He was around from before I was born and will probably survive the coming Iceless Age. All of my life he has been there in times of crisis and conquest; he is the red-blooded American male's last chance. His ability to morph to suit each decade's needs, growing older, then younger, then old again, and if needed, fake his own death, yet no actor who has played him has yet to die, unless you count David Niven, and I don't. He's immortal yet continually imperiled; through him we learn the best ways to create diversions so you can steal from your enemy, and how to never trust pretty women. He is Bond, James Bond; James like my own father, James Kuersten.
My late dad. My dad, like most dads, loved him, at least in Sean Connery form. I grew up watching those early ones with my dad, thrilled with all I did not understand. I feel close to him now, through Bond and so I dedicate this post to his memory. Father's Day shit. If you get that free trial of EPIX, there's an all-day marathon.
Following a handful of similar but deceptively elaborate plots that seem to bleed across each other (making each particular film hard to remember), Bond films have always rewarded repeat viewing; as we change from children to men our perceptions of the movies change, too, and new fissures of interest are sussed out. As kids the car chases are ripping, the girls hot, the plot incomprehensible; as adults in the digital age, the atomic bomb hijacking minutiae and intrigue grow fascinating in ways that used to be boring - the giant computers and tracking devices are like windows into a forgotten field of technology, like finding the distant relatives of Skynet. In THUNDERBALL (1965) for example it takes about five minutes of real cinematic time to throw a camouflage net over one lousy sunken NATO bomber. Another five to steal a missile and swim it over to an underwater cavern. Now that I'm an adult lost in a world of whiplash editing and every third climax needs to have the world on the brink of extinction and six girls abducted in a closet for us to feel any sense of urgency, I love that the early Bond films weren't about saving the world but stealing code machines from embassies and foiling relatively un-apocalyptic sabotage-blackmail schemes, trying to keep one's wits about them while a seductive Russian spy claims to love you. On pan and scan the copious ocean footage was hard to follow. Now, on the anamorphic, it's a poem.
The widescreen enhanced HD look lifts even mediocre Bonds, for they're generally artful with widescreen deep depth travelogue on-location compositions. We don't have to go now, to Istanbul or Osaka or Las Vegas, we just send Bond, and reach into the screen like a combo diorama and dog door. But Bond needs to go, on our and the world's behalf, even if the world he saves no longer even exists. He takes the risks and endures the long flights and torture and performance anxiety, so we, as men, grant him the good life, the trappings of wealth and power, because he's in the zone. Imagine if your taste buds were so heightened you couldn't even drink champagne unless it was perfectly chilled and just the right vintage and now it becomes clear why we need Bond. A license to kill requires senses so acute you can smell a KGB double agent from a half mile away. Like Roderick Usher, at night Bond can hear the rats scurrying through the walls, or find a bug in his hotel room in under 30 seconds. That's a steep price, the constant upkeep of the body, training, being hit and teased; if we don't have his luck, or way with the ladies, or cat-like reflexes, or perfect hair, we can't begrudge him because he risks his life daily. We can always watch the movies if we need to feel proxy danger, or luxury. But which came first: our impoverishment creating a need for escapism or escapism being used to make us impoverished, making complacent and unquestioning, a kind of slow-motion sleight of hand diversionary tactic?
My first memories of Bond: falling in love with the very kinky edge of THUNDERBALL (Largo beating the naked heaving backside of kept woman Domino [Claudine Auger]) as a little sadomasochistic seven year-old. To me, that was Bond in the 70s, in a wet suit, shooting at a shark or a bad guy with his harpoon gun while a hot girl with a cute mole lounged in the white sand at his side. This was the time of Roger Moore's SPY WHO LOVED ME, which was a colossal hit my parents felt I was too young to see. Then, in the 80s, when sexual harassment was becoming a thing we rented them all from the newly opened video stores at the mall (or from the back room of appliance stores) and saw them over and over, as reminders of the power we were once going to inherit as men, allegedly. My best buddy Alan and I saw them all (MOONRAKER the first one I actually saw in the theater) and when FOR YOUR EYES ONLY came to cable, we must have seen it 500 times. Gradually we learned to appreciate Connery over Moore. The TV game show handsomeness and self-reflexive winking of Moore was reassuring but he lacked the muscularity of Connery, and even Dalton and Lazenby looked like they could handle themselves in a fight. Moore's punches looked like they would hurt only himself, though not in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY! In MOONRAKER, OCTOPUSSY, and VIEW TO A KILL though, he seemed far too old to not be creepy when he gets it on with a girl young enough to be his daughter. He didn't smoke and seldom even drank by then. I had yet to start either vice.
