Raritania
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Daniel Craig's Comments: A Second Thought
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Daniel Craig's criticisms of his own character and movie are, predictably, still much in the news. Indeed, the Toronto Star 's Vinay...
John Gardner's Final Three:
Never Send Flowers
,
SeaFire
,
Cold Fall
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WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD While there was always an important element of continuity between James Bond's adventures in Ian Fleming's...
James Bond, Aristocratic Action Hero
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Kingsley Amis wrote of James Bond as a "semi-aristocrat," with even that aspect of the character smuggled in by the backdoor rathe...
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Have Superheroes Taken Over the Box Office?
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In a piece for Forbes earlier this year, Scott Mendelson took on the question of whether there are "too many comic book movies." ...
Thursday, October 22, 2015
A Bondian Way of War?
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In Britain and Her Army, 1509-1870 , Corelli Barnett lamented what he saw as the failure of the English people to accept an efficiently run ...
Are Ian Fleming's Novels Midcult?
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Umberto Eco, while favorably disposed toward Fleming, specifically used that label in reference to him in his classic essay, "Narrative...
Just How Old is James Bond Supposed to Be?
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Where most of the series' writers (including Ian Fleming) tended to fudge the issue of James Bond's age, having him miss the passage...
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Making Sense of Midcult
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In his essay "Masscult and Midcult," Dwight Macdonald offered a picture of a cultural hierarchy and its evolution over time. There...
Of Ian Fleming and Thorstein Veblen
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The James Bond series is often criticized for representing outmoded, backward attitudes. Contemporary politics being what they are, most cri...
A Dirk Pitt TV Series?
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I continue to be struck by how many people come across my blog looking for word about a new Dirk Pitt movie--and the strong feelings that so...
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
"The Name is Skywalker, Luke Skywalker."
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George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) is one of that handful of mid-'70s films celebrated, and attacked, as giving us the contemporary bl...
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Win, Lose or Die
and the British Techno-Thriller
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The military techno-thriller is more British in its origins than anything else. Even overlooking the tradition of the "invasion story&...
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Review:
Role of Honor
, by John Gardner
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New York: Putnam, 1984, pp. 304. In John Gardner's Role of Honor , the British Secret Service stages a spy scandal which has Bond rath...
Monday, October 12, 2015
Reviewing the Posthuman Prospect
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It was about the turn of the century that I first took notice of the whole transhuman-posthuman-Singularity dialogue , reading the books of ...
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Heir to the Empire
, by Timothy Zahn
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New York: Bantam, 1991, pp. 361. I first read the books of the Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy ( Heir to the Empire , Dark Force Rising ...
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