The View From The Mountain

Daniel Craig exploded onto the scene as James Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale. And, after four 007 adventures, he calls it a day with No Time To Die, a film that was supposed to have been released back in 2020 but was pushed back for a year and a half, thanks to the pandemic. Apple and Netflix made multi-million dollar offers to the 007 people to air NTTD on their streaming services, but the Bond producers held out for a theatrical release, which they finally got in the fall of 2021. The irony here is that MGM, which releases the Bond films, was bought out by Amazon, which owns its own streaming service. James Bond is happily retired from spy craft and happily living with Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) in Italy--until their extended honeymoon is disrupted by the usual assassins who come out of the woodwork gunning for Bond. It turns out that Spectre, the criminal organization that Bond previously tangled with, is still very much active--and it looks as if Madeleine aided i...

When I was a kid, my G.I Joe figures were twelve inches tall, and they came with an assortment of vehicles, many of which I had. I was a kid back in the 1970s, and G.I. Joe then was mainly an adventurer, he was an Indiana Jones-type of explorer several years before Raiders of the Lost Ark had even been released. When the G.I Joe resurgence happened in the 1980s, I was too old to be playing with G.I. Joes, having given my old figures away to my younger cousins. Besides, I really didn’t care for the whole 80s craze of having the cartoons be nothing more than half hour commercials for the toys. When I heard they were making Snake Eyes, I originally thought it was going to be a remake of the Brian DePalma film starring Nicolas Cage as a cop trying to uncover a conspiracy during a hurricane in Atlantic City. In other words, I really had no knowledge of the “new” G.I. Joes--one of which is a dude dressed in all black who goes by the handle of Snake Eyes. But when I went in ...