Dr. No (1962). Credits. Or the foreign agent and Dr. Yes. While it makes for an interesting reference to Ian Fleming's Jamaican estate, "Goldeneye," as the inspiration for all the exotic locations to come (Fleming wrote the novels there, and this movie and Live and Let Die were filmed near there), for the series the Broccoli-Saltzman team (and its successors) missed a setup-payoff scheme. That would be in the way the Dr. No character presumes Bond's ethos by track record in order to cater to him. He wants to conquer Bond by potlatch and appeals to his, what is supposed to be already, famous appreciation of fringe benefits. Perhaps familiarity with Fleming's novels was assumed, so much by the producers themselves they didn't even think about it. Perhaps they were thinking in terms of Dr. No introducing SPECTRE, but it makes it funny, too, that Bond says, at the beginning of what will be the most dragged-out franchise of all, "World domination. That same old dream." At any rate, in the movie line Bond's first infiltration of a villain superlair is by invitation, and the courtesy wouldn't have the same implication if you didn't know of other Bond captivity, not to mention predilection. Regardless of the willingness of the host, this device of having Bond be a kind of infection, an isolated cell in an organism of whatever preposterously fabricated dimension, is the main formula for the series, and gives this, subcutaneous if not subtextual, sense to "foreign agent" throughout. Bond's allegiance to the state must be stated all too flatly by means of this offer, that is, in contrast to all his other desires. Even at that, Bond is all too flat-footed in some of his statements of Cold War-era moral simplification. "Unfortunately I overestimated you, you are just a stupid police man," says Dr. No, who would be more appropriately named Dr. Yes, with Bond the rote "no" of the superego when pressed into service. We certainly get the id. Though she's not the first Bond woman chronologically -- Eunice Grayson gets that distinction, cueing the definitive Bond introduction -- Ursula Andress is the first by other estimation, her grand entrance from out of the ocean more iconic than Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. The dragon machine that kills a terrified, superstitious local also gives an offhand creepy effect that none of the grandiose diabolical setpieces can. And some of the superbunker designs, here, have an expressionist suggestiveness quite against the grain of movie ostentation to come. [2/27/10]
From Russia with Love (1963). Credits. Things aren't quite what they seem. One Russian sounds awful German, another quite Italian. A Turkish ally is using a pretty strong Mexican accent, and some gypsies are posing as a family of acrobats with Klezmer music. We see how Bond gets hold of a decoding machine, but not how Eastern Europeans got hold of technology to change a Dodge truck into a Chevy. And just why would any self-respecting Brit secret service agent give a damn about French wine rules? Who's betraying authenticity, there? Despite all these things -- because of them, in terms of camp -- this is the height of the Bond series, so it's downhill from the second, into the sort of ridiculous sci-fi kitsch that would pan out during the Roger Moore tenure. This is the most straightforward spy business, in comic book terms, and with a more modest, adventure yarn kind of camp. The fight sequence on the train between Connery and Shaw is hands down the best of the entire series. None of the hyperbolic action from then on, exponentially so by the time it's choreography on giant cranes, can match it. Daniela Bianchi, the Italianate Russian, shows some flashes of candor rare for Bond girls, and Lotte Lenya is extra fun, notwithstanding her Brechtian background for the fall into Western commodification. There's even a remarkable allusion to Anita Ekberg, and not by her most prominent parts. [3/6/10]
Goldfinger (1964). Credits. A variation of the agent pun, the infiltration of Dr. No, here Bond is a germ (though Gert Frobe as Goldfinger is the German). A sperm even, perhaps, since its via Pussy ("Pooshy" in Connerese) Galore that he takes down the whole enterprise. It's made even more drastic here, as his nullification is kept up to the last, well, 007 seconds: and that number on the timer is blaring it in a whole other way. From the beginning (post-credit) he flubs up, gets a girl killed, and has to get an ultimatum from his boss. He resorts to cheap cheating, tit for tat though it is, in a golf game, gets another girl killed in a car chase he prolongs only enough to also lose the car, finneagle his way out of losing his own cajones, then is kept locked up inside the nefarious operation. He's our eyes and ears there, too, of course. When he gets out long enough to spy from beneath the Fort Knox miniature, the play of scale suggests this infection in another way. He can't match up to Oddjob in a fight (the way he could in the best fight scene, cf. From Russia with Love), but has to use some luck and wit, and he flounders over the ticking deadly device and another hand comes in time to rescue him. This leads to the revelation that the one thing he could do was conquer Galore, her heart through -- well, you know the crudities of the franchise, and if you didn't, there's her name. And this results in a really big rope-a-dope. Bond is given a clumsy epilogue to duke it out with Goldfinger and plummet again with Galore (where do the closing credit girls all go). [3/6/10]
