The demise of movie advertising, all in one handy Bond puzzle

I had a very diligent Secret Santa last year -- or Kris Kringle, as they insist on calling it down here.

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. 

Ranking all 25 Bond films

As promised, my rankings of all 25 Eon Bond films. (I hate that you have to keep sticking in the qualifier "Eon" just because of two others that weren't part of this chronology, one that was intended as a parody.)

I've written enough Bond in the past two weeks to make your eyes bleed, so I will dispense with the preamble on this one.

I did, however, want to say that I didn't agonize too much over the exact order of these, going mostly by feel, and in some cases with a lack of recency that meant I was ranking them on an impression that was formed 40 years ago. I might at some point become more familiar with them and consider this exercise again, but more on that later.

For now, my rankings from 25 to 1, with 50 words or so of explanation about each.

25. The World is Not Enough (1999, Michael Apted) - The worst of any thing you might rank is probably hurt by the conditions in which you experienced it. But either I was having a really bad day when I saw this, or I did really think Denise Richards was that terrible.

24. Die Another Day (2002, Lee Tamahori) - Two Pierce Brosnan films as my worst -- really? Perhaps not, but I do remember hoping DAD would bring me back into the Bond fold after the disappointment of TWINE and being sorely disappointed in that hope. 

23. License to Kill (1989, John Glen) - There was a reason Timothy Dalton was shown the exit after only two Bond films, and License to Kill was it. All I really remember about this is Robert Davi and some sharks. Incidentally, this is only the seventh title that comes up when you search "License to Kill" on IMDB, which is crazy for a Bond movie and indicates how little people remember and/or think about this movie.

22. Quantum of Solace (2008, Marc Forster) - This is actually one of the most recent films I've seen in that I only got to it in 2015, just before seeing Spectre. But I don't remember much about it at all and feel like it was a pretty anonymous entry in the series, the one that temporarily gave them pause about whether to continue onward with new movies.

21. Moonraker (1979, Lewis Gilbert) - "James Bond in space" is the four-word phrase that will continue to hamper my memory of this movie even though it is probably just fine. This is where I first met Jaws, who did scare me quite a bit, but I feel like I ended up laughing at this movie -- even though it may have been the first Bond I ever saw. (There's a debate about whether it was this or For Your Eyes Only, or if I only saw both of those after I saw Octopussy.) 

20. A View to a Kill (1985, John Glen) - "Nope, they couldn't keep up the Octopussy magic" was mostly my reaction to Roger Moore's final Bond movie, though I do remember liking the Duran Duran song and finding Grace Jones a very interesting, confronting Bond girl. I think also the cultural conversation about how he was too old to play Bond (two years shy of his 60th birthday) had seeped into the brain of even the 11-year-old me. It was the first Bond I saw in the theater though. (A friend of mine on social media the other day suggested we saw Octopussy in the theater, but I don't think so.)

19. Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell) - There's an argument to be made that this belongs in the 20s since when I saw this, I actually disliked it. However, being in such a minority in that opinion, and the fact that I've always liked Daniel Craig in the role, tempers my feelings about Casino Royale and suggests I should probably watch it again sometime. I remember I was really annoyed by the ridiculous hands in the poker game they play in the movie. 

18. The Living Daylights (1987, John Glen) - I remember being pleasantly surprised by Dalton's first appearance as Bond, and the discussion at the time that they were trying to make Bond less of a lothario. So my only enduring memory of this movie is Dalton quaintly holding hands with Maryam d'Abo as they board the London Eye. 

17. Dr. No (1962, Terence Young) - I hate to not give more love to the original, but the fact remains that I was perplexed about the sedentary nature of the action of this movie. Clearly, in a first movie of anything you have no idea what it's going to be, but my interest in this movie was largely an academic interest in discovering where it all began. (I also still think Dr. No is a funny name for the first movie in a Bond series. Shouldn't the first movie have been called James Bond or something?) Incidentally this is my lowest ranked Sean Connery film. 

16. Spectre (2015, Sam Mendes) - When we all thought this was Craig's last Bond movie, I thought it was a decently satisfying way for him to go out, and met the high filmmaking standard that Mendes had brought to Skyfall. Bonus points for Christoph Waltz as Blofeld. 

15. Thunderball (1965, Terence Young) - This is one of the two movies I'd seen in the last decade before I got restarted with On Your Majesty's Secret Service two weeks ago, and even though I've seen both of them within the past three years, I have trouble remembering what happens in Thunderball and what happens in You Only Live Twice. I do remember that Thunderball was the silly one with an excessive number of boobs, and that it earns it #15. 

14. You Only Live Twice (1967, Lewis Gilbert) - I originally had this movie two spots higher, but considering what I just said about not remembering what happened in which movie, and that I gave both of these movies three stars on Letterboxd, I think I have to movie this one down to just before Thunderball -- though it probably could have also gone just after. 

13. For Your Eyes Only (1981, John Glen) - I don't remember a lot about this movie other than there's skiing in it. However, I do have some memory of it relative to how I felt about Moonraker, which was something along the lines of "This restores order after the fiasco known as 'James Bond in space.'" Incidentally, this was the movie they were supposed to make directly after The Spy Who Loved Me, except that the success of Star Wars prompted them to jump the queue with Moonraker.

12. The Spy Who Loved Me (1976, Lewis Gilbert) - And here we get to another pairing where the plots blend together -- even though I just saw these two movies last week. So I'm not going to use this space to argue for the merits of TSWLM over ... 

11. The Man With the Golden Gun (1974, Guy Hamilton) - ... this movie, which gets a higher ranking because I think Guy Hamilton brought something special to this franchise in terms of goofy humor, whereas if Gilbert was doing that also, it didn't land in quite the same way. (I'm inclined to think I'd view Gilbert's Moonraker differently if I saw it today, potentially making him the equal of Hamilton.) All I know is I had fun during both of these movies on Friday but I don't remember what happened in what movie. 

10. No Time to Die (2021, Cary Joji Fukunaga) - Okay so the top ten is when we start getting serious about really "good" Bond films. Perhaps because of the [unprecedented thing] that occurs in this movie, it holds a really distinctive place within the Bond chronology, and because it's Fukunaga, the filmmaking is also quite good. 

9. Skyfall (2012, Sam Mendes) - After I had not liked Casino Royale and not even seen Quantum of Solace, I was surprised to enjoy this as much as I did. The first time I remember a Bond film seeming "arty," but in all the right ways. Still a little shocked by the way Craig blows off the cold-blooded murder of his apparent love interest right in front of him, though.

8. Goldeneye (1995, Martin Campbell) - The debut of Brosnan felt like a breath of fresh air after the series had been petering out for an entire decade beforehand ... but his reign would require another reboot 11 years later. Goldeneye was one of two good films, the other of which we haven't gotten to yet.

7. From Russia With Love (1963, Terence Young) - Although the Bond series had not yet found its defining traits in only this, its second movie, I was pleasantly surprised by it being a confident step in that direction, after being generally unimpressed by Dr. No. In order to stay in sequence, I watched this the day before watching Goldfinger, which I needed to do for other reasons. The urgency of the viewing didn't make me like it any less. 

6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969, Peter R. Hunt) - The only film starring George Lazenby and the only film directed by Peter Hunt obviously made an impression on me when I saw it last month, though I think this might be a little inflated by recency bias, plus by being impressed with where the story goes in the last minute before the credits. 

5. Live and Let Die (1973, Guy Hamilton) - Possibly more recency bias at play here, but this movie is silly and funny and Yaphet Kotto gets blown up like a balloon at the end. What more do you need? 

4. Diamonds Are Forever (1971, Guy Hamilton) - I think I just really like Hamilton's films. Although this movie, which I watched the night before I went to the Bondathon, also loses some of its distinctiveness in my memory because I watched it in the same 24-hour period as three other Bond films, it primed me plenty for those three films and was a lot of fun.

3. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997, Roger Spotiswoode) - Well hello there Pierce Brosnan up in this rarefied air. This is one of three Bond films that I "love" where that affection has also stood the test of time, though I have to say, I can't fully remember why Brosnan's second time as Bond was such a win for me. I'll definitely have to put this ranking to the test at some point in the future.

2. Goldfinger (1964, Guy Hamilton) - And here's Hamilton again, meaning three of my top five were directed by him. This is, by most people's assessment, the "gold standard" of Bond films, the time when Connery and the screenwriters both started really having fun with the role, in terms of both colorful villains and Bond girls, particularly their names. Don't forget, this film features Pussy Galore, Auric Goldfinger and a henchman with a killer hat named Oddjob. 

1. Octopussy (1983, John Glen) - What else could it be? For most people, this was just a random late-period Moore film with a titillating name. (Yes, I just realized that both of my top two Bond films have a pussy in them.) For me, it was a beloved VHS tape that I watched about ten times between 1985 and when I graduated high school in 1991. However good it may or may not be, I cannot see past the role it had as cinematic comfort food for me in the 1980s, and so of course even when I watch it today (as I did most recently back in 2012), it still seems great. As I've mentioned several times while writing about Bond these past few weeks, it's the only Bond film I've seen more than once. 

I was curious to see how closely the list I made organically (with only one minor adjustment) matched the actual star ratings I've given these films on Letterboxd, and it's pretty close. Here you can see them in the reverse order with the star ratings listed afterward:

1. Octopussy - 4.5 stars
2. Goldfinger - 4 stars
3. Tomorrow Never Dies - 4 stars
4. Diamonds Are Forever - 4 stars
5. Live and Let Die - 4 stars
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service - 3.5 stars
7. From Russia With Love - 4 stars
8. Goldeneye - 4 stars
9. Skyfall - 3.5 stars
10. No Time to Die - 3.5 stars
11. The Man With the Golden Gun - 3.5 stars
12. The Spy Who Loved Me - 3.5 stars
13. For Your Eyes Only - 3 stars
14. You Only Live Twice - 3 stars
15. Thunderball - 3 stars
16. Spectre - 3 stars
17. Dr. No - 3 stars
18. The Living Daylights - 3 stars
19. Casino Royale - 2.5 stars
20. A View to a Kill - 3 stars
21. Moonraker - 3 stars
22. Quantum of Solace - 2 stars
23. License to Kill - 2.5 stars
24. Die Another Day - 2.5 stars
25. The World is Not Enough - 1.5 stars

Pretty close to descending order in star ratings, with a few exceptions thrown in -- but never by more than a half-star out of sequence. Only five of these got less than three stars from me, meaning thumbs down rather than thumbs up, and even two of the last three were no worse than 2.5-star movies. 

So I guess I do like Bond pretty well overall, and have had a fun time immersing myself in the character recently.

Fun enough to consider doing my own elongated Bondathon, rewatching all the films in order?

Yes definitely, but not today, and not likely as soon as next year. However, I do note that at least as of right now, it breaks up pretty well as two annual monthly projects, maybe worth starting as soon as 2025 -- and not necessarily in place of a regular monthly viewing series. Maybe I'll need to run it in addition to that as I don't really want to sacrifice two years of good monthly viewing series projects for this, especially since I've already got two years' worth of ideas backed up.

I say "as of right now" because it's unclear how soon we'll get a 26th Bond movie. However, Barbara Broccoli has said that it could start filming in 2024, meaning a potential release as soon as 2025. Then again, they have to cast someone first.

And since I'm all caught up now, that's probably the next time you'll hear about Jimmy Bond on this blog -- when they've told us who's slipping into the tuxedo next. 

You know I'll have opinions. 

Finishing James Bond where I began

It's hard to believe it took me 40 years to watch all the Roger Moore James Bond movies.

This was my James Bond, after all.

And after my 9:25 p.m. showing of The Spy Who Loved Me last night, I have now seen 24 James Bond movies exactly one time -- and one about ten times. (Will get to that in a moment.)

I can't recall whether I saw Moonraker (1979) or For Your Eyes Only (1981) first, but I'm inclined to say Moonraker just because that keeps the chronological order. Both would have been on cable at a friend's house.

I know the next was Octopussy, because we recorded that off cable ourselves and I continued to watch it regularly, maybe once a year, for the rest of the 1980s. If it came out in 1983 it would have been on cable in '84 or '85, which was when we had The Movie Channel and when I recorded a bunch of other seminal films released about two years earlier that I watched about as often as Octopussy.

A View to a Kill would have been the first Bond movie I saw in the theater, followed by most of the rest yet to come (with exceptions for each of the men who would play Bond, even Timothy Dalton -- I think I didn't see Licence to Kill until it was on video). And that was also the last for Roger Moore, my Bond.

In between when Pierce Brosnan left the role and Daniel Craig started it, I went back to the beginning and watched Dr. No on January 2, 2006, intending to belatedly begin my chronology forward until I'd seen all the films.

Almost 18 years later, that task is finally complete, thanks to the Sun Theatre in Yarraville.

I shouldn't really credit the Sun with helping me finish. I could have done that any old time, considering that just about every, if not every, Bond film is available for streaming on Stan. Any that aren't could be easily rented.

But the Sun's four-day Bondathon, which began Thursday afternoon with Dr. No and ends Sunday night with No Time to Die (incidentally, the only two Bond films with "No" in the title), gave me the excuse I needed to watch the final three I hadn't seen. And really, it was actually the final five, because I had to watch On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever just to get to the point in the chronology where the next film I hadn't seen (1973's Live and Let Die) would align with my first available time slot on Friday after work (5 p.m.).

I should also thank the Sun because the whole thing ended up being free.

Now, I'd fully intended to pay for these tickets. I watch a ton of movies at the Sun for free, because they accept my critics card and they are the closest theater to my house that does so (about a 15-minute drive). I thought this was my way of "giving back" -- to actually fork over money to them for once.

But when I first arrived and chatted up the ticket clerk about how the marathon had been going -- which I had planned to do from the start, in order to get more of a feel for the marathon on the whole -- I also broached the question about whether it made any sense for me to buy all three tickets I needed up front. Of course I fully intended to stay for The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me after Live and Let Die, but what if my wife called and one of my kids was sick or something? I didn't want to have already forked out an extra $40 for tickets I couldn't use. 

I could tell she was not a "company woman," as eager to roll her eyes at the whole thing as to hawk the product earnestly -- but that also meant she was looking out for me as the customer. Instead of trying to get my money up front, she said I could certainly buy them between sessions, although I had already calculated out that the window of time between the end of one movie and the beginning of the next would be very short, during which I might also need to use the toilet or buy another snack.

I had in fact decided to go ahead with all three -- if I had to leave for some reason, "giving back" to the Sun would take on a whole new meaning. But when she asked if I had any concessions, meaning something that would allow my tickets to be discounted, I did pull out my critics card, knowing that it usually means a couple bucks off even in a situation where the film would not be free, like this one.

Well, the woman said the movies weren't blocked out on her screen, meaning they were still eligible for free tickets, so she just printed three tickets and handed them to me. I actually tried to protest, double checking to be sure, but I wasn't going to argue with her about it.

Wow is the Sun awesome.

I wasn't sure how well the Bondathon might be going now seven movies into the event, but the woman assured me that "they've been here all day." I actually asked if anyone had come to all of them, but I realized she probably wouldn't have been there since 8 a.m. and so couldn't say for sure. 

But there were definitely some diehards there. While the others around me looked a bit more like geeks than aspiring international spies, there was an older man dressed in a tuxedo. Given the relative freshness of the tuxedo, he wouldn't have been there all day. 

One who had definitely been there all day was the programmer/owner of the Sun, not a man I know but he was the right age for it. I suspected this might be Bert Murphy, a name I know from these short films produced by the Sun about their community that play before features, which he directs. In any case, he was dressed a bit like the captain of the Titanic, and he was trying to make his staff wear similar hats. The woman taking my ticket as I went in -- who was the same woman who had sold me it, "sold" being used very loosely there -- removed her hat as soon as he turned his back.

