Something for Thursday (Diana Rigg edition)

 Actress Diana Rigg has died. She lived a long life (82 years) and did a lot of amazing work, but for me, she will always be Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo, also known as Tracy...who would, very briefly, be Mrs. James Bond. Rigg was the greatest Bond Woman in the long history of Bond Women, and she is a huge reason why On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the greatest Bond movie ever made.

Thank you for the wonderful work, Diana Rigg! Here's Louis Armstrong with his signature ballad from OHMSS.

"Thy dawn, O master of the world, thy dawn....": ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE AT 50 (a repost)

Fifty years ago today, on December 18, 1969, the sixth James Bond movie opened. Its initial reception was mixed, partly because the Bond mania of the 60s was simmering down, and partly because it was the first time that Sean Connery had not starred as Agent 007, in favor of complete unknown newcomer George Lazenby. While I didn't see the movie until an ABC telecast sometime in the early 80s, I liked it from that very first viewing and it very quickly shot up my personal rankings until by the time I was fifteen or sixteen I was willing to crown it as my favorite Bond movie of all time. And while certain opinions that we have in our youth shift as we learn and grow, some do not...and for me, this is one of the opinions that stuck. To this day, almost 19 movies later, OHMSS has never been equaled.

I wrote the following essay almost nine years ago and repost it here without a single word changed, except to fix a broken link.




Sometimes I change my mind about movies. Sometimes I don't. Some movies meant a lot to me, years ago, but have dropped away to the point that I've forgotten about them. Other movies, though, have stayed with me forever. One of those is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth James Bond film, which I have regarded since I was a teenager as the best Bond film ever made. In fact, I consider it one of my favorite films of all time, in any genre.

My long examination of the film, with lots of screencaps, after the page break.

Nobody Did It Better: Thank You, Sir Roger Moore

Sir Roger Moore has died.

I've loved all the James Bonds, to be honest. My favorite is George Lazenby, but I appreciate each and every actor who has played the part. There is a special place in my heart for Roger Moore, though, because he was my first Bond, and you don't forget your first. That initial Bond experience for me was Moonraker in 1979, and I've been a James Bond fan ever since.

Here's Moore as I first saw him:


Oddly, Moore's first film as Bond is the Bond film I like the least -- in fact, I dislike Live and Let Die so much that to this day I do not own a copy of it, and I don't think I ever have. This isn't Moore's fault, though. He's actually very good in the movie, and my distaste for it is based on other complaints. Moore's reputation as Bond is unfortunately skewed: many see him more as a comic figure, when the Bond films had a lot more broadly comedic moments than in the Connery (or Lazenby) years. (Witness Jaws flapping his arms after his ripcord breaks in the clip above.) It always struck me as unfair to blame Moore for faults in the writing of the scripts, to be honest, and the Bond films of the 70s were all written with that kind of broad comedy that often bordered on outright slapstick. This started with Sean Connery's last turn in the role, Diamonds are Forever, and didn't end until 1981's For Your Eyes Only toned things down significantly. That film and its successor, Octopussy, are two of my absolute favorites, and I even have a soft spot for the troublesome A View to a Kill, which starts trending to over-the-top comedy again.

Witness this clip from For Your Eyes Only, when Moore's Bond gets the drop on a vicious hit-man who has been dogging him throughout the film:


That is as lethal a moment as anything that Connery's Bond ever did, and it's worth noting that no matter who plays him, James Bond is rarely that cold. But Moore could play it.

Moore's Bond was an enormous part of my geek childhood, and I wouldn't be a Bond fan if not for his work. So thank you, Sir Roger Moore, for your wonderful work, and I hope there are some wonderful ladies and nifty Q gadgets awaiting you!

Thoughts on a Matter of Extreme Importance and Relevance

After listening to one of my regular podcasts recently, I realized that there exists a deeply important topic about which most people seem to be deeply confused. As I have a good deal of understanding pertaining to this particular issue, I have decided to use space in my blog in an attempt to clarify things, so that discussion of this deeply important subject can move forward, freed of misconceptions and the errors that those misconceptions can create. These are matters of deep import, and my blog is a wasted opportunity if I do not use it to help the world in its ongoing grapples with this issue.

I speak, of course, of the plot of Octopussy.

The podcast in question was the James Bonding cast, of which I have written before. Octopussy is actually one of my favorite in the series of films featuring the adventures of British secret agent James Bond (code-number, 007). It’s not the first James Bond movie I ever saw – that was Moonraker – but Octopussy was the first one I ever went to see by myself, when I was twelve years old. One shouldn’t discount that: it’s generally my view that what one is into when one is twelve is likely what one is into for much of the rest of life. And that’s not a bad thing.

So, if you remember Octopussy, it’s likely as the one with the ridiculous name, the one where James Bond dresses up as a clown at the end, the one where Bond flies a tiny jet plane in the pre-credit sequence, et cetera. If you remember the plot at all, you likely recall that there’s a Russian general with a plot to detonate an atomic bomb on a military base, and that somehow the story involves Faberge eggs. It is, admittedly, not the easiest plot in the world to follow.

But having listened to the James Bonding guys struggle to explain things, I realized first that the story isn’t that hard to put together, and second, that enough is enough. Let’s get this over with, shall we?

After the opening credits end, we’re in East Berlin (remember, this was 1983), and there’s a clown on the run from two identical twins who are expert at throwing knives. The clown is no slouch, very nearly pulling off the escape before getting a knife in his back and falling into a river. This clown staggers to the British embassy, where he tumbles through a glass door as he dies. Something rolls across the floor to the feet of the Ambassador: a Faberge egg.

Next, Bond is briefed in London. It turns out that someone is auctioning Faberge eggs and other rare Russian treasures, someone unknown and shadowy. MI6 has no idea why, but they suspect that the Russians are raising money for use in intelligence work. The reason this is all relevant to MI6 in the first place? The reason some shenanigans in the jewelry market is on their radar at all? Because the egg in the clown’s hand is a forgery of an egg that’s about to be auctioned, and because the dead clown is actually Agent 009.

Meanwhile, a Soviet general named Orlov is trying to sell the Soviet High Command (or whatever they call it) on his plan to steamroll Western Europe, but they are having none of it, with General Gogol (a recurring character in Bond movies in that period) pointing out that the West will respond to a Soviet invasion by nuking the Soviet Union. So here’s Orlov’s problem: he wants to overrun the West without risking nuclear reprisal.

