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

Live and let die - 1973

 Not too bad for an old Bond movie,  but still, to never watch again. Roger Moore is different but not too much. He has the elegance and cocky attitude of Bond, and while he may be a bit less charismatic than Connery, in this film he makes a somehow softer Bond, which is not bad at all.

The sstory shows a lot of voodoo superstition but not real, what instead appears to be real to the characters is thee girl’s power to read tarots and predictt what will happen.

Apparently she was always absolutely right until Bond came along…

He’s called in because British agents have been killed, one at a United Nations conference, one in New Orleans and one in San Monique, a Caribbean island. 

The opening titles show right away “Roger Moore as James Bond-007” so no surprise this time… good, those are not good surprises, but things to know in advance. It also says “introducing Jane Seymour”, was this her first film? Really? One hell of a debut role, a Bond girl with lots of screen time…

This time M gos to find Bond directly because after a mission in Rome he’s now having his fun with an Italian agent, Miss Caruso, who now hides while an embarrassed Bond hopes he doesn’t see her. Caruso hides, Moneypenny sees her but doesn’t tell :-)

Bond is sent to investigate, one of the agents was keeping an eye on Dr Kananga, San Monique’s Prime Minister.

Bond’s watch can turn “into a hyper-intensified magnetic field, powerful enough to even deflect the path of a bullet at long range, or so Q claims” - luckily for him we don’t see him dodging bullets like Neo, no.

M: “I feel very tempted to test that theory right now” :lol: sometimes M feels like a 00-sitter. :-p

Dr Kananga is now in New York so Bond will go there and meet up with Felix.

I don’t really understand the thing with the cars with identical plate numbers, what was up with that?

Bond’s driver is killed.

Solitaire foresees that a man is coming who will oppose bringing violence and destruction. Bond is brought in front of Mr Big - his men all call him baby or Jim :lol:

When Bond appears, Solitaire’s cards show her the High Priestess and the Lovers…

Kananga goes back to San Monique so Bond follows. Someone puts a snake in his bathroom but Bond burns it. A black girl, Rosie Carver, enters with a gun, says she’s with the Cia and was asked to help out. She says Felix’s suggestion in dealing with Bond was “if all else failed, cyanide pills”, but when she sees a hat with a bloodied feather on her bed she gets scared, she’s all begging “please don’t leave me alone tonight”…

Bond wants her to take him where agent Baines was killed. She mistakes a man helping Bond for an enemy and points a gun at him. “As I was saying, Quarrel, a lousy agent, but the compensations speak for themselves. Rosie Carver, meet the man who shares my hair brush” so she apologized, and the man said “you might have even killed me if you’d taken off the safety catch”.

Still, she’s very very pretty and he calls her darling.

Solitaire is telling Kananga about the man coming via water, all very true, but she also saw again the Lovers card and didn’t say it. Kananga - we’ll soon see that he and Mr Big are the same person - ordered Rosie to do something: she’s scared of voodoo magic, and Big has convinced people that he’s Baron Samedi reincarnated, or something, a divine or spiritual being connected with the dead, a sort of Charon, but with a tall hat and a clean but otherwise zombie-like appearance.

Bond knows there’s a trap and wants answers from Rosie, he wants her to talk: “they’ll kill me if I do” - “and I’ll kill you if you don’t” - “but you couldn’t. You wouldn’t. Not after what we’ve just done” - “I certainly wouldn’t have killed you before” … no words… :-/

When Rosie sees some kind of voodoo totem, death-warning, Rosie runs terrified and is killed.

Bond then finds himself another girl sneaking into Solitaire’s room and “tricking” her with a tarot deck made only of Lovers cards. Still, jokes on him because he shouldn’t have bothered, she was convinced already by her own cards. They have sex and then he asks for “a little bit of information”, sure that she’ll now tell him everything. But she can’t now. “The power… I’ve lost it. The High Priestess is wife to the Prince no longer of this world. The spiritual bridge to the secret church. It’s my fate. By compelling me to earthly love, the cards themselves have taken away my powers”.

