I feel Carte Blanche is the best of the single continuation novels. Trigger Mortis and Forever and A Day are in a class by themselves. I gone back to reading one Fleming once a month just to remember “the sweep”
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I’ve long been a fan of Carte Blanche and am a little saddened we’ll likely never get a follow up.
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I’ve heard about ‘the sweep’, but don’t know what it is. Could you explain?
I love Indiana Jones - mainly, Last Crusade, which in my view is perfection, and so much better than Raiders which, though very good, may have stayed in the bland desert too long).
Curiously, though, Temple of Doom isn’t particularly well-regarded, although fans have since re-evaluated it, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is detested by almost everyone (though a mate of mine can’t see any of its many flaws).
Which means that only 50% of the Indiana Jones series is actually beloved.
That’s quite low, considering how iconic it is.
You could say that about the Jaws films, of course, but people only seem to think of the first film with that. Same with Halloween, really. Lethal Weapon, meanwhile, is fondly remembered for the bantering leads more than any specific film or story, though the second film is regarded as the best (certainly Rotten Tomatoes thinks so).
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From Wikipedia’s article on the Live and Let Die novel, ‘Style’:
Benson analysed Fleming’s writing style and identified what he described as the “Fleming Sweep”: a stylistic point that sweeps the reader from one chapter to another using ‘hooks’ at the end of chapters to heighten tension and pull the reader into the next:[42]Benson felt that the “Fleming Sweep never achieves a more engaging rhythm and flow” than in Live and Let Die .[43] The writer and academic Kingsley Amis—who also later wrote a Bond novel—disagrees, and thinks that the story has “less narrative sweep than most”.
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It’s racism makes Octopussy look like a tourism advert for India. If you live in India, you’re either in famine, or need to be “nicely done away with”
Indy is the only character in the film that doesnt go straight for massively offensive stereotypes in that script…I say script loosely, as it veers towards UKIP manifesto more than a few times.
Kingdom of The Crystal Skyll is under-rated. It’s a meh film at best, but it in no way deserves the VISCIOUS reaction it got for daring to exist.
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So if I missed this comparison before, I apologize, but the Crystal Skull is to INDY what Die Another Day is to Bond. Full of cringe moments (swinging with monkeys vs. para surfing on huge waves) and (aliens skulls vs disappearing cars) and considered by many at the bottom of the series.
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I remember loving it too but nine years later as I approach 30 there is so much more to it that I can appreciate, whether it be the very human way Deaver handles Bond’s mentality toward dating life or the borderline obscene level of detail that gives this book a legitimacy the other continuation novels do not possess. This is really worth a revisit folks. Absolute shame we never got a sequel.
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The number one thing Carte Blanche has going for it is the way it laid claim to being a modern reinterpretation of the mythos, in relation to his parents, etc. I do find that aspect interesting and worth a revisit. There could be aspects worthy of Bond #7/Bond 26 in there.
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All true, but in the same context, neither film is actually the worst in the series, as films guilty of FAR worse have been protected by childhood nostalgia as they were released in a time when the distaste couldn’t be repeated infinitely to strangers, so you have only your memories of the time to go on. The addition of the internet has left two “meh” films a reputation they do not deserve, whilst films happily selling bad plots and disgusting attitudes (and were reviewed as such at the time) get a free pass “'cause i thought it was cool when I was little”
What you write is interesting, but I disagree with some of it. I’m a fan of the Brosnan era, but I would still put DAD near the bottom of the list (Quantum, I think, is the worst - but, really, I don’t there’s a single terrible Bond film, and there’s fun to be had even in these two).
Certainly, there are worst films out there. Ones which have been deservedly forgotten. Franchise films - particularly ones which have managed to spawn entries into recent times - are protected and preserved because of that link. It’s why A Good Day to Die Hard (broadly speaking, an unpopular film, with objective flaws) can get packaged in box sets of the series, and be afforded repeated television airings, while the 2006 Willis film 16 Blocks is left behind, even though it would have made a better Die Hard film with its smaller scale, simpler premise and a character just as explicitly human as John McClane was in the first film.
I’m not sure OP deserves too much of a whipping because of the way India was presented. As Sinclair McKay asks in his (terrific) book, The Man with the Golden Touch, is it any worse than Austin Powers filling Carnaby Street with Beefeaters? You could say that film is a parody, but Bond, by OP, was becoming something very similar. It’s a fantasy-land version of India. The “that’ll keep you in curry for a few weeks” line, meanwhile, is no different to the bit in the Hugh Grant comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans in which a man from Wyoming calls him a “tea-drinker”. The sheep’s head scene, to me, seemed okay as it was obviously Khan trying to unsettle Bond. You can tell this by the way he takes the eyeball and eats it with such pointedly casual enjoyment. Really, Blades is depicted similarly in DAD.
