Category: James Bond

James Bond, Radio

‘The Late Show’ on BBC Merseyside talking THE CINEMATIC CONNERY | Radio Appearance

A J. Black

So I’ve been on the radio! BBC radio no less, local Radio Merseyside covering the North West, talking my new book The Cinematic Connery.

It was quite a late one, 11pm, but I had fuelled myself up with coffee and I’m glad to say I sounded fairly lucid chatting with Linda McDermott (who was very lovely about me and my work) on The Late Show all about Connery and, more broadly, James Bond and the franchise in general. This will be available for a month on BBC Sounds so plenty of time to listen.

This is actually the first of several BBC local radio appearances I’m going to be doing. I have a brace of them on the 24th in various parts of the country, mainly in the morning, so I get to recycle a lot of this then and hopefully add new bits and bobs. It’s a lot of fun and hopefully will get my name, and more importantly the book, out there much more.

It’s just under half an hour from timestamp 1:07:50. Enjoy! Link below.

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Essays, Film, James Bond

DAILY EXPRESS – ‘Never Say Neil Again’ | Film Article

A J. Black

Ahead of the release of The Cinematic Connery: The Films of Sir Sean Connery this week, I was very happy to pen a piece for the Daily Express about a lesser known slice of James Bond history.

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Film, James Bond, Partisan Cinema

Partisan Cinema: OCTOPUSSY (1983) – From Orlov to Putin | Film Feature

A J. Black

In a recurring feature called Partisan Cinema, I look at movies from a political slant, gleaning insight from them about how they relate to society then, and indeed now…

Just this last weekend, as of writing, I ticked another milestone off my cinematic bucket list. In this case, it was watching Octopussy on the big screen.

Much like catching Pokemon, my intent is to try and see every James Bond film on a cinema screen across my lifetime, especially those which were released before my birth. Octopussy was the first Bond movie filmed after I was born, shot during the same summer I came into the world: 1982. The 13th Bond film, and Roger Moore’s penultimate outing, Octopussy is considered outside of 007 die hards such as myself a cinematic relic. It would never make any film critics list of the greatest Bond pictures. For many, it is a creaking, close to pastiche example of Bond lethargy as Moore’s ageing lothario limped toward old age.

While especially catching it on a broader canvas made apparent that John Glen’s picture is rather critically underrated, and deserved of some level of reappreciation, Octopussy also stands out on a political level. Though 007 producer supremo Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli might have long protested that the Bond pictures were apolitical, he was lying to himself first and foremost. Every single one of them made before 1995 reflected the Cold War, with Octopussy no exception. Yet in this film, the political scheming by forces within the Soviet Union, Britain and Bond’s seemingly eternal geopolitical nemesis, is far more overt thanks to the inclusion of one character: General Orlov.

Looking back now, long after the end of the Cold War, with almost 40 years distance, what fascinates is not just how much Orlov stands as an artefact of a lost era, but rather how his Russian zealotry makes Octopussy far more relevant in 2022 than anyone might have expected.

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Film, James Bond

The Spectre of Death in NO TIME TO DIE | Film Feature

A J. Black

Death is everywhere in the James Bond franchise.

This has always been true, from the existential nihilism and accidie of Ian Fleming’s original novelised character through to the carefree deadliness of how Cubby Broccoli & Harry Saltzman translated him to the big screen. “That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six” voiced Sean Connery’s 007 as far back as Dr. No in 1962. Bond’s license to kill remains one of the core tenets of the character, a chilling aspect that can be forgotten in our hero worship of the man. He is, ultimately, a killer.

In No Time to Die, we find a paradox. Bond has given up his life in the British Secret Service, his life as an assassin, and yet the spectre of death pervades his world in a deeper manner than ever before. Even the title references death, for the first time since 2002’s Die Another Day, and here suggests the fateful understanding that there is no good time to die. It comes for us all, and in this film it even comes for Bond himself, but we almost never anticipate or even sometimes expect it. Death is a constant now in a way it never was for 007 before.