“The physical violation cannot be undone” is a really bad-tough phrase, and yet this is Bond so she doesn’t appear to be very regretful. She may miss her cards and she sure fears Big’s reaction when he learns she’s lost her power, she fears for her life, but this is Bond so she looks very eager to keep doing it.

Of course he says he’ll take her away ‘after’ he’s discovered everything, and when they’re caught it’s Bond-luck again: Big tests Solitaire’s powers and yet when she fails he doesn’t have Bond’s fingers cut like he threatened before. For no reason, he lets him go whole.

Bond discovers that “Voodooland was just poppy fields”, and the whole thing is “a simple matter of heroin smuggling”. Bond keeps the girl around because, as I said before, she’s quite eager, and also because she’s “a valuable piece of merchandise” and if they want her back they’ll show themselves. They’re caught, of course, and taken to Big.

Did Solitaire fake-attack Bond to pretend she’s not on his side? What was that?

Cia agent Strutter, who mocked Bond in Harlem for entering certain places with his white face, doesn’t seem as knowing in New Orleans. To give him credit, many others have fallen for this fake-funeral march scene. Quite good though, I liked it. :-)

People start moving, slowly, solemnly, a woman crying, then a man stabs the agent and the coffin that was being carried around empty gets now filled with him.

Big is very upsett that Bond “stole” Soliatire, and keeps asking “did you touch her?” Because now she has no more powers, and he wanted her to stay useful and untouched until he himself chose to do the touching…  :-/

The “trespassers will be eaten” sign was funny; the bad guy wants to leave Bond to be eaten by alligators and crocodiles together, but Bond hops on their heads instead and sends them after the bad guys. He sets the place on fire and escapes on a boat. And here a rather long boats chase starts. They fly over the roads with those boats, more through gardens, land in a swimming pool, wreck a wedding, speeding on land as if it was water. A sheriff kept chasing after them too, and is quite upset when told who he is: “secret agent? On whose side?”

So they plan to set Voodooland on fire with bombs, while he goes to save Solitaire. She’s about to be killed voodoo style, bitten by a snake while people dance and yell. There are machines and underground caves and labs, to keep people believe in voodoo so to control them. Now, the agent who died this way didn’t appear to have any particular outfit, but of course the girl ha her hair loose to her back an is wearing a light white dress…

Big doesn’t seem too bothered, says “the poppy’s a very sturdy flower” so Bond’s and Cia’s efforts so far were only a “relatively minor nuisance”. He asks about Bond’s special anti-sharks gun, so we can learn about it and recognize it later. It uses “compressed gas pellets”. Bond sees Big’s “underground monorail” that they use to carry the heroin, and again because it is Bond the villain goes: “correct again Mr Bond, what a quick study you are. Let me show you exactly how it works” !!

Bond and Solitaire are tied up and Big makes a couple of cuts on Bond’s arm to attract the sharks. Bond uses the watch to cut the ropes and to get him the shark-gun bullet: when he fights Big, he kills him by pushing that down his throat so Big inflates because of the compressed gas and explodes.

After this it’s over, I guess nobody even tries to stop him if there’s no big bad boss shouting at them.

Bond and Solitaire choose to travel by train because it’ll be a 16 hours journey and Felix wonders what can they possibly do for 16 hours…

Bond just has to kill the bad guy with the hook and then the girl is all his.

Last image is of the laughting man. Not sure what he represents, but I liked him, he was fun and intriguing.

James Bond is Roger Moore

Kananga-Mr Big is Yaphet Kotto

Solitaire is Jane Seymour

Leiter is David Hedison

Rosie is Gloria Hendry

M is Bernard Lee

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell 

Tee Hee is Julius W. Harris  (the man with the hook)

Baron Samedi is Geoffrey Holder  (the laughing man or the various Samedi to come out of the cemetery in voodooland?)

There is no Q!!!