As for Indiana Jones, the fourth film, I think, is scorned because it’s a pretty bad film, with woeful CGI, an annoying co-lead in Mutt, a ridiculous final act (religiosity has consistently been shown to be the world of Indy, not aliens), and John Hurt is basically playing a dog. I think the film would have been comprehensively derided even without the internet.
Replace Mutt with Willie, chuck in some racism, and you are describing Temple of Doom.
The internet allows people to dwell on the things they hated and loved, in a way that wasn’t present before, so a meh film can get thrown in a bucket with truly awful films, and a vaguely cool gimmick allows throw away fun to get adoration (hello, Avatar and Cloverfield) when actually they are more on a par with films that have been forgotten to history. Die Another Day, if it were not a James Bond film released in an internet age, would’ve been completely forgotten.
I agree about A Good Day to Die Hard - tbh all 4 sequels would’ve been forgotten without the Die Hard name (though With A Vengence might’ve developed a cult following of its own)
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I don’t rate Temple of Doom either, though I haven’t seen it in twenty years. I suppose it goes back to what I said up-thread in that only two of the four films are popular. Raiders, perhaps because it’s the first one, gets most of the plaudits, though I personally believe Last Crusade is stronger.
I agree totally that DAD would’ve been forgotten had the Bond name not been on it. To look at it exclusively through the prism of Pierce’s body of work, I’d rather see After the Sunset, though DAD is better than The November Man (which seemed to run out of money halfway through as the second half is set almost entirely in an interrogation room).
Die Hard With a Vengeance is a really good film, yes. Notably, like all but the last one, it was based on a story which didn’t involve McClane at all. Willis himself, funnily enough, didn’t like the second one at all. I thought the fourth film was good too, though I’m not sure how that ranks with others.
The internet makes people’s feelings known, but I’m not sure whether they influence the severity of them. More opinions are projected into the world, yes, which makes the film’s reception all the more ignominious. Cats, for example, is more embarrassing for the cast now than it would’ve been in, say, 1983 as the disdain has been communicated more comprehensively through Twitter and Facebook than Barry Norman could’ve managed on his own. As you say, the opposite is true, and the internet can make fashionable something gimmicky and ephemeral like Avatar. Whether this sort of fleeting fashion will make these films seem dated in the future, of course, remains to be seen, but that’s another discussion.
It’s not so much enhancing, so much as allowing to dwell on things you otherwise would’ve forgotten.
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Interesting. You could be right. Especially with ‘look back’ articles and other retrospectives.
I think it may also be because we carry heroes - Bond, Indy, Batman whoever - with us, and therefore, also, the baggage of bad films. Standalone films seem like orphans by comparison. They don’t have the iconography of a franchise to carry them into the boxsets of the future.
This is true - only really happens if a director made enough films to condone it; Hitchcock for example.
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Absolutely. A film like Jaws is given added historical weight because the director is still famous and having hits, and younger people can respect the film, even if they haven’t seen it, because they love Jurassic Park or Saving Private Ryan.
Hitchcock, as you say, means that his lesser films, like, say, Jamaica Inn or Marnie or Torn Curtain, can play in revival houses, accrue TV airings and be part of a box-set, because of the cultural kudos of North By Northwest, Psycho, Rear Window and The Birds.
Which reminds me: despite loving many of his films (The Lady Vanishes, Rear Window, North By, Dial M for Murder and The 39 Steps are some of my all-time favourites), I haven’t seen Stage Fright, I Confess, Foreign Correspondent, Topaz, Family Plot or Frenzy. Does anyone know if these are good?
Havn’t seen the rest, but I definitely enjoyed Topaz. Would put it up there with North by Northwest and Rope in terms of Hitchcock greats.
History has kind of ruined Psycho. Weird to go into a film knowing it’s plot twists above all else.
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As a HUGE Hitchcock fan, I’ve seen pretty much all his films except many of the silent ones. Of the films you listed, Foreign Correspondent is one of my favorites. You left out a few others that I consider his best - Vertigo, It Takes a Thief, and Saboteur are all in my top 10.
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I definitely recommend Foreign Corrospondent (haven’t watched it in ages, great idea for tonight). And Frenzy is a first class nail-biter.
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