to go back to where he belongs. Of course. 

And  he goes, he can’t stay in London. 

Just as she did when her ex husband left her, she puts his things in a box and puts it in the basement, and then, just as she once did with her childhood imaginary friend, she writes all about him.

She burned the first, but the djinn is real so e won’t burn this one. She’s back to her life, and quite content, also because the djinn has promised to come meet her from time to time, for as long as she’s alive, and he does. 

We see that three years later he appears in front of her, they hold hands, and walk together. 

This is enough for her, because it’s not as powerful as passionate love, but it is real, and it is love, and it is good.

Djinn is Idris Elba

Alithea is Tilda Swinton

Prince Mustafa is Matteo Bocelli

Gulten is Ece Yuksel  (I don’t know how to make the u with two dots on top)

Hurrem is Megan Gale

Zefir is Burcu Golgedar

Quantum of solace - 2008

 I liked it, it’s my favourite Bond movie. 

It’s how Bond deals with the pain both from Vesper’s death and her betrayal. At first of course he pretends there’s no pain at all, because that’s the kind of person he is, but then he meets agirl set on revenge and they kind of process it together. It’s a long paht, but good.

It starts with a car chase in Italy. I don’t know who is in the black Alfa chasing, but the Aston in front is Bond’s, he’s taking Mr White to Siena. M is there and they interrogate him.

No title song, of course, this one is “another way to die”. Credits: “Daniel Craig as Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 in Quantum of solace”

The Cia is not too happy that they couldn’t have LeChiffre alive, but they should not complain to Bond or Mi6, they should have gotten him before he took Bond and Vesper. M is always rough and tough, but she does worry “you look like hell, when’s the last time you slept?”. Bond almost smiled at that.

M shows him pictures of Yusef, Vesper’s boyfriend, “the one who was abducted in Morocco, the one she was trying to save”. A body turned up with his wallet but otherwise not identifiable. 

M checked and can confirm it was not him. She used a lock of his hair that Vesper ha kept in her apartment. Bond: “I wouldn’t have thought Vesper the sentimental type” which only shows that he can not read everyone as well as he thinks, because this is not at all shocking. For an entire movie she wore the same necklace because her boyfriend had given it to her, she wore it with work clothes, with the elegant dress, with everything. It seems sentimental to me.

M asks him if she can trust him because “well, it’d be a pretty cold bastard who didn’t want revenge for the death of someone he loved” but he’s like ice: “you don’t have to worry about me, I’m not gonna go chasing him, he’s not important. And neither was she”.

Mr White does not answer their questions, instead laughs and taunts Bond: “the real shame is that if she hadn’t killed herself, we would have had you too. I think you would have done anything for her”.

When M acts sure that he’ll talk, sooner or later, he laughs because she doesn’t know who he works with: “you really don’t know anything about us. It’s so amaziing because we are on the other side thinking ‘oh the Mi6, the Cia, they’re looking over our shoulders, they’re listening to our conversations’, and the truth is, you don’t even know we exist” . Still laughing he adds, “the first thing you shouldknow about us is that we have people everywhere”, and come to think about it, this fact connects this movie with Licence to kill, when Bond was on a revenge mission and the bad guy escaped because a cop betrayed (and of course Dr No but that’s a given). 

It’s agent Mitchell that betrays here, he shoots the agent closer to him, I think, and then has to fight Bond and try to escape him through the crowd of Siena’s palio, but of course Bond gets him and kills him.

M is upset because Mitchell “worked for me for eight years” and he passed the lie detector test every year. Also, 5 of those years as her personal bodyguard and she has no clue as to why he did it. Of course with all the ruckus, Mr White escaped. 

M’s people find a connection and give her a name: Slate, at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, so Bond starts there. He checks Slate’s apartment, has to fight him and ends up killing him. Luckily the hotel was holding a briefcase for Slate so he takes it now. A girl insists he enters her car, expecting a geologist, and it turns out Slate was hired to kill her. 

He follows her to the docks where she confronts her ex Dominic who admits to try to have her killed and she yells that she was helping him but Dominic thinks otherwise. The real geologist is now dead, so he can’t sell her information anymore. Whatever all this was about.

Dominic knew all along that she was with him “to get to general Medrano”, a “deposed dictator”. Dominic assures Medrano that he can help him, “we’ve already begun destabilizing the government, we’ll supply the private security, we’ll pay off the right officials, and we have 26 Countries ready to officially recognize your new Bolivian government”, his organization can give him his Country in a week, in return for a desert that to Medrano appears worthless. 

Dominic also gives him the girl, Camille, “just promise me to drop her over the side when you’re done”. 

Seeing her on Medrano’s boat, Bond rushes to get her out, despite her protests.

Cia Greg Beam makes a deal with Dominic to do nothing against his Bolivian coup in exchange for “the lease to any oil found”. Dominic also asks Beam to get rid of Bond for him.

Felis is not happy about any of it. 

Austria. At the opera, Dominic’s organization members communicate through ear pieces, hidden in the crowd. Bond got a ear piece too and listens to them for a while then he talks, to let them know he was listening, and checks every person that goes away. Bond kills a “special branch” man and M calls him back, and restricts his movements when he refuses. So he’s without credit cards. How did he get to Talamone from Austria, then?

Anyway, he goes to Mathis. He was innocent after all, so Mi6 bought him a villa as an apology, it seems.

Bond asks for his help and for Mathis to come with him. To Bolivia.

Miss Fields meets him at the airport, with orders to send him back to London. Bond refuses the hotel she chose because it’s for normal people, he only accepts the rich treatment.