The ending credits state “the end of Live and Let Die. James Bond will return in The man with the golden gun”

ITA agente 007 vivi e lascia morire

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - 1969

No, I don’t like it. I don’t like this new James Bond and I don’t like this ‘romance’ and teh sad ending, quite convenient for the character but not a nice ending at all. I don’t like how it starts, it makes no sense to me why did he follow that car and why he thought he had to save that girl… I mean, he doesn’t know her, he follows her and sees that she’s at a beach. It’s late, nobody’s around and she walks to the sea and goes into the water… and he runs and takes her out, unconscious… why did he think she wanted to kill herself and how come she’s already unconscious a minute later? And who where the men that attacked him at this point? Wiki says they worked for her father, and yet they attacked him instead of saving her…

The girl runs to her car and drives away and he says “this never happened to the other fellow” …

They are at the same hotel, “Commander Bond” gets the best suite. At the casino, she loses but Bond pays for her who can’t. “Why do you persist in rescuing me, Mr Bond?” - “it’s becoming a habit, isn’t it, Contessa Teresa?” 

She’s the Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo, and it’s all here in her first words: “Teresa was a saint, I’m known as Tracy” and “people who want to stay alive play it safe”: there it is, her past and her future right there.

Bond says “please stay alive, at least for tonight” because he’s a jerk.

They spend the night together and she leaves him some chips as payment for what he paid for her earlier at the casino. Some men take Bond to see Tracy’s father: Draco, of Draco Constructions.

“Marc Ange Draco, Head of Union Corse, one of Europe’s biggest crime syndicates in Europe” (Spectre “operates worldwide”). -2however, your legitimate business fronts are somewhat extensive”

Tracy’s mom died adn he sent her to Switzerland. Tracy is a bit wild, he thinks, and makes wrong choices like marrying “an Italian Count who killed himself in a Maserati with one of his mistresses”.

What he wants is for Bond to court her, “what she needs is a man to dominate her, to make love to her enough to make her love him, a man like you”. Bond finds her attractive and fascinating, of course, whenever does he not, but it’s not for him…

“I’ll give you a personal dowry of one million pounds in gold” but Bond doesn’t need money “and I’ve a bachelor’s taste for freedom” … yet Draco may know something about Blofeld, so they do have a sort of deal. Bond will see her again for informations.

Bond is rather upset whem M relieves him from “operation Bedlam” because after two years he still has no idea where Blofeld is: “a licence to kill is useless unless one can set up the target”. Bond asks Moneypenny to bring his letter of resignation to M, and is again rather upset when M grants it… but it’s only a two weeks’ leave, that’s the request Moneypenny gave M.

When Tracy finds Bond at her father’s birthday party, she knows something’s up and insists her father tell Bond what he wants to know right away.

Draco knows of a possible connection between Blofeld and a lawyer in Bern named Gumbold.

Bond and Tracy spend a lot of time together anyway, like in a romance movie, and she falls in love of course. But, she doesn’t want her dad to speak to him about it, “whatever happens, there’ll be no regrets”.

In Bern, Bond sneaks into Gumbold’s office and makes copies of some documents found inside his safe. All quite easily. Watching Playboy’s pictures to pass the time.

Commander Bond goes to see the Admiral (M). Bond shows off his knowledge of buterflies and M is impressed: “I wasn’t aware that your expertise included lepidoptery” - of course it does, Bond knows everything.

Bond tells him that lawyer Gumbold received a letter with a request “to establish de Bleuchamp’s claim to the title”, a letter by “a certain Count Balthazar de Bleuchamp”: which is the French form of Blofeld.

“I assumed you’d reassign me sir”, os Bond contacted sir Hilary Bray already, the “Sable basilisk of the College” and started reading up on genealogy and heraldry. 

We see Bond’s coat of arms: Sir Thomas Bond was Baronet of Peckham and died in 1734. Its motto is orbis non sufficit, the world is not enough.

They went further back and found a Sir Otho le Bon in 1387.

A meeting has been set, Bond will take Sir Hilary’s place and meet Bleuchamp. After a long ride, Bond is taken up to the Alps in a private helicopter: theBleuchamp Institute for allergy research pretends to be no-profit, “for the sake of mankind” but Blofeld is actually working on bacteriological warfare and using his patients to do his work.

