My Evolving Relationship with The Character of James Bond

I have a long, but oddly complicated relationship with James Bond ever since I laid eyes on the movies when I was very, very young. Obsessive fandom means that I've watched those movies repeatedly, to the point of rapidly and repeatedly watching each new one on its release. As a teenager, I turned to the novels and read those a few times each as well (well, the ones that I liked the most). I even started to read the continuation novels, starting with Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun (actually one of the best of all the novels, period), carrying on through John Gardener's tenure. But although I've bought every single one, I have to admit that I stopped actually reading the novels sometime during Raymond Benson's run.

I don't think that this was due to some quality issue on his part, but a change in my own tastes. Having said that, I keep buying them on the basis that I'm going to get around to reading them at some point. Although this occasionally holds true of other books I've bought, the chances of it happening for the newer Bond novels are presumably decreasing over time.

Hero is a pretty complicated word. While Ian Fleming undoubtedly did things that were heroic, my personal aversion to a lot of his politics (a feeling that's grown in me as I've grown up) and some of the (not always so casual) racism and misogyny in his writing have meant that the biography of him is also unread. Come to think of it, that tome may have well found its way to the charity shop (I checked - it hasn't, but it will).

The James Bond of the novels is also often difficult to describe as heroic. Is he a hero? Well, yes. And although he's probably not quite an anti-hero, his own snobbery, racism & misogyny (his role as Ian Fleming's alter ego is pretty well understood) make it difficult to root for him unequivocally. In some ways that makes him a perfect contemporary hero - people are complicated after all and nuanced writing through history tells us that good people sometimes do bad and bad people sometimes do good. Furthermore, heroism is sometimes a little more meaningful when achieved despite personal failings. In some ways however, this possibly makes him unadaptable to the screen in his purest form; screen heroes can be flawed, but movies tend to insist that they have some kind of inherent likeability or a similar sympathetic quality. Accurately depicting a 'hero' on screen who enjoys a sexual encounter tinged "with the sweet tang of rape" is beyond the pale and rightly so.

Maybe just for this reason, screen depictions have veered away from too pure a portrayal of Fleming's Bond (some Moore than others, of course) and given us various versions of a hero who's much easier to root for - predilections for alcohol and casual sex aren't really the worst things in the world. So my faith in the screen Bond as opposed to the literary one has been much easier to maintain as I've grown older (I nearly said 'grown up' but let's not go crazy). I still anticipate new Bond movies with the same fervour that I did decades ago and love movies that I loved years ago with undimmed intensity.

Fandom's a complicated thing and something I'm thinking of writing a lot more about as there are so many facets to it. Many people who are fans of something get a huge amount of pleasure from their fandom. But we shouldn't let blind devotion stop our fandom from evolving. After all, relationships begin, evolve, grow and sometimes end, so why wouldn't our fandom? I think it's safe to say that I've fallen out of love somewhat with the literary James Bond, but I think of him with the same warmth I might have for an ex-boyfriend. And that's not a bad thing.

Why I Love: Listening to Other People Talking About Movies

From long before I was born, film magazines were the only medium where audiences could find out about and engage in conversations about movies. During my own infatuation with movies, I've bought more magazines than I can count, including issue one of Empire (still going, of course) which had a really well-researched article on Bond title songs. I carried on buying Empire until I felt I'd outgrown it, getting rid of all my back issues when I stopped, except for the first five (nostalgia wouldn't let me). At various times, I also bought Sight & Sound (which is also still going), Neon, Cinescape, SFX, Cinefex (the US special effects quarterly), Deathray, 007, Premiere, Starlog, Starburst & Cinefantastique, while I'm still buying MI6.

I loved movies and movie magazines so much in fact that I even wrote for one after university. It may not have been the most impressive magazine; the look resulted from the editor's PC only having three fonts and without professional sub-editing, the editor was able to indulge design whims leading to things like unbroken, solid pages of text. But Movie Collector still has a special place in my heart as a magazine for people who genuinely loved movies.

The proliferation of media and the cost of paper have led to a slow decline of film magazines in print, which has had an impact in terms of numbers, quality of output and circulation. The ubiquitous internet has of course started to provide a lot of things we used to get from film magazines for free (or thereabouts, depending on how you look at it). There is of course an argument that the quality of what we get on the internet doesn't necessarily rival what we paid for in print, even if it is more timely. And although there may be occasions where this is merited, it should also be observed that internet clickbait (overhyped trivia designed to draw hits for advertising money) is matched by self-generated content of similar quality in print - I'm thinking particularly of articles listing 10 of the greatest car chases or the 10 greatest horror movies, which don't really give the reader anything new.