They sleep together then they attend, invited, Dominic Greene charity gala. Bond meets Camille and wants information from her They drive away and are stopped by the police, a set up, someone put Mathis injured body in his truck; Mathis dies in Bond’s arms, after asking him to stay. Mathis asks him if everything’s forgiven between the two of them, and then says Vesper “gave everything for you”, asking Bond to forgive her and himself, before he dies. His murder is blamed on Bond.

Bond told M that he won’t stop until he finds who tried to kill her, and now he tells Camille that Dominic “tried to kill a friend of mine” - “your mother?” - “she likes to think so”.

There’s a plane-chase. Later Camille tells him why she’s after Medrano. When she was a small child, general Medrano came and shot her father, “did things” to her mom and sister and then killed them and set the house on fire. Now Bond apologizes to her for pulling her off Medrano’s boat. He admits he lost somebody and hasn’t yet caught the responsible people, and they kind of share a moment of solidarity.

They discover that Greene is not after the oil like everybody thinks, “he wants the water” because that’s what the world can’t really do without. 

They walk to the hotel. M is there, Fields is dead, covered in oil, with her lungs full of oil. 

Both the British and Americans want Bond to leave, because they lust after this oil they wrongly think exist. Bond escapes and M only wants Tanner to find out where he goes, because she trusts him and is sure he’s on to something. 

Bond has a chat with Felix, to get the location. Medrano signs the papers that give Greene the desert he wanted, and right after that Greene presents him with another contract: “my organization own more than 60% of Bolivia’s water supply, so this contract states that your new government will use us as utilities provider” at double the price as before. Medrano has to sign or die. 

Bond comes looking for Greene and shows Camille where it is so she can go after Medrano, because that’s her fight. 

He fights Greene while she’s face to face with Medrano. The hotel goes on fire; they both fight hard, she manages to shoot him but then she goes in a state of panic because of the fire. 

He goes to her, to hug her, rather thinking they’ll die together and ready to shoot her to save her from her worst nightmare of burning alive when a way out presents itself and they both get out through the wall he blew up. 

Bond gets Greene who apparently answers all his questions, tells him “what you wanteed to know about Quantum”, and Bond promises to let him go… which he does. He leaves him in the desert with a can of oil and nothing more.

Camille says she’s fine, “but I keep thinking, he’s dead, now what?” So he makes a suggestion. “The dam we saw will have to come down, and there’ll be others, too. Someone who worked for Greene might be of help” - “Not a bad idea”.

She looks at him and say “I wish I could set you free, but your prison is in there” touching his head. She gives him a kiss and goes away.

Bond is in Russia, waiting in an apartment. Yusef’s apartment.

He’s with a girl from the Canadian Intelligence service, Corrine, because that’s what he does; Bond talks to her first: “You work in Canadian Intelligence? It’s all right, I know you do. And knowing this man, I’d guess you have access to some very sensitive material which you’re gonna be forced to give up. His life will be threatened and because you love him you won’t hesitate. It’s a beautiful necklace, did he give it to you? I have one just like it, he gave it to a friend of mine, someone very close to me” and “Corrine, I suggest you leave now. You contact your people, and you tell them to check their seals. They have a leak. Do it now please. This man and I have some unfinished business”. She thanks him and goes out.

M is surprised he left him alive, and tells him Greene was found in the desert with motor oil in his stomach, and shot in the head because he talked. He tells M she was right about Vesper.

M: “I need you back” - “I never left” and he goes away leaving the necklace on the ground, in the snow.

James Bond is Daniel Craig

Camille is Olga Kurylenko

Dominic Greene is Mathieu Amalric

M is Judi Dench

Mathis is Giancarlo Giannini

Strawberry fields is Gemma Arterton   (I can see now why she refused to say her name)

Felix Leiter is Jeffrey Wright

Tanner is Rory Kinnear

Gemma is Lucrezia Lante della Rovere

Yusef is Simon Kassianides

Corrine is Stana Katic

“James Bond will return”

Octopussy - 1983

It starts with Bond turning his common country clothes inside out and becoming a Spanish Colonel with fake moustaches. When he’s caught by the real colonel and taken away, the girl working with him distracts the soldiers with her legs so Bond can free himself and jump on her car. It wasn’t really pulling a horse carriage, inside there’s a small plane - under a horse camouflage - so he can fly away. I guess the mission is accomplished when the place blows up. Bond has to stop at a gas station when he runs out of fuel…

The title song is “all time high”, of course it’s not the film title, what good song could…

Opening titles: Roget Moore as Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 in Octopussy. Lyrics by Tim Rice.

We see a 00 agent who is as good as 007 but not as lucky because when they throw a knife at him, they get him good. They always miss Bond.

This is East Berlin and he still manages to enter the “Residence of the British Ambassador” to die there but only after delivering an object; the jeweled Fabergé eggs were made “as an Easter gift for the Russian Royal family”, all very rare and priceless, and “this one contains a model of the Imperial State Coach” and it’s really beautiful, but a fake nonetheless. Their art expert shows them that the real one is at Sotheby’s, and the 4th “to turn up at auction this year” from an anonymous seller. Now this “near perfect forgery” will unravel a huge threat to the world: a Russian general fimly opposes Nato proposals of “mutual disarmament”, he calls these ideas “timid, outdated and unrealistic policies”, he thinks they’re so superior that with all their divisions they could easily win evey battle.

He believes “the West is decadent and divided” which is not untrue but he’s still mad.

He rejects Gogol’s words that the US would reply with nuclear weapons and that’s the talk of a fool. Good Gogol thinks they should not risk war but devote their energy to their own “pressing domestic problems”.

