Prior to meeting my better half, I had never seen a James Bond movie. I considered this an achievement of sorts. Lilly, however, has a fondness for them, so over the past eight years or so, I’ve seen what I assume is all of them, and most of them at least twice!
The problem with this is a bit like being introduced to twins, or how I used to have back-to-back German and Spanish classes in high school – everything just goes into the same file in the brain-cabinet. In that spirit, here is me tipping out the contents of the James Bond file as it currently appears in my mind.
- There’s an early one with Odd Job, who has a deadly bowler hat. They are fighting over some gold
- Wheelchair villain scooped up by a helicopter ‘I’ll buy you a delicatessen in stainless steel!’
- There is one where the villain is a man with three nipples who has a sociopathic dwarf assistant. They live on Thunderbird Island
- There is one with Willard Whyte. Baja?!
- There is one where the villain is on a boat called M.Y. Disco Volante. Does he have an eyepatch? He says ‘jettison cocoon’ and James Bond is dressed up like a saveloy sausage
- There are two with Jaws, one where he falls out of a closet in a train and one where he falls in love with a tiny blonde girl with glasses in space
- There is one exceptionally racist one set in the bayous of Louisiana? Or are they all exceptionally racist?
- Roger Moore’s tiny plane that appears out of a horse’s backside? Lesbian pilot school?
- There is one starring Christopher Walken and Grace Jones, Walken has a blimp and Jones rides a bomb Dr Strangelove style
- James Bond rides a cello down a ski slope?
- There is a Pierce Brosnan one where he drives a car around a car park from his giant Nokia communicator, and one featuring jungle thug Goldie. I’ve no idea if they’re the same movie
- There’s another Brosnan movie where he makes his car invisible at some big ice palace
- In one of the modern Daniel Craig ones he uses a pocked defibrillator on himself. It may or may not be the same movie where there’s some nasty rape scene in that hotel in the middle of the desert that I thought was totally inappropriate for a 12A-rated movie
- In Skyfall they blow up the big house in Scotland and Judi Dench dies
…That’s about the extent of it. If nothing else, I think I got the chronology vaguely right?