The patients are all wealthy, pretty girls and the therapy includes listening to recorded speeches. Who knows why but whenever they hear his voice these girls fall asleep, hypnotized maybe, and only them. Bond shows up at dinner in a Scottish kilt, says that coat of arms “can include all sorts of funny things” like bezants, gold balls, and he says that his coat of arms “includes four of them, if you’d care to see them”. A girl writes her room number on his leg with lipstick. I found the whole scene a bit distasteful, and not funny. 

They played curling up there.

Another agent who was to support Bond tried to reach the Institute, but was caught and killed. Bond gives rendez-vous to all girls but this behaviour is so Bond and so not Sir Hilary, he’s found out soon: “respectable baronets from the college of heralds do not seduce female patients in clinics”. Bond also made a genealogy mistake.

As always, the other agent has already been killed, but not Bond. First he’s told the whole plan: the United Nations will receive “the information that I now possess the scientific means to control or to destroy, the economy of the whole world” and he has “prepared a demonstration”. He’ll show them how he arranged the outbreak of a disease in England the previous summer. His research now found virus omega, total infertility, in plants and animals. It could cause “the destruction of a whole strain forever, throughout an entire continent”.

They’ll accept his terms o he’ll “proceed with the extinction of whole species of cereals and livestock all over the world”.

Blofeld says he’s been training his own special angels of death, the girls/patients. Through hyposis they’ll do what he asks when the time comes. Then, Bond iwll be kept there “as my guest. You’ll be very useful in helping to convince the authorities that I mean what I say and I’ll do what I claim” which is nonsense, he does not need Bond at all.

Of course Bond manages to escape, he wears another man’s outfit and skis his way out of there. He’s followed but he’s good at skiing too, like anything else, so good he can even ski with one single ski!

He reaches the village where he finds Tracy, come looking for him. She has a car so she helps him escape. It’s a long chase scene, and she’s driving!

When they’re alone for the night, Bond tells her “an agent shouldn’t be concerned with anything but himself” but he doesn’t want to leave her so “I’ll have to find something else to do” because “I love you, I know I’ll never find another girl like you. Will you marry me? I mean it”. It would have been a romantic scene if I had felt even a bit of feelings in him, but honestly it’s not even a day since he went from the room of a girl to the room of another girl having fun.

Anyway, they escape together, again skiing, but a bad avalanche stops them. “A grave deep enough, I think, to prevent even 007 from walking” …really? He can clearly see the girl and has his men taek her to the Institute. It never crosses the mind of this genius that if she’s alive and well maybe he is too? And of course Bond is, not only alive, but barely covered in snow.

Neither of them felt it much, this avalanche.

When Blofeld acts, sending his blackmail demands, M orders Bond to step back and do nothing. Those are the orders of their superiors, probably thinking the risk too great considering what Blofeld could do.

Tracy is up there prisoner, but that is Bond’s “personal problem”, so of course Bond calls Draco and of course he agrees to save his daughter.

This scene was nice, Tracy recognizes the voice of her father and knows he’s coming. She keeps Blofeld talking, and when the attack starts, she fights back knocking out two men. Good girl.

Draco’s men fire at the Institute, they could hit her!

Anyway, Bond takes pictures of the girls/patients and where they live, and Draco sets a bomb to destroy the entire facility. Bond follows Blofeld but once again he escapes.

Indeed Bond marries Tracy, I wasn’t sure until I saw it. Draco tells her to obey her husband and she agrees “as I always obeyed you” :-p  Bond refuses Draco’s dowry, gives his hat to a moved Moneypenny and leaves with his wife. She says he has given her a future, but Blofeld and his loyal Irma Bunt drive by shooting.

Nothing else it touched but Tracy is killed, a shot to the head.