Next comes a pretty odd scene: Orlov is called to the bowels of the Kremlin Art Repository, which looks like the Soviet equivalent of the giant warehouse into which the US government stashed the Ark of the Covenant in 1936. There’s a guy down here working on forging jewelry pieces, and also there is one of our knife-wielding twins. The jewelry guy, named Lenkin, informs Orlov that his superiors have announced an unscheduled inventory of the Repository holdings, and that the fake egg has been lost. Orlov says that “their man in London” will have to get the original egg back. So here’s the first plot point: these characters are replacing treasures from the Kremlin Art Repository with fakes and auctioning the originals in the West.

Now, one might wonder how long such a plot can go on. Sooner or later, someone is going to do an inventory and discover that a lot of priceless art objects in the Kremlin Art Repository are actually fakes, and they will find that the actual items have been auctioned off to Western collectors. So what could possibly be the point of all this? As M later asks Bond, “Why would General Orlov participate in a jewelry caper?” Bond replies that the jewelry is merely “the tip of the tentacle”, and it really is. The key here is that General Orlov doesn’t give a shit about the jewelry.

We’ll come back to that. In London, Bond goes to the auction and antagonizes the eventual buyer, an Afghan man named Kamal Khan (played, in nice 1980s whitewashing, by Frenchman Louis Jourdan), buy forcing up the price and, we later learn, actually switching the real egg for the fake one. Bond knows that he was at no risk of winning the auction: Khan had to make the purchase, but Bond doesn’t know why. Off he goes to New Delhi to find out why.

And what does Bond find out in India? Well, among other things, he learns that Orlov and Khan are working together. Orlov shows up at Khan’s palace with a cask filled with jewelry, and he overhears the men talking about something to do with the town of Karlmarxstadt in East Germany. Bond also learns that there’s a connection of some sort between Kamal Khan and a mysterious leader of a women’s cult named “Octopussy”. He learns that her cult is a front for a crime organization, albeit a fairly small-potatoes one, whose activities include using her circus’s travels throughout Europe for...wait for it...jewelry smuggling!

So, by the time Bond arrives in East Germany, he knows that Octopussy is smuggling the jewelry, with Kamal Khan acting as the “middle man”. Orlov gives the jewelry to Khan, who has it duplicated "according to Lenkin's specifications". Then Khan keeps the genuine jewelry, while Orlov returns the fakes to the Kremlin. Octopussy then smuggles the jewelry into the West; there, Khan sells it and, presumably, keeps the money. Or so it seems.

But remember what we established above: Orlov doesn’t give a shit about the jewelry. He has a huge doublecross in mind. He’s arranging this shipment of jewelry, well enough, but the only reason he’s participating in the jewelry caper is to give him a way of smuggling his real goal into the West: an atomic bomb. As the train is setting out, Orlov’s men switch the cask full of jewelry for a cask loaded with the bomb. The idea is that when the bomb detonates, on a US Air Force Base in West Germany, everyone will assume that it was an accidental detonation of an American bomb. This will enable Europe to demand that all nuclear weapons be removed from their countries, allowing Orlov to send his armies into Western Europe without fear of nuclear retaliation.

Octopussy is to die in the blast, because you always sacrifice your co-conspirators, if you can. She has no idea at all of the bomb plot, remember. As for Kamal Khan? He stands to make a ton of money, and Orlov will be, as he says with his dying words, “a hero of the Soviet Union.”

I always loved this plot, to be honest. It’s complex, like any good spy thriller plot should be, and it employs the conspiratorial activities of people who each want different things. It’s just plausible enough, by Bond film standards, to be a bit scary as Bond’s race against time in the film’s last act plays out. There’s some real edge-of-the-seat stuff that goes on in that last part of the film as Bond races to get to the bomb before it goes off, and the scene in the train car between Bond and Orlov is as good a Bond-confronts-villain scene as there is. It’s the only time Bond and Orlov are on screen together, and those who think Roger Moore a lesser actor should watch this scene again. Bond, having realized that Orlov plans to detonate a bomb on a USAF base, says, “What happens when the US retaliates?” Steven Berkoff as Orlov, who has been wildly overacting through the entire movie (to this day, my sister brings up his goofy enunciation of the word Czechoslovakia – “Czech-o-slo-VAKIA!!!”), goes understated right here to look at Bond, smirk slightly, and simply say, “Against whom?”

I love that scene.

I’m not sure why the James Bonding guys apparently had such a hard time following all this. Admittedly, there isn’t really any scene at which all the dots are connected, so it’s easy to lose sight of how the jewelry-smuggling caper fits into the larger, “Tilt the geopolitical scales” scheme. But the connective tissue is there, and when one is trying to piece together a complex plot, I find that the best way to figure it all out is to first keep in mind what the villain, or villains, are trying to achieve. What does the bad guy want? That should inform all the things that happen. In the case of Octopussy, you have two outright villains and a villain/ally who are all working together but who all want different things.

So, when one of the James Bonding guests asks how they expect to get away with switching real jewels for fake ones (or something like that), the answer is: They don’t care. That’s not the objective. By the time the fake jewelry is discovered, the world will have bigger fish to fry, the real jewelry will either be sold or in Kamal Khan's collection.

Thus concludes our lesson. Tune in next week when I either propose a comprehensive plan for solving global warming, or post pictures of the cats and the dog!

Ranking the Bond Songs!

You know what this blog needs? More lists of things ranked in reverse order of how much I like them! So here is a ranking of all the James Bond theme songs.

Before I start, a brief proviso: by “theme song”, I mean, “song that plays over the film’s opening credits”. This is necessary because there are some places where the particular movie’s most memorable song plays at some other point, and in some latter cases, the films have multiple songs. So that’s my definition of “theme song” for this post, and even that definition will have an exception or two along the way.

Why do this? Well, as I noted in a post a while back, I’ve been listening to a podcast about the Bond films, so this lore is often fresh to mind in some way. I remember an LP album I had when I was a kid that had all the Bond theme songs on it, up to For Your Eyes Only, if memory serves. I played the hell out of that album, which I got when I had only seen a few of the Bond films at all; thus I came to know some of the songs before I saw the films. I found “Under the Mango Tree” from Dr. No particularly baffling and un-Bondlike, but...well, anyway, let’s get started! I’m going in reverse order here, and as in all such lists, I find that my bottom group and my top group are pretty well set, and everything in the middle is changeable.

23. Quantum of Solace (Jack White and Alicia Keys)

This is just a nothingburger of a song. It goes nowhere, it does nothing. Listening to it is outright unpleasant. I can’t say much more than that about it. It actually opens promisingly, with a bass line that calls back to the opening guitar smash of the previous film’s song, Casino Royale, but the vocal lines are awful and there is no real melody at all. I was glad when the opening credits were done running when I saw this movie.