Since the Committee wants peace they listen to Gogol, but general Orlov doesn’t give up.

Orlov’s face at the Committee… he was really disagreeable but his pouting face was comical :-p

Bond and the art expert Fanning go to the auction to “try and spot the seller”. M worries the Russians might want “to raise currencyy for covert operations abroad or for payoffs” and he’s right, only it’s just one Russian.

At the “Kremlin Art Repository” expert Lenkin is worried: there will be “an unscheduled inventory in two days” and they’ve lost the fake egg - 009 got it - so Orlov orders to get “the genuine egg back”.

Bond joins the auction for the egg - gold, saspphires and diamonds - raising the price to “half a million pounds”, bought by Kamal Kha. Fanning knows his as a seller, “marginal quality from dubious sources”. Bond was sure he had to buy it no matter the cost. Of course Bond also switched the eggs so he wouldn’t have paid if he’d got it.

Now the egg is “government property”.

Bond goes to India and meets his contact when the man starts playing the James Bond theme music :lol: Vijay introduces him to Sadruddin, “head of Section”. Vijay likes tennis and knows Kamal as an “exiled Afghan Prince” which explains why his guards obey him so much, I guess. Kamal lives “up on the hill” at the “Monsoon Palace”. Kamal keeps winning at backgammon because he cheats, so Bond uses his dices and beats him. He had already let Kamal’s lady friend Magda know he was the man at the auction, and as if that wasn’t enough he shows him the egg now. Kamal is not amused: “spend the money quickly, Mr Bond” :lol: and neither is his guard Gobinda who turns the dices to ash in his fit :-p

Vijay’s taxi is one of those things that look like an ape piaggio but without doors or container. They’re attacked but Bond fights using the things around him, like hot coals, a bed of nails and even a sword he takes from a man’s throat… and for once that a knife hits him, it actually hits a stack of money in his jacket… then Bond throws the money to the people so they gather and slow the bad guys enough to hide. They meet Q who is “most unhappy”, “sent out here at a moment’s notice, no proper facilities”… 

Bond: “someone seems to have stuck a knife in my wallet”. Q: “they missed yoou, what a pity” :lol:

And I like that there’s both men and women working in the Q department, but of course if there’s sewing to do they call the girl to do it. At least Q calls him out on his “adolescent antics” when Bond points a camera on a girl’s breasts.

Magda shows up to sleep with Bond in order to steal his Fabergé egg. Bond lets her becausehe and Q put a chip inside it so when Bond is at Kamal’s palace he can listen in on his conversation with Orlov. But now there’s the scene I don’t understand: Orlov compliments Kamal on the quality of his fakes because it’s Kamal who provides the duplicates made “according to Lenkin’s specifications”… 

Their deal is that Orlov gets the money and Kamal keeps the genuine jewellery… and then Orlov says “this fake has caused enough trouble” and breaks it, revealing the chip inside…

So, Kamal gave them the auction-egg to give to Lenkin before the inventory, believing it the real one, and nobody noticed that it was a fake,, not even Lenkin. Bond left the real one to his government and got a new perfect replica from Q who can do anything, and Orlov smashes it thinking it’s the one 009 got. 

It was a bit hard to believe that nobody noticed they had bought a fake egg, but after all people are superficial, that was supposed to be the real egg so to them it was real and didn’t even look at it… 

Seeing the chip starts a search for Bond who hides in a bag as one of the corpses ready to be taken out… yeah… someone sure gets a fright when the ‘corpse’ gets … then they hunt him, on the back of elephants as the English liked it, poor animals; Bond escapes the men and also the snakes and the tiger by swinging on the jungle vines like Tarzan until he reaches a tourist boat.

Sadruddin and Vijay tell him of the “blue ringed Octopus” that Bond saw on a boat and tattooed on Magda’s back. Her “little octopussy” and that’s also the name that Saruddin gives him because no one knows her real name, the woman leader of “ an old secret order of female bandits and smugglers”. Bond goes disguised as a crocodile but is soon found. Octopussy tells him of Major Dexter Smythe, Bond was “sent out to arrest him” because he never came back from a secret service mission and the gold was never found, and when Bond found him, they talked and Bond gave him a day to put his things in order before arresting him. She says “he committed suicide rather than face the disgrace of a court martial”, and also that he was her father and she thanks him “for giving him an honorable alternativc”…

Kamal had also gone to her with the egg taken from Bond, thinking they got the stolen fake back…(didn’t Orlov break it???), I don’t know why since he plans to take it back with him. Now Kamal is not happy to find him having a drink with Miss Smythe, “you have a nasty habit of surviving”. 

I’ll call her Smythe because the other name is awful, it sounds ridiculous. These Bond people were really obsessed with the word pussy, they take every chance they get to use it.

 She likes it because her father used it for her pet name, but she was a kid. 

She tells Bond that “smuggling is no concern of the secret service” and “I’ve violated no British law” then sendshim to sleep. Alone.

There’s only women on her little island; there are many women “looking for a guru, spiritual discipline, who knows what?” And she says “I train them, give them a purpose, a sisterhood and a way of life” and also that she has “diversified into shipping, hotels, carnivals and circuses”.

Kamal hires men to deal with Bond without harming ‘the woman’, and they attack at night. They kindly give Bond and Smythe enough time, because of course they sleep together, they “are two of a kind”, and the they kill Vijay who was watching the island and then they try to kill Bond. She takes a gun against the men but she probably believes Bond dead when he ends up in the water and does not come up. He’s actually fleeing under his crocodile disguise. Q tells him about Vijay’s last words, that Kamal’s men killed him, because Gobinda was with them.