They had all the time in the world…

James Bond is George Lazenby

Tracy is Diana Rigg

Blofeld is Telly Savalas

Draco is Gabriele Ferzetti

Irma Bunt is Ilse Steppat

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

Sir Hilary Bray is George Baker

M is Bernard Lee

Q is Desmond Llewelyn  (we only saw him at the wedding”

Joanna Lumley was one of the girls/patients

ITA agente 007  al servizio segreto di sua maestà

Diamonds are forever - 1971

Well, up to now, this may be my favourite of the first seven films (only of the first sevecn, though, it will change). I didn’t much care for this Blofeld, I much preferred Savalas - although Pleasance did a better crazy-evil mastermind. Savalas’ Blofeld was more sane.

This time it’s neither as charming or as crazy enough a performance. 

The story: Bond is set on finding Blofeld, and ‘finds him’ at a clinic for plastic surgery. He enters disguissed ad a doctor and kills Blofeld, only to learn that it was a copy; after a battle he kills this other one too, and Blofeld seems gone forever… 

The scene when the bad guy frisks him to get his gun and finds a mousetrap instead was fun - silly but funny.

Sir Donald, who can give orders to M, wants them to work on a huge smuggling problem. Diamonds, a lot, and “none of the stones have reached the market”, maybe someone is stockpiling; “what concerns us is the possibility of someone either dumping the stones on the market to depress prices or… “ - “makingyou agree to perpetual blackmail”. So of course they want to know who is keeping all those diamonds.

Mr Wint and Mr Kidd are the assassins Bond knows nothing about. They like their job always act together, walk away hand in hand, and like their little jokes : “Curious how everyone who touches those diamonds seems to die” after putting a scorpion insidea man’s shirt and a bomb on a helicopter in South Africa.  “Mrs Winter did want some pictures of the canals for the children” aftr the old lady is found dead in the canals of Amsterdam - “how kind of you, Mr Kidd, the children will be thrilled”; “that’s most annoying” after being told to let a man live when they had already killed him, stuff like that.

Of course with Bond they always choose ways more elaborate… I give them credit, their methods almost worked, if it wasn’t for outside intervention, so kudos for that.

When Bond enters the game, the murders had only been in South Africa but M sends him to Holland instead because he says “we’ve had our eyes on a professional smuggler called Peter Franks. He’s due to leave for Amsterdam”. I like M here: “we do function in your absence, Commander”. 

So, they get Franks and Bond takes his place, with a fake passport of course. Franks had to meet T.Case so Bond shows up with fake fingerprints on his fingers, Q’s idea, so he passes the test when Miss Case checks. Miss, yes, because “there isno Mr Case, the T is for Tiffany”. Tiffany Case, yes, because she “was born there on the first floor while my mother was looking for a wedding ring”. 

She likes to wear and change often wigs, but I like the red hair better. “I never mix business with pleasure” she says… Guess how long that lasts?

Q informs Bond that Franks escaped killing a guard, so Bond hurries to stop him before he can meet Case. They fight on the elevato and Bond exchanges their wallets so Case finds his “playboy club and playboy casino” card and believes Franks jut killed James Bond.

They take the diamonds and put them inside the dead body to smuggle  them to America.  

Bond meets again “Felix Leiter, you old friend”, the Cia agent. 

The dead body flew with them,   And then is cremated to get the diamonds back in an urn. Bond gives them the urn and then Mr Wint and Kidd knock  him out and almost cremate him too. He’s alive because people realized he gave them false  diamonds  and want him to give them the real ones. The bad guys saved him here.

At the casino he meets Plenty, a girl who clings to him because he has money, but up in his room the bad guys throw her out the window: “I didn’t know there was a pool down there” says the guy played by the actor that always plays mafiosi.

Miss Case is there to talk about diamonds. They sleep together then she makes him a deal: she’ll help him get out of the Country alive and they’ll split the diamonds. He sends her to a circus, she gets the diamonds but instead of meeting him she completes her first mission and sends the diamonds along. When he shows her that Plenty was killed because believed to be her, Case changes her mind and decides to help him for real - well, we know what won then, Bond thought it was a 50-50: “her devotion to larceny versus my incomparable charm”…

Bond follows the diamonds to Dr Metz’s laboratory, owned by Willard Whyte, and escapes driving a lunar rover. It may not be fast, but it can go anywhere. Tiffany then drives him away then Felix tells him to stay put, they’re not authorized to bother Willard Whyte, so Bond goes anyway but by climbing from the outside. When he arrives, it’s not a surprise and Whyte was waiting for him, only it’s not Whyte, it’s Blofeld. It was another copy that he killed, and even now there’s two of them right there in front of him. He has a machine that changes his voice so people really believe him to be Whyte. 

