The Casino Royale Titles: Daniel Kleinman's Early Designs

Following yesterday's interview with Daniel Kleinman, designer of six James Bond title sequences (including the forthcoming Skyfall), here's a bunch of "rough electronic sketches" that he produced while creating the titles for Casino Royale. Some of these images have never been seen before outside Daniel's computer, and I'm eternally grateful to him for allowing me to publish them on The Incredible Suit, not to mention somewhat inappropriately aroused.

The first twelve images are scans of an annotated storyboard of the first part of the sequence; the notes are Daniel's own. The rest are sketches intended to convey the visual ideas he wanted to put on film.

All images are reproduced with the kind permission of Daniel Kleinman.
All images are © Daniel Kleinman.

Don't forget, all images are © Daniel Kleinman. I'm not mucking about here.

BlogalongaBond / Casino Royale: A Tale Of Two Daniels

"THE NAME'S BLAND... JAMES BLAND", honked the Daily Mirror's side-splitting critique of Daniel Craig's casting as James Bond. They weren't alone in their baseless condemnation: others said he was too short; too ugly; too young; too old; too blond. Some even said he was too blonde. One website, made entirely by idiots for idiots, offered a template letter we could sign and send to Sony informing them of a planned boycott of the new Bond film due to the decision "to replace Pierce Brosnan with such an unknown and unattractive actor". Before anyone had seen a single frame of footage from Casino Royale, Daniel Craig wasn't just derided: he was skewered. One sympathises.

Skeptics soon learned to choose their next criticisms carefully, because Craig treated them in much the same way that his Bond treated bathrooms, building sites, Aston Martins and Venetian palazzi: he demolished them. His 007 is an unstoppable force meeting a series of immovable objects and kicking the absolute living shit out of them. Within the first twenty, breathless minutes of Casino Royale, Craig virtually erased all memories of his predecessors, and as an encore spent the next two hours doing something only Timothy Dalton had previously achieved in the role: acting. Reviewing the film, the Daily Mirror seemed to quietly forget "James Bland", noting that Craig "oozed the kind of edgy menace that recalls Sean Connery at his best".

The combined brilliance of Daniel Craig and Casino Royale is in no small part due to the bold decision to reboot the franchise and wipe the slate clean of double-taking pigeons and CG kitesurfing. The crusty, cobweb-laden Bond formula of old was forcibly shoved out of the window in favour of a daring structure that front-loads the film with two massive set pieces in its first hour, makes a half-hour card game its centrepiece and has somebody else kill the villain while Bond is busy counting his remaining mangled knackers. Only in the final act does the script chicken out and throw in some extraneous architectural carnage, but by this point Craig could dress up as a clown and we wouldn't mind.

See?

Despite being a first class, bollock-busting blockbuster, Casino Royale's script isn't quite as clever as it thinks it is. It goes to enormous lengths to bring Bond's ego, naivety and emotions to the fore so that they can all be battered back into the depths of his psyche by a series of life lessons administered by ruthless sadists and duplicitous women; the problem is that we don't really get a sense that he's changed as a result. It's the first film to give Bond a character arc, but he doesn't quite reach the end of it despite having 144 minutes to play with. Evidently collapsing buildings are more important than fully-complete character development.

Nevertheless, Casino Royale is textbook money's-worth entertainment. Arguably the greatest action film of its decade (say what you like, it's more fun than the Bournes and less preposterous than the Mission: Impossibles), it restored the Bond series to its rightful place in action cinema, even if it was only for a short while. I can even forgive the irritatingly continuity-mauling appearance of Judi Dench, simply because it's her best in any Bond film.

But while one Daniel was losing his Bond virginity in style, another was ensuring that the foreplay would get our juices in full flow. Daniel Kleinman's astonishing title sequence for Casino Royale is, for my money, the best of any Bond film.

I've wittered about Kleinman's work before, but for this edition of BlogalongaBond I decided to drag him away from working on Skyfall's title sequence in order to talk about Casino Royale's. To his infinite credit, he was happy to do so.

