jake87

... before he directs, or especially, writes again. This is one of the most poorly crafted movies since "Manos: Hands of Stone."

If it were true to its characters and had anything to say, it could be a sleazy slice of life, not to everyone's taste, but still a respectable effort. But Lennon doesn't have the chops to do that, and his leads compound his troubles.

Hairy Angus Macfayden does such a poor New York accent that the script actually has to explain he was taken to Scotland as a boy. That pathetic explanation comes in one of many faux documentary interviews interspersed through the show because Lennon has no idea of how to develop character through plot.

Milla Jovovich's so-called career continues to go down the, uh, drain. The only thing she brings to this part are her gigantic nipples, again exposed from time to time to underscore her lack of anything else.

But even if Milla could act, it's hard to get over terrible writing. This is a movie where a battered woman's counselor also winds up advising the perpetrator. And the counselor's advice to the victim is to use her lips, hits and tits _ it clearly didn't occur to Lennon to use a brain anywhere. And the supposedly clever revenge plot simply involves a montage of scenes of the scrawny Jovovich in various states of undress followed by one twist-you-can-see- coming-a-mile-away. As bonus, it also indicts her character and a seemingly decent character as more mindlessly violent and cruel losers.

As secondary characters, Stephen Dorff and Aisha Tyler seem like they're visiting form a better movie, but they'd have to write that one themselves.

In short, if you come upon a copy of this movie, burn it.

* Spoiler alert *

As astounding waste of time, talent and yes, money, "Two for the Money" varies from predictable to preposterous to unpleasant without pausing for entertainment.

A top-flight cast, plus Matthew McConaughey, tries to put a palatable spin on the saga of a sports betting firm preying on gullible customers who should instead be in Gamblers Anonymous.

Scriptwriter Dan Gilroy has a strong facility for finding old clichés in new settings, crafting a tale of boy-meets-boy, boy-makes-boy-money, boy-loses-boy-money, oh-who-cares.

McConaughey is a washed-up football player trying to rehabilitate an injury and making ends meet through a betting tips show. There's a surface plausibility that he has some insights into college football as a former player, which gets him customers.

In swoops Al Pacino as the owner of a high-flying betting service. He brings Matthew to New York to pick pro games, setting him up with a posh apartment and work-out room to offer beefcake shots of McConaughey for his fans of various lifestyles.

Gedde Watanabe stands in for all the hapless betters relying on the service. When McConaughey hits big with his initial picks, Watanabe gets gulled into anteing up more. Unfortunately, the power goes to Matt's pretty head. Immediately. He has one good week, and then is off to play golf instead of researching games.

Pacino is fine with this. Infatuated with his new boy toy, he fires long-time associate Jeremy Piven. Rene Russo plays Al's very tolerant wife _ you see, she knows that he's a gambling addict himself. There's no difference between Al and his customers, except that he's taking their money to enable his own bets. Always watchable, Piven gets out of the movie with his dignity intact, and Russo is her usual reliable self.

But Pacino is in full "hoo-ha" mode as he tries to inject some life into his empty character. At that, Gilroy gives him more to work with then the rest of the cast. As one of Al's employees, super-skinny Carly Pope stands around in the background of multiple scenes while getting perhaps 10 words of dialogue. Her big scene is sliding into McConaughey's lap to kiss him for his good work. One can't help thinking of Susan St. James snuggling up with Rock Hudson in "McMillan and Wife."

Gilroy's script is so inept that he can't even realistically portray the ebb-and-flow of games. After things go wrong and McConaughey tries to get back on track, there's a scene where the football team he's picked goes up over the spread with two minutes to play. It's just the sort of situation in a real game where the other team would push for a quick score. But in Gilroy's world, Matt's colleagues immediately start celebrating their success, and then are stunned when the other team scores. (And of course, the teams playing are always "New York," never Houston or Tampa Bay.)

