I'm with you on "Russia," easily the best Bond in the series and not likely to be toppled. But "Temple of Doom" is a sick, dark mess. The "raft from the plane" bit is pure Road Runner and Coyote stuff (in a bad way). The brains,bugs and eels for dinner scene takes the cute "sheep's head" moment from Octopussy and drags it on well past the point of humor (like an SNL sketch) and at best is the kind of thing you expect from a 6-year-old. Kate Capshaw plays easily the most annoying love interest in any film ever, and that's including Denise Richards, Tanya Roberts and Britt Eklund from the Bond films. Indy's attempt to shoot the bad guys near the end, only to find his gun gone, is a joke that can't work because it references the previous film...which according to Steven and George happens LATER in Indy's life. And the whole "fortune and glory" routine is a half-hearted and abortive attempt to paint Indy as a younger, more reckless and not yet fully developed character compared to "Raiders." But other that that line, and a bit of a harder edge to Indy in the opening scene, nothing is done with it.
This is an unrelentingly dark and depressing film that piles on stunt after stunt with no sense of pace. I still remember coming out of the theater in 1984 feeling like I'd been dragged into an alley and worked over with brass knuckles. Lots of films have created the same effect since then, but that one was the first.
On the question of TEMPLE OF DOOM's pacing...the first act was pretty much BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG, going from a nightclub gun battle to a car chase to a plane nearly crashing out of the sky...I found it breathtaking, presenting something new every few minutes...but I can see why others found it exhausting. Either way, it doesn't last long: it then leads to the scary, quieter second act, where you've got a frightening Indian guy giving exposition, missing children taken by an evil cult, and finally forests filled with evil idols and vampire bats. For me, the spookiest moment was NOT the guy getting his heart ripped out, but was earlier, on the way to Pankot, they good guys are presented with this downright otherworldly idol that the elephants refuse to approach, and Harrison Ford selling the scene, demanded Willie and Shorty "not come up there." While on the idol, he discovers fresh red huiman blood. The music becomes screechy and strange...an astonishingly frightening scene.
The point here is, TEMPLE OF DOOM wasn't all breakneck - they mixed up the kind of movie it is periodically.
As for the "chilled monkey brains" scene...I'm with you that it was pretty moronic, but what is often forgotten is that the subtle, angry tension between Indiana and that Prime Minister guy, which made it all a very tense, dramatic scene.
When people say they didn't like TEMPLE OF DOOM because it was the most horror-centered and darkest of the Indiana Jones films, I'm not sure how to respond, because the reason I like TEMPLE OF DOOM is BECAUSE it makes the exotic horror and the darkness so explicit. There's a tendency to lump RAIDERS and LAST CRUSADE together and have TEMPLE OF DOOM be the odd film out of the three.
Actually, I think it's the other way around: it is RAIDERS and TEMPLE OF DOOM that are more like each other, and LAST CRUSADE that is the odd film out. The reason is that - the presence of Marcus and John Rhys-Davies aside - the TEMPLE and RAIDERS have their artifact be a mysterious, and rather scary, object with a mind of its own. They featured occult forces that were downright scary (that had really spooky John Williams music surrounding them). LAST CRUSADE on the other hand, was much more the traditional adventure film, with cowboys and escapes and castles.
RAIDERS had Indiana Jones start out in spooky, possibly haunted Mayan ruins with spiders and heathen idols. LAST CRUSADE started out with Indiana Jones in a Western with a gunfight against banditos.
People call Indiana Jones a series of adventure films with occult/horror elements, but that doesn't ring true to me: Indiana Jones films are really, horror movies with adventure elements. If you take out the horror/occult elements from Indiana Jones, you lose the distinctiveness of the franchise and you get a movie like THE ROCKETEER (a great film, but not very Indy-ish). TEMPLE OF DOOM makes that the most clear, which is why I like it most of all: the "personality" of the Indy films shines the most. This is why I don't think Indiana Jones's imitators have been very successful: they keep making adventure movies in exotic locales without duplicating the history and occultism, so they never do it quite right.
