James Bond and China

Over at The Spectator Coffee House, I've written about James Bond and China.

Sam Smith: Writing's on the Wall

It is an indication of how much I really wanted to like Sam Smith's James Bond theme that I initially thought I liked it. I'd seen a link on the website of The Guardian and clicked it only to find myself being asked for my Spotify login. I don't have a Spotify login. I don't want a Spotify login. Even if I did, I damn well don't want a Facebook account so I can get myself a Spotify account. So I headed over to Youtube, typed in 'Writing's on the Wall', and clicked on the first picture of Sam Smith.

I started to listen. The song was at once somehow familiar. My first thought was that I didn't dislike it but I began to suspect something was wrong when, after about thirty seconds, Mr. Smith still hadn't start to sing. That's when I realised it was a fake. About half an hour later, I finally found a proper link.

I started to listen. The song was at once somehow familiar. My first thought was that I didn't dislike it. I began to suspect something was wrong when, after about thirty seconds, Mr. Smith has started to sing. That's when I realised it was a fake.

This is another of the fake James Bond themes, written by somebody trying to write a James Bond theme and producing something that's deep in the desert of pastiche. It's something I've noticed over the course of the past few Bond films. I think the woeful Madonna effort, for the absolute worst James Bond film (Die Another Day), made the producers wary about letting artists have too much freedom when it comes to the Bond themes. Their response was Chris Cornell's 'You Know My Name' for Casino Royale, full of sweeping strings and penetrating guitar riffs, which felt like a proper stab at writing a Bond theme. Yet it also felt like just that. An attempt at writing a Bond theme.

Bond films have passed off quite a few pastiches for the real thing. I often think the problem stemmed from David Arnold taking over the music direction for the Bond movies. Arnold professed himself a Bond obsessive, deeply influenced by the music of John Barry. I always liked his enthusiasm and love for the Bond movies but, at the same time, to these very cloth ears of mine, it always felt like he was directing his energy into something other than the song. The most obvious example was the Arnold song, sung by K.D. Lang over the closing credits of 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. Some say it was better than Sheryl Crow's 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. As a Bond song, it might well be true. As a song, however, I can't help but think that Crow's is far superior.

And that, I think, is the problem. There's a difference between writing a good song and writing a Bond theme. When the artists set out to write a great song, you usually end up with a great theme. When they set out to write a Bond theme song, you get something that's not quite as good.

'Another Way to Die', the theme to Quantum of Solace, is a fine example. The Bond riff is very evident from the outset but Jack White struggles to adapt it to his style, producing a song that was at once blues and grunge and sometimes all over the place.

'Skyfall', by contast, was just a great song which is a great song outside the content of the film's opening credits.

Sam Smith's effort is far from the worst Bond theme (take that bow, Madonna). Nothing wrong with the orchestration. Nothing much wrong with Sam Smith's voice in that years of listening to Sparks has tuned my ears to the falsetto. Lyrically it is as bland as lyrics get: a schmaltzy list of ballad clichés hastily written down (twenty minutes to write the song, Smith claims) by somebody steeped in schmaltzy ballad clichés.

Second, third, and then fourth listening, I found it growing on me but, really, not so much that I think Smith has justified the filmmakers made in giving him the honour. Smith has the wrong kind of voice for a James Bond theme or he has the right kind of voice for a James Bond who is has become the ultimate metrosexual, as obsessed with his skin cream as the Bond in the novels was obsessed with his cars and women. I don't see this changing any time soon. Might as well try to get used to it. You can't change the world, which might as well be the title of the next James Bond film.

Feeling As Hoagy As A Carmichael

Another bad night's sleep but this time no drawing. For some reason, my heart hasn't been into it. For a few days (perhaps even weeks, if I'm honest) I keep starting cartoons and I find that my energy just isn't there to finish them. I blame this throat infection, which feels a little better in so far as it now feels more like a heavy cold but also makes me feel worse because it's now more like a heavy cold. The Strepsils have been working but I'm not convinced they don't give me mild insomnia. I find I'm full of energy at about 5am.

Another bad night's sleep and a lost hour due to the clocks going forward means that I'm behind with everything and especially the news.

Interesting to see the Tory infighting has already started with IDS suggesting the Cameron will be forced to quit early. I thought Cameron's 'no third term' an odd confession to make but because of one point that I've not seen mentioned in the media. If Cameron doesn't intend to stand for a third term, there's nothing to stop him promising the earth at this election. Politicians are programmed to ensure they never box themselves in. They hate to rule things in or out lest it come back to bite them when next they need the public's vote. If this really is Cameron's last election, can it be any surprise that he's already promising us a 7 day NHS when the 5 day NHS is broken to buggery?

