Post-Craig review: Goldfinger

Goldfinger is the Donald Trump of Bond Films, and I'm not talking about the titular character being a fat swindler with a penchant for golf.

Have I got your attention? Have I annoyed you? Oh, good.

It's "big and bold and brassy" they say. It's a gilded parody of a Bond film, I say. Casino Royale 1967 may have been/will be a delusional psychedelic mess, but this is a film where Bond wins by shagging a lesbian straight.

You might say that I'm being unfair. I would say that this is my review and I can do what I want, so there.

Post-Craig review: From Russia With Love

One of the rules of this project is that I'm not allowed to start writing one review until I've finished the previous one. An exception to that is if I've written something but in the editing process decide it'd fit in better elsewhere. Kind of like Sylvia Trench showing up again at the start of this one.

She is an odd artifact of Dr. No, the last vestige of "we don't exactly know what a Bondfilm is yet" in the first film with Desmond Llewellyn and the last one before the Aston shows up. In their defense, Dr. No was insanely profitable (made back its meager budget more than 50 times over). As I hinted in the previous one, a couple of the key players had worked together before, but Bond isn't Yer Typical Action Movie (or at least, it shouldn't be... looking at you, Skyfall*).

*And Tomorrow Never Dies. And Licence to Kill. And... 

There are times to take risks and times to play it safe, and bless 'em, most times the Bond people know what time is what. From Russia With Love isn't The White Album - you don't make an album like The White Album as your sophomore offering - it's With the Beatles. A worthy follow-up that doesn't muck too much with what works, but there are still a lot of covers.

Post-Craig Review: Dr. No

 Back to the very beginning.

This is a lie. "The beginning" would surely be a review of Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale. But we can skip that. The books have, for all but the most obsessed of us who pegged the ending of No Time To Die the moment the rumor mill told us the working title was Shatterhand (hi), faded into obscurity. (Besides, it's far too much effort for me to hold the novel open while I type this, as opposed to just having a movie running in a different window.) So too can we skip the "Card Sense Jimmy Bond" 1954 American telemovie Casino Royale, the long strange path that the rights to the Fleming novels took to land in the hands of Mr. Broccoli and Mr. Saltzman, and how director Terence Young and writer Richard Maibaum (who had both worked on a 1958 World War II film called, uh, No Time To Die [oh, and take a gander at that cast list]) were brought in to hurl James Bond onto our screens one October evening in 1962.

2022 rewatch: THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

 Oh, come on, after The Man With the Golden Gun, we needed something, you know, good.

The Spy Who Loved Me is Roger Moore's third outing as James Bond, his first in Proper Cinematic Widescreen (2.35:1), his first "shaken not stirred" (although of course he doesn't get to say it), and the first time the Bond actor is credited as "Ian Fleming's James Bond" (definitely a lie, it's Roger Moore), has his face appear in the titles, or wears a tuxedo in the gunbarrel. Other than that, it's You Only Live Twice, right down to the choice of director, only now performed through the medium of underwater ballet and Bond doesn't "die" in it. No, wait, I take that back. He does in fact get fake-shot in both.

It's okay that it's not Ian Fleming's James Bond and it's okay that it's Roger Moore. For the third film in a row, he's the only Bond who could pull this nonsense off. I've said before that a franchise broad enough to encompass both Moonraker and Quantum of Solace is a very weird beast, and it's largely Moore's fault that it lasted long enough to do either. (Very annoying that all three of his successors have gone, with varying degrees of sincerity, the Connery/Fleming route instead of the far more entertaining Moore/Gilbert one. Yes, it's true that a Daniel Craig movie with Baron Samedi in it would have been nigh incomprehensible, but so was Spectre, and this would at least be more fun.)

Along for the ride are Curt Jurgens as this entry's Notfeld, Barbara Bach as the cleavage, and Richard Kiel as Jaws. It involves things that are long and hard and full of seamen and Ms. Bach ends up thoroughly wet.

