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.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-seven — THE HARD WAY

It's Patty McG v. Lee Van C as Original Cast host Patrick Flynn joins Chris & Glen to discuss the existential 1980 thriller The Hard Way. Synopsis, synopsis, synopsis.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-five — THE PHANTOM

An increasingly besotted Glen & unceasingly bemused Chris wax purple on The Phantom, 1996’s two-fisted failed franchise starter with Billy Zane as the 30s comic strip hero who coulda been called WHITE PANTHER & Patty McG as the Ghost Who Walks™ ’s… Ghost Dad?

The Phantom

Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam

Directed by Simon Wincer

Released June 7, 1996

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-four — SCANNERS

Democracy dies in dorkiness this week as the brilliant Washington Post columnist, essayist, playwright and retired (?) Emo Sith Lord Alexandra Petri joins us to solve the riddle of David Cronenberg's 1981 swollen-headed cult classic Scanners, featuring 24 minutes of a possibly first-billed, maybe third-billed, but unequivocally box-named-on-the poster Patty McG as a, um, North American mad scientist named... Dr. Ruth. Glen is determined to spark an international incident by dismissing Steven Lack, the picture's aptly named lead player, as "Canadian hot" while assessing future Lion in Winter star Michael Ironside as "Philadelphia hot."

It's a ripe program, this one. Ripe indeed.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-two — ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ

I wish I knew you actually painted this portrait of Patrick McGoohan’s sadistic, unnamed warned, attributed in the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz to the character of Doc as played by Roberts Blossom.

Maximum Fun? More like maximum security! Maximum Fun podcast network founder and San Francisco native Jesse Thorn joins us this week to tunnel through the crumbling walls of Escape From Alcatraz, the 1979 Clint Eastwood-starring dramatization of the real 1962 prison break, featuring Patty McG as…The Warden. Stunt casting doesn’t get any stuntier, though Glen and I differ on exactly how much The Artist Formerly Known Only as Number Six contributes to the 115-minute picture in his roughly 10 minutes of screen time.

Also, am I the only person on this dang podcast who respects Eastwood as an artist? Sure, I hated his film Richard Jewell, and I said in my 2019 review that the then-89-year-old’s make-a-movie-every-year working tempo may have contributed to the declining quality of his ouvre. But you can’t just dismiss the guy who made Unforgiven and A Perfect World and Bird and so many others, outside of the westerns and cop thrillers and middling airport novel adaptations that his name conjures up.

I never saw The Mule, but I heard he has not one but two threesomes in that movie, which my parents saw at the cheap seniors-only early-afternoon weekday show. That’s reason enough for me to choose anything else from his 45-film, 50-year feature film directing resume next time I feel like clearing up one of my Eastwood blind spots.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Suicide Squad" and What's Making Us Happy

Margot Robbie, Daniela Melchior, Idris Elba, a shark-man voiced by Sylvester Stallone, and David Dastmalchian are most of the lineup of The Suicide Squad. (Warner Bros/DC Comics)

Wednesday was my birthday, and it was not the first time I’d spent part of my birthday talking about a James Gunn comic book movie on Pop Culture Happy Hour. In 2014, I reported to the now-long-since-demolished-and-replaced NPR headquarters to talk about the just-released Guardians of the Galaxy before heading off to dinner at Oyamel. This year, I skipped the studio — we all skipped the studio — but still joined a panel chaired by my A Degree Absolute! co-host Glen Weldon and allies Daisy Rosario and Ronald Young, Jr. to dissect (it’s a grisly movie) The Suicide Squad.

Glen and I two-handed its kinda-sorta precursor, the definite article-free Suicide Squad, in 2016. I also wrote a review of that film for NPR. God, what a rotten year that was.