Bond, James Bond

Who was the best Bond?

  • Total voters
    8
  • Poll closed .
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
craner said:
that they were the Athens to the American Rome
Click to expand...
I feel compelled to applaud this analogy which is, as you know, exactly the kind of analogy I would make

I guess that would make Demosthenes the Athenian James Bond

instead of gadgets, guns and suavity he defeats enemies with the awesome power of his oratory skills

he has a Spartan sidekick who only speaks in laconic action movie one-liners
 
  • Like
Reactions: sus
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
my boring and predictable opinion about James Bond is that John Le Carre is a million times better than Ian Fleming

give me more everything is shades of grey existential dourness, less declining empire fantasia
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
craner said:
Have you watched the Piers Brosnan ones lately? It's amazing that these films were hailed at the time as being a return to the "good" Bond films of the 1960s because they are probably the worst films ever made. I can only put it down to that ludicrous, cocaine-fueled overconfidence and narcissism of the mid/late 1990s British pop culture. It's like the inferiority complex of the Connery films further congealed, transforming into toxic slime.
Click to expand...
Oh god, remember when they called Denise Richards's character "Christmas Jones" purely for the sake of having Brosnan say "I thought Christmas only comes once a year..."?

I mean I love puns, but fucking hell.
 
Last edited:
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
I actually wrote about this, and had Bond in mind too, at the end of my recent (brilliant) essay on Powell and Pressburger, which nobody has read, viz.:

By 1946, Great Britain was shrinking. There was no money left to maintain tangible commitments and what was really left was image, fantasy and cultural influence. This seeped into the fabric of Powell and Pressburger’s films. Black Narcissus was a meditation on imperial collapse and Gone to Earth presented an image of society undermined by its own moral and social strictures. The finale of Powell and Pressburger’s gorgeous existential fantasy A Matter of Life and Death (1946) served as an explicit recognition of the eclipse of British power relative to America’s rise. In the film, a celestial tribunal is established to decide the fate of British pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) and Bostonian radio operator June (Kim Hunter), whose love affair hangs in the balance following a clerical error by Heaven’s Recording Angel (Kathleen Byron). The legal arguments presented by English doctor Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey) and American revolutionary martyr Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey) drift from the case at hand to the relative merits of British and American democracy and culture. The thrusts and counter thrusts are tart and telling: Farlan recounts the crimes of the British Empire, Reeves enlists the glories of English literature; Farlan plays a listless English test match commentary, Reeves replies with a raucous swing band. Nobody wins this exchange: it is only resolved by love, in favour of connection and cooperation. The propaganda purpose of this beautiful film was to foster Anglo-American partnership, but in the process it betrayed the insecurity felt by the British in their post-war relationship with America.

The radiant triumph of The Red Shoes in 1948 — a distraction, if anything, from bankruptcy, rationing and crumbling prestige, and a profoundly European film anyway — was followed by the insular and pessimistic drama The Small Back Room (1950). The story of Sammy Rice (David Farrar), a scientist who wears an artificial foot following a failed bomb disposal operation and battles physical and psychological pain with whiskey, is shot in brooding monochrome, and largely takes place in dark, constricted lodgings, jazz clubs, dingy laboratories, tube trains, bare offices that desperately need decorating and Whitehall meeting rooms disturbed by the noise of building work. The tone is insular, claustrophobic and anguished: a world of breakdown, decadence, paranoia and dissolution. As a post-war war film it is startling in its cynicism and lack of illusions: key decisions about weapons programmes are ensnared in departmental vendettas and petty personality clashes fought out in hostile committee meetings (a world Churchill would have recognised). Rice’s relationship with his secretary Susan (Kathleen Byron) is fraught with misunderstanding, alienation, jealousy and suppressed violence. On the edge of this is the new cultural climate of post-war urban Britain, gestating during war-time but fully forming by 1950, a world framed by Kray Twins ultra-violence, Tony Hancock dankness and Diana Dors orgies. The Small Back Room is subtly suffused with this emerging atmosphere, a compelling and modern mire of existential despair and imported kicks, suicidal drinking and promiscuous nightlife, a world that would finally find apotheosis and implosion in Powell’s own 1960 horror masterpiece Peeping Tom.
Click to expand...

guerrapittura.wordpress.com

Alliance of Nations: Powell and Pressburger on Great Britain

Great Britain, as it emerged in the years between the Act of Union and the accession of Queen Victoria, and as it exists today, must be seen both as one relatively new nation, and as an alliance of…
guerrapittura.wordpress.com guerrapittura.wordpress.com
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
craner said:
I actually wrote about this, and had Bond in mind too, at the end of my recent (brilliant) essay on Powell and Pressburger, which nobody has read, viz.:
guerrapittura.wordpress.com

Alliance of Nations: Powell and Pressburger on Great Britain

Great Britain, as it emerged in the years between the Act of Union and the accession of Queen Victoria, and as it exists today, must be seen both as one relatively new nation, and as an alliance of…
guerrapittura.wordpress.com guerrapittura.wordpress.com
Click to expand...
I read at least the first half of it! Thought it was very good but almost more like a dissertation than an essay. I should read the rest of it at some point.
 
Last edited:
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
it's Connery. it's always been Connery, and can only be Connery. he set the mold followed by others, all of whom arguably play it as more mainstream movie stars and are far less cool (Roger Moore retains a bit of the Connery cool but still).

early Bond films are like a parallel universe "mad men", of a different culture and made in real time as opposed to 50 years later.
 
Last edited:
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Bond is to Britain what westerns and Clint films are to Americans.

For Bond the entire world (in a collapsing empire) is the frontier. Chaos. In westerns, it’s the prairie. Both motifs bring order to chaos, often through chaotic, ultra-violent action. Bond represents incorruptible allegiance to nation state and monarchy, plus rugged individualism and mistrust of private equity owning entrepreneurs, but he’s never going to have a northern English accent or speak West Country and order a pint of snake-bite. All foreigners, barring that CIA motif, are to be weighed up as threats.

In westerns, the local sherif or land owner is usually weak or corrupt, which requires a stoic hyper-individualised figure like Clint to develop order from chaos. Manifest destiny. The larger world rarely features. One is suave, evidenced by drink choice and evening attire, the other orders whiskey immediately after 3 months riding a horse with fuck all water. Same archetype, slightly different myths and settings. It’s only as the US becomes the empire crown holder that films like In Like Flint and the later Bourne franchise appear.

Gimp note - early Bond films have a voice dub actor who must’ve done thousands of films. You’ll hear him if you listen. Cunt is everywhere.

Lunch break over.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Mr. Tea said:
The logical iteration of this for the present decade would be that Bond gets into psychedelics. Routinely microdosing psilocybin and rhapsodizing about DMT.
Click to expand...

Would be cool if they retconned Die Another Day and revealed it was Bond tripping his nuts off having been dosed by an evil venture capitalist.
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Bond is never going to dose himself. Dosing others, covertly, not a problem.

Bond is a killer, not a micro dosee. Booze is his poison. Booze is distilled strength even when pissed right up.

Now I’m thinking of Bond hiding under a table, crying publicly in a restaurant, because his taxi full of dead ghouls and victims just pulled up. @Corpsey you’ve put Bond in a secure hospital ward.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
And yet, while Britain's last great act was holding off the Nazi menace in Europe, by that point it was already too late. America had ballooned, eclipsing mom. There was no *way* she'd listen now to anything short of self-admitted deathbed words, a life lesson delivered with the circumspect of no more lessons. Britain's influence lingers in pre-modern influence and childrearing, on not just America but all her colonies—the flow of the universe, channeled through successive entities taking cues from forebears.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top