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YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062512/) - Watched this for the first time. Saw a part of it many years ago. This is a nice Bond film. Bond has to become Japanese and enters a Ninja school. The most interesting thing about this film is that most of it is spoofed in AUSTIN POWERS and instead of Mike Myers you get Donald Pleasence as the bald grey suited evil dude with the cat who rides around in egg shaped transports. Also the space scenes are copied in AUSTIN POWERS only they use a giant Bobs Big Boy to swallow the ship. Didn't know about the obvious link between the two movies till yesterday. The film played on AMC yesterday. By the way the Bond movie is also fun.

(http://93ol.diy.myrice.com/dyhb/007/00764.jpg)

One of my favorites since it was the first Sean Connery Bond film ,and also the third ever, watched. Mie Hama as Kissy Suzuki is one of my favorite Bond girls. Yowza!

Great battle at the end also.

When I was a kid, this was my favorite Bond movie (for awhile).  I think I liked it so much because of the massive ninja attack at the end.  Over the years, it has slipped lower on my list of Bond favorites.  Right now, GOLDFINGER is my favorite.

Sean Connery rules, Daniel Craig drools!

I enjoyed it, but couldn't get my head around the changes from the book to the movie [the book was my favourite in the Bond series and was much different]

Also, Goldfinger is still my favourite Connery Bond film as well.

Scott, Donald Pleasance's character's name is Ernst Blofeld, founder of SPECTRE (that's the Special Executive for Counterintelligence , Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion).

Blofeld has also been played by Telly Savales and Max Von Sydow. I can't remember which one it was in but Roger Moore once hooked Blofeld's wheelchair on a helicopter skid and dropped him down a smoke stack.  Does anybody remember which movie that was in?

Trek Geezer:

That movie was FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.

And don't forget that Blofeld was also played by Charles Gray in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.  Interestingly, Gray played a different character (a good guy) in another Bond film.  It might have been YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE!

trek_geezer Wrote:
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> in but Roger Moore once hooked Blofeld's
> wheelchair on a helicopter skid and dropped him
> down a smoke stack.  Does anybody remember which
> movie that was in?

I think it was For Your Eyes Only.

You Only Live Twice is one of my favourite Bond films, because it has almost everything a Bond film should have -- megalomaniacal villain with plan for world domination, gigantic secret fortress full of high-tech stuff, lots of cool gadgets (like the gyrocopter), combination of detective work and wide variety of fighting (guns, helicopters, army of ninjas), sexy girls and exotic settings. The Connery Bond was also a perfect combination of tough guy and playboy. All this movie really lacks is a henchman with a cool gimmick. That and a chance for Bond to spar with the villain in a social setting early on. Blofeld is, of course, not a public figure like some of the other villains.

But really, this movie is stylish and fun, and a fine example of what the more recent Bond films are doing wrong.

Kissy Suzuki was nice and so was the other female. Also liked the later Pierce Bronson one with Michelle Yeoh.

Yep, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE really did have a lot of everything.

When I first read the book I was surprised by how much of it was different. Though I didn't usually apprecaite a book with less action back then I still liked the book.

No my favourite Bond by any stretch, but lots of campy fun to be had. Connery in (pseudo)Japanese makeup? Check. Gadchets? Check Big battle at the end? Check Ninjas? Sure as hell!!

And this was years before ninjas became popular. It was on the cutting edge, to use an irritating cliche AND a bad pun.

Sean Connery is the one true Bond, all the others (including Daniel Craig) are wannabes.

Oh, c'on! There's at least one good Bond movie for every actor that played him, that makes them all (including that Australian dude) decent Bonds in my book. About Craig, he was great on "Layer Cake", so I think he'll do just fine.

Craig is to James Bond what Christian Bale is to Batman: the a***ole that barges in out of the blue and declares all the other mogvies non-existant, including the GOOD ones.

SEAN CONNERY AND MICHAEL KEATON 4-EVER!

Hey plan9, can you spell j-u-v-e-n-i-l-e?

Connery was the first and actually the third to play Bond and in the beginning he gave Bond a very dangerous edge. The later ones during his tenure started the whole trend of being about the gadgets.

