Friday, April 28, 2017

Phoning It In Due to Finals Week: Tomb of Horrors

You know what’s fun? Getting racked. Getting racked is fun, at least by comparison to taking college finals. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a demonstration:

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Looks refreshing, doesn’t it? But in all seriousness, there aren’t words sufficient to describe the kind of soul crushing anxiety that college tests cause me. Knowing that my entire future may rest on my ability to successfully complete one exam. At any rate, do you know what actually is fun? Dungeons & Dragons! And the most fun thing about Dungeons & Dragons is the fabled and infamous Tomb of Horrors. This one:

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Gary Gygax wrote this little nugget for the very first Origins convention in the way back days of 1975. D&D had only been around about a year, and I’m sure he was looking for an effective way to promote the game, and I gotta say, there was no better way than this module. Over the years, this module has taken the lives of countless player characters in the game, and it’s been such a popular phenomenon that it’s been reprinted, and updated for every edition of D&D. It’s pretty much become a staple of tabletop gaming, and since tomorrow is International Tabletop Gaming Day, and I get to run this gem for some unsuspecting saps, I figured we’d take a look at the book that started a phenomenon. Also, I kind of felt like I ran through this scenario in real life this past week! So take enjoyment at the expense of my suffering! I wouldn’t have it any other way!

As I said before, E. Gary Gygax wrote this adventure in order to promote D&D at the first Origins convention in 1975. The setup is pretty basic. Your adventuring group stumbles across an artificially built, and mysterious looking hill. Rocks on the hill form the facade of a smiling skull, but only if you look at the hill from just the right angle, which most players don’t bother to do. The thing that I love about this adventure is that it’s specifically designed to kill every character that gets played in it. One entrance of three goes nowhere. The second entrance leads to an inescapable death trap. Characters walk in, players filled with awe and wonder, and then a spiked wall crushes them. The final entrance is the entrance that will actually take characters into the full dungeon, but even this entrance is fraught with peril. There are traps all over, and the first obstacle characters run into is an enticing glowing portal that steals all of the character’s items and deposits them back at the entrance to the tomb. However, if you survive that leg, all that’s left is the proverbial D&D meat grinder. Every turn conceals subtly hidden traps that can absolutely kill a character instantly. There are puzzles to be solved, and monsters to be defeated, and of course, treasures to be had, if you can survive! *Cue the evil laughter and thunder. Should the players survive the monsters, and the fake out treasure hoards, their reward is an epic final battle with a demi-lich named Acererak. This boss battle borders on the realm of system breakingly unfair, but it offers a huge challenge, and the rewards are are vast. You get… Your items back! And a few other shiny items. Of course, should they survive, they also get the prestige of surviving the tomb.

This is an extremely challenging D&D module to play in. Honestly, there’s not a lot of draw if you don’t like your character being killed. However, the fun of the game is just seeing if you can make it through, and if you do, the sense of accomplishment is well worth the frustration. And you can’t argue with the iconic nature of the adventure. Generations of gamers have approached the Tomb in order to test their mettle. It’s a challenging and enjoyable time for everyone involved, and surviving earns the highest respect from pretty much any other gamer who’s in the know. As we prepare to celebrate International Tabletop Game Day, let’s take a moment to remember all of those characters claimed by the infamous Tomb of Horrors. Stay tuned! Next week we’re starting what will hopefully be a fascinating series for the month of May!

Friday, April 21, 2017

Why the World Needs the "... Meets World" Shows

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This is an article topic that’s been stewing in my brain for a little over a month now. For reasons, I’ve been putting it off. Just let me say that my wife and I started watching Girl Meets World when it came to Netflix as a result of our mutual interest in Boy Meets World. I’m almost certain that she and I were not in the intended audience demographic, but we’re weird. What can I say? I want to focus more on Girl Meets World in this article because it’s a recent thing, and this is mostly an expose on my personal feelings concerning the show. It was cancelled after its third season. By contrast, Boy Meets World ran for a total of seven seasons. Let me say before we jump in that I in no way want to minimize Boy Meets World with this article. My intention is to hopefully bring to light some aspects of Girl Meets World that I feel make it a strong show, and that I feel people need more of in their lives.