Thunderball (1965). Credits. Let the corn begin. The most notable thing in this entry, when the smoke sheen clears, is the encounter between Bond and Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi). It's the exception that produces an outright statement of the rule. Notable also that Bond says "king and country," rather than queen. The joke I had made before was that Bond was loyal to only one woman: the queen. But in fact, Bond (Fleming or the screenwriters?) expresses the misogyny, or at least the obviation of women, all the more, if not the homosocial. Bond is using a stratagem, trying to provoke the woman with an attack on her pride, but she then returns the volley. All the strange leaps and circuitous logic: what not only Bond but many characters do that is proven unnecessary by something else. A kind of logic of diversion at work, if not merely a compulsion. Bond, as an oeuvre, as a principle or formula, by which versions are multiplied like the offspring of so many encounters, is little more than a fantasy of male conquest, a reversal of the gumshoe code, but in the form of dalliance. The inflationary aspect of the antagonists, their pulp grandeur, and this increases over the history of the franchise, is compensation for the fact that there is no real antagonism. It's all dressing, background, explosions or superbunkers nothing more than ritzy decor or exotic locales. The Bond films are like the musicals of the 30s and 40s that had plots like clotheslines, but rather than song and dance numbers, it's the women who are strung up. Already the substitution of other action for the act that must be elided -- and this Bond film calls attention particularly to what's skipped -- is codified. Conversely, it's also as if Bond's ineffectuality in other things must be emphasized in order to show by contrast the one way he does conquer. There's the toss-off way with which Bond dispatches fodder, and this increases in the series -- the killer quip progressively more brutal (the burning man here or Lana Wood tossed out the window later) -- after Goldfinger, but that one's emphasis of this contrast remains diversionary, circuitous and unnecessary. [3/13/10]
You Only Live Twice (1967). Credits. The first Bond to have a big cinematography, thanks to Freddie Young, of Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago fame, and it's the best cinematography of the series until, at least parts of, The Man with the Golden Gun. This is also where the Bond franchise really starts getting spacey, literally. The infatuation with technology has one of the biggest jokes, now, because of the scene with a giant typewriter style console and punch cards to operate a surveillance camera. Connery's first lines are a stiff belt, a martini of racism and sexism, shaken not stirred, and Japan is recommended as an exotic setting for the way it suits the sexism, but the attempt to make Connery/Bond up as Japanese is where the crudity of the ethnicism ends up snapping the joke back on him, intended or not. There's no way around that hunk of silly cheapness, even as camp. So much for "taste." Ian Fleming's agent of male fantasy was already a collision of taste between the spoils of men at the front and the morality of their home front. To some extent, Bond is a phenomenon because it is a frank expression of this male fantasy, despite all the subterfuge supposedly involved. Note the contrast between the pretense of covert operations and spectacle, Bond's cover always blown. It's a fantasy not because of the underlying code, but because of the way it sublimates every obstacle to that, an even infantile extent of wish fulfillment, if that's not redundant. Donald Pleasance as Blofeld shows the benefit of undertone instead of villainous bluster. [3/20/10]
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). Credits. The first Bond besides Connery, George Lazenby, lasted only one picture. It seems a great attempt was made to come up with something like Connery, but in such a remote, generic way, you wonder if they wanted him to fail. Lazenby's voice in particular is like a shrill attempt at the Connery cadence. And there's all this material more suitable for Connery's finish than for jokes about it with a new Bond: the Scottish stuff, a kilt no less, and end of the line for Bond, rummaging through mementos of the previous films. It's as if they couldn't do but to memorialize Connery. But not long into this movie, that swill aspect of the goings on makes you realize that it doesn't make that much difference who Bond is. The Bond films, even at their best, are a pageant, a kind of apperceptive hum of activity. In a way, it's like putting on -- perhaps in some primitive Bond version of a virtual reality helmet -- the mentality of the uncontemplative doings of an upper bourgeois leisure drone. Bond picks you up, takes you to fancy places, shows you around, dances some, gets down to action. But afterwards, for all that reputation, there's distinctly something lacking. [3/20/10]
Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Credits. Want to know how the 60s turned into the 70s? Want to know what resulted when 50s social-climbing swankiness gave it up for pop? You could do worse than the James Bond series for an index, and this one particularly for just that turn. Ian Fleming's avatar of male fantasy becomes the whore of a whole new enterprise of pandering. Space and high-brow fantasy, the U.K. for the U.S., the 70s turns it into slumming, even Lana Wood (despite her pedigree of 60s swank, sister Natalie) the Bond girl index of this, a sort of cheap pop pick-up. The focus on action, meaning strange detached stunt spectacle, starts here with the Vegas Mustang chase. It's not so much a transformation as a manifestation that the 70s slack allows, the cheapness underlying the whole Bond series. If Roger Moore was thus the Bond of the 70s, a sort of smarmy Ken Doll as poor substitute for the roguish charm Connery managed to give the 60s, Connery's return for one 70s stint is in the fabric all ready for Moore. The other index of this is Guy Hamilton. Although he directed Goldfinger, which doesn't quite prefigure such a level of cheese, he presides over it from this through The Man with the Golden Gun. [3/27/10]
Live and Let Die (1973). Credits. America and regalese. The consideration to turn Bond into an American (which is actually how he began, at least in filmed versions) after the departure of Connery shows how this had become a franchise driven by its largest market. To actually have transformed the character into an American, however, would have been a double fault. Middlebrow, English as the acceptable exotic and ancestral at once, air of empire and aristocracy the envy of capitalism, Bond was asymptotic. He would have lost his appeal precisely to Americans as their utterly domesticated projected exterior. (Cf. the naming of neophyte suburban subdivisions of this same period.) What the franchise-makers ended up with was Roger Moore, whose placid (when not flaccid) cheeky (if not tongue-in-cheek) rendition is the perfect service man for this appeasement. He is Bond as obliging tour guide, as butler gigolo. Just as Connery had prefigured this, despite all the rivalry in the minds of fans, so Moore's 70s Bond sets in motion the backgrounding of sex, even implied, in favor of other action, indexing the move to the "family values" that led into the 80s. For contrast by Moore himself, see the Brit TV series The Saint, with a more brutal edge than any Bond would have, though the Daniel Craig version is an attempt. This is stooping by bending the knee. Cf. also Paul McCartney and Wings, re-import and U.S. market lesson of the Beatles. The outright stooping, as into the pop gutter, is the bozo Southern sheriff (though this apparently inspired as much pandering in Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazard), if that wasn't really part and parcel of the blaxploitation aspect of the movie, particularly announced in the tone of the early New York scenes. This film was based on the second of Ian Fleming's novels to be published, while the first Bond film Dr. No, based on the fifth book of the series, had already involved Jamaica. Again, compare the 60s and the 70s for what and how this pop wagon carried. The boat chase was the next step from the previous movie in setpiece spectacle, the bit with cutting something in half repeated several times through the franchise.
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). Credits. The opening shots of the island, cinematography by Ted Moore, of A Man for All Seasons and From Russia with Love fame, don't portend what lies in store. This pretty face opens its mouth and it's another obnoxious American tourist. They actually brought back Sheriff Pepper, as if it wasn't pandering enough to have him in one movie. The funhouse bit, despite obvious movie predecessors like Lady of Shanghai, is making the Bond product overtly carnivalesque, reaching out for and embracing 70s populism in all its forms like nostalgic ice cream parlors and amusement parks. Bond is a roller coaster ride, no bones about it. This is not to say, however, it's particularly good at even that, or even very fun. In the funhouse scenes there's a -- perhaps inadvertent -- riff on Roger Moore as a mannequin, just a series of poses in suits. This goes well with Maud Adams, the most mannequin of Bond girls to this point. Even Britt Ekland is too clumsy here to inject some 60s bounce back into the girls. Christopher Lee meets with the same fate as all Bond villains, which is to be drowned in the Bond casual imperviousness. You can't dominate overtly the laissez-faire world. [4/10/10]
