I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

OMF'ingG! RUSH LIMBAUGH HAS FINE TASTE IN "CHEESE"!

There was a magnitude 6.5 on the Richter Scale earthquake this afternoon in California, centred about 10.5 miles north of Cambria, a town in San Luis Obispo county about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It's a relatively low population density area (by coastal California standards), though there were at least three deaths and there was some damage, but the area's main tourist attraction, William Randolph Hearst's Castle in San Simeon, was undamaged.

Anyhow, Rush Limbaugh mentioned this on his programme shortly after it happened, and, in doing so, inadvertently revealed that he has much better taste in "cheese", of the cinematic variety, than I would have realized.

"...and, you know, I'm sure a lot of people, you get Tom Ridge out there announcing all these horrible things, and here comes an earthquake. It's not terrorism, folks. This is not The View to a Kill [sic], the James Bond movie where the... the evil -who, by the way, you know, the bad guy, the ba... the Bond villain in A View to a Kill was named "Zorin", not "Soren" (?), but "Zorin", and this guy was trying to create a... an earthquake in the San Andreas fault. But this is not terrorists doing this..."

Holy crap! He mentioned A View to a Kill! And Rush talked about it in enough detail, like remembering the name of the villain played by Christopher Walken, (Max) Zorin, that he must have seen it multiple times a lot more recently than 1985, when it was released. I mean, look, I know for all you people whom take spy films seriously, that A View to a Kill is widely considered to be one of the worst Bond movies, but it's still one of my favourites because I think it's so cheesy that it's hilariousm, which may have been the intention of the filmmakers since it's difficult to take seriously as an action film. It's got the worst Bond Girl, Charlie's Angels' Tanya Roberts (from one of the crappier seasons), one of the worst Q devices, that robot dog thing that really only sets up for a lame joke in the ending, and one of the worst villain origins, Max Zorin's intelligence being the result of Nazi experiments in a concentration camp where they injected his mother with steroids to make him intelligent, though it left him a psychopath. And the whole plan to flood the San Andreas fault with seawater in order to cause an earthquake and sink Silicon Valley leaving Zorin the only microchip manufacturer in the world (what about Asia?) is preposterous. And the title song from Duran Duran, the first Bond song to reach number one on the Billboard charts, while cool to listen to, has lyrics which have no discernable meaning (and which different people transcribe differently).

"Meeting you, with a view to a kill,
Face to faces, in secret places. Feel the chill.
Nightfall covers me,
But you know the plans I'm making
Still oversea.
Could it be the whole earth opening wide
A sacred why? A myst'ry gaping inside
The weekends; why? Until we

Dance into the fire,
That fatal kiss is all we need.
Dance into the fire
To fatal sounds of broken dreams.
Dance into the fire;
That fatal kiss is all we need.
Dance into the fire."

?????

But, as someone who thinks the more cartoonish the Bond movie, the better, ideally only slightly more serious than the Austin Power films at points, I think A View to a Kill is sublime, and second only to Diamonds are Forever for total cheese value, so Rush has fine tastes.

(1985 was a good year for "cheese" overall, with one of my top "cheese" movies of all-time, Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce, with vampire space zombies, led by the naked Mathilda May, overrunning London... a B-movie with A-movie special effects.)

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:33 PM