Guy Hamilton1922-2016

"Your time in the cutting room is much too short,
but basically that’s as good as it gets"

- Guy Hamilton, director of Goldfinger, Diamonds are Forever,

Live And Let Die and The Man With The Golden Gun

Crispin Glover's UK tour is as mad as eggs and you should definitely see it

Last Friday found me at London's deeply sensual Hackney Picturehouse for the opening night of the UK tour of Crispin Glover: actor, director, writer and artist who - whether he likes it or not - will forever be connected to the role of George McFly in Back To The Future. While that role is undeniably magnificently written and portrayed, Glover has a remarkable body of other work behind him, much of which is completely and utterly batshit mental. And I'm not just talking about Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

A typical evening on his current tour (which visits several Picturehouses in the UK over the next three weeks) consists of Crispin Hellion Glover's Big Slide Show, in which he reads from obscure 19th century books which he's altered for his own ends; a screening of one of two films he's directed (which film you get depends on which venue you book) and a post-screening Q&A. It's a fascinatingly odd experience which will delight as many as it will frustrate; personally I loved it, but the gentleman next to me in the Back To The Future t-shirt was left visibly and audibly frustrated by Glover's insistence on yelling non-sequiturs in German rather than discussing fondly-remembered weekends spent skateboarding with Michael J Fox.

The slide show is the maddest part of the event: less a deconstruction of the concept of storytelling than a total obliteration and subsequent reconstruction of it by a demented force. Glover reads lengthy extracts - often from memory - of stories, manuals and textbooks from which he's removed several passages and, occasionally, added his own contributions. The pages appear behind him on screen, and are annotated and illustrated by what appears to be a deranged spider with too many dark thoughts and not enough friends. Not a second of it makes an ounce of sense, so you have to be prepared to let it happen to you, although towards the end I found myself so immersed in Glover's world that I began to appreciate and enjoy some of the readings. I remember thoroughly liking one called An Egg Farm, but can't for the life of me remember anything about it now except that it was really quite crackers.

Friday's screening was of Glover's second film in his proposed It trilogy, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE., while some dates on the tour will screen the first film, What Is It?. Part three, IT IS MINE, is some years from completion, although evidently it will continue to employ an avant-garde approach to capitalisation. It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is a remarkable, surreal and challenging film written by its lead, Steven C Stewart, who was crippled by cerebral palsy (he died a month after filming wrapped). Stewart plays a man who deals with his handicap and his feelings for long-haired, beautiful women in unusual and occasionally troubling ways, and while it's certainly an offbeat film it's much less bonkers than Glover's slide show. A lazy person would probably describe it as almost Lynchian in its wilful weirdness, so I'll simply say that to me it seemed almost Lynchian in its wilful weirdness.

Low on production values but high on originality, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. feels like a far braver and much more starkly honest version of last year's Helen Hunt / John Hawkes-starring The Sessions. Unrestricted by such annoyances as certification and studio approval, Glover's film dispenses entirely with cheese and goes straight for the jugular with its rage-fuelled protagonist and arguably misogynistic approach. It's probably not one to watch with your mum, but it does give you some insight into what it must be to be so agonisingly frustrated by a disease which renders your body useless but your mind lively and bursting with everyday impulses upon which it is near-impossible to act.

I had to leave the post-screening Q&A early in order to take advantage of outer London's marvellous weekend public transport timings (want to stay out past 11pm on a Friday? Then enjoy getting home via at least four varied and torturous methods, possibly by Sunday if you're lucky), but fortunately Mr Glover kindly agreed to my own personal Q&A via email. So here's a closer look at the musings of a deranged madman, and as a bonus I've included Crispin Glover's responses.