In the 90s, my whole relationship to Bond changed when our friend Jen (not her real name) brought a rented copy of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE over to our loft one foreboding Friday night in 1997 -- year of my party boy apocalypse. I was so hungover from the night before it carried through the day and into the night - a blackout of shame and regret and paranoia and terror of the idea of going out again, into the night and the swankiness of another expensive bar (we were a hard-partying, very fancy bunch). Once I saw the video rental bag in her hands, I knew it would all be OK. I absorbed the film fully, enraptured in ways I never would have been without her guidance via Lazenby. It was a special event, one we tried to duplicate again and again after, but it never worked, not unlike ecstasy itself, that first big breakthrough is so good you pine for it with a broken heart forever after, never to recapture more than its stale reflection. Meanwhile Brosnan was entrenched, a perfect choice for the Metrosexual Age.
And so Bond became something to drink to, and who could make hangovers or sobriety disappear in equal measure. This was the era of the TNT Bond marathons, so important in staving off looming male impotence they were even cited by Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY. Pierce Brosnan had taken over after a two film stint by Timothy Dalton, who at the time had some big shoes to fill and people weren't prepared for a Bond who could act, or had the physicality and grace to appear like he could actually do the stuff Bond did and still seem actorly and a little wicked. We had to adjust. And then we disliked that he quit on us.
By then the issue of sexism was too pronounced to ignore, so they cast Judi Dench as M, and made post-modern wisecracks about Bond's dinosaur patriarchal cluelessness. But dismissing Bond movies as sexist is a bit like dismissing MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE as alarmist. The truth is that being a spy has always been about sex (NOTORIOUS, for example), about being a whore for your country, a master of using sex to convince vulnerable people to confide secrets, then leaving them to be killed while you pursue your quarry, keeping your dance card open for the next girl, who can maybe help you kill, who is maybe a spy too, which means both of you are pretending to love each other, so well you might even be in love for real and not know it. So unless a man is super confident, irresistible to women, inordinately lucky, able to keep one hand on his trigger as well as hers even unto the point of orgasm, as well as a great shot and dogged in determination to chase down his man, even at the risk of massive destruction (all those trashed and probably uninsured third world villages), and the death of the girl you just 'turned', that man doesn't stand a chance.
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| Save the jokes, Mr. Bond |
How does this translate to genuine cinema thrills? One thing I've been studying of late is the importance of tick-tockality or Hawksian/Carpenterian cohesive momentum, which involves minimum time lapse edits and very little cross-cutting to other players to create a sense of immanent danger around our main character, creating a space where time elapses normally and we stay with the same character rather than bouncing around all over a plot, this allows for a deeper connection and sense something might actually be at stake. The first six films are the best for best (Brosnan's GOLDENEYE the worst).
CHRONOLOGY / ACIDEMIC GREATNESS RATING:
DR. NO
1962 - ****
Everything is new and fresh. There's no vocal to the opening theme song/credits, and Bond actually acts in a cumulative manner, super cool most of the time, but unnerved by a midnight tarantula visit, and around 3/4 of the way through he starts to really exhibit the stress of continually fending off attacks on his life. His only gadget is a new hand gun and he shoots and kills a man point blank who has an empty pistol, and nearly breaks a girl's arm for taking his picture. That's what I miss most in the new Bonds, that kind of cold ruthlessness. He's the fire you use to fight fire with.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
1963 - ****
These first four were each released a year apart, capturing a very successful momentum marked by an adherence to tick-tockality of an almost Hawksian level and low stakes games (missile toppling, codex triple crosses, gold irradiation) that are more believable and therefore more engaging. Nothing like a sanely motivated super villain to make the proceedings feel actually possible, like we're learning a bit of what goes on in the world that the media never gets wind of.
