Hmmmmm...... How about if I slit your wrists for you?

[John Marchioro]

http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-craig-paid-25-million-for-next-bond-movie-2018-5

There is a bit of a Bondathon this weekend on AMC. But only the Pierce
Brosnan Bond.... Brosnan's four turns as Bond, featuring many even
more scantily clad babes (or rather, the same number of babes, only
with fewer ..... immmmm..... accouterments), ample sexual innuendo,
the usual "make my day" and "hasta la vista" one liners that
inevitably accompany the dispatch of an evildoer, and of course lots
of boom boom, car chases, exploding helicopters, blown up buildings,
etc. etc. etc.

This follows on a less compacted showing of the Daniel Craig Bond
films over the past few weeks. I guess May is National Daniel Craig as
Bond Month, and June is National Pierce Brosnan as Bond Month......
Let me know when they get to Timothy Dalton.

OK. Not a Bondaphile, as you can probably gather from the above.
Though I always enjoyed and still enjoy "From Russia with Love", which
in addition to featuring the scrumptious Daniella Bianchi is the one
Bond film that appears to have a plot that does not involve a mad,
diabolical genius who has hatched a Deeply Evil Plot to gain world
supremacy. For more decades than I care to count now, I have thought
that the whole Bondathing is basically a kind of transatlantic sop to
British angst about the end of empire..... A series of increasingly
improbable fictions about a lone British agent saving the world while
the CIA agent sits at some bar with both thumbs firmly up his arse.
And of course the Bond films have one thing that is psychologically
irresistible to the average male viewer: Instant sexual gratification,
with no complications (did you ever hear a Bond girl say "Don't forget
to call me?" or "You were flirting with that waitress!" or .... well,
you get the idea).

So yes, in spite of numbness to Bondamania I did watch at some point
"Casino Royale", "A Quantum of Solace" and "Skyfall".... Though it is
hard for me to remember when and where. I certainly did not pay for
the experience.... the last time I saw a Bond film in a theater was
"From Russia with Love", which I watched on Capitol Hill in Seattle
about 35 years back at a small theater that usually shows art films.
packed house that night, lots of crypto Bond fans out there I guess.
and I did buy a pirated DVD of "Die Another Day", the Pierce Brosnan
Bond film with a NoKo storyline, one of the most ludicrous things I
have watched in my life.... with the exception of the scene where the
luscious Halle Berie emerges from the sea like a Black Aphrodite, that
is.

But I digress. Now 2015's "Spectre" is being shown on TV at long last.
And once again, there is a serious Bond Babe, Lea Seydoux, with whom I
am familiar from her appearance in this film:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Is_the_Warmest_Colour

Which I purchased in Paris not quite two years ago.... Yum. Yum. Yum.

But I have not actually sat and watched "Spectre" even though it has
been shown on TV about 10-15 times in the past few weeks. And it makes
me wonder more generally about how people are viewing such stuff these
days. I am aware that some people focus on key scenes.... They no
longer want the cinematic foreplay, they just want the Big O, if you
catch my drift..... Other people are just too busy to bother..... And
others are simply unreachable by the Hollywood machine. (Some
combination of the last two applies in my case.)

So you have a lot of people who have not seen a full film but only
snippets of it, enough to be able to cite those snappy one liners ("I
am invincible!"), discourse about which Bond Babe (or whatever, which
piece of Hollywood eye candy du jour) is the best to spank the monkey
to, etc. etc. etc.

Post-modernists write a lot about changing perceptions of time and
space, and there is of course some measure of truth to it all.... I am
wondering (and of course deploring) the above, not only the
superficiality and absurdity of the typical Bond film and like
"entertainment", but also the inability of people to sit for two
hours, watch a film, discuss it.... I hate to sound like Cato the
Elder, but it just seems to be one more thing, like the daily paper
and long rambling conversations, that is now being consigned to the
dustbin of history.

That is of course a separate matter from 007, which IMHO should have
been consigned to the dustbin of history before "You Only Live Twice,
Mr. Bond" was made.

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 8:32 PM, John Marchioro <jkmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-craig-paid-25-million-for-next-bond-movie-2018-5

OK. Not a Bondaphile, as you can probably gather from the above.
Though I always enjoyed and still enjoy "From Russia with Love", which
in addition to featuring the scrumptious Daniella Bianchi is the one
Bond film that appears to have a plot that does not involve a mad,
diabolical genius who has hatched a Deeply Evil Plot to gain world
supremacy.