Now, when I first heard that Disney was making a spinoff of Boy Meets World, my initial thoughts were that they were just going to make a silly show with no soul that was just a cheap exploit of a wonderful part of my youth. You know the usual reboot gripes. Along that line, Boy Meets World really was a pretty big deal for me growing up. I didn’t get to watch nearly as much as I would have liked, but the episodes that I did see helped to introduce me to new life concepts that I had yet to encounter on my own, and also to reinforce moral axioms that I had been taught all of my life. Also, coincidentally, I was just a little bit younger than the cast when the show started so I grew up with the cast as the show was running. Feeny was almost as much a mentor to me as Captain Kirk and Captain Picard were, and I saw a lot of myself in Cory. Through Cory and the rest of the cast, I learned what it meant to be an honest, and compassionate person. I got to experience situations vicariously that helped me to better understand how to deal with the curveballs of life. The show was generally optimistic, but in its 90s kind of way, it didn’t shy away from some pretty heavy topics, either. It was a good balance in narrative subject matter.

As I said before, my wife and I picked up Girl Meets World when it came to Netflix. I was skeptical at first, obviously. However, I was quickly won over. The characters were well defined, the stories were interesting, and the themes were surprisingly still informative. I realized pretty quickly that, for me, the show was an extension of the previous show, and that as an aging young man, the lessons that Cory was learning in this show were lessons that I could file away and take with me because I’m probably going to be there before I know it. I’m sure that I’ll have kids of my own in the future, and that I’ll have to carefully navigate the dangerous waters of parenthood personally. What I liked about the presentation of GMW in particular is that it didn’t attempt to glamorize anything. Hollywood has a nasty habit of taking the mundane and glitzing it up to make it seem more appealing. The moral there is never make a life decision based on what you’ve seen in TV, or a movie. It will probably end badly. But seriously, I’ve experienced this in my own life, primarily with college. How many movies have you seen where college is just a non-stop frat party, and no matter who awful things get, the characters manage to do well anyway? It’s pretty much its own genre. I’m not saying that I was so naive that I thought college would be exactly like that, but what Hollywood failed to mention was how much work is involved in doing well in college. I put around 30 hours a week into just keeping up with my five courses. It’s exhausting. GMW could very easily have stuck to that glamorizing formula, but instead, it was very frank about the struggles involved in being a parent, and being in a family. No one had anything particularly easy, and everyone certainly had to struggle to maintain forward momentum. The show also did a good job encouraging people to take joy in the mundane things. It’s an uncommon message to see these days.

Now the main reason that I’m pretty sure I don’t quite fit the target audience of GMW is because these are the main characters:

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While I am male, it’s been a lot longer than I generally like to admit since I’ve been in high school. Also, as the title entails, the girls are the primary protagonist characters. That said, the show does a fantastic job making each character pretty universally relatable. It’s easy to see characteristics of any one of the characters in oneself. Their struggles are universal, and so any lessons learned can be applied to anyone. It’s a tough line to walk trying to accomplish that without coming across as bland, but GMW did it exceptionally well. This brings me to the main motivation behind this article. GMW is really optimistic in its view of the world. So much so that some might find it nauseating at times. It’s also kind of silly at times, but then so was BMW. The main main character Riley, is practically incapable of seeing bad in anyone. The character has a penchant for compassion, and seeing the good in people that borders on superhuman. However, I spend my week critiquing TV shows and movies, and I see a lot of negativity and criticism around me. This is the crux of this article. This is why I feel like the world needs more of these shows.

In a world that is constantly attempting to bombard you with negative, and demeaning messages, we all need a source of optimism. This may be unpopular, but we also need a source telling any who will listen that the traditional way of things, and traditional morality are still okay. And GMW does that. Riley has two parents. One is a man, the other is a woman. They’ve been together since they were in middle school, and they’re more in love with one another in the more recent show than when they were in the original show. There are traditional moral principles being offered, and no one attacks any of that in a truly malicious way. It is teased harmlessly from time to time, but at the end of the day, it’s just accepted that that’s the way things are, and that that’s okay. A lot of that negativity, and vitriol that gets spewed around today is focused on ‘changing’ the traditional way of things, at least here in the US of A. Now don’t get me wrong, I feel like as long as your way of life isn’t doing direct harm to another human being, you should be able to live your life however you see fit. But so much effort is expended to undermine more traditional ways of life because… ...Because. Just because… I haven’t actually ever heard anyone give an explanation why that I’ve found objectively satisfactory. I guess being traditional just isn’t cool these days, but that’s not a good reason to start lashing out at people who choose to maintain those traditions for themselves and their families. And GMW does a good job creating an atmosphere where even when things happen that challenge those moral traditions, characters come to the conclusion that they need to accept others as they are, and those others need to just accept the characters as they are. It’s stupidly simple and optimistic, but it’s a message that needs to be shared, I think. We all need to realize that we can accept each other as we are, and we can live lives that don’t hurt others, but that also don’t necessarily conform to the morals of others and that’s okay.