Hello Daniel. Can you explain the evolution of a Bond title sequence from initial concept to finished article? The process starts with me reading the script and jotting down ideas, then I do some visual research and lots of sketches. I then do rough visuals and storyboard some of the sequence. I pass the ideas by the producers and director and see if we're all in agreement. Early rough electronic sketch for Casino Royale title sequence Once my ideas get the go ahead I almost work as an autonomous unit, as everyone else is busy on the film. I have my own production team and shoot whatever material I need. In the case of Casino Royale, I wanted to have Daniel Craig in the titles as the film was introducing him as Bond, so I filmed some shots with him, some with his stunt double and some fight sequences. Then there's a rough edit to do and many weeks of special effects work. Strangely, one of the last things I do is put the names on the titles. This is because, for many reasons, the list of credits can change up to the last moment. How does the theme song fit into all this? I may or may not have a copy of the song at the early stage. It's certainly easier if I do, but it's a long process to tie down the song, artist, mix and edit of the song and quite often I don't hear or get the final version of it until very late in the day. Then, in a nail biting moment, I put it against the visuals and hope they both sync up as I planned. I did have the Casino Royale track earlier than usual which was a very good thing, and maybe why the two elements work well together. This was because I have great respect for - and a good relationship with - David Arnold, who co-wrote the song and scored the film. I kept bugging him to get me the lyrics, if not the music, so I had a head start, but I had most of the ideas drawn up before I heard the song. I just had time to make sure they fit with the lyrics. How has the way you work changed since you designed the titles for GoldenEye in 1995? Over the years, the process of creating the titles has changed immensely due to the progress of the technology. [The titles for] GoldenEye were created in an analogue edit suite and then copied and matched by eye on very slow high definition machines only designed to create shots a few seconds long, so syncing to the music or adjusting anything was a very difficult process. Even watching a shot back was difficult as it couldn't be done in real time, just in slow motion as the computers weren't powerful enough to process the frames quickly. Due to the time it took to create just one frame of the titles at high resolution, the first time I really saw the full resolution titles all joined together was right at the end of the process, when it's too late to change anything. So it was a bit of a hairy process, but exciting. By Casino Royale the machines had more or less caught up with the way I like to work and I could preview and adjust things, which makes the process much more user friendly and not quite the edge of the seat worry it had been in previous years. Did you get to see Casino Royale before designing the titles, or were you just asked to base your ideas on a casino theme? I have to start the titles process long before the film is finished. I can read the script and discuss with the director of the film, but I can't wait to see the film finished before I'm committed to what I'm doing. Of course I had read the book and the script of Casino Royale. The gunbarrel shot in Casino Royale is very striking: was it your idea to work it into the story in that way? That clever idea was already in the script. The idea was to explain what the gunbarrel represented and how it came to be: it was Bond's first kill. The lack of naked women and the animated style of the figures in Casino Royale's titles are a marked departure from previous title sequences. Why did you decide to change direction in this way? For Casino Royale, [director] Martin Campbell didn't want any dancing women in the title sequence. This was a conceptual decision, as Bond in the film wasn't yet the Bond we know; at the start of the film he isn't even a 00, and his love of getting physical with women hadn't been introduced. Of course the film was really a sort of 'birth of Bond' story, and arguably his attitude to women is formed by Vesper Lynd's betrayal at the end of the film, so the sensual dancing girls weren't really appropriate despite them being historically an iconic part of Bond title sequences. The graphic nature of the figures is really just an extension of the graphics on cards and casino chips. I chose the style to fit the idea, I don't