Blogalongabond

It's all his fault.

Or alternatively, it's partly Ian Fleming's fault for writing the source material, and partly down to Cubby Broccoli for building a never-ending film franchise out of them. I forgive them all their parts in this, although not enough to remember to stop mispelling Cubby's surname. One L, two Cs! When will I learn?

Anyway, Blogalongabond is, for the moment, the ultimate test of Bond-based endurance: watching one Bond film, every month, in chronological order, starting with Dr No and finishing with Quantum of Solace, just before Bond 23 appears in cinemas, and writing about each one. It's a voyage of enlightenment for me, combined with a horribly depressing feeling of disappointment as I find that not everything that is old is vintage, and the worrying discovery that it used to be a lot more acceptable for a big man to slap little ladies around.

Plus, I get to read what lots of other people have read too, and possibly get into a big argument about the plausibility of the plot of A View To A Kill at some point.

So far I've seen:

Dr. No - in which we're meant to learn that all Asians are the same, and it's easy to sneak up on a British secret agent
From Russia With Love - which tries to teach us that no vehicle with James Bond in it is safe, and Spectre's spy school is just as lamentable as MI6's.
Goldfinger - the main lessons of which are never to trust fat men, or cover your lady friends entirely with paint
Thunderball - in which the confusing lesson from the first film is explained, because the entire training budget was wasted on funding an enormous cartographic department. Producting enormous maps, mind you, not huge cartographers.
You Only Live Twice - perhaps intended to instil in us a well-grounded fear of furniture
On Her Majesty's Secret Service - which shows us you can trust your memory, and George Lazenby is still better than the majority of people give him credit for
Diamonds Are Forever - a film that tries to say a lot about the banality of evil and the ennui of Vegas.  And fails, sort of.

More soon.  If you want to read what everyone else has written (and you should), or join in (at this point you'd be 7 films behind, but there's still time to catch up) then go over here