2022 rewatch: GoldenEye

 GoldenEye was the first Bond Film starring Pierce Brosnan and the first made after a six-year hiatus. It was the second attempt to get Brosnan on-board (cheeky reference thereto in the opening - yes, I wonder what else might possibly have happened in 1986, and BrosBond's activities therein utterly bosh the timeline, no point in not making the reboot clearer - oh yes, I know they kept Q around, so what? They kept M around for the first three Craigs) and the first of two directed by Martin Campbell, the Bond Director whose name I am most likely to forget (but not most likely to misspell - I could make a crack here at the expense of Mr. Tamahori or Mr. Fukunaga, and will instead settle for the safe option of belittling Mr. Spottiswoode). It is also, trivia fans, the only entry in the Bond canon to mention "safe sex."

Is it great? No. Does it do what it needed to do, take a 60s British staple that had lain dormant since 1989 and bring him back in the mid-nineties in a sort of greatest-hits mishmash that buggers up the continuity? A smidge better than Doctor Who: The Movie, that's for certain.

2022 rewatch: The Man With The Golden Gun

 The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) has some redeeming qualities. For example, the film never subjects us to a shootout where Bond survives unscathed despite being absurdly outnumbered by men with automatic weapons (see, off the top of my head, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Living Daylights, No Time To Die* - all of which I think are super in spite of this glaring break in "realism" - as well as all the Brosnans, which, um, exist). Instead, the climax features Britt Ekland in a bikini. Brilliant trade 10/10.

*Look, it's not an automatic weapon that gets him, so it counts, shut up.

It stars Roger Moore as James Bond, except the script seems to be a recycled Connery in terms of his characterization (not the last time one of an actor's weakest Bond films looks like it was written for his predecessor - looking at you, Skyfall). It also stars Christopher Lee as the badhat and Maud Adams as the Other Girl - she'll be back in Octolowerlips, and he'll be in two turn-of-the-millennium trilogies where he's a former good wizard turned evil secondary villain who's quickly killed off at the start of the third film. Which is weird that that happened twice. The villain's name is some variant on Francis, which is weird because that happens again, twice (Licence to Kill and Spectre, in case you tried to forget).

2022 rewatch: LIVE AND LET DIE

 Live and Let Die is Roger Moore's first outing as James Bond. It features Yaphet Kotto as the eminently watchable Dr. Kananga (really, when they get around to The Historic First Black Blofeld*, I'm just going to throw this in their faces) and "introduces" (a lie; this was her fourth film role) Jane Seymour (not Henry the Eighth's third wife (as far as we know - there is voodoo in this movie, after all) or the Canadian actress of the same name) as a Tarot card reader who loses her powers once she has sex. This is only the second most bizarre supernatural occurrence in this film. It stars, however, Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi, against whom the rest of the cast demonstrates their prodigious acting skill by not simply fading into the background in the face of this madness.

NO TIME TO DIE review

 Before we begin, I think you should probably revisit the following posts, as they will inform much that follows:

In which I explain why On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the best Bond film ever. (10/10 on a curve)

In which I watch and reevaluate the chaotic mess that is Quantum of Solace. (5/10 on the curve)

In which I give Skyfall more attention than it deserves. (3/10 on the curve)

In which I give Spectre less than half the tongue-lashing it deserves. (0/10 on the curve)

You will note that I've never bothered to do a review of Casino Royale because it's a mishmash of the novel and OHMSS. And if you read the Skyfall and Spectre reviews, you'll note that I got increasingly pissed off at the films' superficial lip service to OHMSS. Given that No Time To Die is a mishmash of OHMSS the movie (surprise?) and You Only Live Twice the book (actual surprise, unless you knew the working title was Shatterhand), you might think I'm done here.

Oh no.

I'm not. 

The short version is this: Okay. Congratulations. After five attempts, you’ve finally made the superlative, quintessential homage/remake of OHMSS. Didn't think you had it in you. 8/10; now please never do this again.

(SPOILERS. SERIOUSLY. GO WATCH THIS MOVIE BEFORE YOU READ THIS REVIEW. IT'S GOOD, HONEST, I KNOW THAT'S HARD TO BELIEVE GIVEN ITS IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS, BUT YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO BE BOGGLED BY THE FACT THAT THEY MADE THIS FILM)

(I will also casually spoil certain terrible Star Trek and Star Wars films. You may be able to guess which two if you've seen NTTD already.)

