Ranking The Bond Films (Part 3/3): The Top Five

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the first film in the James Bond series. Directed by Terence Young, the movie established not only one of cinema's most enduring heroes but the entire action movie genre.

In commemoration of the series' beginnings, I have ranked all twenty-five films in the main series. If you haven't read Part One yet, featuring the movies ranked 25-16, you can do so here. Part Two, counting down the films ranked 15-6, can be read here. Spanning six decades and the tenures of six actors, the films are as fascinating in their own right as they are snapshots of the times in which they were made. One of the many great things about the series is that it offers so many entry points, with any one film having a wildly different tone to another, that there can never be a conclusive list of the best Bonds. This ranking is simply my own, and if you too are a fan, you will appreciate that disagreement is not just expected, but essential. Finally, here are my top five Bond films. Enjoy.

Ranking The Bond Films (Part 2/3): 15 - 6

Poster Credit: Sean Longmore

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the first film in the James Bond series. Directed by Terence Young, the movie established not only one of cinema's most enduring heroes but the entire action movie genre.

In commemoration of the series' beginnings, I'll be ranking all twenty-five films in the main series. If you haven't read Part One yet, featuring the movies ranked 25-16, you can do so here. Spanning six decades and the tenures of six actors, the films are as fascinating in their own right as they are snapshots of the times in which they were made. One of the many great things about the series is that it offers so many entry points, with any one film having a wildly different tone to another, that there can never be a conclusive list of the best Bonds. This ranking is simply my own, and if you too are a Bond fan, you will appreciate that disagreement is not just expected, but essential. Enjoy.

Ranking The Bond Films (Part 1/3): 25 - 16

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the first film in the James Bond series. Directed by Terence Young, the movie established not only one of cinema's most enduring heroes but a whole new genre. If Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest laid the foundation for the modern action movie, it was Goldfinger which built the house with its focus on big-budget spectacle, a larger-than-life villain with an audaciously implausible plot, and a stylish, implacably cool hero helped by high-tech gadgetry and beautiful women. As much as the Bond films have always moved with the times, often chasing trends, it took decades - the action boom of the eighties - before the rest of the industry began to replicate the high-octane formula which made the classic Bonds so timelessly exciting.

In commemoration of the series' beginnings, I'll be ranking all twenty-five films in the main series. This excludes the unofficial and mostly terrible Never Say Never Again, released by a Thunderball producer who had clung onto certain rights to the story, and the fascinating trainwreck which is the 1967 'comedy' adaptation of Casino Royale. Both would be near the bottom of the list if included. The main series alone offers plenty to be getting on with: spanning six decades and the tenures of six actors, the films are as fascinating in their own right as they are snapshots of the times in which they were made. As a result, one of the many great things about the series is that it offers so many entry points, with any one film having a wildly different tone to another, that there can never be a conclusive list of the best Bonds. This ranking is simply my own, and if you too are a Bond fan, you will appreciate that disagreement is not just expected, but essential. Enjoy.

Movies: No Time To Die (no spoilers) review

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

NO TIME TO DIE
Dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga

Stars: Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Rami Malek, Ben Whishaw 

Running Time: 163mins

No Time To Die arrives a year shy of the venerable Bond series' 60th anniversary and concludes the tenure of Daniel Craig in the lead role. Though all but Goldfinger of the original six films contained some degree of serialisation, Craig's time in the lead role has been characterised by plots more tightly interwoven with each other than ever before, all concerned with answering the question of who James Bond is, what role he has to play in the modern world, and what, if anything, that means.

If any conclusions can be reached from what No Time To Die has to offer, few feel satisfying and most outright misguided. Nine years ago, Skyfall - then a standalone film, since uncomfortably retconned into the increasingly incoherent Craigiverse continuity - delivered a self-assured and conclusive answer: Bond as the modern Arthur, an eternal defender forged in the best values of old but existing in a cycle of rebirth and evolution to deal with the threats of changing times. No Time To Die's version of Bond also exists somewhat in legend - one character refers to himself as a 'big fan' of the temporarily-retired spy - but looking at how he's characterised this time around, one can only wonder why.

