by 007hertzrumble | Jul 4, 2013 | My Favorite #Bond_age_
The Simplicity of Dr. No
by Eric Jones (@deacon05oc)
Dr. No was not my first James Bond film. As a child growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s, before the release of GoldenEye, it was actually one of the last movies in the series that I watched. It is however my favorite movie in the franchise. Are there better Bonds? I certainly believe so. Do some of them have better stories, better villains or more in-depth characterization? Absolutely. Dr. No is more known for being a watershed moment in film history than it is, perhaps to say, a watershed film. This is the introduction of Agent 007. And boy is it an introduction.
Dr. No is both a James Bond movie and not at the same time. Being the first big screen version of Ian Fleming’s literary spy, no one knew if this enterprise would be a success or a failure. It certainly has elements of the movies that would follow, the theme, the gun barrel, his briefing with M, flirting with Moneypenny, exotic locations, beautiful women, megalomaniacal villain. But it wasn’t yet meshed together as the formula had yet to be written. For the most part, the movie feels like a two-part episode of Hawaii Five-O set in Jamaica. It sounds as if I am nitpicking, but these are exactly the things that make this movie my personal favorite. (more…)
by 007hertzrumble | Jun 26, 2013 | Live Tweet Digests, Official Project, Wraparound
Let the #Wraparound Edition of #Bond_age_ commence! #DrNo began #Bond_age_ back on December 12th of 2012. We’ve come a long way… would the return of the virile 30-year-old Sean Connery live up to our live tweet expectations? Hell yes.
by 007hertzrumble | Jun 20, 2013 | #Bond_age_ Project
This is the intro to a 24-part series about the James Bond cinemas. I encourage everyone to comment and join in on an extended conversation about not only the films themselves, but cinematic trends, political and other external influences on the series’ tone and direction.
Skyfall and the Question of Spacetime: An Of [In]human #Bond_age_ Introduction
by James David Patrick
The Bond film franchise, now aged fifty, has endured long enough to have had the luxury of multiple reinventions and course corrections, informed, directly, by the rapid shifts of the sociological and political tides. Bond is both a reflection of our deepest fears and of our guiltiest aspirations. Women want him and men want to be him, so the saying goes. Or went, perhaps. Our modern cynicism and over-intellectualization has re-rendered that phrase. James Bond has become the man that women want, in theory… if he weren’t such a serial womanizer with a thrill-addiction. He is still, however, the man that men want to be, no caveats. Draw your own assumptions about how the collective male id has evolved over the last fifty years. Bond has become a character in our modern commedia, played by six different actors (all informed by the original on-screen Bond, Sean Connery) and parodied and re-imagined the world over, no more or less human than Pierrot the fool.
Taken at face value, however, James Bond’s cinematic escapades in international espionage are a collection of stories taken from the career of one man. Independent scholars John Griswold and Henry Chancellor have taken it upon themselves to assemble the original Ian Fleming novels into chronological order based on the events contained within. The films, however, prove more problematic. If the latest, excellent entry into Bond’s resume, Skyfall, has cemented one notion about chronology it is that the Bond films cannot be treated as isolated escapades along an individual timeline. Not even suspension of disbelief can atone for Skyfall’s temporal incongruities (even within the movie itself). Must we then consider the Bond series as multiple serials distinguished only by the actor playing the role? (Also made problematic by recurring, self-referential leitmotifs.) Or is it something more complicated, like the intertwining plots of a collection of linked short stories with no particular start or finish? (more…)