Girl Meets World got cancelled after its third season, but this blogger is sincerely hoping that the producers can get it picked up because once I do have kids, I want to have plenty of show to show them that reinforces that their world could be more positive, compassionate, and accepting. Speaking of tradition, stay tuned for next week! We’ll be moving into summer, and I’ve got some exciting reviews lined up!

Friday, April 14, 2017

The Final Most Dismal Bond Film. Ever.

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Last week we started looking at some of the worst films to come out of the James Bond franchise. I gotta say, that was a painful experience! I’m still having night terrors as a result! True story! I kind of left you all on a cliffhanger, and I feel really bad about that, but I needed some time to recover. Also, I have a lot to say about this final entry. But before I do, let’s review the criteria that I was using to review these movies. They were minimized use of cheese, having a good villain that has a somewhat believable plan and isn’t a Mary Sue, use of a legitimate theme in the film, and attempts at giving Bond more depth as a character. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get this party started because I know that you’re all dying to know what film I chose. Oh, let me just say that while the other films were in no particular order by way of awfulness, this one is by far my least favorite film. Okay, the movie is:

#1: Skyfall:

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Alright, alright, calm down. I can hear you raging through my router. Did you think that I would make such a bold claim and not have any empirical evidence to back myself up? I should certainly hope that you know me better than that by now. Of course I have empirical evidence to back up my asinine claims! But I can understand your confusion:

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Proof that you can't believe everything that you read on the Internet.

For whatever reason, this movie is pretty popular. There are probably a lot of reasons why people think they should like it, but please allow me to debunk a bit. So Bond, and actual Moneypenny have to track down a guy who’s stolen the NOC list, I mean list of aliases of several MI6 agents that’s on a hard drive. In the process, Moneypenny has to just straight up shoot the thief because Bond just can’t catch him, but instead she shoots Bond. Once we get done with the spoiler ridden credits, we catch up to Bond drowning his sorrows in cheap beer on some tropical island. How does he have money to do these things? Anyway, There’s a huge to do about just how needful MI6 even is anymore, and in order punctuate the situation, MI6 gets hacked, and then the MI6 building just up and explodes. Engineers these days, amiright? M also gets a message from an anonymous source claiming that MI6 operatives who are in the field are going to start dying soon, and they absolutely do. Also, this mystery admirer is totally after M. Bond gets wind of the bombing and decides to go back to work, finally. He’s put through the batteries of tests, and pretty much fails them all, but hey, MI6 is kind of desperate so you know what? Why not? And so Bond is reinstated.

Bond goes to China to continue what he should have finished at the beginning of the film, but the guy who stole the NOC list, I mean operative list falls to his death before he can offer up any answers. Bond, being a good sleuth, finds a poker chip, which takes him to Macau. There he meets a woman who claims to be the thief’s accomplice. She says that she will take Bond to the head honcho if he promises to kill said honcho. Bond, of course, agrees knowing full well that pretty much anyone within a thirty yard radius at any given moment is screwed anyway. There’s a fight, but Bond escapes to this woman’s yacht, and then they’re both captured. They end up on a deserted Japanese island where Bond finally meets the orchestrator of his misery Raoul SIlva. Silva used to be an MI6 operative himself, but turned to cyber terrorism because reasons. There’s some boring expositional back and forth, and then in a “trust building” exercise, SIlva and Bond have a contest of weapons accuracy, featuring the woman that Bond already did the nasty with, probably. Bond watches as Silva casually kills the woman. The important thing is that MI6 swoops in at the last minute to pick up Silva and take him into custody. They also confiscate his laptop.