22. Die Another Day (Madonna)

I gave some thought to whether this song or Quantum was my least favorite, and this one wound up not quite dead last because the song’s disjointed nature actually does mesh fairly well with the disjointed nature of the film’s credits sequence, which depicts a captured James Bond being held captive and tortured for more than a year. I can accept the song’s nature on that basis, but still, it too is just plain unpleasant to hear.


21. Goldeneye (Tina Turner)

As I look over the list of all the Bonds, it appears that Pierce Brosnan really didn’t fare well in the theme song department. This song suffers in a number of ways, first by not being very tuneful (I’ve seen the film any number of times and I can barely summon up the melody in my head), not memorable in the lyrics department, and it’s written in such a way that it really doesn’t do much justice to Tina Turner’s voice. I’m not the world’s biggest Turner fan, but I don’t think this song does her any favors.


20. Dr. No (special case)

This feels slightly unfair, since the very first Bond movie underscores about half of the credits sequence with nothing other than the James Bond Theme in its original incarnation. That’s pretty cool. But eventually the Bond theme fades out, and it’s replaced with some calypso-sounding percussion (again, not bad), but then a very bizarre calypso rendition of “Three Blind Mice”. This ends up referring to the three blind assassins who start the plot off in the first scene, but then these fellows are never seen again and the whole “Three Blind Mice” thing ends up just seeming weird. The whole effect is pretty disjointed.


19. Moonraker (Shirley Bassey)

Bassey did three Bond themes, and here’s the last. She sings it gorgeously, so the problem here is the song itself. It’s a very slow, ponderous ballad that just slides by without leaving much impression at all. The Bond films did a string of slow songs for themes in the late 70s and early 80s, only two of which really worked. This isn’t one of those. It’s telling that they recorded a faster, kind-of discofied, version for the film’s end credits.


18. The Living Daylights (a-ha)

Lots of people always assume that the producers were trying to capitalize on a-ha’s short-lived MTV popularity here, but it’s worth remembering that the Bond films are made by Europeans, and a-ha was a much bigger deal over there. They actually had a long career in Europe which you’d never know about if your view of the music world never extends beyond the American top-40 list. This song is OK, but it’s not especially memorable, it’s not even the most memorable actual song from the film, and John Barry didn’t like it all that much, so he didn’t make a lot of use of it in his score.


17. Tomorrow Never Dies (Sheryl Crow)

Another instance of the producers grabbing a contemporary popular name for the song, this one is again an OK tune, but again it’s not especially memorable and it doesn’t fit the rest of the movie. The problem here is that composer David Arnold drew a lot of melodic inspiration from the other song in the movie, by kd lang, which was supposed to be the main title song in the first place but ended up getting bumped to the end credits. It does fit the TRON-esque credits sequence, but that’s about it.


16. The Man With the Golden Gun (Lulu)

I have a soft spot for this song because it’s so goofy in the lyrics department (“Love is required/whenever he’s hired/he comes just before the kill!”), and because John Barry did a lot of neat things in the actual score using this song as inspiration – some terrific action writing, for instance. The song’s got a good beat to it, but ultimately it just feels like it’s trying too hard. It feels almost like a parody of a Bond theme song.


15. A View to a Kill (Duran Duran)

After Golden Gun, we’d go ten years before another up-tempo Bond theme. This song just reeks 80s pop to me, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s a fun listen and the melody pops up in the score, which listening to the song the first time isn’t something you’d initially think possible. I mainly rank it down this far because the lyrics make absolutely zero sense. Seriously. You could sing a Sarah Palin speech to this tune and have as coherent a set of lytics.


14. You Only Live Twice (Nancy Sinatra)

It’s gorgeous and lush and Nancy Sinatra has a wonderful voice. The problem is that it might be too lush, at times feeling repetitive. This song comes after the Bond films have been ratcheting things up in the song department, and though I like it a lot, it’s not my favorite thing in the world.


13. Octopussy (Rita Coolidge)

Another in the string of slow ballads that dominated the Bond series right around the time I was starting to cultivate my 007 fandom. Notably, one of the few times the song doesn’t use the film’s title in any way, which I suppose was the right decision to make, since I doubt anyone really felt like taking on the challenge of using “Octopussy” in the song. It’s a nice ballad and I like it, particularly the little guitar licks toward the end, and I love Coolidge’s husky voice. But for Bond, the song may be just a bit too nice.


12. Licence to Kill (Gladys Knight)

This is a weird song. I like it a lot, actually, and like the movie itself, I think it’s terribly underrated. The song goes on a bit too long, but I dig the way Knight really sinks her teeth into it. It’s a good Bond-type of ballad, even if it tries to rip off Goldfinger a bit with those big opening chords.


11. Goldfinger (Shirley Bassey)

Yes, Goldfinger doesn’t even make my top ten. I know, I know – it’s the most iconic of all the Bond theme songs, but iconic or no, I simply don’t like it all that much. It’s good, but like the movie, I think too much is made of it.


10. From Russia With Love (John Barry)

Unusual case here. FRWL has an honest-to-goodness song, with a singer and everything (a fellow named Matt Munro), and it’s really quite good. It starts off almost sounding like a lounge song, but it gets bigger and bigger and at the end it’s pretty dramatic. Problem is, it’s only heard during the movie’s end credits. For the opening credits, we simply have a John Barry instrumental arrangement of the same song, as the credits are projected over the undulating features of a belly dancer. That arrangement is pretty awesome, though, starting with very fast and staccato chords in the brass. The arrangement really sets the tune for some action and adventure in an exotic locale. That instrumental is terrific stuff, and would later be quoted by David Arnold in his score to Tomorrow Never Dies.


9. Diamonds Are Forever (Shirley Bassey)

My favorite of the Shirley Bassey songs. This ballad is haunting and evocatively scored, with that wonderfully mysterious open and some nifty 70s synth stuff in the middle. John Barry even gets in some of his trademark staccato brass stingers in the midst of this lush bit of mysterious romanticism. I love this song. Too bad the movie doesn’t rise to its level. (Or anywhere near it, really.)


8. The World Is Not Enough (Garbage)

This is one of those Bond movies that no one much talks about, which is a shame because it’s loaded with good ideas and good performances and is pretty much done in by the ridiculous inclusion of Denise Richards as a complete nothingburger of a character. This song is really quite good, too, in my opinion. I don’t know anything about the band Garbage other than this song, but this is just a terrific Bond song. David Arnold does some Barry-esque things with the sound (brass stingers, again), the chorus is ear-wormy as hell, and the overall sound is one of exotic mystery. This is a deeply underrated gem of a Bond song.