By the end, after ruining Watanabe, getting threatened by mobster types, and (attention guys!) showing off more of his physique, McConaughey decides to return to oblivion, but not without leaving Al his very special Super Bowl pick. Will Pacino use it and keep his shell game afloat? Never has a big game seemed so small.

* Some spoilers *

Writer-director Ori Kowarsky obviously chose subject matter of deep personal importance, to the point where some of his family and friends may find certain scenes painful to watch. Despite this highly specific setting, though, some in the independent film audience will see things to like here.

That's true even though Kowarsky makes the basic error of many young would-be auteurs. He focuses the film on his dull, confused protagonist (alter ego?) instead of the more interesting characters around him. For Josh Szchevisky, the Canadian college student at the center of Kowarky's film, parents, girlfriend, other students and university life in general are all problems to be overcome or avoided. It doesn't help this schematic approach that Tygh Runyan gives a remarkably closed performance as Josh. Some of this is attributable to the script, but some of it is just wooden acting.

Nevertheless, this film illustrates a certain type of Jewish family. Certainly, the dialogue among Josh, his parents and his younger brother has an authentic ring. Michal Suchanek is charming as Josh's younger brother Tzvi, who is home on a break from studying to be a rabbi, apparently at ultra-orthodox Ner Israel in Baltimore. The arguments between Josh's parents are well played by L. Harvey Gold and Marie Stillin, and may sound familiar to some viewers.

But it would be interesting to see these people interact in ways that were not simply rhetorical. In particular, Josh's father seems to be the second most important character in the film. As with many Holocaust survivors, his Jewish identity and the outer formalities of religious observance are of overriding importance to him, yet late in the movie we learn he is furious with God and unable to truly invest in faith. This combination of extreme legalistic practice coupled with the revelation of deep-seated doubts could be compelling, but Kowarsky treats the latter simply as an afterthought.

Instead, the plot hinges on the family's reaction to Josh's puppy-dog involvement with Cheryth, a new student whose father is a wealthy, non-observant Jew. He married a gentile woman, and so in the traditional method of reckoning descent, Cheryth is not Jewish. This becomes a problem almost immediately, when Josh invites her home for a Passover Seder and Cheryth gets the third-degree from his father, eventually leaving in embarrassment.

That's unfortunate on many levels, not least because Mr. Szchevisky is portrayed as a bully and many Jews would regard his behavior as bigoted as well as boorish. Details that will be telling for Jews, such as Cheryth's rebuffed attempt to shake hands with Tzvi, also may come across as bizarrely intolerant to non-Jews.

It's a shame that Cheryth simply becomes a bone of contention between Josh and his parents, because Carly Pope breathes life into this movie during her scenes. Cheryth is a talented young artist, whose work ranges from simple but luminous wraps of fabric and lights to more elaborate public installations. The featured artworks are among the strong points of this movie, adding beauty and interest.

Yet Kowarsky weighs down Cheryth with a parallel but poorly explored dispute with her father, as well as an affair with a French-Canadian student who hardly makes an appearance. Late in the movie, Cheryth and her friends trash the university library. One can speculate that it's because her father has made her transfer her major to computers, and the vandalism has the look of more public art. There are some striking visuals, yet it's so haphazardly presented that at first it seems like a dream sequence. The incident cries out for further explanation (and certainly has nothing to do with a simple-minded attribution to Marxism).

Cheryth is clearly talented and troubled. There's a lot to explore with the character, and Carly Pope seems more than capable of handling that job. Yet like more mainstream films on the topic, Kowarsky is content to suggest that Cheryth's complications make her unsuited for Josh, especially since she won't convert. That conclusion may be true, but it's also pat. And an obligatory nude scene really shouldn't make viewers worry about the health of the actress involved, but when she takes off her clothes in this movie, Carly Pope is so skinny and flat- chested that one wants her to get counseling and nutritional help. (On the other hand, Pope is confident enough in her pretty face to go without make-up and covered with zits in that bedroom scene. That makes 'Various Positions' the only movie in recent memory where an actress playing an 18-year-old student actually looks like an 18-year-old student.)