Loved how gloomy and literate 'Spectre' is looking: 'You're like a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond'... Great writing. Hated the media attacking Sir Roger Moore for saying something that I believe many Bond fans would say. I think it's a sign of a largely white paranoia about issues of race that nothing can be debated without immediate accusations of bigotry. It's precisely why UKIP already have such a strong hold in politics.

I'm sure the first black Bond will come and perhaps he/she will be a revelation. I've never been a fan of any Bond who looks unlike the Fleming model which was Hoagy Carmichael. Much as I love the Craig movies, the blond Bond is not really James Bond in my eyes. So, given I've watched and enjoyed movies that have moved away from the canon, would it matter if they changed his ethnicity or even his gender? Hamlet was recently being played by a woman in Manchester and it was supposedly a great success.

I feel too ill to argue otherwise. I'm too ill to argue why we should cherish our cultural icons. Would it matter if in the next adaptation of Sherlock Holmes the BBC turned him into an Eskimo woman? Perhaps not. It depends on the execution but, really, even if it were great (and, oddly, I can imagine it might be great) it wouldn't be Sherlock Holmes. It would be a pastiche of Holmes, something like Sherlock Holmes but very different to Sherlock Holmes. It I were a fan of DC Comic (I'm not) I'd probably be shocked by the New 52 relaunch of their major titles in which they've changed everything, turning Thor into a woman and Superman into an angry young man. The market will ultimately decide these things. We live in a mash-up culture and nothing is sacred except the mighty dollar.

Listening to other people's conversations

Thanks to a signal failure outside Manchester Victoria, it took two hours to get home after an already tiring day. My ankles are killing me. I'm too exhausted to write anything long except to relate the highlight of the trip: sitting on the station around 11am this morning after doing a hike to the hospital and back. I was there fifteen minutes early so I sat in the shelter with my Samsung Note and continued to draw an increasingly pornographic caricature of J.C. Mogg. A man and a woman were also in the shelter and provided ample entertainment. I swear that the following is an accurate transcription of part of their conversation because I stopped drawing to take notes as the discussion developed. As you read this, imagine me sitting to one side and wanting to shout 'Stop! Everything you're saying is wrong!' However, I didn't. I just took notes.

 

Man: See that Joanna Lumley on telly last night? She seems to have aged suddenly...

Woman: Oh, didn't she sing that James Bond song? You know the one from the 1970s?

Man: Oh aye. Man With the Golden Gun. Rodger Moore wasn't it?

Woman: Yes.

Man: Not the best James Bond.

Woman: No, that was Pierce Brosnan.

Man: They say Daniel Craig is the new Sean Connery but I think Sean Connery was the best Bond along with that Australian. George Lazenby.

Woman: Oh wasn't he in that spoof James Bond film? I didn't like that one.

Man: Did you know that was the longest James Bond film they've made so far?

Woman: When's the new film out?

Man: Next month.

Woman: Next month? That soon?

Man: Oh aye. They finished filming it a while back. Of course, we've got to wait until next year to see the new Dad's Army film.

Woman: Oh I saw they were making that.

Man: Doing a good job too. They've got everything right. They've got the costumes right.

Woman: Really?

Man: And you know what they've also got right?

Woman: What?

Man: Walker's moustache.

 

I think that's worthy of a caption on the posters when the new Dad's Army film is released. 'Now with authentic Walker's moustache'. Personally speaking, I wasn't intending to see the new Dad's Army film until I'd had it confirmed about the state of Walker's moustache. Now I know Walker's moustache is in the film and looks just like Walker's moustache, I'm marking it down in my 2016 diary. 'Must see the new Dad's Army film. Must also pay extra special attention to Walker's moustache'.

Yes. I'm tired.

On Samsung, Bond, Boyd, and Teeth

So, I think we’re back and, as usual, I’m probably last to get updated name servers, those mysterious doodads that translate the www address you type into your browser into the real life address of the computers where websites live. I’ve been looking at a grey screen all weekend, waiting for the website to come live. Now it is, I’m left wondering what to say.

I wish I could say I had a busy weekend but I’ve been distracted by, among other things, the terrible news that Samsung are launching their cheapest Note 10.1 (2014 edition) in the UK at the price £479, or about £130 more than I’d hoped and considerably more than I could afford.