When you gaze into the abyss, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die: a look at Bond's villains

 I began plotting this idea out in my head that I would review each of the main villains of the Bond series and then rank them. And then I thought that was too much work because I don't particularly want to sit through Diamonds Are Forever or, God help us, Spectre again. And as much as I love love LOVE The Living Daylights, its villains are the whitest of whitebread. 

So then I thought, "hang on, lemme do one on the best villain of each Bond incarnation." Of course, Lazenby only has the one, and Dalton really only has the one (see my comment about TLD above), so those wouldn't be terribly interesting. 

But the answers for "who was the best villain of the Connery Era" and "who was the best villain of the Moore Era" are pretty damn obvious - there's really only one candidate and one obvious runner-up for each, and no, Donald Pleasance and Christopher Lee are not on those lists - and I began thinking about them, and how they relate to Bond, and how their qualities are reflected in the Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig eras, and that brings me to the title of this post.

My definitive ranking of the Bond films to date

Haha, I'm going to cop out a little bit. Rather than give a strict "this one is better than this one" thing all the way through, I'm going to group the films in to clusters of five (for the most part). Tiers, rather than a straight ranking, if only because I don't particularly care to quibble whether Quantum of Solace is worse than Live and Let Die. Within each tier, the films will be ordered chronologically.

The Top Three (cinematic art)

From Russia With Love (Connery, Terence Young, 1963)
The best Connery film by a mile is also one of the closest adaptations of a Fleming novel. Some people say Connery hadn't yet found his footing, but Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya (yes, the one name-checked in the Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin versions of "Mack the Knife") are positively brilliant as the villains. They say Goldfinger's the one they keep trying to remake, but they always do the hotel room scene from this one when they're casting a new Bond, hmm...

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Lazenby, Peter Hunt, 1969)
I stand by everything I said here and here. I really don't think there's anything more that needs to be said. They use the hotel room scene in this one when casting new Bonds, too.

The Spy Who Loved Me (Moore, Lewis Gilbert, 1977)
People routinely put this around number eight on their lists. Those people are wrong. With the possible exception of the lead actor (and Moore was given far more to do than Connery was), this is superior in every way to Goldfinger, and people who disagree should have a word with Jaws.

Four and Five (A-)

The Living Daylights (Dalton, John Glen, 1987)
This is the only non-sixties Bond film that Ian Fleming might plausibly have written. I don't think I need to say anything else, but I will: Timothy Dalton is a brilliant James Bond, and it's too bad if you can't see that.

Casino Royale (Craig, Martin Campbell, 2006)
Fact: Casino Royale is the most overrated Bond Film that isn't Goldfinger. Fact: It's still very, very good.

Six through Ten (watch these to understand what a Bond Film is)

Dr. No (Connery, Terence Young, 1962)
It is a film that exists. Better films followed.

Goldfinger (Connery, Guy Hamilton, 1964)
A film that far too many of its successors tried to emulate.

Thunderball (Connery, Terence Young, 1965)
A film that blubbers, boggles, and bemuses.

GoldenEye (Brosnan, Martin Campbell, 1995)
It is a film that exists. Worse films followed.

Quantum of Solace (Craig, Marc Forster, 2008)
If Licence to Kill, the second film featuring a more serious actor playing Bond Out For Revenge, was a Lethal Weapon knockoff, then Quantum of Solace, the second film featuring a more serious actor playing Bond Out For Revenge, is a Bourne Tepidity knockoff, right down to the shakycam. It's better than it's given credit for being.

Eleven through Sixteen (either "so bad it's good" or "they tried something different and it didn't quite work")

You Only Live Twice (Connery, Lewis Gilbert, 1967)
Turning Japanese I think I'm turning Japanese I really think so. Famous for giving us Dr. Evil and the only one where Bond never learns the name of the girl he ends up with.

Live and Let Die (Moore, Guy Hamilton, 1973)
A Blaxploitation flick dressed up as a Bond film nevertheless delivers one of the best villains in the entire series. Roger Moore's introduction ably proves that they can throw him up against just about anything and he'll make it work.

