1. Dr. No (1962, Sean Connery). It all starts here, when Connery introduces himself at the baccarat table. Ursula Andress wows audiences as she strides out of the sea in a belted bikini as Honey Rider (the image is iconic enough that it’s been referenced twice since then, first by Halle Berry in the forgettable “Die Another Day,” and then in the #2 film by Bond himself). Jack Lord co-stars as Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA counterpart; Lord was already too famous from Hawaii 5-0 to continue in the role, however, and the role proved somewhat intermittent anyway — since ’62, he’s been in 9 films (counting the upcoming Quantum) and been played by 7 people (most recently Jeffrey Wright).

2. Casino Royale (2006). Daniel Craig renews the entire franchise. It’s really that simple. That’s a little over-simplistic; they did well by hiring Judi Dench a few films ago, but the wholesale reboot here makes the whole affair seem fresh, even if the parkour sequence seems a bit contrived up front.

3. Goldfinger (1964, Connery). Look, how do you NOT love a film wherein Honor Blackman introduces herself as “My name is Pussy Galore?” The other star of this one is the Aston-Martin DB5 (the same make and model Craig’s Bond wins at poker in Casino Royale) chock full of, shall we say, aftermarket goodies. (“Ejector seat? You’re joking!” “I never joke about my work, 007”.)

4. From Russia, with Love (1963, Connery). By far the most complexly plotted of the original films, it’s still somehow under-appreciated by modern fans. Bonus: nemesis Red Grant is played by Robert Shaw, later famous as the salty old fisherman Quint in Jaws. The gadget thing starts here with a fantastic trick briefcase.

5. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969, George Lazenby). The odd one out; you can win bar bets by knowing this Australian model’s name. The story is that Connery left the role for fear of being typecast, and Lazenby got the nod. Then Connery decided to come back one more time (for 1971’s Diamonds are Forever), and poor old George got the boot. The film is quieter and a bit more subtle than most Bond outings; it’s also the only one with an actual romance (until 2006, anyway). Bond’s paramour in this one is played by Diana Rigg, and by the film’s end he’s married her. Sadly, she’s also murdered by arch-nemesis Blofeld (a viciously cackling Telly Savalas!) before the credits roll. [Blofeld, Bond’s most persistent antagonist, appears or orchestrates action in five films, but shows his face in only three. In those, he’s played by three different actors: Savalas here, but previously Donald Pleasance (“Halloween”) in “You Only Live Twice” and subsequently by Charles Gray (the Criminologist from “Rocky Horror”) in “Diamonds are Forever.”]

6. GoldenEye (1995, Pierce Brosnan). I always thought it was cool that Brosnan got a second shot at Bond after NBC wouldn’t let him out of “Remington Steele” to take the role in ’86. It’s a damned shame only one of his films is worth watching. It’s only in checking facts to write this that I realize why this may be: GoldenEye was directed by martin Campbell, who also directed Casino Royale. The plot here is more plausible than most, too — post-USSR heavy weapons are ending up in the wrong hands, and Bond has to stop it. It earns extra points by casting Royal Shakespeare alum Sean Bean as the bad guy, and even MORE points by returning to classic nomenclature with Famke Janssen’s lethel “Xenia Onatopp.” Somewhere, Fleming is smiling. (Robbie “Hagrid” Coletrane makes his first appearance here, too, as ex-KGB Bond associte Zukovsky.)

7. Live and Let Die (1973, Roger Moore). Bond does the Voodoo, and fights that 7-Up dude. No, really. Actually, the main bad guy here is the mysterious Mister Big, played by Yaphet Kotto (see also “Homicide”), but Geoffrey Holder does appear as Baron Samedi, a voodoo priest. Jane Seymour plays a virginal (until Bond gets to her, anyway) clairvoyant. This one’s the first Moore outing, and includes the delightfully absurd super-magnetic Rolex with a bezel that doubles as a circular saw. Suffice it to say that this is where the gadgets get goofy.

8. Moonraker (1979, Moore). It’s terrible — a few years after Star Wars, and even Bond is in space — but it was also the first one I saw. My dad took me when I was 9 — at a drive in. How dated is that? Also, the wrist-mounted dart gun is a delight, even if we are a bit afraid that the by-then 52-year-old Moore will pass out in the G-force testing apparatus. (Bad news: Moore holds on until the patently ridiculous “A View to a Kill” six years later; even Christopher Walken and Grace Jones couldn’t save that one from the idea of 58-year-old Bond.)

9. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, Moore). This gives us the first appearance of two late-70s Bond fixtures: the Lotus Esprit the doubles as a submarine, and Richard Kiel as the 7-foot steel-toothed henchman Jaws (he returns in Moonraker). It’s otherwise reasonably forgettable, except for Barbara Bach as KGB agent Triple X.

10. License to Kill (1989, Timothy Dalton). By the 80s, the producers at Eon were well out of unmined material with only a few exceptions, and apparently felt that it was too early for a third version of “Casino Royale” (there’s a 1954 American TV version, plus the satirical ’67 take starring David Niven and Peter Sellers). Several of 80s films were actually cut-ups taken from some of Fleming’s short fiction, and LtK is the last of those scripts. As such, it’s kind of a mess, but the central thread is still fun: Bond’s off the reservation and is hunting down the drug lord who killed his pal Felix’s wife (remember him?). (80s note: the wife was played by Priscilla Barnes, near-famous for replacing Suzanne Sommers on “Three’s Company.”) The film’s also fun because of its cast — Robert Davi chews scenery as the baddie, and Bond’s girls include a pre-Law-and-Order Cary Lowell. Lovable gadgetmeister Desmond Llewelyn makes his only field appearance when Q heads to central America to aid the technically unemployed Bond in his quest. Oh, and Wayne Newton shows up as a crooked TV preacher. What’s not to love?

Our favorite scary move, hands down, is the excellent Bubba Ho-Tep. The premise is simple: late in his career, Elvis arranged to swap places with an impersonator in order to escape the circus his life had become; his intention was to swap back, but before that could happen, the impersonator expired on the royal throne at Graceland, and the authentic E.A.P. (an excellent Bruce Campbell) was stuck as the impersonator, eventually ending up in a rural Texas old folks’ home where his best friend (played by Ossie Davis) is convinced he’s actually JFK.

And that’s when the mummy attacks start.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous and silly. But trust me: they completely pull it off with the right blend of horror and comedy plus an unexpectedly graceful touch on the existential angst of aging. Highly recommended. (And previously discussed here (10/2003) and here (12/2003).)

There’s a follow-up coming, which is sadly bereft of Campbell, but perhaps Perlman can pull it off.

Martin Luther has 95 Theses, but the pope ain’t one.

(Via Kevin at Facebook)

I’ve been taken in by HBO’s True Blood, which is at least fun. Last night, however, when I watched Sunday’s episode, I found myself kind of uncomfortable with the final scenes — not because of any plot development, and not because of what Joe Bob Briggs called “aardvarking”, but because of who one of the aardvarkers was.

She’s grown up very nicely, and is (according to IMDB), a healthy 26 years old, but it still made me feel vaguely creepy to watch half-naked Anna “The Piano” Paquin in a sex scene.

I know what you’re thinking. Barry and Levon, where did you get $240?.

(Re-found via my friend Kevin over on that Facebook.)

From my friend (and Mobile native) Michelle Richmond’s blog, in a post about a documentary film making the rounds called The Order of Myths, about (the original) Mardis Gras in Mobile:

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel about searching and longing in Louisiana, Binx Bolling, himself a less-than-enthusiastic participant in the better-known Mardi Gras of New Orleans, says that to see one’s own city on the big screen is, in a way, to have one’s own place and time validated, made real. I’m a long way from Alabama. It’s fair to say that, for a long time, I have not considered it home. In one of the stories in my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the narrator, Gracie, who has also left Mobile, remarks on how ill-at-ease she feels every time she returns there: “Some Mobilians don’t know that the party has long-since ended, clinging hard-heartedly to the notion that the Confederates won the war.” I was 25 years old when I wrote that, close enough to home to despise it, too young to understand the subtler nuances that Brown captures in The Order of Myths. This is a film for Southerners who’ve left home, and for those who have stayed, and for anyone who wants to reach a deeper understanding of a place and a culture that has been by turns mocked and mythologized for decades.

There’s a trailer.

A year after taking their ball(s) and going home, NBC Universal programming is once again available in iTunes. Turns out they need Apple more than Apple needs them. No surprise there; making it hard for your customers to see your programs they way they want to see them is never a good plan; NBC’s bullheadedness here certainly sent Heathen to the Torrents to catch up on Battlestar last year, after they foolishly pulled the show from iTunes without having DVDs in the channel.

Don LaFontaine is dead.