Summer Movie Mini-Review Roundup, Part Two (including Shang-Chi & The Legend Of The Ten Rings)

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

Although cinemas have only just started to reopen as mass vaccination takes the edge off the COVID pandemic, there has been no shortage of movies of all shapes and sizes to watch over the past months. From comic book blockbusters like The Suicide Squad or Black Widow, to more niche genre pieces like Censor or Pig, there has been a satisfying variety of offerings compared to more traditional cinematic summers, which tend to be dominated by major studio releases alone.

Rather than review each individually, these round-ups comprise short reviews of several films released to UK viewers over the past few months. The reviews in Part Two are The Suicide Squad, The Green Knight, Zola, Free Guy, Gunpowder Milkshake, Pig and Shang-Chi & The Legend Of The Ten Rings. Part One, published last Monday, comprised Black Widow, Another Round, Reminiscence, Censor, Jungle Cruise and Old.

Summer Movie Mini-Review Roundup, Part One

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

Although cinemas have only just started to reopen as mass vaccination takes the edge off the COVID pandemic, there has been no shortage of movies of all shapes and sizes to watch over the past months. From comic book blockbusters like The Suicide Squad or Black Widow, to more niche genre pieces like Censor or Pig, there has been a satisfying variety of offerings compared to more traditional cinematic summers, which tend to be dominated by major studio releases alone.

Rather than review each individually, these round-ups comprise short reviews of several films released to UK viewers over the past few months. The six are Black Widow, Another Round, Reminiscence, Censor, Jungle Cruise and Old. Part Two looks at The Suicide Squad, The Green Knight, Zola, Free Guy, Gunpowder Milkshake, Pig and Shang-Chi & The Legend Of The Ten Rings.

BS With Friends Podcast: On Her Majesty's Secret Service

I was privileged to take part in a very enjoyable podcast about one of my favourite James Bond films, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with resident hosts, Maxwell Roahrig and Xzyliac Ariel. We cover some recent entertainment news stories, Peter Hunt's borderline experimental editing, how Bond beat the Fast & Furious franchise to punch with a flying car (in addition to a double-taking pigeon), and On Her Majesty's gay influence, helped in part by writer Simon Raven, an old-school libertine who was expelled from school - and I quote said school's obituary - 'less for homosexuality than for the bravura with which he practiced it'.

 

Below the jump are links to articles I've written on this blog about Bond, including a set of film reviews and why OHMSS is the great unrecognised Christmas movie. Have fun!

Movies: Zack Snyder's Justice League review

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE
Dir: Zack Snyder

Stars: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Henry Cavill

Running Time: 242mins

Zack Snyder's cut of the 2017 Justice League movie sits at the nexus between the Donner cut of Superman II and Snyder's own extended edition of Justice League's much-derided predecessor, Batman v Superman. Although director's cuts of movies have existed for a long time, the 2006 re-edit of Superman II to fit the vision of original director, Richard Donner, was the first time a movie had been effectively remade and rewritten with unused footage and the removal of any scenes added by the director who took over the project. Ten years later, Zack Snyder used the home release of Batman v Superman to signficantly extend the running time and clarify the near-incoherent narrative of the theatrical cut.

Snyder's re-edit of Justice League does a little of both: it removes all trace of Joss Whedon's contribution to the 2017 release and uses its massively extended running time - doubled, in fact - to add missing character motivations and give the story room to breathe. Like his Batman v Superman extended cut, it improves on many of the fundamental shortcomings of the original release. However, just as the Donner cut simply turned a bad movie into a different kind of bad movie, Snyder's Justice League may be different from Whedon's cut, but whether it's a better movie overall is an open question.

Appreciating Nikki van der Zyl, Who Gave The Women Of James Bond Their Voice

For a series whose hero embodies the masculine id, the history of women's influence on the James Bond movies is a long and fascinating one. The figure of the Bond girl is the most famous and most analysed, though the importance of the many women who have guided the series from behind the screen is just as great, albeit less widely recognised. A prominent modern example would be Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of one of the series' original producers, Cubby Broccoli, and who now runs the show along with her half-brother, Michael G. Wilson. A less known example would be Johanna Harwood, an Irish screenwriter who was a credited screenwriter on the first two Bond movies, Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and contributed uncredited work to Goldfinger.