GOLDFINGER
1964 - ***1/2
This movie used to annoy me because everyone talked about how it was the best Bond but I thought it was the most illogical. Goldfinger kills a mobster who wants to back out of the deal by crushing him up in a big Lincoln, along with a fortune in gold. Odd Job brings the crushed block back to the horse ranch and then needs to 'extract' his gold. Dude, talk about a waste of time and effort all just to show a car getting crushed into a block. Just shoot him! My dad loved that scene and talked about the 'great piece of music, horns blaring, I didn't think so, and thought Bond (even though I too was drinking mint juleps) a real snob in this, lecturing heads of MI6 on an the "indifferently blended" whiskey they serve him.
THUNDERBALL
1965 - ***1/2 (see above)
Even with the new anamorphic letting us appreciate the underwater stuff, it still stops the picture dead more than once, as does the dumb shit like the spine stretcher and jet pack. Nonetheless, the tick-tock momentum is still in effect, mostly, with a great evil spy lady.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
1967 - ****
Second to DR. NO and the first film as far as tick-tockality -especially the entire first half which seems to unfold almost in real time, ramping up suspense in knowing who to trust as Bond navigates Tokyo, and the difficulty in separating which spies are on his side vs. the other when everyone's playing so close to the vest.
1969 ****
The idea to make George Lazenby's first appearance 'the one where he gets married' is a bit of a misstep. It makes him seem weak. But the whole down the Alps chase is all so well done it achieves greatness (when Bond's pursuers prove dogged and resourceful, the chase can last half the movie). Lazenby's a bit of a cypher but that works when he goes undercover as a snobby genealogist sent up to Kojack's window on the world. He needs to be a bit of a blank slate to achieve such ease with impersonations. That said, Bond in a romantic montage? Emma Peel and Satchel Mouth or no, it's just not done.
1971 - ***
The song is over quick. The intro finds Bond tracking Blofeldt clones played by Charles RIDE WITH THE DEVIL Gray; Connery's back and looks great, rested, but the 70s has begun. Bond gets slugged from behind with the regularity of old Jim Rockford. And the two mincing coded gay assassins are kind of, what is the word, antiquated?
1973 - **3/4
One of the weakest climaxes ever, just voodoo, tarot readings, piranhas, gators, and Yaphet Kotto as a heroin distributor named Kananga inflating like a balloon, though before then there's a great boat chase my brother and I used to watch endlessly (the second thing we ever taped), and we still talk like the tobacco-chewing Louisiana sheriff ("what are you some kinda doomsday machine, boy?") And the Bond girl is interesting as she's a psychic whose powers will disappear once she loses her virginity, a pleasure Kananga intended for himself. Heh heh.
1974 - * /?
I've never really given this a full chance, too boring - I mean this rich killer constructs an elaborate funhouse just to chase Bond through so he can use a golden gun? A little effort, people! Christopher Lee is the only redeeming feature. Plays like a long episode of FANTASY ISLAND rather than a real Bond movie. (Or so I dimly remember) and not just because of Herve Villachez.
1977 - ***1/2
The producers realized they should take their time rather than deliver another glorified TV movie, and the result is easily the best of the Moore Bonds. I was eleven years old when THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was in theaters and it was an aching sweet thorn in my side. It was PG but my parents figured Bond was too risque for us. The cool kids and parents all went on dates with their wives or others to see it and then came back and told us all about that underwater car and Jaws. Torture. I imagined Jaws with a monocle and a Prussian hat and black gloves, like the one-armed prefect of police in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. I was disappointed he just looked like a big dumb German farmer. He's a novelty and a fine comic actor, but not menacing. Now when I see it I'm constantly fascinated by how my childhood imagination of this film, based on word of mouth recounting, as was the style of the pre-internet, pre-VCR, pre-cable time, differed. But that doesn't mean it's not great. And Moore's perfectly tailored.
