It wasn’t my idea to be here. I don’t belong here. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m gonna get eaten alive. But Tom Zielinski and Paul Baack thought it would be funny to get me – a Bond-ignorant action movie fan who once called 007 “a fucking baby” — to review Thunderball and GoldenEye. So here goes nothing.
First, the backstory. My disparaging comments about Mr. Bond came in the form of a review for Die Hard 2. In the review I called Bruce Willis’s character John McClane “the working man’s James Bond” and compared and contrasted him to 007. My argument was that Bond was a spoiled rich boy among action heroes. Bond gets an Astin Martin that shoots missiles, McClane has to borrow his mother-in-law’s beater, and it gets impounded. That kind of thing. Tom and Paul had written me a lot of nice emails, and I felt bad that I had been so harsh to their favorite fictional character. So when I was putting together a collection of my reviews, I thought it would be a nice addition to the book if they would write a rebuttal to the review. They graciously did me that favor, which brings us to today, when I owe them one.
I don’t know if it’s payback for my big mouth, or if they’re trying to convert me, but I welcome the incentive to learn a little more about Mr. Bond. I have to admit I am most familiar with the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, and I wouldn’t say I was a fan. Watching Thunderball though, I was about 4 minutes in when I realized it was already better than all the Pierce Brosnans combined. In the opening scene, Bond is at a funeral for some SPECTRE bastard he was gonna kill. Now I don’t want to be judgmental, but in my opinion it is pretty god damn rude to show up at the funeral of some motherfucker you were planning to kill. I mean come on people, you just don’t do that. Call me old fashioned, call me a square, but that’s one rule I try to follow. The only exception is if once the person was dead you realized it was wrong to want to kill them, and maybe you were going to go make amends with this person when you found out they were dead. That is not the case for Bond. So I’m not inclined to let him off the hook. But luckily this point of etiquette becomes moot when he discovers that the funeral is a fraud and that the not-really-dead villain is in drag, disguised as a grieving widow. (more…)
One year before PREDATOR, two years before DIE HARD, John McTiernan wrote and directed this unusual thriller about ghostly demons or demonic ghosts. (Actually I thought they were ghosts, but the back of the DVD calls them demons. So let’s split the difference.) NOMADS stars Lesley-Anne Down as Dr. Flax, recently moved to L.A. One night after 32 hours on shift she sees a patient covered in blood, babbling in French, so crazed that they have to cuff him. He’s played by “Pierce Brosnan, the star of REMINGTON STEELE like you’ve never seen him before” according to the trailer narrator.
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