Casino Royale (1967)

Every spy movie has to have some sort of mystery in it. The mystery here: who the hell thought this was a good idea? I mean, it’s not like the legit Bond movies take themselves all that seriously, so how far can you really go in parodying them? The answer to that question is painfully evident here. Every so often this movie raises itself up and achieves a level of extraordinary stupidity; the rest of it is a mishmash of lame, incomprehensible, unwatchable, or some combination of all three. The only moment in the movie that is even within hailing distance of competence is the baccarat scene—and that’s the one part of the script that plays it straight! Otherwise, this is a bomb of staggering proportions, a film that is so bad it can’t even achieve "so bad it’s good." Seriously, I like a spoof as much as the next guy, but this...words fail. At least, as I struggle to find something good to say, I can at least report that a few of the women in the flick are great to look at. So there’s that. Otherwise, yeesh. Your mission: avoid this at all costs.

The African Queen

This is one of those movies you hear about a lot, even before you ever see it. What they never tell you is, it's kind of boring. This may have to do more with my own perspective, which has decidedly less interest in how two people feel about each other, and more about what people do. There's not a lot of doing in stretches of this film, though in the end the film makes up for some of those deficiencies with a clever and satisfying resolution. Part of the problem throughout probably comes from the lack of conflict between the protagonists; Hepburn and Bogart, in their characters at least, seem quite mismatched from the start. And then they get a little too into each other too quickly. A little more conflict a little deeper into the proceedings probably would have been more entertaining. (If this film were made today, the leads certainly would hate each other until at least two-thirds of the way through; what that may say about the difference between today and the 1950s is a topic for open discussion, to be sure.) It's also notable that, given the lack of clash with the two characters who share almost all of the running time by themselves, the movie frequently resorts to using the African setting (and its cohort of animals and natural perils) as a substitute for plot and interpersonal drama. That may have impressed audiences back in the day, but it's old hat now. Everyone else can be satisfied with this one as a classic, but I insist upon more than this.