the December King said:
Seconded. I think that Live and Let Die is my favourite. A colleague and I set out to watch all 28 Bond films chronologically. Even though it took us over a year to find the time (about a flick every 2 - 3 weeks), Live and Let Die stands out to me as the most exciting one.
Not that I don't see other excellent cases, moments and examples presented here, mind you, it's just my personal experience. And so far I've enjoyed Daniel Craig's portrayal of Bond- Skyfall is my second pick- but that has more to do with exploring his relationships with women.
I get that, but a lot of people tell me that; "Oh, but Craig is the thinking person's Bond ..." and I refuse to accept it's just
me how insincere that sounds, or that I'm not
smart enough to process something more than Jaws biting a person to death or a boat chase scene through the Bayou with a stereotypically stupid Southerner sheriff (try saying that 10 times).
I refuse to accept how Christopher Walken as a memorable villain in a
View to a Kill is 'unthoughtful', or how Craig story-arc ala
bringing back SPECTRE is any more thoughtful, especially considering the delightful realism of the Moore era villains with real goals that weren't simply 'take over the world'. The plot cherry of admitedly blaxploitation-y Kananga's goal of controlling the flow of cocaine (early 70s, people) seems a
hell of a lot more thoughtful (ironically) than any of the mediocre plot related garbage of Craig saying; "SPECTRE is a thing again."
You don't need SPECTRE ... you just need to head up Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank ... done, consider the world
taken over. You don't even need to gun down intelligence agents or anything illegal. Ironically half of the villains Bond faces could be seen as the people who are taking down the SPECTRE Bond ultimately
defends. So when you get movies like Quantum of Solace it strikes me as not only threadbare, but; "How cn we make villains as villainous as possible while we ignore the obvious problem with this equation?" And it just comes off as
mean-spirited by this point.
Craig isn't the 'thinking person's Bond' ... it's an indictment of thought. It would only be the 'thinking person's Bond' if it were at least honest with itself and treat SPECTRE as merely a cabal of Wall St. investment bankers rather than saying; 'underground organization + realistic depiction of world power + crazily not realistic because these people are patently
bad(tm) ... rather than just bankers'. At least with previous Bonds we invented villain-*y* and didn't pretend to broach the issue, and thus not come off as merely protectionists of venture capitalism and investment banking firms. So with all of the Craig movies it just strikes me as; "Take out the bad guy because he was merely a little extra bad than simply all the other bad guys we're obligated to protect who ultimately just do this stuff indirectly."
Tell me all you "thinking person's Bond" fans. Would you be entirely on board with an MI:6/SIS assassin murdering a landowner with the QoS plot arc? Someone who simply purchased the land to artificial control aquifers in the region? Or more realistically ... be entirely on board with Craig murdering the entirety of the Egyptian development boards when they built the Aswan dam projects?
No. You wouldn't. And the argument that; "he did other stuff, too..." precisely highlights the point. Of course you wanted him to... that gives Bond a reason to murder him and you feel good about it, doi. If it had been just an investment banker or developer taking advantage of a coup ... you might still think it's a good idea to murder him, right up until Bond gets put away in a black site prison somewhere by M for doing so.
Moore films (and to a lesser extent Dalton and Brosnan)? Nup. None of that. Didn't need it ... and it didn't need to pretend to paint a false dialectic.
People might watch Craig films for his 'relationships' ... but frankly the realism they want to inject along with it ultimately comes to deny us an at all decent portrayal of Bond. Whereby only by making him sympathetic can he be seen as doing a 'good job' ... and only if we ignore all other aspects of plot, world-building, and methods can we fail to associate him with the very worst aspects of both our world and his.
(Edit) So either bring us back the fun, over the moon villains, convoluted plots with a cheesy British assassin, or stop making me feel guilty for rooting for the bad guy to put a bullet in Craig's forehead every second he's on screen. Because my brain is telling me that if the Skyfall villain had won, the world might actually be a better place WITHOUT an MI:6 ultimately undermining every element seeking to topple the powers that be. Sure he might have been working with SPECTRE ... but I'm pretty sure by his mannerisms he would have started attacking them if only because he wants to see the world as it is *burn* (at least that's my interpretation).
That M and the rest of them
deserve to die in Skyfall (being no less than tools for the people they pretend to oppose). That
maybe Sean Bean should have been allowed to fire the GoldenEye device over London. If that was their goal, congratulations. I agree.
This might have been the 'thinking person's Bond' ... if it were intentional. But my gut says; "No. This is truly cognitive dissonance you're having. You truly feel like you should care for M's passing but don't because the movie and its context unintentionally make her and Bond awful as shit and both of them deserve to die. But you only get one scalp on screen there missy..."
Not only that but the movie tries to make me feel awful by pretending I shouldn't feel glad she died.
This is why I have so far found all the Craig movies to be genuinely insulting. And bitter no less. Especially for every person thst tells me it's a 'thinking person's Bond'. NO! I *did think* and it left me with a trio of movies calling me an arsehole. So go fuck yourself everyone involved in making them.
There is a reason why SPECTRE works in Connery-era films. There were REAL QUESTIONS about how the world should organize itself with the end of traditional concepts of empire, and how human civilization will or should look like. There is a reason why it wouldn't work in Moore's era until now (and including Craig's) ... financial markets won the Cold War. That's it. Big finance won... so pretending to paint anything less or more than this is a horrible parody of a world bereft of real nations and true political dialectics of East vs. West (for good or ill).
You'd think then that the big bad shouldn't be about tying it to fundamental geopolitics, or about world domination ... ohhh! Oops. FOUR MOVIES PRECISELY ABOUT THAT.
Anyways ... that's kind of why I didn't like Skyfall or any Craig movie to date ... if they could keep the relationship stuff but make it devoid of the rest of the garbage I might be on board. But if the relationships were tied to the plot of them, I don't think it was a good trade off.
Or to put it as I wrote before,
reality is shit. It really makes Bond as a construct feel antiquated, and ultimately
regretful that he exists. Unless you give us a Blofeld seeking to quizzically hold the world hostage through some weird MK Ultra device from their hidden moonbase, not merely have a (more?) evil version of Rhodes scholars in some super secret club ... because apparently the golf course and hanging out with CEOs, large military contractors and politicians there isn't nefarious enough ... don't bother.
If there was one movie I could highlight why I found Craig and the plotlines in his movies conflicting with my thoughts and the tone they were trying tp create... I point to Escape From L.A. Snake Plissken is totally justified sending the world back to the Stone Age by hitting '0000' into the McGuffin weapon. That is how I felt with every Craig movie to date, and yet the movies are blatantly telling me I shouldn't feel like that.
Snake Plissken is the antagonist of Skyfall. It IS Skyfall but seen from the villain's perspective. Yet I had no problem considering his actions not divorced from the morality the movie was trying to explore. Craig and Dench are just thoroughly awful people, and they didn't even adequately show how they were necessarily awful people. Unlike GoldenEye... where Brosnan catches Bean solely to look him in the eye and say; "No, for me." He accepts how he's a killer and on a leash for good reason... he sees himself in Bean... in QoS and Skyfsll they just painted the antagonists as cartoonishly evil beyond reason (while pretending to have this gritty *realness*). And then pretended I should feel bad for coming up with a different conclusion.
"Welcome to the human race."
Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but never a line better said and delivered.
