Revision #99

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Age: 19
Occupation: College Student
Whereabouts: Nowhere, Illinois (roughly around the middle)

What's Up

Yeah, so I finally got around to watching Die Another Day, and I think Ian Fleming has passed rolling and is now racked with the full body dry heaves in his grave.

I won't even bother to discuss the plot, I'll just list the cliches (and I'm fully aware that some of these are Bond movie standards, but they're not even trying to be creative anymore).

1. There are two girls. Bond sleeps with both. One is good. One is pretending to be good, but is sleeping with the bad guy. The latter is, therefore, conflicted in her emotions (since she has had sex with both bad guy and Bond) but ultimately chooses the bad guy. Unless, of course, she chooses Bond, like Paris Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, in which case she'll be found face down in her hotel bed the next morning. Whomever she sleeps with, she dies, and is ultimately irrelevant to the story. Cue Bond looking over her dead body whistfully for about five seconds, thinking what a good lay she was, until he packs it up and moves along.

2. There is a bad guy. This guy has unlimited amounts of money and the preparation of an obssessive-compulsive for whatever scheme he is pulling. His scheme involves world domination, usually by some sort of explosive or laser. Director Lee Tamahori decided to go with an orbiting laser (what other Bond movie was that similar to?) this time around, the catch being that it absorbs the energy of the sun (huh?) and focuses it in a beam on one small patch of land (oh, now I remember).

3. The bad guy has a sidekick. A muscular sidekick, with a facial deformation and a bad attitude. This guy has no family, no prospects, no career, no hobbies other than being a goon. He is angry at Bond for some reason, probably as a deflection of the abuse his boss (the bad guy) gives him.

4. There is a comic sidekick as well. Often a computer programmer or otherwise smart tech guy, this fellow runs the technical aspects of the bad guy's empire. Because those lasers don't program themselves. He always has a sucky, unglamorous death.

5. Back to the good girl: she always enters the picture first. The trend lately has been to make her a tough, feminist sidekick who can (supposedly) kick as much ass as Bond. Inexplicable is it then how she becomes the bargaining chip. The villain captures the good girl and puts her in a death contraption. Bond comes to the rescue, frees the girl, kills the bad girl/guy/sidekick and they have sex at the end. Jinx is no exception to the tough good girl trend, except she's a complete and total idiot. Her first conversation with Bond consists of her begging for sex through double entendres. I mean, even Denise Richards played hard to get.

I hear tell they want to make a Jinx spinoff, too. Well, they've already got the character development down pat. I think she had about five lines in Die Another Day, and they were all brilliant:

JINX: Ornithologist, huh? Wow. Now there's a mouthful.

BOND: What are you, CIA?
JINX: NSA. Hello, we're on the same side.
BOND: Doesn't mean we're after the same thing.
JINX: Sure it does. World peace, unconditional love, and our little friend with the expensive acne.

ZAO: Why are you trying to kill me?
JINX: I thought it was the humane thing to do.

ZAO: Who sent you?
JINX: Your mama. And she told me to tell you she's really disappointed in you.

FROST: I can read your every move.
JINX: Read THIS, bitch.

She read them terribly, too, but I guess I can't blame her. She's an Oscar winner, not a miracle worker!

6. I'm just gonna move on from the cliches because the dialogue was so stock that I was literally reading their lines ahead of them. This movie sucked, and here's why: I've seen this all before. This was great when it was called Thunderball, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, take your pick.

There was a giant orbiting laser. It could be turned on and off with the click of a small button. Never needed warming up, never needed calibration. For "gently bathing the world in sunlight," also, it seemed odd that the bad guy tested it at near-full intensity. Could he possibly be able to gently bathe the world in skin cancer? Could this technology possibly have fallen into the wrong hands?

There was an extravagant bad guy hideout (made out of ice - regulated by body heat, too) that got obliterated by the guys who built it, no less, to kill one agent.

There was a fencing match that turned into a bloody swordfight over a Zale's jewelry-store-size diamond. It ended up destroying half a country club. Madonna made a cameo as a fencing instructor. I repeat, MADONNA MADE A CAMEO IN A JAMES BOND MOVIE. The most externally recognizable face they've ever placed in a Bond movie up until that moment was John Cleese. THANKS, BARBARA BROCCOLI, FOR SELLING YOUR DAD'S SOUL TO A WOMEN WHO WISHES SHE WAS BRITISH. I sincerely hope the Material Girl will return in I NEED TO PERMANENTLY RETIRE MY FACE FROM CELLULOID.

For a bunch of cold-blooded assassins, everyone sucks. I mean, the wiseguys in Goodfellas and Casino knew how to do it: you walk into the house calmly, wrap a towel around the barrel or use a silencer, and put two in the back of the guy's head before he knows what hit him. Raid his fridge and drive quietly away. These guys (in every Bond movie) don't seem to communicate with each other very well. If they had some kind of megalomaniac newsletter, or some kind of chat room where they could get together and network, they'd see that giving a speech to James Bond before you shoot him only gives him time to use the Q Branch weapon. Maybe it's that they all get their moment in the sun, though: they all want to be the one that bags Bond, but they all fail miserably. Quite excellent orators they are, though.

The death trap was out of control in this one, too. It was a dentist chair surrounded by lasers. And just instantaneous death won't do, either - the death trap must play with its food. When Bond found Jinx in it the torture dude wasn't even monitoring her death progress. He was just crouching in a corner while the laser was slicing off the edge of the chair nowhere near her vital regions. Bond dispatched him pretty handily, too, because the guys that run the death traps are the easiest to kill.

Of course there are countless other terrible moments in this terrible movie, as well ("Look, boss! He beat your record!"), but this rant has gone on far too long to continue.