James Bond, Madlibs, & the 007 drinking game

IT WASN’T NECESSARY for me to rewatch the entire Bond series, in order, with my girlfriend, to recognise that the series is heavily reliant on an established formula, but it didn’t stop me. Indeed, what’s remarkable is not how formulaic the films are, but how successfully a 54-years-24-films-long series has been built where other, equally formulaic, series seem to have stalled (for reference, see the Carry Ons, the Rockys, the Karate Kids, the Friday the 13ths, the Nightmare on Elm Streets, the Halloweens or, really, any other film franchise at all). Another, perhaps related, peculiarity of the Bonds is that no-one really tends to see them as a series, with the possible exception of the more continuity-heavy post-reboot films; they’re more like this year’s model than sequels, which can be tracked in the trends they embrace: blaxploitation in 1973’s Live and Let Die; Kung Fu in 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun; disco in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me; Star Wars in 1979’s Moonraker.

So successful & so enduring is the Bond formula that, aside from its imitations in many other works, even within the franchise it has frequently proven possible to deconstruct & reconstruct it however the creators see fit. Like a game of Madlibs, the same elements show up in new combinations across the series, & what that’s given rise to in my household at least, is the 007 drinking game: take a sip of vodka martini each time one of these elements show up.

1. Film ends with Bond & Bond girl on raft

Appears in: Dr. No; From Russia with Love; Goldfinger (a parachute is the aerial version of a raft); Thunderball; You Only Live Twice; Diamonds Are Forever (a yacht is just a really fancy raft); The Man with the Golden Gun (a junk is just a big raft); The Spy Who Loved Me (a miniature submarine is the…well, submarine version of a raft); Moonraker (an escape pod is the space version of a raft); For Your Eyes Only (again, a yacht is a fancy raft); Octopussy; Tomorrow Never Dies

Drink twice if: Bond is actively avoiding a rescue effort in order to get off with the Bond girl (Dr. No, Goldfinger, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, Tomorrow Never Dies)

2. Film ends with Bond & Bond girl hilariously interrupted mid-coitus by an attempt at rescue or communication

His superiors will act shocked at his promiscuity, every time. Appears in: The Spy Who Loved Me; Moonraker; For Your Eyes Only; A View to a Kill; GoldenEye; The World is Not Enough

Drink twice if: Bond is on some sort of raft or other craft when it occurs (see above).

3. Shark tanks!

Appears in: Thunderball; You Only Live Twice (a piranha tank is just a modest version of a shark tank); Live and Let Die (which features a functionally similar alligator farm in addition to the real deal); The Spy Who Loved Me; Licence to Kill (which also features a revolting maggot tank)

4. Assassination attempt by deadly (sometimes, not-so-deadly) animal

Due to the prevalence of tanks full of sharks or other aquatic creatures, they’ve been given their own section. Appears in: Dr. No (tarantula); Live and Let Die (snake); Moonraker (another snake); Skyfall (komodo dragon)

5. Villain wears a Nehru jacket

Appearances: Dr. No in Dr. No; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever; Hugo Drax in Moonraker; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only; Kamal Khan in Octopussy; Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre

6. Villain bearing some sort of physical deformity or disfigurement

Appearances: Dr. No in Dr. No (metal hands); Emilio Largo in Thunderball (missing left eye); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (baldness; scar over right eye); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (baldness); Tee Hee in Live and Let Die (missing right hand, replaced with hook); Whisper in Live and Let Die (obesity); Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (superfluous third nipple); Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun (dwarfism); Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (acromegaly; metal teeth); Jaws in Moonraker (acromegaly; metal teeth); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only (baldness; paralysis); Alec Trevelyan 006 in GoldenEye (burns across right side of face); Valentin Zukovsky in GoldenEye (limp due to bullet wound in knee); Renard in The World is Not Enough (baldness; forehead scar from bullet wound, also causing inability to feel pain); Elektra King in The World is Not Enough (missing lobe of right ear); Mister Bullion in The World is Not Enough (gold teeth); Zao in Die Another Day (diamonds embedded in face due to explosion; later, bald, blue-eyed & pale while retaining Asiatic facial structure due to interrupted Caucasiplasty); Le Chiffre in Casino Royale (scar over left eye; cries blood); Adolph Gettler in Casino Royale (missing right eye); Raoul Silva in Skyfall (deformed jaw due to cyanide incident); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre (scar over right eye due to an explosion, also causing blindness in right eye)

