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.