Hello Crispin. IS EVERYTHING FINE? Hello Neil! One usually only says "It is fine!" when something is actually wrong. How would you prepare someone who's coming to one of your current shows because they loved you in Back To The Future but know nothing else about you? I'm thinking in particular of someone like this chap: Frankly that is quite rare. I’ve not had many people come to the show that have exclusively seen me in Back To The Future. At least not people that come up to me. I would prepare them in the same way I would prepare anyone. I prefer films that cause the audience to ask questions. Your Big Slide Show includes some amazing slides: did you make all those annotations and illustrations yourself? How long did the process take? I started making my books in 1983 for my own enjoyment without the concept of publishing them. I had always written and drawn and the books came as an accidental outgrowth of that. I made most of the books in the '80s and very early '90s. Some of the books utilize text from the binding it was taken from and some of them are basically completely original text. Sometimes I would find images that I was inspired to create stories for or sometimes it was the binding or sometimes it was portions of the texts that were interesting. Altogether, I made about twenty of them. The books and films are all narrative. Sometimes people see thematic correlations between the content of my books and the content of the films. How did you select which books to use as the basis for the Big Slide Show? Many of the books that are in the show are specifically books that will perform well dramatically or that have a sense of humor. Some of the books that I have not used in the slide shows are books that work more as art objects as opposed to narratives. Your presentation technique in the Big Slide Show feels like you, as an actor, playing a part. Is that fair? How much of the real Crispin Glover are we watching? I would assess the slide show performance as a performance and interpretation of books I made not originally meant for performance. That being said I enjoy performing them. You described It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE as "the best film I'll have anything to do with in my whole career". What is it about the film that you are most proud of? The cinematic and subconscious emotional catharsis that happens with the protagonist / writer / Steven C Stewart in the film is central to what I am proud of with this film. You played Andy Warhol in The Doors: as an avant-garde artist do you feel any affinity with him? I met and spoke with Andy Warhol at the wedding of Madonna and Sean Penn. It was right after Back To The Future had come out which he had apparently seen. I did not speak with him for so long but definitely enough to get an idea about him. He was quite nice to me. After I spoke with him I stood back and looked at him and watched how he held himself and thought he would be an interesting person to play. I had met Oliver Stone previously for Platoon which I was not in, but we had a good meeting and I auditioned for the role and got it. I would not compare myself to Warhol for a lot of reasons, but I would take any comparison as a compliment. First off, the enormity of influence of Warhol’s art is something that is extremely important to consider. Someone asked me once if I related to Warhol's eccentricities. I feel like Warhol’s "eccentricities" were very different from my own, and frankly I believe that a lot of my own perceived eccentricities are greatly exacerbated by inaccurate media myopia. I do not know what Warhol would say about his perceived eccentricities, although I would say he was much more in control of his media perception during his entire career than I have been of mine for much of mine. You've also dabbled in music, and I love your song 'Clowny Clown Clown'. How do you really feel about clowns? The lyrics leave one uncertain. Even as a child I never found clowns particularly amusing. I am a little confused as to why even children find clowns amusing. 'Clowny Clown Clown' by Crispin Glover. Warning: contains clowns I recently watched Rubin & Ed, the film in which you play Rubin Farr, who also infamously appeared on David Letterman and in your video for 'Clowny Clown Clown'. Is Rubin an alter ego of sorts? I have neither confirmed nor denied in media whether or not that was me on the 1986 Late Night with David Letterman appearance. If asked I go in to a lot of detail about it at my shows. You own a 17th century castle in the Czech Republic where you are planning to shoot your future films. Do you know any Czech swear words? No. Like me, you are an only child. Did you ever invent imaginary friends as substitute siblings? I mean, not that I did or anything. No. I did not invent imaginary friends. Unlike me, your father Bruce played a Bond villain's henchman in Diamonds Are Forever. Are you a Bond fan? Who's your favourite James Bond and what's your favourite Bond film? I have not seen all the Bond films or all the actors that have played Bond. I think the first Bond film I saw was Diamonds Are Forever so I do like that one. I also like Dr. No. I love Notorious by Hitchcock with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. That is the movie that supposedly influenced Ian Fleming to write his first Bond novel Casino Royale. I did see the recent Casino Royale and thought Daniel Craig did an excellent job and liked to see the obvious structural influences on that story from Hitchcock’s and Ben Hecht's great screenplay for Notorious. Would playing a Bond villain be something that might interest you? Certainly. Who is your favourite Charlie's Angel? I do not have a favorite Angel. All three of the actresses were very nice people to work with. Of note structurally, the character I played in Charlie’s Angels was somewhat similar to the character my father played in Diamonds Are Forever. They were both assassins that kept coming back to at least seem to attempt to assassinate the protagonists. You starred in Hot Tub Time Machine, a film which examined some of the most basic elements of the human condition, such as what it is to be a man, to be an adult, to lose sight of your hopes and dreams, and to find true happiness and a peaceful soul. If you had a hot tub time machine, would you use it to travel in time or just to feel the bubbles? Time travel would be of course amazing. Crispin Glover's one-armed bell boy was tragically absent from the Hot Tub Time Machine marketing campaign. Finally, as a man who has long contemplated growing a beard, I am impressed by your very handsome facial hair. How do you decide when to grow a beard and when to shave it off, and how do you maintain it? I have only in the last several years grown out facial hair because it has been appropriate for a number of period films in which I have played characters that it would be appropriate for. I do not grow facial hair or wear my hair for my own personal preference. My preference is probably shorter hair and clean shaven. Crispin Glover, thank you very much for your time. Thank you Neil!

