Fred and Loathing on The Internet

007's Less Used Alias Is James Mutual-Fund

2024-Feb-19

Updates made to the production repository since the last blog post are metaphysical. To the user, there are some subtle templating fixes to bring font families into uniformity that can be noticed. The /rp URL is now being cached once an hour. The results of my effort to cache all the variables that are generated whenever that URL is requested at /rp are middling. I know that my invoking of flask-caching works in my codebase. I call the results middling because that particular URL is still the slowest one on my website. I thought caching the results every hour would reduce response down to what it is on most other web pages, which is well under 1 second. Maybe it did and my meager human senses can’t notice the difference between two and three seconds. At this moment I cannot understand why a ‘cached’ result would take any longer than a single second.

Also there are some raw HTML Plotly views to the top five artists and tracks available on the Spotify section’s landing page. Starting on the next blog update I am going to restrict all ‘raw’ or unfinished stuff to just the logged in users. Also some more responsive HTML for the status of being logged in or not, along with more utilitarian account stuff for the user’s experience.

For the more meaty section of this blog post there are going to be big changes. Thematic changes! A whole redirection as to what fredlambuth.com/blog is about. Big, thoughtful renovations pushing provocative ideas about the same ol’ topics, but with more gusto! The more sensational change is going to be the requirement of new graphic material for each blog post. The necessity of juicy repo updates have been reduced in juiciness. The new editorial factor in deciding when a blog post will be published is: did graphic material get made to express the views of the blog post? No longer will some cropped snapshot of some of my previous artistic work be used as the graphic header for each blog. Instead new finished ink work will be the minimal entry and hopefully a body of text commensurate with the hours of work put into the graphic material. One can hope.

In that blog header image we have my efforts to convey two dynamic pistol packin’ women sliding around a leaden old man in a tuxedo. To paint a simple picture, that’s what I found with A View To A Kill. This well enoughly crafted 1980s cheeky action thriller has Roger Moore well into his fifties galavanting about a wealth of villains and supporting characters that make him look ridiculously stodgy in comparison. The oblivious reason for this would be the 20-30 year age gap between Roger Moore and the glamorous women, or the movie’s villain, Christopher Walken. Had this movie been made now, I’m rather sure a late fifties actor could have competently trained and performed to match the wits of younger actors. That was not the case for the 1980s, let alone for the established actor of stage, films, and television Roger Moore.

Roger Moore drags his old fashioned leading man presence in an 80s action movie. A View To A Kill checks all the marks of what most James Bond movies need to qualify as a solid 007 story. The elevated level of excitement of action films and the production needed for these stunt-filled explosion romps had left behind Roger Moore’s era of Bond films. The scenery, stunts, fights, camera blocking, and expectations upon the star of an action film in A View To Kill are further along than where‘‘thriller’ movies were in the early 1970s; when Moore took over the acting job of international secret agent James Bond. 007 was now an ‘action’ movie star with a more muscular actor needed onscreen to act out the hardcore action. Roger Moore was a dapper actor clearly pretending to be a dapper agent of British foreign intelligence.

Visually this movie looks to be any of the new burgeoning ‘action’ movies of the 1980s. The kind with Schwarzenegger or Stallone. Sonically it carries over the audio touches I had come to expect in Bond films; coming from the originals with Sean Connery. Assault rifles and submachine guns have their 007 film twang, especially when ricochetting. The guards pacing around that need to be avoided have their familiar Russian cadence. Helicopters careening to their death have the same metallic whine until their fiery grounding explosion as they did in From Russia With Love. This film pulls in the world class views expected of the adventures of an international spay, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, and some unnamed but stunning country estates. If you are looking for a Bond film, you’ve got the visual and audio elements with the smart fights, stunts, and gunplay of some solid 80’s action schlock. Definitely on a quality level above Cannon Films at the time.

As far as I’m aware, the Bond film formula basically has the titular hero thrusting himself into the realm of some new villain with every new film, and that’s exactly what we have here in this iteration. Right away the film jumps into mise-en-scene with Bond evading Soviet ski-bound infantry to deliver a very important microchip; a very new word for 1980s Hollywood screenplays at the time. Microfiche, transistors, or even diamonds was the tradecraft prior to this, but this is the era of Duran Duran! Secrets were now in the printing of company names on tiny silicon chips this time around.

