• Following Us

  • Categories

  • Check out the Archives









  • Awards & Nominations

Non-Review Review: Thunderball

This post is part of James Bond January, being organised by the wonderful Paragraph Films. I will have reviews of all twenty-two official Bond films going on-line over the next month, and a treat or two every once in a while.

Thunderball perhaps gets a bit of a bad wrap because it’s perhaps not quite as good as From Russia With Love or Goldfinger. I’d argue that very few Bond films are. Thunderball perhaps represents the first moment that the series came to a rest – the first three installments had been built around establishing the character, his world and the tropes and clichés that viewers could expect from movie to movie. Sometimes concepts evolved gradually (for example, the novelty henchmen grew from the three blind assassins to Klebb and her knifey boots to Oddjob), while sometimes they were introduced suddenly (Bond’s Aston Martin), but by the time the fourth film came around, all these elements had been fairly firmly established. As such, the fourth film seemed to be more intent on consolidating the series than in breaking new ground. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

Bond isn't washed up... yet...

Continue reading

Non-Review Review: Goldfinger

This post is part of James Bond January, being organised by the wonderful Paragraph Films. I will have reviews of all twenty-two official Bond films going on-line over the next month, and a treat or two every once in a while.

Even though it was the third movie in an already iconic and hugely successful franchise, I think that Goldfinger is perhaps the film most responsibly for defining the shape of the archetypical Bond film we’ve been watching for fifty years now. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dr. No and From Russia With Love, but this film defined what an audience could expect from a Bond film. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s confident and it’s flamboyant. It’s also a wonderfully fun cinematic experience which manages to be consistently entertaining but never veering too far into the realm of the ridiculous.

A Golden Girl…

Continue reading

Non-Review Review: From Russia With Love

This post is part of James Bond January, being organised by the wonderful Paragraph Films. I will have reviews of all twenty-two official Bond films going on-line over the next month, and a treat or two every once in a while.

Dr. No demonstrated that Ian Fleming’s suave British secret agent could make it to screen. Sean Connery’s James Bond was on the pop culture map, but perhaps just short of becoming a pop culture icon – that was a sequel or two away. Of course, a second movie was pushed into development, with a rich library of Fleming’s novels to adapt – as faithfully or as loosely as the producers might like. When President Kennedy, one of the other “coolest men of the sixties”, announced that From Russia With Love was his ninth favourite novel of all time, it seemed th choice had been made. Rumour has it that Alfred Hitchcock was at one point intended to direct the film, but Terrence Young’s From Russia With Love is still a wonderfully iconic Bond film, which represents a pretty large step from “an entertaining espionage movie” to “globe-spanning spy franchise”.

Bond was already making a splash at this stage of his career...

Continue reading

Non-Review Review: Dr. No

This post is part of James Bond January, being organised by the wonderful Paragraph Films. I will have reviews of all twenty-two official Bond films going on-line over the next month, and a treat or two every once in a while.

Sure, there’s an opening scene involving the murder of a British agent stationed in the Caribbean, but the start of the movie that everybody remembers takes place in a late-night British casino over a game of card. A beautiful young woman is losing to the suave cigarette-smoking stranger on the opposite side of the table. “I admire your luck, Mister…?” she remarks, locking eyes with the figure. He coyly lights a cigarette.

“Bond,” he introduces himself. “James Bond.”

The rest is cinematic history.

You know the name… You know the number…

Continue reading

Who is Bond?

This post is part of James Bond January, being organised by the wonderful Paragraph Films. I will have reviews of all twenty-two official Bond films going on-line over the next month, and a treat or two every once in a while.

If you only count official EON productions, there have been six actors to play the role of suave British Secret Service agent James Bond, 007. However, the continuity of it all gets kind of tangled. Is Roger Moore’s clownish spy the same person as Daniel Craig’s cold-hearted assassin? Has the same agent been in operation since Dr. No (clearly taking place in the 1960s) through to Quantum of Solace (featuring all the technology of now)? There’s a popular fan theory that “James Bond” is just a cover identity, passed down from agent to agent as easily as the number “007” – so each iteration of the character is a different agent given the rank. It actually holds up surprisingly well when you watch the twenty-films in the official series.

What’s on the cards?