Moonraker (Moore, Lewis Gilbert, 1979)
Star Wars ruined everything. Great music, though.

For Your Eyes Only (Moore, John Glen, 1981)
The "average" Moore film is average. Quelle surprise.

Licence to Kill (Dalton, John Glen, 1989)
A Lethal Weapon knockoff that goes Road Warrior at the end. Someone was really upset they didn't get Mel Gibson, I guess. It's supposed to be one of the darkest Bond films, but the mickey-mousing gunfire during the tanker chase is utterly hilarious now that the world has graced us with Baby Driver.

Tomorrow Never Dies (Brosnan, Roger Spottiswode, 1997)
If I absolutely had to rank these, this film would be the best of this batch. There is no actual reason for it to exist other than $, but it's inoffensive and entertaining, and Brosnan gives what is probably his best performance. It has one standout scene (the one with Doctor Kaufman) and the villain is simultaneously a Rupert Murdoch caricature and stunningly prescient. Really the only of the Brosnans that has aged remotely well.


Seventeen through Twenty-One (do not watch unless you're marathoning the series)

The Man With the Golden Gun (Moore, Guy Hamilton, 1974)
Christopher Lee didn't fare any better in Bond than he did in Star Wars, managing to get less interesting as this film blunders on. There are a couple of good scenes (Bond's first encounter with the baddie's girl being foremost among them) and a plethora of bad ones (anything pertaining to a fake nipple or Britt Ekland).

Octopussy (Moore, John Glen, 1983)
The best of this batch by virtue of being the most forgettable. The plot is actually pretty complex, which is a refreshing change of pace. Kristina Wayborn, who gives the the-censors-must-have-been-asleep line "That's my little octopussy" is in my opinion one of the most overlooked Bond Girls ever. Ultimately, though, it's tonally inconsistent, and its basic idea was repackaged four years later in the vastly-superior The Living Daylights.

A View to a Kill (Moore, John Glen, 1985)
Roger Moore deserved a better swan song, and his horrible facelift doesn't help at all. What keeps this film out of the bottom three is Christopher Walken in a Thatcher wig, but even he can't stop me from noticing that Tanya Roberts is the worst Bond Girl ever. I am rather fond of the firetruck chase through San Francisco, though.

The World is Not Enough (Brosnan, Michael Apted, 1999)
It's Pierce's turn to take on OHMSS. (Oh, sorry, did you not notice the Tracy/Elektra comparisons, the skiing, and the villain who cut off their own earlobes?) The helicopter assault on the caviar factory is quite good and belongs in a better movie.

Skyfall (Craig, Sam Mendes, 2012)
Sam Mendes does not understand James Bond. I'm sorry, but that just needs to be said.

Twenty-Two through Twenty-Four (watch only to prove that yes, they can make utterly terrible Bond films)

Diamonds Are Forever (Connery, Guy Hamilton, 1971)
Gay villains: the movie. Features laser satellite.

Die Another Day (Brosnan, Lee Tamahori, 2002)
Gay villains: the movie. Features laser sat... wait.

Spectre (Craig, Sam Mendes, 2015)
The only thing Mendes understands less than James Bond is Bond Villains. This film is a grotesque farce, a horrid throwback to the Hamilton Error, except it insists on playing everything straight. Pro-tip: when you take a gag from Austin Powers and make an entire film around it, you're very likely to end up with the very worst Bond Film ever on your hands.

Sir Roger Moore, 1927-2017

Sir Roger Moore was, of course, best known for playing a remorseless alcoholic sociopath in seven films, increasingly flabbergasted after each successive one that he hadn't been fired yet. (He was fifty-eight when he finally gave it up.) Also, despite the character's quintessential Britishness, Moore was in fact the first Englishman to play him - his predecessors being an Aussie and a Scot.

His favorite of these films was The Spy Who Loved Me, which happens to be awesome.

