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Well. There’s another month gone. A whole sixth of the year has already passed by, and so far I’ve only made significant progress on one of my three targets for the next twelve months - that’s the photos, which are now looking far, far better and are, in some cases, printed and ready for use.

The trip to Moscow is slowly inching itself towards the back burner, and the book - well, I’ve written some more in the last few days, but every time I do I keep on starting back at word one, page one, in spite of the fact that 70,000 words of it are already down on paper. Or at least virtual paper, stored away in hard drives and on CD Roms.

Today wasn’t such a bad one to finish a hectic fortnight. We celebrated payday with cake from the tea shop, and I hung around at work to sort out some transatlantic cock-ups which required a certain amount of calling and emailing while the Americans were awake, so by the time I got to the tube, and then on to the train, things were quiet and calm.

Came home and flopped down on the settee to watch the last episode of V over dinner. I should have known something was up when the single-sided DVD kept asking me to flip it over. It looks like it’s had half of the first disc pressed into it, which is annoying, as it’s taken months to find the time to work my way through the whole series, having missed it when it was on the TV years ago. In fact, it’s so long since I bought it I’m sure I don’t have the receipt any more, so it’ll have to go all the way back to Warner Bros.

Settled for Goldeneye in the end, which has to be one of the most uncomfortable of the Bond films. It was in that awkward transitionary stage when they had a new Bond and the whole franchise was trying to work out where it should be going.

There was a new M, of course (Judy Dench) and a new Moneypenny (Samantha Bond, but she should have been a brand new character, not a Moneypenny replacement) and they do try and push things forward. M’s rant about 007 being a relic of the cold war is kind of apt but it sticks out as an obvious device aimed more at telling the audience where they are trying to take the character and less as a piece of natural dialogue. They should have taken it further, though - there is still too much Dalton in this film, and they are preserving far too much of the Bond back story with the references to him being an orphan.

The result is a lacklustre effort that has neither the panache of Connery or the toughness of Timothy Dalton (or even the questionable humour of Roger Moore) .

I don’t think I’ve seen it since it was in the cinema, but watching it again, when you know how much better the ones that came after it were, it doesn’t go nearly as far as it should have done.

I can’t put my finger on what is the root cause of the problems, though. Perhaps it’s the music which, in this last film before David Arnold took over the sound tracks is tacky and ill-fitting (which perhaps explains why it has been added at such low levels). Perhaps it’s the excessive imagery that merely suggests the producers don’t trust the audience to have even a modicum of intelligence (meetings amid scrap heaps of Soviet statues pointing once again to the fact the Cold War is over and they are doing their best to move the storyline along; excessive explanations of the subtleties of the storyline in latter conversations between 007 and 006). Perhaps it’s just the fact that Pierce Brosnan’s hair is way too long for a convincing secret agent.

Rosa Klebb + sex appeal = Xenia Onatopp?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 28th, 2003 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.