Movie Night at the Virtual Cinema: Licence to Kill

-

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I've been using Oculus Quest and SKYBOX VR to watch movies in a virtual movie theater, focusing on films I either never saw in the theater, or have never seen.

Licence to Kill is Timothy Dalton's second, and final, film as James Bond. It was released in the summer of 1989, which was a huge summer for genre films. Other films in theaters at that time were Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and the biggest film of 1989, Tim Burton's Batman, among others. I had never seen Licence to Kill until now, watching it in SKYBOX VR's virtual cinema environment.

Warning: Minor spoilers follow.

I only knew a little bit about this one before watching it, basically just that it was considered a dark film, was originally going to be titled Licence Revoked, and that it involves Bond out for revenge for the death of his friend Felix Leiter's new wife, and Leiter's maiming by a villain-induced shark attack.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

The film has quite a cast. Not only does it include the short-haired Assistant D.A. from Law and Order (Carey Lowell, who I knew was in the film), it also includes Terri from Three's Company (Priscilla Barnes), Kitana and Shang Tsung from 1995's Mortal Kombat (Talisa Soto and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the low-life scumbag from Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Benicio del Toro), the bad guy from Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (Anthony Zerbe), and Wayne Newton! The main villain is played by Robert Davi, who was a prolific portrayer of villains in 1980s TV, and who I know best from the 2004 - 2009 series Stargate Atlantis.

This is definitely an odd one as Bond films go. Something about it just looks off. To me, it looks more like a TV movie than a theatrical one, and the casting of Davi as the villain doesn't help, given his prior roles (and I mean no disrespect to him). And it starts off in a very goofy way: Bond and pals Felix Leiter and Sharkey are dressed in grey tuxedoes and on their way to Leiter's wedding. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency pulls a helicopter up alongside their limo to let Leiter know that they've got a fix on notorious drug dealer Sanchez (played by Davi). Bond and Leiter go after Sanchez, leaving Sharkey to go to the wedding and let Leiter's bride-to-be know that they'll be late. This sequence ends with Bond, hanging from a cable attached to a helicopter, tying another cable around Sanchez's plane, which they then tow away, while Bond and Leiter parachute to the wedding. It's truly weird. Weirder still is how much attention Leiter and his new bride (Terri from Three's Company!) give Bond after the wedding. They almost make the whole occasion all about him. Eventually, Sanchez escapes, has his goons kill the bride (Terri, no!) and kidnap Leiter, and it all goes downhill from there.

I don't want to say much more, other than this one really didn't feel like a Bond movie to me until the 2nd half, but overall, it's one of the stranger Bond films, and not really consistent with much of the series. Wayne Newton was great in it though! He plays a small, and again, weird, part, but I laughed.

Oh, just one more thing: as the film ends, they start playing If You Asked Me To by Patti LaBelle over the end credits. I've heard this song many times and had no idea it was in a Bond film...and it's really out of place. The final line in the movie leads into it, and that line alone didn't really make any sense. That song was stuck in my head for the next 12 hours...

Watching this one in the virtual theater was, strangely, the most immersive experience I've had yet in SKYBOX VR. At times I actually forgot I had a VR headset strapped to my head. And on the original Oculus Quest, the theater looks great (unfortunately, it looks like a hazy mess in Quest 2 thanks to its LCD screen, ugh). It was a fun time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Resolving the "n timer(s) still in the queue" Error In Angular Unit Tests

-
A few months ago one of the developers I work with ran into the below error in an Angular unit test: 1 timer(s) still in the queue The fix was to specify a particular amount of time in the tick() call as shown below: it( 'should set accountConfirmationDetails when getAccountConfirmationDetails is called' , fakeAsync(() => {          // Arrange          let  spyGetAccountConfirmationDetails = spyOn(accountService,  'getAccountConfirmationDetails' )         .and         .returnValue(Promise.resolve(AccountMockData.mockAccountConfirmationDetails));                    // Act         fixture.detectChanges();         tick(15000);          // Assert         expect(spyGetPaymentConfirmationDetails).toHaveBeenCalled();           expect(comp.zone).toBe(42);           expect(comp.hasValidProfile).toBeTruthy(); })); Hoping this helps someone!
Read more

How to Get Norton Security Suite Firewall to Allow Remote Desktop Connections in Windows

-
Image
I ran into an issue recently with RDP connections being blocked by the firewall in Norton Security Suite. I checked the traffic rules under Settings > Firewall > Traffic Rules  and found that it was enabled by default (and couldn't be edited): But during further research, I found  this page  on Norton's support site which discusses the different trust levels of networks and mentions that, for the Public trust level, "This setting also blocks remote desktop connections by default.". I checked my network's trust level, and sure enough, it was set to Public (I'm not sure how/why). (Sidebar: Notice in the screenshot above that allowing Remote Desktop for Public Networks is defaulted to Allow , though that rule is not active). Here's what my network trust level looks like now after changing the setting to Private (accessible under Settings > Firewall > General Settings > Network Trust ): After changing the network trust level t
Read more

How to Determine if a Column Exists in a DataReader

-
I recently had to work on something which required me to query a database, open the results in a DataReader, and check for the existence of a particular column. While the DataReader doesn't have a method to do this, with just a few steps I was able to accomplish this task. Here's how. First, the DataReader has a method named GetSchemaTable() , which returns a DataTable consisting of information regarding the data contained in the DataReader. The first column in this DataTable is named ColumnName , and its value is (obviously) the name of the column. Knowing this, we can loop through the rows in the DataTable, checking the ColumnName column for a value that equals the name of the column we're looking for. To this end, I wrote a static method in one of my classes which takes the DataReader and the name of the column being sought: (C#) public static bool HasColumn(DbDataReader Reader, string ColumnName) {    foreach (DataRow row in Reader.GetSchemaTable().Rows)    {       
Read more

Silent Renew and the "login_required" Error When Using oidc-client

-
I recently implemented the Silent Renew functionality of oidc-client in an Angular application I work on, and was getting reports that the users' tokens were still expiring. This made no sense to me as I'd verified the code was working during development, but yesterday I found the problem and am hoping it will save someone some time. The error we were getting back was "Error from signinSilent: login_required". This indicates that the user's session is no longer active on IdentityServer and they must re-authenticate -- which, of course, is what we're trying to prevent by using Silent Renew. In our case, the problem wasn't with the Silent Renew functionality, but rather the user's session was expired. The reason why  it was expired was because, for some reason, we were setting the session length to 15 minutes instead of the default 10 hours . What was occurring was that Silent Renew was attempting to renew a token after 55 minutes (60 minutes expirat
Read more

Fixing the "Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation" Error In An Angular App After Upgrading to webpack 4

-
I'm currently in the process of upgrading an Angular application which does not  use the Angular CLI from webpack 2 to webpack 4. The incremental upgrade from webpack 2 to 3 was easy, but once I made the jump from 3 to 4, I encountered a lot of problems. I went through them one by one, but the one that had me stumped was the following: Unhandled Promise rejection: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. ; Zone: <root> ; Task: null ; Value: Error: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. The code was transpiling/compiling fine, but this error was occurring when I'd navigate to a page containing this pipe. This code has worked fine under webpack 2 and 3. I made sure that the pipe was being set up as a declaration , which it was. What finally  corrected the issue for me w
Read more