7. For Your Eyes Only (Sheena Easton)

Here’s some Bond trivia for you, next time you’re in a bar and you need a James Bond fact to stump people: What’s the only Bond film in which the theme song’s singer appears in the titles sequence? That’s right, it’s FYEO! Cool, huh? Yup, Sheena Easton is right there on screen, belting out this early 80s ballad. And it’s a good one, with some exotic sounds from the synths, and lyrics of the oft-used “lonely woman singing to the secret agent who has come to save her” genre. This is a terrific song.


6. Casino Royale (Chris Cornell)

The Daniel Craig reboot era begins with the blood-soaked gunbarrel animation giving way to this hard-driving rock song. It’s really a nicely-crafted film sequence, in which Craig’s Bond appears in two separate black-and-white sequences, one of which is muted and quiet, the other of which is harsh and loud and garish – and then this song kicks in with driving opening chords and explosions of color as the titles begin. As for the song itself, I like it a lot. It’s got a very ear-wormy aspect to it, and it sounds like a new version of Bond while still being Bond.


5. Live and Let Die (Paul McCartney and Wings)

Once upon a time I hated this song, but over the years it has relentlessly climbed up my list. It’s a very different kind of Bond song, really – John Barry was not involved in this film, and so the sound of the music is quite different. LALD starts right off with Paul McCartney singing, and then we get those wonderful smashing chords when he reaches the words “Live and let die”. I had a problem for years with the fact that probably half the song is instrumental, but all that stuff works. To this day, though, I can’t quite get behind the weird funky middle section (“What does it matter to ya? When you got a job to do, you gotta do it well!”), because it’s just so weird and out of place. It’s very McCartney-esque, as sticking mismatched sequences into the middle of songs is something he likes to do, but I still don’t care for that tiny bit. Still, this song is terrific. Not enough to redeem the movie, though, which is by far my least favorite Bond movie ever.


4. Thunderball (Tom Jones)

Oh, this wonderful, weird, gonzo song! Listening to it, you can just hear the producers telling John Barry, “We need a song even bigger than Goldfinger!” So out comes this strange number, in which Tom Jones sings ever-so-lovingly of the world’s most narcissistic and misogynist asshole. Seriously, listen to the lyrics and imagine what it would be like, to be in the company of a guy like that. But Jones sells it, doesn’t he? Just don’t ask what it means to “STRIKE [bum bum bum bum BUM] like THUN-DER-BALLLLLL.” (For added fun, listen to Jones’s voice as he holds that last high note and imagine the colors his face turned before he finally collapsed into unconsciousness.) This song is like the movie: bloated, over-the-top, and huge. It makes the most liberal quotes from the James Bond Theme itself, and...I just love it to pieces.


3. The Spy Who Loved Me (Carly Simon)

The song is titled “Nobody Does It Better”, and it’s just an outstanding song – so good that it’s probably been overplayed through the years, and it’s a staple of many a karaoke bar. The film’s music score is a regrettable mishmash of disco-sounding crud, but this song is outstanding, quite easily the best of Roger Moore’s films. Just the way Carly Simon sings it is amazing: in the first verse she sounds small and hesitant, backed by little more than a piano, but then she gets to “Baby, you’re the best”, and as she sustains the word “best”, her voice seems to double in size, and it keeps growing and growing throughout the song. I’m not the biggest fan of the movie, but this song is fantastic.


2. Skyfall (Adele)

Adele may be the first person to ever do a Bond song where I thought, “I’d like her to do more of them.” This is the Bondiest of the Craig songs, with its lush sound, its big vocals by a big-voiced singer, and even its way of making almost-coherent lyrics out of a made-up word (“Skyfall”). It’s a wonderful song, and it even goes so far as to suggest the film’s somewhat downbeat ending in its constant references to the sky falling and tumbling and such. I really like it.


1. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (John Barry)

I suppose this is no surprise, coming from me, is it? I make no apologies. This movie’s opening titles sequence is scored not with a vocal song but with a driving instrumental by John Barry that doubles as the film’s main action-sequence music. It begins with Barry-esque staccato stingers in the brass, and then there’s a driving downward pounding motif my bass synths before the main melody kicks in with an amazing rhythm in the background. It’s the perfect music for the film’s ski-chase sequences, and it musically suggests speed and danger as well as anything Barry every wrote for a Bond film. I’ve always been amazed that the producers made no attempt to convey the film’s “Bond-ness” through the use of a song, but rather just gave the job to John Barry, who then delivered perfectly. No piece of music, other than the James Bond Theme itself, screams “007!” to me so well as this one, which is why I put it at the top of the list.


(At some point I’ll look into some other songs and musical oddities from the Bond films.)

Responding to Bonding

A while back, Michael May started an exploration of James Bond, by going back to Bond's literary roots. In the inaugural post, Michael mentioned a couple of Bond-related podcasts, one of which I've been listening to semi-regularly for the last few months. It's James Bonding, and it has two comedy writers, Matt Gourley and Matt Mira (the "two Matts"), discussing the films one at a time, with guest commentary from people they know. I've found listening to this podcast to be an interesting distillation of everything about geek-discussion and geek-debate: sometimes it's a blast, other times it's totally maddening. There are times when I find myself laughing uproariously, almost to tears, and other times when I start screaming my rage-filled disagreement. Huh...after writing that, I'm starting to think that maybe it's a bad idea for me to listen to this podcast while driving.

Listening to a podcast that focuses on any particular geek-obsession is a dangerous game. For one thing, they can't respond, because they're not there. So there's no way for you to express your disagreement other than commenting on the site, or e-mailing, or Tweeting, or...writing a blog post. If you've ever sat by in forced silence while someone gets things WRONG!!! about your favorite thing, whether they're genuinely wrong or they just have the totally WRONG!!! opinion, then you know the frustration. Likewise, there are times when I want them to focus on one aspect or another of the movie-in-question, be it something I really like about the film or seriously hate about it, and if the two Matts either don't bring it up or gloss over it, the shouting starts anew. That's just the way it is!

Also, I always have to remind myself that they're producing a podcast and not, say, a DVD commentary. A lot of times they end up discussing earlier parts of the film in pretty gory detail, and then when it comes time to break down the ending, they mainly fly through it and then close up shop. Often times, though, the ending warrants more discussion than it gets, which I always find frustrating.

And then there's just the plain fact that these are two people who aren't me and who don't always think like me, which is annoying in itself!

So yeah, listening to the James Bonding podcast is frustrating, annoying, angering...and a lot of fun. For the most part. But what's the point of a blog if I can't take after someone else's opinions? So in this post I'm going to do just that, by responding to a few points they make about each film, as if I myself was a guest. Fun wow!