Details of the rest of Crispin Hellion Glover's UK tour can be found at his website, CrispinGlover.com.

BlogalongaBond / Diamonds Are Forever: Blofeld Blows It Again

The commercial disaster of On Her Majesty's Secret Service left the James Bond phenomenon in crisis. The only way forward was to look backward, and so Sean Connery was lured back with a massive cheque, Goldfinger's director Guy Hamilton was hired to make Bond fun again, and Tom Mankiewicz was told to inject more humour into his script, which was based on a dream Cubby Broccoli had. Apparently this is a perfectly valid way to write a Bond film.

Sadly Hamilton and Mankiewicz confused 'fun' with 'funny' and 'humour' with 'comedy', and the result is a decent story smothered by stoopid gags and ludicrous plot devices designed purely to raise a LOL or two.

Now I don't mind a good double entendre or a subtle, relevant visual gag in a Bond film, but in Diamonds Are Forever there's a fruit-machine-playing elephant, a chase across a fake lunar landscape inexplicably featuring slow-motion-running astronauts, and a pair of gay hitmen with comedy haircuts. And Mr Wint and Mr Kidd aren't the only ones raising the camp factor: Connery himself is only five minutes of photoshopping away from turning the pre-title sequence into a Carry On film.

The film's biggest crime, however, is its insulting decision to ignore everything OHMSS worked towards. The murder of Bond's wife is never even mentioned, and Bond himself doesn't appear to have been remotely affected by the brutal slaying of the only woman he truly loved, apart from the fact that he looks like he's tried to find happiness at the bottom of a freezer full of Pukka Pies.

Treated with equal disdain is the once enigmatic, now laughable figure of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. At one point Blofeld, for no adequately explained reason other than to get some cheap laffs, wears a dress, full make up and the same wig in which Dick Emery was prancing about on his none-more-'70s TV show. It's a glaring visual metaphor for the series as a whole: where once Blofeld had been classy, threatening and mysterious, he was now reduced to a punchline; an old queen just dying to go "I'm just stroking my pussy, ooh pardon!"

The Bond films' depictions of Blofeld over the years have never fully satisfied, neither in comparison to the books nor as original creations for the movies. Blofeld should have been Bond's Moriarty, his Joker, his Darth Vader. Instead he's Bond's Dr. Evil. Mike Myers probably gave himself a huge pat on the back for coming up with Austin Powers' nemesis, but in truth all the work was done for him by the Bond screenwriters.

Diamonds Are Forever marks Blofeld's fifth and, thankfully, final (kind of) appearance in the Bond films, ignoring a typically ludicrous (for the Moore era) cameo in For Your Eyes Only. He only appeared in three of Fleming's books, dramatically altering his appearance in each one, which I suppose gave the filmmakers an excuse to do the same - although the fact that it's never referred to on screen suggests it's more of a coincidence than a deliberate choice. In 'Ian Fleming's James Bond', John Griswold's exhaustive examination of the novels, illustrator George Almond shows how Fleming described Blofeld in each book:

In the films, however, the depictions were even more inconsistent, except this time without explanation.

In From Russia With Love, we never see the head of the head of SPECTRE, although his subordinates do. It's a nice touch and makes for an interesting and typically '60s master villain, especially at a time when we were constantly being told that the nearest dirty commie could be anyone. Christ knows why he's stroking a fluffy white cat though, the ponce.

By Thunderball, he doesn't even want his minions to see his features, so he hides behind shutters. This must make it tricky for him to see whose contract he's terminating in an improbably over-the-top fashion, but in a Cold War where nobody was trustworthy I suppose it makes sense to prevent yourself being identified by possible double agents. Or maybe he's hideously disfigured?

