Content tagged with “james-bond”

“I don’t know how I missed this James Bond-themed Heineken commercial from back when Skyfall came out. It’s funny, and the Doctor No cameo is witty. (I might be dim, but I had to watch it twice to realize that the guy and Bond are wearing the same clothes, and it’s a case of mistaken identity.) It’s…”

“I saw this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble in the ‘Travel’ section. Thrilling Cities was a travelogue written by Ian Fleming in 1963. He had been writing the Bond novels for a decade and the films had just become very popular. The Sunday Times flew Fleming around the world to visit 13 cities to…”

“Did you know that October 5 is ‘ James Bond Day ’? I didn’t, until everyone started talking about it today on Reddit. Supposedly this because Dr. No premiered in London on October 5, 1962. So, take the day off work, have a martini, and blow-up the lair of an international terrorist. You know, usual…”

“To my surprise, Roger Moore showed up on an episode of Alias playing a spymaster named Poole… Edward Poole. He would have been 77 at the time and had last played Bond fully 20 years before. In my imagination, he was still Bond, and still in the espionage game, just living under a different…”

“ This guy spent a lot of time recreating the Bond ‘gunbarrel’ intro in LEGO . Some amazing ingenuity here. ”

“I finally got around to finishing my collection of John Gardner’s original Bond novels . He wrote 13 original novels and two movie novelizations between 1981 and 1996. I’ve never been a huge fan of Gardner, but I stumbled on Seafire in a used bookstore a couple of months ago, then realized I was…”

“I was reminded of the bit player from three consecutive James Bond movies who witnesses something surreal and subsequently questions his sobriety. He was uncredited, but IMDb lists him as ‘Man with Bottle’ twice and ‘Man with Wine Glass’ once. The official YouTube channel compiled all three clips…”

“ On the heels of Reading Maps, we have Movie Scene Maps , which appears to locate both plot locations and filming locations. The Bond movies never disappoint in terms of globe-hopping: here’s the locations for Casino Royale . ”

“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…”

“ 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…”

“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…”

“ 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…”

“ 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…”

“This is the first novel in the Young Bond series. It covers James Bond in 1933 when he’s a 13-year-old boy at Eton. The date setting of the novel is actually never mentioned. I was trying to reverse-engineer it based on comments by the characters. Mentions of ‘the war’ had me thinking they were…”

“Wonderful graphic adaption of Fleming’s first novel. It obviously abridges somewhat, but the artwork is unique, and there’s a neat element of ‘floating words’ that represent what Bond is thinking about in a given situation – you’re let inside his head, to all the analytic processes he’s considering…”

“Entertaining, but not the best Bond I’ve read. It involves Bond racing at Le Mans, which is new, and there’s a very interesting post-script about how this was Ian Fleming’s idea, and Horowitz used Fleming’s notes for the basis of the first part of the story. The main plot is pretty fantastical. It…”

“I’m an old-school James Bond fan. I’ve read every original novel (the Fleming novels), and most the later novels (Gardener, Benson, and some others). I’ll come out and say it: this is the best non-Fleming Bond novel I’ve ever read. It’s divided into two parts. The first is Bond’s mission in a small…”

“Absolutely loved this book of James Bond short stories. Since it’s not canon, it takes so much…license, with the character and the series. There’s a Bond/Cthulu mashup, Bond as a teenager at Eton, a couple with Bond as a retired 90-year-old, etc. It was such a fresh look at aspects of Bond that…”