The movies had gotten a little behind due to a small mishap earlier in the day, he told me while we were chatting briefly in the lobby, which is why I could see there was still about ten minutes left in Diamonds Are Forever at the expected start time of Live and Let Die. (I could easily estimate how much time was remaining from the events on screen, given that I'd just watched the movie myself for the first time the night before.) With the tight schedule they'd programmed, which included about five but no more than ten minutes between screenings, there wasn't a good opportunity to catch up once you'd gotten off track. He tried to do so by starting LALD about a minute after DAF ended, but fortunately I was there and ready for that exchange of films. Anyone who had been there longer than that was probably accustomed to the idea that they might miss a minute or two of a film if they required a longer bathroom break between them. (Any time credits rolled on one of these films, the beeline for the exit was noticeable.)

It was when he was standing in the auditorium itself -- the biggest one the Sun has, by the way -- that I got my best idea of whether anyone might have been at all the films. Before LALD started, he asked those gathered if anyone had been seen Dr. No last night, a question he proffered allegedly to see if anyone agreed how great the print looked. (I would certainly agree, all the movies looked great and it was really fun to see them on the big screen.) Informally, I suspect he was trying to do his own calculations about whether anyone else had been crazy enough to be there from the start.

I hadn't intended to get one of the passports they were giving out to people who were going to at least three movies. That was probably another thing the eyeball-rolling woman didn't care about foisting on me when I got my tickets, and since I got them for free I didn't dare ask. But in a conversation with the man I will say was Bert Murphy in the lobby, in which I told them these were the final three movies I needed to see to finish the Eon productions, he told me "Oh well you've gotta have a passport!" And quickly fetched me one.

The image you see above is what a typical page in the passport looks like. There's one for each movie and as you are going in -- or between movies if you're staying longer -- you go back and get a new page stamped. I did indeed get all three of mine stamped. Oh, here's what the cover looks like:

It may be obvious that the content of these three movies, watched in immediate succession and with the same Bond in each film, tended to bleed into one another. And since I've already used up most of my allotment of your attention span on details about the experience, I won't go on at length about each film. But I do think I should make a quick comment about each, especially since I can accompany that with a quick comment about what I ate during each.

To get that established up front, I'll tell you that I went in with two cans of Pepsi Max, a foot-long BMT from Subway, a bag of miniature Reese's peanut butter cups (even smaller than the individually wrapped ones), and a bag of gummy worms. These were all tucked away safely in my backpack. Don't worry, I did also buy some things from the Sun, as you will see. But unfortunately, going in with so much on hand meant that I didn't apportion them out the way I would have liked.

1) Live and Let Die - This was my favorite of the three, though it's impossible to say whether that's because the movie was the best or because my conditions for experiencing it were the best. It was the first so I hadn't yet started to get tired from more than six hours of James Bond movies. This is as close to a blaxploitation film as James Bond ever got, as Yaphet Kotto is the villain and the whole thing has the flavor of the occult to go with its Caribbean island setting for part of the film (in a fictitious island nation called San Monique). Jane Seymour plays a tarot card reader in one of her earliest films, and she's astonishingly good looking. There were some good set pieces here too, but I am having a little trouble remembering them. Oh yeah, there's a great speedboat chase that takes place partially on land.

What I ate: Well this was a rough start in terms of my food resources. I bought a small popcorn going in, both because I wanted to give the Sun some of my concession money and because I wanted to push the eating of my sandwich to the second movie, which more closely aligned with my normal dinner time. But then I ate the first half of the sandwich, thinking that would be it. And then I ate the second half of the sandwich. And then I ate the Reese's peanut butter cups. What are you going to do.

2) The Man With the Golden Gun - Now this was one I knew a little about because a friend's brother -- the same friend at whose house I had watched Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only -- used to talk about Scaramanga, its villain, played by Christopher Lee. As soon as I saw him shirtless I remembered that his thing was that he had an extra nipple. When my friend's brother used to talk about him I think he thought he was drawing on a mutual experience, and I'm sure the two brothers had seen this movie, but I hadn't. The other notable things about the movie are the villain's henchman, played by the erstwhile Tatoo (Herve Villechaize), and the two Bond girls, one international beauty Britt Ekland and the other Maud Adams, who was also a Bond girl (playing a different character) in Octopussy. In terms of the actual plot, I remember less about what happens in this one. Middle child syndrome I think.

What I ate: You'll notice I at least held off on my two Pepsi Maxes in the first film. I drank one of them here. I also ate the gummy worms.

3) The Spy Who Loved Me - I'd heard the named Barbara Bach and she is the Bond girl this time. By the way, all the Bond girls I've mentioned are still alive, I'm glad to see. (Bach is married to Ringo Starr.) Bach plays the titular spy, which I guess means Bond is the titular "me," though since they are both spies and since they both "love" (i.e. sleep with) the other, the perspective is not entirely clear. Here the villain is Curd Jurgens, who I was sure was the "diplomatic immunity" guy from Lethal Weapon 2, but it turns out Jurgens was already dead by then and that is actually Joss Ackland. Anyway, they look a lot alike. If it sounds like I'm not getting to the plot it's because I don't remember this one either. Oh yeah, it was about a device that can track nuclear submarines. And I almost forgot! This is the first appearance of Richard Kiel's Jaws, who would return in Moonraker.

What I ate: I came in a little late to the start of this movie -- just a minute or so -- in part because I needed a little fresh air, and in part because I wanted to buy something else at the snack bar. Was I hungry enough for another thing? Probably not. Was I concerned about needing a jolt of sugar to keep me awake for the whole movie? Yes I was, especially because a Pepsi Max does not contain any sugar. So I bought a bag of peanut M&M's, and finished it without any trouble I am somewhat ashamed to report. I also drank the second and final Pepsi Max. And failed to save them for when I really needed them, the last minutes of the last movie.

And even though I didn't have any more tickets, I did for a moment think about staying for Moonraker at 11:25. I was in a groove in some "movie marathon or die" sense if not in an actual "I can stay awake for one more movie" sense. But I came here to finish exactly the movies I hadn't seen, and staying for Moonraker would have destroyed the perfection of that mission. To say nothing of requiring me to buy yet one more food item and possibly a drink, after which I would probably throw up.

Four takeaways about the experience on the whole:

1) The most fun thing about watching these movies with a crowd was to hear everyone produce gales of laughter whenever Moore dropped a particularly silly one-liner. I think the best was when he's just finished passing himself as Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun, a feat he is able to accomplish by affixing a fake third nipple to his chest -- that being the only thing most people know about the man's appearance. Upon reporting back to, I think it was, the Bond girl Ekland, he quips "I think they found me titillating." Even when you see a movie with an appreciative crowd nowadays, you don't usually hear everyone howling at lines like this one, because baked into it is the idea that it's silly and dumb and exactly what we would hope for from a James Bond movie made nearly a half-century ago. And the great thing was that this happened at least three times, maybe closer to five, in every movie.

2) The other thing that got us laughing, though, was the hick cop played by Clifton James, described on Wikipedia as "an uncouth Louisiana sheriff." I recognized James from his similar role in Superman II, a role he almost certainly received as a nod to these Bond films. He's introduced in LALD and pops up again in TMWTGG, and he is turned up to 11 in his southern hick mannerisms, to hilarious effect. It's so off tone for a Bond film but it just reminds us how much fun these movies could be when they wanted to be, especially the ones directed by Guy Hamilton. (Which include Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.) 

3) I was curious to see to what extent Blofeld, who does not die at the end of Diamonds Are Forever, remained as a villain for Moore's version of Bond. The answer is: not at all. They weren't necessarily making a totally clean break between George Lazenby and Sean Connery in the previous two films, as Blofeld appears in both, but he doesn't show up here. That said, in The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bach's Russian spy is giving Bond a little biographical run down on himself to prove she has done her homework, she says "Married once, wife killed --" before Bond cuts her off in no uncertain terms. So after two movies of making no overt or covert reference to anything related to the ending of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, we do get one quick mention here, keeping alive some small amount of continuity between the films. (And in terms of continuity, I believe we've gotten Bernard Lee as M, Desmond Llewellyn as Q and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny in each of the five films I've watched in the past ten days.)