In You Only Live Twice, it turns out he's hideously disfigured. Not only that but he's short and bald and now has a silly squeaky voice. This reveal was kinda fun when I was eight, but the boring grown-up Bond fan I've become now wishes he'd stayed hidden. The threat and tension are immediately dissipated when it appears Bond could defeat Blofeld with a good tickle.

OHMSS's Blofeld had surgery to remove his earlobes, which makes sense in the context of the plot, but simultaneously took the opportunity to fix the scar, grow a few inches, add a mole to his left cheek, turn on the charm and speak with an American accent, which doesn't. In actual fact Telly Savalas makes quite a good version of the literary Blofeld, but his resemblance to his From Russia With Love self is negligible.

By Diamonds Are Forever, our confused antagonist has grown hair, changed his accent again and developed a penchant for cross-dressing. He wants to make copies of himself, which seems pointless when he can apparently change his entire appearance and demeanour at will, and claims that "science was never my strong suit", despite having spent the previous film developing viruses for use in chemical warfare.



Mercifully, after Diamonds Are Forever, EON Productions more or less left Blofeld alone. This was partly because the rights to the character were owned by Kevin McClory, who co-wrote the screenplay on which Fleming based 'Thunderball', and who was prepared to sue the asses off Broccoli and Saltzman if they used SPECTRE or Blofeld again.

With Connery saying "never again" again and SPECTRE and Blofeld off-limits, it was time for the third consecutive overhaul of the franchise. The tongue-in-cheek, raised-eyebrow strategy had paid off but someone with more cheek and more agile eyebrows was required to drag Bond, smirking and preening, into the 1970s and beyond. Only time would tell how much Moore the audience could take.

Bambi and Thumper

While the fact that a reclusive billionaire's entire security force consists of two female gymnasts is emblematic of Diamonds Are Forever's wilful stupidity, the scene in which Bond is beaten up by acrobatic totty is probably the most fun to be had in the whole film. It's the first time 007 gets into a decent scrap with the fairer sex (his tussle with Rosa Klebb just consisted of waving a chair at her, while Pussy Galore's tumble in the barn was basically foreplay) and it's the only time he gets a good hard kick in the knackers, which sadly - for those of us by now fed up of Connery - happens offscreen.

The rare moment of actual comedy

Not long after dispatching Bambi & Thumper, Bond and Willard Whyte hide behind a rock while Whyte's former lieutenant Bert Saxby takes pot shots at them. When Saxby is eventually shot and Whyte realises who's been trying to kill him, he exclaims "Tell him he's fired!" Connery's wordless reaction is funnier than all the homosexual villains, cross-dressing megalomaniacs and moon buggy escapes put together. Imagine that.

The score

John Barry - "The Whyte House"

As usual, the best thing about the worst Bond films is the score. John Barry pulls out so many great themes this time that you forgive him for helping to make some of the characters as comical as they are. He also pours so much sleazy loungecore into his Las Vegas themes that I daren't ever go there in case this music isn't playing on an eternal loop at ridiculous volume.


And finally: As Plenty O'Toole, Lana Wood's sole purpose in Diamonds Are Forever is to set up knob gags. The first, a cheap shot about her name, is just baffling, but the second is much better:

Having just disrobed Plenty in his hotel room, Bond discovers three men pointing guns at him.

BOND
Good evening... I'm afraid you've
caught me with more than my hands up.

BlogalongaBond will return with Black Dynamite Live And Let Die

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

Further BlogalongaBondareading here

Saturday Playlist #5: James Bond In The '70s

If Bond music in the '60s was all about the sleaze, in the '70s it was all about the cheese. From John Barry's Vegas of Diamonds Are Forever, through George Martin's funkalicious blaxploitation-esque wah-wah of Live And Let Die, to Marvin Hamlisch's whatever-the-hell-you-describe-it-as version of the Bond theme for The Spy Who Loved Me, well-past-its-sell-by cheddar runs through these scores like massively-collared safari suits run through Roger Moore's wardrobe.

So get out the cream crackers, raise a solitary eyebrow to the heavens and suck your cheeks in as you kiss a series of ladies in a horrifically unwatchable fashion, because it's time to...

