BEFORE: Before I get to the film, it's time for Part 47 of my multi-part rant against the cable company, who for legal reasons I'll call "TimeMorons/WarnerJerkWeasels". Hey, it's not slander if it's true. You may recall last August that one of my DVRs went loco and deleted all of my programs, and although I got some satisfaction after swapping it out for a new device, a week's worth of television was lost forever, because there's simply NO WAY that the company allows you to download shows off of a corrupted drive to another drive. The technology to download files from one drive to another simply does not exist in their universe, even though that's what every other hard drive in the world allows.
This time I was swapping out an old modem, because our internet connection at home has been spotty, and while getting the new one at the walk-in service center (because there's one near my office, and it's much faster than waiting for a technician to never show up at the house) the representative of TimeMorons/WarnerJerkWeasels tried to sell me on the concept of "bundling" services, since he is essentially a corporate robot and this is what he is programmed to do. I'm usually against such things, as any time a corporation offers to save me money, I start to smell their bullshit.
But by combining my cable and internet services and adding a phone line to complete the bundle trifecta, the offer meant about an $80 savings on my bill. Now that I'm only working part-time, I have to consider such things seriously. Plus, with an emergency phone line available through the modem, this would mean I could drop our phone service from AT&T. No one except telemarketers has called us on the land-line in months anyway, everyone just calls our cell phones. (In fact, our outgoing answering-machine message somehow got mixed up with a telemarketer's pitch to save money on our electric bill, and we've never bothered to fix it. I like the poetic justice that any telemarketer calling us has to also listen to someone's sales pitch.) That's another $70 a month I could eliminate from my bills, so this bundling concept could save me $150 a month. So, please, robot representative of a Moron/JerkWeasel conglomerate, please tell me more.
I agreed to the bundling, packed up the new modem, and, flush with an extra theoretical $150 per month in my favor, went hog-wild and asked him to add the only premium channel that I wasn't already getting to my line-up, Epix, for an extra $5. They're the only channel running "The Wolf of Wall Street", which I missed the last time they had a free preview weekend. I went home and checked my cable box, no Epix yet, but I knew that any time there's a change made to the channel line-up, it gets implemented at 5 or 6 am, when most viewers, even slackers like me, are asleep.
4 am the next morning, I checked my cable box and it was fine. I woke up at 11 am to find I had the Epix channel, but my DVR also appeared to have recorded a bunch of children's shows that had aired in November and December, which was impossible. Most of those shows I'd never heard of, and the DVR certainly wasn't programmed to record them. They wouldn't even play back, and they weren't taking up space on the drive, they were somehow just phantoms of non-recorded shows from last month. And the DVR also chose to delete shows that I HAD recorded, possibly to make room for all this non-existent children's programming.
Well, I was livid, but after deleting the phantom shows, the DVR seemed to be working more or less normally. I lost three episodes each of "Jeopardy!", "The Daily Show" and "Late Show with David Letterman", but at least some of that was available on demand. Plus I had my new channel, so I gave the box one last chance to work correctly, and on Friday morning, the same thing happened - kids' shows were recorded, and my Thursday night shows were deleted. It's as if adding a channel got my DVR's programming swapped with someone else's.
So Friday morning I went back to the Morons/Jerkweasels service center, DVR in hand (somehow I avoided smashing it with a sledgehammer to make my point) to explain the problem, and I was beyond angry. Yeah, I caused a scene - all the money I pay this company every month to provide service, and they can't give me a device that will record my shows, save them for me to watch, and then delete them, in that order. Brainless Robot Representative #2 offered me a brand new DVR, "guaranteed" to work, the new models apparently came out in September (of course, because my last DVR problem happened in August, when I was also given a new DVR "guaranteed" to work right.)
I'm going to simplify the story a little bit here, because there were other tangential problems that occurred, like the bundling hadn't happened right, and there were a number of robot representative body orifices that I may have threatened to shove my DVR down (or up) - it doesn't matter. The point is that for the next half-hour, I was "that guy" - the disgruntled customer making a scene. And the robot had to call over another robot to assist me, and that guy said something like, "Sir, you have to believe that we're giving you the best possible equipment, and that it will work properly."
Really? I HAVE to believe that? I gave it to this guy good - "No, as a matter of fact, I DON'T have to believe that. Don't even TRY to tell me what I HAVE to believe. Because I believe that every piece of equipment this office has ever given me is a piece of crap. I also believe that everyone here is completely incompetent. And I believe that this DVR will work properly for 6 months and then go crazy, because every DVR you've given me has done exactly that. THAT'S what I choose to believe."
I hope there's security footage somewhere of me unloading on these robot representatives, I really do. This company needs a wake-up call. They've got thousands of DVRs out in the field, and every 6 months they download new software to the boxes, under cover of night, without checking to make sure that the software is compatible with all of the hardware. This leads to weird glitches, like deleting all of the recorded shows from the drive when a customer does something simple, like adding a new premium channel.
