From The Guardian:
The [23rd James Bond film] would be Mendes’s first proper action film – the director is best known for taut relationship dramas such as his 1999 debut American Beauty, for which he won the Oscars for best film and best director, and last year’s Revolutionary Road. However, he has dabbled in more high-octane fare before: on the 2005 Gulf war tale Jarhead, as well as the 2002 gangster flick Road to Perdition.
Well if it’s true it would make perfect sense, and would point ever more clearly to Bond 23 being the third part of a trilogy that kicked off with Casino Royale.
<spoilers ahead>
At the end of that film (and indeed the book as it was a fairly faithful adaptation), the treacherous Vesper lay dead and Bond retreated into the emotional shell that sees him through the rest of the series with the immortal words ‘The job’s done and the bitch is dead’. They were lifted directly from the book.
It’s only when he meets Tracy – an equal – that he is finally able to let down his guard where women are concerned.
Quantum of Solace picked up an hour on from the end of Casino Royale, and followed Bond on his quest to track down the Quantum organisation, which was ultimately behind Vesper’s death (through revenge of duty? Who knows – it could be a little of both). In the closing scenes he confronts Vesper’s betrayer in a Moscow flat, but apart from leaving him more or less alive we know nothing of what happened between them or the content of their discussion.
Bond 23, then, must surely repeat Quantum’s trick and pick up the story an hour later as Bond sets out to use the information he learned in the flat, find a way to reconcile himself to Vesper’s betrayal and finally become the a fully-formed, rounded character who can leave this thread behind in Bond 24 and beyond.
The 23rd instalment will be Bond’s final counselling session. So who better to direct than Mendes? A man who, in the words of The Guardian, is ‘best known for taut relationship dramas’?
That’s what Bond has been since Casino Royale.
It helps to have a couple of weeks off work, but I raced through this book in about a fortnight. What a contrast to the last book I read, which took far, far, far longer than it should.
Secret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries
So it’s a bit of a relief to find that these books aren’t about ordering paperclips and maintaining the stationery cupboard. In the first, Guardian Angel, Moneypenny played a key role in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis. This second volume, Secret Servant
Moneypenny befriends his wife and is sent behind the Iron Curtain to bring them back.
The language very clearly evokes the feel and spirit of the sixties, when a fancy dress was a frock, flirting was discrete and the hotbed of office gossip was the powder room.
It’s as gripping as the original, fast paced and well written, with a real sense of menace running through the Soviet chapters, but in the last quarter relies a little too much on telling the reader what has happened than on letting us experience it alongside our hero. It drops a star for that, unfortunately, but Westbrook (a pseudonym) has nonetheless written a cracking tale that keeps you guessing what will happen to the very end. Indeed, at times the only reason you know Moneypenny survives is that she wouldn’t have been able to retrospectively write her diary had she not.
It’s a worthy addition to the Bond cannon, and a great lead-in to the final volume in the series, Final Fling
Price£7.99 (£4.98 from Amazon
Author Kate Westbrook
ISBN 0719567696
The Moneypenny Diaries
The premise is simple: Jane Moneypenny, M’s secretary and 007′s muse of many years, is dead. She died 10 years before the start of the book, when Kate Westbrook – supposedly her niece – received three packages in the post, in the largest of which were Moneypenny’s secret diaries.
Highly secret, it turns out, as she should never have been writing them.
The main thrust of the story, though, takes place in 1962 and follows a year in Moneypenny’s life. In the Bond timeline that places it between On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice; in real life 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Westbrook has done a stunning job of weaving the two storylines – real and fictional – into one another, and used the books rather than the films as her source material.
But if you expected this to be the tale of life in M’s outer office you’d be wrong (and disappointed if you really did want to read about humdrum secretarial happenings). It starts out down that track, but soon Moneypenny is dragged off to Cuba on a mission with Bond, and she ends up playing a pivotal role in both the Bond timeline and world events.
There are plenty of twists, and it had me fooled as to who was good and who was bad on one of the threads right up until the last couple of pages, but it’s skilfully resolved in a very satisfying and believable way.
The question is, though, if you’re not into the Bond films would you enjoy the book? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Bond himself plays second fiddle to Moneypenny, and even if you’re not interested in the Bond franchise this is a cracking adventure story built around actual historical events, told at impressive speed.
Price: £7.99 (£5.99 from Amazon
Author: Kate Westbrook
ISBN: 0719567424
Oh dear. This film came out when I was 12 and I remembered it being terrifically exciting. Zorin seemed more evil than it was ever possible to be, Mayday the coolest henchwoman of the series and the high tech plot was spot on for its day.
And then, after perhaps five or ten years of not having seen it, we watched it again last night. Not good.
The plot is almost non-existent, and when you compare it to the latest Bonds there’s so much chat and so little ‘doing’. The computers, which crop up frequently, are so very very outdated for a film 23 years old, and the plot’s dependence on them makes it look even more of a dinosaur. It looks even more out of date than older films like Goldfinger or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
The characters are entirely one-dimensional, the lines are corny and Roger Moore is very old. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re bedding a woman young enough to be your daughter (he was 28 years older than Stacey Sutton with whom he had his wicked way in the shower and 29 years older than Pola Ivanova, whom he had pressed up against the side of a Jacuzzi). And don’t get me started on the names. Jenny Flex. Monsieur Aubergine. May Day…
Even the soundtrack sounded recycled. You could easily have cut it into Octopussy and nobody would have known, and the noise on Stacey’s computer when she’s pinpointing the epicentre of the earthquake is the same as is made by the globe in the Liparus control room as it tracks the nuclear missiles in The Spy Who Loved Me.
