expensive and shitty mid-80's films geaux!
I really wanted to like Dune. Its lovable and aged in ways that are charming, but its so often tedious, dramatically inert, and endlessly expository (it pretty much only stops being that when the credits roll) that all the best practical effects that 1984 could provide (and a fair number of crappy ones for that matter) and cool production design can't mitigate all of its flaws. I watched it as homework, more or less for next year's almost certain to be better re-adaptation. But no matter how well the new version comes out, it'll have to work hard to be as bracingly strange as Lynch's version sometimes (not often enough) gets to be.
Presently, on American Netflix, the first 21 James Bond films are available to stream. So I've been taking the opportunity to revisit a bunch of films that I hadn't seen in many years. Mostly I've been pleased with the older films, but I've got to make special mention for A View to a Kill, which sinks far below the comfortable mediocrity of the weaker entries and is just plain shitty. Its only two years after Octopussy (not actually terrible) but the already creaky Roger Moore looks like he aged ten years in between. Its a James Bond film that wastes Christopher Walken as the villain, and this was long before he became his own self-parody. Even accounting for the unusually persistent stunt doubling the action scenes have got no zip, and once again, the edge-of-elderly Roger Moore's lechery is just off putting. The film even fails at the lifestyle/travelogue porn that these films always succeed at, with a litany of the worst in 80's fashion paraded around the screen. James Bond has perhaps had so much lasting appeal because its always been such a potent male fantasy for the audience to vicariously enjoy, this one at least turns that undeserving, colonialist fantasy way sour, so at least there's that.