Drink twice if: they bear their disfigurement as a direct result of Bond’s actions (Ernst Stavro Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only; Alec Trevelyan 006 in GoldenEye; Valentin Zukovsky in GoldenEye; Zao in Die Another Day (twice over!); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre)

8. Villain hoist with his own petard

This might be a physical feature, a personality quirk, some sort of weapon or item, or a feature of the villain’s plan, just as long as it causes his downfall. Appearances: Dr. No in Dr. No (unable to climb slippery pole due to own metal hands); Oddjob in Goldfinger (electrocuted via own razor bowler hat); Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever (set alight with own burning shishkabob); Mr. Wint in Diamonds Are Forever (blown up with own bomb); Mr. Big in Live and Let Die (shot with own compressed-air pistol); Tee Hee in Live and Let Die (wrenched out of train due to inability to free own hook-hand); Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (fooled by own mannequin of Bond); Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (shot through own gun-pipe in table); Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (attracted to electromagnet via own metal teeth); Dr. Carl Mortner in A View to a Kill (blown up by own dynamite); Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights (crushed by own Waterloo diorama); Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies (killed by own sea drill); Colonel Tan-Sun Moon in Die Another Day (sucked into jet intake by own parachute; also electrocuted by own power suit)

9. A villain the audience had forgotten about appears to attack Bond & Bond girl aboard moving vehicle

A final, post-climactic action scene particularly beloved by director Guy Hamilton, who used it in each of his Bond films: Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger (aboard aeroplane); Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever (aboard yacht); Tee Hee in Live and Let Die (aboard train); Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun (aboard junk)

10. Bond challenges the villain, early on in his investigation, in a sport or game

He always wins, too. Appears in: Goldfinger (golf); Thunderball (clay pigeon shooting); Moonraker (pheasant shooting); Octopussy (backgammon); A View to a Kill (steeplechase); GoldenEye (impromptu motor racing; Baccarat) Die Another Day (fencing). This also supplies about half of the plot of Casino Royale (Texas Hold ’em poker).

Drink twice if: the villain cheats, but Bond wins anyway (Goldfinger, Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, arguably Die Another Day)

11. Henchman with a bizarre method of assassination

Appearances: Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love (concealed blade in shoe); Oddjob in Goldfinger (razor bowler hat); Bambi & Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever (tag-team gymnastics); Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (firing golden bullets from Golden Gun); Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (biting with metal teeth); Jaws in Moonraker (biting with metal teeth); Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (crushing with thighs); Mr. Hinx in Spectre (pushing thumbs through eyeballs)

Drink twice if: the henchman is hoist with his own petard (see above)

12. Ski scene

The best ones are choreographed by Willy Bogner. Appears in: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; The Spy Who Loved Me; For Your Eyes Only; A View to a Kill; The Living Daylights (Bond on toboggan; enemies on skis); The World is Not Enough; Spectre

13. Diving scene

Naturally enough, Ian Fleming had a passion for marine biology. Appears in: Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, Tomorrow Never Dies

14. Gadget car

There is something of a misconception that Bond receives a new one in each film; in fact, this is only true of the Brosnan era. James Bond’s gadget cars are: an Aston Martin DB5 (Goldfinger; Thunderball; GoldenEye; Tomorrow Never Dies; The World is Not Enough; Skyfall; Spectre); an Aston Martin DBS (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Diamonds Are Forever); a Lotus Esprit S1 (The Spy Who Loved Me); a Lotus Esprit Turbo (For Your Eyes Only); an Aston Martin V8 Vantage Volante (The Living Daylights); a BMW Z3 (GoldenEye); a BMW 750iL (Tomorrow Never Dies); a BMW Z8 (The World is Not Enough); an Aston Martin V12 Vanquish (Die Another Day); an Aston Martin DBS V12 (Casino Royale; Quantum of Solace); an Aston Martin DB10 (Spectre). Villainous gadget cars are Francisco Scaramanga’s AMC Matador/light aircraft in The Man with the Golden Gun, & Zao’s Jaguar XKR in Die Another Day.