In short, 'Various Positions' is not as simplistic as typical Hollywood fare, and it's subject matter may be refreshing to some viewers. But it's target audience is fairly narrow, and it's appeal waxes and wanes from scene to scene.

* Spoilers *

Sam Shepard won't be collecting any Pulitzers for the often tired, stagy script of Don't Come Knocking, but he has written a part that he can play and this movie offers some other satisfactions. It's a work that is better as a concept than on screen, but if you can accept the loping pace it delivers an unexpectedly graceful ending.

While all roles except Shepard's Howard Spence are underwritten, some strong supporting players, notably Eva Marie Saint and Sarah Polley, are able to make more of them than what's on Shepard's pages.

Sharing the playwright's sensibility, Wim Wenders isn't the ideal director to keep him focused. But Wenders' strong visuals add grace notes and depth to the otherwise meandering story. Fans of their long-ago collaboration on Paris, Texas, may be especially interested to see this follow-up, although it is well-described by another viewer as a bookend rather than a sequel. Then again, as comments here illustrate, this movie suffers by comparison with its ancestor.

If this is a tale of missed opportunities, the same can be said of the writing. Yes, Shepard is known for his presentations of Western myths, sometimes in sharp counterpoint to realistic settings and sometimes in fantastic or incoherent contrast. This script uneasily tries realism and whimsy simultaneously, which might work better in the immediacy of a theater than in a Montana thoroughfare.

As detailed elsewhere, aging bad-boy actor Howard Spence (Shepard)hoofs it from the Utah shoot of his latest horse-opera, feeling a need after 30 years to reconnect with his roots without telling his employers.

By beginning on a movie location and taking off on an antic trail, Shepard seems to be setting up an examination of movie myths of the West and their effects on actors and viewers. But he soon jettisons this for a visit to Spence's mother (Eva Marie Saint), and a cat-and-mouse game with Tim Roth as a pursuing agent from the movie company's bondholder.

In her 80s, Saint gives a sly, low-key performance and remains amazingly lovely and spry. Sam Shepard has always been one of those men who look better from across the room than close up, and after decades of hard traveling he seems distressingly more like Saint's husband than her son. But Mom's scrapbook of tabloid articles about her bad-boy son's misadventures in Hollywood is an artful way to fill in Howard's back story. Then, the script simply has him repeat the same type of antics. OK, we get it.

But Howard is surprised to learn he has a son, fathered on a long-ago movie shoot in Butte, and he's again quickly on the road again. More-or-less playing the Wile E. Coyote role, Roth might be said to have wandered in from another movie. But since this is a Wim Wenders film, his eccentric, closed-up character is right at home. He's an alternative version of Howard, equally a loner, but without the wild, irresponsible side that clearly helped Spence's actorly appeal to female fans. Shepard can hardly go anywhere without starting an altercation, but even when he's in a hash-house Roth is mainly interested in defining types of potatoes.

Meanwhile, a young woman named Sky is headed in the same direction, transporting the ashes of her mother. Shepard usually deals in violent, self-destructive male stereotypes like Spence, but here essays a female one, a surreally mild, well-adjusted earth mother. Only an actress as subtle and natural as Sarah Polley could cope with the sentimental claptrap of carrying around and talking to her mother's urn.

Still, Sky's unruffled calm makes a welcome respite from the angry contacts between Howard and his 20-something son Earl, played by Gabriel Mann. A hedonistic, hot-headed musician, Earl of course reminds Spence of his younger self. Unfortunately, while he's somewhat talented musically, Mann isn't a good enough actor to add depth to this one-note part. The talented Fairuza Balk is wasted as his girlfriend, giving little to do beyond looking funky (and suffering from a Hollywood diet, since if Balk gets any skinnier she'll be transparent).