This was Roger Moore’s last film, and not before time. The franchise was looking tired by 1985, and it needed to be reinvented. He should have stopped after For Your Eyes Only.
A View to a Kill (with retrospect): 
Speaking of The Spy Who Loved Me, anyone who knows both it and Goldeneye well (and the soundtrack to The World is Not Enough), will appreciate this very clever bit of editing:
’007 goes rogue’ is how they billed it. The last time they did that – License to Kill – was one of the series’ low points, portraying a cold, heartless character, and a story that lacked many of the franchise’s cornerstone features.
Well, Quantum of Solace doesn’t do that, but the three star ratings it garnered in most of the press reviews weren’t far off the mark. There’s still no Q, and there are no gadgets beyond an impressive array of Sony phones that run software years ahead of their time. There’s no Moneypenny and the villain – a fay environmentalist called Dominic Greene – has all the menace of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. His sidekick is more Bob-a-Job than Odd-Job.
There are some genuine edge-of-seat highs, like a prop-driven aerial dogfight and the much-hyped car chase, which really is brutal, exciting and loud. But in trying to emulate the Bourne films by putting you right in the middle of a fight or the Aston Martin’s driving seat it becomes confused and hard to follow. Bourne simply – sadly – did it better. Perhaps because it did it first and now we’re always comparing.
Never is the more evident than those times when director Forster stops trying to copy the competition and goes his own way, producing something so grand and impressive as Bregenzer Festspiele opera house scenes and the graceful gunfight that ties them off.
If the crew had been brave enough to do this throughout and create something entirely their own it would have been a stand-out entry in the franchise. In parts, though, it feels like a best-of. MI6 has dumped Windows and switched to whatever operating system they used in Minority Report, Agent Fields gets the Goldfinger treatment, although this time with oil, not gold paint. The eco hotel in which the climactic battle takes place looks for all the world like Ken Adam’s Fort Knox (Goldfinger) or the power station (green energy again) in The Man with the Golden Gun. And Quantum itself is the modern day Spectre.
That this is a more intelligent Bond isn’t in doubt, and it has once again stripped away the clutter of the Brosnan era to produce something more in tune with the rough, stark, more authentic From Russia With Love.
I left the cinema feeling a little disappointed, but suspecting that this would be a film that repayed rewatching. Two days later, I’m convinced that’s true, and already looking forward to the DVD.
And also to the third part of what is looking increasingly like a trilogy. We still don’t know what Bond found out from Vesper’s boyfriend, what Canadian intelligence has to do with all of this, or who heads up Quantum (or quite what it is). There is clearly a new Blofeld on the scene, and it wasn’t eco-warrior Dominic Greene.
Quantum of Solace: 
So the new Bond film is called Quantum of Solace. A strange choice, it sounds like sci-fi, but the actual story behind the name was nothing of the sort. It first appeared as a short tale in For Your Eyes Only, the volume of stories that also contained A View to a Kill.
But just as View to a Kill’s producers took nothing but the story’s title when they made it into a film, I can’t see much of the original Quantum of Solace making it to the screen, either. For starters the story doesn’t involve Bond; it’s merely recounted to him by his host at dinner.
Yet the name could still be appropriate. The new film picks up an hour after the last one ended. Bond is emotionally broken at the close of Casino Royale, and the unfortunate central character in Fleming’s account of Quantum of Solace is similarly damaged by his wife’s wandering ways.
I’m still not convinced it’s a name that will line up well against the likes of Moonraker, Tomorrow Never Dies or Dr No, each of which had a clear and easily definable link to the story’s driving force. Daniel Craig claims that it ‘also alludes to something else in the film’, but I hope that ‘something’ is not too obscure.
Anyhow, it’s months yet until the film comes out. It’s been put back to 7 November, which is a better time for Bond anyway, as it’ll be two years since the last one. My only worry is that the fantastic rebooting of the franchise we had with Casino Royale may be lost as Quantum of Solace slips back into the habits of the Brosnan days, when Bond was more about explosions and chases than character development.
And producer Michael Wilson is promising ‘twice as much action’ as they had in Casino Royale.
Hmmm.
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007, james+bond, quantum+of+solace, daniel+craig
We watched Goldfinger at the weekend. Rich had never seen it before, but he made a very good point: Bond doesn’t actually do anything.
M and the Governor of the Bank of England put him on to Goldfinger, so he does nothing there. Felix points him out in Miami, so he doesn’t even have to stalk him. The Bank of England comes up trumps in getting him a game of golf with the man himself, where he manages to plant a bug in Goldfinger’s car.
He follows this over to Switzerland where he gets easily captured (his own stupidity: he crashed into a wall) and flown to Baltimore by Pussy Galore. There he’s held prisoner at Goldfinger’s ranch, until being handcuffed to a nuclear bomb and locked in Fort Knox. A battle rages outside the fort in which, for obvious reasons, Bond can’t take part, and then someone from the CIA bursts in and defuses the bomb. Apart from a little fight on a plane in which a window gets accidentally blown out and Goldfinger is sucked into outer space, that’s it.
So what was Bond’s contribution to the story, considering even his attempts to warn the CIA of Goldfinger’s plot were thwarted?
He seduced Pussy. That’s all. One literal tumble in the hay and a bit of quick kissing (or maybe more, but we’ll never know as this was the 60s and they didn’t show such things back then) and she was turned. She phoned the CIA (where did she get their number?) and double-crossed her employer. End of story.
Yet Goldfinger is held up by many as one of the best Bonds of all time. The third in the series, it was the one in which the team got into its stride. I still like it a lot, but it’s strange that it took a first-time watcher to point out something I’d never noticed before; this isn’t really a James Bond film at all. It’s the story of Pussy Galore.
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james+bond, 007, pussy+galore, goldfinger
