As you (should) know, Bond 22, Quantum of Solace, is coming out this November 14th. In honor of this momentous occasion, I have decided to spend a little time each week digging into my James Bond DVD collection and talking about the best and worst of the series up until now. I also like to compare the movies to the source material, when it exists. I find all of this very entertaining, but if you don’t, the scroll button is still right over there. >>>>>

I hadn’t watched You Only Live Twice in many years, and I’d forgotten large portions of it. Now, having seen it again, I realize why: large portions of it are really boring.

The problem with ’60s movies set in foreign cultures is that they tend to go all Discovery Channel and spend inordinate chunks of time just quietly observing local customs. But now that the Discovery Channel actually exists, we don’t need or want to watch a ninja training school - I’m serious, this is actually in the movie - at least, not for 20+ minutes.

You Only Live Twice, despite being Ian Fleming’s second-to-last James Bond novel, is considered the proper coda to the series. There is some debate over the authorship of the final book, The Man With the Golden Gun, and somewhat less debate over its quality: it is bizarre.

You Only Live Twice was supposed to be the end of the Bond canon. And it’s a good one, if very sad; most of its impact is lost if you strip all this emotional depth from it and make it just another Bond story. Which, of course, the film did.

I don’t want to take anything away from YOLT. After all, it gave Blofeld his historic face (Donald Pleasance, of course) and featured Bond “disguised” as a humble Japanese fisherman, a disguise that you would literally have to be blind not to see through. It’s an important part of the Bond canon. Then again, all the movies are.

There’s not particularly “wrong” with it, so to speak. It’s just not good. Aside from the cinematography, which is quite nice, there’s not a single aspect that wouldn’t benefit from some simple improvements. Such as not hiring children’s author Roald Dahl to write the screenplay. I mean, I liked The Big Friendly Giant, but come on.

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