Previously he would die ‘another day’, tomorrow ‘never dies’, or he could ‘live and let’ die. Bond made his peace with death as something that happened to others, not to him. No Time to Die changes that forever.

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James Bond

All the Time in the World: JAMES BOND in the 2020s | Film Feature

A J. Black

As we bask in the long-awaited glory of No Time to Die, if not the pinnacle of the Daniel Craig era as James Bond then a fitting conclusion, the inevitable question on everyone’s lips is simple: what’s next?

You can totally understand the thinking of Eon Productions head honchos Barbara Broccoli & Michael G. Wilson behind giving themselves space to enjoy Craig’s swan song. No Time to Die has spent a torturous 18 months thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic ready to go and suffered delay after delay as Eon & MGM (now Amazon) waited for the right moment to give audiences the best chance to see it in cinemas. Their patience will pay off given No Time to Die is tracking to be a huge hit, even if it is unlikely to match the box office haul of either Skyfall or Spectre.

Although in decades past the wait between the announcement of Bond actors was shorter, with Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton replacing their predecessors within two years, we will almost certainly not know who the next Bond will be until 2023. We had to wait three years between Die Another Day and Craig’s unveiling and that was 15 years ago. We are unlikely to see Bond 26 until, at the very earliest, 2024 and personally I would wager it will more likely be 2025. Which means, in all likelihood, Bond in the 2020s will reflect the 2000s as a transitory decade giving way to the next Bond’s debut, and his second movie before the decade is out. Anything more is likely to be very optimistic, and this is even without pandemics or other unnatural global events getting in the way.

The future, however, is not just about who plays James Bond as it perhaps was in many previous decades. The future of the Bond franchise now has many broader questions attached. After No Time to Die, is the franchise ever quite the same? What kind of Bond should the character be? How does he figure into a rapidly changing geopolitical and cultural fabric? A fabric in even greater flux than when Craig assumed a harder edged, stripped back version of the role in the wake of 9/11 and the global ructions of the terrorism threat that shaped much of his Bond era. And how exactly does this uniquely produced franchise continue to exist, and more importantly work to evolve, in an entertainment landscape that increasingly threatens to leave the style of how Bond is made behind?

These, for me, are the questions that will define the discourse around James Bond’s future over the next few years.

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Film, James Bond

NO TIME TO DIE gives Daniel Craig a stirring, grand and brave 007 goodbye | Film Review

A J. Black

For the very first time, the story of James Bond has an ending thanks to No Time to Die.

This turns out to be true of Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film on multiple levels. The much-delayed 25th 007 movie is, famously, the last outing for Daniel Craig’s take on Ian Fleming’s legendary spy and Craig has not only become the longest serving Bond in history (even if the official record holder of most Bond films remains Roger Moore), he has also played the role during the longest period of existential change both for the character and, more broadly, the nature of cinema. Pierce Brosnan might have last played Bond in 2002 but Craig is the first true James Bond of the 21st century and No Time to Die assures his place as the 007 who helped transform the franchise. The ending is a key part of that.

No Time to Die is a brawny, swaggering confluence of the two styles of Bond movie Craig’s era has often struggled to bring together. On the one hand, it has Skyfall’s sense of steely modern grandeur but also Spectre’s level of throwback adoration for perkier, flimsier and more colourful decades in the franchise’s history. Though it lacks the striking panache of Casino Royale or Skyfall’s emotional catharsis, No Time to Die is, in a sense, the perfect James Bond movie for the modern era for what it brings together, and one senses it could become a significant fan favourite. It frequently looks incredible, boasts the requisite stunt work and effects to (pun very much intended) die for, not to mention one of the strongest casts in Bond history, and it provides fans with many of the traditional ‘Bondian’ aspects they look for in these films.

On a creative level, No Time to Die serves as a capstone on five pictures over the last fifteen years which have elevated the James Bond franchise into something they rarely were before: fine examples of artistic, dramatic craft, as well as action, suspense, style and cool.