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

SATURDAY PLAYLIST #5:

JAMES BOND IN THE '70s

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Don Black: ICON, Apparently

Great news for dreadful amateur songwriters out there last week: lyricist Don Black will have the title of "Icon" bestowed on him by the BMI at their annual awards next month!

Don Black is, as you're all aware, the man behind the words to some of the greatest Bond themes of our time. Let's have a look at some of his work in detail:

Tom Jones - Thunderball

A cautionary tale: "His needs are more so he gives less"? I tried that in Tesco once. I needed more fish fingers so I gave the lady on the checkout less money. When she asked me what I thought I was playing at I explained that it's how James Bond goes about achieving success and that they call him the winner who takes all. She quite rightly pointed out that nobody's ever called James Bond that and if he came in here and tried that shit she'd strike him in his Thunderballs.

Lulu - The Man With The Golden Gun

Be honest Don, when you wrote that you weren't concentrating were you? I bet you were watching Yugoslavia thumping Zaire 9-0 in the 1974 World Cup. Don't worry, I think you got away with it.

Shirley Bassey - Diamonds Are Forever

Don claims that Shirley Bassey added all those extra letters in but I think he fell asleep on his keyboard and was too embarrassed to admit his mistake.

Having said all that, Don - along with The Incredible Suit hero David Arnold - was responsible for the Bond theme that never was that absolutely should have been: "Surrender" by upper-case-phobic k.d.lang, which had to be content with slouching grumpily over the end credits of Tomorrow Never Dies when it was relegated in favour of Sheryl Crow's abysmadirge ("Darling I'm killed / I'm in a puddle on the floor").

k.d. lang - Surrender


All of which gives me a good excuse to shove up this clip from one of the greatest Bond documentaries ever made, available to watch in irritating chunks on YouTube at your leisure.



So congratumalations Donald! I always said you were the best at what it is that you do.

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Tom Mankiewicz 1942 - 2010

Tom Mankiewicz wrote or co-wrote some of the most average James Bond films. That might seem like a perfectly good reason to politely ignore his passing, but it meant that his Bonds (Diamonds Are Forever, Live And Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me) reached massive - and massively varied - audiences, ensuring the survival of the brand for years to come. His place in the history of 007 should be neither underestimated nor overlooked.

Mankiewicz was also responsible for reshaping a humungous and flabby Superman script into two classic films, thereby creating the template for superhero movies that can be found at the core of every blockbuster with the suffix -Man since. Except maybe Rain Man.

Combine all that with uncredited work on Gremlins, The Goonies and Batman and it's easy to see how Tom Mankiewicz has almost certainly touched the lives of every single person reading this blog.

And for that, The Incredible Suit salutes him.

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Sherlock Holmes

In Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond smuggles diamonds into the US inside the body of a deceased smuggler by shoving them up the corpse's arse. When Felix Leiter asks Bond where the gems are, he replies: “Alimentary, my dear Dr. Leiter”, thereby simultaneously paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes and hammering another nail into the coffin of early Bondian wit.


The standard of this gag is interesting, because by an extraordinary coincidence it is exactly the same standard as Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film, and also relates directly to the location from whence Mr Ritchie produced his film, and to where The Incredible Suit recommends he forcibly return it at the soonest convenient occasion.

Now I haven’t read every Sherlock Holmes story, but I have read some, and I don’t recall quite as many explosions, tedious chases, pointless set-pieces and weak, badly-told stories as there are in this film. I’m also reasonably sure that Holmes wasn’t American, although I suppose the States could just be getting us back for casting a Welshman as Batman.

Seriously though, if you’re going to make a film called Sherlock Holmes that only vaguely resembles the source material in that the characters have the same names and it’s set in Victorian London, why not just rename the people and call it something else? Especially if you’ve taken one character - Dr Watson - and altered his status from perpetually flummoxed companion to action-hero sidekick who says and does nothing of any use or interest, and even manages to do that badly thanks to the ‘skills’ of Jude Law.

And another thing, right, let’s get some London geography sorted out here: even the most athletic type would have a job legging it through a sewer from the Houses of Parliament to Tower Bridge (a distance of about three miles) in less than 30 seconds. If an American had directed this film it would be almost forgivable, but when it’s a self-proclaimed London-phile it’s surely a capital offence punishable by ten years of uninterrupted Madonna records at high volume?