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Credits. Big swill. Lewis Gilbert offers more sophisticated shot and montage style to what is still cheese. You Only Live Twice is not so much a precedent for this, the sophisticated part, as Alfie. But along with deft evocation of space in location, and action in some cuts, there are scenes and sets that look as vaporous as the plot. Barbara Bach continued the development away from acting by the Bond girls. The Jaws character represents in name the level of pandering the Bond franchise has become, flagrantly chiming other, and now far bigger, hits. Despite the debt owed to Bond as avatar of action box office, he proved no match for a shark, just as he would for action cousins who harkened to older serials and more far out in space. Cf. the next installment. [4/10/10]
Moonraker (1979). Credits. This one is really a giant parade balloon. The bigger they try to make Bond, the more vaporous it gets. They rushed this one ahead in the series to ride the Star Wars wave, but it should not have invited comparison. While You Only Live Twice actually preceded 2001 in the form of fairly realistic, by the recent real standards, sedate portrayal of space travel, by the time we get to Moonraker's redo of that, too, it looks more like a disco floor show than even Battlestar Galactica. Jaws comes back, which cinches his being as bad a device as Sheriff Pepper, and here they even give him a girlfriend and have him turn to James's side! This and the space sci-fi stuff marks where the Bond series is reaching for the level of kitsch of the Godzilla series, but misses because it lacks that charm. It's at this point, too, that we can trace in the Bond series -- if it isn't precisely the index for this -- the way action, violence, explosions took over for sex as the preoccupation. Against the grain of all that, Michael Lonsdale takes up the mantle of Donald Pleasance for underplaying villains. [4/17/10]
For Your Eyes Only (1981). Credits. Just as director Guy Hamilton was the bridge in style despite the switch from Connery to Moore, Jon Glen clears the kitschy cobwebs off Bond as Roger Moore even before Timothy Dalton takes over. This is hands down the best entry in the series with Moore, and the most straightforward spy plot, absurd circus car chase notwithstanding. And while she was a model, Carole Bouquet is the least cheesecake Bond girl of all, making even that aspect more sophisticated. [4/17/10]
Octopussy (1983). Credits. By this point, could you say anything more about the James Bond phenomenon than this movie's title? After all the shaking and jiggling in cheap, trendy get-up the series had become, did it ever turn so many heads than with this title? Of course Fleming had already got it off in publication, but they went and put it out as a movie title, up in lights, on the marquis of the world, the big screen, for all the ads to blazon, announcers and reporters and reviewers to have to say. The entire film, then, is presided over by one dripping bad Bond crude joke. You can't call it innuendo, since the Bond cracks honk too much. It's where Fleming/Bond has always shown his navy background, the latrine humor that pokes through all the champagne veneer. So many of these remarks have been so unsubtle, such bad puns, that Bond has been more Beavis and Butthead. And the worse part of the offense is not the crudity, but the hamminess. Example at hand: apart from jumping on the last part of the word (Beavis and Butthead), what would this mean? What would it be? Apart from some freak show extent of lewdness, would it be like 8 1/2 with Fellini's oeuvre, referring to a tally of Bond's adventures in getting some? Oh, but it's really just a cute diminutive. Maud Adams is back, and despite the reasoning used in some background material -- there was a question of Moore's return, so they wanted to have someone recognizable -- there is no reason for it, for having her repeat as the main Bond girl. This film really gets into the kind of inane complexification of plot, with all the criss-crossing about who's an enemy, who's an ally, who's a bedfellow, that would become more prevalent in the series. [5/1/10]
A View to a Kill (1985). Credits. Did Duran Duran need to do another song besides "Girls on Film" for this? They used "California Girls" in it, for cryin' out loud. It's midway through the 80s, and the sagging Bond act plays for the crowd with a feeble new wave, Grace Jones being the other part of that act. After buttoning down, Bond breaks out for the most bedhopping since the early 60s, but Roger Moore is pushing 60. Tantalizin'. Still, the whole honking, wheezing thing is worth it just for Christopher Walken's delivery of the line: "I'm happiest -- in the saddle." In fact, it might be worth going through the entire Bond series, if that's how you have to find out about this line. And now you don't. [5/1/10]