Some people in Octopussy Circus are working for Kamal. The knives-throwing brothers killed 009. Now Bond goes to Berlin, the circus is there. Smythe thinks they’re just smuggling jewels and they’ll sell them in Zurich, but Orlov takes them away and puts a bomb in the circus train car instead. It’ll look like an American bomb exploded ‘accidentally’, so all Countries will insist on disarmament. General Gogol is investigating, he found out about the fake jewels and is now here to retrieve the real jewelry from Orlov’s car and try to stop him. They have to shoot him. 

I have no idea why Orlov tried to get on the train.

So, the train takes the bomb to the circus. They were in West, now they’re in East Germany, I think, and it is near a US base? Or at the base, maybe.

Bond disguises himself as a clown - with all the make up and stuff, done so quick - to geet in because the guards don’t listen to him and want to stop him. Bond tells a general about a bomb and tries to convince Smythe that she’s been double-crossed by showing her a jewel. Everyone is on him, he can’t get to the bomb, until she shoots at a lock revealing to everyone the bomb. Only a few seconds time, but Bond stop it. 

Back to India, all the women do a great job of attacking Kamal’s place while Q and Bond arrive on a hot air balloon. Smythe is Kamal’s hostage, they take her along on their plane and Bond takes a hold of it and is on the plane. Gobinda is not happy to be ordered to go outside while they’re flying to kill Bond, and of course he’s the one who will fall. The plane got damaged during the fight, I think, so it goes down and crashes, boom. 

Bond and Smythe jump out of course.

Mission accomplished, so Bond of course stays  behind with the girl as usual instead of reporting to his superiors.

James Bond is Roger Moore

Octopussy is Maud Adams

Kamal is Louis Jourdan

Magda is Kristina Wayborn

Gobinda is Kabir Bedi

Orlov is Steven Berkoff

Q is Desmond Llewelyn

M is Robert Brown

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

Gogol is Walter Gotell

Vijay is Vijay Amritra

P.s.

The scene when Vijay used his tennis racket while driving his taxi to fend off the attackers was funny;

The credits end with “James Bond will  return in From a view to a kill”

I agree with Bond that the “stuffed sheep’s head” did not look inviting at all, as it wasn’t watching Kamal take out one eye and eat it…

Moneypenny had a new assistant, Penelope Smallbone, and Bond gives to her the flowers he brought and one to Moneypenny. Penelope knows him because Moneypenny described him “in nauseating detail”.

ITA Octopussy operazione piovra

Moonraker - 1979

 I never liked Bond’s space scenes, but Jaws was back and his scenes were fun.

Bond ends his previous mission when his latest conquest draws a gun on him, on a plane. The pilot parachutes out but Bond is thrown out without one so he wrestles him an opens that one. Jaws tried to kill him but his chute won’t open. He lands on a circus tent.

When Bond tells Moneypenny he’s late because he “fell out of an airplane without a parachute” she thinks he’s joking. 

The Moonraker is a new type of space shuttle that was arriving “on loan from the Americans on the back of a 747” but two men took the Moonraker away destroying the plane. Since there’s no trace of the shuttle, and these shuttles are built by Drax Industries, that’s where Bond starts: California.

Corinne is one of the pilots, Drax is very very rich, “what he doesn’t own, he doesn’t want”. 

Drax Residence is like a castle, “every stone brought from France” and he even bought the Eiffel Tower “but the French government refused him an export permit”.

Drax pays for the Astronauts training program and considers “afternoon tea” Briatin’s “one indisputable contribution to Western civilization”. I guess he means the hour and the cakes, because it’s not really like tea comes from England…

One meeting is enough for Drax to want him dead, he tells his servant “see that some harm comes to him”, and he’ll try again and again, from “the centrifuge training” that “simulates the gravity force you feel when shot into space” when he put it on so high a level Bond really suffers and survives only by disabling it with one of Q’s gadgets, to their fight in the Museum of glassblowing, causing damage worth millions. It was painful to watch, to see all those beautiful things go to pieces.

There’s also Dr Goodhead who is a woman and this surprises Bond. Holly Goodhead is not a wanna-be astronaut, she’s “fullytrained, on loan from Nasa, the Space Administration”. She’ll soon be revealed as Cia, she’s probably both since she’ quite capable and at ease on a space shuttle.

The Moonraker is “capable of being launched into space by rockett, orbiting the Earth and reentering the atmosphere to land like any conventinal aircraft”. At first Bond wonders if she had a hand in his disadventure with the centrifuge machine but they’ll eventually join forces.

Corinne is useful to Bond, he seeks information and a kiss is enough to convince her to help him. They sleep together then he wants to know “what goes on here besides the manifacture of a moonraker” so he opens Drax’ safe and takes pictures of his documents with a small camera with 007 written on it. Because of this,, Drax not only fires her, but sets his dogs on her, the poor thing - I wonder how many girls are dead because of Bond…

When Drax is outside clay shooting, he wants Bond to try: he misses the clay target but he does shoot the sniper on a tree…

In Venice to check out Venini Glass - they provide first class glass for Drax, of course: Merano - Bond moves around on a gondola, and when the poor man is killed Bond uses its ‘gadgets’ to turn it quite challenging, ending with making it a hovercraft that can come out of the water and move around Piazza San Marco. When Bond checks out a place - I don’t know how he learned of it - he finds out that it’s a lab dealing with a highly toxic substance. He takes a sample before he knows what it is, and not knowing he moved things, so the men in there break a vial and die, but when Bond takes M and the Minister there, there’s nothing, no lab anymore, only Drax’s apartment. They entered with gas masks and Drax plays it cool but firm: “not being English I sometimes find your sense of humour rather difficult to follow” and Minister Grey is all apologies.

