Has it been only two years since Daniel Craig first showed up as Bond, James Bond? I'm hoping to see QUANTUM OF SOLACE this weekend but in the meantime here's the stuff I did two years ago for MSNBC. First, a piece on the history of James Bond. My favorite graf — and apologies for quoting myself:

Bond’s goals with both villains and women were the same — to infiltrate the seemingly impenetrable fortress, make things explode and then get away — and many feminists thought him a misogynist. Yet if you look at the early films, sex is one of the ways Bond differs from his villainous counterparts. The bad guys were either clumsy around women, like Goldfinger, or asexual beasts in starched Nehru jackets, sublimating their sexual desires by repeatedly petting cats. The meta-message was that sex was good. As soon as it was denied, well, you began thinking up ways to destroy the planet.

Then there's the James Bond quiz: 25 questions in all. Fairly in-depth since I re-watched all of those 21 official James Bond films. How in-depth? I just re-took it and got a 24. (I missed no. 15 if you're keeping score.) So even the quizmaster can't master his own quiz. As Bond would say, "He always did have an inflated opinion of himself."

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