Of course, the main attraction of this part of the movie is supposed to be Spence's reunion with his long-ago lover, played by Shepard's real-life amour Jessica Lange. There's a certain poignancy in the realization that an old photo of Howard and Doreen is the two actors. But Lange's performance is erratic. She can't decide whether to play a real person or play off that Hollywood subtext. That's even true in her big scene, where she runs a gamut of emotions when Doreen finally tells Spence that he's never gotten a life and he's not going to co-opt hers. All this plays like the necessary third-act blow-up before a resolution can be reached. It's not mythic, it's just crafted.

But the resolution does come, and as noted, it's surprisingly satisfying, well-directed, and within the context, upbeat. Howard Spence can't really change, but his children can. This isn't a movie for everyone, and I share some of the disappointment of other reviewers. But if like Shepard and/or Wenders, you might find it worthwhile.

`On Her Majesty's Secret Service' is the James Bond movie for those who don't like James Bond movies. That's the secret to the vehement opinions this movie still sparks. Taken on its own terms, OHMSS is a flawed but entertaining action-romance. Certainly, all concerned, including Ian Fleming, recognized that the highly successful Bond formula was becoming entirely too formulaic. Sean Connery had dropped out, with greater consequences than anticipated, and this gave the producers a chance to stir things up. That the attempt was a partial failure can be traced in part to fans' resistance to change. But there also are the matters of a somewhat miscast cast, a long, involved plot and a downbeat ending (which will not be described here). Where the Bond recipe offered Connery smoothly dispensing frat-boy bon mots in the true spirit of the Sixties, OHMSS presented male model George Lazenby delivering similar lines woodenly. Lazenby represented reckless casting _ the idea that the look was more important than the acting _ but he is not a total loss. George does have the right physique, and handles the action scenes tidily. His obvious discomfort in early scenes, especially in the boudoir, eases a bit as the movie continues. His willingness to present a tender side, even spoof himself, is more than Connery managed. But if Lazenby improved as an actor, his ego won him few friends behind the scenes. That likely contributed to his variable chemistry with his leading lady. It's untrue that the Bond formula required the `girls' to be nincompoops. But the competence of previous female leads, such as Honor Blackman, was undercut by their silly names and subplots, as well as by their ability to stuff wild bikinis. Unfortunately, while it might be a blessing that other Bond women were not later asked to play Medea, it's relevant here that the lovely but boyish Diana Rigg clearly couldn't hope to fill their bikinis. An experienced actress, she's got more than enough talent to turn the troubled Tracy into a memorable character. But a spoiled, depressed heroine who isn't instantly overwhelmed by James Bond is another startling departure from form, no matter how nuanced the performance. It doesn't help that Rigg's unconvincingly pushed-up and padded figure obviously leaves Lazenby unmoved in the early love scenes. Trying to generate a trace of sexual tension, Rigg must act for two. It takes the movie a while to recover, and the many dubbed scenes in the first half further slow the momentum. Telly Savalas to the rescue. With his riveting ugliness and top-dog swagger, Savalas has the right phsyicality to make a menacing Blofeld, even if his grating accent expunges the `international man of mystery' effect. Still, Savalas and Rigg seem to enjoy their scenes together, and Ilse Steppat makes a great henchwoman. As the movie goes on, all the good and bad guys and gals get their shares of scenic action, especially in the Alpine setting of Piz Gloria. And of course, fashion houses still are trying to take over the world with atomizers... All in all, OHMSS is an interesting sidetrip for James Bond, and worth checking out if you've got a long afternoon that you're licensed to kill.

As it turns out, the one group of diabolical masterminds that `The Avengers' can't outwit is film editors.

Still, despite its well-documented flaws, this movie doesn't quite deserve the peasants-with-pitchforks-and-torches reception that it got from fans of the 1960s British TV series.

For those who come to it with no expectations, well, your expectations won't necessarily be exceeded, but there are some fun bits. The movie version is as mindless as typical Hollywood summer action fare, but no worse.

First, the good news: screenwriter Don MacPherson does draw on a wealth of wacky plot points from the series; like that show, the movie does have stylish fashions and sets; it doesn't take itself too seriously.

