"I'm sorry, Mrs Broccoli. I don't dance"

HEAVY NTTD SPOILERS AHEAD

It's been almost three weeks since I watched No Time To Die. Of course, I followed other people's "advice" to watch it more than once so I could "like it or understand it better", because, naturally, it took me 10 watches of GoldenEye and beating the whole N64 game in 00 Agent mode to love both! (I'm being extremely sarcastic, by the way). Long story short: I watched it an additional three times after the premiere, mostly because a friend of mine had tickets of spare. I left the cinema before the final 45 minutes in the other showings except for the IMAX one because I went with him, mostly. The thing is... I didn't understand it better and with each showing, my disliking for this production grew every day more.

That said, I'm surprised to see many "fans" have liked it, but I'll do my best not to judge them. I'll speak about me, not them. For this thing bastardizes James Bond to an insulting point, so insulting that it makes the 1967 version of Casino Royale almost a "proper" Bond film. Well, in fact, three or four elements are taken straight from it: Bond is retired and brought back to active service, Bond has a daughter he ignores, the villain deals with a virus/germ that turns people into weapon, and... here comes da bomb (no pun intended): James Bond dies.

Yes. I'm not kidding. James Bond dies! 

James Bond dies, but, before we get to that, let's go to the proper Dr No homage, which isn't the fact that Safin is Dr No. No, I'm not refering to the coloured dots during the main titles, or the fact that he "plays God", or that he's a scientist or that Jamaica is a location. The biggest homage made to the first James Bond film, that intruduced the gentleman spy with a licence to kill now turned into the misogynist assassin with a licence to die, is that... James Bond acts like a stupid policeman whose luck runs out! Precisely, the way Joseph Wiseman's character described our hero 59 years ago is the way he acts in this film: from vanishing during the bloodless gunbarrel sequence, to letting a valuable asset and person of interest go because he feels "betrayed" (no, she didn't sleep with a soccer player, she apparently sent Bond to a death-trap) and waiting five years before informing the headquarters that the dangerous terrorist he put in Belmarsh prison has apparently made an allegiance with his girlfriend to kill Bond and probably to turn our unsafe world even less safer than what it was. From being functional to Safin's plan by offing Blofeld off by a stupidity he makes, to peeling apples to a little girl he would later learn she's his daughter. From bowing down to a villain Sean Connery would have killed with a single slap, saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I apologize, I apologize, you're right, you're right" to allow that villain to ambush him, shoot him three times in the back (because you know, spies that have been retired for five years forget how to use stealth), infect him with a virus that would kill Madeleine and her daughter by simple touching them - a virus that conveniently has no cure. They could have forced the scientist who developed this virus to create an antidote, but the new 007 felt offended because he told her a racist comment and she kicked him over a railing to a pool of radioactive water. After all of that, Bond decides his life is crap because he wouldn't see the girls he ignored for five years and watches as a couple of missiles come to eviscerate him. James Bond, Her Majesty's Loyal Terrier, "the best they have", Commander James Bond 007, CMG RNVR, commits suicide. The end of the film features M toasting in his homage, reciting a passage from Jack London: "The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them, I shall use my time". In a similar situation, we could read the second sentence in You Only Live Twice, as everyone at MI6 tought Bond was dead but he had just lost his memory and was enjoying some sort of "married life" with Kissy Suzuki. There you go, we have FLEMING. Even if Fleming never killed James Bond, Mrs Broccoli who owns James Bond more than anyone else decides to do what the books, comics and video games never did: killing him. Because, unlike what the far superior 1995 motion picture GoldenEye tried to show us, Bond has no place in this world anymore. He's an assassin, everything he does is wrong, he's exactly like the villain, he's a man, he's straight, you know... he has to die. We move to Madeleine Swann taking over his place: driving the Aston Martin V8 and telling her daughter "the story of a man whose name was Bond... James Bond". Cue to Louis Armstrong's "We Have All The Time In The World" over the end credits.

