Bonding with James

I have had an affinity with the James Bond genre, as I like to refer to it, since an early age.  Living in India in the very late seventies, I spent a fair bit of time bonding with James, as my mother used to take my sister and I to regular Bond screenings at the American Embassy in New Delhi.

I was always transfixed when the fictional British Secret Intelligence Service agent lit up the big screen. This probably had less to do with the plot, and more to do with the fact that television was a bit of a foreign concept in India back then, apart from the odd black and white episode of I Love Lucy, if you could manage to find the right channel on your telly.


I look tired cos I have been fighting terrorists

 Back in the day, I admired Bond’s strength, wisdom, and heroism, and delighted in watching him kick the crap out of the bad guys, time and again. I suppose I was a bit of a tomboy.

And even back then, I saw the Bond girls as talentless bimbos, and I remember pondering the point of them at all, and then working out they served as annoying distractions for Bond’s roving eye, and to provide a bit of suspense before he inevitably crushed the bad guys.

Bond is the longest running and most financially successful English-language movie franchise in history, having grossed about $12 billion at the box office. The Bond series is the spy genre. To quote a Bond movie power ballad (and the catchcry of the tawdry real estate agent, LJ Hooker); nobody does it better.

Bond knows that the only way to snatch power back from evil men who threaten to destabilise the free world is to kill them, then take their toys.

Bond has shown time and again that you save a country from destruction at the hands of bad actors with poorly Russian / Arab accents by killing them, taking away their nukes, making out with their chief nuclear scientist, who tends to look remarkably like a supermodel, and then explaining yourself to MI6. Situation handled. Sometimes Bond will simply dob in the baddies and then take their toys, but those movies are a little dull. Geez, we are lucky that Barack Obama doesn't get to write a Bond script. It would go like this:

James Bond travels to Iran to track down a psychotic mad man called…. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Wow, that name sounds familiar). Bond finds him, and learns that he is trying to sell nukes to (insert another insane Middle Eastern country), again.

The pesky and stupid U.S. President (obviously a Democrat, and obviously played by method actor Sean Penn) forces Bond to back off, by telling him we need to “negotiate” with the mad man, and that he isn’t crazy as such, he just wants to be hugged, and mad man was just kidding around when he said he wanted to annihilate the West.

By some incredible coincidence, this movie eerily resembles reality, when negotiations fail with said mad man, and the western world explodes into tiny pieces. The end.  The Bond genre is over, and we are all dead.  Not shaken, not stirred; just dead.  Yeah, thanks a bunch Barack – way to wipe out a franchise / the rational thinking portion of the human race.

How about you just stick to destroying the free world, and leave movie making to movie makers who have balls. Actually, it’s also preferable to have a President with balls, but we can’t have everything. If the international political arena were a Bond movie, the good guys would not be winning right now.