Anyway, here are some choice quotes from his book, Bond on Bond:

"When I handed in my licence to kill I was constantly asked who should replace me. No! I lie. I was asked that question after about my third film, which, of course, gives an insecure actor a great feeling of being wanted. In fact, I did make a number of suggestions to Cubby - always names of really bad actors so I looked good by comparison. In the end, I was forced to abandon that idea as I couldn't find any actors worse than me."

"Sometimes [to help Desmond Llewelyn, 'Q,' remember his lines] we had 'idiot boards' on set, with his technical dialogue written in large text. As he glanced up to remind himself of the next line, the cards were peeled back one after the other. I helpfully rewrote some of those too. I like being helpful."

"[Director] Terence Young and [editor] Peter Hunt decided to have a bit of fun with [the explosive attache case from From Russia With Love] when some United Artists executives were visiting Pinewood. They ran the first couple of reels of the movie, and when it reached the scene where Bond opens the attache case, Peter cut to the huge explosion from the end of Dr. No and ran the closing titles. The end."

James Bond: Octopussy

(This has been sitting in my Drafts folder for three years. Enjoy.)

First time, ladies and gentlemen, that a Soviet Russian is the Big Bad. (This film was made in 1983.) Second and last appearance of Maud Adams, making this the only film where one named Bond Girl looks an awful lot like a previous one (she was the doomed Andrea Anders in The Man With the Golden Gun).

The Daniel Craig Films Are Just Darker Regurgitations of Pierce Brosnan Ones

So this is a post that is kind of due the political (warning) blog, Ace of Spades, which did a post on The Man From UNCLE - the recent box office flop starring the Great Lost James Bond Henry Cavill. By the way, it's a great movie and you should see it, but that's not why we're here. In discussing the film, Ace said the following:

Napoleon Solo, on the other hand, is essentially inhuman in his absolute detachment from the world. If you read the reviews for the early Bond novels and films, critics were scandalized at how amoral and nihilistic and sadistic James Bond was. That's largely what made the movies popular, of course: It just felt more adult and "real" that a professional killer would be emotionally cold and unburdened by the weight of conscience. 

Over the years, they've lost that aspect of Bond, though they try sometimes to reclaim it. Sure, Bond says "The bitch is dead" at the end of Casino Royale, but we also had this embarrassing exchange in Goldeneye: 

GIRL: So there you are in your armor again.
BOND: It's what keeps me alive.
GIRL: It's what keeps you alone. 

In fact, they returned to this armor metaphor in Casino Royale, having Bond tell Vesper that all his armor was now gone, and that he was absolutely naked to her and ready to fall in love. 

Well, that didn't last long. 

But anyway, while James Bond is often said to be amoral, the movies actually do spend a lot of time trying to "humanize" him. I suppose they have to. Hell, it's been 22 movies; you can't spend all that time with a total sociopath.

Hrm.  Not entirely sure that even the Connery Dr. No Bond, thumping that extra bullet into an already-dying Professor Dent, was ever quite as much an heroic sociopath as Napoleon Solo was presented in UNCLE, but anyway. That got me thinking about my usual James Bond formulation, how Connery, Moore, and Brosnan all play Boring Invincible Superagent 007 and Lazenby, Dalton, and Craig play Actual Human Being James Bond, and actually what a total crock that theory is.

Because even in the Lazenby and Dalton films, Bond's humanity was presented as a weakness: in OHMSS, Bond is captured because he spends more time chasing tail than he does trying to figure out what Blofeld's up to. And then he falls in love For Realz and takes his eye off the ball and that causes him no end of emotional grief - or would have, if Lazenby and/or his agent hadn't been so short-sighted. The entire final act of The Living Daylights only happens because Bond gets too close to the girl he's supposed to be, ahem, pumping for information. And of course Licence to Kill is a case study in just how bad revenge and obsession can be, as Bond bolloxes up the plans of not one but two allied foreign intelligence services.

But since then, we've had eight films in a row where we've tortured Bond's psyche for the audience's entertainment, starting with making his friend and comrade the villain in GoldenEye and ending with making his friend and adopted brother the villain in Spectre. Bond's Feelz have suddenly become sources of Drama, not Weaknesses That Must Be Suppressed.