But the heart of the show was the rapport between Patrick Macnee, playing suave agent John Steed, and his various leading ladies. In Cathy Gale, the brisk, buxom Honor Blackman created a leather-clad woman warrior who was still a feeling person. With her fashion-model figure and classical theater background, Diana Rigg made Emma Peel the ultimate in intelligence and charm. Voluptuous Linda Thorson was perhaps too young, but she brought a combination of physicality and bubbliness to Tara King.

Macnee provided graceful support to these three very different actresses, and the show arguably reached its height during the black-and-white Diana Rigg season. While Rigg made an arch, androgynous Emma Peel, her chemistry with Macnee produced role models for female-male relations.

It's a difficult formula to emulate, and there may have been worse choices that Ralph Fiennes as the movie Steed. The Rock comes to mind. But while Fiennes is attractive and seems kindly off-screen, on-screen he generates all the warmth and charm of week-old bath water.

And while Macnee did as few stunts as possible _ as even a cursory glance at a TV episode clearly shows _ he at least looked formidable. Fiennes looks like a gust of wind would blow him away _ unfortunate, considering the film's weather-related plot.

In contrast, the athletic Uma Thurman creates her own special effect as Emma Peel. Her dangerous curves seem to defy the laws of physics, filling catsuits in ways that the underendowed Diana Rigg couldn't imagine, much less match.

And Thurman's Emma starts out well, with her early scenes providing much of Rigg's breezy playfulness. Alas, the more time she spends with Fiennes, the more she mimics his mumbling, diffident performance. As the scenes jump around almost at random, Thurman's version of Emma becomes equally fractured.

Sean Connery gives a one-note performance, and one wishes that only dogs could hear him. Of course, the choppy editing doesn't give him a chance at grace notes. The megalomaniacs on TV episodes were often eccentrics in a script filled with eccentrics, with highly personal grievances and plots.

The movie lacks those charming supporting characters, and in this underpopulated movie, Connery is the obvious bad guy right from the start. Still, even if the cast is adrift, there is some genuine feeling between the Steed and Peel characters. It's a pale copy of the Macnee-Rigg pairing, but one suspects there was a better movie here that got derailed on the Hollywood assembly line.

Director John Dahl's stylish film noir `Red Rock West' couldn't find a distributor, played on cable television and then was picked up by a San Francisco moviehouse where it set attendance records. If you think its subsequent success taught Hollywood suits anything, you just aren't cut out for the movie business.

With an even better script by Steve Barancik, Dahl found the ideal lead to play the very fatale femme of `The Last Seduction.' Linda Fiorentino, someone else who hasn't been well served by Hollywood, gave one of the great performances of the 1990s as Bridget/Wendy. Her no-holds-barred potrayal perfectly matched Barancik's uncompromising writing. Fiorentino deserved an Oscar, but didn't qualify because this film also went straight to cable before finding a distributor and becoming a hit.

Limited resources can focus the mind. Dahl isn't the most sweepingly visual of directors, but he can provide the occasional arresting scene. With a small but outstanding cast of what were then B-list actors, everyday settings and a tiny budget, the director kept `The Last Seduction' focused on the basics needed to make this genre work.

Without revealing too much of the plot, Bridget is on the lam after stealing $700,000 in drug proceeds from her sleazy, abusive husband, well played by Bill Pullman just before he became a good-guy leading man. The late great J.T. Walsh is smooth as a silk suit as Bridget's attorney, who appreciates a cold-hearted bitch. Bill Nunn does yeoman work as the detective on her trail.

But the key to this sort of black widow movie is a willing sap, and Peter Berg makes one of the best. A lean slice of beecake, he's back in his small town after a disastrous fling in the big city, that is, Buffalo. He's looking to get out again, and when Bridget breezes into the local shot-and-beer joint with her `city trash' attitude, he's done for.

As another reviewer chooses to emphasize, with her skinny legs and barely pubescent, pancake-flat chest Linda Fiorentino is the scrawniest femme fatale in the history of film noir. But that just makes her and her character's progress more amusing. Like Bridget, Fiorentino gets over on attitude more than pulchritude.