A simple plan: “no one’s seen the man for five years so who’s going to miss someone who’s already missing?”

Bond sees a white cat and he kicks it, then shoots the man the cat went to… only there’s another white cat, and this other one has a diamond collar… “bright idea, mr Bond” - “but wrong pussy”. 

Once again Blofeld doesn’t shoot him, but leaves him inside a pipe where people are building a pipeline.

He gets indeed trapped inside it, but all he has to do is break a machine and someone comes to repair it, and he can get out.

Bond uses Q’s machine to change his voice and calls Blofeld to get Whyte’s location, where he meets Bambi and Thumper, two girls who quite acrobatically kick his a++ until of course they have the stupid idea to drown him in the pool, because there they lose their advantage and he is stronger and he is the one who almost drowns them both, until Thumper tells him where Whyte is and he frees him.

Leiter comes too but doesn’t do much.

Q is having fun testing one of his gadgets to win at all the slot machines, although he’s not interested in the winnings.

Tiffany saw a ‘woman’ with a black cat and followed, so she’s taken by Blofeld.

With Whyte they realize the plan: a satellite goes into space and activates a huge laser powered by diamonds. Dr Metz built it, but he’s “a committed idealist to peace” and believes they will just destroy missiles and bring about “total disarmament and peace for the world”.

Blofeld has other ideas, of course. They do destroy missiles, but for power and blackmail. With Whyte’s help Bond finds him; he enters the place and with Tiffany’s help he manages to substitute the cassette tape that controls the laser. Tiffany doesn’t know though, and when he gives her a tape she thinks she has to do it and switches them back. Well, reasonable, since he gave her no hint whatsoever.

Thinking he accomplished his mission, Leiter and co. attack. Blofeld tries to escape on his “bathosub” but Bond takes control of the crane. Somehow the whole base is destroyed

Bond and Tiffany sail for Britain but Kidd and Wint try to kill them still… and in a rather pathetic way. Kidd is set on fire and Wint blows up with his own bomb. When all is done, Tiffany has an important question for James: “how the hell do we getthose diamonds down agaiin?”

The end.

I’d say this line from one of them: “I must say, Miss Case is quite attractive, for a lady” might indicate that  Wint and Kidd may be a couple, added to the hand-holding, but this is as far as they go so it’s not definite.

I’d say that Bond was so set on finding Blofeld because of what happened in the last movie, the fact that he killed Bond’s wife, but if we’re continuing that story then Moneypenny’s line that he brings her back from Holland “a diamond, in a ring” is not the light joke-flirting that it could have been before he actually had a wedding.

James Bond is Sean Connery

Tiffany Case is Jill St. John

Leiter is Norman Burton

Wint is Bruce Glover

Kidd is Putter Smith

Blofeld is Charles Gray

Plenty is Lana Wood

Whyte is Jimmy Dean

M is Bernard Lee

Q is Desmond Llewelyn

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

ITA agente 007 una cascata di diamanti

Dr. No - 1962

Really, who should be more offended at this age? Women or people from the East? Or maybe everybody who had to deal with England in history? Maybe they get precedence, in this case.

I’m speechless. It was 1962, let’s leave it there.

An agent in Jamaica is killed by a group of black men, as is his secretary, to get their files on Dr No. ThisStrangways was there as requested by the Americans, whose rockets got interference from there. The Cia sent Leiter, and England sent Bond. We see him flirting with Moneypenny, right after he flirted with a gambling woman and gave her his number. 

Bond keeps using his old Beretta, has been for 1 years, but last time “it jammed”, and he “spent six months in hospital” because of it, so his boss at Mi6 wants him to change it. “If you carry a double-0 number, it means you’re licenced to kill, not get killed”. He gets a Walther Ppk now and must leave in three hours. Enough time to spend some of it with the gambling woman he finds in his room.