really like doing things the other way around. I suppose there is a Saul Bass homage element as well. Tastes change, and I think that Bond is always one step ahead of the game. The films have always been cleverly innovative and different whilst not losing the key iconic elements that make Bond Bond. I don't want to create the same thing again and again so I'm always trying to bring something fresh to the titles, and also many people copy or plagiarise Bond, so that's a good reason to keep doing it differently. Casino Royale's titles evoke the original novel's first cover. Was that a conscious decision? I was intrigued that Ian Fleming had designed the original book cover himself, so I took that as a starting point. I love the graphic nature of cards and gambling paraphernalia, so also used that as a theme. For instance, I saw a connection between the club symbol and a puff of smoke, so used it as an image of smoke coming from a gun. Diamonds and spades are pretty aggressive looking, so I used them as knives and bullets. The heart is, of course, a symbol with many meanings, particularly appropriate in Casino Royale. Violence and gambling have always gone together and the added element of the graphic patterns used on money seemed to knit everything together for me. Are there any hidden "easter eggs" in Casino Royale's titles that the viewer might have to carefully look for? There is an image that you could easily miss: a gunsight moves over the face of the Queen of Hearts and is revealed as Vesper Lynd, but like all royal cards she has a mirrored image which is the Queen of Spades. What were the biggest challenges you faced in creating the Casino Royale title sequence? There were a few odd difficulties. We had to ensure that we designed all the card faces and elements ourselves, so that no existing card manufacturer could say we used their imagery or lifted anything from their designs. The lyric "I've seen diamond cut through harder men" worked particularly well with the images I wanted to create; I put a diamond skewering a man, then a bad guy with a spade sticking in him, and finally I wanted the third dead guy to have a club bullet hole in his temple but it was deemed possibly a bit too violent and might have compromised the rating of the film, so I just stuck it in his chest. Also, I wanted the sequence to start with Bond putting a gun together while he's sitting on a sort of mad card pattern that has grown organically like a psychedelic set of veins. I've always thought screwing on a silencer rather a cool and brutal action, but amusingly Daniel Craig had great difficulty doing it without looking at it. We had to do quite a few takes, but I think now with three Bond films under his belt he could whip on a silencer with his eyes shut. Which of your Bond titles is your favourite? And which of the others do you admire the most? I was very honoured to be asked to do GoldenEye and so have fond memories of that particular sequence, but I suspect like most people who create things there are always elements I like and elements I think could have gone better in each piece of work. I tend not to look back if I can help it; I like looking forward to the next project and I'm pretty engrossed in and excited by the process of creating the titles for Skyfall at the moment. I hope they live up to what I think is going to be a great movie. My favourite early Bond title sequence is You Only Live Twice. I love the Japanese imagery and it's a great, classic title song. Most of the Bond titles done by Maurice Binder and Robert Brownjohn are amazing; they created an instantly recognisable visual style all over the world that has been mimicked and copied ever since but never bettered. It's my understanding that you weren't involved in the titles for Quantum Of Solace, yet IMDb has you credited as that film's title designer. Can you clear up any confusion? Nothing to do with me. They were created by MK12, who I don't know, but I thought they did a fine job. What can you tell us about your title sequence for Skyfall? Is it finished? Have you seen the film? Can you tell us who's doing the theme song? Is the gunbarrel back at the start of the film? I could answer all those questions but I'd probably find a man clad in black in my bedroom with a silencer, and have only a very short time left to live while he tried to screw it on, if I did. As I write [mid-August 2012], the title sequence for Skyfall is still in production, as is the film. I have seen an unfinished screening of the movie and in my opinion it's going to be a triumph. Daniel Kleinman, thanks so much for your time. My pleasure.

