A couple of other Bond movies are like this. Moonraker had an awesome opening sequence, with Bond and Jaws fighting over a parachute in midair, and a great fight scene in Venice. It also had what is probably one of the best one liners in the series:
Bond and Drax are out hunting, and Bond fires.
Hugo Drax: You missed, Mr. Bond.
[a sniper falls from a tree]
James Bond: Did I?
I’d rank the first 90 minutes or so up there with the best Bond movie of the '70s, The Spy Who Loved Me. But then the movie goes into space and the last half-hour or so feels like a second-rate knock off of Star Wars.
Die Another Day is another that starts out promisingly - Is Bond a double agent? But it quickly falls off the rails. Invisible car, anyone?
You know what’s funny-check out History is Made At Night. It’s basically Titanic without the sinking, or, in other words, the middle hour.
“It deals with a love triangle among a possessive shipping magnate, his beautiful wife, and a French headwaiter, with a spectacular ocean liner as a backdrop.” The boat also strikes an iceberg.
I thought the actual combat scenes were extremely good in the movie- whether we’re talking the initial beach scenes, or the later fighting in the small French town (except for the mortar bomb bit; that was stupid).
All the stuff in the middle was kind of forgettable though.
In fact, they developed their format in part so they didn’t have to provide a punchline for every sketch. Instead the sketch would veer off on a tangent and then segue into “something completely different.”
Makes me wonder if they preemptively added the slasher element before their next pitch meeting to make it less like *Solaris *and more marketable.
Yeah, good call. The rest of it was okay but not at the level of that opening bit, agreed.
I didn’t think any of the nominees that year were very good (unless you count the foreign film nominees: Central Station, which won, was excellent). Yet it wasn’t actually a bad year in cinema. The movies released in 1998 that I’d consider better than any of the Oscar nominees include:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Your Friends & Neighbors
Happiness
Last Night
Central Station
Deep Impact
Out of Sight
Pleasantville
There’s Something About Mary
The Truman Show
Pi
Rounders
American History X
The Big Lebowski
Rushmore
High Art
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
These aren’t classics, but they could have been much better than they were. The beginning half of Cloverfield was terrific. It was the first movie that I had seen with such a great viral marketing scheme that blurred the lines between real and fake (I never watched Blair Witch so I never got into that whole thing). In retrospect, once the bugs and the monster came out, it was just another shakey-cam monster movie. It would have been much better if they never showed the monster at all.
I also felt that the mood set with the first half of the horror movie Chernobyl Diaries was great, but starts feeling like a typical slasher movie once they find the mutants.
If they did, they forgot to actually market the slasher part. I don’t remember it appearing in any of the trailers (if I remember right, they emphasize the space madness part) and was pretty surprised just how slasher-y it got.
This seems to be something that Tarantino movies has been suffering from recently. The opening scenes of Django Unchained are also excellent, but the overall movie seems a bit underwhelming
I remember as a kid watching on TV the 1950s classic The Giant Claw.
Great opening - Planes Being Knocked out of the Sky! Mysterious Shadows Hurtling across the Clouds! Whole World Gripped By Unknown Terror! It was really quite well done and suspenseful.
Then, eventually, they had to show the Monster. And it was the 1950s.
Somehow, after spending 10 minutes rolling on the floor laughing, the movie had lost some of it’s tension…
Phantom of the Opera started with the auction scene and a great visual treat as the chandelier rose and we’re transported back to the opera house in all its glory, great rehearsal scene, Emmy Rossum charms our socks off, the girl playing Meg Giry does a great job with the opening of Angel of Music (besides being gorgeous), the candles blow out and then… and then… Gerard Butler starts to sing. Which he can’t. Then the movie goes way off the original script and we see Mme. Giry’s background with the Phantom from way back, a totally unneeded tangent. The movie with such great promise comes up flat, due to a bloated script and the worst casting of a title role in history.
Dittos for the Private Ryan comments. The Normandy Beach scene was just masterful. Then it turns into an ordinary melodrama.
I agree all the way, except that I’m not quite as hard on Butler’s singing as you are. He can sing. He can’t sing well. He certainly can’t sing well enough to play this role. He’s more THIS … IS … PARIS!!
And another item was his makeup – his phantom has to be the LEAST scary of any Phantom of the Opera (including Herbert Lom’s in the 1961 version). He looks like he has a bad case of Rosacea, at most. When they were exhibiting him as a kid (during the flashback sequences) what were they billing him as? The Kid With The Bad Sunburn?
I also take issue with the “worst casting of a title role in history”. There are plenty of other contenders. Even if you confine yourself to Bad Singing in A Movie Musical, Peter O’Toole as Miguel Cervantes/Alonso Quijana/ Don Quixote in Man of la Mancha beats Butler hands down.
Maybe I am a bit to hard on Gerry. Thanks for mentioning the makeup. Come on, the studio must have somebody that could make a realistically horrifying deformity. Oh, if they only had given the role to Antonio Banderas.
