What I Reckon About... Bond. James Bond.

Sky Movies has launched an "All James Bond, All The Time" channel.
 No idea why; I can't find anything about Bond in the papers, or on TV, or on buses and in magazines and alright fuck it, look, it's a shameless ploy and we all know it.
 It also means I've been watching a lot of Bond films lately, because there's not much else on.
 Turns out - and forgive me if I'm late to the party - that Bond films, by and large, are shit.
 I just watched "From Russia With Love," often voted as one of the best Bond movies of all time.
 I'd seen bits of it before, but coming home after a long day's work and feeling quite detached, I watched it objectively and realised that it's fucking stupid.
 In one scene, Bond deduces that Robert Shaw's character is a Russian spy when Shaw orders red wine with fish at dinner.
 How many people who were just not-very-good-with-wine did Bond have to kill before this tactic paid off?!
 Presumably, this is why we never see Bond throwing a party for friends and co-workers. Everyone would sit, rigid and petrified that a lapse in manners could be their undoing.
 "What happened to Felix?"
 "Oh, he used a table spoon for his soup so James lasered his face off with a wrist-watch."
 It's the same reason Bond saves the world every other month, but never gets invited to the palace. It's not that the government isn't grateful for his effort, it's just that they can't take the risk of him lunging over a table and garotting an ambassador for using the wrong knife.
 Back to the movie: Bond battles a female assassin who has snuck into his hotel room, disguised as a maid. She then springs her lethal trap: Knives on the front of her shoes!
 Either through poor casting or the limitations of 1960s maid uniforms, she doesn't try to kick anywhere higher than Bond's knees, presumably because really badly cutting someone's shins is the most surefire way to ensure they'll die, later on, in an accident on the stairs on their way to the front desk to ask for plasters.
 Seriously, the woman was already in the room. She could have killed Bond easily with a small, concealed pistol, or even a non-shoe-related knife that you can use to stab someone above the waist, where their organs are.
 Later in the series, in "Diamonds Are Forever," the two scenes are combined.
 In this movie, Sean Connery's Bond (who, by virtue of being Scottish, seems to have aged about thirty years in the 48 months between movies) is told by the fake waiters aboard a cruise ship (who are really henchmen bringing a bomb disguised as a cake to Bond's room) that the wine with the meal will be a Mouton Rothschild. Bond says he would have expected a Claret instead, and the waiter apologises, at which point Bond points out that Mouton Rothschild is a claret, and then throws the waiter over the railing of the ship, along with his cake bomb.
 I've dealt with many snooty wine drinkers over the years, and it's usually best to just agree with them. Once again, we face the prospect that Bond has been killing and brutalising waiters for years, just for humouring him.
 "...All I did was sigh and agree that the Gallo wine was the best on the menu, and he yelled 'A-ha!' and threw me out of a window. And then he threw a cake after me and dived for cover, for no reason..."
 All in all, then, Connery's Bond films were just too stupid for me to ever take them seriously. If you don't agree, here's a clip of Bond with a seagull on his head.
 I tend to ignore the Roger Moore entries in the series, because I can never understand what they were trying to do.
 As I understand it, Roger Moore is a super-spy who must save the world from grave peril and evil masterminds, but has some sort of disease where he has to crack cheap knob jokes every few minutes. I can only assume there was a paperwork mix-up that led MI6 to hire a jobbing, end-of-the-pier comedian to carry out these missions. Meanwhile, somewhere in Blackpool, a lethal hit-man is grinding out tired Mother In Law jokes to a bored lunchtime crowd and wondering when he's going to be told who to kill.
 Timothy Dalton gets a lot of brownie points for being Bond when I was a kid, and for being the best film incarnation of the character that Fleming wrote. Dalton's Bond is hard-hearted and troubled, a burned out government asset with a conscience that he can't quite silence.
 Which isn't much fun, if you're a fan of exploding cake and nudge-wink humour.*
 Divisive as Dalton was, what's inarguable is that the plot of his first effort, "The Living Daylights," is a mystery to anyone without a degree in political science. If an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters create Shakespeare, this movie was written by throwing an infinite number of monkeys at one single typewriter until it produced something about the Cold War that also featured Gimli from Lord of the Rings.
 To compensate, the plot of the next movie, "License To Kill," involves Bond being mad at someone for feeding his mate to a shark. Also, Bond temporarily loses his License To Kill, in case you really needed things dumbed down. You do? Okay, Bond's friend Felix Leiter gives him a cigarette LIGHTER as a present, which becomes a plot point.
 (Years later, Leiter's replacement, Arnold Blowtorch, gave Bond a similar present that nearly took his fucking eyebrows off. Bond was even less fond of the American NSA liaison, Gerald Exploding-Cigar.)
 By this point in the series, anybody who had been working on the production staff since the first movie in 1962 was either too old or dead to continue, and with "License To Kill" getting slaughtered at the box office by Tim Burton's "Batman," the series took a hiatus for a few years and came back with Pierce Brosnan.
 On paper, Brosnan is the best Bond of them all. Handsome even by Bond standards, he could be as cruel as Dalton, as smooth as Connery and as relaxed with broad comedy moments as Moore.
 Sadly, Brosnan's films were mostly shite. "The World Is Not Enough" was easily the best of the series, a good movie and arguably the last "proper" Bond film ever made, but generally, Brosnan films were all style and no substance. "Die Another Day," a movie about Halle Berry's tits helping Bond stop a Korean diamond smuggler played by a ginger Englishman, is standout for featuring CGI so awful that it couldn't ruin your immersion in the movie any more completely if it just cut to a shot of Pierce Brosnan on the weekend, scratching his arse in his pants and drinking a can of warm Stella whilst reading "Razzle."
 I don't think Daniel Craig can be judged yet because he isn't done with the series, although I like his entries more for taking the action seriously, even if they do still have annoyingly silly moments like Bond having a heart attack and then immediately going back to his card game.
 I guess this whole long piece has been about me trying to find my opinion on Bond, because everyone seems required to have one, especially right now.
 I guess my opinion is this: I like Bond as a concept.
 And so does everyone else.
 Everyone has their own idea of what Bond should be, as the character has spread beyond literature and even beyond film, becoming the sort of cultural touchstone onto which we can all project something, whether it's Dalton's jaded, icy killer, Moore's "Mr. Nudge in a tux" incarnation, or Fleming's snooty, misogynist original.
 I'm not a fan of the films, because a lot of them, as I've pointed out, are stupid.
 But I'm a fan of the character, the way he exists in my head, and it's probably the same for everyone else. The only good films are the ones that give you the character you have in your mind's eye, whoever that might be.
 Just, for Christ's sake, don't order the wrong wine.



*I'm not, so I really like Dalton in the role.

[At least some credit for this article belongs to my cousin Sam, who doesn't have a blog or anything else I can plug in this acknowledgment. Still, most of this article is based on a conversation we had last week.]