My online acquaintance Bill Mudron has just finished watching and/or rewatching his way through all the James Bond films. It's been interesting and fun reading his reactions, especially since I already knew that he and I process films in overlapping but very different ways. (There's at least one film that's on my I-watched-it-until-I-had-nearly-the-whole-thing-memorized list that he loathed and will never go anywhere near again.)

I have ... well, I don't know for sure, because I never did a word count, but it's about thirty pages of material, and each of those pages is at least a few thousand words long ... let's say I have a substantial body of work on the web, gathering dust, about Bond films. Those pages have been gathering dust for a long time now. I see a 2014 date on one page, that's the only date anywhere in them, but I'm pretty sure that was when they were originally posted; I think I began at least one top-to-bottom revision after that and never got all the way through, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. Let's say that most of the pages there have been gathering dust for over a decade.

They will likely continue to gather dust. The Magic 8-Ball says that it is far more likely that I will eventually take down the pages entirely than revise them. Why that's the case is ... well, I'll get to that, but let me say a word or two (or five hundred) about the current state of the Bond franchise first.

I own all the Bond films through Skyfall on DVD. That should be a tipoff about me, right there, because if you're one of The Youths, this is automatically retrograde. Actually owning movies in physical form and watching them that way? Horrors!

To tell the truth, I don't watch any of my DVDs very much (in terms of physical media, I get much more mileage out of my music CDs than my DVD collection), but then, I don't watch anything very much these days. I go to maybe two movies a year in a theatre. I watch movies at home on very rare occasions (usually when my spouse is away so we don't have to have issues about our tastes in film, which, like mine and Bill's, have many overlaps but significant differences). Once in a while I will fire up a DVD on one computer while doing renders on the other. That's a good time to watch Bond films, especially the ones I've watched ten thousand times and can play basically as background noise.

I watch things on DVD I can't get any other way. I have all six boxes of the Golden Collection of old WB cartoons, and it's a damned good thing I do, since Warner (or whoever owns the property now) has done their very best to make sure those cartoons are no longer available intact in any format. I don't know why. I can see restricting something if you would like to still make money from it and are offering only one legal way to see it -- but they're not offering any legal way to see these cartoons unbutchered, that I can find. I understand that Corporate IP Control is craven, stupid and evil, but they do tend not to leave money on the table, which is what Warner has been doing with these cartoons for nigh twenty years now.

I have all of "The Avengers," which, again, you can't really see any other way, and I do rewatch those fairly often even though I have most of my favorite episodes memorized. Some movies which are otherwise inexplicably nearly impossible to find. Things like that. Long-format content becomes more and more scarce on the web as attention spans get shorter and Corporate IP Control squeezes ever more greedily, and streaming/cable services have fragmented so badly that I no longer try to keep track of what I can see where. I'm too old for Poob.

I tell you all this so you understand what it means that I didn't buy Spectre or No Time To Die on DVD. I think that's indicative. Yes, I saw both of them in the theatre. No, I haven't rewatched either. No, I didn't feel particularly inclined to own them.

James Bond began to lose me about the time it became clear that EON (AKA the Broccoli family and their trusted accomplices) had no idea how to bring younger audiences into the theatre -- had no idea how to prolong the longevity of this character and this franchise. They were coasting on Daniel Craig and on some other good performances, and nothing else. It's coincidence that my fandom began to flag when they [spoiler!] wrote out Judi Dench, but it certainly didn't help. When Craig had obviously become tired of the part, that was, I think, really the end of the road for me. Not so much because there wouldn't be another Bond as good -- he's not even my favorite Bond -- but because it had already become clear that they had no good ideas left and that Craig was the only thing keeping the machine running.

Skyfall is a very good Bond film. (Very good films and very good Bond films are not always the same thing.) I don't actually remember much about Spectre except Christoph Waltz chewing scenery and a general sensation that trying to give Bond any kind of consistent backstory was a tactical mistake. I don't remember a gotdam thing about No Time To Die except that Rami Malek is in it and [spoiler] Bond dies. Seriously. I remember no details of the plot at all.

I've said elsewhere that a Bond film is allowed to be bad -- sometimes hideously bad -- but the one thing it can never be is boring. I don't recall that either of those two films were boring, so let's add a codicil: They are also not allowed to be forgettable. I have forgotten them. I forgot them five minutes after I saw them. That isn't acceptable.

I had utter faith in Barbara Broccoli's stewardship for decades -- until I didn't. Now that the films are apparently in the hands of Corporate IP Control, I have even less faith. These ratfuck clowns don't give the slightest shit about the property. The only reason they want Bond at all is that they are firmly up the ass of "remake existing shit over and over because it is far less of a financial risk than new ideas," and Bond's still got a lot of "people will come see the same crap over and over" juice. They don't really care about what stories they tell, or whether the stories are shit. All Corporate IP Control ever looks at is what money can be wrung from it.