This bit from the WaPo almost certainly sums up The Clone Wars better than anything else:

Lucas fulfills his lifelong dream of completely dehumanizing his space opera, replacing it with a digitally animated style that is somewhere between cartoons, Christmas specials and panoramic paintings on the side of a van. One thing is definitely intact from the most recent prequel episodes: From the first frame, all but the learned geeks in the audience won’t know what the heck is going on. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker (celebrity voices impersonated) are in the midst of the legendary and pointless Clone Wars, the battles of which seem to transpire on either Planet Marriott Airport or Planet Phallic Symbol.

Zap! Pow! What’s? Boom! Happening? But wait: Now Yoda has ordered our heroes (accompanied by their inappropriately dressed teenage Jedi summer intern, Ahsoka Tano) to help rescue the kidnapped toddler of Jabba the Hutt. That’s right: There’s a Baby the Hutt. I’d go on explaining “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” but you’d think I was high.

Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes: “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix.”

Even better is Keyes on library size: “I don’t care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn’t matter if I don’t want to see any of the movies that we have . . . our assortment is heavily weighted toward newer releases and mainstream staple titles.”

Somewhere, I have a no-doubt-decaying VHS tape of one of Dana Gould’s early standup specials; it’s some incredibly funny stuff, but I worry it’s become unwatchable. Fortunately, a signficant subset of it is available in his MySpace channel. Check it out, especially if you’re Frank and remember the tape. (No, the commercial bit isn’t included.)

The film is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, about a production of Hamlet infested with vampires and the quest to cure them, stars Jake Hoffman and Devon Aoki, and includes Jeremy Sisto and Ralph Macchio. No, I’m not kidding. Watch the trailers.

Via MeFi.

As it turns out, the old Dana Carvey Show had some pretty fantastic moments. Do NOT miss “Germans Who Say Nice Things” or “Skinheads from Maine” or, especially, “‘First Ladies as Dogs.”

For some reason, Metafilter didn’t call out Mrs H’s favorite terrible Lifetime movie in their pointer to Lifetime Wow!, a blog devoted to the genre. We’re puzzled; what could possibly top Baby Monitor: The Sound of Fear?

(Well, we looked it up: apparently, BM:SoF was for USA, not Lifetime, so there you have it. Still, you have wonders like “Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict” to keep you happy.)

Mrs Heathen tells us that Ze Frank has a movie deal.

You all completely and totally suck. You just had one final chance to reward the best show to ever be on television with proper recognition, and you blew it. Instead:

“The Wire,” the just-ended, critically acclaimed HBO drama about police and drug dealers in Baltimore, lost its last shot at a best-drama nod after years of Emmy snubs. It received one nomination Thursday, for writing.

What got best drama nods? Lost, Mad Men, Damages, Boston fucking Legal, Dexter, and House. The Wire makes all those look like high-school plays. Seriously.

There’s a Watchmen trailer online.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script is friggin’ hilarious. Enjoy.

And, unsurprisingly, also a Clayton Cubitt find. Check out Death to the Tin Man, a 12-minute undergraduate film by a 24-year-old director. Really. Close your office door and watch this thing.

Harrison Ford, in answer to the unasked “now that you’ve shat all over Indy, will you do the same to Han?” question, says no more Star Wars.

Mohney provides three three-word reviews of “Crystal Skull:”

• “Big dumb puppy”
• “Jar Jar Lebeouf”
• “I miss Nazis”

All spot on.

Sydney Pollack is dead at 73.

Spielberg, apparently jealous of the way in which his buddy Lucas was able to completely destroy a film legacy with three new films, does his level best to shit all over Indy in a single, derivative, bloating, and limping sequel comprised largely of elements stolen from the X-Files, the 2nd Mummy film, and misplaced fifties nostalgia. For the most part, he succeeds.

Stay away.

Pajiba:

And as it all that weren’t enough, news also came down this week that Nicolas Cage will star in a remake of Bad Lieutenant (holy shit) directed by Werner Herzog (holy shit). Pressman Film Corp. will produce the updated edition of its original, which was directed by Abel Ferrara and starred Harvey Keitel as the titular bad lieutenant. Who knows what direction Herzog will take the picture; maybe he’ll have Cage ride around L.A. on a grizzly bear.

Tommy Lee Jones does commercials for canned coffee in Japan.

Nerve and IFC have teamed up to produce a list of the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time, and it’s a doozy. Longtime Heathen faves The State are well represented, including “$240 dollars worth of puddin'” and “Porcupine Racetrack,” among others. Don’t miss SNL’s “Gerald Ford is Dead” skit, either.