     Mmmm, yeah.

     I liked the Bond films a lot when I was much younger, since much of what they contained was supposed to be "adult".

     I read once that Ian Fleming's James Bond series didn't really take off until JFK made some comment about really enjoying the books.

     I've always liked John le Carre's grittier version of the espionage world more.  As Alec Leamus states in "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold":

What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.

     I loved Richard Burton in "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold"!

     I found "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" confusing, though, but maybe I should give it another try.  "The Russian House" was not bad, and brought Sean Connery over from the 007 franchise.

     I'm not aware of many other le Carre novels from the Cold War period, but he has found fertile new ground in the post_Cold War world of terrorism, gangster capitalism, and neocolonialism.  Some have made it to the big screen: "The Tailor of Panama", "The Constant Gardener", "The Night Manager", "Our Kind of Traitor", "A Most Wanted Man".  I'm hoping they do a decent job if "The Mission Song" and "A Delicate Truth" are ever filmed, since I really liked the books.

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy Translation
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[John Marchioro]

That is correct about JFK.... and there is a funny story behind it.

You have heard of the Cambridge Five, no doubt, Philby, Burgess,
MacLean, Blunt and a fifth man whose identity is still a matter of
dispute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five

If you want to see a great film about the milieu where these guys were
recruited, there is this minor masterpiece from the 1980s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Country_(film)

Now, Philby was heterosexual and I do not know about Blunt, but
MacLean was a repressed homosexual who married an American woman,
while Burgess was flamboyantly gay. In "A Wilderness of Mirrors", a
great and neglected book about counterintelligence by David Martin,
formerly ABC's top intelligence correspondent, the whole story of how
the Cambridge Five spy ring was rolled up is told through the prism of
the career of CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton
(there are many more recent and detailed books about Angleton, Philby,
et al; Martin's book came out 35 odd years back and was a pioneering
effort). Apparently the following happened. Burgess, an obnoxious
drunk, was a talented sketch artist. He was invited to a DC party
thrown by Philby at the latter's house in 1951, at which he met FBI
counterintelligence agent William Harvey and his Midwestern college
dropout wife Libby. Libby had heard that Burgess did quick sketches
and asked him to do one of her, and Burgess obliged..... He did a
caricature that made her face look horrid, "with its jaw like the prow
of a dreadnought with its underwater battering ram". He also
apparently depicted her with her skirt hike up, pudenda unmistakeably
visible. This infuriated the Harveys..... The party ended in a huge
row with livid guests fleeing the place.

And Harvey went back to his office and started thinking about the
curious relationship between Burgess, Philby and MacLean.... And not
long thereafter he hit upon a theory that turned out to be true, that
the three were all part of a spy ring whose existence had been rumored
and was actively being investigated by the FBI. Now, Harvey was not
the only person looking into the matter, and the efforts of others
were crucial as well:

https://www.amazon.com/Enemys-House-Secret-Breaker-Russian-ebook/dp/B071HD82JR

But Harvey was generally credited for having seen through the upper
class posturing and the rest of the Brits and fingering them as the
actual spies (James Jesus Angleton sadly failed to do this..... and in
fact he had a habit of eating three martini lunches with Philby
several times a week, at which Angleton shared all of the most top
secret information of the US government, which Philby then turned over
to his Soviet controller.... not a good story).

OK, fast forward to a decade later. JFK is elected. He goes over to
visit the CIA, where Harvey is now working.... And he is told by
General Lansdale, hey Mr. President, do you want to meet America's
James Bond. And of course JFK did. And he was introduced to Harvey.
Only........ Harvey was about 100 pounds overweight, the result of a
bad diet and heavy drinking.... Not exactly Sean Connery, in other
words. JFK was crestfallen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_King_Harvey

In my teens I read Fleming's "The Man with a Golden Gun", which may
have been the last of the novels. I found it pretty uninteresting.
Later I bought a cheap copy of "Dr. No" at a used bookstore and read a
bit..... The one thing I remember from that is that Bond does a lot of
talking.... About what makes a woman beautiful, for instance, or the
mating habits of swallows.... Just drivel really, and thoroughly
boring, just blah blah blah to pad the book out. The smartest thing
that Terence Young ever did (other than casting Connery, that is) was
to jettison all this logorrhea.... nothing could be more boring than
watching a spy discourse on cabbages and kings and sundry other
things. No, the stripped down cinematic version is an improvement, and
small wonder it did so well at the box office, even as the plots
became more and more ludicrous and baroque with the feckless Roger
Moore as Bond..... Personally I rather liked the two Timothy Dalton
films, they were more down to earth and realistic, I thought. But then
they amped the whole thing up again with Pierce Brosnan.... And the
same with Daniel Craig...... I hear next up Bond is going to be
Afro-British, perhaps.... Anything to keep the franchise going, I
guess.