15. Gadget watch

Again, these are only a regular feature of the Brosnan films, though Q’s line in Die Another Day, “Your new watch. Your twentieth, I believe-?” wrongly implies they are a feature of every film. James Bond’s gadget watches are: a Breitling Top Time with inbuilt Geiger counter (Thunderball); Rolex Submariner with inbuilt electromagnet & buzzsaw (Live and Let Die); Seiko 0674 with inbuilt teleprinter (The Spy Who Loved Me); Seiko M354-5019M with inbuilt explosives (Moonraker); Seiko Duo-Time H357 with inbuilt communicator (For Your Eyes Only); Seiko G757-5020 with inbuilt surveillance equipment (Octopussy); Omega Seamaster 2541.80 with inbuilt laser beam & remote detonator (GoldenEye); Omega Seamaster 2531. 80 with inbuilt explosives (Tomorrow Never Dies); Omega Seamaster 2531.80 with grappling hook (The World is Not Enough); Omega Seamaster 2531.80 with inbuilt explosive detonaor & laser beam (Die Another Day); Omega Seamaster with inbuilt explosives (Spectre)

Happy drinking!

James Bond, Mission: Impossible, & the nonsense of spycraft

FIRSTLY, sorry for being away for so long. I’ve been busy moving city & also I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about film over on mrrumsey.com.

Secondly, in case no-one’s noticed, Spectre, the 24th – or fourth, in-continuity – Bond film, comes out in just over a month, & it’s incredibly exciting. Since rebooting the franchise with 2006’s Casino Royale, the producers have crafted an intricate & continuity-heavy universe that manages to be just credible enough to work without going full Man of Steel & sucking all the vitality from its source material.

This is in stark contrast to Bond‘s rival, Mission: Impossible. Their latest, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, released earlier this year, delivers all the spy action thrills (& leans heavily on the rebooted Bonds for inspiration; see “Recycled Script” here) in a big, preposterous package. Among its other borrowings, it takes from the new Bonds a slight inclination towards the political thriller, a sense that, rather than being a series of cool standalones like the television programme on which it is based, the film series now takes place in a real world, an organic world in which actions have consequences & overweight CIA men get stuffy at you when, despite saving the world, you can’t prevent a deactivated missile clipping a building slightly. Since Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was probably the coolest action film ever made, I’m sure fans were very happy to see it granted a continuing influence on the plot of this new, slightly more action-oriented movie. But in copping a move from Bond once again, the M:I series sink further into their own nonsensicality.

The five movies in the series each have a different director &, consequently, a totally different feel: Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was a techno-thriller not too far removed from the TV version; John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II was an action film showcasing its director’s obsessions (slow-motion wirework, flocks of doves, dual handguns with infinite ammo, villains as near-identical Shadow Archetypes); JJ Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III benefitted from his fannish penchant for ditching a series’ silliness while retaining its cool; the best, Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol won much praise for its visual “pop” & fast-paced humour, both elements found in the director’s previous animated work. Rogue Nation, by The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, is the first without an agenda of its own. Rather, it tries to be a continuation of Ghost Protocol while also rehabilitating past entries in the series. But continuity isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a big issue here. The series, like the Alien films (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & apparently Neill Blomkamp), has benefitted rather than suffered from its tendency to be remodelled by auteurs. If you can ignore your hang-ups, you’re better off seeing each film as a new artist’s interpretation of the material, rather than a continuation of what’s gone before. It’s certainly easier than believing the bombastic M:I II is something that actually happened in the past of the characters in the later films. They probably just try not to talk about it too much.