Remember when people whined at the homages in Die Another Day? That they were too blunt and a fan service checklist? Well, here they appropiate of the musical identity of a much superior James Bond film, eternally associated to the ill-fated marriage between Bond and countess Teresa "Tracy" Di Vicenzo, and subvert its meaning. The lack of originality of EON Productions has reached a point where they have to rip things from the series of films they tried to wipe out from our mind (just see Being James Bond, the Craig documentary where they barely mention "Roger and Pierce" and there's no other reference to the fact that 007 is a series of films dating from 1962!) only to subvert its meaning - just like they have successfully subverted everything James Bond is in this movie!

In No Time To Die, you don't see Fleming's Bond. Or Connery's Bond, Lazenby's Bond, Moore's Bond, Dalton's Bond or Brosnan's Bond. You don't even see Craig's Bond. The Bond you see... is a completely forged Bond. A fake Bond. It's like Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers) all over again, the baccarat expert given Bond's name to play baccarat against Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) in the far superior 1967 spoof produced by Charles K Feldman.

Well, I made a much needed catharsis. 

Now that I said that, I want to say the following: I don't care about the future of James Bond anymore. The character no longer represents what I loved in him and the Bond community is no longer my place. They can do anything, cast John Boyega, Idris Elba, Henry Golding, anyone in the role. I won't watch it. I'll stick with the films from 1962 to 2002 and pretend the last time we saw 007 was in Die Another Day. Making a bit of a stretch, I can still pretend Bond left with Madeleine Swann on the Aston Martin DB5 in SPECTRE, another far superior film to Time To Die (no, I didn't forget to write No). I placed Never Say Never Again next to Octopussy, by the way. There's nothing "unofficial" in that film for me now. And while Kevin McClory wasn't exactly a guy I liked and was a shit to Ian Fleming, I affirm that he loved James Bond much more than Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig ever did. 

I will cover (No) Time To Die on the updated edition of A View To A Thrill: A Closer Look At The James Bond Trailers coming November. A promise made is a promise kept. I'll be as objective as I can, so don't expect this kind of language there - in fact, I rarely editorialized in the first edition. Then, I have another Bond book for 2022 and after that, I think I'll stop writing about the character save for some articles and mostly focused on the past. I'll try something different for my books, you will see.

I won't buy Time To Die on any home video format, I won't buy the soundtrack, I won't have any poster of that film hanging on my room and I won't give EON Productions my money nor support any of their projects. You know, all of this comes after they have unfairly sent a "cease and desist" notification forcing two very good friends of mine to cancel a freeware project that was recreating the N64 game GoldenEye for PC, when it didn't harm them in any way. They do that and then they kill James Bond! Do you really think I'll be proud to exhibit James Bond's open casket in the form of a Blu-ray disc next to films like Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, The Spy Who Loved Me, GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough? They don't deserve that.

Who do you think to are to do that? Someone who values his money. Who do you think to are to tell EON what they have to do? Someone who has been supporting for 23 years, telling people who watched Dragon Ball Z and the Marvel movies that I preferred James Bond over them, and that the character is not "someone from the past", but he is still a hero for our days. The one that represents what a man always aspires to become. Ha, ha, ha... do you think Barbara will cry if you don't give her money? She won't, that's for sure. But I don't care. I'm content with knowing she won't have my money. It's like it happens in The Great Escape: the prison camp manager is convinced that their escape plan won't succeed, but Richard Attenborough insists that he's simply happy to have one or two people running away from the prison. The same applies here: even if Barbara gets millions of dollars and can live for two entire years without working, I won't contribute to that. I won't financially support my hero's death.

It all narrows down to another of my favourite movies (and far superior to the first unofficial EON-produced Bond film, although that's an undertsatement): Clear And Present Danger. I'll leave you the clip.

I'm perfectly aware that I may be losing followers and potential buyers for this blog entry. I'm even ready to see very few people buying A View To A Thrill or any other of my books (well, who knows. For every bold decision you take, you lose three friends and win another three), but if there's something both my parents taught me is to put values and principles over all the money in the world.

