Bond films - the awards

With the epic year-long trawl through the Bond franchise coming to an end last Sunday evening it is high time that I made use of my time to make a list of my highlights and lowlights of the series.  And so with almost no further introduction - I present the winners of my awards for the Bond film franchise.

Best Bond:

Sean Connery.  It could so easily have been Roger Moore, but the raised eyebrows and super-hammy performances of his latter years in the role underlined how well Connery did to keep things away from cliche for so long.  Connery defined the role, Connery is the benchmark against whom all others are tested.  Connery wins.  No one can beat Connery at this - suave factor 10.

Best film:

A very hard category to call.  Re-watching them all again has given me a new appreciation of a series I thought I thoroughly knew.  I used to think Live and Let Die was great - now I'm not so sure.  Goldeneye was my first Bond experience - but now I've realised the plot makes little sense.  On the other hand I used to think The Man with the Golden Gun was trite, I've found a new appreciation of its straightforward plot and tense finale.

A few years ago I probably would have put You Only Live Twice in consideration - its quintessential Bond-ness defines the series and was the blueprint for Mike Myer's excellent parody Austin Powers.  But 50 years have aged it badly.  Its misogyny and casual racism would play very poorly to a modern audience I suspect.

As such the winner is... Octopussy.  I doubt that many Bond purists would quickly agree, but on a pure film level it is superb.  The plot is tense and has real danger to it.  The opening sequence is horrifying and the whole sequence culminating in Roger Moore's sad clown diffusing the atomic bomb is brilliantly paced - you almost let yourself believe that Bond could fail.  Maud Adams is one of the least meek Bond girls there ever was, and the bad guys are actually believable in their motives and actions (surprisingly rare for a Bond film).  Set aside the pointless and distracting references to tennis and brace for an occasional 'British Empire' moment - but aside from this Octopussy is one of the best scripted films in the series that gives Roger Moore a final hurrah before his reign as Bond quickly crashed downhill.  It's today's winner.  Tomorrow?  Who knows...

Best theme tune:

Goldfinger



It's almost impossible to look past Shirley Bassey's finest hour.  Sure, Live and Let Die is probably a better song, but every Bond theme song that's ever been written is and will always be compared against Bassey's gravely high notes layered against that wailing eerie brass section.  Tina Turner giving it both barrels in Goldeneye is probably the closest we've seen in more recent years, and Tom Jones does his best with Thunderball - but nobody does it better than Shirley.  Goldfinger, hands down.

Best Bond girl:

This is a very tough category, as it depends what you want from a Bond girl.  If you want a character who's Bond's match then you can't really look beyond Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies or Maud Adams as Octopussy.  If you want someone who's going to be a witty sassy sidekick then it's probably Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.  If you want a femme fatale, then it's clearly Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.

Having said all that, maybe you're just looking for someone who's straight-up gorgeous.  So I'm going for Rosamund Pike as Miranda Frost in the otherwise utterly awful Die Another Day.  So sue me.

Best Bond Moment:

So much to choose from, but in spite all the love I've handed out to the classic films of the 1960s and 1970s here so far - I'm going to plump for a moment from Skyfall.  After the awfulness of Quantum of Solace, the makers of Skyfall seemed in conciliatory mood and so after holding back for most of the film finally revealed a classic of Bond-gone-by, pulled out the steel strings and gave us Monty Norman's classic.  Oh how the cinema I was in did sigh with approval!

Low point:

Doubtlessly the nadir of the entire series is the moment in Moonraker when Bond is chased around Venice in a gondola - and some pigeons are so surprised that they do a double take.  After that point I'm surprised they made any more.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - a fable for an America lost

The start of a new year is always an inspirational time to remember that one can go to the cinema on a lazy Saturday afternoon.  With the awards seasons in swing and the Oscars around the corner, it is traditional for the 'good' films to be released at this time of year.

I would image that writer / Director Martin McDonagh is confident his latest film is worthy of such consideration.  Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (yes, that really is its name) is a story of right v wrong, forgiveness v revenge, light v dark and death v rebirth set against the foreground of post industrial rural America adrift in a world that has left previous certainties behind.  Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a woman who's daughter was raped and murdered less than a year prior to the film's opening.  The town's police have made almost no progress in investigating the murder, and have a better reputation for assaulting prisoners than solving crimes, so Mildred resolves to hire three disused billboards outside the town and express her frustration publicly.

In Trump's America this act takes on a political dimension mirroring the election of the 45th president, overwhelmingly voted for by disenfranchised post-industrial communities in the 'fly-over' states.  The vote felt like a scream of pain into the abyss.  Without any real policy or plan, Trump offered himself up as the anti-establishment candidate, a vote for him was billed as a cathartic vote against the Washington elites.  Like Trump, will Midred's billboards actually make any difference to those who so eagerly put them in place?  Probably not - but she doesn't seem to care.  To her, the act of defiance in the face of the establishment is an end in itself.

The establishment here are personified by the police, played with no small amount of swagger by Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell.  Harrelson is police chief Willoughby, initially the antagonist identified as the bad guy of the piece by Maldred's billboards, Rockwell is Dixon - the redneck racist who drinks, fights and lives with his oppressive mother.  Each seem trapped by the hopelessness of an America fallen into ruin.  Even though Harrelson's character is the more likeable and seems genuinely crestfallen at his own inability to find a killer, an illness allows him no peace or escape from Ebbing's terminal decline.

Like McDonagh's superb In Bruges, Three Billboards plays out like a modern fable.  Characters are possessed of great wisdom when required, characters are possessed of great stupidity when needed too.  Vengeance is shown to be something that's an incredibly strong force, but ultimately hollow and only part of a cycle that leads to more violence.  Each of Hayes, Willoughby and Dixon try to get vengeance over someone or something they perceive to have wronged them - each fail.  Each of those characters are reborn in a sense, perhaps seeing the world in a new way.  When the final scene fades to black with our our anti-heroes heading towards an uncertain future, the fact that they're questioning their motives at all shows how far they've come.  Three Billboards is a wonderful fairy tale that channels a lot about what has gone wrong in America in the 21st century.  It's a deeply moving on an emotional level, but never stops being blackly humourous as we are encouraged to laugh into the face of the abyss along with its characters.  An excellent start to the year in cinema.