Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Happy 50th, Cinematic James Bond!

So, James Bond has been in film for decades now - 5 of them, as of this year. As a result, the pop-culture staple is getting a lot of attention in 2012. I'm only highlighting two of these videos today, but the Bond series will come up a lot in this week's Question post, and DJ will pop in to review Skyfall...

For starters, there's this official video (AV Club told me about it), which was created by Barbican. It's always been true that the world of 007 is all surface, lots of excitement without necessarily a lot of depth. Appropriately enough, this vid is about designing 007's style:



If you follow the link to Barbican above, you can see the other videos hosted on the site. They cover various aspects of the series, so you'll get to learn quite a bit about the only spy too stupid to use a fake name...

And I have to mention that, in October, even The Economist got in on the game. Its website posted statistics for all six James Bond actors. So what kind of stats does a spy like 007 get? Yeah, Economist couldn't do better than a Maxim article: they went with the number of (a) martinis, (b) sexual/romantic conquests, and (c) enemy kills.

It's shocking, because the results don't play out like you'd expect. Pierce Brosnan blew everyone away in the murder/death category, killing nearly 20 in just 4 movies. Sean Connery and George Lazenby seem tied for conquests - but George was in only one film, so he must've had like 8 women or something in OHMSS...
And, more surprising still, Skyfall figures were excluded. It's a problem because Daniel Craig has had triple the alcohol - in two movies - than all the other Bond actors. The more I think about it, the less I'm sure the math holds up... Alas, tho, I can't take time for checking figures now, I gotta move on...

Months ago, I learned about this other Fan-made Gem from several sources, but I had too many better Gems that I wanted to post first. This Gertrude Stein approach to Bond was very popular at the start of this Summer, so you may already know about it. If its inclusion seems too late... well, oops, I have my reasons.

This video is much like, but still inferior to, The Lost Boys clip I linked to before. Instead of getting every line reading of "Michael," we have 1 minute and 13 seconds to hear every "double-oh" spoken in a James Bond film.

It's... to be honest, it's way too much (over 100 repetitions). Something more should've been done to improve the flow and keep it from becoming flat - which it does, in a few spots. At the same time, this is also kinda mesmerizing... And I even came up with a few good ideas just from watching it; if I can get my hands on the right programs, I'll show you what I thought up...

I'd suggest skipping to the last 30 secs; the pace gets much better.

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