Ok back again for Bond watch.
GoldenEye (
Martin Campbell, 1995)
Omfg I hate the 90's so much. Every character is so unbelievably annoying because in the 90's everyone gets to be the snarky one. Like, I expect a handful of lousy quips from Bond throughout a film but no, I can't deal with every line from every character being a dumbass quip. Also, the music sucks. Also, Brosnan sucks. Nothing even remotely interesting happens until well over an hour in. There's some solid stunts but they're all shot bad and the fight scene at the end is good despite being only mid-shots and Izabella Scorupco has a really cute outfit I'm jealous of and those are the only positives the film has. Otherwise in the bin with this.
Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997)
Alright so the real star of the show here is the lighting, or I guess rather how it's captured (I don't have the technical know-how to specify why it looks so good unfortunately), as every outdoor or shot-on-location scene is gorgeous with a lot of grit and texture to it but never at the expense of clarity. Scenes with obvious studio lighting are a bit hit-or-miss for me; at their best they still look top notch and at their worst they just have an (intentional) pop 90's look that I'm not much a fan of. Despite every aspect of the film getting overshadowed by the lighting, most the other elements are still solid enough. Our villain is a pretty interesting concept but still feels like a natural fit for a Bond film which caries the film through some of the more by-the-numbers plot developments and theirs some neat moments in terms of action set pieces, though nothing at all mind-blowing which is a bit sad considering Michelle Yeoh is in the cast. In the end that's really what holds the film back, lots of good stuff but very little great stuff.
Current Bond rankings:
01. From Russia with Love
02. Thunderball
03. The Spy Who Loved Me
04. Diamonds are Forever
05. Moonraker
06. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
07. Licence to Kill
08.
Tomorrow Never Dies
09. Dr. No
10. The Man with the Golden Gun
11. Octopussy
12. A View to a Kill
13. For Your Eyes Only
14. Live and Let Die
15. You Only Live Twice
16. The Living Daylights
17. Goldfinger
18.
GoldenEye
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and for the other things I've watched:
Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (
David Blair, 1991) (rewatch)
Probably one of the all-time greats. The vibe is just unmatched and there's just no other film like it. It's like
San Soleil meets
Xavier: Renegade Angel or something.
Pieces of a Woman (
Kornel Mondruczo, 2020)
Starts off promising but just turns into generic melodrama. Inconsistent performances, some really cheesy writing and a completely baffling score.
The First Movie on the Internet: Volumes A,B,C,D (
David Blair, 2020)
The long-awaited, 7-hour prologue to the follow-up to Wax and its even more dense and mind-bending than its predecessor. Watching this feels like someone's massaging your brain like a bowl of spaghetti at a school haunted house (or whatever the trope is). It doesn't quite have the feel of the first film (being a dirt-cheap indie project from 2020) but its every bit as imaginative and fulfilling as I could have hoped for.