If you are happy to celebrate the humilliation and death of James Bond, good for you. But I won't.

I'm sorry, Mrs Broccoli.

I don't dance.

Actions speak louder than words...

 

 

 

Read my No Time To Die review here (MODERATE SPOILERS): https://goldeneyedossier.wixsite.com/bond/post/no-time-to-die-the-final-insult

Lean mi crítica de Sin Tiempo Para Morir en español (SPOILERS MODERADOS):
https://bondenargentina.tumblr.com/post/663851759314321408/sin-tiempo-para-morir-007-con-licencia-para

'Die Another Day': shaping James Bond for a post-9/11 world

It was 20 years ago today that two hijacked Boeing 747 commercial aeroplanes caused a macabre terrorist attack in the heart of New York City, but watching the images all over again still chills anyone in any part of this world. The terrorist attacks that took place in the morning of September 11, 2001, didn't just change the politics and social mood of the United States of America. It changed the whole world and particularly the Western hemisphere: anyone who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s surely remembers how afraid we were of going to McDonald's or walking next to the US Embassy in the days that followed 9/11.

 

CONTINUE READING

Bond Gets the ‘Endgame’ Treatment in Final ‘No Time to Die’ Trailer

 WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS CONTAINED IN THIS ARTICLE!

As many social media users point out, the next two weeks will determine if the upcoming James Bond film No Time To Die becomes a great movie or a great meme. On August 24, during the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, MGM’s Michael De Luca screened nine unseen minutes of the pre-credits sequence of the film and assured attendants that the film will be released for good on October 8 in the United States and a week earlier worldwide, on September 30. 

CONTINUE READING

'GoldenEye' and the Soviet Coup of 1991

 

There are at least two big historical events that nurture the story of the 17th James Bond film GOLDENEYE. The British betrayal of the Lienz Cossacks in 1945 directly motivates Alec Trevelyan's revenge plan, and there is also the setting of a new world order after the dissolution of the Soviet Union which serves as a backdrop as the story moves along through nine years.

However, there is a historical event most people overlook, and it is the one that directly provoked the fall of the Soviet Union. But don't worry, don't blame yourself if you didn't catch it. After all, Ourumov's electronic dossier at M's office appears onscreen for less than a second. This is an event that began on August 18, 1991, and culminated exactly 30 years ago, on August 21, 1991. This was an ill-fated attempt to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev's government to reinstate a radicalized Soviet government in a USSR that was beginning to embrace glasnost (openness) policies towards the West. 

CONTINUE READING

Nothing more. Nothing less. Only love.

During the past week, I've been frequently thinking about love and concluded that the most recent romantic films, those that were released in the last five years —La La Land comes to mind as the primary example— gave me a bitter aftertaste. A taste of disappointment, because (call me old-fashioned) whenever I see a love story on the big screen I hope for them to end up together and seal their relationship with a kiss during the film's finale. This disappointment made me want to rewatch On Her Majesty's Secret Service and take a closer look at the relationship between James Bond and the woman he married for a short while before his dreams were shattered by the burst of a machine gun: Countess Teresa Di Vicenzo, Tracy for her friends.

The 1969 film, the only appearance of George Lazenby as 007, shows us an exclusive Bond: this time, he is romantically involved with a girl and dates her. He womanizes at one point in the story, but only as the means for an end (gathering more information on Blofeld's clinic in Switzerland). And, notably, he is very comprehensive of this somewhat conflicted woman: the consented, rebellious and suicidal daughter of an Italian mafia don who sees in Bond the man that could "dominate her" and "make love to her enough to make her love him". However, Bond does exactly the opposite: he comforts her and promises her "a future", the emotional stability she was lacking and exteriorized with scandals, like trying to drown herself in a Portuguese beach or betting without funds in a casino: "People who want to stay alive play it safe", she initially tells 007.

