The best of the James Bond adventures starring Roger Moore as tuxedoed Agent 007, this globe-trotting thriller introduced the steel-toothed Jaws (played by seven-foot-two-inch-tall actor Richard Kiel) as one of the most memorable and indestructible Bond villains. Jaws is so tenacious, in fact, that Moore looks genuinely frightened, and that adds to the abundant fun. This time Bond teams up with yet another lovely Russian agent (Barbara Bach) to track a pair of nuclear submarines that the nefarious Stromberg (Curt Jürgens) plans to use in his plot to start World War III. Featuring lavish sets designed by the great Ken Adam (Dr. Strangelove), The Spy Who Loved Me is a galaxy away from the suave Sean Connery exploits of the 1960s, but the film works perfectly as grandiose entertainment. From cavernous undersea lairs to the vast horizons of Egypt, this Bond thriller keeps its tongue firmly in cheek with a plot tailor-made for daredevil escapism. Jeff Shannon
James Bond's fourth adventure takes him to the Bahamas, where a NATO warplane with a nuclear payload has disappeared into the sea. Bond (Sean Connery) travels from a tony health spa (where he tangles with a mechanized masseuse run amuck) to the casinos of Nassau and soon picks up the trail of SPECTRE's number-two man, Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), and his beautiful mistress, Domino (Claudine Auger), whom Bond soon seduces to his side. Equipped with more gadgets than ever, courtesy of the resourceful "Q" (Desmond Llewelyn), agent 007 escapes an ambush with a personal-size jet pack and takes to the water as he searches for the undersea plane, battles Largo's pet sharks, and finally leads the battle against Largo's scuba-equipped henchmen in a spectacular underwater climax. This thrilling Bond entry became Connery's most successful outing in the series and was remade in 1983 as Never Say Never Again, with Connery returning to the role after a 12-year hiatus. Tom Jones belts out the bold theme song to another classic Maurice Binder title sequence. Sean Axmaker
Pierce Brosnan returns for his second stint as James Bond (after GoldenEye), and he's doing it in high style with an invigorating cast of costars. It's only appropriate that a Bond film from 1997 would find Agent 007 pitted against a media mogul (Jonathan Pryce) who's going to start a global war (beginning with stolen nuclear missiles aimed at China) to create attention-grabbing headlines for his latest multimedia news channel. It's the information age run amok, and Bond must team up with a lovely and lethal agent from the Chinese External Security Force (played by Honk Kong action star Michelle Yeoh) to foil the madman's plot of global domination. Luckily for Bond, the villain's wife (Teri Hatcher) is one of his former lovers, and at the behest of his superior M (Judi Dench), 007 finds ample opportunity to exploit the connection. Although it bears some nagging similarities to many formulaic action films from the '90s, Tomorrow Never Dies (with a title song performed by Sheryl Crow) boasts enough grand-scale action and sufficiently intelligent plotting to suggest the Bond series has plenty of potential to survive into the next millennium. Armed with the usual array of gadgets (including a remote-controlled BMW), Brosnan settles into his role with acceptable flair, and the dynamic Yeoh provides a perfect balance to the sexism that once threatened to turn Bond into a politically incorrect anachronism. He's still Bond, to be sure, but he's saving the world with a bit more sophisticated finesse. Jeff Shannon
TRUMAN BURBANK HAS LIVED HIS ENTIRE LIFE IN A STORYBOOK COMMUNITY CALLED SEAHAVEN. BUT WHAT HE DOESN'T KNOW IS THAT THISTOO-PERFECT WORLD IS REALLY A GIANT SOUNDSTAGE, HIS FRIENDS AND LOVED ONES ARE ACTORS, AND HE IS THE SUBJECT OF THE WORLD'S MOSTPOPULAR 'LIVE' TV SHOW. |
Cute but silly, this 1983 cautionary fantasy stars Matthew Broderick as a teenage computer genius who hacks into the Pentagon's defense system and sets World War III into motion. All the fun is in the film's set-up, as Broderick befriends Ally Sheedy and starts the international crisis by pretending while online to be the Soviet Union. After that, it's not hard to predict what's going to happen: government agents swoop in, but the story ends up in the "hands" of machines talking to one another. Thus we're stuck with flashing lights, etc. John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) directs in strict potboiler mode. Kids still like this movie, though. The DVD release has a widescreen presentation, theatrical trailer, Dolby sound, director commentary, optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. Tom Keogh
Far from the masterful treatment that groundbreaking animator Ralph Bakshi gave the similarly themed The Lord of the Rings just a year later, Wizards feels amateurish. A simplistic distillation of fantasy tropes, the scenario is millions of years after nuclear war wipes out civilization. Middle Earth fairies, elves, and magic emerge from the "good lands," while dimwitted mutants with poor comic timing emerge from the nuclear wastes. In the ultimate confrontation between good and evil, a hippie-ish wizard named Avatar defends his utopia against the technological and neo-Nazi revival of his bad-seed twin, Blackwolf. With volleys of jokes that couldn't hit a barn door, elves with Brooklyn accents, and the dubious climax that sees the kindly old wizard using one of the hated machines of war to triumph over evil, Wizards is one of fantasy animation's least successful examples. Alan E. Rapp
This collection of 8 DVDs including over 24 hours of archival footage, takes you through the war years, from the Battle of Britain in Europe to the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which ended the war in the Pacific. Each theater of operation and major turning point is examined in detail, the great battles and the political struggles, the sacrifices and triumphs of millions of men and women, caught up in the greatest war mankind has ever known. |
Made with Delicious Library