What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

I rewatched Arrival with my SF students after they read the Ted Chiang story. Even with the dumb nuclear war plot device it is pretty moving and they had the feels at the end. I had forgotten that Costello dies. Maybe every Ted Chiang story that comes to the screen should have bomb timers and the threat of global nuclear war.

Last summer, I commenced an epic viewing of all the James Bond movies, courtesy of Amazon Prime. But I'm not that big a fan of Bond, so I watched them over a period of months, until Amazon abruptly dropped them. Also, I had to skip the original Casino Royalle and Never Say Never Again, because Amazon didn't have them.

On Saturday, I was unsurprised to see that HBO MAX now had a collection of Bond movies. I knew that I left off during the Brosnan movies but couldn't remember where, so I re-watched both Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies. But HBO didn't have the next two Brosnan movies, The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day, which I nicknamed Bond Another Bond. Since I still haven't seen those two, I have paused my Bond viewing again, to be resumed at some future date when one of my streaming services carries them. It appears that HBO still has all the Daniel Craig Bond movies, so it's tempting to skip ahead.

Since I came of age during the herpes panic, which was shortly followed by the AIDS epidemic, I have long been annoyed by Bond's jokey womanizing. During the early Brosnan movies, Bond finally receives some criticism for it, though he deflects with humor. The Craig Bond still engages in a bit of womanizing, but it feels less glorified and is finally dispensed with by the second Craig movie. Although this is possibly a sign that the producers and writers are trying to adapt Bond to modern mores, it's possible that the passing of long-time Bond producer Albert Broccoli and his subsequent replacement by his daughter Barbara were the real driver of change.

DIE ANOTHER DAY might be the single worst Bond movie of them all, so you're not really missing much . TWNE is OK, probably third best of the four Brosnan movies but still way better than DAD.

I may be off base here, but I don’t think the sexuality aspect of Bond is really negative. Yeah, he sleeps around, but that’s not really immoral or inherently bad. Yeah, he often uses sex as a means of achieving some other goal, but pretty much all of the women he does this to are simultaneously doing it to him. And the other women he has sex with for fun aren’t portrayed as his victims.

None of it is ever really expressed as negative interaction, but consensual.

I’m not religious, I don’t have any “moral” objection to people having sex for fun, and women aren’t any different in their desires than men. I wouldn’t say these are examples of positive sexual expression but they don’t seem to me to be negative either.

The Bond movies tend to display a casual misogyny. The Bond Girls, as they are known, are nearly always young, attractive, and willing to sleep with a guy that they barely know. They often die, following a similar trope of how people in horror movies die after having sex. There have only been four Bond movies where a Bond Girl didn't die, including the two most recent movies. Even when they don't die, Bond Girls are often treated as disposable entertainment, no longer of interest once James has had his way with them.

screenrant.com/james-bond-girls-movies-all-deaths-explained/

Thanks.

I’m not entirely disagreeing, but in my own life experience there are plenty of women that treat men as casual sex objects to be thrown away; it seems outdated or perhaps even misogynistic in a way to not acknowledge women as sexual people who always need a deeper connection or longer term relationship out of sex.

It’s certainly a social sexual bias and double standard, stemming from a desire to keep women controlled, to portray them as being genuinely different in sexual desire. Liking sex isn’t bad. Bond is always fit and handsome, exciting and self-confident. He’s a sexual object himself.

Yes, he’s an assassin and it’s dangerous to be around him. Yes, women who sleep with him end up dead, but for so many of them the goal is to kill him or to be involved in whatever dangerous thing he is doing.

I think a lot of people grow up in a body-negative, sexuality-negative environment, especially when it comes to women, and they don’t necessarily acknowledge that women like sex too. Or attribute a desire for intimacy, security and commitment as only something women want and that men are inherently casual and even predatory. It’s more complex than that, and we should stop equating sex and sexual expression as subjects of morality.

Msample wrote: DIE ANOTHER DAY might be the single worst Bond movie of them all, so you're not really missing much . TWNE is OK, probably third best of the four Brosnan movies but still way better than DAD.

IMO A View To A Kill has it beat. It's terrible.

Its close I'll grant you that. AVtaK at least has Christopher Walken chewing scenery and offers an amusing detour into peak 80s. The female lead is rather weak I'll grant you that. And by this point Roger Moore was getting rather old. DAD suffers from some CGI that has aged rather poorly as well as an oddly juxtaposed Halle Berry character who was shoehorned into the plot as an attempt to spin off her character into her own series that never clicked. The villain is urterly forgettable and one of the more bizarre premises, even for a James Bond movie.

Operation Fortune - A Guy Ritchie spy movie. It was stupid but fun and Aubrey Plaza was a delight as always.

I have checked out Kurosawa's Rashomon for like the eighth time and may actually watch it.

One of my all-time favorites.

Uwe Boll is a notoriously bad director, so I have gone slightly out of my way to avoid his movies... until now. Amazon Prime has his 1968 Tunnel Rats (2008) movie, and I felt that was a sufficiently original movie concept that maybe even Uwe Boll could make an okay movie. Years ago, I read a good book about a specific aspect of the Vietnam War: The Tunnels of Cu Chi. The clay soil of the Cu Chi province is ideal for tunneling, so the Vietnamese riddled the region with tunnels during the war. It was ideal for their style of guerilla warfare, and they also defended these tunnels with some insidious traps.

The movie is okay. The first hour is a bad war movie, but then it turns into an intense horror movie, especially if you have claustrophobia. Boll is still a bad director, except that he seems to have a knack for horror. And I suspect that he read the same book that I read, or at least comparable works. If you value realism in your war movies, you should probably pass on 1968 Tunnel Rats. But if you are looking for some novel horror, this movie is worth the trouble.

I saw Banshees of Inishirin last night. I though it was a well made and acted movie but it didn't do much for me. I don't really care for magical realism adjacent stuff either, so maybe I wasn't the intended target. I do want everyone to know who watches this that it is an incredibly grim film, in content and in theme. I think people selling this as black comedy are greatly exaggerating the chuckle worthy moments in the first half before it becomes black as night.

I dunno. I like depressing work but none of the film resonated emotionally with me. It was just a difficult, sad watch. I get that it was an elaborate analogy for the irish civil war and senseless conflict more generally but boy, there wasn't much to glom onto besides that for me.

I’ve been interested in this strictly because I liked In Bruges. It sounds like the tone of Banshees is not the same? I actually don’t know anything about the plot.

I thought Banshees was excellent, but I am a hardcore McDonaugh fan. Gary is right in that it is very dark; probably the darkest thing he's ever written, which is saying a lot. But I thought it was so well-grounded in, well, reality that it made the characters both appealing (once you get to know them) and the situation understandable, once you realize what he's really trying to say. But, yes, Disgustipater, the tone is heavier than In Bruges.

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