One of the least recognised names is Nikki van der Zyl, yet if you haven't heard of her, as a Bond fan you certainly will have heard her. A German voiceover artist who died three days ago aged 85, van der Zyl leaves behind a legacy which shaped the Bond girl icon every bit as much as Ursula Andress - whose voice van der Zyl dubbed.

Movies: Promising Young Woman review

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
Dir: Emerald Fennell

Stars: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Laverne Cox

Running Time: 113mins

The rape-revenge movie has a long and inglorious history of adopting a false stance of female empowerment in order to fulfil male fantasies, not just in terms of sexualising the traumatic assault, but in the act of revenge itself. Revenge in these movies is typically enacted on the physical bodies of the perpetrators, a male sense of power twinged with BDSM undertones by having a woman as the heroine. Promising Young Woman's most potent idea is to feminise the concept of revenge: what if the heroine's vengeance was not on the body, but on the soul? What if, for a moment, she could make those who inflicted trauma on others see themselves for who they really are and understand the gravity of what they have done?

Promising Young Woman's writer/director, Emerald Fennell, was also the showrunner on the second season of Killing Eve. Despite the strength of its core ideas, Fennell unfortunately carries over the weaknesses of her tenure on that show to her first full-length feature behind the camera, notably an inability to maintain the razor-edge balance between drama and irony which Phoebe Waller-Bridge made look so effortless. The intensity of feeling behind the material and its central character is never in doubt, though perhaps ironically, Promising Young Woman is too wounded to achieve its full potential.

2020 Movie Catch-Up Review: Wonder Woman 1984

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

WONDER WOMAN 1984
Dir: Patty Jenkins

Stars: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Pedro Pascal, Kristen Wiig

Running Time: 151mins

Wonder Woman 1984 shares more than a little in common with Gal Gadot's infamous celebrity rendition of 'Imagine': both well-intentioned, yet tone deaf and hopelessly misjudged in every conceivable way. WW84 brings to light how much of its predecessor's success was rooted in its setting. The horrors of WW1's trenches and war-torn landscapes gave the original Wonder Woman an emotional and thematic heft which its sequel's lazy pastiche of Eighties fashions and hues, unsurprisingly, cannot come close to matching.

Wonder Woman emphasized the values and value of its heroine by transporting her - a sheltered, yet powerful and intensely compassionate woman - into one of the most apocalyptic periods of human history and letting the audience experience it with her first as despair, then as hope as she used her power to do something about it. WW84's setting, by contrast, evokes nothing about its heroine and forces the film to resort to meaningless bromides, whose espoused values it itself does not even stick to.

2020 Movie Catch-Up Review: Soul

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

SOUL
Dir: Pete Docter

Stars: Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Rachel House, Richard Ayoade

Running Time: 101mins

Pete Docter's last outing as director, Inside Out, had a lot of big ideas but none of the focus needed to develop them into a coherent whole. It managed to be completely underdeveloped in its thinking while simultaneously too overtly structured around an increasingly predictable Pixar formula. Soul feels like the kind of movie Docter intended to make last time out: its big ideas are grounded in enough internal logic that its abstract and metaphysical questions are communicated with an easy clarity. allowing any little gaps to be glossed over without becoming distracting. Its adherence to the Pixar formula is stronger than ever - similarities in plot and theme to the company's own Coco from 2017 are legion - but the rigour of the writing and world-building allow that underlying structure to strengthen the storytelling rather than highlight its flaws.

Soul tells the story of a struggling, middle-aged jazz musician who dies immediately after receiving his big break. Finding himself as a soul adrift in the afterlife, his attempts to return to his body on Earth lead him to mentor an unborn soul sceptical about the value of physical existence. Despite the premise's potential for saccharine sentimentality, Docter skillfully edges the film in the predictable direction before swerving into a bolder, more intriguing treatise, a hallmark of all the best Pixar movies to date.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service Is The Great Unrecognised Christmas Movie

UPDATE (23.04.21): For those interested, I've recorded a podcast with further discussion of Bond and OHMSS.

