James Bond Is the Real November Man
Looking back on the first four Bonds I saw in movie theaters.
Usually, I try to format this newsletter like an essay—an essay that I would (and in some cases absolutely did) pitch to some of my regular (or not-so-regular) outlets, but have found, through suspicion or actual experience, unlikely to be picked up by anyone. This month, I’m going to do something a little different, and write up something that I might have normally put in an overlong Twitter thread! Rest assured, I will be back writing about movies starring SNL alumni soon enough.
The impetus for this edition is something I’ve had no trouble booking writing assignments about: James Bond. Specifically, this is inspired by my recent A.V. Club essay about the Bond movies that starred Pierce Brosnan. My main objective in this piece was to point out the ways that Brosnan’s sometimes-maligned movies actually anticipated a lot of the stuff that the just-concluded Daniel Craig series did (and received plenty of acclaim for doing). But the reason I was doing this in the first place was, of course, that I really like the Brosnan Bond movies, and wanted to defend them. So it was an absolute delight to read the... do I have this right?... comments section?! And find out that people were saying complimentary and supportive things?!? I don’t mean about my writing (though there were some nice comments in that department, too, and much appreciated!), but about Brosnan’s Bond, who I casually (and rhetorically) referred to as “nobody’s favorite.” Plenty of folks spoke up to say actually, Brosnan was their favorite, and of course they did: As many have pointed out, your favorite Bond is—like your favorite SNL cast! See, there’s your SNL bit for the month—very likely informed by who was doing it when you were in high school. That certainly accounts for my affection for Brosnan, though I can’t really claim a “favorite” Bond. GoldenEye was the first Bond movie I saw in theaters, possibly the first one I saw at all (I don’t remember when I first rented Goldfinger, just that I did so while visiting family in Rochester, New York), and Brosnan’s tenure lasted from my sophomore year of high school through my first post-college year. Recently, I was chatting with my friend Maggie (who also has a newsletter and you ought to subscribe to it!) about that very phenomenon: Going to James Bond movies because you were in high school and they were big movies and that was that! I’ve also been lamenting the fact that No Time to Die, which I believe at some point was expected for November 2019, wound up pandemic-delayed almost all the way back into a Thanksgiving release—but just short of one, unfurling across the globe throughout October. For my whole moviegoing life, Bond has been a holiday-time event. November or maybe December. Spectacular, but obligatory. Exciting, but a little old-fashioned. October doesn’t feel quite right.
This all got me thinking about the specific circumstances under which I saw all four of these Bonds, and made me want to write about them, which is absolutely something I would have done on LiveJournal back in the day, but now we have Substack so here it is. (Actually, I’m pretty sure my old LiveJournal still exists somewhere if you want roughly a thousand pages of extremely amateur film criticism and setlist reconstructions.) The not-insignificant portion of this newsletter’s audience comprised of people I know in real life may encounter some familiar names and stories here! You’re welcome/I’m sorry!
GoldenEye, November 1995
In my hometown, high school started in tenth grade, rather than ninth—they maintained a junior high school, that deepest pit of hell as designated by Matt Groening, until several years past my graduation—and this was also the year where I made friends. I don’t mean this to renounce the friends I had before 1995, which included my best friend, Rob, and one of my oldest friends, Derrick, as well as various chaps I met and sometimes hung out with in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. But I’m fairly certain that 1995 was the first year I went out to a movie with people I hadn’t known since elementary school.
Said movie was not GoldenEye.
But GoldenEye was an event in the making, that is for sure! Plans were afoot to see it in a big group on opening weekend, certainly a bigger group than I’d ever seen a movie with. It’s not that I ran with a group of hardcore James Bond aficionados; there just weren’t that many action-adventure extravaganzas being released in the non-summer seasons at that time. It was pretty much Bond and Star Trek, and I missed out on Star Trek: Generations the previous November, through a potent combination of not watching Star Trek and not having friends. A year later, it was Bond’s turn, and I was ready to see movies with kids my age, something that had happened only occasionally in the past, on the occasion of really important stuff, like Congo.
Except it turned out I wasn’t ready at all. I was out of town the weekend GoldenEye came out, and was far from integral enough to shift plans to accommodate my absence. The weird thing is, I’m not sure where I was; my family usually went to my grandma’s house in Rochester for Thanksgiving, but GoldenEye came out the weekend before the holiday, and I’m quite certain that when I did see it, I caught up with it before I went out of town again for the holiday. (That means the movie I saw in Rochester with my dad—we always went to at least one movie when we were in Rochester—was most likely Casino.) So my friends—some longtime, some nascent, some probably not qualified as actual friends yet—saw the new Bond together en masse on opening weekend, while I caught it on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon with Derrick, who also didn’t make it to the group outing (and also probably had to hightail it to Rochester shortly thereafter).