First off, by way of format, the way they're approaching the films is interesting in itself. They aren't going in strict chronological order of release; they're alternating each week, with the odd weeks starting at Dr No and progressing forward, and with the even weeks starting at the other end, with Skyfall, and progressing backward. In the introductory installment (Episode zero), they talked through the roster of films in that way and determined that the podcast will conclude with a long series of installments on the Roger Moore era, ending with For Your Eyes Only. It's an interesting approach, and as I write this, they have just arrived at Live and Let Die, having moved through all the Connery films (and the Lazenby one), and just finished with the Pierce Brosnan era, so that only Timothy Dalton remains.

As I note, they always have a guest or two on the show, and they always start by inquiring of their guests as to their personal relationship with James Bond. They've done a great job of getting a wide variety of such; they've had folks on who are so steeped in Bond that they have actually worked on DVD releases of the films, and they had a couple of women on who knew nothing about Bond at all, with the rest of the guests being somewhere in the middle. So it seems to me I should offer the same background info. How did I come to James Bond? Well, unlike a lot of the guests (the ones who are familiar with Bond, anyway), I didn't come to love Bond through my father. No, it was via my mother that I discovered Agent 007.

I was born in 1971 (the year of Diamonds are Forever), but I didn't discover Bond until 1979, when I saw teevee commercials for a movie called Moonraker. The commercials screamed out, "Bond is Back!", but I had no idea who Bond was or what he was back from. All I knew was that this movie took place in space. There were laser guns and spaceships. For eight-year-old Star Wars fan me, this was all it took to sell me on this movie, so my mother – who apparently knew her James Bond – took me to see it. I still remember my initial confusion as the movie started – what's with the white dots going across the screen? Who is this guy who just shot the camera, and what's the red stuff...oh wait, that's blood...wait, is this a space movie or what?

Moonraker doesn't get to space until its third act, which might have bothered me, but I found the stuff leading up to that enough fun that it didn't bug me much, and when we did get to space, well, that shit was just cool. I loved the movie, and that's where my love of Bond started. Over the next bunch of years I would see all the remaining films, but in those days, the only way to see the Bond films was to wait for them to show up on the ABC network; they would air one every couple of months, in no set order, either. Plus, they were heavily edited, and when we moved to WNY in 1981, our reception of ABC was awful until we got cable, three or four years later. My first viewings of the Bond films were hardly ideal.

The next Bond film after Moonraker was For Your Eyes Only, which for some reason only played in the Olean, NY theaters for two weeks or so, so we missed that one. (As much as I love a lot of the movies with which I grew up, there's no getting around the fact that the theaters in which I saw most of them all sucked. Olean's theaters were terrible.) When Octopussy came out in 1983, though, it began my as-yet-unbroken string of having seen every single Bond film since in the theater. I've just consulted the list of all the Bond films, and it turns out that not until last year's Skyfall did I reach a point where I have seen the majority of the films in the theater. Wow. (And what I wouldn't give to see On Her Majesty's Secret Service in a good theater!)

Along the way, at some point I read probably half of the Ian Fleming novels. I also collected the film score albums, and I also owned a James Bond trivia book at one point (I miss that book and wonder whatever happened to it), along with a couple other Bond "encyclopedia" type books. I'm not a hard core Bond fan, but I'm no slouch, either. I know my Bond lore, so it would seem that the James Bonding podcast is made for me!

However, with a series of films like this, it's always the case that you meet other fans just as devoted whose opinions are entirely different, and that's certainly the case with the Two Matts of James Bonding. Thus, in this post, I air my thoughts on the podcast in somewhat random order.

:: First off, this just bugs the living hell out of me, so out it comes. I'm not a huge fan of tests of geek purity. I don't believe, much, in challenging fellow fans to tests of trivia to prove their worth. No matter what your particular geek obsession is, there is always someone out there who knows more about it. This kind of thing gets downright obnoxious: someone claims to be a comics fan and professes a preference for a certain superhero, and then some obnoxious douche sets out to prove that this person's knowledge is not sufficiently encyclopedic about that one character to warrant that person being taken seriously at all.

But...well, for me, there are certain base things someone should know. I don't care if someone claims to be a Star Trek fan but can't name all the episodes of TNG, or never bothered watching past season three of Voyager or any of Enterprise at all. [Yeah, that's me.] But if I ask a self-professed Star Trek fan to tell me the Enterprise's registry number, they'd better be able to come up with "NCC-1701". They don't need to be able to tell me what specific year any given Star Trek episode takes place in, but they at least should know that classic Trek takes place in the 23rd century and the TNG era in the 24th.

Likewise, a Star Wars fan need not know what species Yoda is, but if they can't name the planet on which we meet Yoda, that's a problem for future conversation. A comics fan doesn't need to be able to name every single mutant who has ever been a member of the X-Men, but they should know that the X-Men is a team of superheroes who are mutants.

So it really, really, really bugs me when on two different occasions, the Two Matts of James Bonding can't get right what SPECTRE stands for. In one installment, they actually Google it; in another they say it from memory, and get it wrong. This just irritates the hell out of me. True, a casual fan who likes the Bond movies because they're fun action movies may not know it, but these aren't casual fans. These are two guys hosting a Bond-related podcast. One of them had a Bond-themed birthday party when he turned a round number. They can recite the roster of films in order of release, with the years, but they can't come up with "Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion". I'm sorry, but if you're hosting a podcast based on your James Bond fandom, you need to have that in your memory bank.

:: It is refreshing to encounter Bond fans who don't automatically take the view, which has become almost a pop-culture shibboleth, that Sean Connery was the definitive James Bond and everyone else since Connery has worked in his shadow. I've never believed this for one second, and when I heard the Two Matts both basically admit that Roger Moore is their favorite, I found that somewhat refreshing. However, I was subsequently a bit let down when they advanced a notion that you hear all the time these days, but which has never made a great deal of sense to me: that "favorite" does not equal "best". Why the hell shouldn't it? Why do we have to always hedge our bets with that weird idea? Why not just go ahead and argue that what you like is best, and that you like it because you think it's the best? "Best" and "favorite" are different words, but they're still just words that we use to express opinions. I often find that the "favorite versus best" distinction is a way of trying to deflect criticism.

Both Matts, when they eventually get around to ranking all the Bond actors, say that their rankings of "favorite" Bonds and "best" Bonds are different lists, which strikes me as really silly. I expect they do this so they can still put Connery at the top of a list, which is what pop culture seems to have decided that we should all be doing. I, of course, reject this.

