Kenneth Hughes

Something to do with James Bond, kind of.

So completely terrible, it made me want to cry a little. I guess it was meant to be a comedy? It has the tone of a comedy (so far as it has a tone at all), and the synopsis says it's a spoof, and there's a joke every ten minutes or so. The first thing I could definitely say was meant to be funny was a little over fourteen minutes in. Nearly halfway through the movie, I still couldn't say what the plot was. Most of the time I either didn't know what was happening, or didn't know why it was happening; the rest of the time, I didn't know what it had to do with anything else that had happened. I'm fairly confident that this movie's quality-of-product-to-talent-involved ratio is lower than any other movie.

Enjoyment: F

estimated GPA (I only watched the first hour): 0.9/4… (meer)

Rating: well, why not? 3* of five

Oops! Forgot one. This is 1967's film version I'm discussing, not the book, which was *awful*. That's not fair...it's not horrid writing, it's just so very very very dated and not in a good way. Kind of a time capsule of what was wrong with 1954.

Ya know...this film version was pretty damn lame, too. What redeems it is the sheer balls-out what-did-I-just-watch comedic pace of the thing. David Niven is LUDICROUS as Bond, but good as this character who isn't Bond but is called Bond. The return of Ursula Andress, this time as superspy Vesper Lynd (not to be mistaken for 2006's Vesper, completely different character), is notable; but the turn to the comedic and ridiculous is signalled by Bond having a child by Mata Hari, yclept Mata Bond.

It was one of the many moments where I rolled my eyes so hard I think I saw my brain. There's a bit with a flying saucer in London that convinced me I was having an LSD flashback.

Don't go into the film thinking it's a Bond flick and maybe it's okay...but frankly, it feels a little too Sixties-hip-via-Hollywood for me to do more than smile faintly.

Why watch it, then? Because David Niven is very good at being urbanely nuts. It's a meta-performance. If he arched his eyebrow any higher, he's lose it in his receding hairline. Because Ursula Andress is classic as Vesper. Because Orson Welles is endearingly baffled as Le Chiffre, seeming not to have seen a script before being shoved in front of the camera. It's like a Warhol-movie moment. If you're a straight guy, Jacqueline Bisset and Barbara Bouchet are pneumatically endowed. But Peter Sellers was a major disappointment to me. Clouseau was his only character at that point, I guess. Blah.

Fun. Not Bond, but fun. Sort of.… (meer)