Their entry for “Porcupine:”

39. Porcupine Racetrack – The State

Is “Porcupine Racetrack” the best musical of the ’90s? I wouldn’t argue against it. A parody of Broadway musicals played so straight it’s almost an homage, it packs in class consciousness, an aborted tap breakdown, syrupy melodrama (“So God if you’re above / And it’s orphans / That you love / Then help the porcupine I chose”) and the triumph of the human spirit (in the form of Thomas Lennon wearing a giant porcupine outfit) into less than three minutes. It’s a marvel of performance and production design on a budget — the manic energy of the cast selling every last ounce of the willfully bizarre premise. Conceived by Mr. Lennon and set to music and performed by Teddy Shapiro, who wrote most of the incidental music on the show, it’s a tour de force of brightly colored absurdity — performed with loving care, all the way down to the checked suits and newsboy caps. –R. Emmet Sweeney

Turns out, not many people know.

From the wisdom of Al Swearingen, late of Deadwood, S. D., on the subject of the rapidly approaching telegraph lines:

SWEARENGEN: Messages from invisible sources, or what some people think of as progress.

DORITY: Well, ain’t the heathens used smoke signals all through recorded history?

S: How is that a fucking recommendation?

D: Well, it seems to me like letters posted one person to another is just a slower version of the same idea

S: When’s the last time you got a fucking letter from a stranger?

D: Bad news about Pa.

S: Bad news. Tries against our interest is our sole communication from strangers, so by all means let’s . . . let’s plant poles all across the country, festoon the cocksucker with wires to hurry the sorry word, and blinker our judgements of motive, huh?

D: You’ve given it more thought than me.

S: Ain’t the state of things cloudy enough? Don’t we face enough fucking imponderables?

Bait shop. No Internet in the bait shop.

This is the only piece of Wire-backlash we’ve seen that’s actually funny, wherein Paul Ford extemporizes about his as-yet-unseen better-than-the-Wire show.

It’s not HD, and isn’t engineered to do bullshit like this. We’ve never seen it refuse to record something, or insist that it needed to delete something because of restrictions placed on the recording by DTV. The HD-Tivo boxes apparently do this now, as do the halfass DVRs sold by myriad cable and dish companies.

We’ll stick with the device we have, since it seems to understand for whom it works: US, not the content providers. Tricks like automatically zapping PPV movies off your DVR after an arbitrary amount of time will serve to do one thing: drive more people to Bittorrent.

This actually reminds me of something else: Why are the TV people so stupid? Yes, I know, I need to be more specific, given how widely their stupidity gets deployed. I speak now of DVD release dates. SciFi had ample chance to get the 3rd season of Battlestar Galactica ready in time for, if not Christmas, then at least in stores in advance of the premier of season 4 in a few weeks. That way, folks could catch up, and do so with legal media.

Did they do that? Nope. The Season 3 DVDs are still unavailable, so in order for Mrs Heathen and I to get caught up, we’re watching episodes gleaned from Bittorrent. iTunes would have solved this, had NBC not taken its ball and gone home in favor of their own half-assed, commercial-ridden, streaming-only site, but who wants to watch like that?

Imagine the riots we’d have from the idiot-goons if we ran this ad here.

BoingBoingTV gives us Kung Fu Fuck You, which is actually the first part of a double feature also including a spot for the Falipornia Speak Therapy Institute. “We learn to nouns, sentences, and talking!”

I’m not sure what the origin of this is, but the Aimee Mann Christmas Special is not something you should miss at all. It’s weird, surreal, and chock full of cameos — Patton Oswalt, Emily Proctor, Fred Armisen, Ben Stiller, etc.

I’ve had this on my desk for a while, and just got around to watching it now. The whole thing’s about 25 minutes, split into 3 parts.

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

Amusingly, the director — Michael Blieden — is the same guy behind this very odd Kanye video starring Will Oldham as well as several other amusing bits.

A couple weeks ago, Richard Belzer made a guest appearance on The Wire in-character as former Baltimore homicide detective turned NYC SVU member John Munch.