1979 - *1/2
Rated G. Am I right? Now my parents had no more excuses. I missed the party, though. Bond seems very old and tired suddenly, like he should be home watering his garden not being spun around in a G-force simulator or pretending he could punch a grill like Jaws' and not break his hand. The girls he meets and seduces seem like Valium-zonked call girls, paid to pretend he's a spy, tagging along as he goes from room to room, uncovering little clues his butler sets up around the mansion. It's G so Bond doesn't even carry his own gun, Drax has to supply him with hunting rifles and lasers as needed. He doesn't even drink or smoke. Not even tea.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME had been such a huge hit, so popular, the underwater sports car thing so cool, so perfectly in tune with the vibes of JAWS and STAR WARS, that for the follow-up they made the mistake of trying to deliver more of the same instead of doing something new. Now instead of a car that becomes a submarine, it's a gondola that becomes a comical parade float. Richard Kiehl returns as Jaws and gets a Pippi Longstocking girlfriend and becomes a good guy, like Arnold in T2. The biggest crime, so rare in any Bond movie, is that the filmmakers and Moore presume our love and laughter without bothering to really earn it. And Drax is a dreadfully dull villain. The girls are all in that later 70s mode, wearing dowdy old peasant blouses or LOGAN'S RUN and ZARDOZ cast-offs, waiting around for old rich dudes to just start making out with them, like WESTWORLD for guys with British spy fantasies. Dumb sight gags abound and repeat: an old, coughing man sees a floating coffin and throws his cigarette away; the password to get into the secret lab is the notes from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. That's just off the top of my head.
Thank god the 70s were almost over, and all the variety show schtick that resurged from its watery Vaudeville grave would descend once more. With cable there was no longer a need to appeal to the elderly, children, and everyone in between all at the same time. Rated G would soon mean strictly for children. But it's still the 70s here and we have the sort of movie where we get a tour through a priceless antique glass exhibit and know in a few scenes it's gonna be trashed in a moving brawl. And bouncy music plays after every lame innuendo, and Kiehl survives everything with a flustered genial slow burn like Wiley Coyote after his latest trap backfires. Still there's one great moment: a slow Carnivale clown stalk that in its weird shambling silence recalls the previous year's HALLOWEEN!
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
1981 - ***1/2
Return to basics! Smart move, Mr. Bond. A very welcome resurfacing of one of the lost Bond archetypes, the ultimately good-natured rogue with criminal connections who helps Bond against a bigger threat, here played with robustness by Topal.
OCTOPUSSY
1983 - *
Louis Jordan looks way too old and tired to be a convincing villain. Was he cast to make Moore seem vibrant? More than anything, Jordan seems like he just wants a nap, not world domination. All the lessons of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY are forgotten. Maude Adams was hot in Playboy but dull as dishwater as the titular circus spymaster. Half the film is wandering around some Turkish harem, like Bond and Jordan are two rich old sex tourists. The other half is incoherent nonsense on a circus train with a cache of pilfered Russian baubles, and some swipes from the Hitchcock playbook, fumbled.
A VIEW TO A KILL
1985 - **
Long considered the worst Bond, I'd argue it's only the third worst - mainly since Christopher Walken is great as the bad guy, and aquamarine-eyed Tanya Roberts is in it, over whom I have always been delirious (I was of the right impressionable age when she had a Playboy cover spread with photos from BEASTMASTER in 1982) And there's a zeppelin!
1987 ***1/2
LICENSE TO KILL
1989 - ***
Timothy Dalton's Bond has been slighted over the years but we've forgotten why now (at the time we felt he betrayed us by walking away after only two films) but his time has come. DAYLIGHTS especially is a stripped down Bond with real and strange escapes and KILL makes hilarious use of Wayne Newton as a preacher using yoga as a kind of mind control for a MOONRAKER style conglomerate of hottie New Age chicks and there's a great down the mountain tumbling car wreck climax.
GOLDENEYE
1995 - ***1/2
After a lengthy absence, a new Bond for a new decade. Famke Janssen makes her mark though her dumb name 'Onnatop' demeans an otherwise furious and crazy (and aptly named) Russian assassin who gets off on machine gunning and spine crushing. Pierce Brosnan makes his debut and he's devastatingly handsome with mussed dark black hair that he inherited from his predecessor Dalton. We also see the first 'hacker' in Bondland (played by Alan Cummings). After being used to Russians or SPECTRE agents in lab coats and ties we've got lollipop sucking nerds as legitimate threats to national security and use of EMPs (Electro-Magnetic Pulses) and Joe Don Baker is a believable CIA agent, bringing grumpy ex-military crime drama resonance to where it belongs. Not a lot of forward tick-tockality though. Lots of scenes inside the KGB as it's undermined by a villainous general, and the final girl wandering around a remote spy satellite control station enduring the juvenile antics of Alan Cumming. There are some actually witty lines ("That's close enough" Bond says after Onnatop jumps up and starts climbing on him) and I dig that the bad guys are colorfully diverse, allowed to be human, and witty rather than simply cardboard megalomaniacs.