Moving closer to the final scenes of the film, before the tragic ending, Tracy rescues Bond from SPECTRE agents during the Christmas celebration in Murren, Switzerland. A car chase ensues and both stay in a barn, where Bond confesses how much he loves her, but clarifies that "an agent shouldn't be concerned with anything but himself". She initially takes that as a warning of a break-up, or a reinforcement of the idea that they should meet occasionally. Instead, James does the unthinkable: he tells her he will resign to Her Majesty's Secret Service and asks her to marry him.

In contrast, when we watch La La Land, we see a couple breaking up because their love interfered with their job or vocation. I know, these are modern times and love lately is perceived as a relative feeling instead of an absolute one. Few people seem eager to leave everything for love or to put their dreams on hold just because they are getting along well with a significant other. So, Sebastian and Mia parted ways and reflected on "what would have been" while starting new relationships and going along with their dreams.

I don't know about you, but comparing both situations makes me appreciate James Bond even more as a man. We know of his patriotism and devotion to Queen and Country, how he needs this job to feel alive (read the first chapter of Ian Fleming's Thunderball novel, when he is acting erratically while off-duty), how much he enjoys being a ladies' man... and yet in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, he is willing to leave everything for a girl he loves. He understood that this job wasn't compatible with giving someone like Tracy the emotional stability she needed, to look after her and form a family with her (in the final minutes, we see them planning to have "three boys, three girls").

The Peter Hunt film also teaches us a big lesson about love: it isn't something easy and without obstacles. We are constantly working to improve a relationship and that the person we love is not perfect: we all have our backstory, our dramas, our complications... I tie this with Vesper Lynd's line from Casino Royale: "I'm afraid I'm a complicated woman". She was, Tracy was, we all are complicated. Bond is complicated and also is the man writing this piece, too. The beauty of love is not finding someone who is "not complicated", because that's simply impossible to find if you want a serious love relationship. The challenge is to find the person whose complication is compatible with ours. I, for once, never saw love as an easy thing or as something relaxing. Love demands and you have to act in consequence of those demands. And I think there's not some kind of bulletproof vest for love, to be honest. Love hurts, and please don't misunderstand the meaning of "hurt" here. I don't want to associate it with pain, I'd say in this case it'd be more associated with effort - it's like doing exercise: when you do bent-over rows, if it hurts, that's because you're doing it well. The same happens with love, you have to feel it: feel the joy of having it or the concern that might not be there one day. I will never understand today's indifference in couples regarding how long their significant other will be there, or that are willing to end the relationship for work reasons, as it happened between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in the 2017 movie.

I'm not going to dwell too much regarding personal life, but in 2014 I was faced with a dilemma: November 2015. Going to London and the premiere of SPECTRE along with fellow Bond fans, or going to Rio de Janeiro to meet the girl who showed me more love than anyone else. I went to Rio, picking her over Bond (well, not quite as we watched the movie there) and I missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me. But guess what? I don't regret it. And if I was back in November 2014, when she simply told me on the phone: "Start saving to come to Rio, because I'm kind of... in love with you" (unbeknown of my original London plans), I would have taken exactly the same decision - and those who know me are aware of how addicted to Bond I am.

Many will strongly disagree with me on my views on La La Land, Bond and Tracy, love or even the decision I took in 2014. But I just wanted to share my two-cents regarding today's romantic dramas, and to highlight a beautiful side of a persona who is frequently perceived as a womanizer or a misogynist like 007. I would say On Her Majesty's Secret Service probably gives us the most generous and genuinely caring version of James Bond we have ever had in almost 59 years of history. And kudos to George Lazenby. Despite his lack of acting, or maybe just because of that, he delighted us with an emotional Bond that felt really natural.

