Yay!
Here’s a commercial for the Honda Del Sol from 1995.
It’s very Bondian, from the music to the casting to the theme. So much so, that MGM sued Honda and made them pull it off the air.
The lawsuit accuses Honda of copyright infringement and falsely implying that the car is endorsed by MGM and Danjaq.
In a prior post, I mentioned the scene from Casino Royale where Vesper Lynd says, “I’m the money” and Bond responds, “…every penny of it.”
I suddenly started wondering why Bond would say the word “penny,” given that it’s a name for a unit of American currency. Shouldn’t he of said… “pence” or “quid” or something?
Well, it turns out I’m pathetically uncultured and American-centric. AI set me straight:
Your instinct has it backwards — "penny" is about as British as currency words get. It's Old English (penig), it's the name of an actual British coin (pre-decimal pence, and the 1p piece since 1971), and it's woven through the idiom: in for a penny, in for a pound; a penny for your thoughts; the penny dropped; penny-pinching; spend a penny. Americans use "penny" too, but only colloquially — the US coin is officially a cent. So if anything, "penny" reads as the Anglophone-original and the American usage as the borrowing.
I’ve embarrassed myself.
Back in 1979, Timothy Dalton guest-starred on Charlie’s Angels as cat burglar Damien Roth, described as “a man with James Bondian tastes, means, and charm.”
Someone has helpfully compiled all of his scenes in this YouTube video.
Here’s a short video about Daniel Craig’s screen test for Bond (it says 2006, but Casino Royale was released in 2006, so it had to be earlier than that). There’s a voiceover from Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson about how much they wanted Craig for the role.
Then, towards the end, you see and hear the scene they’re doing — it’s the “I’m the money” scene between Vesper and Bond (”…every penny of it”) that was on the train in the film but is being done on a hotel room set for the screen test.
Vesper is played by someone other than Eva Green. I’m not sure who is playing Craig’s haircut.
M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye has to go down as one of the great monologues in the Bond movies. Pierce Brosnan was the new Bond, and we had a female M in Judi Dench, which people weren’t so sure about, but this one scene likely laid every concern to rest.
I especially love it when Bond says “point taken,” thinking that would defuse the situation, but M just goes right on to tell him how she’d be perfectly happy to “send a man out to die.” And this was after she deliver the now-classic, “sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War.” And let’s not forget the symbolism of when M summarily dismisses Bond’s suggestion about the bottle her “predecessor” kept in the office.
Bond’s responses are key to the exchange too. Beyond the dialog, he has some facial expressions and pauses that really sell the idea that he’s dealing with something completely new.
The scene is utterly brilliant, and it launched one of the greatest character portrayals in the Bond movie canon. I’d never say GoldenEye was one of the top-tier Bond films, but it was exactly the film that the series needed at the time it came it out, and Dench was exactly the supporting actor that Brosnan needed to land on his feet.
Just before starting in on the James Bond theme, the Danish Symphony Orchestra had their conductor “assassinated” live on stage. That visual, followed immediately by the opening bars of the Bond theme is just legendary.
I was previously unaware of The Moneypenny Diaries which is a short book series that tells James Bond adventures from the perspective of Miss Moneypenny (did anyone know her first name is apparently “Jane”?).
It doesn't seem like the series got too far, but there some short stories published in British magazine. One of them is entitled For Your Eyes Only, James which sounds vaguely like Bond and Moneypenny might have consummated their flirtation.
(I did some looking, but that particular installment seems to be hard to find. Several people are trying to find reprints of it.)
A clue in today's New York Times Crossword was “Bond between Lazenby and Dalton.”
The answer was “MOORE”.
I read the James Bond novel Seafire while on a business trip. This is from 1994, which is late in the John Gardner era — he only wrote one more original Bond novel after this one.
It was…okay. I've never loved Gardner's work. Here’s my review.
Reading Maps visually plots the geographic travels of various novels. As you can imagine, the James Bond novels are pretty active, in terms of globe-hopping. Here’s the entry for Casino Royale (the movie).
British author Jeffrey Archer supplied recommendations for “The Best Heist and Con Artist Books” novels over on Five Books named Goldfinger as the best heist novel. I find this interesting because, while the film version is wildly popular, I thought the novel was weaker.
(Speaking of Jeffrey Archer, I loved his novel “The Fourth Estate.”)