Have a look here at more of Daniel's early design work for the Casino Royale title sequence. I'd do it here but there's literally tons of it (not literally).

Bond's first kill

The first fight in which we see just how bastard-hard Daniel Craig's Bond is comes less than two minutes into the film, and it absolutely does not fuck about. Shot in grainy black and white and skilfully cut together - almost every edit takes place on a kick or punch - it's the most vicious scrap we've seen since from Russia With Love, and it nods to that film by taking place in a confined space (the bathroom of a cricket club in Pakistan, trivia fans). Weaving the new gunbarrel design into the story is a glorious stroke of genius too.

Le Chiffre

The Bond films have always had trouble pulling off realistic villains who are also the physical freaks that Ian Fleming so loved creating, so it was a joy to see Mads Mikkelsen make such a good job of the blood-blubbing bastard that is Le Chiffre. Joyously sadistic and permanently oily with nervous sweat, Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre is never a physical challenge for Bond, which is why the mental war that is a game of poker works so well.

That bit *winces*

Not including the novel's torture scene in the film of Casino Royale would have been like Bane not snapping Batman's back in The Dark Knight Rises, and it's leg-crossingly, groin-clenchingly, eye-wateringly effective. The knotted rope is a horribly perfect replacement for the book's carpet-beater, and both Craig and Mikkelsen play the scene perfectly. I don't normally enjoy watching a naked man having his balls shredded by a rope-wielding monster, but on this occasion I was deliriously excited. Not quite sure what that says about me.

And finally: Not all Bond traditions were jettisoned: there's still a hilariously-named minor character, and this one is infinitely better than Die Another Day's "Mr Kil":

BlogalongaBond will return with Quantum Of Solace

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here

BlogalongaBond / Tomorrow Never Dies: The Pryce Is Wrong

From Russia With Love, The Man With The Golden Gun, Licence To Kill: all difficult second albums for Pierce Brosnan's predecessors, all improvements on their first efforts. As was by now customary, the actor playing James Bond had relaxed into the role, the writers understood his strengths and weaknesses and audiences knew what to expect. Nothing could possibly go wrong. Right?

Well. Let's be positive: Tomorrow Never Dies undeniably delivers some standout moments. The pre-titles "terrorists' supermarket" sequence is thrilling (although nobody seemed to take advantage of the BOGOF offer on Kalashnikovs and Bond totally failed to redeem his clubcard points on the way out), the set-pieces are fantastic, Brosnan is excellent and there are some mighty fine one-liners, not least of which is Moneypenny's award-winning "You always were a cunning linguist, James".

There are also a couple of relatively interesting Bond girls who are, for once, more than just somewhere for 007 to park his cock. Bond's former squeeze Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher) lends his character rare depth, suggesting an interesting history in a few tender and touching scenes. Most of her lines are razor-sharp critiques of Bond's inability to settle down, and are the kind of things GoldenEye's script should have been saying instead of all that floppy-fringed pouting into the sunset. Meanwhile, Michelle Yeoh's Wai Lin is a formidable ally, amusingly aloof and disinterested in our hero until the inevitable final-scene cock-parking. What's more, both actresses are only about ten years younger than Brosnan, which comes as some relief from the usual borderline kiddy-fiddling that goes on in these films.

Sadly, that's about it for the good stuff. Like You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me, Tomorrow Never Dies races along with typical Bondian gusto, skipping over plot holes and underwritten characters so deftly that it's only when you check your pockets at the end that you realise your wallet's been nicked by an inane story, an embarrassingly weak villain and a director with a CV that includes Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

Despite director Roger Spottiswoode's previous indiscretions, it's hard to blame him for what makes Tomorrow Never Dies such a below average Bond film. Rushed into production by a recently-sold studio desperate to impress Wall Street with boffo Bond box office, the film started shooting before either the bad guy or one of the Bond girls had been cast and with a script that was changing daily.

The biggest casualty of this chaotic production was that everyone forgot to write a decent villain. Media mogul Elliot Carver looks like an ineffectual economics teacher who's accidentally come to work in his jim-jams and spends the entire film titting about his various HQs bashing away at a magic keyboard that can somehow make sense of the nonsense he's randomly hammering into it. He's so useless at villainy that he requires at least three henchmen (also rubbish) to do his various dirty work, and he's so cripplingly dull that it's actually hard to tell who has the most charisma between the character and his "action" figure.

Fully poseable!*
*Only one pose included: "Lacklustre"

Roger Ebert's mantra "Each film is only as good as its villain," applied so dramatically in Licence To Kill, is tragically forgotten here; even the writers acknowledge how ponderously yawnsome Carver is, having 007 continually treat him like the most boring guest at the party. Audience identification with Bond hits a new high when he almost fails to stay awake through one of Carver's rambling monologues, shooting a nearby flunky just to keep everyone (in the scene and the audience) from nodding off.