While Fiorentino's physique won't make women viewers jealous, many respond enthusiastically to the sex scene where Bridget rides Berg's Mike against a fence behind the bar. In fact, there's hardly a standard bedroom scene: most of the sex is of the right-now kind. And while both seem to enjoy themselves a lot, Bridget is clearly in control, emotionally and physically.

In recent years, we've gotten used to zaftig super-women like Xena throwing men around. But perhaps not since the heyday of Diana Rigg on `The Avengers' has there been a thin, flat-chested woman who dominates males like Linda Fiorentino takes care of business here. Bridget certainly isn't a role model, but her enthusiasm for her work is infectious.

This movie also has the courage of its convictions. If it seems amoral, well just about every Arnold Schwartzenegger movie celebrates massive killing by so-called `good guys.' The only difference between this movie and Hollywood's standard murderous agit-prop is that `The Last Seduction' has a brain.

Unfortunately, great work doesn't always bring great rewards. Fiorentino was good in Kevin Smith's ramshackle low-budget `Dogma,' only to be dissed by the director. She was one of the best elements of the equally ramshackle but costly `Men in Black,' only to be booted from the sequel for more compliant girls. (In Hollywood's homoerotic subtext, `buddy movie' means no women allowed.)

Fiorentino did hook up aagin with John Dahl in the highly forgettable `Unforgettable,' weighed down by a bigger budget, second-rate script and Ray Liotta. Both the director and his leading lady are still in play, though, so we can hope they will find other siutations worthy of their talents. And if not, Linda Fiorentino makes `The Last Seduction' unforgettable.

Cowardly and cynical, `The Hospital' represents the nadir of Paddy Chayefsky's special brand of celebration of the status quo disguised as satire.

Thanks to ham-handed director Arthur Hiller, this ludicrous script gets the visually ugly, poorly paced presentation it deserves.

Only a great performance by George C. Scott, in the sort of mean-spirited role he was born to play, keeps `The Hospital' from being a complete disaster.

Ironically, though, Scott's performance does viewers a disservice. His magnetism keeps them watching when they might more profitably turn off the VCR and clean out the closets, stare at the clouds, or watch re-runs of `Baywatch.'

Certainly, anyone who emotionally invests in the set-up _ modern medicine apparently gone amok _ will feel cheated by the dismal payoff, where Chayefsky reveals that The System Works Just Fine, So Quit Your Carping.

While the first half of this film provides some entertaining black comedy, it all turns out to be a red herring. Before that becomes clear, though, Chayefsky gives some good lines to Scott as his middle-aged, middle-class, white male stand-in.

Bitter, alcoholic, impotent, Scott's Dr. Herbert Bock has alienated those who know him best, and he has the bile to keep alienating them. In Chayefsky's worldview, all that of course makes Bock a magnet for a hippie chick half his age.

Playing a collection of adjectives, the long-haired, long-legged, braless and almost bust-less Diana Rigg struggles in the part of `the girl.' The British Rigg is miscast as a southwestern free spirit, but any other actress would struggle as well. Like the rest of a good cast gone to waste, Rigg can't overcome a script that isn't interested in any character except Bock, or any philosophy beyond banality.

For fans of George C. Scott, this is another star turn and worth watching. For fans of black comedy, turn it off after the first 45 minutes. For anyone else, don't bother.

Perhaps it's the effect of vibrations from all the bombs in the story, but the intended comic souffle of `The Assassination Bureau' never rises beyond mild amusement. While the movie doesn't crash and burn, it also doesn't take full advantage of the ingredients at hand, including a story co-written by Jack London. In the hands of director Basil Dearden and writer Michael Relph, what should be lighter than air becomes a lead zeppelin.

