YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) **1/2 Sean Conerry's great as usual, it has one of the great climactic scenes in film history (it's fun just looking at it, and also of course thinking about "The Simpsons"), and but Roald Dahl's screenplay is somewhat inconsistent in getting there. Not that there's anything disastrously wrong with it, just that writers of the calibre of Mr Dahl are used to messing around a little bit to see what they can get going on the side, and Bond requires non-stop pedal-to-the-medal adrenaline from the opening credits 'til close. There are some fairly dreary bits scattered around this film, where nothing much blows up and no evil caricature gets beheaded or anything. I suggest that Mie Hama and Akiko Wakabayashi played more central roles than they're given credit for in establishing the "exotic" mythology of Bond-Girldom (I have seen Bond films where there are no interesting females for him to play with, but this decidedly isn't one of them), and post-war, modernizing at full speed Japan seemed particularly exotic at the time, and stills plays that part well. All of which makes it a good weekend afternoon film, you can kind of check in and out, but make damn sure that you're wide-eyed and paying rapt attention for the last twenty minutes or so, gaze on in amazement as…
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