Continue reading

Non-Review Review: The Bourne Identity

It’s strange to look back on The Bourne Identity, knowing that it kick-started one of the most highly-regarded trilogies in cinematic history. I must confess that I was never excessively enamoured with the espionage thriller – I quite enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it. Though my favourite movie of the “Bourne” trilogy is The Bourne Supremacy, regarded as something of an ugly step-child of the franchise, so what do I know?

Bourne's just hanging out...

Continue reading

Yay! My Word (and Poster) is My Bond…

I’m just doing a bit of housekeeping at the moment, as I’m away on holidays from today. Don’t worry, there will still be daily reviews and stuff, so don’t worry about your movie nerd fix.

Anyway, just a quick note to say thank you to the guys over at Anomalous Material. I won a competition a few months back and got the snazzy James Bond poster pictured below. Good old Quantum of Solace. Anyway, the poster arrived yesterday and I thought I’d say thanks. If you aren’t reading them, you probably should be.

If you want a look at the poster, click on the image below.

And, in case you’re wondering what a “quantum of solace” is – apart from the logical “smallest quantity of solace which can exist independently” which isn’t really much of a meaning so much as dictionary definition – here’s a snippet of a Bond story in which Ian Fleming explains it:

The governor paused and looked reflectively over at Bond. He said: “You’re not married, but I think it’s the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn’t care if the other is alive or dead, then it’s just no good. That particular insult to the ego – worse, to the instinct of self-preservation – can never be forgiven. I’ve noticed this in hundreds of marriages. I’ve seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I’ve seen crimes and even murder forgiven by the other party, let alone bankruptcy and every other form of social crime. Incurable disease, blindness, disaster – all these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. I’ve thought about this and I’ve invented a rather high-sounding title for this basic factor in human relations. I have called it the Law of the Quantum of Solace.”

And, while I’m riffing on the movie, check out the following spoof theme for Quantum of Solace. It’s much better than what we actually got:

I love the lyrics, particularly:

Sometimes I wish Roger Moore would come back
With an underwater car or some kind of jetpack
Or a hover-gondola
And a Union Jack

Forget it mate, it’s not the Eighties
He’d rather kick you in the face
We got a new Bond for the Noughties
Because the world’s a terrible place

So true.

In Defense of the Sam Mendes and Bond 23 Rumours…

There’s been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on the next Bond film, provisionally titled as Bond 23. This week has been a bonaza of news about the project, which has been slowly taking shape through dribs and drabs of information. On one hand, we had the official confirmation of what everybody really knew (but it’s nice to know for sure): the movie won’t get made until someone buys MGM or the rights. The other tidbit was much more interesting. Bond has a director: Sam Mendes. I think it’s a great idea.

Things at MGM are so bad that Bond can't even afford dry-cleaning...

Continue reading

Non-Review Review: Quantum of Solace

It seems that the cast and crew took the entirely wrong message out of the hugely successful (commercially and critically) Casino Royale. A brilliant combination of fancy stunts and grittiness that called to mind the series’ recent challengers in the Bourne series, Royale reinvented Bond for the naughties, in much the same way as GoldenEye did for the nineties. Unfortunately, Quantum of Solace seems to be based around the assumption that the reaction to Casino Royale was based solely around the modern aspects of the film, rather than the fusion of the old with new, so Solace ends up being Royale without the knowing grin. And it’s a shame, because the knowing grin is part of what makes Bond Bond (perhaps moreso than gadgets, gizmos and world domination plots). Don’t get me wrong, the action in the sequel is nothing short of fantastic (possibly surpassing even its progenitor in the action sweepsteaks) and the movie is well put together, but it just lacks the firm sense of identity which defines the best of the Bond movies.

Bond admits he might be getting a bit old for these crazy college nights out...

Continue reading

Sequels Separated by Decades…

Flynn lives! Jeff Bridges’ career declines! The viral marketing campaign for the sequel to Tr0n kicks off this week at Comic Con and I’m skeptical – but not just because they haven’t decided to go with the logical title Tr1n. I’m mostly skeptical because it’s a sequel to a cult movie produced twenty years after the fact. How many sequels separated by decades have actually succeeded?

It was cutting edge for the time, I swear...

It was cutting edge for the time, I swear...

Continue reading