A View to a Kill

Roger Moore's send-off as the longest-tenured James Bond is a bit of an underwhelming one, and probably should have come sooner. The movie certainly isn't terrible, and is better in a lot of ways than its predecessor. I've lost track of how many times Moore's Bond has gone skiing (it's like three or four), something which every Bond seems to do except Connery, strangely; but he does so in the opening sequence, killing his only victims until the very end, and of all five, he actually directly personally offs zero of them. It's a bit unusual how sometimes he'll destroy a small army by himself, and others he'll barely harm a fly. I wonder if it's a conscious decision on the part of the filmmakers to mix it up from film to film, because while movies often follow similar story structures to previous entries in the series, if he was always involved in the same amount of violence people might wonder what the point is.

This is also a high water mark for number of different girls slept with, pretty impressive for a 58 year old. The problem is that it's hard to believe he could pull it off, he doesn't so much romance them as just let them fall into his bed. Even Moore himself he either didn't have chemistry with or downright didn't like the two main women. And it took me this long but I finally got fed up with his constant boring witticisms. When he's infiltrating the villain's base with the girl, he points to a hiding spot on a vehicle and says "Why walk when you can ride." Does every god damn thing out of your mouth have to be a quip, dude? It's okay to talk like a normal person once in a while. I liked Christopher Walken as the antagonist, he's one of the more psychotic ones in the series and actually has something approaching an interesting background. He's pretty much the highlight of the movie, although his penchant for theatrical executions over definite ones is his downfall as usual. Not a bad movie, but again, not a great one.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "A View to a Kill" by Duran Duran
Foreign locations: Siberia, France, California
Bond, James Bond: 32:05 (fake name), 1:12:10 (other fake name), 1:33:55, 1:34:30
Martini shaken, not stirred: Not ordered
Ladies seduced: 4
Chases: 3
Kills: 5
Non-lethal takedowns: 5

How I Met Your Mother - Season 4

So now I'm caught up. While the show has always been funny, only now does it seem to actually be getting somewhere with the actual supposed point of the whole thing, the story of the title. I'm curious how much planning has actually gone into this, because they started dropping hints about future events in the previous season, and really did it in earnest this time, but all of it seemed to culminate around the finale with very little that I can think of as far as suggestions for what's next, other that Bob Saget basically saying "No seriously, I'm getting to the point now". The whole season is basically life kicking the crap out of Ted in order to apparently get him to make a decision that will lead to him meeting his wife, though I can already see how they're going to continue pussy-footing around the issue with teases and fake outs.

One of the secretly most interesting things of watching this time was noticing all the ways they tried to hide the fact that both female leads were pregnant for at least part of the filming. Some worked, like when Lily wins an eating contest and has a resultant bulge, others not so much, like loose shirts and bags or boxes doing a fairly poor job of obscuring it. They even wrote Alyson Hannigan out for a few episodes when I guess it was especially bad. There's not a whole lot to say about the actual comedy, it's a nice mix of clever wordplay, snappy dialogue, and humorously over-elaborate rules, diagrams, and theories about dating. Just a couple days from when I'm writing about this until season five begins, and I couldn't have timed it better.

Octopussy

Here's another Moore Bond film I didn't really appreciate, mostly because it seemed more concerned with making the audience chuckle than exciting them. It's sort of like Moonraker, but instead of an utterly absurd final act it's just pervasively silly almost the entire time. It's just hard for me to be interested when action sequences are played for laughs instead of any sense of tension or suspense. There's a part on a speeding train late in the movie which is decent, but otherwise it's a pretty goofy film. An early scene in India is less a chase than a personal challenge by the filmmakers to see how many clichés they could stuff into a single scene. Sword swallowers! Walking on hot coals! Juggling torches! I mean, at one point Bond is trying to escape some pursuers in a jungle and swings away from them on some vines, and the iconic Tarzan shout plays. Just for no reason. This movie is fucking stupid.

It does have some decent elements, though. The plot involving Fabergé eggs, nuclear weapons, East/West Berlin, and the tenuous truce between the USSR and the western world is one of the less terrible ones in Moore's tenure. Maud Adams, in a rare return for a Bond girl actress and I believe the only one to do so as a different character, has been treated relatively kindly by time in the nine years since The Man with the Golden Gun, and is still pretty good at it. And I mean, Jaws isn't in it. The main henchman is a big, mostly quiet Indian fellow, and pretty forgettable... but he isn't Jaws. The final action scenes are a mixed bag, the stuff with the circus people in the chateau is silly as usual, but the airplane sequence is fairly tense and an okay climax. It's a shame the movie is so silly, because otherwise it's really not bad.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "All Time High" by Rita Coolidge
Foreign locations: Latin America, India, Germany
Bond, James Bond: 31:20
Martini shaken, not stirred: 1:08:40 (Unspoken)
Ladies seduced: 3
Chases: 2
Kills: 13 humans, 1 spider, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 10

Muse - The Resistance

Muse isn't exactly breaking a lot of new ground here. This album is a little more operatic, a little more theatrical, a little more like Queen, but there's no real change to the sound they've had for years. It's actually one of the most predictable albums I've heard in years. I could guess some of the flourishes and melodies before they finished happening, and the only real surprise was when "Exogenesis", the three part symphony that closes the album and impresses the most of anything on the record, didn't explode bombastically at some point, instead merely building and then falling pretty beautifully.

It's not a bad album by any means, just an unexciting one for a group that's ostensibly unique and totally original. I can't think of any groups that have the mix of synth elements, driving bass, and falsetto vocals that make up their identity, but it doesn't quite sound new anymore. Also, Matthew Bellamy's guitar playing is totally restrained here, which is not a good thing at all. "Uprising", "Resistance", and "MK Ultra" sound like normal singles for the band; catchy, epic, and occasionally a bit silly. A couple tracks incorporate excerpts from classical music and operas, which is a bit pretentious, but doesn't really hurt them. "Guiding Light" is the epitome of sounding like they've done this all before. The key to whether you enjoy this album might hinge on whether you like Muse for their style or just for being a rock band.