sufi
lala
My great uncle peter was in a few of them https://www.aveleyman.com/ActorCredit.aspx?ActorID=2414#
He was the first Q
He was the first Q
I feel compelled to applaud this analogy which is, as you know, exactly the kind of analogy I would makethat they were the Athens to the American Rome
I feel compelled to applaud this analogy which is, as you know, exactly the kind of analogy I would make
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..."?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.
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.
This is how good cocaine was in 2002.
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.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.:
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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
The logical iteration of this for the present decade would be that Bond gets into psychedelics. Routinely microdosing psilocybin and rhapsodizing about DMT.
That's a thing I've said to people so many times.Bond is to Britain what westerns and Clint films are to Americans.
See, Craner gets it. I pick these people and characters for a reason. Jean-Claude Van Damme was another.It's like James Spader, though, there are deeper desires and anxieties at work...