Never Say Never Again (1983). Credits. A Bond film by any other name, or by any other title sequence or song or theme music, would be the same. And so Sean Connery returns to assure us that it's not because of him that things have become so bloated and empty at the center. With him, too, they can be so. In fact, this attempt at a non-pedigree Bond film -- the rights to Thunderball were the only ones Broccoli and Saltzman didn't get originally, which through other circuitous details led to it being the basis for this redo -- may be the most vaporous of them all, and that's saying something considering the trajectory of the fare. This means, also, that Connery manages to outbid Roger Moore in that respect, rather in the wrong direction. Kim Basinger squares up to Tanya Roberts (if slightly before the fact) as one of the most un-Bond Bond girls. Somehow that big corny sweet American doll thing manages to clang, despite all the other pandering crap the franchise has become. The presence of Max von Sydow, Klaus Maria Brandauer, even Irwin Kershner as director, who distinguished himself in what would in some ways become the more overpowering Star Wars franchise, does nothing to change the tenor of the shtick. Everything Bond touches turns to gold lamay. [5/2/10]
The Living Daylights (1987). Credits. A no-nonsense Bond is an oxymoron. Without nonsense, on at least two levels, there wouldn't be James Bond. This is as close as the series gets, since at least the less campy parts of From Russia with Love, thought notably director John Glen started with For Your Eyes Only, the most sedate of the Moore years. Timothy Dalton, who was considered for Bond when Connery left but declined because he was too young, is the right antidote to Moore, clearing the palate of the sugary quality. But Glen keeps pasting him in these bizarre shots where he's dazzled and fluffed up and glossed like a centerfold. Therein, too, is the Bond franchise's sensibility, like that of Playboy. Dalton's efficiency as an actor can seem like a distinct lack of presence when they try to make him that sort of centerpiece. He suits better the unintended effect of Bond as a cipher. Dalton actually resembles more what Fleming had in mind, which was someone looking like Hoagy Carmichael. He delivers the contrast, his virtue, in one instant: his delivery of the line, "He got the boot." This is the best quip execution in the entire series. Inadvertently well directed? The rush of it, the cut, the blending in with the action editing, and Dalton's ability to do so without any cheekiness (of either Connery or Moore variety), make him, unfortunately, too lean for this kind of spectacle. [5/9/10]
License to Kill (1989). Credits. If Dalton lacks presence, at least in the form of the preening of both his predecessor and successor, despite the possibilities that we do get flashes of for a more serious suggestion of ungraspable and unscrupulous killer, he's nonetheless as suitable, then, to Bond as it is to him. As demonstrated in this movie, with the attempt to personalize Bond in a way the series has never quite tried, in keeping with the attempt to de-fluff it somewhat, honor, sympathy, comradery come off awkwardly in this context the straighter -- perhaps just more -- they are played. Connery's roguish charm was making any of that as offhand as golfing. Cf., for comparison, the way the putting on marriage as spy cover drag in From Russia with Love was lighter, but more allegorical, suggestive even for relationships, as with Suspicion or Notorious. To put it inversely, the problem is not Dalton for Bond, but Bond for Dalton. Bond is the antithesis of everything about being a spy. Could you say "Look at me, I'm a spy" in any more ostentatious a way? Imagine two hours of stake-out, holed up in a flat somewhere on surveillance equipment, or staring through binoculars in the desert. And that would just be the movie cut of it. Imagine nine hours of it, or 12. Andy Warhol's version. Bond is an automated clothesline for a theme-park style adventure fantasy, for guns, stunts, explosions, women, exotic locations, all those things a relay in a juvenile projection of virility. If the movie became anything else, anything of actual pathos, drama, character, anything even good (considering so many installments), it wouldn't be -- Bond. Apart from the squeaky effects of that setup, then, the mechanics of this plot, Bond going rogue, offer some of the most interesting relief. But then there is an attempt to pull back in everything. The Wayne Newton bit, what would be a front to the drug ring as grandiose as some of the other supervillains themselves, manages to be only a couple of scenes, unnecessary, extraneous. The serious possibility of Bond himself as a menace must of course be undermined, sent off sideways. [5/14/10]