Lazenby, is somewhat under rated. I think he did a very servicable job.

Roger Moore was the producers first choice, but he was busy doing The Saint on TV. When he did take over the franchise, I think it eventually got sillier and sillier with each film.

I think Timothy Dalton did a very good job and is highly under rated in the part. He brought the edge back to Bond.

Pierce Brosnan also gave the character that dangerous edge, which Roger Moore just could not make believable.

I don't know about the Craig character, he certainly doesn't  look suave enough to be Bond.

Don't forget Sean in his unofficial outing as 007 in Never Say Never Again. You know that remake of Thunderball.

Connery if my favorite.

I liked Lazenby.

Roger Moore, is my least favorite.

Timothy Dalton made a great Bond. He had an edge and was given chances to show emotion, a rather uncommon sight for Bond.

Bronsman was good looking and he was suave. Another good Bond.

I'm willing to give the next guy a chance.

The only Bond I didn't like was when Roger Moore got old.  He did not age as well as Connery and the later movies with Moore being all wrinked fiirting with an equally geriatric  MoneyPenny was just creepy

In terms of what th e books had [a racist, hard, bastard of a Bond] Dalton probably came closest. though in my minds eye, Connery is great and Dalton comes close.  The others do an ok job, so I'm not too fussed really [I mean it's a Bond movie!!!  It's not like someone will ever get an Oscar playing James Bond...these days especially.]

Haven't seen Layer Cake, but like most things, I'm watching it before I make any judgement other than 'he doesn't look like he'll do a bad job.'

The Dalton movies actually tried to recapture some of the Connery Bond after the campy Roger Moore films. Unfortunately, the scripts sucked. First, too much basis in reality -- arms dealers, drug lords. Second, lame villains. Honestly, was Joe Don Baker really supposed to seem dangerous, or even competent, in The Living Daylights?

Brosnan had everything Bond should have, and could have been as good as Connery, but his movies had the same problems. Russian mobsters, media moguls, North Koreans? Where was the Billionaire with delusions of godhood, or SPECTRE? Too many generic tough guys and not enough stylish henchmen. Action that could be in any action movie.

Die Another Day was the closest to what a Bond movie should be, although I didn't like the idea of someone successfully imprisoning Bond, even if he did win in the end. I'm wary of this new Bond, but I'm hoping that they continue in the direction they were going with the last movie -- to get back what sets Bond apart from the other action heroes.

The Brosnan era suffered from the end of the Cold War and not having the Russians as bad guys anymore. Dalton was in during the height of the Drug War, so of course he had to fight a drug lord.

Dalton, Brosnan, and Connery were all believable as the cold blooded killer that is James Bond.

The Russians weren't really the bad guys in Bond films anyway. They often played a part, but I thought too much was made of the end of the Cold War and it's effect on Bond. Bond never needed Russians. He had Goldfinger, Stromberg, Drax, Blofeld, and a bunch of other rich kooks who weren't affiliated with any country.

As for the war on drugs, that was exactly my point. Everybody was fighting drug lords. Bond has got to stand apart from the other action movies. The villains can't be ordinary.

That was be one of the things I didn't like about Live and Let Die. Although it had a lot in its favour, the villain was basically a drug dealer and nothing more. He had a fancy underground lair, but it seemed added on for no purpose but to make the movie more Bond-like. Really, Live and Let Die was almost an attempt to stick Bond in a blaxploitation film. A good movie for many reasons (boat chase, redneck sheriff, Baron Samedi), but lacking as a Bond film.

Bond movies need a rich lunatic bent on nothing short of world domination (not lots of money, and certainly not higher network ratings). And the villain needs a henchman who is more than some scary tough guy. Give him a hat that slices through things, metal teeth, a steel claw, something cool.