4) The songs! Hearing Paul McCartney and Wings sing "Live and Let Die" (and have its melody repeated throughout in orchestral form) and Carly Simon sing "Nobody Does It Better" (and have its melody repeated throughout in orchestral form) were both very nice. I didn't know the song from The Man With the Golden Gun but I can sort of remember it emerging from my six-hour James Bond blur. 

To end this long post where I started it off, it was indeed strange that it took me so long to see 3/7ths of the movies made by the guy who was the only James Bond I had ever seen on film until Timothy Dalton took on the role. 

But it occurred to me that these three movies were kind of like a Bond prequel trilogy for me, a primer on the man I'd watched so many times in Octopussy and once each in three other films. Except instead of as is the case with most prequel trilogies, I actually did want to find out where Roger Moore's James Bond had started out, how he had gotten to the place he was when I first met him -- even though these movies mostly have nothing to do with one another and generally make little of the character's past. 

And these three films in particular operated very much along the lines of prequel trilogy logic, especially as Jaws is introduced in the third one. The appearance of Jaws, the man who can tear metal (and kill people) with his bite, was the thing that gave me the greatest sense of finishing where I started off. I remember when I saw Moonraker way back in what was probably 1982, I was a bit terrified of this man, who occupies a bit of the same space in my mind as Non in Superman II (speaking of Superman II). Now I finally got to see how it all began.

This is a lot of talk for a guy who doesn't actually consider himself a huge Bond fan. Remember that Octopussy is the only Bond movie I've seen more than once. Don't worry, I'm almost done.

I do, however, want to finish this off with something that now seems obvious: a ranking of all 25 Bond films. So maybe after a breather of a few days to let the last five films settle into place, I'll wrap up this whole thing mid-week next week. 

Oh, and if you are reading this and are in the Melbourne area, my beloved Octopussy is just about to start as I publish this. While you'll be too late to jump in your car to go see Octopussy, there's still time to get in Moore's last movie (A View to a Kill) and watch all of Dalton, Brosnan and Craig.

One of our last bastions of such great customer service and such delightful programming spirit, The Sun most definitely deserves your money, even if they didn't get much of mine. 

Diamonds are for now, the rest of Bond for later

The Sun's Bondathon is in progress!

They started yesterday afternoon with Dr. No and squeezed in From Russia With Love and Goldfinger before the night was through. About 25 minutes from now as I am typing this, they will resume with Thunderball at 8 a.m. Friday and go from there.

I needn't get on board until 5 o'clock, when Roger Moore makes his Bond debut in Live and Let Die. I'll stay for The Man With the Golden Gun at 7:05 and The Spy Who Loved Me at 9:15, and then I will have seen every Eon James Bond release. (I've also seen Never Say Never Again, a non-Eon release, but have not yet seen the Casino Royale starring Woody Allen. I'll surely want to see that someday, but the canon films are the ones we're talking about here.)

I got in the position I needed to be in thanks to an 11th hour viewing last night of Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery's one-movie return to the role after George Lazenby's one movie. (Representing the only time in history where there were three different Bonds in three consecutive movies.) If I'd tried to see that as part of the marathon as well, a) I think four movies in one day might have broken me, and b) I'd have had to leave work early for a 2:40 start.

I won't go into too much detail about Diamonds Are Forever since I plan to write more Bond tomorrow, and since I need to get ready for work. But I did want to get in a few quick comments:

1) When I discussed the dour ending of On Her Majesty's Secret Service last week, I wondered where they would pick up the next movie after the (SPOILER ALERT) death of Bond's wife in literally the last minute of the film. The options seemed to be to completely ignore it and start fresh with a "new" James Bond (a.k.a. the return of the old James Bond) or to follow on directly from that incident and make the next movie all about revenge.

At the very start it seemed they were doing the latter. In the cold open of Diamonds, Bond is roughing up various low-level criminals to ascertain the location of Blofeld, whose drive by shooting was responsible for the death of his new bride. In short order -- in terms of screen time if not geographical locations -- Bond locates and seems to almost immediately dispatch this arch nemesis, though more with his usual whimsical dismissiveness than with a murderous instinct driven by fury. It would appear that the whole Blofeld character is done and dusted by the opening credits, making a clean break to let Connery get back into his familiar tuxedo and not be encumbered by the story of a different Bond.

Then (SPOILER ALERT) Blofeld returns later in the narrative, meaning the clean break was maybe never what they intended. However, until that point, the narrative had nothing to do with him and Bond just seemed to be on to a brand new adventure involving a fortune in diamonds and a satellite that can shoot laser beams at the earth.

Throughout Blofeld's involvement in the film, though, no mention is made of Bond's dead wife or any specific beef Bond has against Blofeld other than him being his arch nemesis. And he's grinning out of the side of his mouth, making wisecracks and bedding new women with the same non-monogamous lust he's always had. So ultimately, more of a clean break than a direct continuation of the events in the life of Lazenby's character.

2) They in fact don't make any cheeky references to Connery returning to the role, the way they make a cheeky reference at the start of OHMSS about Lazenby starting to inhabit it. Perhaps that would be saved for the non-Eon Never Say Never Again. What's more, there's no sign of Connery returning to the role with a gun to his head or with his tail between his legs. He's just his normal James Bond out there, and damn good at it.

3) This movie has a pair of gay assassins! The movie does not make a lot out of their sexuality, but when they dispatch their first victim, they walk off holding hands. I actually had to go back because I saw it only out of the corner of my eye and wanted to confirm what I had just seen. There's only one more overt mention, when one tells the other that a particular woman is "attractive ... for a woman." I can't figure out exactly what is being said through these characters and whether I should be offended on their behalf 50 years later, but the performances are particularly fun and not because they are played in a campy way -- they are not at all. They're just sinister and good at dropping one-liners in the manner of all the best villains. 

4) The whole movie is similarly fun. In fact, this might immediately become as high as my second-rated Connery film behind Goldfinger. I'd have to think about it because I was indeed a fan of From Russia With Love. But this movie is sprightly and goofy in all the right ways, with good set pieces and approaching a modern level of secret contraptions and the like. A really swell time at the movies. 

I think there was one more thing I wanted to say but work calls. Especially since I will need to duck out about 15 minutes early in order to keep my date with Roger Moore. 

Bond is on

Not long after I wrote this post, in which I aired hopes of trying to finish off the Bond movies I hadn't seen at the Sun Theatre's four-day Bondathon, I realized that the three movies I would need to see -- the first three starring Roger Moore -- play on the same day of the week that I coach my son's basketball games.

Basically giving up hope, I still said "Well, maybe we'll have a bye that day."

Because we'd already had one bye this year and it was only four weeks ago, I considered the likelihood of that pretty low.

And then, it came to pass. I just found out a few days ago, since they only set the schedule about two games in advance.

So now instead of coaching his basketball game next Friday, December 1st, I will be seeing Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me -- conveniently starting at 5 p.m., after I've already finished work for the day.

The next movie in the sequence would be Moonraker, the first Bond movie I ever saw, so that would be a wrap on all 25 Eon movies.

I watched them chronologically, but in two separate chronologies. Until I saw Dr. No in 2006, I'd seen every Bond movie from Moonraker onward in the order it was released. I then also worked my way forward from Dr. No -- with seven-year breaks between Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and between Goldfinger and Thunderball -- while continuing to intersperse the new releases as they came out. (Actually, there was one other chronological break, as I didn't see the 2008 movie Quantum of Solace until 2015.)

Now, as soon as I realized my availability for this small part of the Bondathon, I also realized I had some work to do. In order to remain chronological but watch only those three Moore movies that did not conflict with my work schedule, I had to watch the only George Lazenby movie, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and the last Eon Sean Connery movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. Fortunately, all the Bond movies are streaming on the Australian service Stan, to which I am a subscriber.

On Thursday night I got to work.