Anyway, back to the title of this post:

GoldenEye and Skyfall: the villain, a blond ex-MI6 agent, was betrayed by Britain in the past and wants revenge, which he shall achieve via The Power Of Hacking. Bond's relevance in the modern world is questioned at length, the answer ultimately being "yes, because $."

Tomorrow Never Dies and Quantum of Solace: Bond in mourning. Bond Out For Revenge. The most "pure" action film of the lot. Bond Girl murdered and left on a hotel bed. Villain is physically weak but politically well-connected. The only one of the era that withstands repeated viewings, sadly overlooked in favor of its flashier siblings.

The World is Not Enough and Casino Royale: references to OHMSS. Bond develops Genuine Feelings for the girl with the most screen time, but she turns out to be evil and ends up dying.

Die Another Day and Spectre: Retro nostalgia tour. Over-the-top villainy. Bond brutally tortured, shrugs it off, demonstrates heretofore unmentioned ability to stop and restart his heart/ignore severe brain damage. Gets in a car chase where his Aston's special features malfunction.

Spectre

A hot mess.

Spoilers below.

Le James Bond

I have finished re-watching every James Bond film (the EON ones, I mean, so not Casino Royale 1967 or Never Say Never Again), and the verdict is...

So what the hell is going on with Daniel Craig?

There's this story running around about him saying some really, really stupid things. I guess he was strung out from what was an exhausting shoot, but f*ck's sake man you're an actor, you're the face of the brand - The Brand, the hugely-grossing, fifty-years-and-counting franchise that has basically become to action movies what Doctor Who is to science-fiction television, namely That Thing That Defined It In The Sixties And Then Refused To Die. (Oh, there are so many parallels between Bond and Who - they started within a year of each other, both franchises did Things They'd Never Done Before in 1969, their longest-runner started in the early-to-mid-70s and did seven films/seasons, 1987-9 saw a darker and edgier take on the character and the "death" of the franchise, followed by a wrongheaded dead-ended revival in the mid-90s and then a proper quasi-reboot circa 2005 with that short-haired amusingly-eared actor from Our Friends in the North.)

Anyway... Daniel Craig had some extremely unflattering things to say about the role that made him a household name. And these comments frankly veer straight into the realm of utterly unprofessional. I'm shocked, actually.

Of course this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened.

The various stages of the various stages of Bond Films

Right! So:

Connery: "Working out what the franchise is going to be and then blowing it up to one billion."
Lazenby: "Making a proper movie but bungling the transition."
Moore: "Nailing the transition but bungling proper movies."
Dalton: "Grr."
Brosnan: "Extremely idiotic villain plots."
Craig: "Giving Our Hero yet another psychological scar."

Alternatively:

1962-1967: "Setting up the formula and pushing it as far as it can go."
1969-1974: "Getting burned, falling back on proven routines, and going inane."
1977-1979: "Spectacle."
1981-1989: "Increasingly cheap-looking decline that not even a recast can save."
1995-2002: "JAMES BOND, isn't that enough?"
2006-present: "Not Yo Momma's Bond Film."

Alternatively alternatively:

Before watching it: "It's getting overhyped."
While watching it: "They ripped that part off from Thunderball and that part off from Live and Let Die and that part off from TWINE, where it was ripped off from OHMSS..."
After watching it: "Well, it wasn't terrible."

March 11th would have been Peter Hunt's 90th birthday if he was still alive. As you might know, I'm a wee bit of a fan both of his editing style and his masterpiece. I'll mark the occasion, probably by live-tweeting the film. Details eventually.

No, James Bond is not a sodding Time Lord

Every few months I end up doing a post like this.

So there's this (old) post on Tor about how Bond evidently must be a Time Lord because the car from Skyfall is the one from Goldfinger.

Sigh.

Who's gonna be the next James Bond?

There was a big to-do a few weeks back because a certain Big-Name Right-Winger said Idris Elba can't be the next James Bond cuz he's black, and Fleming wrote Bond as white.

Fun story: Fleming pitched a fit when some brute Scotsman was cast as a character he'd imagined as David Niven or Hoagy Carmichael.

Then Fleming turned around and made Book!Bond half-Scottish because the films were Just That Good.