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James Bond

The Lost Adventures of James Bond (MARK EDLITZ) | Book Review + Author Interview

A J. Black

Every franchise has their lexicon of tantalising lost projects, stories which failed to see the light of day, and James Bond is no exception.

Many of these tales are public knowledge and have been documented over the decades since 007 came to the big (and small) screen in various incarnations and guises, but Mark Edlitz is one of the few scribes to comprehensively piece together the fabric of James Bond narratives lost to the ages and weave them into a document which, rather forensically, presents many of these fascinating fragments into a coherent meta-narrative of his own.

The Lost Adventures of James Bond is the story of Bond that never was.
Continue reading “The Lost Adventures of James Bond (MARK EDLITZ) | Book Review + Author Interview” →

Film, James Bond

SPECTRE suggests James Bond’s ‘team-ethic’ future | Film Feature

A J. Black

Looking back at Spectre, 2015’s unfairly maligned James Bond film, it becomes apparent just how much of 007’s future may lie around a team ethic.
Historically, Bond was, of course, a lone wolf, certainly in Ian Fleming’s source novels and particularly in the film adaptations produced by Eon from 1962 onwards. Fleming describes Bond’s general routine, in Moonraker, as “evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockford’s; or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women; weekends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London.” Bond’s life is distant, remote and detached from the world around him, aside from gambling or disposable sex. His cinematic adventures bore this out. If ever we did see his personal life, which we seldom do across any of his incarnations, it almost always revolves around women as opposed to family or friends.

Spectre, building on character introductions and developments introduced in Skyfall, begins to change that. Bond only wins the day with the help of the MI6 team around him back home, and sometimes in the field. Q covers for him, later joining him in Austria to help him reach Madeleine. Moneypenny is no longer the sweet, desk bound, lovelorn secretary who he flirts with and leaves behind, she actively aids him in terms of intelligence, and aides him in the field in Skyfall. M, or Mallory, is the most narratively involved head of MI6 in the series’ history, working to expose Max Denbigh aka ‘C’s connection to villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and gets his own (admittedly rather anaemic) action tussle with the man toward the end. Blofeld’s plans are only foiled thanks to the entire MI6 squad backing up Bond’s determined action.
This marks a sea change in the Daniel Craig era that could well stick through the upcoming No Time to Die, and into the uncertain waters for 007 beyond, as the franchise adapts to a vastly changing cinematic landscape.
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Books, James Bond

Book Review: THUNDERBOOK (John Rain)

A J. Black

What is there left to say about James Bond 007? The world’s most legendary spy has been written about for almost sixty years since Ian Fleming’s 1950’s/60’s novels exploded onto the cinema screen in 1962’s Dr. No, analysing every facet of the character’s escapades, his place in the wider scope of history, through to the technique behind his many movies. 

Thunderbook, however, might be the first text to freely take the piss out of each and every one of Bond’s (to date) 24 missions.

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Essays, Film, James Bond

What if killing off Daniel Craig’s JAMES BOND makes sense? | Film Feature

A J. Black

Another day, another James Bond rumour. Of all the great franchises out there, 007’s—perhaps appropriately—seems to play its cards the closest to its chest.

Eon Productions always rations information about where their legendary character is going right up to the point they are ready to announce his destination, and for what looks to be Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing in the role, this time is no different. Yet this time the rumour mill, courtesy of a story in The Express, has thrown up an unusual possibility.

The as-yet-untitled Bond 25 will end, apparently, with the death of James Bond.
This got me thinking, because the typical reaction to this would be a shocked gasp, a firm shake of the head, and a stiff dry Martini. “James Bond can’t die!” You can almost hear the clamour of middle-aged men who have been following this franchise since Roger Moore bedded women half his age in a safari suit angrily huffing those words, shaking off another nonsense newspaper report with various rebukes. “Bond is the main character!” “Bond is the hero!” “Bond, in the end, wins the day, kills the bad guy, saves the world and shags the girl over a load of diamonds which were being used to power a gigantic laser in space!” (or something).

Here’s where I’m wondering… maybe Daniel Craig’s 007 should bite the bullet.

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