While I don't think I'll ever be able to remember the difference between certain Bond movies -- I could only guess at which events happened in Thunderball and which happened in You Only Live Twice -- On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a number of things to distinguish it.

For one, it's the only Bond movie starring Australian George Lazenby, who is still alive at age 84. In fact, he's only five days older than my dad, who is also still alive.

Then there was an event that I knew happened in this movie, I just didn't know when. So now it's time for me to issue a SPOILER ALERT for this 54-year-old movie.

Have you averted your eyes?

I had always known that OHMSS was the movie where James Bond gets married ... and also where his wife is killed on their wedding day.

I didn't have any idea how this actually played out, dramatically. But I had assumed it was an inciting incident sort of thing. We meet Bond's fiancee at the start of the film and get to know her for about 15 minutes, enough to feel a little more than surface-level sorrow when a bullet takes her out in her bridal dress. The rest of the movie, vengeance for Bond.

In fact, the event happens so late in the narrative that I thought I'd gotten it wrong that it even happened in this movie.

During a climactic fight on bobsleds between Lazenby and Telly Savalas -- Savalas took over the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld from Donald Pleasance -- I thought there was no way for Lazenby and Diana Rigg to still end up at the altar in this movie. Not only is there an inherent comedic aspect to having a fight on bobsleds, but the Bond one-liners had been particularly groan-worthy. When Savalas finally exits the fight, it's by getting caught on a branch. "He's branched off," Lazenby quips, to no one in particular.

It was really hard to imagine transitioning from this silliness to Rigg's Tracy dying, but in the last five minutes of the movie, that's what happens.

After they've left the ceremony, Bond pulls the car over on a coastal road to remove some of the flowers from the outside of their car. They've been waxing poetic about how they now have "all the time in the world." Anyone who's ever seen a movie about a detective on his last case before retirement knows this is the kiss of death.

Indeed, Blofeld and his henchman drive by for a drive-by. Bond is missed but Tracy isn't so lucky.

The way Lazenby plays his last moments on screen as Bond really surprised me. You'd expect bottomless rage over the death of his new bride. Instead, he cradles her head in his lap and tells a passerby, who I guess doesn't know what's going on, "She's just having a little rest," weeping in a barely noticeable manner.

Roll credits.

Bold way to end a film. We get invested in Tracy for an entire film, rather than 15 minutes, and it remains to be seen what kind of revenge Bond will seek for her death.

And I have to wonder if how they do ultimately handle this was dictated the fact that Lazenby didn't return as Bond, which was his own choice.

Historically, to the extent that the character has any memory of the events in his own life at all, that memory has been limited to the time that a particular actor was playing James Bond. In fact, at the start of this film, there is a cheeky reference to this never happening to "the other guy." This was, after all, the first time James Bond had been played by anybody other than Connery.

With Connery resuming the role for one more movie in Diamonds Are Forever, I have to suspect the murder of his wife will not be the most recent event in the life of his James Bond. In fact, they might pretend if never happened at all, since referencing it might remind everyone that Connery's was taking up somebody else's sloppy seconds. Connery's ego wouldn't have that. They could possibly saddle Moore with the memory of these events in his first outing, but I guess I'll find out next Friday. 

As for Lazenby, it's a shame he didn't want to continue as I do think he did the role proud. He was only 30 when the movie came out so he could have had a standard number of Bond outings and not even approached middle age. But, he just wasn't interested, and you have to respect him for that.

A couple other takeaways:

1) This was the most interesting editing I had ever seen in a Bond movie. It was the first Bond movie for editor John Glen, who is better known to Bond fans as the director of five straight Bond movies, those being Moore's last three and Timothy Dalton's only two. He was also editor of the two Moore movies before the first he directed, so I'll have to note if there is similar editing in The Spy Who Loved Me. The fight scenes are fast paced and exciting because each shot lasts a half-second less than you would expect for it to look clean. The jagged results at first seem like they could be poor or dated technique, but I'm ultimately landing in the camp that it was an intentional way of underscoring their rough physicality. 

2) Before he finally picks up a machine gun at the end of the movie, the only other time Bond wields a gun is when he shoots the eye in the standard Bond opening. For the first 80 percent of this movie Lazenby engages in fisticuffs and knife-throwing only. I feel like I remember reading somewhere that this was something Lazenby wanted. 

3) This was the only time I'd seen Rigg in a movie at this age, becoming familiar with her through her role on Game of Thrones and remembering that her final role was in a film I did not like, Last Night in Soho. She was a looker.

Okay, will tick Diamonds Are Forever off the list one of the nights in the next week, preparing me for the Bondathon ... or, about 1/8th of the Bondathon, in any case.

Reason #462 I love the Sun

The Sun in Yarraville is randomly having a weekend where they show all 25 Bond movies, and there are no overlaps, so if you wanted to watch all 25, you could.

As far as I know, there is no reason they are doing this except that they can. It's one of the reasons I love them.

It's the last weekend of November/first weekend of December, Thursday to Sunday, and they have tiered price entries for various levels of engagement.

And it's obviously a labor of love. You have to get the rights to show the films. You have to get all the prints. (It's probably digital projection, but the Sun does still do some projections of film.) You have to have staff come open the place no later than 7:30 a.m. to accommodate the first 8 a.m. showtimes, when they ordinarily would not be in for two to three hours after that. You have to have some stay well past midnight, when their last shows ordinarily don't start past 9:30, because Moonraker and The World Is Not Enough (of all films) start at 11:30 on those Friday and Saturday nights. Because, of course, they're going in order, though I probably needn't even clarify that.

They're going to allow you to work on Thursday, but not Friday.

The festivities kick off at the reasonable time of 5:30 on Thursday, November 30th, with the one that started it all, 1962's Dr. No. From Russia With Love and Goldfinger also get knocked off the schedule that day.

Things start bright and early on the first day of December with Thunderball at 8 a.m., followed consecutively by You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, to wrap up Sean Connery and also get in the only George Lazenby movie. At 5 p.m. the transition is on to Roger Moore with Live and Let Die, followed by The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me and the aforementioned Moonraker.

Saturday the 2nd continues Moore's Bond reign with For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill. Timothy Dalton takes over for two at 2:40 with The Living Daylights and License to Kill, then it's Pierce Brosnan time starting at 7:20 with Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough. Three different Bonds in one day, for the second day in a row. 

Brosnan's final film, Die Another Day, kicks off Sunday morning at the same 8 a.m. start time, and then the baton is handed off a final time to Daniel Craig. You mightn't think that Craig would take all day, but then you'd be forgetting he made Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die, each of which was made in the era of bloat, when a Bond film rarely clocked in any shorter than two hours and 30 minutes. Still, the final film starts at a reasonable 8:05, to get everyone out and home for a decent night's sleep before starting work again.

How many people will go to all 25 films?

Not many. But if they want to, there is a ticket package for that.

For $377 you can go to all the films. Some people will buy this package, probably, even though the more reasonable ten-film package is likely to be more popular. That one's only $155. But it might be fun to say you bought the bigger package. The Sun probably could have given people a bigger price break on the big one. If you are going to go to 25 films over a four-day period, I reckon you should be able to do so for closer to $10 per film.

But wait there's more. 

There is a super extravagant $777 VIP pass, which includes a ticket to all the shows plus an item from the candy bar for each show. Now this is just wrong. Granted, if you are going to be in movies all day, you have to eat. But I don't know how great you'll feel after eight popcorns or bags of chocolate, even if it is the only thing you eat that day -- especially since that'll be your diet for two days in a row on Friday and Saturday.

I should tell you that if this weren't enough, there is what they are calling an "amuse bouche" the weekend before, when three unofficial Bond films will be shown. That's when the Casino Royale from 1967 and Never Say Never Again will be shown. How does that get me to three? There is also something called "Casino Royale TV," which maybe differs from the Casino Royale movie. But given that this plays at the same time as the other Casino Royale on that Sunday the 26th of November, I guess you can't watch both.

So the big ticket packages include those movies as well, which they are pitching as 28 movies total, though two of them play at the same time. If that's a beef you have, well, you're probably doing it wrong.