The thing about being "edgy" is that you have to keep one-upping yourself. In 1964, just releasing a film with a character named "Pussy Galore" was about the most scandalous, daring thing imaginable. Showing a guy like Bond, who beds multiple partners in one film with no pretense of commitment, was amazing stuff. But all it amounted to really was, "Oh my god, he's in his bath towel and she's already naked! They're kissing! They're gonna do it! Pant! Pant!"). Nothing graphic was shown, but it was "racy." Ten years later Bond is still bending a girl over a bed, with a slow fade to the next scene, only now it's tame...a cop-out. By now you'd have to show them naked and thrusting to get anyone's attention and even then some audience members would be yawning.
Yeah, I'm with you. I love Roger Moore, but the last thing I need to see is his bare ass.
The point I'm making here is not that Bond movies should be excessively violent or the sex should be explicit.
What I'm trying to say here is this: James Bond films are not seen as being the kind of racy flick they used to be. I don't think this is because the general culture has "caught up" with James Bond, so much as it is that Bond movies have, over time, become so enmeshed in the formula that we've forgotten what a "bad boy" James Bond really is.
Maybe. like you said, a nice guy like Sir Roger had a lot to do with this. He's such a sweet old English dude that you can take him home to meet Mom - a very strange statement to make about a character like Bond, and very different from the two guys before him. Even when Sean Connery's trying to be a sexier version of Dick Van Dyke in DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE, there was this strange grit and sex appeal about him that was totally inappropriate. Watching "Sean O'Connery" in DARBY O'GILL was a little like watching a porn star play Snow White.
I think the raciness is a much more important element of Bond than you make it out to be because without the Bond movies's daring - without all the bright blue gags and very distinctive, misbehaving hero, the Bond films become just another action film...which is precisely what happened in the past few recent films...and why CASINO ROYALE trying to give Bond his "edge" back is something that really tickles my fancy.
If they want it to be edgy they don't have to try to one-up themselves when it comes to explicit sex. They just need to make a film where there is a type of raciness, and more importantly raciness that leads to glamour and adventure. MOULIN ROUGE had no explicit sex, but it had a kind of sexiness that was exotic and glamorous, and not entirely PG-13.
One element that has been lost over time gradually from the Bond films is how there's been this sort of humor related to sex. Whether it was the gay henchmen in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, or Bond turning a radio off and saying "I'm fully satisfied" in GOLDFINGER, or the girlfriends with names like "Plenty O'Toole" (!). You can even see this in the early Roger Moore films - the trick he pulled on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman with the tarot cards, or his tendency to say "Oh, the things I do for England" so forlornly as he's about to do the nasty with some hot babe (no doubt hating every minute of it, of course
).
Like I said, KILL BILL was more "James Bond" than "James Bond" was. This humor about sex was present there, too. When Uma Thurman steals a vehicle with PUSSY WAGON spraypainted on the side, for instance.
That's an odd scene, isn't it? You have to wonder if that's the writers trying desperately to justify why this guy should be considered the villain. A well-dressed, cultured Englishman who shoots people for a living....hmm, is this the bad guy or the hero? The funny thing is, you'd think with all that was happening in the world in 1974, James Bond would come off as even less sympathetic. After all, he did his killing on the orders of a government.
That's a very, very interesting point that didn't occur to me. Considering what was going on in 1974, you'd have to make Bond a heroic type, because Bond as a guy that kills people on behalf of his government comes off as downright sinister. Incidentally, that was by far the most hallucinogenic and counterculture of the Bond films, from that weird disco tunnel scene to Tattoo, who is himself a living acid trip.
Nowadays, I think the idea of Bond as assassin will play better, because - for good or for ill - we as a culture have gone back to the idea that sometimes you have to do something bad to make things turn out right.
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