Goldeneye (1995). Credits. Trumping up the innuendo. Bond by the 90s -- after six years, the longest break in the series, a gap suggesting the stress over whether it should even go on -- wears badly but precisely by the irony of reaping what it sewed. It's like watching a grandparent try to look cool in the grandchildren's style that was as fawningly derived from the progenitors. Bond's progeny is now everywhere, well-inbred with Spielberg and Lucas in the line, predominate, overbearing. It's the supermenace, the giant, wealthy supervillain compound of Hollywood. All melodrama is now a protagonist with guns, layers of costume and set design sheenery, the brinkmanship of increasingly hyperbolic set stunts and explosions, the killer quip, the toss-off flair (however corny or stooping). Even the idea of a rival 00 agent gets squished into the balloon abstraction of supervillain, not to mention the inflation of more than one. Janus/Trevelyan is a suggestion of a much more interesting possibility, a duel of agents, Bond stalked by his own kind, the rival equal idea as old as Gilgamesh and even a cliche in contemporary fare. But there can be nothing personal in a Bond film. Nothing can get that close. The choice is made again for what outrageous height or extent to have even hand to hand, like a giant satellite dish, over subtleties or mundane complexities. The Goldfinger car gives the smack of pedigree, Bond pandering with Bond. Pierce Brosnan tips the scales back from the straighter Dalton towards the Roger Moore smarm. In this first effort, he may even outdo the smarm, with his ad model squinting all over. [5/22/10]
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Credits. They toned down Brosnan's squinting and pursing. They keep trumping up the -- hard to even call it innuendo or suggestion. Maybe sloppy naughty talk. It's so grasping and clamorous it's not even lurid. A world media mogul, Microsoft as much as CNN -- it's amazing that Bond outrageousness might come to be true, here even a bit prophetic, but at the same time the trajectory of any Bond missile must be impertinence. Isn't this also a gist of this, a sense of "agent," of agency? The cipher? This very emptiness, the glancing impetus -- action empty of pertinence -- the fantasy of inflated evil with no real menace. Bond tames, in a whole other way. Brosnan provides for Bond, at least if there has to be a 90s version, what George Clooney does for Batman: camp with a serious bearing. The comic aspect comes through his playing it straight. [5/22/10]
The World Is Not Enough (1999). Credits. The cleverest title of the series, coming after they'd run out of Fleming titles, but in the reflexive comment on the rules of this genre unto itself, trumping even those. This is used as the motto of the Bond family coat of arms in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Let's face it: his ham-handedness didn't provide much of a challenge, so it was hard to hold drippiness against the copies. But even inadvertently, this title expresses the interest, the impetus, of this phenomenon of imagination, even globetrotting as a flight from the mundane. Bond is worthy of a good ambivalent female, something of Fione Volpe lifted to the main. But the Patty Hearst complex machinations end up spending far too much set-up and gimmick and m.o. on Renard (Robert Carlyle), squandering most the whole bullet in the head bit that, characteristic of the juvenile seriousness of the fantasy, is an awfully thick slice of ham to be passed over for comic effect. Sophie Marceau continues the improvement in acting for the Bond girls, especially over the Moore era, but for all the kick-ass gains supposedly made by women in the post-Alien age, Marceau particularly represents how Bond girls in general are still less imposing than Luciana Paluzzi, or Karin Dor, or Honor Blackman. Once again, the camp aspect has much to do with this. Another chance at really interesting ambivalence is wasted with the convenient switching from one demonstrativity to another, culminating in a torture sequence (cf. Karin Dor's in You Only Live Twice) that's like Dudley Do-Right at Sotheby's. The submarine sequence offers a rare injection of uncoiffed intrigue, action or even spectacle, coping with the steep turn of the surroundings, that is, until the usual baloney where they're fighting over a plutonium rod. [5/29/10]
Die Another Day (2002). Credits. The most outrageous Bond of all, a whole 2000s exponent of hyperbole over Moonraker, turning Pierce Brosnan Bond into a kind of Star Trek, comicbook, digitized pasteboard superhero. Set in an Ice Capades fairy city, and with Halle Berry as a proto-Catwoman CIA agent, this involves outracing shockwaves and surfing on tidal waves, on surfboards made while plummeting off a colossal effects cliff, no less. By now the fads Bond is copying, not to mention the generations of derivation, are not worth keeping up with, scarcely worth knowing, so who knows just which one is being pinched with the diamond-studded face. But like dude sheer total stud awesomeness is inversely proportionate to plausibility, or let's just say explanation. (He must've had the same surgeons as Renard from the previous film.) This special effects inflation is an inverse proportion in toto: it reduces Bond to pure sheen. [5/29/10]