Once we have some narrative reason for James Bond to enter, under a thinly veiled guise, the movie villain’s lair- in this instance that of a cosmopolitan industrialist played by a bleach blond Christopher Walken- Bond normally has a few avenues to gain access to just what is going on behind the villain he is investigating. For A View To A Kill, the henchmen, or henchpeople, we have is a boring head of security, a flamboyant enforcer (in this case also taking the role of villain’s girlfriend), and a less flamboyant but just as demurely sexy enforcer in the villain's employ. There is also a wonderfully bright and wholesome American Tanya Roberts playing a keen geologist that withers into the most distressed damsel several times throughout the film.

Bond can use his martial or sexual prowess to push into the villain's secrets. In this case James Bond performs a hat trick by bedding the exotic femme fatale, the orthodox femme fatale, and the damsel in distress- along with a throwaway blonde in a submarine in the prologue scene! Roger Moore leaves the role with a bang.

All these vivacious characters jumping into bed or sometimes sparring with a very weathered but handsome Roger Moore makes him look so old fashioned in this new era of action movies. The story itself puts up the pretense of placing this movie into a Cold War between the Soviets and The West. The film contains several classic 007 trappings to ground this explosive 80s action flick into what used to be a series about espionage. Walken’s villain has the same scale of operations you’d expect from a Bond villain. Instead of cornering the gold market after destroying Ft. Knox, this evil captain of industry has updated the standard villainy plan by setting his sights on destroying ‘Silicon Valley’ in California so he would have monopoly on microchip fabrication. The Cold War subterfuge lingers in this story by having the villain, Zorin, revealed to be a test tube baby made by the USSR’s eugenics program. The very old Nazi appears in the film sporting a monocle, palling around with Zorin. A mish-mash of Hollywood screenplay cliches and contemporary politics that suits Roger Moore quite well as an actor.

Grace Jones is the very big obvious counterpart that shows how dated an on screen Roger Moore is in this cinematic era. Grace Jones is brimming with the most vigorous 1980s fashion energy, and the taught muscular tone needed for that. She moves with athletic grace and Moore at best moves with swashbuckling candor. James Bond is an old man in this film, holding back women who’d be better off doing the shooting and kicking.

This is not the first James Bond film talked about on the blog. This one fits on the other end of the chronology of the ‘classic’ Bond films. From Russia With Love was the second chronologically and the least colorful entry in the series. A View To A Kill is the last with the second (George Lazenby is not recognized on this blog) actor to take up the Bond role. The immediate era that bridged these two actors’ streak of movies is the prototype for the action film genre that outpaced the Bond film producers. The playground for the idea of the hero elevating himself out of fist fights and car chases and into choreographed set pieces were found in the Bond films. James Bond leapt into the world of action films out of the tough guy landscape where actors like Steve McQueen or Charles Bronson made their names as tough guys rather than action stars leaping out of exploding helicopters.

That sort of explosive movie needs a different kind of commitment from their star. Roger Moore, and likely Sean Connery, were not equipped to be that kind of actor. It was a different time, and in that time I bet those two actors seemed more dashing than their cinematic forebears.

If you are looking for a recommendation, this is not the best Bond film and it is not that great of an 80s action movie. Christopher Walken is the type of actor that could reward this movie with more pizazz. Instead its garden variety villainy without any Walken zest. Perhaps he was too young to know how to be the Walken I think of when it comes to hammy acting. There is a blimp involved in the film’s closing action climax. That was a nice bit of pizzazz to jazz up this Bond film that drifted into dreariness in the third act.

Grace Jones can do no wrong on film. If you are looking for Grace Jones on film being Grace Jones, you have it. She has costumes with shoulder pads and glistening bare thighs on several occasions. Sculpted haircuts that change with most scenes. If only Christopher Walken was allowed to compete. There is a bit of psycho-sexual chemistry between the two actors. The movie does not do more than tease as to what that meant. Even if Roger Moore is your go-to James Bond, I’m confident he’d appear more charming without such a stark age difference between him and the rest of the cast.