:: So what's my list of "best" Bonds? Here it is:

George Lazenby
Daniel Craig
Roger Moore
Timothy Dalton
Sean Connery
Pierce Brosnan

Now, breaking this down just a tad: yes, Lazenby only did one movie. And yes, there are a few times – fewer than most admit, though – when Lazenby's status as a guy who has never acted before shows. But the fact remains that the movie he did is not just my favorite Bond movie, but one of my favorite movies of all time. It's the most emotional of all the Bonds (only Casino Royale and Skyfall come close in sheer emotional heft), and in the scenes that carry the emotion, Lazenby nails the role. In Lazenby, we see an emotional Bond, a fearful Bond, a loving Bond, an angry Bond, a weary Bond. So I make no apology at all for liking Lazenby most of all and being sad that he didn't continue in the role (although that means he would have been around for a really bad series of scripts).

:: That said, the Two Matts are also careful to point out that criticism that sounds harsh often sounds more negative than it really is, because the only context in which the criticism can be taken is the context of James Bond. When I rank Pierce Brosnan at the bottom of my list, it's because I see his run of films as being the most faulty – and yet, I still enjoy watching them, for the most part. I don't hate the Brosnan era, by any means, and I like him very much as Bond. I think he really got screwed by scripts that each had issues. Roger Moore started out the same way, but his films got a lot better toward the end.

:: Talk about differing opinions: both Matts express a good deal of fondness for Live and Let Die, which is by far my least favorite Bond movie. It's the one I've rewatched the least, and I'm not sure I've ever owned a copy, even back in the VHS days of keeping copies of movies I taped off ABC. LaLD does have some good stuff in it – Yaphet Kotto is fantastic – and I like Roger Moore, but what's bad in LaLD is so bad that it renders the rest of the movie nearly unwatchable. I quite literally hate that movie, and I won't even let it play if I randomly find it on teevee.

:: Going back to Lazenby and OHMSS for a moment: several times, the Matts say that they would love to see OHMSS with Connery in the lead instead of Lazenby. This is odd, because they also indicate their view that in Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, the two films before OHMSS, Connery looked more and more bored by the whole thing. Plus, when they do the OHMSS installment, they openly state something that I've said for years to people who have wished for Connery in that film: they're not sure he could have really sold Bond-in-love. Lazenby could, and did, and for that alone I'm willing to overlook a handful of wooden line-readings that mostly occur early on in the movie. Ultimately, the Two Matts (and their guest commentator on that installment) don't really offer any real specific critiques of Lazenby, just general statements that he doesn't have enough charisma or something. That's not terribly convincing.

:: Missing plot details seems to happen a lot, too. Sticking with OHMSS, they wonder why Bond would follow that strange girl to the hotel at the beginning of the movie – not noticing that he didn't follow her, but pulled into the hotel and only then recognized the distinctive car there as being the one from the odd encounter the night before.

:: The installment features guest commentators each time out, which can be a lot of fun...or not so much, depending on the commentators and their views on Bond. This is actually one of the better aspects of the series, because it always lends a fresh viewpoint to the show, and the Two Matts are careful to pick a variety of guests, some of whom are well-schooled in Bond and some of whom are less so. There are men and women featured, which is good; there was one woman who is staggeringly in love with Casino Royale, and then there was a pair of women who absolutely HATED Goldfinger, mainly because of its wild sexism. The podcast doesn't just take the same approach and viewpoint each time out, which I appreciate.

:: On the topic of the Goldfinger installment, which got some flack from the show's fans...that installment is a hard listen, because the two women who guested were really turned off by the movie, so much so that the installment pretty much stayed on that one topic the entire time they were talking about the film. (There's a long stretch in the last half when they just ditch Bond for what seems like twenty minutes and talk about bartending and alcoholic drinks.) I'm of the view that you can't really talk about Bond today without coming to some kind of grips with the sexism of the series – particularly that of the first bunch of films, and maybe even all of them – but it was still frustrating to hear Goldfinger discussed pretty much only in those terms, because, well, there's an awful lot wrong with Goldfinger apart from the sexism. They barely touch on the fact that for most of that entire movie James Bond is almost entirely irrelevant to the action, or how a lot of the movie makes absolutely no sense (why does Goldfinger bother spelling out his plan to the criminals, since he's killing them anyway?). I know, this puts me dangerously close to "You're not using YOUR forum to talk about what I want you to talk about!" territory, but it was a thought that occurred to me. However, I stand by my view that you have to talk about sexism in Bond at some point, if you have any honesty at all.

:: That said, if you want to talk about sexism, racism, and other "Western exceptionalism" tropes, the movie to do it is probably You Only Live Twice. I watched that recently and there are parts of it that are downright painful.

:: The two women who hated Goldfinger actually returned, for an appearance with one of the Matts at a "James Bonding" panel discussion at some convention. The idea was for them to watch Casino Royale, and see if their opinions of James Bond changed with a more modern film whose racial and sexual mores aren't firmly rooted in the 1950s. (Yes, Goldfinger came out in 1964, but it was very faithful to the book, which Fleming wrote in the 50s.) This has mixed results. The more outspoke of the two, a woman named Alie, rails on how ugly she thinks Daniel Craig is; they both fail to pick up pretty obvious plot points (Bond hasn't earned his Double-O stripes at the beginning); Alie says that she didn't really like the parkour chase because she didn't know why Bond was chasing the guy; she refers to the scene where Bond comforts Vesper in the shower (when Vesper is almost in shock after witnessing some Bondian violence and brutality) as "the rape-shower scene". And then, it comes out that she didn't even watch the entire movie. That is, to me, kind of insulting, and while it's perfectly OK to not like James Bond, or even hate him, I find it bizarre to bring someone to a podcast who hates the concept the entire podcast is built around. She even says, "This is like you hand me a plate of the best tomatoes on earth, and I hate tomatoes, so I won't get it." I'm thinking, "Why even go on the thing, then?" Again I'm reminded of people who hated the first two Star Wars prequels and yet still dragged themselves to see Episode III opening weekend. Plus, I generally find it a major turn-off to listen to or read commentary on movies by people who completely miss basic plot details.

:: Since I listened to this one most recently: they weren't generally too pleased with Licence to Kill, the second of Timothy Dalton's Bond movies. That bugged me, because this one has always been one of my favorites in the series! The criticism seems to mainly fall into the idea that LTK is too heavily influenced by the action movies of the day, such as Die Hard. I'm not sure that's fair, since Die Hard came out the year before this movie, and I doubt had started to be an influence so early on. In fact, it's likely that LTK was already in production, at least in the pre-production phase, when Die Hard came out. They also mention Miami Vice as an influence, but I'm not sure about that, either – that show's feel was really not terribly evident in LTK, other than the subject matter of Latin American drug running, which was more of a heavy concern at the time of the film's production.