Even at the time, I wasn’t wildly impressed by GoldenEye. As far as handsome man shooting a bunch of anonymous bad guys to hell, it wasn’t quite up to my gold standard, which was released a few months earlier: Desperado. I enjoyed GoldenEye, and with the fullness of time I even feel nostalgic about seeing it with Derrick, who I’ve known since fifth grade, who I rode the bus with in seventh, who I made laugh by flipping him off every day when I exited said bus, who I still text about rock & roll and SNL. Yet it’s probably difficult to disentangle that nostalgia from the sting of missing the big friend trip, which, looking back, probably affected my subsequent zeal to break our group moviegoing record. The bittersweet twinge I feel now is not based on feeling left out of big movie plans for the first and, honestly, maybe only time, but embarrassment that it was so important to me, at a time when seeing a movie with one friend at a time counts as a major treat. A lot of chatter and stress about a big even that ultimately doesn’t mean a lot; I guess that’s a pretty good introduction to James Bond, innit?
As far as I can remember, that big moviegoing record was, indeed, broken and re-set the following year, by a movie that still holds it. Of course, that movie was Star Trek: First Contact. (I believe that year’s Rochester selection would have been The English Patient. How did I manage to never see a James Bond movie with my dad?)
Tomorrow Never Dies, December 1997
Tomorrow Never Dies came out the same day as Titanic. Because my high school friends had, since the previous Bond, coalesced into an unruly, impatient bunch, we endeavored to see both movies on the same day: We’d drive to the good mall outside Albany, take care of Bond after school, and then make Titanic the main attraction for the evening. So the Bond crew was sort of a skeleton outfit—more people showed up to Titanic, as would be the case by a factor of a bunch in terms of global grosses, too. Though their opening weekend numbers were pretty close together, Tomorrow Never Dies never hit number one at the box office because of Titanic, and is similarly overshadowed in this ridiculous oral history I put together about, uh, going to see Titanic on opening night. Weirdly, this is probably my favorite Brosnan Bond, despite seeing it in such a massive, James Cameron-directed shadow. The Sheryl Crow theme song is underrated, Michelle Yeoh kicks ass, and it’s the only one that clocks in under two hours, which is important when you’re double-featuring it with Titanic.
The World Is Not Enough, November 1999
As I said on my pithy Letterboxd entry for my rewatch of this film, the 1999 versions of me and my friends were unbelievably excited for this Bond movie and its potential to be the best one ever (note: I know for sure that I hadn’t seen anywhere close to all of the Bond movies at this point, as I’m still missing much of Roger Moore’s tenure, and I imagine the same was true of at least some of my friends, so we were full of shit before we even realized how full of shit). Much like the mental gymnastics performed circa Thanksgiving 1997 that said “it wouldn’t actually be that hard for Alien: Resurrection to be the best or second-best one!”, it all seemed very plausible to us at the time: It had Begbie from Trainspotting, the hot chick from Starship Troopers and Wild Things, Garbage doing the theme song, and John Cleese! What could go wrong?!
I mean, nothing really did go wrong. My recent rewatch confirmed that this is a solid Bond flick, and I didn’t fully appreciate some of its innovations at the time. I vaguely remember a feeling of slight disappointment, though I preferred (and continue to prefer!) World to GoldenEye. We were past Peak Denise Richards, and we didn’t know it. In retrospect, it seems obvious: Wild Things came out in spring 1998. Some major changes were afoot by this time in 1999: First, we were all in college. Second, because of that I became unwilling to do Thanksgiving with my extended family, because I wanted to see my hometown friends during my school break (and because my hometown is a much quicker trip without a side trek to Rochester thrown in). Third, November was suddenly a movie hotspot. I’m not even sure where in the utter fugue of Thanksgiving break moviegoing my buddies and I watched this one. I know it came out the same weekend as Sleepy Hollow, and before I came home for the week, I saw Sleepy Hollow at Destinta Cinemas in Middletown, Connecticut, with some college chums. And I know that over the course of Thanksgiving week, my high school friends and I saw Toy Story 2, The World Is Not Enough, End of Days, Toy Story 2 again, Sleepy Hollow again, Dogma again, and possibly what would have been my third viewing of Fight Club.