This appearance put Belzer-as-Munch completely over the top in a fairly esoteric category: He’s got the record for appearances as the same character on different shows:

1. Homicide (original cast member)
2. Law & Order (4 crossover eps)
3. Law & Order: SVU (regular cast member)
4. Law & Order: Trial by Jury (one episode, “Skeleton pt 2”)
5. The X-Files (“Unusual Suspects”)
6. Arrested Development (“Exit Strategy”)
7. The Beat (“They Say It’s Your Birthday”)
8. The Wire (“Took”)

Wikipedia, by the way, notes that he’s slated to appear in the French adaptation of Criminal Intent, which would take him to 9. (The character is actually one step ahead of the actor, as a Munch Muppet appears in a “Special Letters Unit” Sesame Street short, but is voiced by someone else.)

What’s particularly amusing about his appearance on the Wire? He’s in a bar that obviously references the bar in which Munch and Homicide colleague Meldrick Lewis were partners (with others) back in the Homicide days. Lewis was played by Clark Johnson, who has a major role in this season of the Wire — as someone else.

(Yes, we talked about this once before.)

What if Saul Bass had done the opening credits to Star Wars?

The new trailer for Iron Man makes us hopeful that the coming year might feature not one but TWO superhero movies that don’t suck.

Please don’t ruin them, Hollywood.

A couple writers — Paul Farhi at WaPo, and Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Trib — are whining that Saturday Night Live has done something racially insensitive in casting Latino-Asian Fred Armisen as Obama in last week’s cold open, and that it would have been more appropriate to cast a black actor.

Oh, please. Fred Armisen is a profoundly gifted physical mimic (though his verbal skills aren’t a match for castmate Bill Hader), and is the natural choice for a whole host of political and cultural targets. He’s been Prince, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, George Carlin, David Gregory, Vicente Fox, Steve Jobs, and Tony Danza, for crying out loud. The right person to impersonate anyone is the person who can most bring humor to the skit. Darryl Hammond did a wonderful Jesse Jackson, and he’s white as Wonder Bread. Billy Crystal made us all laugh as Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s not about race. It’s about the funny — and on a deadline. Farhi and Ryan are at best missing the point, and at worst grasping at racial straws to create controversy and therefore draw attention to themselves.

Do not read this until you have seen last week’s episode of The Wire.

Via a review in the New Yorker, we discover that up-and-coming actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (American Gangster, Inside Man, Children of Men, and, most notably at our house, Serenity) is in a production of Othello in London. Ewan McGregor is Iago. The run has been sold out for a while; tickets now go for $1500.

The same article notes something we find astounding: Laurence Fishburne‘s 1995 adaptation was the first film version in which the title role was played by a black man.

Cracked.com gives us the Internet Party, a quick little video about a cocktail gathering amongst anthropomorphized Web 2.0 properties. I promise you’ll giggle at least a little.

You should go here and search for “martians” and “telephone.”

Mrs Heathen hates it, but Conan does it on TV, so we see no reason to stop now:

This video is completely safe for work, but will probably hurt your head anyway. The Japanese are different than you and I. (Thx, RN.)

These ads don’t make us any more likely to have a Bacardi and Coke, but they definitely are super-awesome.

• Intro
• Yacht, or “Who’s Dirty?”
• Names
• Poolside
• Mardi Gras

We here at Heathen HQ are slowly catching up on the new Battlestar Galactica, and finally got to the end of season 2 tonight via NetFlix.

Of course, it ends in a cliffhanger, so I figured I’d just snag the next ep — from their cleverly named “Season 2.5” — from iTunes. Except, of course, BSG is a SciFi show, and NBC owns SciFi, and those goatfuckers at NBC decided it would be a good idea to pull all their content from iTunes so they can create their own online show-watching deal at Hulu.com.

Hulu isn’t actually live yet, and probably won’t work worth a damn once it does. For right now and the foreseeable future, then, if you want to watch NBC content online, you have to go to the so-called “darknets” full of pirated content because there is no other way to get it. This is a situation NBC has deliberately chosen because of their pissing match with Apple, and they deserve to suffer mightily for it.

As for us, we’ll have the 2.5 DVDs in a couple days, which means incrementally LESS revenue for NBC. If it had been available online right now for $1.99 at iTunes, I’d have bought the next episode immediately. As is now, I’ll just wait for the NetFlix DVD to show up on Tuesday.

Nice one, GE! You guys rock at teh Intarwub! Enjoy your impending doom.

Our pal Chris Mohney gives us Ten Reasons ‘The Wire’ Is Better Than ‘The Sopranos’. Enjoy.

If you’re coming late to the party, by all means start with the season 1 DVDs. Don’t dive into the final season without context.