Another disappointment is the news that William Boyd’s new James Bond novel, Solo, might be a bit of a disappointment. If we’re to believe the early reviews, it’s probably the worst effort so far. It wouldn’t surprise me if it is, given that I’m a bit of a Bond purist. I will often reread all the original Bond books every year or so and then relive the disappointment of attempting the continuation novels. I’ve not enjoyed any of these new writers writing as Fleming. I thought Faulks’s effort the least objectionable despite the monkey pawed villain and the book being generally dismissed by the public. Deaver’s effort is as easy to ignore as he found it easy to ignore the canonical Bond, choosing instead to create something new and different and (sadly) popular. I couldn’t read any of the novels by Raymond Benson or John Gardner. The best was Kingsley Amis, though Colonel Sun was more Amis than Fleming. One book that I did enjoy but haven’t read it in many years was James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007 by John Pearson. Perhaps I should give that another go.

Having said all that, I don’t want to dismiss Boyd’s efforts until I’ve tried it, especially when reviewers customarily confuse the literary James Bond with the movie James Bond. Reading Amazon’s reader comments, I found this, typical of many:

Remember how Fleming would introduce a subject? M would mention a name and Bond, showing off, would fire back a couple or three facts about it in half a minute which was supposed to be useful, as if spat out by his card index system (no computers worth anything in 1960-70: I used the first, at Manchester, a KDF 9 in 1965 which needed punched cards). This Bond is more intelligent. He takes serious injuries unlike the original who is always unscathed, his looks just as handsome as before. This version even has a scar.

I don’t recall Fleming introducing a subject through M and then Bond rolling off all the facts. That was the movie Bond. Yet the bigger mistake is in believing that the literary Bond was ‘always unscathed’. The Bond of the novels was routinely battered, broken, and bruised. It was his defining characteristic. He spends nearly the entirety of Live and Let Die with a broken finger and Fleming is always commenting on his scars, including the scar on his face which has never made it onto screen. It’s Bond’s vulnerability that makes the books so great. The films have entirely different virtues.

Speaking of battered yet misunderstood heroes, I’m going to the dentist later today to make a long overdue appointment. I’d like to say it’s precautionary but life isn’t like that. A bit of tooth broke off last week and it needs fixing. As soon as it happened, I knew my Samsung dreams had come to an end given that my money will now probably go to fund my dentist’s next skiing holiday.

When Roger Moore Was The Best Bond

I’ve become hooked again on rewatching the James Bond films. It happens from time to time, usually when I’m feeling tired or down or simply uninspired. A James Bond season is my way of turning my brain off and vegetating in the early evening over a week or two. My lack of critical faculties during this time perhaps explains why I usually find myself enjoying the films the critics tell me that I’m not supposed to enjoy. It also leads me to write outlandish statements like ‘Roger Moore was the best James Bond’, even though I know that to be rubbish. The best James Bond was Timothy Dalton. The worst James Bond by a good distance was Pierce Brosnan. The rest sit somewhere between those extremes of brilliance and banality.

Connery may have looked the most like the Bond I knew from the novels but it was Dalton who took the Bond from the page and played him on the screen with the right mixture of self-loathing, anger, and masochism. He was Daniel Craig before Craig brilliantly remodelled Bond as a hitman from the pages of GQ magazine. George Lazenby could have been the best had he been given chance and, certainly, his one outing remains a highpoint of the franchise yet he was unlucky to appear in the first Bond film that broke away from the established model. Years ahead of its time, you might say, and in retrospect, probably the first real Bond classic, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the Bond they got so very right but they didn’t realise that at the time.

As for Brosnan, it was an experiment that began well with Goldeneye but went wrong very quickly. He also suffered from his own good looks. He only became a genuinely interesting actor once he stopped trying to be James Bond, making two woefully underrated movies Matador (2005) and Seraphim Falls (2006), and then the critically acclaimed The Ghost with Polanski in 2010. In those films he delivered something he failed to bring to Bond which was the complexity of a man no longer young but more interesting because of that. In contrast, the Brosnan Bond had been too suave, too debonair, too liable to pout to camera at important moments. The films also lost their way with diamond encrusted villains, invisible cars, Madonna, and (the possibly the worst plot point in any Bond film) facial transplants that turned a North Korean colonel into a proper plummy Toby Stephens.