On the way out, I noticed the Moron/JerkWeasel Corporation is now offering home security and fire protection services. Now, why would ANYONE trust the safety of their home to a company that can't build a DVR that works properly, or deliver a consistent internet signal? What could possibly lead customers to think they'll offer a burglar or fire alarm that does a proper job? No, thanks! I already live in constant fear my recorded shows will vanish, which is why I'm always dubbing them to safe, reliable videotape. Call me old-fashioned, but it works, and I get to see my shows on my own time this way.
Sean Connery carries over from "Medicine Man", getting younger once again (53).
THE PLOT: A SPECTRE agent has stolen two American nuclear warheads, and James Bond must find their targets before they are detonated.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Thunderball" (Movie #1,447), "Skyfall" (Movie #1,464)
AFTER: I covered most of the James Bond series in June of 2012 - and this one is sort of the "red-headed step-child" in the franchise. In fact, it's technically not part of the MGM franchise at all (plus I didn't have a copy of it to watch then, I had to wait an extra year for some channel to run it.). It was made by a different production company than the others, leading to a number of lawsuits and arguments over who owns the rights to what. This WB film was released in 1983, just 4 months after "Octopussy", so there was sort of a "Battle of the Bonds" that year. Roger Moore was the official James Bond, but no one knew if audiences were more eager to see Connery get back into character.
Of course, this raises questions about who "owns" anything. Some things are copyrightable, some are not. You can't copyright a title, for example - if I wanted to make a film about tornado chasers and call it "Gone With the Wind", that's legal. So there are always ways around the rules, and once you get a judge involved, all bets are off. In this case the co-writer and producer of "Thunderball" won the right to re-make that film, so a Bond film could be made by another company, as long as it was essentially a re-tread of "Thunderball". They fiddled with a couple character names, and undid some of the changes made for the first movie, but it's got the same DNA.
This film's producer was Jack Schwartzman, (father of Jason) and his wife, Talia Shire Schwartzman, is listed as a production consultant. Much speculation has also been made about her brother's (Francis Ford Coppola) contributions to the script. And it was the only Bond film directed by an American, Irvin Kershner, who also directed "The Empire Strikes Back".
Unfortunately, this ends up being more proof that the 1980's were, at heart, a very silly decade. The Bond (and Bond villain) gadgets used here are much siller than usual. The laser-watch and exploding pen are fairly standard, but remote-control sharks? That's the sort of thing that the Austin Powers movies made fun of. "Entrapment" got around the retinal-scan thing with goggles, someone here uses an entire fake eye. In his head. Yep. Silliest of all, though, is an attempt to cash in on these new-fangled arcade games that the kids are playing by having Bond face off against his foe by playing a game that's a weird combination of Risk, Tempest, and that old-time arcade game that gives you an electric-shock and judges your manliness by how long you can hold on without letting go.
When I watched the other Bond films, I agonized over the viewing order. I wondered if I should just start with "Dr. No" and move through the whole franchise chronologically, or go in the order Ian Fleming wrote the stories, or attempt to work out some chronology that would make more sense. I opted to start with Daniel Craig in the origin story "Casino Royale", then watch "Quantum of Solace", then go back to "Dr. No" and proceed forward, ending with "Skyfall". This naturally led to a lot of story confusion, characters changing their look, and going from being dead to alive and all that, but really there was no good way to do it. I satisfied myself by linking from a Daniel Craig film before the beginning and to another Daniel Craig film after the end. (This keeps the OCD beast in my brain at bay.)
You might ask, "Where does this film fit in the chronology?" which ends up being one of those unanswerable koans, like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" This film doesn't fit anywhere in the chronology, because it's not supposed to, any more than the Daniel Craig films fit with the Connery or Moore or Brosnan films, because the franchise got re-booted. This film features an older, retired Bond, who gets dragged back into service because, umm, OK let's just say that no one else was available, maybe everyone was on holiday or there was a gas leak or something, leading to a secret agent shortage. This film takes place during "story time", which means that all issues of when or why get tabled, and you should just sit back and try to enjoy the story.
For example, Ernst Blofeld is back as the head of SPECTRE, despite a Blofeld-like villain being killed quite dramatically by Roger Moore's Bond at the start of "For Your Eyes Only". And that Bond was (probably) younger than this Bond, so either he didn't really die, or the timeline's out of whack, or Bond faces another villain here with the same exact name. Again, try not to worry too much about this. But the next Bond film was recently announced, and its title is "Spectre". Will we see Blofeld again? Who knows? (Count on it...)
Bond sleeps with beautiful women (4, but who's counting?), Bond tracks down the missing warheads, Bond rides a motorcycle and fights a bunch of enemy agents. Stuff blows up, SPECTRE is defeated, and the world order is restored. If you're looking for things to make more sense than that, you're probably watching the wrong film.
Also starring Kim Basinger (last seen in "8 Mile"), Klaus Maria Brandauer (last seen in "Out of Africa"), Max von Sydow (last seen in "Shutter Island"), Bernie Casey, Edward Fox (last seen in "Force 10 From Navarone"), Pamela Salem, Alec McOwen, and a cameo by Rowan Atkinson (last seen in "Love Actually").
RATING: 4 out of 10 dry martinis
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