Ben Arfken ranks James Bond films, praising Sean Connery’s From Russia With Love ("S") and Goldfinger ("S2"), while criticizing Roger Moore’s era (Live and Let Die "C," Moonraker "B?") and mocking Connery’s toupee-heavy return in Never Say Never Again. Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day earns defense via Bond’s line on terrorists, but Daniel Craig’s Quantum of Solace ("poorly written") and Spectre ("forgettable") fall short, dismissing No Time to Die entirely. The 1967 Peter Sellers spoof is called "awful," yet Thanksgiving’s Bond tradition persists—despite better alternatives like The Plymouth Adventure—as the speaker urges subscriptions amid VPN privacy warnings and Merlin series promos. [Automatically generated summary]
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Here's an odd local custom.
By local, I mean local to America.
When Thanksgiving comes, apparently people like to watch James Bond.
I think it's Amazon Prime puts up all the Sean Connery, all the James Bond movies with all the different actors who have played Bond.
And for some reason, this is comfort food during Thanksgiving.
So I will rank them in the internet way, which means starting with S, which stands for super, superior, slick.
I don't know what it stands for, but that's the top one.
And then there's A, B, C, D, and then whatever comes after that, which I've never learned.
So let's start with the Sean Connery era.
To my mind, of course, because I was there for the Sean Connery era.
He is always James Bond.
There was no other James Bond.
Dr. No, I actually re-watched Dr. No recently.
I have to say, these films date.
They really do date.
And there's something, because they're supposed to be so cutting-edge and so cool and so slick, when you're watching them from the internet world, they look just like people playing with plastic toys.
So there is that about them.
And so you have to throw yourself back into the past, like into the 1960s, to watch them that way.
Dr. No is an excellent one.
The thing I loved about Sean Connery was he played the guy as a killer.
He played him as a cold-blooded killer and a cold-blooded lover to some extent.
And that was what made the character so cool.
And as he started to get more sensitive over the years, I just totally lost interest in him.
And Dr. No has some great scenes.
That's the one I believe with the tarantula scene.
So what do I give it?
I'll give it an A.
I mean, it no longer is an S film, but I'll give it an A as a piece of history.
From Russia With Love, that's probably the best of the Connery films.
So I'll give that one an S for James Bond film.
And it has a great song, which I actually know every word.
I know all the lyrics of the song from Russia With Love, and I will not sing it to you now, so you can just imagine me singing it.
I think that's the best one.
I think it's the best James Bond film, with one exception that I'll get to later.
Goldfinger, you know, so many of the scenes in Goldfinger are memorable, especially the scene where he tortures Bond and says, Bond says, Do you expect me to talk?
And Goldfinger says, no, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond.
And I think Gertfro, the famous Goldfinger, I think that one is up there from Russia with Love.
This is like the prime of the Sean Connery ones.
I'll give this an S2.
It really dates because it's so, Goldfinger is such a slobby, weird little character.
Thunderball, 1965, I'll give this a B.
It's still among the really good ones, and it's all underwater stuff, and that's kind of fun.
You only live twice.
This is where things just start to go wrong.
This is the blend that takes place in Japanese.
Maybe a B-that's going too far.
All right, here's George Lazenby's Bond entry on Her Majesty's Secret Service.
This is actually a pretty good one.
I would give this a B, at least.
It was actually kind of exciting, and it has Blofeld in it, which is fun.
So yeah, now Sean Connery returns and things really get kind of, they really go pear-shaped.
Sean Connery returns and Diamonds are forever.
Still up there around a B-.
This is diamond smuggling or something like this, but it's okay.
And then the Roger Moore era begins, and I, I'm sorry, disappear because I just thought, I actually kind of liked Roger Moore in his old films as the saint, but he himself said that his entire acting style was raising one eyebrow.
And it was typical of Hollywood in that they saved the suave, but lost the absolute brutality of the James Bond character.
I mean, James Bond would just shoot a guy in cold blood.