I have read both "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" and "Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy". I enjoyed the former though it is a very bleak
book, found the latter a disappointment. The first TV version of the
latter is a very fine production, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy_(TV_series)

I cannot vouch for the most recent film version starring Gary Oldman.

I have seen "The Russia House", "The Constant Gardener" and "The
Tailor of Panama"..... They all have their merits, I guess.... I found
the storyline of "The Russia House" pretty improbable. And of course
"The Tailor of Panama" is an anti-US farce, not meant to be taken
seriously. At least Le Carre's novels and the films made out of them
are more diverting and less cliche-ridden than the Bond films are.

I honestly have no idea who else writes espionage novels. I read
McElroy's "LA Confidential" ages ago, thought it was a rambling mess,
not remotely as good as the film.... Cannot really think of anything
comparable, though I did read a couple of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley
novels as well as a couple of James Crumley's novels (I rather liked
"The Last Good Kiss", though again the plot is highly improbable), and
of course there was Richard Price's "Clockers" . My sense is that it
is pretty hard to do something new and innovative in any of these
genres, espionage, crime fiction, detective stories.... And the stuff
that is out there is mostly middlebrow at best.

I did enjoy reading some books by Hammett and Chandler of course....
But they are long long dead, and it was a different age back then.

On 6/4/18, Matthew Schlecht <matthew.f...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 8:32 PM, John Marchioro <jkmar...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-craig-paid-25-
>> million-for-next-bond-movie-2018-5
>>
>> OK. Not a Bondaphile, as you can probably gather from the above.
>> Though I always enjoyed and still enjoy "From Russia with Love", which
>> in addition to featuring the scrumptious Daniella Bianchi is the one
>> Bond film that appears to have a plot that does not involve a mad,
>> diabolical genius who has hatched a Deeply Evil Plot to gain world
>> supremacy.
>
>
> Mmmm, yeah.
> I liked the Bond films a lot when I was much younger, since much of
> what they contained was supposed to be "adult".
> I read once that Ian Fleming's James Bond series didn't really take
> off until JFK made some comment about really enjoying the books.
>
> I've always liked John le Carre's grittier version of the espionage
> world more. As Alec Leamus states in "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold":
>

> *What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring

> everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not!
> They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men,
> drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and

> Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.*

>
> I loved Richard Burton in "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold"!
> I found "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" confusing, though, but maybe I
> should give it another try. "The Russian House" was not bad, and brought
> Sean Connery over from the 007 franchise.
> I'm not aware of many other le Carre novels from the Cold War period,
> but he has found fertile new ground in the post_Cold War world of
> terrorism, gangster capitalism, and neocolonialism. Some have made it to
> the big screen: "The Tailor of Panama", "The Constant Gardener", "The Night
> Manager", "Our Kind of Traitor", "A Most Wanted Man". I'm hoping they do a
> decent job if "The Mission Song" and "A Delicate Truth" are ever filmed,
> since I really liked the books.
>
> Matthew Schlecht, PhD
> Word Alchemy Translation
> Newark, DE, USA
> wordalchemytranslation.com
>

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[John Marchioro]

One note: I mentioned that Burgess was flamboyantly gay. The reason is
that this was part of why William Harvey and others found him so
loathsome..... Again, I am not defending that reaction, but part of
the reason why Burgess got caught is that he insisted on doing things
like going to parties at other people's home, getting riotously and
saying outrageous things (including things about his sexual
orientation, something that was beyond the pale back in those days in
polite company).... Not exactly the conduct his Soviet controllers
were hoping for, in other words.

I actually think the whole thing is rather sad. Burgess's father was
some kind of navy officer, he came from an upper class which while not
aristocratic had a sense of itself as being part of the elite.... And
Burgess's life was very much planned out for him (Cambridge, naval
career, marriage to a woman of the same social class, etc.). And he
rebelled against that.

But treason? I am sorry, but that is a bridge too far. I am sure
Burgess found his long exile in Moscow intolerable.... The Russkis
were even less tolerant of homosexuality than the Brits and Americans
of that time were, and remained so even as things changed slowly in
the West.

A very sad story. And MacLean's story is equally sad.