Again I come back to the idea that a) there is no reason to do this, b) there are very few people who will probably actually shell out for these tickets and c) there is no c, but you have to list three things. In an era in which the bottom line is considered on literally any venture undertaken that involves some level of financial risk, it's refreshing to see the passion burn this brightly in the Sun programmers, against all odds and with very little prospect of real remuneration for their efforts.

I have to participate in this somehow.

Now, this is of interest to me anyway because I have been working my way through the Bond movies, having started mid-way through the career of Roger Moore and seen every movie since then. Within the past 20 years, I finally saw Dr. No, and then began working my way forward in Connery's movies from there. It's been slow going as I haven't even gotten to Lazenby yet, which means there's still one more canon movie starring Connery after that.

If I were to pick up on Lazenby's movie, which is next up for me, it would mean needing to attend a showing at 12:20 in the afternoon on that Friday. I can't make that work with my work schedule.

However, I could do some homework in the next six weeks before then and finish off both Lazenby and Connery. Then I could rock up at 5 p.m. in time for the first-ever appearance of "my Bond," Roger Moore, in Live and Let Die.

This sounds like a plan.

Now, if I want to take it a step further, I could stay for the rest of the night to watch The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me, getting out of there before the wretched Moonraker -- which is the oldest Bond movie I had seen until I finally watched Dr. No. This would finish off all five of the remaining Bond films I haven't seen as of today. And hey, if I weren't already burned out from three straight Bond movies, I suppose I could stay, as that headspace might be the perfect to experience the ridiculousness of Bond going to outer space.

The one thing the Sun website doesn't say is whether I can buy a ticket to just a single movie. It's probably obvious that I can, but I suppose if I had to pay $155, then I should at least stay for the four that night.

And if I do manage to do this, the event will have been going on long enough that I'll be able to tell if anyone has been there for all seven of the movies that had played before I showed up -- or all nine if you include the previous weekend, or all ten if they managed to make a copy of themselves to watch both older versions of Casino Royale. It'll be the perfect environment to strike up that sort of conversation, since the others present will be eager to chat. 

And if there isn't anyone else at Live or Let Die, at least I can get an update/commiserate with the staff.

Part of me would enjoy dipping in and out for the rest of the weekend, but to be honest, Bond movies have little repeat viewing value for me. In fact, there's only one Bond movie I've seen more than once, which remains the one I had on VHS when I was young, Octopussy. I've probably watched that seven or eight times in total.

Though never on the big screen, so maybe I'll have to come back the next morning for at least that one.

If you happen to be an Australian, more specifically a Melburnian, reading this, you can find more information and buy tickets here. 

Resumption of my quest for James Bond completism

About 14 years ago, I watched Dr. No, the first James Bond film I had ever seen starring Sean Connery, if you don't include Never Say Never Again. Which I don't.

About seven years ago, I watched the next two in the span of 24 hours, getting in From Russia With Love so I could go sequentially and see Goldfinger, which I was watching as part of the series I was writing at the time called Flickchart Road Trip, where I watched a movie at least partially set in each U.S. state for 50 weeks in a row. (Goldfinger goes to Kentucky.)

It's another seven years later and I've finally moved on to the next.

You may recall in yesterday's post that I vowed to watch a pre-2000 movie on streaming, and you know what? It's hard. At least 80 percent of the movies available on streaming have been released in the past two decades, and the ones that haven't are classics that I've already seen multiple times.

Except not the James Bond movies. As the timeline above will tell you, there are plenty of Bond movies -- about three starring Sean Connery, about three starring Roger Moore, and the one starring George Lazenby -- that I hadn't seen yet. (There's also the one starring Woody Allen, if we're counting movies we don't count.)

And fortunately, my Australian streaming service Stan is carrying all of them.

As you can tell from the poster, Thunderball was next up for me, and I watched all 130 minutes of it -- at least half of which were underwater -- on Saturday night.

Although Goldfinger is definitely the movie where many of the James Bond tropes we still know first appeared, Thunderball seems like the movie where they became ripe for parody. And boy is this movie jam-packed full of James Bond silliness. Just a small overview of some of the things we see in this movie:

- James Bond uses a jet pack. For reasons that seem entirely superfluous to the scenario, he escapes some kind of compound with the help of a jet pack that, I guess, he had stashed in there. If you have the access to stash the jet pack in the first place, it certainly doesn't seem essential to your escape, now does it?

- James Bond punches out a woman. During that same opening scene with the jet pack. It's not actually a woman but a man dressed as a woman, though it does function quite symbolically in terms of the mild to heavy misogyny that characterized the franchise at the time.

- James Bond gets "stretched" on a device called "the rack," that is supposed to assist with rehabilitation from injury. This seems to clearly call back to the famous scene in Goldfinger where his manhood is threatened by a table saw. I was surprised that he doesn't actually figure his way out of it, but is saved by the returning nurse, whom he quickly beds.

- Spectre makes its first appearance. I believe, though it could have appeared in Goldfinger. You get the cat being petted and the room full of Spectre agents, one of whom is accused of embezzlement and summarily executed, his chair sinking into the floor and coming back empty. Classic fodder for an Austin Powers movie.

- You get a villain with an eye patch. Largo by name. Classic.

- James Bond is the target of an assassination attempt during a big parade/festival. The gun peaking from behind the curtain also seems classic Bond. Of course, he turns the duplicitous woman he's dancing with in the path of the gun shot, and she takes the shot to the back and dies instantly. In fact, numerous people are killed instantly from back wounds in this film, including, ultimately, Largo.

- In addition to the large meeting of Spectre agents, we get a large meeting of 00 agents. Not sure if we had seen that before either.

- Desmond Llewelyn appears as Q. Not for the first time, but he appears in a way that reminds me of all his subsequent appearances, completely rolling his eyes at everything Bond does.

- Doppelgangers. A villain gets cosmetic surgery to look like the NATO pilot with security clearance, so he can board and ultimately hijack a plane carrying nuclear weapons.

- The one-liners. Ugh! A typical example: Connery shoots an approaching villain with a spear gun, and says "I think he got the point."

- The shark tank. I almost forgot! Largo has a pool full of sharks he feeds with human beings who have crossed him, or merely let him down. Classic villain behavior.

Thunderball clearly has it all. However, the most ridiculous thing it has is literally 40 minutes of underwater footage.

Many a Bond movie might have a single underwater scene, but Thunderball really goes for it. It keeps returning, and returning, and returning to the underwater milieu, and I'll be damned if I could figure out what was supposed to be going on and what was at stake in half of those scenes.

But the most hilarious moment had to be the grand finale. You know well those scenes that have become ubiquitous in epic adventure movies, where the two armies run at each other on the battlefield and ultimately meet up for a ferocious clash where heads are bashed and blood flies.

Now imagine the same thing underwater.

That's right, there are no fewer than 200 scuba divers shooting each other with spear guns and engaging in hand to hand combat underwater as one group escorts a nuclear device and the other tries to stop them from doing so. (In an interesting failure to present an immediacy to the threat, the device is not about to be detonated, but is just being escorted in the finale.)

The scene goes on for so long, and includes so many people speared (how many spears does the average scuba diver carry?), that I spent most of the time laughing. The hand to hand combat was almost as funny, with combatants slashing each others' air hoses and removing each others' face masks. (This last was considered some kind of fatal move, almost like they were removing an astronaut's helmet rather than a diver's. I suppose it's disorienting not to have your mask underwater, but does it really limit your effectiveness as a combatant? When it happens to Bond himself, he just gets a mask from a floating corpse nearby. Never mind that if you put the mask on underwater your mask would be totally filled with water and would not function as intended anyway.)

Thunderball is so silly at some points -- including the crazy speed of the background in the climactic fight scene aboard a boat -- that I almost considered giving it less than the minimum three stars for a movie you would recommend to somebody else. But after judging that I had had a really good time watching it, I did give it those three stars.

