Perhaps all of the hoopla surrounding the upcoming James Bond installment Skyfall has created a bubble for all things 007, or this little piece of pop culture is really worth the thousands it recently fetched from its lucky buyer. The swimming trunks Daniel Craig wore as Bond in his first stint as the sexy agent in Casino Royale sold at auction for almost $72,000 at a charity auction in London. Judi Dench's comments on the cleanliness of the shorts may have also triggered a jump in the price.
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So maybe Daniel Craig lost last night's SNL spotlight to Big Bird. He still held his own and promoted Skyfall with fun little riffs on his James Bond persona, starting with his opening monologue — an Oscars-style In Memoriam tribute to all the poor guys he's killed over the years while dutifully serving as Hollywood's iciest action hero.
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With her soulful contralto, Adele was born to sing a Bond theme song. She delivers with “Skyfall,” produced by regular collaborator Paul Epworth, and released yesterday on James Bond’s 50th birthday. That should be a relief to music lovers and Bond fans alike, but just how much musical DNA does Adele's "Skyfall" share in common with the best Bond themes to date?
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"This is the end/hold your breath and count to ten..." Adele's moody retro James Bond theme song has hit the web in full! How does it measure up to its predecessors? (Best theme in many Bonds, no?) Listen to the U.K. crooner sing "Skyfall" and chime in with your thoughts after the jump.
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Onetime Bond girl Carey Lowell and Bond villain Robert Davi — respectively, Pam Bouvier and Franz Sanchez from Licence to Kill — were among the celebrities who came out to celebrate the 50th anniversary of James Bond at the EPIX and Vanity Fair-hosted premiere of Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007 on Wednesday night in New York. Mr. Big was also there — not Yaphet Kotto from Live and Let Die, but rather Chris Noth from another die-hard franchise, Sex and the City. more »
In many ways, James Bond laid the template for what a modern-day action hero would look like: handsome, cool, badass, but most importantly, witty. The tradition of tough-guy one-liners may not have originated with 007, but it certainly had a good run within the franchise, and has continued to thrive across all genres of action today. Here’s some of the best of Bond’s zingers over the years.
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I wonder how much pure willpower it takes for Daniel Craig to look as tirelessly cool and bad-ass as he does in every second so far of Skyfall, a Bond pic whose plot I have very little knowledge of despite all the ads, other than Javier Bardem is a blonde-wigged weirdo villain, 007 bags more exotic ladies in exotic locales, and he jumps onto exploding trains while nonchalantly adjusting his cufflinks. That cufflink move gets a lot of mileage. Watch two new exciting-but-not-terribly-expository spots from Skyfall and tell me I'm wrong.
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James Bond is not going all emo on us. In a new Vanity Fair cover story on 007 actor Daniel Craig, the actor defends the tear his character shed over the death of the girlfriend who betrayed him, and says Bond is not getting soft. “He didn’t sob. There was, like, a tear in his eye. No snot coming out of his nose, you know,” Craig says in the magazine's November issue, which is out this month. more »
The Game’s Bond. James Bond. Which means that you will be Bored. Majorly Bored. Agent 007 should be perfect video game character. “Kicking ass with the latest fun gadgets” is his actual job description. So it’s a shame that almost every Bond game sucks. Not even Blofeld got to betray Bond this many times and come back to do it again. more »
British super-crooner Adele confirmed via Twitter that she has recorded the theme for the upcoming James Bond installment, Skyfall. The Rolling in the Deep singer posted a photo of the song credits on her Twitter page. The confirmation comes after months of rumors she would lend her talented vocals to the Bond pic.
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Bond villainy is demanding work. Evil genius and a lust for world domination are crucial, but future Blofelds of the world take note, a way with words — steeped in wit and curare, or whatever neurotoxin the cool kids are using these days — is essential. Given that inevitable defeat and death are occupational hazards of obsessively pursuing the world's greatest spy, one of the few ways a Bond villain to distinguish himself from the other loser Bond villains is by delivering some of the most memorable lines of the movie. Sometimes it's the little victories that count. more »
Is there a name more tattered in the annals of big-movie casting choices than George Lazenby?
Notice I say “choice” rather than “mistake,” because for all the static about the admittedly somewhat wooden Lazenby’s shortcomings, he managed to hold his own as the steady center of what James Bond fans have gradually come to recognize as one of the hidden highlights of the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
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Despite the silliness, sexism, and let’s face it, more than a handful of bad movies, James Bond has endured as a franchise for 50 years because deep down inside, all of us, at one time, wanted to be spies, and as anyone living vicariously through the movies knows, a good spy needs a great theme song. For better or for worse, presented below are all 22 James Bond title songs and sequences, ranked in order from worst to best. Get your martinis and Walthers ready, ladies and gentlemen…
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In an industry where success is often measured by a movie's performance over a single (opening) weekend, the James Bond franchise is that rarest of things: a long-distance runner. At 23 movies — 22 if you don't count the independently produced Never Say Never Again — and counting, Ian Fleming's Agent 007 has managed to be mostly relevant at the box office for 50 years and, according to filmsite.org, while earning more than $1.5 billion. That's third only to, respectively, the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises. Even more so than Bob Dylan records (especially the recent ones), Bond movies are very much products of the times in which they are released. The campy 1980s sex-fluff of the Roger Moore 007 movies would probably not fare so well were they released in today's economically fraught kill-or-be-killed world. Daniel Craig is the right Bond for this era, and, if you ask me, in a dead heat with Sean Connery for the best Bond of all time. But, actually, I'm more interested in your opinion.
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I'm going to need more than one martini — Ketel One, straight up, lots of olives — to swallow this ad. Daniel Craig appears with Bond Girl Berenice Marlowe in a new Heineken ad tied to the release of the upcoming 007 feature, Skyfall. Craig's brief appearances book-end the commercial and martini lovers will find some consolation in the fact that he doesn't actually drink from the bottle of Heineken that he orders in the clip. more »