1997 **1/2
This used to be one of my favorites, saw it in the theater with one of my aforementioned Faxy friends whilst getting sober, and when you're getting sober you really feel the action deep in your gut. But nowadays parts of it irk me: Jonathan Pryce--great in BRAZIL--is a colossal bore (and sports terrible socalist dentistry) as a prissy media mogul in the Charles Foster Kane- Rupert Murdoch vein, crafting a war with China for the nefarious purpose of filling a 24 hour news channel (which is why the paranoid amongst us know CNN cover the missing Beijing airliner so much). Pretty clever, but sunk by Pryce's way-too-pleased with himself delivery as he says awful things like "what kind of havoc shall we create with the world today?" and "I'm having fun with my headlines." At least he says, "Thank you," to his aides instead of just shooting them. Meanwhile, as if Moneypenny on her own wasn't bad enough, Dench's M delivers terrible puns like "you always were cunning linguist, James, (and Q looks so old and rheumy he should have retired 20 years ago) and clunky expository dialogue abounds. For another thing, there's almost no female hotness: TV's Lois and Clark star Terri Hatcher is the first babe--the one who always dies early--as the way-too-fussed-over rich bitch lavender wife of Jonathan Pryce's hissy media mogul villain. She's sexy if you think Brody's wife in HOMELAND is sexy. I don't, but mainly because they both remind me of the same ex-colleague - j'recuse! Michelle Yeoh is great in the fight scenes but speaking perfect English distracts her from adding any kind of sexuality (though we fans knew her and loved her already from SUPERCOP 2). She's a lithe dancer-action star, not a buxom love machine. When she rubs noses with Brosnan, there's no question who spent the longest time in hair and makeup.
1999 ***
My problem with Brosnan in this one mainly is the hair, and the Panama suits, it being the 90s only excuses so much. I saw this opening weekend with my very first AA sponsor when I was counting days. I loved it! But if your hair is still perfectly moussed after a knockout brawl, Mr. Bond, I would suggest you avoid work that requires such regular proximity to open flames.
But this is also the one with Sophie Marceau as the deliciously evil villainess. Her stylist is without peer. Playing a Turkish-Serbo-whatever national oil baroness, Marceau ably melds styles from the west, east, north, south, and middle into a fabulous modernist wardrobe, my favorite since Jane Birkin's in SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE! And I don't care, Denise Richards IS a believable atomic scientist. She's so hot she should be handled with specially insulated tongs.
2002 - ***
Halle Berry tends to be fierce only in dramas, and mousy in action films Too much 'good' acting only gets in the way of a Bond film. But there's a good plot about genetic alterations that turn a North Korean army brat into a posh Brit using conflict diamonds and reflected sunlight in a bid to invade South Korea before his father finds out. There's a nice visit to the Ice Hotel, and a sword fight that tracks all around a posh British fencing club, providing such a nicely emblematic mix of privilege and destruction that not even Madonna's leaden presence, or the cliche'd use of the Clash's "London Calling" can detract from its splendor. And Miranda Frost looks great in fencing gear!
2006 - ****
I was blown away at first sight--Craig is easily the best Bond and most believable killer since Connery. With those haunted sunken eyes and scowl, he seems genuinely dangerous and competent. But as an 'origin' story, CASINO ROYALE becomes harder to enjoy as years pass, the way it pains me to watch young teenagers make the same mistakes over and over. I can't save him myself)=. At least we learn why he would never trust a dame from now on (Eva Green redefines sultry as British treasury agent Vesper Lynde). "Does everyone have a tell." - Everyone has a tell - everyone except you, which is why you suck at poker, Erich, unless you're freshly unlucky at love. This also has a bit of ball torture which delivers 50 years later or whenever on the threat of Goldfinger's space age gem-cutting laser and makes us fear for his future erections (did it leave him sterile which is why he never worries about protection?) Never trust a girl who doesn't have a tell. Now it pains me to imagine him getting it on with Vesper after his balls are smashed numerous times by the evil Le Chifre.
2008 - **
This might have been a good Bond movie once, but some insecure editor whittled it down, shortening nearly every shot and cross-cutting like coked-up Eisenstein between bullfights, races, post-modern operas, and rich men and women taking off their coats at a coat check. There's also some vile sexual assault undercurrents and political disillusionment very out of place for a Bond film. Disillusionment with the system and our hatred for sexual violence is why we turn to Bond! We don't need to hear there's no use fighting evil! Disheartening. Don't ask me to pick between RIO BRAVO and THE SEARCHERS because it will be RIO BRAVO every time. Every fucking time.
