Fiddling about with words

Over the last two years, I wrote an awful lot of words about the 23 Bond films that had been made up until the end of 2012. (We don't count the David Niven Casino Royale, or Never Say Never Again, because they were, well, shit.) Inspired by Jon Millward's Deep Inside, a statistical analysis of porn stars, I thought I'd do some data mining of my own. Unfortunately, I'm still not very familiar with R, that programmatic workbench beloved of statisticians, so to get my feet wet I thought I'd start by analysing and displaying the frequency of different words in what I wrote. And here's what you get:

Spoiled: Skyfall and One For The Money

For the first time, I'm reviewing a Bond film less than a fortnight after it's been released (4 days here in Singapore) so there's going to be things you might not want to read if you like surprises. But first I'm going to talk about going to watch a Bond film in Singapore. If you don't want that, just skip down to here.

No horsing about: Taken for a Quantum of Solace

When Quantum of Solace's title was announced, it was met with derision, probably from a bunch of men who are members of the Real Ale Society and think that Sean Connery was at his best in The Man With The Golden Gun. It was a silly and meaningless, nothing more than a sign of how far the series had veered from the True Path of Fleming. I suppose it was convenient for them to forget that the genius who came up with the title for Octopussy was one Ian Fleming, Esq. But what can you do? It would be no good telling anyone that Quantum of Solace is itself a Fleming title, rather than a bit of murky garbage like Die Another Day or Tomorrow Never Dies. People's minds were made up; Casino Royale was an aberration and Quantum of Solace would be rubbish, unlike all the Bond films in the good old days.

Obviously nobody had watched Thunderball lately. Or Diamonds Are Forever. Or Octopussy. Or A View To A Kill.

Unexpected happy ending: The Lives Of Others and Casino Royale

So we've had Scottish Bond, Australian Bond (in a kilt), the return of Scottish Bond (dressed up as somebody's idea of a Japanese fisherman), old age pensioner Bond, Actor Bond, Smarmy Bond, and, at long last, Thug Bond.

Before you can be re-Bourne: Die Another Day & The Bourne Identity

Diminished expectations can be wonderful things. As I started watching Die Another Day, there were a lot of things I knew about it. It was going to be terrible. It had an invisible car. It had James Bond wakeboarding on an iceberg. It had Madonna in it, a truly terrible bit of stunt-casting. It was the last gasp of an already irrelevant franchise, lurching to its death before the Daniel Craig reboot.

East is East But The World Is Not Enough

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Which makes 1999 a bit like France, I think; we think it was cool and sexy, but they turn out to have a really strange sense of humour, and sometimes they smell funny. (Or have bits of one of their ears missing.)

Who are you? Tomorrow Never Dies and Austin Powers

It's 1997. It's 35 years since Dr No. It's time for another Bond.

Unfortunately, that Bond is Michael Myers' lamentable Austin Powers.

Goldeneye: how Pierce saved our (Canadian) Bacon

Goldeneye was the first Bond that I saw in the cinema and, as with so many other films in the series, it turns out that my memory of it wasn't quite what I saw, nearly 17 years later.

Perhaps it was playing Goldeneye nonstop for three years on my Nintendo 64 that papered over the flaws in the film. Maybe it was the relief at a Bond film that was neither as embarassing as late-period Moore, or as gloomy as "I'm going to burst your balloon" Dalton. Or maybe I was just very, very drunk.

Paging Doctor Feelbad: Licence To Kill The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover

Almost before we'd got used to him, Dalton vanishes in one of the grimmer Bonds to date. I always remember this being one of the harder Bonds to cope with, and I was right: it's not often in a Bond film that a man is fed to a shark, or to a cocaine grinding machine, or exploded in a pressure chamber, or forced to watch a televangelist.

Firing blanks? The Living Daylights

As I watched the title sequence of The Living Daylights, I had an epiphany. For the past 14 months I'd believed they were just the prelude to the action. Now I realise they're actually a depiction of Bond's subconscious. In Dr No, when Bond was a half-formed plot cipher, his id was just a series of geometric shapes glowing in the darkness. As we reached early maturity in Goldfinger, Bond was dreaming of a woman with a car license plate for a mouth. By A View To A Kill he was terrified by frigid women wearing neon. And as he reached The Living Daylights, he was concerned with firing blanks while a Scandinavian warbles. I'm not sure what it means, but then I'm no psychologist.

Although ... Much of Bond is obsessed with potency, or the lack of it. We had to endure successively less virile Bonds each time Roger came to the screen, and yet just as we reboot with a younger, keener Timothy Dalton, what do we get? A plot that seems filled with dud ammunition, whether it's Kara's decoy rifle, the disappointing payload they fire through the gas pipe to Vienna, or the faux-shooting of Pushkin. It's almost like John Glen was trying to tell us something.

Please sir, can I have no Moore? A View To A Kill

In his 2008 biography, My Name Is My Bond, Roger Moore says of Grace Jones that

I've always said if you've nothing nice to say about someone, then you should say nothing. So I'll say nothing.

