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Only during his escape did he remember it was Christmas Eve and so his flight from Zurich is on Christmas Day. He’s met at the airport by a secret service car and glad to see Mary Goodnight along with the driver. After teasing her about working on Christmas Day she tells him he is to go […]

When I was a kid one of the things that struck me about the James Bond books was how authoritative Ian Fleming was as an author. The books are full of incidental details that don’t much matter to telling the story but convey a sense of Fleming really knowing what he was talking about. Probably […]

After returning from northern France Bond the Secret Service finally gets the lead on Blofeld they’ve been looking for. After meeting Griffon Or at the College of Arms Bond swots up on the heraldry. He’s to go undercover as Sir Hilary Bray to meet Blofeld in person at his supposed Alpine allergy clinic. This is […]

One thing that underlines how important James Bond is to modern culture is the frequency at which he is mentioned in books. It’s surprisingly often. My reading is mainly focused on espionage novels and what probably used to be called adventure novels but, taking a leaf out of action cinema, are now action heavy. Andy […]

After James Bond checks into Hotel Splendide in Royal- les-Eaux he orders a bottle of the Taittinger Blanc de Blancs from room service. When it arrives in a frosted silver bucket he downs a quarter of it before showering and, after dressing, sits by the window and looks out at the promenade sipping champagne and […]

While James Bond may be a secret agent, it would be stretching things to consider him a spy.

With the news that No Time to Die would weigh in at 2 hours 43 minutes came some trepidation, for me at least. A couple of hours, or just over, is almost always the right length for a film. Most that that are substantially longer could usually do with some seriously heavy editing IMO. There […]

On Saturday night after spending what seemed like a couple of hours trying to decide what we were going to watch we ended up with Knight & Day (2010) with Tom Cruise and Camaron Diaz. Not because ether of us is a Tom Cruise fan you understand, more like mental fatigue brought about by having […]

Last week I saw Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. It was a pretty enjoyable film and quite different to the other two movies I’ve seen in the last few weeks, No Time to Die (duh!) and Dune. One of the things that struck me about The French Dispatch is the number of actors from recent […]

Obviously I’ve been following the production of No Time to Die much closer than most people. Sometimes following 007 so closely leads to learning more than I should before seeing a particular film for the first time. But this time I just was not at all prepared for what the filmmakers delivered. I’m still pretty […]