What's more, Carver's grand plan to instigate World War III by pitting two super-powers against each other has already failed in at least two previous Bond films, and even in these Leveson Inquiry times the idea that a media magnate would commit mass murder in order to sell a few more papers is just stoopid. For him to then alert the authorities by publishing news of said murders before anyone else knows about it is so incompetent you can almost hear the embarrassed facepalms of seventeen previous Bond villains.

Of course the one mistake everyone makes in relation to Carver is his supposed similarity to a real-life insane media baron, who for the purposes of avoiding a lawsuit I shall call "Rooput Merdock". I've carefully investigated these apparent parallels, and while there is definitely some correlation between Carver and "Merdock", differences begin to emerge upon closer inspection:

ELLIOT CARVER	"ROOPUT MERDOCK"
Is a billionaire international media mogul intent on dominating the world's press both in print and on television	Is a billionaire international media mogul intent on dominating the world's press both in print and on television
Has close ties to British PM, according to head of MI6	Has close ties to British PM, according to everyone
Has an enemy called James	Has a son called James
Was attacked by a scary Chinese lady	Is married to a scary Chinese lady
Owns 24-hour news channel which tragically went off air on its first night	Owns 24-hour news channel which is tragically still on air
Wears pyjamas to work	Wears custard pies to Parliamentary committee hearings
Recalls quotes by William Randolph Hearst	Can't recall anything that happened while in charge of best-selling Sunday newspaper
Disposes of underlings when they've outlived their usefulness	Turns underlings into cyborgs and programmes them to take the fall when they've outlived their usefulness
Engineers war between UK and China in order to sell more newspapers	Bites the heads off live kittens and drinks their blood in order to remain alive
Is a fictional character	Is Satan

I'm glad I've been able to clear that up harmlessly and without any need for litigation. Moving swiftly on...

The title sequence

I know I mentioned Daniel Kleinman's title sequence last month, but get used to it because he made five fantastic ones and they're all getting their moment in the BlogalongaBond sun. This one is like swimming down a fibre optic cable with a bunch of sexy ladies and some guns and possibly some diamonds too although I'm not sure why. I'm probably also one of only four people on Earth who quite like Sheryl Crow's song; it's no 'Surrender' by kd lang, but on the plus side it's no 'All I Wanna Do' either, and for that we must be grateful.

David Arnold's music

'Hamburg Break Out'

Former interviewee and great friend of The Incredible Suit (great friends in the sense that we had an email conversation once, we don't hang out or chat or really know each other at all in fact) David Arnold's first Bond score is an absolute stonker, livening up the occasionally ropey action no end and enhancing the film exactly as a good score should. It's also ridiculously of its time, all techno and drum loops and phat beats or whatever that stuff's called. Not only that but the aforementioned end credits song 'Surrender', which he co-wrote with David McAlmont and Don Black, is the greatest Bond theme that never was.

The handcuffs

Tomorrow Never Dies was stunt legend Vic Armstrong's first Bond film as second unit director, and the stuff he delivers here is phenomenal. The film's set pieces have to be amazing to wipe out the tedium of the plot, and this one in particular does so with cock-waggling bravado. As close as Bond gets to a Jackie Chan film, the inventiveness of having the leads handcuffed sets up some insane action, and Brosnan does well to keep up with Michelle Yeoh's kung fu skillz.

And finally: Tomorrow Never Dies stars a young Julian Rhind-Tutt as a yeoman on the doomed HMS Devonshire. His character's name?

Unless of course wardrobe just forgot to take the actor's scribbled name tag off his costume.

BlogalongaBond will return with The World Is Not Enough

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here


Thanks to The Shiznit, from whom I stole the subtitle for this post. It's OK, everyone steals their stuff. In fact they actively encourage it.