While online forum clever-than-thous are busy, yet again, trying to convince everyone that Die Hard is a Christmas movie rather than just a movie which happens to take place during Christmas, Bond fans have long rested merrily on the knowledge that the finest and most under-appreciated seasonal actioner of all rests within their favoured canon: On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).

It's worth acknowledging, however, that while OHMSS is a great Christmas movie, the best Bond movie to watch at Christmas is undoubtedly Octopussy, a perfect post-lunch confection big on stunts, scenery and silliness, where any ten minutes are sufficiently entertaining in their own right that you can drift off for half-an-hour of turkey-induced slumber only to reawaken and slot right back into the fun, barely encumbered by a plot which, let's be honest, nobody has ever paid the slightest bit of attention to anyway. That many wrongly think it's one of the worst Bonds due to the title alone makes it even more of a pleasant surprise. Nevertheless, while Octopussy fits the circumstances, it's On Her Majesty's which captures the spirit and themes of the yuletide season.

The Technicolor Magic Of The Love Witch

I wish I had seen Anna Biller's The Love Witch before compiling my Top Ten Movies Of The Decade last December, because it certainly would have been in contention for a spot. It's a beautiful, idiosyncratic, complex movie which visually harkens to the past while framing its images and tropes from an entirely new perspective. In those respects the movie mirrors the nature of its heroine, Elaine, a witch who travels to a new town to find, through magical manipulation, a loving husband following the death, or her probable murder, of her former lover.

Elaine's hyper-traditional fantasies of love, wherein a woman submits herself entirely to her husband's needs in exchange for his devotion and affection, clash with both her suitors' and her own emotional reality. The magic she uses to ensure male adoration works too well, making them obsessively needy and completely unable to process the strength of feeling she draws out of them. This she finds hopelessly pathetic and she abandons them, leaving them to die in their entranced state either of longing or by their own hand while she goes in search of another prey to make adore her and heal her fractured psyche.

James Bond's COVID-19 Delay Suggests It Could Be Cinema's Time To Die

James Bond has pulled a Lionel Hutz. With cinemas struggling to get customers through their doors on account of the COVID-19 crisis, the theatrical exhibition industry's hopes of survival were resting on the promise of a new Bond film to get them through a potentially fatal winter. The name, No Time To Die, was almost symbolic: cinemas would survive and James Bond would get them through it. With the movie having already been delayed numerous times since its original release date was set for October 2019, the marketing campaign kicked off again with the release of a new trailer, soundtrack listing, partner promotions... only for another delay to be swiftly announced, this time to April 2021.

It seems that Bond's promise to cinemas was not 'No Time To Die', but 'No, Time To Die!'

Movie Review Double Bill: Bill & Ted Face The Music / The New Mutants

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC
Dir: Dean Parisot

Stars: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine

Running Time: 92mins
  

The trend for reviving beloved films and TV shows decades after their natural expiration point has rarely yielded positive results, in no small part because such resurrections often feel like a cynical combination of creative laziness and economic desperation. If there's one thing to be said for Bill & Ted Face The Music, it's that this is as far from a cynical movie as it gets. Nobody involved needed to make it, having all been successful to varying degrees in their own right, and arguably nobody was particularly clamouring to see it, with the originals being cult favourites rather than pop cultural behemoths. Instead, the movie feels like all involved wanted to make it for no other reason than, well, they wanted to make it.

Those good intentions seep into the movie itself, which wholesale carries over the good vibes attitude from Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. The humour is defiantly Gen X, all very shaggy dog and hang-loosey, which is borderline subversive when all other forms of entertainment feel the need to inject politics or ideological preaching into its storytelling. Almost thirty years later, Bill & Ted's philosophy is as pure as it always was: be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.