Somewhere in the middle of such debates sits Sir Roger Moore. Moore wasn’t a perfect Bond by any means. In the later films, he was too old but from the beginning he was already too gentlemanly to be the deeply twisted Bond of the novels. He just possessed too much humour, while his taste in clothes was abhorrent. Yet it’s his films that cheer me up like no others in the series. Of course, Live and Let Die and The Man With The Golden Gun are two of the strongest Bond films yet made but those aren’t films I find myself rewatching. I have a strange special place in my heart for his last three outings as James Bond even though they are routinely placed at the bottom of other people’s lists. I don’t know why but I love For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, and A View To A Kill…

Even when I’m watching them, I know they’re bad. In A View to a Kill, I cringe the moment Bond ‘surfs’ across a frozen lake to the music of The Beach Boys. He then gets into a strange mini submarine camouflaged as an iceberg but inside turned bordello with a blonde busty member of MI6 wearing a one piece fur lined gold lamé ski suit. Don’t get me wrong. If I was going to jump into a mini submarine disguised as an iceberg, my preference would be into the arms of a blonde busty member of MI6 wearing a one piece fur lined gold lamé ski suit and I don’t care what Edward Snowden and The Guardian have to leak about that.

Octopussy has even more of those cringe worthy moments. I detest the moment when Bond arrives in India and the local agent (dressed as a snake charmer) identifies himself by playing the Monty Norman’s James Bond theme. That character, Vijay, was played by Vijay Amritraj, a famous tennis player, which leads to the awful visual pun during a chase scene when Vijay fights off the henchmen with his tennis racquet and the crowd looking one way and then another as if they’re watching a real tennis match. Then there’s that questionable moment when Bond hands Sadruddin, the Head of the Indian Station, a wad of money with the quip ‘That should keep you in curry for a few weeks’. I hate it when Bond swings through the jungle and yodels the Tarzan yodel made popular by Ron Ely’s Tarzan. Then there’s the terrible moment when Bond faces down a tiger by giving it a Mary Woodhouse ‘sit’ and who can really forgive it for the moment Q drops Bond on the villain’s home from a large hot air balloon covertly decorated with the Union Jack. Add in the outlandish yoyo killers who always require a conveniently located high ledge, the scene where Bond dresses as a clown and the moment Bond hides in a gorilla costume and you have the strangest Bond film since the Woody Allen Casino Royale.

Octopussy has a dozens upon dozens of these moment yet I find myself perversely enjoying them and I don’t know why.

A View To A Kill has possibly the worst Bond girl in Tanya Roberts yet I love every moment she’s on screen, either screaming at a pitch that only bothers dogs or talking about geology like she only learned to spell it that morning. It’s also the film with the murder by butterfly on a fishing rod and the bad dubbing that makes French actor Jean Rougerie sound so lecherously vile as Achille Aubergine. In the last twenty minutes, Grace Jones’ May Day undergoes an instantaneous switch from being Bond’s nemesis to being his saviour. There is then a moment when Tanya Roberts is running away and doesn’t noticed the enormous bloody airship chasing her.

Yet my favourite Bond movie was the first of the three. For Your Eyes Only has one of the most stunningly beautiful leading ladies in Carole Bouquet yet it’s also the one with the transgender woman who was born a Barry. If you type 'Carole Bouquet' into Google and it will offer as the top suggestion the phrase ‘Carole Bouquet is a man’. She isn’t, wasn’t and never has been, but, as a youth, I learned with great bewilderment that one of the Bond girls in my much thumbed James Bond annual was originally born a bloke. That, however, wasn’t Carole Bouquet but the actress Caroline Cossey seen briefly walking from the pool. I believe she even claimed to have dated Des Lynam though he apparently doesn’t remember.

But back to Bouquet and Bond... For Your Eyes Only begins with a ropey pre-credit fight between Bond stuck in a remote control helicopter over London and Blofeld in his electric wheel chair. Obviously fake mannequins and atypical electronic music set the tone for the rest of the movie. Bond parachutes with a parasol, climbs a mountain with his shoe laces, and ends up snorkelling in the nude as a parrot gets saucy with Janet Brown’s Margaret Thatcher. Yet, again, all of that never stops me enjoying it.

It’s probably the mistakes, the lousy jokes, the comic accidents that keep me entertained. There would be better Bond films. Casino Royale was possibly the best of the lot and Skyfall almost as good. There would be better Bond girls (Carey Lowell, especially in the latter half of License to Kill… sigh). And yes, there would be better Bonds. Yet none of them have Moore whose personality infects the films with a spirit that’s somehow comforting, reassuring, uplifting. He’s wry, knowing, in on the joke. And that’s why I was wrong to say that Roger Moore was the best Bond. I should have said: there was no better Roger Moore than the Moore of the James Bond films. He was my favourite Roger Moore. Nobody did it better.