Back in the land of rain and fog, a newly minted Q is tasked with unlocking the secrets behind Silva’s antics. It’s at this point that Q makes the fatal mistake of connecting an unsecured device to his network, but we’ll get to that. Meanwhile, M is in court defending her job as a bunch of phony cops start to shoot the place up. Silva gets broken out, and the game is afoot, as some might say. Everyone knows that M is the target so Bond nobly offers to take her back to his childhood home. They get there and there’s a not Sean Connery, but you’re supposed to think it’s Sean Connery character there who offers to help booby trap the place Home Alone style. They do so, and just as they’re finishing, Silva comes swooping in via helicopter blaring opera music… for some reason? There’s a final showdown, and the old DB5 gets demolished, Not-Sean-Connery dies, and M gets killed.After that, there’s some tying up of loose ends. A new M gets appointed, MI6 moves underground… literally, and Bond begins the process of moving on.

Alrighty, this isn’t necessarily a, “Where do I even begin,” moment, but let me count the ways in which this movie doesn’t deserve to be lauded as one of the best Bond films of all time. First, let’s tackle the theme. The theme here is, “Is MI6 really necessary anymore?” The answer is ultimately yes, of course because no film studio is going to wantonly throw away a multi-billion dollar franchise. But we’ve seen this theme done before, and done much better in my opinion. You might recognize a little number called:

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Goldeneye told basically the exact same story, and in my opinion, did it much better. The sad thing is Skyfall goes out of its way to inform the viewer that those involved in making the film were aware that they were rehashing a classic. Silva is just Trevelyan, only with computers. And even the hacking thing plays a big role in Goldeneye as well. And at the very least, I got to see Bond destroy a Russian city in a tank in Goldeneye. What I’m saying is, Goldeneye was more fun, and therefore, quite a bit more enjoyable.

My next gripe is with SIlva. Remember that one of the criteria by which I was judging these films was in the villain, and SIlva is one of the most Mary Sued characters to come out of any franchise in a long time. I understand that he’s supposed to be some sort of wizard hacker, but I guarantee that MI6 has an army of network engineers watching their systems for breaches. Also, after being out of MI6 for fifteen years, I’m pretty sure he’s going to be a little out of the loop as far as protocol is concerned. And lastly, he’s so whiny. Seriously, did the guy stop maturing at age eight? I can’t stand it. Everytime he opens his mouth, it’s whiny. Oh and he’s so melodramatic. It gets old really fast, and he’s just not a likable villain.

Lastly, WTF Q?! I’m literally a first year IT student and I’m pretty sure that in week one of my class we covered not connecting unfamiliar, or unsecured devices to a secure network. It’s basic common sense, and because of such egregious laziness in writing, I just can’t take anything seriously that happens after that point in the film. It’s lazy, and the movie going masses deserve better. I just expected that maybe we’d get a bit more for Bond’s golden anniversary, but then again, that period between July 2012, and July 2013 was a year for bad rip offs of iconic classic films...
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Discuss!

Stay tuned for next week!

Friday, April 7, 2017

5 Most Dismal Bond Films

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Last summer, I did a fascinating and informative exercise wherein I listed my favorite, and therefore the best, James Bond films. At the end of that article, I promised then that a follow up of the worst films would come when you all least expected it so… SURPRISE! The time has finally arrived for me to settle with the house as it were, and give you my personal examination of the most terrible, deplorable, and absolutely unwatchable Bond films. As we can all hopefully agree, the line between a good film, and a terrible film is often very thin, and a lot of movies try to push that limit in order to create something fresh and new for their established audiences. When it works, movies can be awesome. When it doesn’t movies can be absolutely atrocious. This list represents those Bond movies that, in my opinion, not only crossed that line, but also caught the last train to Crazy Town. Some are more subtle, and some are just audacious about it, but all of them took a wrong step somewhere that landed them in the land of bad movies. Last time, I established some fairly concrete criteria upon which I was going to rate each film. Those criteria included minimized use of cheese, having a good villain that has a somewhat believable plan and isn’t a Mary Sue, use of a legitimate theme in the film, and attempts at giving Bond more depth as a character. I think it only fair to hold these films up to the same standards and see how they measure up. Also, just like last time, I made a genuine attempt to cover the majority of the Bond eras because every Bond is fair game for nitpicking. Without further adieu, let’s jump into the worst of the worst! Once again in no particular order…