Of course Bond took that sample for Q to analyse, with “extreme caution” because “it is lethal” so M at least believes him. 

In Rio, Manuela is there to assist him, and she does by providing useful information other than Bond’s usual entertainment. Bond and Goodhead slept together in Venice and now join forces.

Bond killed Cha so Drax needs a new man and hires Jaws! He tries to kill Manuela and when Rio dancers pass by he lifts her up and moves her around like a doll; he tries to bite her but Bond saves her first and then other dancers drag Jaws away. Then Jaws stops the cable car with Bond and Goodhead in it and they fight. When she and Bond escape Jaws crashes but is unharmed of course. 

A pretty blond helps him and they go away hand in hand :-) it’s all very cute. She reminds me of a colourless Harley Quinn. She’sgot two braids and a white dress, glasses and a dark red lipstick, and must be stronger than she looks :-p

When they’re on solid ground again, Holly kissed Bond for saving her, and when strange men arrive Bond only thinks of sending them away so he can have sex with Holly, and he turns his back on them… that’s stupid, and of course they’re captured. He frees himself but she’s taken away. 

Q confirms “it’s a highly toxic nerve gas that appears to have no effect on animals” - which makes me wonder how did he test this theory - it’s developed from a very rare orchid. Bond goes to where it lives and it’s another boat chase. Now, I know they didn’t care about these things back then, and many don’t care even now, but I don’t like that Bond ejects many mines until the chasing boat hits one and blows up… what about the other mines? They’re still there, waiting for innocent boats? 

Jaws is on another chasing boat and when Bond escapes with a hang glider, un deltaplano, Jaws falls down the waterfall with his boat. 

Bond reaches a place with many pretty girls: a trap throw him in the water where he has to kill the python to survive. Jaws is there but so is Drax who stops him. “Mr Bond, you defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you” … and yet now he doesn’t kill him but takes him along, and eventually will explain his plan in details. The orchid is what wiped out an entire civilization because its pollen causes sterility. Drax “improved” it and now it’s lethal, but only for people, not plants or animals. Drax launches six moonrakers - he took that one back because he needed it, one of his six was faulty - to bring many young, beautiful couples on a secret space station. Drax plans to kill everyone no Earth and then “your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image”. 

Once again Bond is not shot, instead he’s reunited with Holly and left to burn under Drax’s shuttle 5; of course they escape and replace the pilots on shuttle 6. This space station is not visible on any radar, “an entire city in space” so they disable its “radar-jamming system” after docking. Now it’s visible to Earth and the US launch their own shuttle right away to investigate…

Jaws is also there, with his blond girl, listening to Drax talking of “a new super-race, a race of perfect physical specimens”, until Bond asks out loud what we were thinking : “and of course, anyone not measuring up to your standards of physical perfection will be exterminated”. Drax: “certainly” …Jaws hears this and he’s not so stupid as to not understand the problem… his girl looks at him, and smiles at him… and Jaws stops obeying Drax and rebels instead. So now Jaws fights with Bond and Holly against the others. When Drax wants to destroy the Us spacecraft, Bond pushes a button very conveniently labelled “emergency stop”, which also stops gravity. Now there’s a space battle with lasers, Drax people against the American crew, and they also dock and enter. They all fight together, Bond kills Drax. 

The 47 globes with the poison will be destroyed with the station harming no onne. Bond tells all ally soldiers to retreat with their shuttle. Bond and Holly take moonraker 5 because it has a laser and they use it to track and destroy the 3 globes already launched.

Jaws can indeed speak because now he makes a toast: “to us”, drinking with his girl. She tells him something and he helps Bond releasing their shuttle because it’s “docking release system is jammed”.

Holly pilots and Bond shoots the globes. Holly looked worried leaving the couple there but Bond reassures her: “don’t worry, they’ll make it. It’s only 100 miles to Earth” and indeed we hear that “colonel Scott reports picking up two survivors from the space station, a tall man and a short blonde woman”… but she’s not that short compared to normal people, only next to him, but Bond also looks short compared to him! Anyway, I guess this also mean that all those young people died… or maybe not, maybe they had pilots alive to come back to Earth on the same moonrakers they used to go up…

Mission accomplished; when Nasa establishes a connection with Bond and Holly’s shuttle, “patched directly to the White House and Buckingham Palace”, an audiovisual of course, they all see them in a very compromising and inappropriate position… of course… 

We see Gogol again, complaining “how can I sleep? Nothing but problems, problems, problems”… but he’s there with a pretty girl…

Opening titles start with Roger Moore as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker.

James Bond is Roger Moore

Holly Goodhead is Lois Chiles

Jaws is Richard Kiel

Corinne is Corinne Clery

M is Bernard Lee

Q is Desmond Llewelyn

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

Manuela is Emily Bolton

General Gogol is Walter Gotell

Dolly is Blanche Ravalec   - but I had to ask google because I didn’t know Dolly was the name of Jaws’ pretty blonde.

ITA Moonraker operazione spazio

The spy who loved me - 1977

A pretty standard Bond movie of the times. The one where Jaws is introduced.

A nice moment was when the Russian wanted to call their best agent, Triple X, and we see a man and a woman in bed but when the phone rings he moves away and she answers :-) too bad that in the film she didn’t really do much. She was there all the time, daring and determined, but she didn’t really do anything.