Casino Royale (2006). Credits. And so a cycle: cheeky Bond, blunt Bond. As Dalton followed Moore, so Daniel Craig follows Brosnan. But it's back to the problem of Living Daylights, raised higher. A Bond taken, or played, seriously seriously would not be Bond. If you play all the over-the-top stuff of this premise straight, what you get is the credulous, soppy intensity that, well, as it turns out, is the lastest fashion. Witness Batman. So Bond, ever the whore, follows trends again, if always late. Following that last installment, the cartoonish hyperbole of Die Another Day, it's easy to see how going back to basics might be as welcome a counterstroke as Craig to Brosnan. But a foot chase and fist fight on the scale of a car chase, with acrobatic jumping from one building level to another as in a recent commercial, and that carrying to the top of a giant construction crane, is only passing another kind of hyperbole for more "real," and replacing lots of sophisticated model-guy cheek-sucking looks with lots of broody, scowling knucklehead looks doesn't make it less overwrought. Trying to turn the serial adventure suspense of Goldfinger's laser castration threat scene into a vicarious torture ordeal, not to mention the scene where Bond treats himself for poison, also betrays what generations now thoroughly steeped in sensationalism think of as sophistication, let alone realism. The collapse of the building in Venice is just tech orgy stuff, making the hyperbolic meticulous, not to say tedious. [6/5/10]
Quantum of Solace (2008). Credits. There was an ad for the movie which was the long awaited return of Star Wars, The Phantom Menace, that showed the boy with the shadow of Vader. What it inadvertently portended was a different stroke, but this switch in the graphic style of the ads was all by itself a vastly more interesting, effective, economic expression of the idea than the movie itself, as a matter of style showing how everything else is a matter of that. The poster for this next Bond movie was remarkably similar to that poster. So too, the effect and in relation to the movie. As I said with License to Kill, a stake-out in a desert suggests the sort of actual business of an operative that Bond is antithetical to. Changing the focus, or even to deep focus graphic contrast, from posterish posing is tantalizing even for this war horse of action fluff. The promise, if inadvertent, of that ad doesn't so much disappoint with respect to the Bond series as by the terms of the previous movie. Bond was supposed to have been "rebooted" and Craig was supposed to be a new form of Bond himself. But this second movie, despite attempts to state the contrary, is even more a return to standard operating procedure, as formulaic as the second Star Wars trilogy was. They carry the story line of the last into this one, a twist for the Bond series cookie-cutter sitcom deployment, but only to make it more soap opera syrupy. Daniel Craig now has bearing the cross of an ill-fated love as a reason for his pouty look. That Bond hardly ever got a scrape was made almost explicit enough to be self-parody with Roger Moore. In the previous film and this one, Craig gets enough cuts to make up for the entire Bond series. And the destruction of his car in one chase scene here is a more compressed statement of this. Kind of like a joke. [6/5/10]
Skyfall (2012). Credits. Chicken Little indeed. This is Bond, fercrissakes. What's all this mopey shit? Interesting stylistic attempt, trying to make cutesy ponderous. It manages notably to be one of the most uninteresting Bonds. Compared to, for example, one of the worst of all, Die Another Day, it lacks even the kitschy -- well, not even that, more like sheeny -- cheek of that excess. It's the same syndrome that has struck Batman, a very drippy -- in a viscous way -- plodding, adolescent self-pity idea of "serious." There are ways in which all the same plot elements could've been worked into each other, but are not, the segments good for nothing but a posiness. Bond thus gains nothing from or does nothing with his pouty vacation stint, nothing is made of it -- the scorpion drinking game is such throwaway sensationalism, even for a Bond movie -- and the definitive moment for this, the microcosm, is his breaking into M's place again. The script explicilty makes this useless. What did he do this for, what was his plan, as M even gets to point out? Nothing, just Bond become ridiculous mopey reaction. [1/25/13]
SPECTRE (2015). Credits. Some movies are not so much written as mapped. Bond demonstrates this in a way. But everything interesting about Bond must be overcome in the flow. Throwaway metaphor, symbol or parable. Symbol and subtext are always there, loud and brash like the bad entendres, but this is as much because they're never really dealt with. That's why Bond is an agent, a cipher, and like a drug delivered with a syringe, all that will be washed in the swill of a sort of apperceptive accomplishment. Here all the possibilities of SPECTRE, even with the symbol of the octopus, are reduced way too much to one more villain who wants to torture Bond, and the whole thing drawn down more assuredly to the narcissistic tether, a trend that the Daniel Craig editions started. This bad selfie-style Bond goes along with the traditional inflation so that you get a tinsel psychologism as the flip side to the old fashioned wish fulfillment. Bond is the spectre, inflated like a balloon. [2/19/16]
No Time to Die (2021). See here.