#5: You Only Live Twice:
You Only Live Twice was the fifth entry in the franchise coming after Thunderball, and being the last film that Sean Connery would do before George Lazenby temporarily took over for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I went pretty easy on this movie because overall, it wasn’t terribly terrible for the time that it was made, but it still has some pretty glaring flaws. Flaw number one stems from the premise. In this movie, SPECTRE is working with a Japanese company to kidnap US and Soviet orbital capsules while in space in order to get the two superpowers to go to war with each other. In the 60s this premise might have worked fine, but in context of more recent times, and with all of the US vs USSR movies that have been made over the years, it just feels tired at this point. However, it was all the rage in 1967 so I mostly gave it a pass for that reason. Flaw number two stems from the very opening of the film. After we see a giant space PacMan eat a US space capsule, we see Bond getting his Bond on with a woman. Everything mostly goes as expected except that at the last minute, she folds up the hide-a-bed and some goons light it up with some machine guns. It was at this point that we switch to a nice funeral and eventually see that Bond’s death was all an elaborate hoax to convince his enemies that he’s dead so that some of the heat can be lifted off of his shoulders. I had to ask myself, if Bond is so terrible at concealing his actions that they had to fake his death, was he really worth all of the trouble. I’ll let you decide the answer to that question. The other big issue I take with this movie is its pacing, both as a film on the whole, and within the events of the story. We’re told toward the beginning that Bond has three weeks to find out who was stealing space capsules, and put an end to it before global armageddon ensued. It sounds pretty dire, but that’s still plenty of time for Bond to take the most roundabout method ever in order to actually contact his guy in Japan, and then do things that involve the most egregious aspect of this movie:


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Bond reconsidering all of his life choices up to that point.


I honestly think that the face says it all. Remember that time that Mickey Rooney dawned Asian face and we all collectively went ape crazy and deemed that movie terrible? Yeah, Bond doesn’t get a pass on that either as far as this blogger is concerned. They turn Bond Japanese, wed him to an operative, give him ninja training, and there’s time for the newlyweds to go on a literal stroll through the countryside even though there’s only supposed to be three weeks until armageddon. And that, friends, is why this movie made this list. I actually thought that other than the slow pacing, it was a pretty decent film. It’s the first film where Bond and Blofeld meet face to face, and it’s pretty standard Bond faire overall, and the theme song is really good. But that face. Surely, there was some other way that they could have hidden Bond’s identity.


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#4: Live and Let Die:
If feel like this is kind of an unfair entry because this movie is so steeped in the fads of the day that it dates itself pretty much immediately. It’s like buying a computer in the early 2000s. You go to the store, consider your options, then make your purchase, only to get it home and see on TV that that “state-of-the-art” machine is now obsolete. Live and Let Die is the early 2000s Compaq computer of the Bond franchise. Ironically, it has one of the more memorable theme songs from Bond history. I’m even able to forgive its egregious grammar, usually. Once again, I really feel like this would have been an okay film except for one major problem:


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Those are the villains of the film. Now, on the surface, one might feel the urge to applaud the film for its racial diversity, but in context of the day, I would caution against it. The 70s were an interesting transitional time for our culture, and transitions tend to attract a lot of vultures looking to cash it before a thing becomes unpopular. Such was the case with Hollywood and their series of blaxploitation films. For those of you who don’t want to read such an in depth explanation of the word, here’s a more succinct definition. What I’m saying is this movie was playing into the stereotyping of a rich culture, and it did it so badly that the whole filme kind of rubs me the wrong way. It’s really too bad too because the main villain Kananga has an intensity that just seethes onto the screen, Jane Seymour is in it, and she’s gorgeous, it’s got kind of a dark streak that would have been advantageous to explore more, and some of the vehicle chase scenes are pretty cool. But none of that can make up for terrible puns like, “Oh Cult Voodoo Shop,” or, “genuine Felix lighter,” said as Bond is talking to Felix through a car lighter, or the fact that Bond uses a rigged deck of tarot cards to take the virginity of a hapless innocent woman. Not to mention this:


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Forty year old spoiler, that’s the animatronic get up for the death scene of Kananga. He literally blows up like a balloon and then explodes. I swear, this movie’s tone is all over the map! Let’s just move on…