Movies: Tenet review

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

TENET
Dir: Christopher Nolan 

Stars: John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branagh 

Running Time: 151mins

Christopher Nolan's Tenet feels like a spiritual successor to Inception, his 2010 action film also based around distorting the rules of perceived reality. Unfortunately, where Inception's success was based on the clarity and surefootedness with which it handled its potentially baffling premise, Tenet feels fatally insecure about the mechanics of its time-manipulation gimmick. It is at odds with itself, telling audiences on one hand not to think too hard about it while on the other over-explaining every superfluous detail. Nolan's best films are those whose ideas are conveyed evocatively enough to overcome shortcomings in plotting and character: Tenet is all plot, all the time, having to cover its shortcomings with seemingly deliberate obfuscation rather than thematic depth.

In the absence of that depth, the overfamiliarity of Nolan's toy box is exposed. Almost everything that he offers up here has been done better in his previous films, from the twisty narrative (despite the incoherence of the storytelling, it's not difficult to anticipate the reveals that Nolan tries to use to disguise messiness as cleverness) to the fetishisation of masculine symbolism and nods to the James Bond canon: where Inception played an entire sequence in homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, here Goldfinger, A View To A Kill and Licence To Kill (also referenced in Dark Knight Rises) are all given cursory glances.

Movie Retrospective: Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Many people discover Akira Kurosawa's work via the great Seven Samurai (1954), a movie rightfully considered one of the most influential ever made and a prototype for the modern action blockbuster. It has been remade in countless forms in the ensuing decades and its inspiration is evident in any ensemble blockbuster you care to mention. Much of its appeal comes from its ballsy, freewheeling tone, idolising its samurai heroes and their bloody retribution against villainous bandits. It's a film by a young director at the height of his popularity, having a great time dreaming up the Japanese equivalent to a boy's own adventure.

Some thirty years later, Kurosawa was out in the cold, shunned by a film industry back home which saw him as out of touch with contemporary Japanese audiences, his work was deemed too expensive and risky at the box office. It was only through collaboration with foreign financiers, including George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, that Kurosawa was able to continue making movies. Though he enjoyed success and critical acclaim during this period, the Japanese film industry continued to overlook him. As he grew older, the enthusiastic outlook of the young director of Seven Samurai morphed into a bleak pessimism, yet out of this darkness came not only Kurosawa's magnum opus, but what I consider one of the greatest works of art ever created: Ran (1985).

Fear & Loathing In Seahaven: The Modern World Of The Truman Show

The Truman Show (1998, directed by Peter Weir) released last week on Netflix. One of the best films of the nineties, if not the best, it tells the story of Truman Burbank, a man who discovers that his life in the island town of Seahaven is a reality TV show, from which he strives to break free. Although rarely used as a cultural touchstone today, the film was not only remarkably prescient in predicting the rise of reality television - Big Brother first aired about a year later - but in observing how real people's lives were becoming as artificial as Truman's.

The emergence of social media as a tool not just of communication, but performance, has over time further vindicated The Truman Show's depiction of modern life as a manufactured illusion. Where The Matrix was celebrated long after its release for its philosophising on the nature of reality, Truman has perhaps been sidelined for asking more challenging and directly applicable questions about human nature and the ways we have willingly become actors in our own lives.

How James Bond Became A Symbol Of Endurance In Uncertain Times

As I suspect has been the case for a lot of people, I've spent quite a lot of time over the past few weeks watching Bond films. The films I've watched have spanned the entire history of cinema's longest running series, spanning from Dr. No (1962) to SPECTRE (2015) and to be augmented in November with the oft-delayed release of the twenty-sixth entry, No Time To Die. It's likely that there will be a new Bond in place for the character's sixtieth cinematic anniversary in 2022, at which point the series will refresh itself all over again. It's a truism to state that the series has kept itself current by reflecting the mood of the era in which each film was made, but there has to be more to it than that for any institution to not only survive, but succeed, for as long as Bond has. Plenty of art reflects its time, but none have reflected so many times as Bond.

The character of James Bond was born in 1953, an amalgamation of various people author Ian Fleming respected during his wartime service. The character's name derives from an ornithologist, author of the work 'A Field Guide To The Birds Of The West Indies'. Fleming described the ornithologist's name as 'brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine', wanting Bond to be 'a dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened'. On the page and on the screen, Bond quickly outgrew the narrow confines of his conception. The essence of what made the character successful, though, has endured from the moment Ian Fleming sat down at his golden typewriter (really) to the present day.