This kind of dull, generic content, whatever the medium, is the opposite of unique, engaged writing and surely the enemy of good film journalism of whatever flavour you're after. And its effect has been compounded by the break-up of film journalism into more niche areas. Movie magazines always used to deal in stars, fashion and glamour, but that's since been largely hived off into celebrity news and gossip. I have to admit to getting engaged by this until literally one day, I realised that I didn't care about most peoples' personal lives and just stopped. I also stopped years of reading Variety and The Hollywood Reporter when I realised that I wasn't genuinely that interested in the movie business as such (I used to believe that it gave me insight into what movies got made - which it did, but again, I just didn't care that much about that particular aspect). I stopped reading Cinefex when I realised that practical effects were becoming used less and less and the ingenuity that went into them was being replaced by a different kind of ingenuity (better and better CG) that I was just indifferent to.

I'm personally only interested in the final product - the actual movie. And hence I'm interested in interviews where filmmakers of whatever specific profession are able to talk about their intentions (not those awful press-junket write-ups), well-written reviews with properly articulated opinions (whether deciding on what to watch or - more often - after the movie to see if others' thoughts stimulate my own feelings in any way), other bits and pieces of critical thinking and sometimes just silly fan stuff.

Nowadays, my film journalism and commentary comes from The Playlist blog as well as Vulture, while I'm also catching up on several years of the James Bond Radio podcast, in addition to listening to directors interviewing directors as part of the Directors' Guild of America podcast. Although I've talked predominantly about film magazines, it's taken me a long time to realise that what I valued wasn't the magazines themselves (hence why they're not mentioned in the title of this post) but what I was getting from them; the reason I love reading other people writing about their love for movies is that it constantly rekindles the joy that I get myself from them. The passion and the voice are mandatory; anything less just passes the time.

Reboots, Reimaginings, Live Action Adaptations & Sequels

Back in the 80s, Film Twitter (notwithstanding Twitter's lack of existence) used to bemoan the infantilisation of movies. After all, the 70s had given us the first two Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation and those were just the work of one director. The 80s gave us, well, Mac & Me. I'm being facetious, of course - the 80s also has some absolutely terrific cinema. In the 90s however, the then equivalent of Film Twitter started to bemoan the preponderance of TV adaptations, some of which have probably sunk back into the ether; The Fugitive, The Flintstones, Maverick, Mission: Impossible & The Brady Bunch Movie are just a few off the top of my head.

Since then, everyone's noticed that reboots and sequels seem to be making up an increasing proportion of new movies released every year. Last year saw the introduction of the third iteration of Spider-Man in less than a decade. While Indiana Jones and Die Hard have been sequelised to the point that new instalments are being dreaded rather than anticipated. Some series are going strong: James Bond - I know, I would say that; Mission: Impossible - although its financial success is unarguable, I've personally found the last couple of movies pretty creatively bereft. Others seem to keep going until audience fatigue kicks in (yup, Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you). And this trend has been crossed with the rise of the comic book movie - these may tail off at some point, but there seems to be no sign of it happening soon.

What studios tend to refer to as new IP (intellectual property - the foundation for a movie, which used to be a script, a novel, a memoir, but can now be a game, a previous movie or even a theme park ride) has become rarer and rarer. Studios have also shown an increased preference for a movie slate (the year's offerings) consisting of a smaller number of would-be blockbusters than the wider, more varied blend of old, leading to many of the studios actually shutting down their specialist/ semi-independent divisions. Meanwhile, huge increases in global audiences and screen counts mean that China is expected to become the largest single movie market in the world at some point in the next three years and the 'rest of the world' is regarded as even more important than the once-dominant US market.

This has led to simpler/ more simplistic movies than we used to see, with less dialogue (e.g. action movies), as these can then play internationally much more easily than films used to. And although in some instances casting has become more diverse (see how the Fast & Furious films have developed over time) other movies have been accused of cultural appropriation (see Ghost in the Shell), whitewashing (er, Ghost in the Shell again) and pandering (see Looper among others).

What does this mean for what we're seeing now and going to be seeing? If you'd asked anyone fifteen years ago what the word 'reboot' meant in a cinematic context or indeed what the words 'sidequel' or 'reimagining' meant at all, you'd have been met with a blank face. If you'd asked anyone about making a live action adaptation of Beauty & The Beast or The Lion King, you would have been told that there's nothing wrong with the animated originals (for the record: there isn't).

If these trends proliferate and we keep rewarding these movies with our money, this situation will just carry on. The creativity we'll see in movies will be restricted to how they're marketed to us, promising us that a reimagining isn't the same as a reboot, that this time will be different and that this time the movie really will satisfy.

