Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

This starts off just fine but increasingly degrades. By the Brosnan films the only people interviewed after the fact appear to be one of the writers, some crew, some of the directors and amusingly a studio executive, everyone else are pretty obviously PR interviews from the release of the film especially because they all speak in present tense about them. By the Craig films pretty much nobody except Martin Campbell (and the guy who makes the title sequences) is much reflexive about the films, they're all quoted from promoting it at release. This leads to a weird situation where nobody on the films seems aware that ones like Die Another Day or Spectre were not well received let alone why since they give the impression that the production was perfect, the scripts were perfect and the actors were perfect. (George Lazenby and Roger Moore seem to be the only Bonds actually interviewed by the authors about having done the movies. Timothy Dalton is reflective but it seems more like taken from other interviews rather than from the authors specifically talking to him.)

Amusingly that writer and studio executive from the Brosnan era are some of the more thoughtful critics in that section as both go out of their way to defend Denise Richards, argue that the character being terrible wasn't her fault and point out she was put in an impossible situation to push back against sexualizing the character since she would be labeled "difficult" for it. On cue one of the critics, who are just savaging her and calling her the worst thing ever and as if she ruined the movie, talks about how she was a problem on set. Apparently the reason was that she demanded the character be dressed less sexually outside of the introduction scene* since she was supposed to be a renown nuclear scientist not a Bond bimbo. The critics seem to blame her for taking the character seriously.

*