I like LTK a lot because it does send James Bond off the grid a bit. It breaks formula in a lot of pleasing ways, and it does so in ways that often nudge you just a bit to remind you what the formula is. So you have James Bond on his way to stand up at Felix Leiter's wedding, to be told that he can only accompany Felix to capture Franz Sanchez "as an observer"; you have Bond's briefing scene with M replaced by M chewing his ass out and trying to get him to snap back to reality (only to be spurned). Q goes into the field, in what is probably a high point for Q fans in the series (I'm a Q fan, so, yay!), and you have Bond not really all that concerned with investigating a bad guy or figuring out what he's up to. Bond doesn't even have a plan, really – he's just reacting to what he finds, and yet, he proves enormously resourceful, figuring out how to ingratiate himself with Sanchez and get him to kill his own allies.

The Two Matts accuse LTK of being "multiple movies", which doesn't strike me as fair, because the movie isn't about a single through-line. They claim to be confused as to why a couple of "ninjas" show up at one point, but their presence is explained in the very next scene (they're working for Hong Kong's version of the DEA, and at this time, Hong Kong was still a British protectorate, so technically, this guy and Bond are working for the same people), and it makes perfect sense. (Also, there's the whole thing about "ninja" being an all-purpose term for "Asian martial arts practitioner" that's a bit troubling, but we'll leave that for now.) The complaint seems to be that there's this drug dealer, but then there are these "ninjas", and then there's some plot involving stolen Stinger missiles – the movie can't make up its mind what it wants to be about! But that's the wrong way to read this movie. What we have here is a Bond film with a villain who has no big scheme. Sanchez isn't planning his own version of Auric Goldfinger's "Operation Grand Slam", or Max Zorin's "Main Strike", or Orlov's plot to get the West to disarm Europe by detonating an A-bomb on an American Air Force base. Sanchez just wants to be the most powerful drug kingpin in Latin America, and his only plan for those missiles is to use them to make terrorist threats in order to keep American law enforcement off his back. That's it. James Bond is injecting himself into a world that has nothing to do with the usual stuff that generally concerns him, and it makes perfect sense that he's going to encounter a bunch of different folks along the way, each with their own goals and things they're trying to accomplish. I like that there's a certain slightly-disjointed quality to LTK. It works for the story being told.

It also kinda bugs me that the Two Matts didn't comment on the wonderful character moment Q has when he uses one of his own gadgets and then, after having berated Bond in movie after movie for never returning his equipment in one piece, just tosses it aside into some weeds and walks away. I'm sure they noticed, but they didn't mention it! Gahhh!!!

The other complaint is that Licence To Kill is somehow an homage to everything that was popular in movies at that time. You had to have a drug lord movie! You had a fight in a roadhouse, because of Roadhouse! This is all pretty silly. First of all, Roadhouse came out the same year, so it's pretty odd to suggest that the bar fight has any basis in the Swayze movie (which is, by the way, one of the worst things ever). But to rip on Licence for its origins in the cultural trends of its time is deeply odd, since the Bond movies had been doing that for years. Star Wars bursts on the scene? Bond goes to space in Moonraker! Reagan and Thatcher come along and get everybody fired up for the Cold War again? Look! Cold-war subtext galore in For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy! Computers start becoming a big thing? Silicon Valley in A View to a Kill! Russia in Afghanistan? The Living Daylights! And it kept going after Dalton, too: the Soviet Union has fallen apart and left lots of dangerous shit behind? Step right up, GoldenEye! Media moguls become a thing? Tomorrow Never Dies! And so on and so on. This entire line of complaint makes very little sense to me, as it can be applied to probably over half the Bond films ever made, once the films stopped trying to be faithful to the novels from which they took their titles..

:: Let's see, what else? Well, one of the Matts really doesn't care for Pierce Brosnan as Bond. That's certainly justifiable, although it's hard to tell if he really has issues with Brosnan or if he just notices things that he doesn't like about Brosnan because Brosnan's films are so all-over-the-map. Those four movies – Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day – probably encapsulate the most schizophrenic run of movies in the entire series. Each film has some good things in it, but each film also has some gobstoppingly awful things going on as well. Goldeneye makes out the best in their view, and I agree; in fact, the only awful thing about that movie is Eric Serra's terrible electronica score. The next three films are really tough to figure, and I notice that the Two Matts never quite notice that Purvis and Wade, the two screenwriters behind those films (with some help along the way), seem to often have some really great ideas but always fall short in the execution.

TND gives us a villain clearly made for the 1990s, an odd blend of Ted Turner and Bill Gates, but it sends him wildly over the top. Additionally, the movie takes an interesting idea – what if Bond has to reunite with a former lover? – and pretty much does very little of anything with the notion, in favor of the first Bond film to really go whole-hog into the "Big Action Movie" style. My take on TND has always been that it's a movie I enjoy as an action movie, but as a Bond movie, it suffers. It takes a real "blunt force" approach, when the first time Bond meets the bad guy, he basically walks in and says, "I'm a spy and I know that you had that boat sunk and I'm gonna stop you." Erk.

And then there's TWINE, which is a movie that, like LaLD, has a lot of great stuff in it along with some awful stuff. Again, a great idea – what if The Girl is also The Villain? – is bungled, because the producers either didn't have the courage of their convictions or because they didn't realize how good an idea that was, so we ended up with Denise Richards as The Single Worst Bond Girl Ever Ever Ever (And Don't Even Try Citing Tanya Roberts Because I'll Take Her Any Day And Twice On Sundays Over Denise Richards). That, and this movie's pacing is all over the map.

The less said about Die Another Day, the better – although there, too, a great idea is wasted. Here, the idea is, what if Bond is damaged or rendered untrustworthy, so that he has to work his way back into MI6's good graces while some villain or other carries out a master plan? That's a great idea, but the movie buggered it to hell, which is a shame, because that very idea was later done spectacularly well – in the fourth Mission: Impossible movie. (For the record, I love love love the Mission: Impossible series and pray that they keep making them. I even love the one that JJ Abrams directed from the script by Orci&Kurtzman, whom I usually hate as writers.)

:: The topic of pacing comes up a lot, and generally they seem to agree that the films are too slow and take too long. Sometimes that might be the case, but not always, and while I chafe enormously at the notion that OHMSS should have been half-an-hour shorter, I agree strongly that Thunderball's pacing blows. The movie takes forever to get going, and then it gets going for an hour or so, and then it screeches to a halt again with something like half-an-hour still to go.