On the other hand, the whole 'who can you trust even after they show you the right code signs' harkens back to the Connerys as does the idea that a pretty girl who invites you into her car might be CIA, SPECTRE, KGB or anyone else pumping you for information to bring back to their handler, so don't presume anything even after you sleep with them. Lastly, the post-internet and cell phone age has changed Bond in ways both good and bad, but inexorable, and the film itself seems to miss the old ways. I don't mind the ping pong around the globe bit because that's the way the internet age is - information flows so fast it's at the risk of outrunning our boy if he doesn't keep it at Jan De Bont levels.
That said, part of the escapism of Bond is to imagine that actual smart, brave, good people are at the helm of our intelligence organization. Here both the British government and American CIA are hopelessly corrupt, in bed with 'Quantum' a world conglomerate of third world puppet topplers. But there is a lot of fire in the climax, and a great airplane through a canyon chase. This is the movie where I first fell in love with Gemma Arterton, even if she does have only five fingers on each hand (she was born with six!) but of course she gets three scenes before she's offed cruelly to make yet another harsh un-Bondian statement.
SKYFALL
2012 - ****
In SKYFALL there's not even enough time for a second, nonkilled Bond babe; M and Javier Bardem are the closest we come. It's a shrinking network, but the return to the old ways pined for in QUANTUM are unleashed with a cathartic vengeance. Try not to muck it up, 007. Things are looking good for the next film, with a new M and a new Q, both of whom seem well-suited to the post-cheeky age.
Non Salzman-Broccoli Bonds:
CASINO ROYALE - *
NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN *
One's a lame overdone 'everything but the chicken soup' disaster, the other a remake of THUNDERBALL with age and urine jokes, a balding Bond, and Kim Basinger at peak lusciousness (she is shown in wet negligees and almost sold at auction to a slavering Arab). Stravinsky's Rite of Spring plays on the soundtrack and James Fox is a very cranky boss who only cares about budgets and reigning in Bond's drinking. Similarly cliched and idiotic plotlines abound and Klaus Brandauer, a fine actor in his own right, ranks with Louis Jordan as far as looking too old, tired, and generic as the villain, and the idea of putting video arcades into the ritzy parties, casinos, and hotel lobbies is really ill-conceived. Both films are worth seeing once though, just to realize how many mistakes the main Bond films avoid as they blast their way to boffo box office. Reign on, Cubby and Harry, and James. The future may be written on silicone chips, but the credits are still on bouncing silhouettes of guns and girls. And we'll always need a real man to kill the rich, even in our dreams.
SEE ALSO:
The Amnesiac Bond (Bright Lights 11/11/08)
"One of the many things which makes Daniel Craig the best Bond since Connery is his pain. He’s aware of the lost sense of intimacy that came with having license to both kill and “be a sexual heel.” Connery’s Bond was always civil to the bad guys until they killed a friend or a girl of his, then his steely eyes hardened and the insults started flowing; underneath the tough veneer he genuinely cared. The later Bonds by contrast put up a caringveneer in addition to a tough veneer; they were all veneer. Daniel Craig comes to us with all veneers smashed; the pain of crushed innocence and the rage of a wounded orphan child in his big deep gray eyes, the “non-venerial” toughness returned. "
James Bond Rides the Strip (Bright Lights 1/21/07)
"The nifty thing about this new Bond approach is the way it remains conscious of the Moebius strip upon which it runs. It is aware, for example, that the entire cycle of Bond films–which stretch from the Cold War straight through to the future–actually involve the surpassing of technologies in real life that were created in the older films as sci fi devices. Consider for example the “full circle” of our post-modern nostalgia over the gigantic “futuristic” computers of the old Bond villains like Dr. No–with their reel-to-reel computer tapes and punch cards–which we watch on plasma screens from super deluxe DVD sets or ultra slim laptop computers. And now Bond is actually younger and the futuristic gadgets he thought were so nifty have not just been invented but have been over-promoted to the point of un-coolness, and promptly forgotten, and his boss has become a woman, and suddenly he is newly promoted to the job he’s had all his life, and he is ready to meet the only woman he will ever love… for the SECOND TIME!"
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