One thing I didn't mention above is that this is also the movie where the Bond franchise just unapologetically goes for the T&A. I just quipped to someone that Thunderball features "enough beautiful babes to fill a Russ Meyer movie." Indeed that is true. The babes are buxom and frequently in bikinis, or baths, or Turkish baths. Hubba hubba.

I don't think it will be another seven years before I see You Only Live Twice, the next up for me, whose beginning I may actually have seen years ago. There's a Bond scene I remember where he appears to be shot in a folded up bed at the beginning, and I think that's this movie. I definitely didn't see the whole thing though.

Especially with the availability of all the movies on Stan, I think Thunderball has inspired me to keep making my way through the now six remaining Bond movies I haven't seen. It may be a tall, and unnecessary, order to see them all before No Time to Die finally does debut later this year, but neither would I be surprised if I ended up doing so.

James Bond has coronavirus

Apparently, James Bond doesn't think April is a very good time to die.

November would be much better.

As you've surely heard by now, the release of Daniel Craig's "last" James Bond movie (didn't we hear that two movies ago?) has been postponed due to COVID-19. No Time to Die was supposed to come out in April, but now Cary Fukunaga's film will debut in November instead.

Maybe that would have been a better time anyway -- more consistent with the last few Bond releases -- but the reasons for it make me uncomfortable. It threatens to set a bad precedent and to screw up our whole movie year.

What if every studio thinks it's not going to make enough money on its movie by releasing it during a coronavirus panic? It'll be a pretty shit summer movie season, then. (Even more shit than it already appears to be, I should say.)

I get that financial considerations must be, er, considered when you are talking about a movie that has cost the studio at least $200 million in terms of both budget and advertising. Whether those are the actual figures for No Time to Die or not, they represent a good estimate for movies of that calibre, probably even on the conservative side.

But I kind of feel like earnings are relative, right? A movie studio has a lot of money, so in this day and age, a flop will rarely bankrupt it. The most important function of a flop, in practical terms, seems to be to determine whether this type of a movie is a hit with audiences, worth making again in the future. The actual box office total should be graded on a curve, relative to other movies released at the same time, not held out as some kind of absolute.

Which would work if all the studios just went ahead with their current release schedule.

But that's not going to happen, because UA/Universal/MGM have already balked. They've already messed up the playing field.

Let's talk about No Time to Die in comparison to April's other big action movie, which so far has not been postponed: Black Widow. If both movies came out in April and made $50 million less domestically than we might have expected, we'd still have a good idea of their success related to each other. We'd still be able to write think pieces, for example, on whether we're stuck in our old-world obsessions with male action heroes, or whether we can get behind female action heroes just as easily.

Now, though, the whole equation has been thrown off. If Black Widow flops, we won't know if it's because of coronavirus, or because audiences don't like female action heroes, or just because Cate Shortland is a bad filmmaker (my vote is for the last one).

No Time to Die, though, could be exchanging the devil it knows for the devil it doesn't know. What if we are even more afraid of each others' germs in November than we are now?

I hope studios don't start cancelling the movie season. And it won't just be the tentpole movies that get moved, in theory. Every movie is judged by its own expected success, and a movie that needs to earn $10 million at the U.S. box office to be considered a winner may be just as concerned about recouping its production costs as the latest James Bond -- just as concerned about proving to investors they have invested their money correctly.

I don't know how it's all going to shake out, but I don't like it.

Meanwhile, people in Melbourne are buying up all the available toilet paper. Seriously.

You can't have it both ways, Daniel

News has come out that Daniel Craig is coming back for a fifth Bond movie.

This after his comments about returning can be summarized as "not on your life, you asshole."

It might not have been quite an example of biting the hand that feeds him, but it's pretty darn close. While I'm not looking up particular quotations right now, his perspective on the subject seemed to be that he would sooner play the little orphan in the next remake of Annie than play James Bond again. (Just looked up an actual quotation. He said he'd "rather slit his wrists.")

Well, he's playing James Bond again.

Money would obviously be a motivating factor, though it would seem that Craig has plenty of that. Not only has he made those four Bond movies, but he's made plenty of other movies during the same period, remaining quite active throughout.

Dwindling relevance? I suppose that could be a factor too. Craig turns 50 next March, so no time like the present for a midlife crisis.

I wouldn't ordinarily fault an actor type or other Hollywood type for taking another job after saying he or she definitely, absolutely was not going to. Athletes do it all the time. Are you retiring or aren't you? It's something we live with in every sphere of entertainment. How many bands have promised this is definitely, absolutely, positively their final tour?

But something about Craig's attitude has made him a bit of a different case. It's kind of seemed like Craig has felt that Bond was "holding him back" for some time now, and that even returning two movies ago for Skyfall involved a lot of arm twisting.

Few people have evinced as much desire to leave Bond behind them, saving perhaps only George Lazenby, who made good on his promise and walked away after one movie. Bond has clearly been a stepping stone for Craig -- he'd be a successful actor without the role, but not a household name. Yet he's been eager to push that stepping stone down to the bottom of the pond and never look back on it, or so it has appeared.

Yet with this fifth movie, he will be becoming the longest running Bond behind only Roger Moore and Sean Connery. He's currently tied with Pierce Brosnan's four, so this would be putting him ahead of the erstwhile Remington Steele.

Is that an important consideration for Craig? Probably not.

What is his most salient consideration? Hard to say. The articles don't say anything about it.

All I know is, next time he says he's done, he better be done.

And, it might be nice to display a bit of gratitude toward this franchise that has thrust him into such international prominence.

Personally, I'm a bit disappointed. Only one of Craig's films is one I'm reasonably fond of (Skyfall), and I definitely thought it was time for some new blood. And I definitely though that new blood could be of a different race or even gender. That would have been a Bond film I'd like to see.

Craig's next, and presumably final?

Not so much.

I finally saw: Quantum of Solace

Considering that I don't think of myself as a huge James Bond fan, I shouldn't be so surprised that I've never made time for Quantum of Solace.

However, you can't argue with facts: Solace had been the only James Bond movie I hadn't seen since 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me. (And it's funny -- even though I consider Roger Moore to be my James Bond, I've only seen four of the seven films he appeared in.)

I would have probably let Quantum of Solace sit on the scrap heap for a while longer except that a) Spectre comes out today in Australia, and b) we're planning to discuss Spectre -- and presumably, Daniel Craig's entire stint as James Bond -- on the next episode of the ReelGood podcast. (Well, the next episode after the one we record tonight, which will be about The Lobster.) Only b actually plays a role in my decision, as mere storyline continuity did not require I see Quantum before watching Skyfall three years ago.

In fact, storyline continuity may have been what turned me off from prioritizing Quantum of Solace in the first place. (That and hearing that it wasn't much good.) I wasn't a big fan of Casino Royale, particularly the ending, in which Bond is all weepy over this woman Vesper who just betrayed him. Given the way Bond has traditionally disposed of women -- most shockingly later on in Skyfall, where he is a disinterested party to the disposal of a woman, if not actually the cause of her disposal -- it struck me as unusual that he would get so bent out of shape over the death of one who actively betrayed him. (It was for a similar reason that the maudlin display of emotion over the death of the traitor Boromir initially did not sit well with me at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.)

Anyway, upon learning that Quantum of Solace was a continuation of the events of Casino Royale, and that it was not very good, it seemed like an easy one to skip.

It was interesting trying to watch it last night without having Casino Royale clear in my memory, because the movie does intimately rely on a knowledge of events and characters from that movie, without giving any kind of flashback to those events or containing any overt exposition in the dialogue. So in one respect, Solace worked even less well for me than it probably would have had I seen it when it came out.

In another respect, however, it probably worked better for me since I hadn't placed the weight of all my expectations on its shoulders. After Casino Royale, I really had no expectations -- no positive ones, anyway. So if I look at Quantum of Solace just as a series of kinetic action set pieces -- and the criticism is that this is all it is -- it sort of works for me on that level. While Marc Forster's handling of the action scenes is one of the things people didn't like about this movie, I found that a couple of them really got my adrenaline going, particularly that one in that half-finished building where Bond and his assailant are fighting each other while riding up and down on pulleys. The camera is moving in an alive and alert way, even if the end result is fairly banal in terms of the narrative.