Only at the end she shows she’s as good as Scaramanga when she opens the bottle by shooting at the cork… she was much closer than he was, but she wasn’t even looking…

It starts with both a British and a Russian nuclear-submarine going missing, the Ranger and the Potemkin. Bond was in Austria - with a girl, that’s how his missions go - when a message comes out of his watch and he leaves immediately. “James, I need you” - “so does England” …

She lets the men outside know and they chase Bond on skiis. One of them is the agent that was with TripleX. It’s a fast and acrobatic chase but of course Bond wins.

The opening titles show “Roger Moore in Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 in The spy who loved me” and the theme song this time is not the title, the song is “nobody does it better” … :-/

I mean, Carly Simon:ok, the song: no.

TripleX is Major Anya Amasova. When the Comrade General tells her that Agent Sergei Barsov has been killed she’s very hurt, and he’s very sympathetic. 

Bond has the same mission, and they both start from Cairo. The villain this time is Karl Stromberg who has a laboratory in Sardegna’s waters. We see him kill a girl, his secretary or something, because she “has bee attempting to sell the plans of our tracking project to competing world powers”, by dropping her in water among sharks. Since Dr Bechmann and Professor Markovitz have finished developing the submarine tracking system, he kills them, thus saving himself the 20 million dollars payment. He orders his men, Sandor and Jaws, to recover “the microfilm copy of the tracking system”. 

Jaws is very tall and big, with metal teeth that he uses to crash locks and stuff, and also to kill. He bites them to death.

He’salso very very strong, he can wreck a car with his bare hands with ease, and he can keep one still equally easily. Sandor is ordered to obey him… so I guess jaws can talk… I don’t think I ever heard him utter a single word…

Bond gains somem starting information from a man he knows in Egypt, and even though he was in a hurry he accepts to stay the night when the man presents him with a girl at his disposal, as a gift Bond has no trouble at all accepting.  :-/

Bond is to meet with Fekkesh and eventually Kalba. At Fekkesh’s place he tells the woman there he lives much longer by being suspicious, and yet he never is, is he? Or careful, he’s never careful as well. He’s still living only because he’s got an infinite reserve of luck and a long queue of girls ready to die for him. Like here, Bond kisses her, she sees a man ready to shoot him, she yells no and covers him with her body dying in his place. He throws her body down (well, on a bed because there’s a living actress there) and chases the assassin without a second’s hesitation. He fights Sandor and kills him. Fekkesh is later killed by Jaws.

Bond and Amasova meet at the Mujabor Club: he knows she drinks Bacardi on the rocks, she knows he drinks vodka martini, shaken not stirred. They’re spies so of course they know all about ech other (still, secret services shouldn’t also have, and keep, secrets?)

“Commander James Bond, recruited to the British Secret Service from the Royal Navy, licensed to kill, and has done so on numerous occasions. Many lady friends, but married only once. Wife killed…” and he stops her there, acknowledging she does know her stuff but not wanting to talk about it, sensitive about certain things.

Mr Kalba is the man with the microfilm and they both want it, but Jaws gets him first so they follow Jaws, hiding in his van. Jaws is a professional killer, and they both know him from their records. She warns Bond from an attack, and helps stop his and Jaws fight, saving his life. Bond makes continuous remarks about women drivers while if she can’t move is because Jaws is holding the van…

Just when Bond thinks she escaped with the microfilm, he finds her and General Gogol with M (his “opposite number in the kgb”). Both Governments agreed to work together “to find out what happened to our submarines”. She has the microfilm but Bond examined it already. A deeper examination leads them to Stromberg. Jaws attack Anya - I guess because she got the microfilm from him before - and Bond helps her throwing him out of the train. When they arrive there’s a car for them - thanks to her we know Q is Major Boothroyd.

They have a hotel booked as Robert Sterling, booked by Moneypenny with two bedrooms. They visit Stromberg as a marine biologist and his wife. Stromberg is fascinated by the sea. “Why do we seek to conquer space when seven-tenth of our universes remains to be explored? The world beneath the sea”.

Of course Bond also knows everything about fish to pass as a biologist…

Stromberg plans to have “an underwater city”, “the only hope for the future of mankind”. 

Jaws is there so Stromberg knows who they are. Once ashore, our duo is followed by a motorcycle, then a car then a helicopter. Bond stops them all and drives the car into the sea; the car turns submarine and Anya uses the car’s button against those that attack them now: “I stole the blueprints of this car two years ago”, and it turns car again when they come out on a beach.

When it comes out that Bond was in Austria, so it was him who killed Sergei, “the man I loved”, she says she’ll kill him “when this mission is over”, but of course she won’t.

They use a submarine to reach Stromberg, but they’re taken like the first two: a huge tanker got it.

Anya “has never failed on a mission” just like Bond. Stromberg caught the submariines, of course, but the crews are still alive. The first two submarines, with a new crew, are sent to attack New York and Moscow, and “global destruction will follow, the new era will begin”.

This is not blackmail, he wants  “to change the face of history” by creating a new world beneath the sea. When Stromberg goes there - he called it Atlants of course - he takes Anya with him, then ties her up after giving her a more succint dress to replace her uniform.

Bond frees himself and the detained crews and they all fight; Bond takes a detonator out of a missile to get into their “impregnable” operaitons room. Bond and the others change the submarines target so they destroy each other. They escape with their own submarine: orders arrive to “destroy Atlantis fast” but Bond wants to go save Anya. He gets there, avoids the sharks trap easily, avoids being shot by Stromberg’s long-table-length-gun and shoots him through it himself. This time Bond wants to make really sure because he keeps shooting him…

Jaws attacks him, and Bond stops him by using a huge magnet to raise him up - attached to his teeh - and drop him with the sharks… not enough to kill him though, Jaws bites the shark!