BlogalongaBond / GoldenEye:When Sexist, Misogynist Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth

Four years between Quantum Of Solace and Skyfall might seem like an inordinately long time to wait for fresh Bondery, but for some of us it's the blink of an eye compared to the aeon for which Eon Productions left Bond fans hanging between 1989 and 1995. During those long and desolate years, the entire world experienced cataclysmic change: communism in eastern Europe came crashing down; Timothy Dalton got bored and wandered off, and I discovered all sorts of things about girls.

Two of those things had a direct impact on the direction of the James Bond films, while the third just made me realise what a load of rubbish all that "Oh, James"ing was. Nobody's ever said that to me in the throes of passion, no matter how many times I've asked. Nevertheless, I maintained my 007 devotion throughout and spilled all sorts of excited juices in the run-up to the release of GoldenEye. I didn't really know much about this Brosnan guy but he certainly looked like he knew how to... uh... stand on some stairs.

The capacity for moody but inappropriately-attired banister-reclining aside, it turned out that Pierce Brendan Brosnan made a pretty good James Bond, even though it felt like he'd been genetically engineered to please everyone. Consisting of precisely 44% rugged Connery, 39% cheesy Moore, 6% funny-accented Lazenby and 11% ruthless Dalton, James the fifth effortlessly ascended the throne of Bond from the moment he hurled himself off a bloody great dam, challenging The Spy Who Loved Me for the title of most jaw-clattering pre-title sequence.

And if Brosnan appeared to have been grown in a petri dish to be everyone's ideal Bond, then the script was constructed with equally precise cold, mathematical precision. As undeniably enjoyable and exciting as GoldenEye may be, somewhere lurking beneath the surface is the clinical stench of Bond-by-numbers that's been mercifully absent since Roger Moore hung up his corset. That Brosnan and director Martin Campbell managed to make such an entertaining film is to their credit, but there are a few too many throwbacks to the Moore years for my liking. Clumsy cyclists, laboured sight gags in Q's lab and shit one-liners accompanied by over-animated eyebrows all feel like a massive step back after the majestic Age Of The Dalton.

At the same time as it rifles through a back catalogue of James Bond's Greatest Hits, GoldenEye's script also appears to be some kind of sixth-form dissertation on the cultural history of 007. Almost every character gets to have a pop at Bond's failings, as if the writers had ploughed through every BlogalongaBond post before starting work on the film. And while it's superficially clever scripting in terms of addressing the series' place in '90s action cinema, it feels forced and a little tiresome seventeen years down the line.

Lines like Alec Trevelyan's smart-arsed observations on the psychological reasons for Bond's liver-crippling martini habit and Natalya's remarkably presumptious judgement on what keeps him alone (she's known him for about 48 hours) might appear to offer the character some depth, but in truth they only pay lip service to the complexity that Licence To Kill so effortlessly conveyed. Once all the pouting and new-age self-assessment are out of the way it's not long before Brosnan's eyebrows are re-activated and he's carefully timing dreadful kiss-off lines like "She always did enjoy a good squeeze".

The least clanging attempt at all this self-referential navel-gazing is the one in which Brosnan is almost acted out of his Brioni suit by the untouchable Dame Judi Dench as M. Significantly wearing a Nehru-esque outfit with a mandarin collar that almost dares us not to think of Dr. No or Blofeld, M ostensibly takes Bond down a peg or two but actually gives a much more interesting insight into her own character, ensuring that we - and he - know that she's quite prepared to send him to his death if the mission calls for it. Sadly DJD's hard work is almost entirely undone by the script's insistence that she softens up and asks 007 to "come back alive" like a damp-gusseted schoolgirl, and all those withering put-downs are suddenly and tragically cancelled out.

Brosnasaurus Rex: sexy, misogynist dinosaur

So GoldenEye remains a curiosity. Turning Bond back into a superhuman in an OTT adventure ensured the brand regained its unique place in a world full of fallible, blubbing action heroes like Martin Riggs and John McClane, and consequently provided the series' most successful reboot up to this point. Had it failed to do so, who knows if we'd still be eagerly awaiting Episode XXIII in 2012? Deep down though, the script feels like it's aimed at the lowest common denominator, and while that worked to some extent it also quietly swept everything from six years before under the carpet, and to me that seems a shame.