A couple of pages later, Roger relates the story of the enormous black dildo that Grace Jones surprised him with during their scene in bed together. Which raises the worrying thought that the only nice thing Roger can think to say about Dolph Lundgren's ex-girlfriend is that she has a gigantic sex toy (no, I don't mean Dolph Lundgren).

Dreaming of egg on your face: Octopussy Is Risky Business

It's 2010. A heartbroken Justin Bieber sings "I'll buy you anything", demonstrating that teenage relationships are reduced to nothing more than materialism, financial worth replacing emotional commitment. This nadir is just the natural end of a process kicked off in the 1980s by Tom Cruise, at the time another fresh-faced child, not the thing he has grown to be. Over a quarter of a century passed before it became clear to us quite how strange 1983 was.

Should have banned it: Time Bandits For Your Eyes Only

Warning: what follows is a load of bull.

It's 1981. Bond isn't just a film any more, it's a palimpsest, where when we read the story we can discern layer upon layer that was there before, and scrubbed out or painted over to make space for the latest edition.

(Please don't ever call the Bond films a "franchise". They're a series. A "franchise" sells joyless fried food to people living in cities, with more or less adeptness. No man wants to be Ronald McDonald, no woman wants to be with Colonel Sanders. Bond films may have been coopted from their very beginning to advertise lifestyle products of little practical use, but they've never been as utilitarian as "franchise" suggests. Leave that to Michael Bay and the rest of the usual suspects.)

Space Invaders: Moonraker and Alien

It's 1979. After ten Bond movies, the eleventh one gets to dispose entirely with Fleming's original plot (Nazis! With nukes! Hiding under the South Downs!) and keep just the title, which is ... well, which is a pretty rubbish title. Oh well. And things don't start that well, given we have another lamentable attempt at comedy in the shape of Richard Kiel falling out of the sky. Some nitwits must have assumed "big bloke" equals "physical comedy" and left it there; every scene with Jaws has him shamelessly mugging to the camera, while just out of earshot must be the swanee whistle that (ruinously) soundtracked Bond's superlative barrel roll in The Man With The Golden Gun. What's annoying here is that the chase from the airplane is a terrific stunt: why did it have to have a giant circus clown gurning throughout?

What a cunning stunt

It goes on and on: The Spy Who Loved Me and The Duellists

Two men in tight trousers.  I'll explain what this has to do with Bond in a bit.

It's 1977.  We're really in the Seventies now - look, Bond is wearing flares in the opening gunsight.  We already know ("like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs") that Bond is dead to contemporary culture; clearly those flares are a nod to 90s Madchester and the Happy Mondays.  Just like having Ron Weasley's older brother working on a submarine is a far-sighted reference to J K Rowling's speccy-gonk-in-a-posh-boarding-school saga.  Yes, the Brocolli boys didn't just invent a green vegetable, they were scrying far into the future.

The Loneliest Profession: The Conversation With The Man With The Golden Gun

It's 1974. Roger Moore has survived an entire film without being rebooted off, and for his return effort, he gets to go up against Ian Fleming's cousin / Saruman / the Lord of Summerisle.

Blogalongabond Tableau

Tired and dehydrated from yesterday, I felt low all day today. I got home and decided to play around with Tableau, an analytical tool that helps you to build graphical representations of data.

A while ago I plotted execution rates per capita, to see where you were most likely to be put to death (assuming random acts of crime across the population, and other baseless assumptions) but this time I wanted to do something useful. I wanted to see which was the most popular James Bond film.

A Game Of Two Halves - Live And Let Die while eating Soylent Green

It's 1973. Sean Connery has been and gone and come back and gone again. Now it's time for the series to get Rogered.

As Simon Winder put it in The Man Who Saved Britain, in Live and Let Die we see

Roger Moore exactly a point: reasonable figure, likeable face, bright eyes, good teeth, a very good Bond, in fact, in a bad film. what we all remember now is the Bond of A View (1985), where he looks like some burst-open yoghurt found at the back of the fridge.

Perhaps the comparison to out-of-date dairy produce is unfair (or not - we're six films away from making that assessment) but certainly as the film begins, you're struck by how young and healthy Moore looks.

Diamonds Are Forever until you get the Shaft

It's 1971. We're about to watch a fascinating meditation on the unreliability of memory, the quotidian nature of evil, and a multi-layered examination of attitudes to race, gender and sexuality.

Oops. No, we're not in that parallel universe.

It's 1971. "The other fella" is a distant memory, expunged from Bond's life without so much as a nod to continuity, and Scotland's Finest Wig-wearer is back in the saddle.

Not what you were expecting: On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Italian Job

It's 1996. I'm sat in a beer garden in Oxford, listening to some overbearing chap telling his friends what a rubbish Bond George Lazenby made. The thrust of his argument seemed to be that Gorgeous George was Australian. Conformist knob-end: he seemed quite happy with a Scottish Bond, or the previous year's Irish Bond, or the seemingly-octagenarian Roger Moore, a Bond that felt like an old soak from the British Legion clubhouse from the first moment he walked onto a set.