Bond goes to free Anya whose outfit at least seems to have pants. 

We see Jaws swimming away, but I have no idea of his fate at this point (but we’ll meet him again)

Bond and Anya have sex but are surprised in bed by both their superiors…

James Bond is Roger Moore

Major Anya Amasova is Barbara Bach

M is Bernard Lee

Q is Desmond Llewelyn

Miss Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

Stromberg is Curt Jurgens

Jaws is Richard Kiel

General Gogol is Walter Gotell

Sandor is Milton Reid

Naomi is Carolilne Munro (the girl on the helicopter)

The end of the spy who loved me, James Bond will return in For your eyes only

ITA agente 007 la spia che  mi amava

For your eyes only - 1981

Well… to be honest I’m not really sure here of some details… but the story was ok enough, Bond-wisse, and the girl was actually a decent and quite capable sort. Shocking.

The plot: The St Georges is a British “electronic surveillance ship” disguised as a fishign boat. A big buoy-bomb or something sank it. “The First Sea Lord and Vice Admiral” go to Mi6 about the ship being there in the afternoon and only “floating debris” in the morning. It’s such a huge problem because it “was equipped with ATAC”, and as Bond helpfully informs me the Atac system, or “automatic targeting attack communicator”, “uses an ultralow frequency coded transmitter to order our submarines to launch ballistic missiles”. 

Since M is on leave Bond has to deal with the Minister (of Defence, I presume) who clarifies: “if that transmitter were to fall into the wrong hands, it would render our entire Polaris fleet useless”, even worse, “our own submarines could be ordered to attack our own cities”.

Since it was a British spy ship off the Albanian coast, “an official operation was out of the question” meaning a salvage operation. So they asked “Sir Timothy Havelock, the marine archeologist, to secretly locate the wreck” and he did, but “heand his wife were killed by a Cuban hit man, Hector Gonzales. The Greek police were able to identify Gonzales from a description given to them by Melina, sir Havelock’s daughter”. 

It’s now Bond’s mission, “operation undertow”. He has to talk to Gonzales “to find out who hired him”. 

Near Madrid, Bond is caught by Gonzales’ men but frees himself when a crossbow bolt kills Gonzales. Bond escapes and meets melina and her crossbow, here to avenge her parents.

When Bond’s Lotus car blows up they take hers, which Google helpfully tells me was a bright yellow 1981 Citroes 2cv and it’s a long chase. They may be “out horsepowered”, as Bond puts it, but they make it nonetheless.

The roll over and people help them while a bus slows down the bad guys then Bond drives, thanks to the helpful local people giving them a push. They roll over again, but nothing will stop htem :-p

Melina is determined: “I’m hal-Greek, and Greek women, like Elektra, always avenge their loved ones”.

The Minister is not happy the mission seems failed, and is not eager to tell the Prime Minister, “she’ll have our guts for garters” and I don’t doubt it, Iron Lady indeed. But, Bond saw a man there to pay off Gonzales, and will identify him using Q’s “identigraph”… honestly, “this 3D visual identigraph” uses Bond’s description like someone drawing an identikit, only it’s… that image would be totally useless to me, but the machine prints a perfect copy of the man.

Q finds a match easily, “by patching into the photographic files of the Surete, Interpol, Cia, The Mosssad and the West Germany police” … do they all know their files can be accessed by this identigraph?

The man is Emile Leopold Locque, vicious murderer, already convicted and escaped, and now works for Greek smugglers. Probably Belgian. The Italian Secret Service (wow, we have one?) thinks he’s in Cortina. Mi6 have a man there, Luigi Ferrara or Ferrari; personally I think that “Tofana 10am” could have been a bit vague but they meet right away, of course. Ferrara introduces Bond to his “reliable Greek contact”, who has a chalet there and is very rich. Ferrara says that Aris Kristatos is “very reliable”, helped them before and the British even “gave him the King’s medal for resistance fighting during the war”. Kristatos knows Locque as Milos Columbo’s man. He says Columbo deals in drugs, slavery, murder… known as “the dove”, and “once we were like brothers, now he hates me”.

No surprise there, since we’ll learn that he’s the real villain and he keeps blaming it all on Columbo. He even tells Bond that Columbo is so well connected that he won’t be able to arrest him and will have to kill him. Brother indeed.

Columbo will approach Bond to avoid this, to prove to him that he’s the ‘not all that bad, just a common smuggler’ one and Kristatos is the criminal. Columbo takes Bond to Kristatos’ warehouse in Albania accompanied by his men, and there’s a big fight, shooting and even everything around Bond blowing up but he stands like it was nothing.

Locque drives away, Bond runs up a staircase that not even Rocky and gets there first and kills him.

Bond goes to Melina’s boat in Greece. They meet underwater and when she sees him she leaves her oxygen down there and goes up with him. I have no idea why she did it, but it sure will come in handy afterwards.

Bond tells her Kristatos killed the Havelocks because he didn’t want them finding the St Georges before he did, so he wants to look at Havelock’s diary. She knows it’s written in a code only she knows, so why she gave it to him first is a mystery.

Havelock went down in their “two-man submarine” so now they do the same and find the ship (that Kristatos still hasn’t found in all this time)

Bond takes the Atac system, which looks pretty much like a bg calculator, and uses its destruction timer to stop the man attacking them. There is another battle between their submarine and another one and then they’re back on her ship… only Kristatos is there with his men.