The pre-title sequence

After six years with his feet up watching Trisha, James Bond had to come back with something pretty goddamn amazing, and he had to do it fast. Hence, exactly sixty seconds into the film, he leaps off Switzerland's 720-foot high (though extended higher with VFX) Verzasca Dam with little more than some knicker elastic tied to his ankles. It's an applause-worthy return for 007, though it's a shame Brosnan's first full-face shot is hanging upside down in a men's shitter. Still, the rest of the sequence is crowd-pleasingly brilliant, mixing subtle comedy (the squeaky trolley) with balls-out, jaw-dropping stunts. Although why Bond didn't shout "Must dash, I've got a plane to catch!" as he drove off the cliff is a mystery.
BONUS BONDFACT: The force on stuntman Wayne Michaels when he performed the jump was so great that his trousers disintegrated, according to this still from the GoldenEye Video Journal:

The titles

Maurice Binder came up with a great idea for the Bond film title sequences in 1965, then repeated it with minor variations for 24 years, creating an amorphous blob of writhing naked totty and wibbly effects that was well past its best by 1989. Fortunately Daniel Kleinman, having directed the Licence To Kill music video, was given the chance to reinvent the formula with GoldenEye, and he works wonders with his not-particularly-subtle (but plot-relevant) fall-of-communism iconography. Oh, and writhing naked totty and wibbly effects. It's actually the least brilliant of Kleinman's Bond title sequences but it's such a stylistic leap it would be an insult not to include it in GoldenEye's Amazing Things list. Want more D-Kleinz?

The score

'The GoldenEye Overture'

OK, I'm just going to put this out there: the score for GoldenEye is amazing. No, Éric Serra's largely electronic contribution isn't "traditional" Bond music, and yes, when it's rubbs it's rubbs, but it's massively atmospheric and incredibly bold, and when he does swap the synths for the orchestra he's perfectly capable of producing swooning, romantic themes. It's just that there aren't any, you know, tunes as such. If you really can't bear the sound of a set of saucepans bouncing around inside a zero-gravity squash court, John Altman's bits during the St Petersburg tank sequence (requested by shit-scared producers after hearing Serra's submission) are just as great in an old-fashioned way. Having said all of that, Serra's end credits song, 'The Experience Of Love', is so excruciatingly awful that my ears try to detach themselves from my head whenever they hear it.

Ксения Сергеевна Онатопп

Part Thunderball's Fiona Volpe, part Never Say Never Again's Fatima Blush, no parts A View To A Kill's May Day (thank Christ), GoldenEye's delightfully mentile erotophonophiliac Xenia Sergeyevna Onatopp is a Bond Girl for the ages. Possibly inspired by The Living Daylights' brief mention of Ula Yokhfov, a KGB assassin who strangled victims with her thighs, Xenia achieves sexual arousal from the faces P-Broz pulls when clamped between her vice-like femora. But then, don't we all?

The best Bond fight scene for 33 years

Somewhere in the middle of GoldenEye's final showdown between Bond and Trevelyan sit 45 seconds of some of the most ferocious fisticuffs we've seen 007 involved in since the rumble on the Orient Express in From Russia With Love. In fact, the fight - set inside a claustrophobic room somewhere in the inner workings of Trevelyan's massive satellite dish thingy - is a direct homage to the earlier film, even down to Brosnan mimicking Connery shielding his torso and face with his arms and getting roundly walloped in the guts for his trouble. 

And finally: I'm not sure if it's a cause for celebration or commiseration, but the references to Little James - which some may say were beneath Timothy Dalton - are back...

Bond and Xenia are playing cards in a Monte Carlo casino.

BOND

It appears we share the same passions... three, anyway.

XENIA

I count two: motoring and baccarat.

Bond loses the hand.

XENIA

I hope the third is where your real talent lies.

BOND

One rises to meet a challenge.

BlogalongaBond will return with Tomorrow Never Dies

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here