Anyway, Hans Zimmer's music is very good, although I could have done without all those incongruous Irish songs thank you very much. Oh and if you remember what I said in this post, I can tell you that it doesn’t happen. Shame really.



PS Dear Cineworld Enfield, if you could see your way clear to doing a proper job of masking your 2.35:1 screen when projecting a 1.85:1 image in future so the edges don’t just fizzle out into grey that would be lovely. It is your job after all.

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Meh

Following last week’s entirely unshocking news that readers of The Incredible Suit voted Pulp Fiction the greatest Quentin Tarantino film, like, ever, I fully expected you to vote for The Dark Knight as the number one Christopher Nolan movie, if only because I thought you were all as predictable as the quality of Shia LaBeouf’s future career.

However, you proved me to be a cynical, imbecilic bumwit by voting for Memento instead, which was a very splendid thing of you to do, even though any sane cynical, imbecilic bumwit knows the correct answer is Batman Begins. So I phoned Chris, great mates that we are, to give him the good news, and guess what he said? He said, right, get this, “Suit Incredible The of readers, much very thanks!” Geddit? DO YOU GET IT?!!

All right, look, it’s Friday, I’m tired. I couldn’t even think of a good idea for this week’s poll, so to celebrate the awesome averageness of The Hurt Locker (see this post), I’ve randomly chosen five perfect examples of mediocrity that you’ve hopefully seen, and you can vote for the most average of all of them. Not the best, not the worst, just the one that makes you go “meh” with all the enthusiasm of Sean Connery by the time he made Diamonds Are Forever.

Now a while ago I posted a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life, which I expect enriched your lives to the point where you thought, “it surely can’t get any better than this. Thanks to The Incredible Suit my life is as perfect as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo”. Well, if that’s the case my work here is done, but because you can never have too much slapstickery, here’s the end of Chaplin’s 1916 short The Pawnshop, in which Charlie gets his head stuck in a double bass. I got my head stuck in a kettle once. It was quite painful but I was in my element.

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Judi Dench Drops An F-Bomb

I recently undertook a massive project to discover who my favourite James Bond is. Or rather, to confirm to myself what I keep telling people about who my favourite James Bond is, so that I could back up my argument with empirical evidence.

What this involved – and this is the kind of selfless act I carry out for the viewers of The Incredible Suit – was watching every Bond film and rating them out of 10, then adding all the scores together for each actor, then dividing the totals by the number of Bond films each actor made in order to give a mean average score. Yes, I really did all those things. It just took me two and a half years.

For the sake of keeping the results pure and untainted, I didn’t include Never Say Never Again because a) it’s not an official Bond film, and b) it would put Sean Connery into minus figures.

So here are the results, and you can treat these as official figures from the National Office of Officially Accurate Statistical Figures And Stuff:

1. Timothy Dalton 9
2. Daniel Craig 8.5
3. Pierce Brosnan 7.5
4. Sean Connery 7.2
5. George Lazenby 7
6. Roger Moore 6.7

Many people get their nethers in a tangle when I tell them Timothy Dalton is the Best Bond, Like, Ever, because they think Sean Connery should be the best because he was the first. Tommywaddle. He was great in the first three, maybe four, but after that, come on. Fat, slow and bored of himself. Go and watch Diamonds Are Forever, you’ll see what I’m on about.

Having said that, I thought I preferred Connery to Brosnan, but looking at the official figures, apparently not. You can’t argue with the stats.

Here are some of the reasons why I love Timothy Dalton as Bond:

He can act (remember, he was preceded by 12 years of Roger Moore’s eyebrow).
He looks like Bond should look.
His Bond hates his job but takes it seriously.
His Bond smokes. Cigarettes, not ludicrously massive cigars.
His Bond has no time for incompetent assistants.
His Bond looks really, really pissed off when his friends get hurt.
His Bond bleeds and his suit gets ruined when he’s been in a fight.
His Bond swears. If you can count “horse’s arse”, “piss off” and “bastard” as swear words these days.

Speaking of effing and jeffing, have you noticed what a potty-mouth M has become lately? It’s all “bugger” this and “bastard” that, I don’t know what the world’s coming to. I bet Judi Dench drops an f-bomb in the next film.


Thanks to Cameron Arrigoni for the video!