For whatever stupid reason, instead of killing them Kristatos has them all tied up and dragged around by his ship, that goes back and forth a few times to… what? Make them drown? He thinks they’ll die hitting some rocks? It was all very silly, all  that “turn around, we go again” thus loosening the rope, giving Bond the chance to cut it and secure it at an underwater rock. A man falls in the water and is eaten by sharks right away (but they didn’t touch Bond and Melina).

Kristatos has the brilliant idea to “run them down” and when he can’t see them he thinks “the sharks have them” and goes away. All very futile and meaningless.

Of course Bond’s motto is “we’re not dead yet”! They were both unarmed and with their legs free - on purpose - so to avoid the ship they swim down and use Melina’s oxygen that she left before. The bad guys discussed their plans in front of Max, Havelock’s parrot, 30 years together, who “repeats everything” but apparently only when and what he chooses since he did not repeat anything important when the bad guys were there, but now he does for Bond, all he has to do is mention the Atac and Max helpfully supplies “Atac to St Cyril’s!”   Smart parrot!

At one St Cyrils Bond learns from Q that there are 439 St Cyrils in Greece at least, so Bond asks Columbo who joins him. It’s an abandoned monastery where they used to hide from the Germans. Bond climbs up there and almost falls a few times because of a bad guy very intent on killing him but that didn’t call anyone else… 

Once up there Bond sends ‘the basket’ down and brings them up, it’s electronic. They all fight, Columbo is very keen on stopping Kristatos and he’s the one to kill him while Bond is trying to change Melina’s mind. Their buyer arrives and it’s Gogol, so Bond takes the Atac and throws it down the mountain making it go a million pieces. “That’s detente, commander. You don’t have it, I don’t have it”. Gogol laughs and goes away.

So, why did Kristatos destroy the St Georges? I guess he did it and it wasn’t a simple accident of catching a random floating bomb… he destroyed a ship hoping they had no time to destroy the Atac - also it means he knew it was a spy ship and had the Atac system - then he killed those trying to find it, and all to try and sell it, even before he knew if there were buyers? Of course there were, but still… also, Gogol took advantage of the system being on the market, he couldn’t “lose such a remarkable opportunity” to obtain th Atac transmitter, but he also said (to his own “comrade secretary”) “there will be no direct involvement”. He contacted Kristatos for the sale… but what about this Erich kriegler? He is a East German biathlon champion, he tries to kill Bond a few times - in Cortina with a rifle, skiing after him and also riding a motorbike after him and down the ski slopes, forcing Bond once again to escape with his acrobatic skiing, we even see them down the ice track, behind a bob! Rumour has it that Erich is “a defector from East Germany” but at the end Kristatos calls him “the voice of the kgb”, which makes it look like Gogol did indeed have some kind of “direct involvement” in place…

Of course the film will end with Bond and Melina together, and with them swimming naked “for your eyes only, darling” in the moonlight, leaving his communicator with Max, so when Q and the Thatcher try to speak with him, they talk with Max instead. Well, she was well acquainted with parrot jokes, I believe…

Still, there were of course other women, as it often is: there was Austrian countess Lisl von Schlaf, who was actually from Liverpool. Columbo told her he was a spy and she was to learn more about him. They sleep together then they’re attacked during a morning walk on the beach where Locque kills her and threatens Bondwith a gun when Columbo’s men arrive to take him away so that Columbo can explain that Locque works for Kristatos, that the guy got the medal “but other people died for it” because he was a double agent.

Then there was young Bibi, training as an ice-skater who is really young and Bond does have limits, thank God, even after he found her showering in his rom and getting into his bed eagerly waiting, and he to insist to get her to put back on her clothes and go out!

About Melina, I appreciated that hers were not just tough words but she actually meant business; when Columbo worried that “we are only five men” and she added “and one woman” it was not just words, she helped with one man and she savedthem against a hidden guard, her crossbow is quite lethal in her hands.

 I liked that it’s not Bond who stops and later kills Kristatos, but Columb, and apparently Bond also knows ice skating since he says he saw Bibi’s trainer Miss Brink skate :-)

Last details: Locque also killed Ferrara; M.Thatcher may be Prime Minister, and yet as a woman she’s the one cooking for her husband; Columbo survives and Bibi and her trainer take care of him, so maybe he’ll be her next sponsor; Columbo reminds me quite a lot of Gabbani with the head-structure of Columbro; Bibi told Kristatos that she knows what he wants “but you’re too old for me!”;  Columbo’s sarcasm “by using a British agent to do his dirty work for him, your government might give him another medal”; Bond is also attacked on the ice rink by a few hockey players, 3 or 4; after entering Bond’s bed uninvited, Bibi calls Erich beautiful and Bond calls her “fickle” :-p

Moneypenny has a special drawer with a big mirror to do her lipstick before Bond arrives; 

Before the theme song, we saw Bond bringing flowers to his wife’s grave when a helicopter comes for him; his pilot is killed and the helicopter is remote-controlled by a bald man in a wheelchair with a white cat: must be Blofeld, he tries an evil laugh guiding the helicopter like a video game but I think Bond gains control again, he raises the wheelchair with the helicopter’s ‘foot’ and drops him into a huge industrial chimney, and this time it should truly be his end.

The opening titles state “Roger Moore as Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007”

James Bond is Roger Moore

Melina is Carole Bouquet

Columbo is Topol

Kristatos is Julian Glover

Lisl is Cassandra Harris

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

Q is Desmond Llewelyn

General Gogol is Walter Gotell

Claus is Charles Dance  (I didn’t see him there, he was one of the bad guys chasing Bond)

The Prime Minister is Janet Brown

“James Bond will return in Octopussy”

ITA Agente 007 solo per i tuoi occhi