That said, `The Assassination Bureau' does have its moments, and won't actually kill brain cells like much current summer fare. Things start off promisingly enough. Diana Rigg seems well-cast as a prim, proto-feminist trying to break into journalism by exposing the nefarious bureau. Oliver Reed is suitably bemused as the bureau's idealistic head, embarrassed by too polite to demur when Rigg suggests his own murder. Telly Savalas isn't very British, but he does have fun as the real villain. He's that epitome of evil, a Fleet Street press lord (some things never change). Morose Vernon Dobtcheff and corrupt Philippe Noiret have amusing turns as two of the bureau's henchmen, who are all represented as national stereotypes. Unfortunately, the repeated misfire attempts on Reed's life lack panache, they become predictable and repetitious.

Mid-way through, glamorous Beryl Reid is brought in to sex things up a bit as a Borgia-like Venetian bella donna. There's a brief cross-cut scene contrasting the curvaceous Reid with the boyish Diana Rigg as they lace themselves into corsets. But this is a tame movie, an action-comedy as opposed to a romance. Beryl Reid is quickly dismissed. Despite their off-screen reputations, Rigg and Oliver Reed generate no sparks on it. Indeed, once Beryl Reid is gone, the movie becomes a sort of ripping yarn for boys. Oliver Reed buckles his swash well enough, but Rigg is marginalized. `The Assassination Bureau' is worth renting on an otherwise idle evening, but you might want to read Jack London instead.

`On Her Majesty's Secret Service' is the James Bond movie for those who don't like James Bond movies. That's the secret to the vehement opinions this movie still sparks. Taken on its own terms, OHMSS is a flawed but entertaining action-romance. Certainly, all concerned, including Ian Fleming, recognized that the highly successful Bond formula was becoming entirely too formulaic. Sean Connery had dropped out, with greater consequences than anticipated, and this gave the producers a chance to stir things up. That the attempt was a partial failure can be traced in part to fans' resistance to change. But there also are the matters of a somewhat miscast cast, a long, involved plot and a downbeat ending (which will not be described here). Where the Bond recipe offered Connery smoothly dispensing frat-boy bon mots in the true spirit of the Sixties, OHMSS presented male model George Lazenby delivering similar lines woodenly. Lazenby represented reckless casting _ the idea that the look was more important than the acting _ but he is not a total loss. George does have the right physique, and handles the action scenes tidily. His obvious discomfort in early scenes, especially in the boudoir, eases a bit as the movie continues. His willingness to present a tender side, even spoof himself, is more than Connery managed. But if Lazenby improved as an actor, his ego won him few friends behind the scenes. That likely contributed to his variable chemistry with his leading lady. It's untrue that the Bond formula required the `girls' to be nincompoops. But the competence of previous female leads, such as Honor Blackman, was undercut by their silly names and subplots, as well as by their ability to stuff wild bikinis. Unfortunately, while it might be a blessing that other Bond women were not later asked to play Medea, it's relevant here that the lovely but boyish Diana Rigg clearly couldn't hope to fill their bikinis. An experienced actress, she's got more than enough talent to turn the troubled Tracy into a memorable character. But a spoiled, depressed heroine who isn't instantly overwhelmed by James Bond is another startling departure from form, no matter how nuanced the performance. It doesn't help that Rigg's unconvincingly pushed-up and padded figure obviously leaves Lazenby unmoved in the early love scenes. Trying to generate a trace of sexual tension, Rigg must act for two. It takes the movie a while to recover, and the many dubbed scenes in the first half further slow the momentum. Telly Savalas to the rescue. With his riveting ugliness and top-dog swagger, Savalas has the right phsyicality to make a menacing Blofeld, even if his grating accent expunges the `international man of mystery' effect. Still, Savalas and Rigg seem to enjoy their scenes together, and Ilse Steppat makes a great henchwoman. As the movie goes on, all the good and bad guys and gals get their shares of scenic action, especially in the Alpine setting of Piz Gloria. And of course, fashion houses still are trying to take over the world with atomizers... All in all, OHMSS is an interesting sidetrip for James Bond, and worth checking out if you've got a long afternoon that you're licensed to kill.