When we do Kris Kringle with my larger work team of a couple dozen people, you get randomly assigned a person to give presents to, and weirdly, you never actually tell them it was you. I suppose if you're only giving one gift, that makes sense, but I prefer it to be like a handful of small gifts over the course of December, and then at the end you say "It was me!" Without that, it's this very odd sort of secretive affair, though I admit, it does prevent you from having to own up to your shitty gift if you missed the mark. And since we are scattered around the state, only all coming together a couple times a year, multiple gifts over a couple weeks isn't practical anyway.
To help prevent your giver from missing the mark, you are invited to give hints about things you would like. For a couple years now I have been suggesting that someone give me a copy of the latest book they've read, as it will allow me to branch out to things I might not have considered, but no one takes me up on that. Since they don't, this year I included chocolate as an option, and I may have mentioned I like puzzles -- or this person just knew it from having talked to me.
In any case, she got me all three things, in a true case of going above and beyond the $20 limit. I say "she" because I am quite certain I know who it was, based on her interests. The "book" she got me was a Star Wars comic book featuring Princess Leia, and I happen to know this person is into Star Wars. She gave me the actual copy, rather than buying me a copy, and since people don't seem to be able to interpret this suggestion correctly, I think I will stop making it next year.
For chocolate, she got me Cadbury Favourites, which come in a distinct purple box and contain miniature versions of their offerings. This alone was at least half of the $20 limit.
Then the puzzle was a James Bond puzzle, featuring posters from all 25 movies in existence at the end of Daniel Craig's tenure. It was quite well chosen, as I had just posted on Facebook about going to that James Bond Marathon at the Sun Theatre that I wrote about on this blog a couple times last year. So that limited the potential Kris Kringles to one of my Facebook friends, which narrowed it down to about eight people. The Star Wars fan is one of those eight.
(I actually didn't want to become friends with any work people on Facebook, and have had a policy of not doing so until I no longer work with the person. That way, I can say whatever outrageous things I want to say without feeling self-conscious. But once my boss sent me a friend request, and her boss sent me a friend request, the floodgates opened and I had to take pretty much anyone who asked. I say "pretty much" as there is still one woman I find objectionable whose request I have not accepted, but I never see her and have never actually met her in person, so I thought this might give her a hint without it being awkward.)
Okay that's a lot of preamble. I am ready to get to the point of this piece now.
My wife and I have been working on the Bond puzzle, one poster of which you see above, and the rest of which I will be providing in snippets across the rest of this piece. The posters go chronologically through the Bonds from the upper left hand corner to the lower right, proceeding more or less in the shape of a Z, and I recently realized that they get increasingly worse as you go trace that route.
Because we haven't quite finished the puzzle yet -- less than 100 of the thousand remaining -- the pictures are from the fold-out picture that comes with it that you use as a reference point. (Or at least, some people do. In a conversation about puzzles with my Kris Kringle, I learned that she and her family do not believe it is fair to check the picture, and you must form the puzzle from the pieces alone. That's insane.)
Let's start with the lovely upper left:
Ah the films of Sean Connery. How delightfully 60s they were. (They were all from that decade except for 1971's Diamonds Are Forever.) They aren't all kinetic, but that Goldfinger one sure is. It should be out of a Batman comic (also from the 1960s) and the word THWACK! should appear in giant letters. The first two on the left are fairly staid in terms of action, but just look at the warm and rich colors. Especially the last two capture the zany spirit of the movies, with Diamonds kind of functioning as the first of the sort of posters made famous in Star Wars movies, with the characters grouping around in poses. Anyway, it's glorious stuff.
As we move to the right and to my Bond, Roger Moore -- with a groovy diversion for one George Lazenby movie, half of whose slogans you can see in the previous shot -- there isn't much dropoff. We get to a lot more storytelling in the poster, as fully half the events of The Man With the Golden Gun are depicted in this poster, and The Spy Who Loved Me looks like something out of an art deco sci-fi movie. Even the simplest of these, For Your Eyes Only, has the clever through the legs shot (while getting in some more female flesh, which was a Bond calling card, and a Moore calling card in particular). The posters aren't afraid to have life and be cheeky, and interestingly, the one my wife called out specifically for positive reasons -- my favorite, Octopussy -- can't even be seen in this quadrant. (We'll get to it in the next.) She said instead of having all 25 movies, she'd rather just have a full puzzle of the Octopussy poster, for example.
As we look at Moore's last two posters, which are striking for different and opposite reasons -- one busy, one sparse -- we get a crucial line of demarcation here. Once we switch over to Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, the hand-drawn art is retired. Not immediately -- Dalton's first, The Living Daylights, seems to be drawn, and works in a similar way to how For Your Eyes Only worked. But from License to Kill onward, photographs of the actors become the norm, for the worse. At least we're still getting story, though. In each Brosnan movie -- Die Another Day is slightly off screen here -- you get not only Bond but his co-stars, plus some visual information that tells you what the movie is about, with plenty of vehicles still making appearances. They're still good.
They're not good anymore. This may be what we thought we wanted in 2006 when the series had probably its sharpest reboot to date, to bring it into more modern times. But fully four of these five posters have only a single person on them, Daniel Craig, and not a single one gives any clue what the movie is about. (Okay, I guess you could argue that he's gambling in Casino Royale, but that title is somewhat self-explanatory anyway.) These are cold, clinical, lifeless. Taken in combination, they sort of make Daniel Craig look like the world's biggest narcissist, when I doubt that actually describes him. Only in Quantum of Solace is any of the real estate ceded to another character/actor.
Unsurprisingly, this is the least fun quadrant of the puzzle to complete. My wife and I each get a little depressed when we try to work at it. Just a bunch of generic whites, blacks and golds. Ho hum.
You don't often think about the long history of movie advertising until you can see a single idea go through multiple transformations as it does here. And here it is obvious that somewhere along the way we lost the sense of fun. We lost the sense of things being larger than life. We lost the sense of someone creating a design that was as much an impressionistic interpretation of the movie as it was an accurate depiction of the contents of the package. And yet some of them were also that, much more than they are now.
And this, of course, is not specifically an issue with the Bond movies, but rather, a larger design trend. Remember when every new poster was blue and orange with some random ignited sparks somewhere in the frame, whether the movie featured sparks or not? That may have been the nadir of this sad loss of inventiveness.
We can only hope that the arrival of a new James Bond heralds a new way to imagine a Bond poster, perhaps one that harkens back to these joyous works of art from the 1960s and 1970s.
And that may happen. The posters that seem to resonate most with us nowadays are the intentional throwbacks, the ones that mimic the design, for example, of famed Star Wars poster artist Drew Struzan. Nothing makes us geek out more, for example, than to see the kids from Stranger Things oriented as they would be in a Star Wars sequel, with ephemera from the show surrounding them on all sides.
Let's hope the next Bond puzzle, released 15 years from now with the retirement of the next Bond, has a fifth quadrant -- if you will -- that makes us forget the mistakes of the fourth.
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