NS

Time is not on your side: how the passing of time affects 'GoldenEye' characters

 

 

GOLDENEYE was the first James Bond film to deal with time. This can appreciated right after Daniel Kleinman's iconic main title sequence, when we see the secret agent driving his classic Aston Martin DB5 in the mountain roads of the South of France and a caption lets us know that this event takes place nine years after the pre-credits sequence, where 007 blew up a chemical weapons facility in the Soviet Union: the indication of this compound's location in the USSR is also a clear evidence of the times as it should have taken place somewhere in the 1980s - 1986, to be precise, as documented by John Gardner's novelization and a simple mathematical calculation: if the film takes place on the same year it was released, 1995, then nine years before those events result in 1986 - although earlier drafts hinted 1984 as there was a mention that the Russian soldiers patrolling the facility were watching the Olympic Games of that year. Ourumov's electronic dossier, seen at M's office, points out that the destruction of the Archangel facility took place in 1984, too. Either way, GOLDENEYE firmly establishes that the pre-credits and the rest of the story take place in two different geopolitical contexts.

CONTINUE READING

Mis libros (digitales) en MercadoLibre

Consciente del gran esfuerzo que implica comprar mis libros en Argentina debido a su costo en dólares, esta semana se han publicado en MercadoLibre mis cuatro primeros libros en formato digital: El Mundo de GoldenEye, El Bond del Nuevo Milenio: Los Días de Pierce Brosnan como James Bond, Licencia Para Promocionar: Un Vistazo a los Tráilers de 007 y Más Allá Del Hielo: A Favor y en Contra de Otro Dìa Para Morir.

El material se ofrece en formato PDF legible protegido contra copias, en pesos y a un valor que para los argentinos será mucho más conveniente que las tiendas online del exterior. Tras realizar la oferta, el producto se envía en un lapso no menor a 24 horas. Pueden encontrar todos las publicaciones completas en este link.

¡Espero que los disfruten!

For England, James: a love letter to 'GoldenEye' on its 25th anniversary

I completely ignore what my five-year-old self was doing on this day in 1995. I was being taken care by my grandmother or my aunt after they picked me up from kindergarten, having a slight preference for my aunt as she didn't feed me to my bones as my grandma did, offering me different kinds of food from 4 to 8 pm, continuously. Anyway, one thing is for certain: I didn't care about James Bond, and I completely ignored that the film that would change my life forever was being released in the United States.

GoldenEye celebrates its 25th anniversary today, and I sadly missed out in theatres. However, it did have a big impact on me when I watched it on the telly three years later, even in those old 4:3 tube TVs where most of the details we over-analyze today thanks to 1080p or 4K resolution went missing. And to me, it will always be my favourite movie of all time.

Ian Fleming stated that his stories were "written for warm-blooded heterosexuals", and the 17th entry in the Bond series wasn't based on any of its books, but damn if GoldenEye doesn't fit that concept like a glove! Could there be anything that could make the blood of a straight eight-year-old kid boil than Famke Janssen's red lips suggestively smoking those cigars? Who didn't fantasize to be that man who looked sharp in a tux or business suit and could escape from a dozen Russian soldiers after his head by performing an impossible death-defying stunt? I did. After watching GoldenEye I wanted to be James Bond, and I wanted to sleep with a woman like Xenia Onatopp. I wanted to walk through the Monaco harbour, visit St Petersburg, and wear a linen suit somewhere in the Caribbean. All that while my schoolmates were thinking of Dragon Ball Z and Knights of The Zodiac or too busy with their favourite soccer players.

The film had me at the Gunbarrel sequence. That graphic of a man walking in a tux with all elegance and determination only to turn and shoot at the audience as blood filled the screen enchanted me and it was right there that I knew I was going to watch a great film. The rest of it from the bungee jump, to Daniel Kleinman's dancing ladies over the Lenin and Stalin statues, the tank chase and the fight above the antenna dish, just fascinated me. 

