While I think development and application of “rules” for assessing James Bond movies against a structured “Goldfinger Standard” here, I also have my eyes on practical need to establish general boundaries.
This harkens to an experience I had when visiting the “Bond, James Bond” special exhibition gallery at The Henry Ford in 2003. Billed as celebration of forty years for the official motion picture franchise, it featured a wide variety of original props seen on screen.
Visitors were issued unique, plastic, individually numbered cards with bar code strips on the back. The idea was to stop at stations placed variously throughout the layout and answer questions. At the end, special recognition status “rank” was bestowed (although only to the card holder), based on number of correct responses.
My goodness! Whatever I may have thought I knew as someone who’d more-than-watched every film, more-than-exactingly-focused on detail and nuance, the design of the instrument struck me as more of a Trivial Pursuit game than assessment of one who’d entered a fictional world of discrete runs and come home to report back. The first area of the layout was a drab and depressing move through a World War II vignette à la Berlin Wall. One question that has struck with me now almost twenty years later had to do with naming the director who was originally tapped to help such-and-so, before before another guy came along to do honors.
At this point I suppose some will find it necessary that I disclose my score — and it was that of highest rank attainable.
But it was not only a miserable process in getting there, and one that undermined the fun of it. Additionally, it missed the fundamental point of this character, this world, and this means of storytelling.
As I write this blog post, I can see several shelves on the bookcase here in my office which hold only a fraction of the books I’ve read and own about “the fictional James Bond character.” Without looking further, I doubt that these are limited to the best or my favorites.
So it is not out of laziness or ignorance that I plan to draw the lines (albeit, in some cases softer, if not broken lines). It is, rather, out of a commitment to practical users of “The Goldfinger Standard” to come.
The world already has far too many film critics who create irrationally exotic, if not outright reverse-engineered standards otherwise inaccessible to the average, real-world viewer — which, when applied Just so! will make any objectively awful motion picture seem irrefutably best-of-the-best.
That’s not me.