I guess it's harder and harder to 'set Bond apart' from action hero stereotypes, since the Bond films really did set a major trend of action cliches and stereotypes [such as hot babes, cool gadgets and lots of flying bullets]

And from what I remember in the books, most of the bad guys were always somehow affiliated with 'the other side' with lots of cloak and dagger stuff, and most of the really cool bad guys like Blofeld were members of either SMERSH or SPECTRE [can't remember about Goldfinger though I must admit]

Casino Royale was the first of the Bond books, and therefore has him without the gadgets, he had just got his '00' prefix and was generally inexperienced, but still obviously talented.  If they don't mess around with the source too much [that is, the book], it can make for quite an interesting film, since it has Bond back to his Baccarat playing best, and it's more focused [for the most part] on the espionage side of things rather than the action side [there really isn't, and shouldn't be, too much action in this one]

It would make for a nice new direction for the Bond series: by Die Another Day, Bond had lost his mystique along the way, with so much mindless action and pointless plots, and quite frankly it was getting tiresome.  Changing the format is the best choice the producers could have made [I mean, the last two films were really really formulaic I thought]

So all in all I'm looking foward to it.

I'm soory, I am NOT looking forward to the Nolanizing of the Bond saga.

I say, if you wanna ignore all the WANNABE Bonds, fine. But don't ignore Sean Connery.

You can't just barge in and ignore the entire saga just because you think you are better than them (and you AREN'T).

Connery was substituted like 30 years ago. Get over it.

I'm afraid there will be action. Craig got his two front teeth broken in one of the fight scenes and had to have the teeth crowned before they could continue filming.

There is really only one solution at this point:  Ben Affleck.

The Bond franchise jumped the shark when they made that rubber guy explode at the end of "Live and let die".  

To me, the JtS moment was near the end of Moonraker, where they had the marines shoot it out with the bad guys in space.  OK, where do you go from there?  I lost interest a couple of movies after that, there wasn't as much character development, it was all neat gadgets and explosions. Too "Die Hard" for me.

Er... I was kidding. There some decent Bonds after "Live and let die", like "The living Daylights" or "The World is not Enough".

Movies CAN'T "jump the shark", that expression strictly applies to television shows.

plan9superfan Wrote:
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> Movies CAN'T "jump the shark", that expression
> strictly applies to television shows.


I donno...if they become a series, i'd say they can...

You are correct, sir. Charles Gray was in "You Only Live Twice."

As for Blofeld he has been played by Max Von Sydow in "Never Say Never Again," Telly Savalas in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and two actors--Eric Pohlmann and Anthony Dawson--in both "From Russia with Love" and "Thunderball." I am making the presumption, that one appeared as the character, and the other actor voiced the character.

While Bond (Peter Sellers) and Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) faced off over a game of baccarat in the 1967 version of "Casino Royale," rumour has it, that in this version of "Casino Royale," Bond and Le Chiffre will face off over a game of Texas Hold 'Em Poker.

...Or Strip Poker. Working title is "Brokeback Casino". Now, that would be a complete makeover of the series...

BoyScoutKevin Wrote:
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> that in this version of "Casino Royale," Bond and
> Le Chiffre will face off over a game of Texas Hold
> 'Em Poker.

OK, someone really should be shot for that if it's true.

The Ernst Blofeld character in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE must have been the film that AUSTIN POWER Doctor Evil was directly "hatched" from.

OK, it goes like this:

-Austin Powers  =  James Bond

-Basil Exposition  =  M

-Dr. Evil  =  Blofeld

-Mr. Biggelsworth  =  Blofeld's cat

-Frau Farbissana  =  Rosa Klebb

-Mini Me  = Knick Knack (from "The Man With the Golden Gun")

-Goldmember  =  Goldfinger

-Random Task  =  Oddjob

-Foxy Cleopatra  = Jinx

-Felicity Shagwell  = Mary Goodnight

-the sharks with friggin laser beams on their friggin heads  =  the sharks from "Moonraker"

-the mutant man-eating tuna fishes = the crocodiles from "Live and Let Die"

-the Union Jack Jaguar   = the Aston Martin

-Alotta Fagina  = Melina Havelock

-Fook Mi and Fook Yu = the Bond girls from "You Only Live Twice"

-Mr. Roboto  = Tiger Tanaka

-the Russian general  =  General Gogol

-Number Two  = Mr. Largo

-Robin Swallows  = p***y Galore

That's a good list plan9superfan. Also don't forget the Bob's Big Boy Scene and the Egg Shaped things.

Just one note: Powers didn't drive a Jaguar, but a Shaguar. Big difference there ;-D