And, of course, so few film series bother going all the way with continuity. The way science-fiction miracle tech habitually shows up in superspy movies, by your third or so installment you’d be living in an alternate timeline. Take the facemasks of Mission: Impossible; the first scene of the first film screws everything with the first time one of the highly realistic gadgets is removed. While being worn, their wearers are indistinguishable from the real deal (the third film gets hilarious, with fit Tom Cruise becoming portly Philip Seymour Hoffman simply by wearing a mask). Fine, that makes no sense but it’s part of the series’ trademark superscience. The silliness comes in during later films. In every scene – & each movie has at least one – in which a character is exposed as an impersonator, someone will grab the lower left corner of their face & pull, easily removing the mask to reveal Tom Cruise or someone else underneath it. Since the masks are so easily removeable once the characters are aware of them in-universe, why isn’t giving someone’s cheeks a good old pinching part of every standard security procedure in the world? Partly it’s to make the plots work, partly it’s to avoid looking silly, & partly it’s the fact that sequels, in general, tend not to be set in the world prior movies have established; rather, they’re generally about those established fictional characters living in our world, not their own. Example: going by GoldenEye, the Cold War apparently ended the same way in Bond’s world as our Cold War did. But in an alternate universe in which the UK is the most hypercompetent power in the world, the Soviet Union should have been militarily & economically outclassed much, much ealier.

Bond gets even sillier than M:I does with facemasks, too: in You Only Live Twice, Bond undergoes a surgical procedure to appear (unconvincingly) Japanese; in Die Another Day, a Korean villain goes through a more painful reverse version of that treatment, having his DNA replaced (???) in order to impersonate a Caucasian businessman; in Thunderball, a SPECTRE-affiliated villain has apparently spent two years’ worth of plastic surgery & acting lessons in order to become the double of a UN pilot; in Diamonds Are Forever, Ernst Stavro Blofeld undergoes plastic surgery in order to hide out in disguise as reclusive millionaire Willard White (his earlier change from Donald Pleasence into the equally bald but much taller Telly Savalas goes unremarked on). What idiots all those people were! From Russia with Love, an earlier film, opens with “James Bond” dying. Except…it’s a training exercise for villain Red Grant, & the deceased was wearing a facemask! If 100% convincing facemasks exist in this universe – & are commonplace enough to be thrown away on a training exercise in which, verisimilitude aside, they really don’t add much – why aren’t they put to use on all those later occasions? The only reason is that the old Bonds really weren’t a series, just a series of impressions, with certain archetypical features (disfigured villains, shark pits, ski sequences, fake-out deaths for Bond) repeated in slightly different order with little continuity. Mission: Impossible was even worse for this, repeating not only its own tropes (infiltration via aerial descent in four of its entries; the IMF discredited in four of its entries; the aforementioned facemask reveal in all five of them) but also square-pegging Bond tropes such as the constantly shifting love interests – Bond’s a bastard who we expect to continually ditch women, but Ethan is a thoroughly decent sort it’s hard to imagine abandoning so many loves of his life so abruptly*.

But continuity isn’t a bad thing. You can get too much of it, certainly – see the mess Doctor Who periodically becomes before a nice soft-reboot (1970, 2005, 2010) – but if you can manage to stay on top of it, your fun little movies become all the more meaningful & worth returning to. Mind you, it took Bond a complete reboot before the producers could keep their continuity straight, & even now it continually threatens to spin out of control. When it was never there in the first place, it might not be best to force it.

*Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher’s thoroughly decent Batman has the same problem, with a new love interest in each; as does, funnily enough, thoroughly decent Daniel-San in his three Karate Kid movies. His lowest moment is convincing the lovely Kumiko to leave her tiny Okinawa fishing village for America, then dropping her, broke & alone in a strange country before the third film begins.