Bondlets: A View to a Kill

1985

 

Roger Moore admitted thinking he was too old for his final outing.  He also specifically stated he would only say positive things about his co-stars in his excessively entertaining book, Bond on Bond.

Then he went on to specifically note he wasn’t mentioning the Bond girls from this outing.

This one’s never going to make it to the top of anyone’s list, but that doesn’t keep it from being packed with the fun moments that were a staple of the Moore era.

Due to the age old conflict between those in the Ski Club and the rest of the student body, my daughter isn’t a fan of skiing. However, she still found the pre-credits antics fun to watch, particularly the corny “California Girls” snowboarding gag, and the ice floe submarine.

Again…fun!

She also found the neon basted Duran Duran accompanied Eighties Fest that was the opening credits scene to be the weirdest out of any of the Bond films.

The Eighties are excessively hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.

Once again, she proved the effects of both nature and nurture connecting her to me by realizing Patrick Macnee is the guy “from that show with the scary lady on Doctor Who with Mr. Sweet.”

That’s my girl!

It says a great deal about the amount of realism they put into these films that the location shots and stunts can still wow an (almost) teenager thirty years later.

Yet another, “They really did that?” for the franchise was earned by the Eiffel tower parachute jump. 

Her jaw dropped and she was unable to say anything beyond, “Whoah,” for a while when she saw the Grand Stables and Château de Chantilly.  (Though she was slightly puzzled why everyone was dressed like George Washington.)

The fun level of the era snapped her out of both of them for extended cheer and laugh filled reactions to the chase through Paris following the first, and the steeplechase following the second.

It’s funny.  Yes, based on seeing so many of these films she’s gotten the ability to predict events fairly well:

The music helped her spot the evil person with a butterfly on a stick.

When the guy refused to take part in Zorin’s plan, she immediately said, “Well, he’s gonna die.”

And when 007 pulled one of his ridiculous leaps out of danger she called the jump way ahead of time, “Because he’s James Bond.”

However, there are an odd collection of occurrences that continue to confuse her:

When Bond and Sutton claimed to be looking for the bar in the insanely high class Château, she responded, “I would have said I was looking for the bathroom.”

She has no problem understanding a British accent, having be raised from birth on Python and Who, but couldn’t figure out the Texas one without subtitles.

She needed an explanation why all German Scientists wear monocles.

She found kissing far grosser than breathing out of a tire.

And she was very puzzled when Mayday tried to kill Bond. As she put it,

“I thought  she liked him…she jumped into bed with him naked.”

At least she maintained her comic timing.

When Pola Ivanova (who was supposed to be Anya Amasova) dropped the classic:

"The bubbles tickle my… Tchaikovsky!"

My daughter was right there.

“Um…what’s a Tchaikovsky?”

And as little respect as she (and Moore, and nearly everyone else) had for Stacy Sutton she cheered for her providing a “Shotgun in the patoot” moment.

Some personal notes:

Like all the Roger Moore films, there’s a weird mix of lightness and darkness.

There were insane, crash filled police chases with no injuries.

Yet there was also the “fisherman in the drying lake” gag in the middle of horrifying massacres with machine guns, floods and explosives.

The ending explosion generated many cheers, and my daughter respects Q enough to understand he’ll figure out where 007 has gone off Jamesbonding.

“Q always knows, follow the clothes.”

Then she choreographed her own interpretive dance to Duran Duran.


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