Bond, James Bond

Who was the best Bond?


  • Total voters
    8
  • Poll closed .

william kent

Well-known member
Who was the best?

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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Gotta be Moore, if only for that eyebrow and that endearing story about signing his autograph for that little boy.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Heinz or Crosse and Blackwell baked beans? You decide.

It's like James Spader, though, there are deeper desires and anxieties at work in this rolling obsession with James Bond: it's all about post-imperial British identity, what it means and how it feels to be British in the modern world. It's a bit of an embarrassing spectacle. This is why the Italian Eurospy rip-offs are so much better: they are free from all of that baggage, purely shameless exploitation, a gleeful exploration of the freedoms of the post-war West.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I don't give a fuck about James Bond as an institution. I really liked Casino Royale. All the Craig ones since have been let downs, especially the last one which was terrible.

American spy films that echo Bond (Bourne, Mission Impossible) are also infused with this sense of guilt and anxiety.

I suppose it's like how modern Batman films have to take him really really seriously as a character because it's no longer acceptable to just enjoy a man in a bat suit fighting crime. Except Bond is even more in need of this guilt aspect cos he was just going around shagging women and killing foreigners.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I can't remember if bond was so embarrassing before he became associated with Alan partridge in my head. It seems like such a partridge/Clarkson thing to be into now.

But actually those films have got huge mainstream appeal. Da kidz love Bond.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
The Bond films are all about the pathetic delusion that the British conjured up in the 1950s, once it was clear that they had been superseded as a global power: that they were the Athens to the American Rome. Tied up with this was a sense of implicit superiority, no matter what the realities of power and culture actually said. That's why the early Bond films (in particular) are anti-American but also crippled with insecurity about America. It's always interesting the note how CIA agents are depicted in these films: friendly rivals, efficient and well-resourced but lacking style, humour and inventive gadgets. The Bond films fulfilled a need to deflect the crushing disappointment and shame of very steep decline in British prestige and power. You could say the films are haunted by Suez and try to bury it in this fantasy of British style, ingenuity and sly omniscience. We are still running the world but nobody else knows it.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The Bond films are all about the pathetic delusion that the British conjured up in the 1950s, once it was clear that they had been superseded as a global power: that they were the Athens to the American Rome. Tied up with this was a sense of implicit superiority, no matter what the realities of power and culture actually said. That's why the early Bond films (in particular) are anti-American but also crippled with insecurity about America. It's always interesting the note how CIA agents are depicted in these films: friendly rivals, efficient and well-resourced but lacking style, humour and inventive gadgets. The Bond films fulfilled a need to deflect the crushing disappointment and shame of very steep decline in British prestige and power. You could say the films are haunted by Suez and try to bury it in this fantasy of British style, ingenuity and sly omniscience. We are still running the world but nobody else knows it.
I knew we could count on you for some decent input on this thread.
 
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