And I guess the big problem is that I really couldn't follow the narrative, and not only because I didn't remember the function of certain characters or what they had done in Casino Royale. But maybe no one could really follow it because it jumps forwards in fits and starts, with a truly absurd number of locations, with fight scenes breaking out seemingly at random, and with Bond ending them in unusually cruel and usually fatal abruptness. Because right, this guy is mad after Vesper drowned.

What seems clear -- and what they kind of figured out with Skyfall -- is that even if Bond has a kind of overall brooding character arc that may be informed by the various things that have happened to him, each new installment needs to stand on its own, without strong connective tissue to the other movies -- especially when it doesn't care to remind us what happened in those other movies. And that not only that, but that Bond should stay jovial even when he's getting down in the muck and knocking heads.

It's a tricky balance, though. In Skyfall, he got so jovial that he cracked a joke after the villain callously blew away the girl he'd slept with the night before.

What I think of Spectre remains to be seen, but I think I'm ready to turn the page on Daniel Craig as Bond. Fortunately, he is too. Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were disappointments, and even though Skyfall was not, my lingering impression of it is its misogynistic treatment of a truly unfortunate Bond girl.

Maybe Spectre will send him out in style ... or just leave me rolling my eyes over another at least partially missed opportunity.

Sexy Bond in a dumb poster

While I can't deny that having the sexy Daniel Craig staring penetratingly out of this poster at me with those radiant blue eyes is fairly arresting, I don't really see the point of this poster.

It's a picture of James Bond against a plain background. In other words, it doesn't say a thing about the movie and why it might be worth seeing.

Unless you like Daniel Craig's pecs and that suggestive bulge in his pants, that is.

I've taken a look back to other recent Bond posters, especially the Craig Bond posters, and it's not like they're models of plot specificity. But most of them at least have Bond placed in some kind of setting. Here, it's just like, "Hey Daniel! Have a minute? Come stand against this gray wall and look sexy."

It's almost like he's pursing his lips out at us in that joking, I'm-blowing-you-a-kiss gesture. You know, kind of like a gay man does to a straight man when he's trying to make an ironic assault on his heterosexual assumptions about himself. Or like Mike Myers might do before pawing at the camera and saying "Do I make you horny, baby?"

I think I'm on to something there. Is this poster just, like, totally for the women? And the gay men, of course. The gun in his hand for the heterosexual men. The gun in his pants for the women and gay men.

Yep, that's a lot of demographics you're covering right there.

I suppose the sexualization of Bond has been in full swing throughout the entire Craig tenure. Whereas the sexiness was somewhat incidental to previous Bonds -- especially Roger Moore once he hit his sixties -- it was in full force from when we first saw him emerging from the ocean in those close-cropped swim trunks back in Casino Royale. If I had had been wearing a necktie when watching Casino Royale, I would have been adjusting it with the international gesture for "Is it getting hot in here?" during that scene.

Well, it's not the most pernicious form of advertising you'll see this month, or probably even this week. But it is one of the most blatant. This is basically barely above a cologne ad. Take away that gun and that shoulder strap and this could be Daniel Craig hawking Eternity for Men.

But will it be effective?

Oh, almost absolutely. Just wait until Spectre once again becomes the highest grossing Bond movie of all time. Probably both by dollars and by number of ticket sales.

"And I'm too sexy for this poster, too sexy for this poster, the way I'm disco dancing!"

Something like that.

James Bond on the brain

Literally.

But the weird thing was that I sent it from my brain to someone else's last night.

I was walking up the stairs from the parking garage to the main level of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where I was planning to meet a couple friends for an 8:30 showing of Skyfall at the Arclight Theater. I started to anticipate not liking the movie as much as I think I should, and viewing that as more evidence that I'm not a huge Bond fan. Apparently, I want to like Bond more than I actually do, so this seemed to me a failure of some kind.

But as I reached the top of the steps I thought "But that's not really true -- I like that second Brosnan movie more than almost anyone I know." The title Tomorrow Never Dies did not immediately leap to mind, but that's the movie I was thinking of.

Apparently, so was someone else. As I continued on toward the main thoroughfare, I caught a lingering snippet of a conversation from the group of people I had just passed. The last words I heard one of the guys speak were "the one with Michelle Yeoh in it."

Which means that he, too, was thinking of/talking about Tomorrow Never Dies at that very same moment. And also not producing the title on the spot as he and his friends did a Skyfall post-mortem before separating to their cars. 

Now, I'm sure you are thinking "Vance, you just heard them talking about Bond, which is what got you thinking about Bond and predicting your reaction to Skyfall." But it's not true. I started to think about Bond before I even reached this group of people, and even if I had unconsciously heard them talking about it, it's still striking that I started to think about Tomorrow Never Dies before the guy ever mentioned it. And even if I had unconsciously heard them talking about Tomorrow Never Dies -- though not by title, because, as discussed, the guy referred to the movie only by mentioning one of its Bond girls -- that's not how I "got to" Tomorrow Never Dies in my own head. I started thinking about it by reassuring myself that I do really love some Bond films, and producing TND as an example. And it's not like we were both thinking of the most recent Bond film before this, which I haven't seen anyway. The film we were both thinking of is 15 years old.

Anyway, this funny little coincidence -- probably not a case of either of us sending messages with our brains -- gave me something to think about for the rest of the walk to the theater.

During one of the down moments of the first act, I got to thinking something else about James Bond and his own personal history. I'm sure this has been written about by untold Bond enthusiasts, but I haven't read their work, so it was occurring to me independently as I watched Skyfall. The question struck me as appropriate for the 50th anniversary of the character's appearance in movies.

The question was:

Is this James Bond supposed to be the same James Bond from Dr. No?

Setting aside the obvious problem that a secret service agent could not be in peak physical condition for field operations for a 50-year period of his life, is Daniel Craig, as James Bond, supposed to be the same James Bond who fought on the platform of a huge satellite dish (Goldeneye), the same James Bond who disarmed a bomb on a military base wearing a clown outfit (Octopussy), the same James Bond who cheated his apparent death the first time after being shot in a fold away bed in Japan (You Only Live Twice)?

There seems to be a good reason that the character doesn't spend much time mentally cataloguing his past adventures, all the ways he's evaded death and all the women he's loved. It's because clearly this is not meant to be the same man for 23 movies. But it's not overtly supposed to be a different man. I mean, clearly there is not more than one superspy named James Bond working for MI6.

I guess it's probably useful to think of it this way: Each actor who plays Bond has had the experience of all the things that have happened to him in his own films. The James Bond of A View to a Kill (1985) has the memories of the James Bond of Live and Let Die (1973), because both are Roger Moore. But if you ask him to remember what happened to him in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), he can't, because that was Sean Connery.

This isn't to say that each actor's first time as Bond represented the character as an agent new to MI6. Bond is a veteran agent even in Dr. No. Just that each actor's first Bond film represents the first cinema-worthy adventure Bond undertook as an agent. You'd assume his previous adventures were more by-the-book, even the harrowing ones. In that sense, the Bond series was mastering the concept of the "reboot" even before we had computers.

I'm sure Travis will have something to say about all this.

As for Skyfall, I was quite entertained. It's an unusual entry in the series in many respects, not least of which was the cinematography by Roger Deakins -- I kept noticing the wonderful composition and framing of shots, for which Sam Mendes also deserves credit. I commented to one of my friends afterward that after the first scene -- which may just be the best 15 minutes in any Bond movie I've ever seen -- the movie was notable for its lack of the kind of Rube Goldberg staging of action scenes that we have come to associate with the series. (You know, the kind that Aardman Animation has since perfected.) The finale of the film is a particular departure in that respect. Skyfall is a lot more raw and straightforward, which is not a bad thing.

I mean, the movie's whole damn point is that sometimes retro is better. As a guy approaching 40, that's an idea I'm starting to get behind more and more all the time.