Our Bond expectations, as it turned out, were a study in the series’ less flexible formulas: Just having the hottest actress of the late ‘90s as the Bond girl or a particularly cool band doing the song at the beginning couldn’t really move the needle on the overall enjoyability. It turns out that it’s all the stuff I wasn’t necessarily anticipating or all that hot about—Bond getting hurt in the opening sequence and actually sustaining that injury (at least a little); the “bad” Bond girl played by Sophie Marceau, who’s really a co-villain with Robert Carlyle; greater personal involvement from M, which the Craig series nicked quite handily—that makes this one stand out on rewatch. My memory of the first watch is more “well, it’s not the movie from that weekend where we snuck in some Cinnabons.” (I think that was Dogma.)
Die Another Day, November 2002
By the time they got around to doing another Brosnan Bond, the perfect Star Trek/James Bond holiday blockbuster schedule had gotten screwy. Three Treks and three Bonds came out in alternating years from 1994 through 1999, then both series took a powder until 2002. Clearly, only one could survive the ensuing face-off, and despite its lousy reputation, that one was clearly Die Another Day. You guys may not remember/know/care: Everyone was coming after Bond in 2002! And by everyone, I mean Vin Diesel, whose summer hit XXX served as both a de facto Fast and the Furious follow-up and a notice-serving to poor James Bond, whose tuxedoed visual surrogate is unceremoniously murdered in the opening sequence. (Also out in 2002: The Tuxedo, a Jackie Chan vehicle essentially equating a superspy’s power with his tux and gadgets, which in that movie are one and the same.) Though my affection for Vin Diesel and his movies is substantial, I still take some pleasure in remembering how XXX did well enough, but was handily outgrossed by the genuine article when Die Another Day came out a few months later. (To be fair, both were outgrossed by that year’s Austin Powers in Goldmember.)
Anyway, Die Another Day: I was out of college, living in New York—for just a couple of months at this point—and regularly visiting my old college campus, not because I was desperate to relive my nonexistent glory years, but because my girlfriend was still in school and I didn’t have that many friends in New York. That’s how I came to drag Marisa to see Die Another Day on a dinky second-tier screen at Destinta, during one of my Middletown visits. I don’t think anyone else from her circle of college friends cared to come with us. And here, as with Tomorrow Never Dies, I was pleasantly surprised: by the toughness of the opening where Bond is captured and tortured, rather than triumphant; by the over-the-top-silliness of the invisible car; by the new comforts of the already-old John Cleese stepping into the Q role. Yes, things seemed to be humming along perfectly for ol’ Pierce Brosnan, complete with a series peak domestic gross. The James Bond movies had just turned 40, and business was booming!
Naturally, that was the last time Brosnan played Bond. It was not the last time I went to Destinta; I know we saw X2 there the following spring, and maybe a handful of others. (Though generally, if we were planning a movie-centric weekend, New York made more sense than Middletown.) Die Another Day was not a conversion experience for Marisa, who still needs me to remind her which of the Brosnan Bonds she’s actually seen, even after I made her watch Tomorrow Never Dies so the simple answer could be, “all of them.” I didn’t realize at the time, but Die Another Day was more a conversion for me, to a world where I see a new James Bond movie with a handful of others. (Though Quantum of Solace, of all things, was—I believe—the first big movie I ever saw with my great friend Nathaniel. Technically, anyway. Marisa and I invited him to meet us there, then forgot to save him a seat with us. The friendship survived.)
I guess fans felt retroactively done with Brosnan and this phase of the series after this one debuted to decent reviews and fantastic coin (as I assume Variety would still say). Watching it again, I begrudgingly understood: It goes on too long, like all Bond movies that aren’t From Russia with Love or Quantum of Solace, and it gets kinda chintzy in its last 45 minutes, and Michael Madsen is there for some reason, which is confusing even if you like Michael Madsen. (Just give us back the Joe Don Baker character from GoldenEye if we’re doing that.)
For some years, I will probably remember that I saw No Time to Die at a press screening at the AMC on 68th Street, and that the invitation inexplicably listed a “dress code” as “smart casual,” ignored by all, and that the screening was simultaneous with the London premiere, and running on multiple screens at this multiplex, where I was shunted off into a non-IMAX room as I scrolled on Twitter and saw plenty of sort-of colleagues (do film critics really have colleagues?) in the nicer auditorium, and felt heartened by several Top Critics (tm) who were shunted into the regular room along with me, and it was part of a three-movie day for me. But that is due more to my freakish recall of where and when I see movies, not because this was a November/December ritual. Those Brosnan Bonds aren’t better, but they’re the ones I saw at certain ages. That sticking around is what Bond does best.