#3: Moonraker:
Aw… COME ON!! Are we kidding right now? Yeah… We all knew this was coming. No worst of Bond list would quite be complete without Moonraker. There are a lot of really specific reasons why I think this is one of the worst Bond movies ever, and then there are some broad strokes things going on. But to put it bluntly, there are a lot of egregious sins committed during this movie without any of the redeeming qualities that make other bad Bond films at least tolerable. First off, would a 747 be able to fly a fully fueled orbiter shuttle? I did the math, I might be able to, but I can’t find a straight answer as to how many pounds of fuel a fully fueled orbiter carried, and there’s only a margin of about 80,000 pounds so maybe not. Either way, no one in their right mind would ever opt to fly a shuttle while it was fully fueled. Also, shuttle orbiters can’t generate enough lift on their own to actually fly, and I’m not sure that this one would have had enough altitude to glide to where it was eventually launched in freaking South America. I hate that the whole movie is spent doing things to Jaws that should kill him, but that he survives. Jaws has never been one of my favorite Bond villains, but to see him relegated to comic relief was just sad. It pains me that they made Moneypenny look so old in this movie. I have to admit to thinking that Miss Moneypenny the first one was a pretty striking woman, but in this movie, she reminds me more of a grandmother than anything else. Perms always have been, and always will be a terrible idea. I’m not entirely certain that there really is much of a story going on here, and the villain, Drax, is boring too. The fight scenes are boring, and the entire movie spends all of its time plodding from one locale to the next. We start in London, then we go to California, then Venice, then Rio de janeiro, then France I think, then back to Brazil, and then freaking space. It’s very confusing, and not very entertaining. I can’t stand all of the music that was optioned for this movie because it was used badly. We hear “Also sprach Zarathustra”, or the theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the jingle from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the “Romeo and Juliet overture”, just to name a few. It’s silly and lame. There was copious bad usage of sped up playback that just looked fake and silly. The one liners were killing me, and I spent the entire movie wondering why Jaws was even there in the first place. Did Drax hire him? Because no one ever showed Drax hiring him. He had zero motivation. He could have died at the beginning and that would have been fine because I had no clue why he needed to be there. I will say that once the space stuff started, the special effects were decent. This movie was lauded for its special effects, but I’ve never bought into special effects extravaganzas so.... And on the downside of that, when the US Marines shuttle troops into space go have it out with Drax’s small army, it reminded me of a bad episode of G.I. Joe. Oh, and the actress playing Dr. Goodhead couldn’t act! K. Done.


#2: Die Another Day:


I took a surprisingly small amount of notes for this movie, and at first, I wondered if I had made a good choice to include this film. I hate the theme song, but that only lasts a few minutes so I can tolerate that, but I spent the first half hour of this movie thinking that the initial premise wasn’t half bad. Then Bond got out of prison, and we started the actual movie. There are so many one liners, and everyone is making them! I swear, the film can’t go five seconds without someone making a one liner. It’s awful! I thought that the bird guide book was a nice nod… Until we got into the rest of the movie, and I started get bombarded by them! I’m okay with a few subtle nods from time to time, but don’t beat me over the face with them every other scene. If you’d like a preview of what a female Bond might look like, look no further that Jinx, and then look the other direction. I know it’s not exactly a fair comparison, but the only thing she lacked as a prototype female Bond was about 15% of the screen time. She made terrible one liners, she used sex as a tool, she swaggered her way through every set piece, and she got in a pissing match showdown with the female henchwoman at the end. All I gotta say is if MGM does ever decide to make Bond a woman, I hope they do a fair bit better with her than they did with Jinx. John Cleese makes a terrible Q. I know that Desmond Llewelyn had recently passed prior to filming, but that wound was still too fresh, and the situation mishandled so badly that it just left a bad taste in my mouth. There’s an unforgivable amount of bad slow motion used throughout. I swear, the director must have fallen asleep during the class where they learned other methods of punctuating action. The cyber suit that Colonel Moon, I mean Greaves, wears is just ridiculous, and its reveal is really dumb. The CGI is poorly rendered. And this happens:


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Who in their right might thought that that was a good idea? Fire them! Fire them, and murder them. It’s pretty much a film that’s offensive to all five of the human senses. It did, however, have a couple of positive things going on. The car chase scene was kind of cool. The nod props are fun to pick out, but only the first time through. They lose their charm immediately. Zao was a pretty cool henchman. And the aforementioned henchwoman was a nice twist at the end. Unfortunately, those little nuggets aren’t enough to save this film and so here it is on my list of the worst Bond movies.


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And Surf Ninjas had already been done!

This exercise has become exhausting! My brain feels like it’s on fire right now! What say we take a break and I’ll finish this gods forsaken list next week. I have a lot to say about this particular movie, and I want to have plenty of room to fully express my loathing and disdain for this stinker. Also, it give you a week to muse on which movie could possibly top this list! Yay for games! Stay tuned to see which film steams worst than the rest!