Culture
Eric Freeman
Not to return to a constant predilection of mine, but I totally fucking love Madonna’s theme from Die Another Day. What’s key to its success is that it totally sounds like a Madonna song about Bond, not a Bond song which happens to be sung by Madonna. It’s weird to me that all of the singers starting with Tina Turner have been pretty big names, but when they record their song, they seem to forcefully amputate themselves from the song. It’s almost as if these artists get so caught up in their assignment — we must write a Bond Song.
Culture
Darren Franich
The Brosnan Bond movies completely botched the treatment of women; it’s like they were trying to straddle (pun very much intended) the line between typical Bond Girl hotness and Strong Independent ‘90s Female. As such, they’d usually give them legitimate titles and roles, only to give them nothing particularly interesting to do, with the end result always being that they’d dispatch a minor henchman/woman and then have sex with Bond as the credits rolled.
Culture
Eric Freeman
The Brosnan era is always going to be looked down upon by virtue of predating the Craig era. Even if Craig’s movies somehow manage to get worse and loopier than Moonraker, the mere existence and unfettered grandeur of Casino Royale — how it manages to be both the all-new different Bond and the ultimate Bond — will always cast a retroactive shadow over dross like Tomorrow Never Dies.
Culture
Darren Franich
In November and December of 2008, Darren Franich and Eric Freeman engaged in a ridiculously long email exchange about virtually everything related to Quantum of Solace and the James Bond franchise as a whole. That conversation is now reproduced here.