:: I agree with one of the Two Matts (I think it's Matt Mira): In the Craig films, they are all calling M "Mum". Apparently this is a matter of some contention, though.

:: One awesome thing they do on this podcast is dig up alternate versions of the theme songs, of which there are far more than I ever realized. This type of thing is really fascinating! Since John Barry (and, later, David Arnold) often worked the melodies of the theme songs into the filmscores themselves, it's interesting to note how much different Bond would sound if different songs had been used.

:: They opine that Quantum of Solace works a lot better if viewed immediately after Casino Royale. I'll have to try that. I remember liking QoS more than most, although I, too, found that director's work in the action sequences abysmal.

I think that just about covers all of my thoughts thus far on the James Bonding podcast. I'll probably have more as new installments appear, but production on the podcast has drastically slowed (apparently due to work requirements on the participants), and as of this writing, there's only one installment I haven't heard yet, and I think this post is long enough without hearing me respond to their take on The Man With the Golden Gun. I'm still generally new to the whole podcast thing, and I find that it takes me a while to get through podcasts, because I generally listen to them when I'm driving, and my local drives aren't very long (ten minutes to work, roughly). I drive longer on weekends, on my way to do shopping and run errands, so that's when the bulk of my podcast listening gets done. I certainly can't listen to podcasts while I write – that way, madness lies!

"Let the sky fall...."

On Thanksgiving Day, The Wife and I have a relatively new tradition of going to see a movie together after dinner (and sending The Daughter off packing with my parents). We've done this six of the last seven Thanksgivings, and on three of those, we've been lucky enough to see a James Bond movie. So...what of Skyfall?

It's very, very good. Here are some spoiler-free observations (with more extensive, and heavily spoilerish, observations after the page break):

:: Daniel Craig continues to own the role a little more, each time out. He gives lots of little windows into the soul of James Bond, sometimes with barely perceptible shifts in facial expression. He also does all the little, tiny things that make Bond Bond, and not some run-of-the-mill action hero. The best of these (which you’ve seen if you’ve seen the trailers) comes when he makes a pretty dramatic entrance into a train (the back part of the car he’s entering is falling away behind him, and thank GOD that the trailer didn’t show why the train car is falling away, because that’s one of the movie’s better eye-pops), and before resuming his pursuit of a bad guy, he pauses ever-so-briefly to straighten the cuff of his dress shirt.

:: If you’ve been waiting for years for a Bond movie that is great visually as well as in the script department, this is the one. Skyfall is a gorgeous film, just amazing to look at. There is color everywhere, always wonderfully used (a shot where M stands over the caskets of slain agents is particularly effective, with stark gray and black everywhere constrasting with the crimson stripes of the Union Jack), and...well, I just had a wonderful time looking at this movie.

:: Remember the awful, nearly-impossible-to-follow action sequences in Quantum of Solace? Remember the quick cuts from close-up to close-up with no establishing shots? Remember seeing entire action sequences when you had no idea what was going on until the sequence was over and you got to see who was still standing? Well...you can forget about those. Director Sam Mendes shoots his action scenes so well that it was a revelation. This is a subset of the item above, actually; I never thought that a James Bond movie could look this good. And that’s not to say that the Bond films haven’t looked good before! But this one? Wow. There’s one fight scene, between Bond and an assassin, fairly early on that had my jaw on the floor, so wonderful was the way Mendes composed the shot. Bond on one side, the assassin on the other, fighting in silhouette in front of the shifting display of an enormous LED display screen. And no cuts at all: the only thing Mendes does with his camera in that sequence is a slow close-up. The movie is loaded with sequences that just look amazing.

:: I need to save my observations about the script for the spoiler section, I think, but...the dialogue is great, and this movie does something that’s been hinted at before, but never attempted so openly: it delves into Bond as a character, looking at him personally. More on that in the spoiler sections. This is also a very emotional Bond film -- the most so since my beloved On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

:: The cast is fantastic. Not a single weak link. Javier Bardem and Ralph Fiennes are as great as always. Judi Dench is a rock. Albert Finney in a Bond movie? More, please! And Naomie Harris in a small role (with a delightful revelation at the end) was a treat. And...that young guy who plays the new Q. Liked him a lot.

:: Judging by the rate at which my admiration for Adele has grown over the last year or so (starting a year ago at a level of “Hey, who is this ‘Adele’ person I’ve heard tell about?”), in another year I’ll be covering the walls of my bedroom with posters of Adele and writing “Kelly Loves Adele” on the cover of all my notebooks. I’m just sayin’. I love the song, and I love Adele’s voice. She’s amazing.

:: I’ve seen a few reviews that aren’t terribly enthusiastic about Thomas Newman’s score for Skyfall. David Arnold has been the Bond composer for the last five movies, starting with Tomorrow Never Dies, and he’s done a generally excellent job, but Sam Mendes has a strong working relationship with Newman, so along came Newman for the ride. I thought Newman did a fine job, working the Bond theme and the Skyfall song into the score in nice ways, and he did a lot with chord progressions that strongly suggest the classic John Barry ‘Bond sound’. I like the score a lot.

:: I thought this movie was just terrific. I don’t have perspective yet to put it into any kind of ranking in my personal Bond pantheon, but I can really see it ranking highly. For me, Skyfall is in OHMSS territory.

OK, now the spoilers, below the break. Read at your own risk, if you haven’t seen the film.

"Thy dawn, O master of the world, thy dawn...."

Sometimes I change my mind about movies. Sometimes I don't. Some movies meant a lot to me, years ago, but have dropped away to the point that I've forgotten about them. Other movies, though, have stayed with me forever. One of those is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth James Bond film, which I have regarded since I was a teenager as the best Bond film ever made. In fact, I consider it one of my favorite films of all time, in any genre.

My long examination of the film, with lots of screencaps, after the page break.

John Barry 1933-2011

John Barry, one of the most distinctive film composers of all time, has died.

Barry could often, for me, be a "hit or miss" kind of composer, but when he hit -- which in my experience was more often than not -- oh man, did he hit. He's probably best known for his work on the James Bond series, but Barry had a very long career of composing. He had a seemingly inexhaustible ability to come up with lush, gorgeous melodies, and he had an approach to film scoring that was all his own (and which, sadly, fell out of favor in the 1990s).

I could probably come up with dozens of examples of Barry's music, but I don't have time this morning (I'm writing this before work, because I don't want to go all day without acknowledging his passing), so here are just a few.











Farewell, Mr. Barry.