GoldenEye opened my eyes to the world and made me investigate. Go beyond the ordinary. I started asking my parents what the Cold War was, what was that red flag with the hammer and the sickle, what's the difference between a Soviet and a Russian, what was the KGB and the Lienz Cossacks. And this film also made me know James Bond. I didn't stop there. I went to watch Tomorrow Never Dies on the big screen and I slowly bought one by one the old Bond films on VHS and every available book on the subject. My first two were James Bond: La Obra Definitiva Sobre el Agente 007 by Juan Tejero (in Spanish) and Lee Pfeiffer and Dave Worral's The Essential Bond, plus some issues of 007 Magazine, Graham Rye's excellent contribution to the Bond fandom. I still remember when I told some of my mates that I was a James Bond fan. "What, James Bond Jr?" they asked me. "Nope. James Bond. 007. GoldenEye!" Then they remembered the Nintendo 64 game, which I couldn't buy but I did rent a lot.

In 2011, a year after I finished high school, I created The GoldenEye Dossier to celebrate not only the film but the many video game versions of it. The site was instantly loved by Bond fans all over the world and it still is. In 2019, facing an atrocious financial situation, I wrote my first book, The World of GoldenEye. Paraphrasing what Bond tells Natalya, I have to say that GoldenEye kept me alive indeed. Twenty-four years after saving the Bond franchise, GoldenEye saved me in a time where friends and relatives looked down at my unemployed self, sometimes lending me some bucks out of pity but making me feel it.

Whenever I think of GoldenEye, I also think of people and places. I think of the comfort of the glorious 90s at my childhood home where I frequently tuned in the TV to see if the film was being re-run, the cheers of the toy stores where everyone was taking a shot at the Nintendo 64 game. I think of my late father, who was always very supportive of my Bond passion. And it was him who told me who James Bond was and -without being a fan- lead me into Bondmanship. I think of watching the film on the old Special Edition DVD my uncle brought me from the US, which I watched on the computer of my grandparents' home. I did practise a lot of English with the DVDs, even some words in French too. Those were the two available languages there. I think of the beautiful Mariana, departed to a hopefully better life, who welcomed me in Rio de Janeiro with the BluRay edition of the movie and Swatch's commemorative wristwatch from 2002, which I proudly wear.

But most of all, GoldenEye reminds me why I am a James Bond fan in the first place. Because GoldenEye has all the elements someone loves to see in a Bond film. There is a protagonist with a commanding presence, a charismatic villain, two stunningly beautiful girls, secondary characters you'll never forget, and it represents the 90s generational zeitgeist very well. The music may be very untraditional to the John Barry standards, but it still fits the mood of the film perfectly. And I have loved "The Experience of Love" from day one, to be honest! 

Lately, I barely care for James Bond's future as the continuous marketing fiascos of No Time To Die (particularly its many delays and bland poster campaign) have made me lose my interest for the movie. It'll come back whenever they are 110% sure that the film will be released in April 2021, surely. But whatever they decide to do to the character, my loyalty will always stand with GoldenEye. I still think it's much better than anything that came after that, with all due respect to the other Brosnan movies and Casino Royale, which I love. But this film is the perfect testimony that the Bond formula is not attached to a determined era and that Bond doesn't belong to the 60s or the 90s, but to NOW.

This said, I'll raise my glass today to commemorate the film that shaped my life more than anything else. The Goldfinger of the 90s. My Goldfinger and Thunderball. Here's to Martin Campbell's brilliant direction, Phil Méheux's paradisiac shots, Terry Rawling's fast cuts and Eric Serra's industrial, metallic sounds. Here's to the sexist, misogynist dinosaur I wanted to be like and the woman I wanted to enjoy squeezes with. Here's to the Lienz Cossacks, the three minutes instead of six, the small talk and chit-chats, the foreplay and the boys with the toys.

Here's to the film that  kept me alive -and a little alone- for all these years.

Happy 25th, GoldenEye!

For England, for James, for the memories...

And for me.

Llueve sobre mojado

 

La fallida producción de Sin Tiempo Para Morir deja una triste realidad en claro: Michael G Wilson y Barbara Broccoli están lejos de la garra y pasión que el legendario Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli ponía sobre la realización de cada una de sus películas de James Bond.

'Beyond The Ice' is now out in paperback and digital

Hello world! I'm pleased to announce my fourth book (not counting updates or translation) is now out in the Amazon store, and I'm sure it'll be available later in BookDepository. Beyond The Ice: The Case For And Against Die Another Day, deals with the 40th anniversary James Bond movie, which -unlike my favourite 007 flick GoldenEye- is hated by many.

