MovieChat Forums > Ismailov > Replies
Ismailov's Replies
As a comment stated, there do exist highly affluent parts of India, and considering both Kamal Khan and Octopussy are wealthy individuals it makes sense they would generally be in luxurious surroundings.
Also, the "blondesque models" reside on an all-female island and work for a criminal organization which teaches them how to fight.
License to Kill. I get that Bond willingly having his license revoked and going on a personal vendetta isn't very "Bond-like," but I definitely consider it more entertaining than TLD, benefiting from a better plot and cast (e.g. TLD casting Don Joe Baker as a major antagonist is already a dubious decision, but giving him so little screentime made his character feel wasted.)
I agree. Out of curiosity I wondered if reviewers back in the day picked up on the same problem, and it seems Ebert did:
<blockquote>The lights go on and off, murder weapons appear and disappear, dead bodies accumulate. Since none of these events have the slightest significance, the filmmakers have attempted to make "Clue" into a screwball comedy, with lots of throwaway gags and one liners. Some of these moments of comedy are funny. Most are not. The cast looks promising. . . but the screenplay is so very, very thin that they spend most of their time looking frustrated, as if they'd just been cut off right before they were about to say something interesting.
Life sometimes contains wonderful ironies. When "Jagged Edge" was released a few months ago, everything hinged on the identity of the killer. The movie showed the killer being unmasked - literally showed his face on the screen - and yet, because of the camera angle, some viewers were still confused. They walked out of the theater arguing about who did it. Now we have a movie that makes it absolutely clear that several different people were guilty, and I walked out of the theater arguing about where to have lunch.</blockquote>
The Cable Guy had him convincingly play a pushover who gets taken advantage of.
While I agree Boris was a great character, I don't think he was misused. His "I am invincible" was meant to show his oversized ego, not display any real menace.
He helped make the villain's plan possible while providing comic relief for the audience. Somewhat similar to Joe Butcher and Truman-Lodge in the prior film and Henry Gupta in the following film.
I'd say he was the most blatantly, unambiguously evil villain in the Bond films since Max Zorin. His motive is purely megalomaniacal (unlike Alec Trevelyan who was partly motivated by feeling betrayed), he has no sense of loyalty to those that work for him (unlike Franz Sanchez), he's cartoonishly narcissistic and quick to anger, and his scheme would quite possibly lead to nuclear war for no greater goal than boosting his media empire.
I think Jonathan Pryce put in an entertaining performance, but I was half-expecting a scene where Carver goes "muhahahahahaha."
The irony is that Nielsen being in Airplane was supposed to be a joke in itself, because he was so firmly known for serious film roles. But nowadays most people don't even realize he was anything other than a comedic actor.
Yes, the intros show who the perpetrator is, how the crime was committed, and what the motive was. The rest of the episode is the audience seeing how Columbo will figure these things out.
I can't conceive of a Y2K-themed plot that isn't silly, like "an evil nerd group wants to bring [first world country] to its knees, so it poses as programmers hired to 'fix' the Y2K bug, but instead they disable.... stuff, and then the entire country is at the mercy of the evil nerd army and its leader, a crude parody of Bill Gates."
Even if the plot isn't specifically about Y2K, what would it be about? Terrorism? TWINE already involves a terrorist plotting to blow stuff up, albeit not on a global scale.
Because if the dispute involves money, the court can order a family member to pay for damages or whatever owed to another family member.
That's pretty much the nature of any "normal" court case. Doesn't matter if it's between family members, former spouses, friends, etc.
I assume in the case of Judge Judy though, both sides get paid something for being on the show.
"Django Unchained" and "12 Years a Slave" have white characters calling black people the n-word.
I doubt there would be outcry over an unsympathetic character in a 17th century setting denouncing a black person as a "black dog."
What Rambo was helping in this movie was the Mujahideen, a loose coalition of conservative and reactionary forces headed primarily by tribal and religious leaders.
When the Soviet-backed government was overthrown, civil war broke out between former Mujahideen. The Taliban's founders included some of these ex-Mujahideen like Mullah Omar, but to act as if "the Mujahideen" transformed into "the Taliban" is just bad history.
And while Stallone leans Republican, back in the 80s both parties were in favor of assisting the Mujahideen against the Soviet Army. In this sense the second film was actually more "conservative" in its messaging, since the notion that Vietnam was continuing to harbor American POWs, and that American politicians and bureaucrats sabotaged the US war effort in Vietnam, were far more widespread sentiments among Republicans than Democrats.
Was Shaq actually offered good films though? I get the impression that studios in the 90s thought he'd be a big hit among younger audiences thanks to his basketball career, and his acting opportunities were limited accordingly. Sorta like how I doubt studios were inclined to cast Hulk Hogan in an R-rated action movie, so he instead ended up in crap like "Santa with Muscles." (I'm not arguing Hogan necessarily deserved better, just saying.)
M is obviously meant to come across as heartless, but to be fair:
* From M's point of view, Bond was supposed to be in a completely different country on a completely different assignment, one that might have concerned something more dangerous (at least from a British or European point of view) than a drug lord.
* He says "this private vendetta of yours could easily compromise Her Majesty's government," and he has a point. A British agent going around killing people on US and Central American soil without any authorization from the relevant authorities could complicate Britain's relations with the US, the Republic of Isthmus, and potentially other states in the Western Hemisphere.
* I assume that "knew the risks" line simply meant Felix knew his job entailed the risk of tragedy to himself or others. It's an (obviously ineffective) attempt by M to encourage Bond to stop thinking of revenge and instead behave in a "professional" manner.
If I had to guess, it was felt that having Quarrell Jr killed in a movie where another previously-established Bond associate is maimed would be going a bit overboard.
I will say though, it's rather convenient that Felix is friends with a character nicknamed Sharkey who can therefore inform Bond that the wound was caused by a shark bite, not a chainsaw.
I have a high opinion of both films, but I wasn't talking about that. By "strong comeback" I was referring to how the public received GoldenEye, which performed better than any Bond film of the 80s. If there were doubts about the franchise's ability to survive the end of the Cold War, GoldenEye silenced them.
I think the scene is meant to suggest Killifer was indeed won over by Sanchez's offer. I can't think of any reason Sanchez would want to pretend to offer a bribe to an already bought man in front of others. That'd just make Killifer look even more suspicious in the aftermath of Sanchez's escape.
I think it aged alright. Obviously Dalton's Bond didn't come back, but GoldenEye was about as strong a comeback as a franchise could get.
And I'd say about them what I just said about Vox: if the article itself seems fine, I don't really care where it's hosted.
I cited Vox in this one specific instance, much like I might very well cite an article from Fox News or CNN if I thought it informative.
The person I was replying to cited nothing. Vox's article cites a bunch of sources. Do you have anything that disputes any of the sources used?
I assess articles on the basis of their content, not whether they're on a site whose politics I don't share.