It Ain't Over 'Til the Garbage Lady SingsThe video to the title song, performed by Garbage, is a reprise of an idea that Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess first devised in his draft of The Spy Who Loved Me. In the SWLM script (which was eventually discarded), a nuclear device is planted in the appendectomy scar tissue of a beautiful Australian opera singer. It is timed to go off as she dances the "Dance of the Seven Veils" in Strauss' Solome. In the video, Shirley Manson of Garbage is actually an android with a bomb inside of her/it, which explodes as she/it sings in a crowded opera house. Hopefully it's the only time that TWINE bombs in a theater. Plot When
a rich oil tycoon is killed in an explosion at the British Foreign Intelligence
Agency, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) becomes the bodyguard
for his daughter, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau).
Good Cuts In an obvious future cut, 85-year-old Desmond Llewelyn ("Q"), introduces a successor. The "new young man" is played by Monty Python's John Cleese. He, of course, plays -- you guessed it -- "R". Sigh... Once again, the script is overwritten and punned to death. For example...
ELEKTRA:
"Do you ski, Mister Bond?"
ELEKTRA:
"Do you ski, Mister Bond" Does any of the filmakers think that was a good joke? I can't imagine they did. It's just there because they're counting punchlines in Bond's dialogue. (Can't he talk like a real person once in a while?) Brosnan himself had a hand in script revisions: Apparently he hated the previous film, Tomorrow Never Dies, and wanted Bond to become a three-dimensional character again (two would have been an improvement). Brosnan told the Scotland Herald that his demands led to bitter rows over the script. "I kind of got a little despondent," he admitted, "because I thought 'Where am I? Where is he?'" So Brosnan finally spoke up: "It was a constant to-ing and fro-ing of phone conversations and faxes and heated discussions, with me calling Bruce Feirstein (one of the writers) every name under the sun and saying, 'You didn't effing well listen to me,' and 'What the hell is going on?' And him saying: 'But don't worry, I'm going to give it to you.' And two days later you had a wonderful scene . . . so there's a good healthy interaction." Now, for a good cut. Let's see... the cut of Richards' tank top t-shirt is pretty good (see poster). Reviews Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times: "'The World Is Not Enough,' the 19th James Bond movie, is in the 'Mission: Impossible' tradition: It presents action, adventure and romance with maximum sophistication and spectacle and minimal clarity." Roger Ebert: "A Bond picture that for once doesn't seem like set pieces uneasily glued together, but proceeds in a more or less logical way to explain what the problem and solution might be . . . My favorite moment? A small one, almost a throwaway. The movie answers one question I've had for a long time: How do the bad guys always manage to find all their equipment spontaneously, on remote locations where they could not have planned ahead? After the snow chase sequence, a villain complains morosely that the para-sails were rented, and 'were supposed to be returned.'" Alexander Walker, This is London: "From its opening minute, The World Is Not Enough, the 19th James Bond film, is determined to take our breath away - and not let us draw it again for another 125 minutes. Far from being "not enough", Bond's world this time round feels much too much. Brosnan stands up to his third outing without showing fatigue, but the non-stop action gives him no chance to show anything else except incredible feats of physical endurance."
"It must be a giant joke played on us by those merry pranksters at MGM. Or perhaps Pierce Brosnan is angry that his excellent remake of The Thomas Crown Affair made so small a dent at the box office that he has decided to give the public what he thinks is appropriate to its IQ: two hours of 'splosions and speedboats and machine guns arranged randomly, lacking beginning, middle or even end, or any connective tissue, while spotlighting some of the most vapid dialogue and some of the most vacant performances in history. It's pure dada, as revolutionary in its way as Marcel Duchamp's stunt of painting a mustache on the 'Mona Lisa' to stun the bourgeoisie." James Verniere, Boston Herald: "Bond's wristwatch is featured so prominently in a lovemaking scene with Marceau it's almost a menage a trois."
Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: "Most of all, though, I wondered how much longer people will pay to see a walking, running, driving, diving, punning, smirking, swimming, skiing, shoorting, parachuting corpse." BBC2's Late Review: Germaine Greer complained that the film was "too noisy," and that it would only appeal to those "small minded individuals with a short span of attention" and that "during the first hour nothing much happens" David Elliot, MSNBC: "Sort of topping the show, or at least starting it, is the title song performed by Garbage. Not quite garbage, really, but you can imagine Ian Fleming turning on a spit, grimly absorbing the lyrics: 'We know when to kiss, we know when to kill / If we can?t have it all, nobody will.'" Undercover Much of Elektra's physical seduction of Bond had to be censored due to the PG-13 rating, which Brosnan was not happy about. Brosnan talked about the film's sex scenes during a press interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills:
Denise Richards felt the opposite way about her sex scenes: "Well, it's always awkward. It's abnormal to go to work and lay in bed with your co-worker," Richards said. "I was nervous and Pierce is a really nice guy and he obviously wanted all of us to feel comfortable and in doing that, it's always uncomfortable."
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