It's not a secret, it's a surprise...

Hello world, hope 2020 finds you well considering the circumstances. And happy 67th birthday to Pierce Brosnan, my all time favourite James Bond! If it wasn't for him, I'm sure I'd be now writing about something else, or probably not writing at all and maybe painting, playing football or the guitar, who knows, but it's thanks to Pierce that I got attracted to Bond some 22 years ago.

Updated Edition for 'The World of GoldenEye'

Hope you are all staying safe, wherever you are. Just dropping a few words to let you know that The World of GoldenEye has been republished as an Updated Edition. Changes you'll find in this update are two additional chapters, an expansion of the original chapters, an image gallery with a few pics of GoldenEye (pics of my collection, some photos provided by a member of the second unit, etc). 

By the way, due to the current worldwide situation, Amazon isn't shipping stuff to Argentina. So I won't be able to buy my author copy until the clouds are cleared. So, please, if you bought it, please reach me and tell me if everything is okay: the pagination, the covers, the illustrations, etc. It all looked good when I previewed the settings, but I won't have the book in my hands anytime soon.

It's available in English and Spanish. The English version has a mini-encyclopaedia and the Spanish one a look at GoldenEye in Latin American territories. Both have the same images.

Nothing more to say. I pray for mankind. Let's hope we all make it for No Time To Die in November.

Where have all the good old Bond film preheating days go?

It's almost 22 years since I became a James Bond fan in January 1998. And I'm sad to say I don't feel identified with the Bond fandom of today, at all. Mind you, this has nothing to do with my love to the character. I love Bond in every media, particularly films, video games and books, even the comic books. Sorry to say it, but, should I have the chance to go to Great Britain in April (something impossible to happen due to my miserable finances), I can count with the fingers of one hand those I would really look forward to meet.

From the shadows, as a child

Happy 2020, everyone!

I doubt this year will be as great as 2015 was (still the best year of my life since the late 1990s), but it already has two things in common: a new James Bond film is coming, No Time To Die, and it's another anniversary of GoldenEye. 

'A View To A Thrill', my latest book, looks at the 007 trailers

As this wicked year comes to an end (fortunately), I release my third James Bond book after The World of GoldenEye and The Bond of The Millennium. As you can appreciate, this piece will take a look at the trailers for the 007 films from Dr. No to the resent first trailer for No Time To Die and including the unofficial Bond productions Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again, released in 1967 and 1983.

'No Time To Die' - Trailer thoughts

Yes, Blofeld is back. And the No Time To Die trailer has finally been released today. Before the end of the year I'll be releasing my third book: A View To A Thrill: A Closer Look at The James Bond Trailers, which basically says it all. Needless to say, this promo will be thoroughly commented but I won't really make too much personal statements, so I'll share them with you here, below the official trailer video.

When the world was more than enough

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, things were pretty different in my life. It was the Christmas of 1999, and as far as I can remember everyone seemed happy. I didn't have a big James Bond collection, not my knowledge of the character and my dominion of the English language was so big, but I remember that I was totally excited as my dad was taking me to watch The World Is Not Enough, which premiered in my native Buenos Aires on the penultimate week of December 1999.

Interview with the Being James Bond podcast

Read my latest interview with Joseph Darlington from Being James Bond, a great site dedicated to the James Bond lifestyle. Here I talk about my books The World of GoldenEye and The Bond of The Millennium, and I also reveal some tiny details on my third book which I'm already writing. I also weigh in on No Time To Die a little bit.

Debunking fake 007 Brosnan myths

Hello everyone. I know I did a similar article sometime before on Universal Exports and the UAMC, but I felt in the need to debunk some facts I regularly see on forums and social media regarding Pierce Brosnan's performance as James Bond. I don't own the truth, neither do them, but here's my take on some exaggeratedly wrong assumptions.