herbiehancock

No 166 - Goldfinger Director - Guy Hamilton I have been following the excellent Blogalongabond since its inception, and now as they reach their third month, they have finally come to a Bond film which makes my list... therefore I can jump onto The Incredible Suit's coat-tails and try to explain why Goldfinger is such an important film for the Bond canon; why it's the film in which Bond finally seems to find his voice... The first two films in the Bond canon create a world of action and adventure - but they are still very much spy films, not necessarily obvious 'Bond films' compared to the structure which becomes so key to future episodes. And many of the elements which are now famous and integral to Bond tradition stem from this film. This is the film where Bond becomes a lot wittier, dropping one liners and innuendo all over the place (though it would be 35 years before the undisputed peak of Bond's smutty rubbish puns). It is the film where we finally meet Q b...

No 306 - Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Director Steven Spielberg When watching the films as a set in succession (as I have just done) - the qualities of this film (which I always remembered as the weakest of the original trilogy) really shine through. After the darkness of face melting and nightmare tribes, the far more jokey vibe of this film seem a lot more appropriate. There is a lot of good in The Last Crusade.... lets check it out. Really - what we're doing with the trilogy is building and then - to a certain degree - deconstructing a legend. So where Raiders of the Lost Ark gave us the hero and a romantic foil who is his equal, the sequels begin to look at how he behaves with people less suited to his adventurous lifestyle. Whether they be children and civilians (Short Round shows Indy's paternal streak far more beautifully than his relationship with Mutt... but I'm jumping forward a film) or whether they be his own estranged family. The films show us just enough...