And Roger Moore just had this kind of, he was like a slick party guy, and he didn't, to his credit, he tried to play it on his own.
But if I saw Live and Let Die, I probably did at some point, I'd probably give it a C. Moonraker, I think, was the best of them.
That was the one that I thought was maybe a B. All right, Sean Connery came back for Never Say Never Again, because he said he was never going to play James Bond again.
This one stars Sean Connery's Toupe.
It's mostly about his toupee.
The toupee is so large that it actually could have done the film without Connery underneath it.
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Roger Moore's final one was a view to a kill.
I've seen bits of this.
I just was not interested in Roger Moore's.
James Bond.
I did have Christopher Walk in it.
It was good.
Now this started to get pretty decent again.
Pierce Bosnan made a surprisingly good James Bond.
And one of the reasons is because my friend Bruce Fierstein wrote some of them.
And he's a really good writer.
I remember he showed me his script.
And Bruce Fierstein was mostly a comedy writer.
He wrote, you know, little funny books and things like that.
That was mostly his claim to fame.
And so I thought, oh, God, now he's my friend, so I've got to read the script.
And I read the first page, and I thought, holy Moses, this guy really knew James Bond.
And I remember visiting him.
He came to England to film them.
And I remember visiting him, and they had him put up in the nicest hotel in, I think it was the Savoy or something, in a luxury suite.
He was smoking the finest cigarettes, drinking the finest whiskey, had these beautiful cut glass crystals, a beautiful silver ashtray.
And I said, hey, Bruce, how's this going?
And he said, it's hell.
I thought some people are hard to please.
So GoldenEye is a pretty good one.
I think that's one of the ones he wrote.
So Die Another Day is hated, but I thought it was really good.
And that's another one Bruce wrote.
And it had, you know, Bruce, you know, is a little bit, he's kind of one of us.
And he has the line in that one where somebody says one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
And James Bond said, I don't think this guy's fighting for freedom.
Because those were the days when they would say, well, maybe these terrorists are freedom fighters.
And that kind of undercut that argument.
And they only ever quote the line, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, but they never quote James Bond's actual answer.
So that was a very good one.
This, to me, Casino Royale, is probably the greatest James Bond film.
And it's very, very loyal to the book.
Daniel Craig is spectacular.
He brings back James Bond's absolutely bloodthirsty, cold-blooded violence.
He is, you know, he's a little bit more sensitive, but it really is a good film.
And it doesn't date like the Connery ones does.
It's more modern.
Quantums Fallus, I thought, just absolutely blew.
Is There a Blow?
It blew writing, yes, and then ABCD, and then it just blew.
Just terrible, and also included pro-socialist lines, which I thought was hilarious since James Bond had single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union.
Skyfall, everybody liked that film, but I thought that film was basically about a guy with an Oedipal complex, and James Bond has to stop him from, I won't give it away, but it's nothing.
I mean, in the old days, James Bond was saving the world, and this he's saving like one person.
And I thought it was well filmed, and it was okay, but you know, it was not a great film.
Specter, I did see this, but I don't remember it.
Oh, yeah, this is another one.
It got very personal.
It was all right.
It was okay.
And had a really good opening action scene.
No Time to Die.
I think I finally got sick of this.
I think I got sick of Daniel Craig and stopped watching it again.
Oh, and the Casino Royale, of course, with Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, and Peter O'Toole, where it's a different, that's a spoof, and it's a different one every time.
I thought it was awful.
I didn't even think it was funny.
So there you go.
So have a happy Thanksgiving and watch James Bond.
I don't know why, why don't you watch something like Thanksgiving like, you know, where people have, like, wasn't there that one about the Plymouth Rock or something?
I can't remember what it's called.
The Plymouth Adventure, I think it's called the Spencer Tracy.
Watch something like that.
Why would you watch James Bond on Thanksgiving?
But if you do, happy Thanksgiving.
And if you don't, happy Thanksgiving.
If you were thankful for that video, like and subscribe.