A lot of my needs for narrative cinema are already being satisfied by great novels and the Golden Age of Television. And in a year where US summer box office takings are down for the first time in a long time, it seems I'm not the only one. Martin Scorsese's next movie is being funded by and will premiere on Netflix. Francis Ford Coppola has talked about how cinema as a form appears to have migrated to other forms. The only way to get the movies you want is to vote at the box office and/ or on your television. After all, there's no fate but what we make. Choose wisely!

Why I Love: Film Posters

I recently realised - the reason for which will be the subject of a separate post - that the highest form of non-narrative art as far as I'm concerned, is a movie poster. Sure, I've been to various galleries and seen and enjoyed various sculptures and paintings. But movie posters? That hits my spot. And in the same way that my growing up slightly before the web meant that my understanding of media predates the internet revolution a little (something I'm very grateful for), I'm also glad that I grew up with painted movie posters, before the prevalence of photo montages and Photoshop overtook everything else. The reason for this is that there's just something about painted posters that provides a sense of heightened reality or fantasy that a touched up set of photos just can't quite compete with (don't even get me started on so-called motion posters) - although having said that, a side order of childhood nostalgia probably has a part to play as well.

Everyone knows Drew Struzan's fantastic work for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future movies (among many, many others!) which still looks as great as it did on the movies' original releases, but there are also numerous other well known poster artists who've delivered iconic work. My own Bond fandom means that Bond posters are, of course, my absolute favourites and I recently found that a huge chunk of my favourite posters were all designed by the same artist: Brian Bysouth.

Bysouth plays an interesting role in Bond history, as apart from images like the poster above, he was also involved in the first photo montage the Bond series ever used (the UK poster for Licence to Kill - a poster I like a lot, although sadly, he doesn't) while his last contribution to the series was the main UK poster for The World is Not Enough, which is probably one of the better efforts from that particular period. Bond posters have a history of committing to giving the audience a rollicking ride with action & excitement coming out of your ears and despite differences in individual movies and posters, for the most part, I'd argue both that that's what you get and that the side order of unnaturally forced perspective is just a bonus.

Nowadays, the proliferation of media means that we all have a strong sense of whether or not we're interested in seeing a movie long before we see the poster. All the poster tends to do is confirm what we're thinking, increase a movie's awareness with an arresting image or - very rarely - make us think again (sometimes in favour, sometimes against?!). But back in the olden/ golden days, posters were sometimes one of the few ways we could find out about a movie and what might possibly be in store.

I have a strong preference for narrative art (movies, novels, music) over other forms. And it only recently occurred to me that many movies never quite deliver against what the poster suggests. So despite these issues, why do I love static movie posters so much? Ultimately, any great poster is a promise. And even if the film subsequently lets its audience down, who doesn't enjoy the excitement of the possibilities?

mother!

The past few years at the cinema haven't been overly kind to me. Years where I regularly went to see somewhere between 100 and 150 films a year at the cinema seem to be quite a long time ago. Some of that is undoubtedly down to how I've changed with age; I'm not as willing as I used to be to risk a couple of hours of my time and/ or £10 just on the possibility that I might like something that has little or no obvious appeal to me (I say this as someone who walked out half an hour into a screening of 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' when I realised that there really was nothing of interest to someone on their own aged more than 10). But I'm pretty sure the movie industry has changed quite a lot over the last few years too. Truly independent movies appear to have largely disappeared from the cinema circuit and we're now reliant on services like Netflix for anything remotely non-mainstream, which may indeed be (as Christopher Nolan has suggested) the canary in the coalmine predicting the death of the cinema experience.

I was fairly indifferent to 'mother!' when I saw it; there were a lot of things I liked, but equally I found much of the experience beyond the limits of my interests. Even before I'd read interviews with the director, Darren Aronofsky, it was pretty obvious that the movie was designed to be loved or hated and my indifference wasn't meant as some kind of bloody-minded superiority. Nevertheless, I'm pleased that the studio behind the movie has leant into the divisiveness that's met it's release, even if I am somewhat suspicious of their motives (a studio publicly supporting a film with major stars and an important director? Clearly not the latest Uwe Boll release). Having said that, the thing I was most pleased about when I went to see it was, as per Paramount's publicity, that the movie exists at all. I'm just as bored by-the-numbers wannabe blockbusters as anyone else. Everyone's tastes change over the years and mine are no exception. Nowadays I have less interest in spectacle and more in characterisation and strong narratives than I used to and more and more I'm finding that that itch is getting scratched on my TV much more than on my still weekly cinema trips. So seeing movies with ambition and ideas in their heads at the cinema is still a bit of a thrill. Even if I'm not mad about the actual movie itself.