Fabricated Truth

[Editor's note: This intro is unnecessarily long and embarrassingly personal. You might just want to skip to the list, after the cut.]
When I was a young boy - maybe six to ten years old - the films about superspy James Bond were a regular feature on television. My father always watched them and whenever I could, I would watch with him, staying up well past my bedtime. I might not have understood everything that was going on - the sexual innuendo and political implications definitely were lost on me - but I understood one fundamental thing that attracted me to the franchise: That James Bond guy was really cool. Today, in an attempt to show off my expanded vocabulary, I might call him suave, charming or even sophisticated, but those words don’t quite describe how fascinated I - and millions if not billions of other people - were by his adventures.

When Goldeneye was released in 1995, after a six year hiatus, it was impossible to believe that Bond was actually on the big screen. He had become such a central television figure for me, that it took me seven more years to decide to see a Bond movie in a movie theatre. (Yes, I am aware that I am mixing British and American English. It annoys me to no end, but I have come to accept it as a slight quirk of my writing.) Nevertheless, I have always claimed that I had seen all Bond movies, but in discussions with fellow aficionados, I have lately realized that I actually remembered embarrassingly little of them.

So, in order to remedy that grave slight on my reputation as a film connoisseur, I decided to rewatch all 22 Bond films made by Eon Productions, i.e. the official Bond films. There are two more: the 1967 parody Casino Royale starring David Niven and 1983’s Never Say Never Again, a remake of Thunderball by Warner that brought back the long retired Sean Connery as Bond. These are not included in the list for the simple reason that they don’t particularly fit and I also had no desire to watch them (again) after seeing so much of Bond over the last four weeks. The following list of the movies ranks them on personal like and dislike, no matter how objective the reviews are worded. If you disagree with my assessment, you are nevertheless wrong. But I would love to tell you why if you told me which movie is much better or worse than I believe in the comments!

And now, without even further ado, the most epic post ever written for this blog! (Isn’t the list of tags impressively long?)

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