For Your Eyes Only

I bought the Blu-ray copy of “For Your Eyes Only” because I wanted to spend a couple of hours remembering Roger Moore.  It was only last night that I got around to watching it.  It was the first James Bond movie that I can remember going to a movie theatre to see.  The opening sequence was kind of foolish, and I hated the attempt at humor.  It appears to show the demise of Blofeld, which was a bad idea.  You shouldn’t get rid of a major villain with a joke.  Even after 36 years, I couldn’t figure out what was going on for most of this movie.  There was a device that Bond was supposed to retrieve, and there is a woman who wants to get revenge for her murdered parents.  One of the scenes came from “Live and Let Die.”  Carole Bouquet didn’t have the most appealing personality, but I liked the basic approach to the action after the ridiculous special effects in “Moonraker.”  I liked the part where Bond is running up the stairs in pursuit of a car.  The chase down the bobsled course looked exciting.  I wondered how they planned it, because it looked dangerous.  Not every Bond film has to have a score by John Barry, and I liked what Bill Conti did in “Rocky,” but not this film.  The music had a trendy 1980s sound to it that I couldn’t stand.  Roger Moore was about 54 when he made this movie, and there are moments when his face shows his face, but mostly he still looks like he’s in good shape.  Perhaps Moore should have departed after this movie, because things would get worse with “Octopussy” and “A View to a Kill.”  What was missing from this movie was M.  How many James Bond films end with the Prime Minister interrupting a Bond encounter with a woman?  It was laughable that Carole Bouquet should say to Bond, “For your eyes only, darling.”  There was a mere thirty year age difference between the two of them.  Bouquet was in “That Obscure Object of Desire.”  I wondered how Sheena Easton ended up singing the theme song.  Bouquet and Easton are now 59 and 58 years old, respectively.  The other movies from the summer of 1981 that I remember seeing were “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Arthur,” and “S.O.B.”  Like all summers, that one was too short.  Those years of the Roger Moore James Bond films passed too quickly.  They were better than the Timothy Dalton years.