Mind you, I think Bond has less juice than they think. As Bill Mudron has pointed out, it's one thing to say "We're going to make a shit rehash of the stuff you loved in your childhood because we know you'll fall for it," but what Corporate IP Control has been doing for some years is rehashing of stuff from your parents' childhood. Making a Masters of the Universe film in 2026 ... that's a forty-year-old hunk of cheese, people. In 1982-1986 I was in high school. This is, as Bill noted, like it being 1986 and someone deciding it'd be a great idea to revive Hopalong Cassidy (who, BTW, was already on his last legs by 1946).

Bond is not the franchise of a current twenty-year-old's adolescence, nor even a current forty-year-old's. It is the franchise of my adolescence, but that was his second coming; ultimately, first-time-around Bond was the franchise of my mother's adolescence (my mother graduated from high school in 1966).

People have been arguing about the relevance and cultural significance of James Bond since about five minutes after Dr. No hit the screens in 1962, just as people have been whining/arguing about "Star Trek" since 1966 and "Doctor Who" since 1963. But those long-running franchises tend to have a different kind of argument associated with them. People feud about "who is this for" and what they want those franchises to be (in addition to the endless quibbling about internal minutiae). With Bond, the argument has always been whether Bond has any cultural value at all -- whether he has any redeeming social importance (which, you will recall, and not coincidentally, is the old test for "is it pornography"?)

As a pornographer, of course, my position is that it doesn't fucking matter if he has any redeeming social importance; sometimes, a good sweaty ride is enough. Sometimes that ride is not politically correct; often it is real-world-unacceptable. Bond at his worst is a horrible person who does horrible things. So what? The question is, is he entertaining to watch? Did you get off?

That's the goal I worry the people who control this franchise have forgotten.

Anyway, the point is, I am no longer sure we can make Bond entertaining to younger generations, because not only has Bond lost his way, the viewers have too. This goes to a larger problem I have, which is that I believe movies are dying because we are no longer teaching kids how to watch them. In the fragmented-attention-span world, the kind of focus required to sit quietly and behave yourself and actually pay full attention for two hours has all but become a lost skill.

And the people who make movies know this, so they deliver fragmented, incoherent thrill-ride bullshit at all times. Who cares if the plot doesn't hold together or the characterization is crap? The audience isn't paying attention anyway. Corporate IP Control, remember, has no interest in quality (and never did). They just want to squeeze money from your eyeballs. They are very good at one and only one thing, and that is giving an audience of 18-25-year-old men what it wants. Unfortunately, what that audience wants is increasingly ... well, let's put it this way: It isn't the films I want to see.

Of course, people have also been making that complaint since longer than I've been alive, but I do think that the slope is getting steeper and slipperier. That is, we were always trending in the general direction of poorer quality, but the trend has dramatically accelerated.

Is this just me being old and crabby? I don't know. I honestly don't know. I know I do still see an occasional movie which seems to me to still be of quality these days, but I also note that these, in general, tend to be films not produced by the Corporate IP Control machine. And I also note that when I go see a movie which demands two hours of really paying attention, in general my spouse and I are either of the average age of attendees ... or we are the youngest people in the theatre. (I'm fifty-eight.)

So, the Bond pages continue to gather dust because I am just not sure they are pertinent to the world in any way anymore, and thus not worth the effort to dust off ... and my overall project on film-rewatching essays, where the Bond pages are located, also gathers dust and will eventually die, because I'm just not sure film criticism/analysis has a place in the world anymore, period. Every so often I get an idea for a piece for it (yesterday's thoughts about humor, for example, could easily have mutated into a film piece), and I show that idea right back out the door again, because it is not a good use of my time.

What is the point in writing about films when the majority of the audience will never bother to do a close reading of what they watch ... or a close reading of anything, for that matter? What is the point of maintaining critical thought while everyone arouond you is losing or abandoning that ability?

I may be being too pessimistic. I'd like it if you were thinking right now "She is being too pessimistic." I hope that you are. Someone here needs to be hopeful.

Anyway. Pierce Brosnan was Best Bond. Roger Moore was second-best, for the first half of his films (he was too old for the rest and coasted on charm). Craig is third; as a rule I prefer Suave Bond to Thug Bond, but Craig was the best of the Thugs. Connery, the ur-Thug, is fourth. Dalton was unable to fully successfully be Suave or Thug and is fifth; Lazenby, a good-looking underwear model who projected absolutely no personality or character whatsoever, is dead last, where he has been undisputably since 1969.

I'll let you argue about the rankings of the films, but Thunderball is the worst one, because again, the only thing a Bond film can never do is be boring. (People tend to skip mentally over the boring bits of Bond films -- for example, no one but me ever remembers how dull Dr. No becomes once Bond finally gets to Crab Key -- but Thunderball is so monumentally boring from start to finish that no one can elide it.)