Once in Jamaica, a fake driver kills himself instead of talking once he’s found out, then a fisherman and his friend try to fight him with a knife until a man comes in with a gun: it’s pretty obvious he’s Felix Leiter. Quarrel the fisherman is on their side after all. 

Bond and Leiter know nothing on why Strangways disappeared, and only know Dr No as the name of a Chinese man that owns an island so they can’t check it. For their search on the interferences. Bond asks a professor Dent, a geologist I think who played cards with Strangways about some rock samples the agent gave him and Dent says it was useless stuff that can’t possibly come from Crab Key, Dr No’s island. Dent rushes there and is ordered to kill Bond - with a spider. That night Bond feels it on his skin and keeps absolutely still until it moves away and he can kill it. Only now they find out the files have disappeared. Bond says those rock samples were radioactive. 

The girl working for the ‘Principal secretary, Government House’ tries to eavesdrop on them and then accepts his dinner invitation only to change it, asking him to go to her house: on the way a car tries to kill him, and she’s clearly surprised to see him when he shows up - because she gave him the right address… imagine that…

They have sex because she’s told to keep him there, but then he has her arrested. Bond kills Dent after he enters trying to kill him.

Quarrel takes Bond on the island. He meets Honey Ryder who sneaks there to get shells to sell. The famous Ursula with the white bikini.

Both she and Quarrel think there’s a dragon here on the island. it’s a kind of car/tank which launches fire from the front, instead of having simple lights.

Honey says Dr No killed her father leaving her all alone in the world. The man who owned her home let her live there for a bit without paying, and then “he came up to my room. Well, you know”. She tried to fight without success, so later she got her vengeance, she killed him with a black widow spider. “Did I do wrong?” - “well, it wouldn’t do to make a habit of it” … really? Because all men would need to do to be safe is: do not assault her! 

They’re caught and given a room. They’re also given clothes: they look nice in Chinese clothes (well, the style, I guess). Dr No is an elegant looking man who appears to wear black gloves, until he says he has no hands. He had a German father and a Chinese mother, he ended up working for the Triad until he stole their money and left for America, where he used the money to finance “this operation”, using “atomic power”.

Bond says “your power source had our organization puzzled for some time” . How does that relate to him “toppling American missiles” ?   “Missiles are only the first step to prove our power”.

Bond here is so arrogantly English: “with your disregard for human life, you must be working for the East”  *rollingeyes*

But no, he doesn’t care about that: “I’m a member of SPECTRE” which means “special executive for counterintelligence terrorism revenge extortion, the four great cornerstones of power, headed by the greatest brains in the world”

Dr No is bored by Bond, he thinks Bond is just a dumb cop, but still doesn’t kill him. He has him beaten up, which results in a very torn t-shirt but not a single mark on his skin - someone likes Bond very much around there…  Bond is then put in a cell, but one not very good, he escapes easily and infiltrates the labs simply by taking someone else’ anti-radiation suit. Nobody notices, Dr No even give him orders to go to a very convenient place where he can stop and invert the process, or something, and since it’s atomic power it’s very dangerous. There’s an alarm, Dr No orders his men to “shut down”… the machines? The island? What they do is run for their lives, while Dr NNo goes personally to fightBond! Of course Bond wins and Dr No dies. Bond searches the place for Honey and finds her chained to the ground where she’ll… drown? But Bond frees her easily, they didn’t waste time to tie her up properly?

Well, they did ve the time to remove her trousers!

Everyone is escaping, jumping in the water or whatever they can. Bond steals a boat, so conveniently placed there. They run out of fuel so they have to wait to be rescued… but he doesn’t care to be towed to land, he prefers to stay there and have fun with Honey, because of course nobody can resist Bond…

James Bond is Sean Connery

Honey Ryder is Ursula Andress

Dr No is Joseph Wiseman

Felix Leiter is Jack Lod

M is Bernard Lee

Professor Dent is Anthony Dawson

Mis Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

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