The Seven Ages of 007: How Daniel Craig Became the Bookend Bond

No Time to Die is a Bond flick like no other for several reasons, one of them being that it’s the only one I’ve ever gone to see immediately after interviewing Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, who’ve been producing these films since 1995’s Goldeneye. The Bond movies are their family business, having been started by their father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, with his partner Harry Saltzman six decades ago. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson were very generous with their time, which gave me the platinum-level problem of having lots more good material than I could Tetris into my four-minute radio piece for Friday’s All Things Considered, which you can listen to below.

Here’s the prose version, which became a related-but-separate piece that wouldn’t have worked on the radio for several reasons, including the fact I wrote it before I landed the interviews.

I have all the thanks in the world for the wonderful and ultra-capable NPR Books editor Petra Mayer, who edited both the prose piece and the radio piece, which meant adding two labor-intensive tasks to what was already a packed week for her. (She hosted a panel at New York Comic Con this week, along with all her usual duties.) Nobody does it better.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "No Time to Die" and What's Making Us Happy

Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright as old soldiers James Bond and Felix Leiter. (Nicola Dove/MGM)

What a treat to join my pal and Degree Absolute! cohost Glen Weldon, frequent co-panelist Daisy Rosario, and writer/comedian Jourdain Searles to perform the Pop Culture Happy Hour autopsy on No Time to Die.

Everybody Does It Bitter: A History of 007s Kvetching About Their Jobs

At the end of Casino Royale, the 1953 Ian Fleming novel that begat the James Bond legend, “the bitch [was] dead”… but the bitching had not yet begun!

Here, for The Ringer, is my deeply-sourced account of how no man who has ever worn the most famous tuxedo in movies has ever been happy about it for very long. Except Pierce Brosnan.

The 58-Year Mission: "Nobody Does It Better," reviewed for The Washington Post

Daniel Craig in 2006’s sublime Casino Royale, chronicling a formative mission for a wet-behind-the-ears 007.

I was a big fan of Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross’s two-volume Star Trek oral history The Fifty-Year Mission, so I fairly leapt at the chance to review Nobody Does It Better, their new oral history of the James Bond movies, for the Paper of Record. It’s not as illuminating or contradictory as their Trek books, though I was delighted to find some comments from my pal Matt Gourley within its (seven! hundred!) pages.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Logan Lucky, discussed.

Workaholic artist Steven Soderbergh on the set of Logan Lucky. (Bleecker St.)

I dropped by NPR HQ to talk about Steven Soderbergh's return to features, Logan Lucky, with screenwriter and author Danielle Henderson and regular Pop Culture Happy Hour panelists Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon.  When we recorded this discussion, I'd taken the opportunity to see the movie a second time after filing my review, and my opinion on it had evolved a little. Anyway, you can find the episode here.

I wish I could put my finger on why it read to me as condescending in a Coenesque way the first time but not the second. I love the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. But the ones Logan Lucky most recalled for me, Raising Arizona and Fargo, are not among my favorites.

Hillbilly Elegy: Logan Lucky, reviewed.

Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, and Adam Driver as the luck-starved Logan clan. 

Logan Lucky, Steven Soderbergh’s return to features after a four-year “retirement” in prestige TV, is a lot of fun, though I’m not as high on it as some. I have the same reservations about it that I do about the Coen Brothers films it most readily recalls. Anyway, here’s my review.

James-Bonding with Kempenaar & Larsen on Filmspotting No. 563

1963's From Russia with Love is still my favorite 007 flick on most days.

It's been a few years since I sat in on an episode of Filmspotting, the great Chicago-based radio show and podcast devoted to dissection of movies new and old, famous and obscure, foreign and domestic. But now I can reveal that earlier in the week, founding host Adam Kempenaar sent me a highly classified diplomatic cable inviting me to join him an regular co-host Josh Larsen for the Top Five segment of this week's SPECTRE-themed show, devoted to Favorite Bond Things. I regret only that I did not refer to Diana Rigg's character from On Her Majesty's Secret Service by her full name, Contessa Teresa Di Vincenzo.

I supposed I might also have expounded more insightfully on how the big parkour chase at the top of Casino Royale (v. 2006) isn't just one of the most fluidly choreographed, masterfully shot-and-edited action set pieces of the 21st century; it shows us plenty about the brutal, clumsy nature of this film's younger, less seasoned 007, too. Or how my favorite "Bond girl," from that same film — Eva Green's British Treasury official Vesper Lynd — is Bond's equal not only in resolve and intelligence, but ultimately in cunning. She's playing him, the same way Bond uses sexuality to manipulate women in just about every Bond adventure to follow. (And they all follow this one.) Had I mentioned the marvelous cold-open car chase from Quantum of Solace, that would've been another chance to stick up for that oft-maligned sequel. But I already did that in my S.P.E.C.T.R.E. essay in The Atlantic last week.

Listen to the episode here.

The Ties That Bond: SPECTRE, reviewed.

Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux in SPECTRE. (Sony)

My NPR review of SPECTRE, definitive Bond Daniel Craig's 004th appearance as 007, is up at NPR now. The fourth time around has been a trouble spot for every screen Bond — witness 1965's Thunderball, 1979 Moonraker, and 2002's Die Another Day — and Craig is the fourth actor to reach film No. 4 in the role. Before I saw SPECTRE, I thought I wanted one more Bond flick from him. Now I'm not so sure.