Work needed on “guidelines” for practical application of Goldfinger Standard

While I think it important to develop and apply “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 (museum) 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 displayed on an individually-accessed CRT, 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 gallery had been setup as a drab and depressing move through a World War II vignette à la Berlin Wall. One question from that display 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 the honors.

At this point I suppose some will find it necessary that I disclose my score — so I’ll disclose that 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 what I’ve read and own about “the fictional James Bond character.” Some are better than others; only a few are personal favorites.

So it is not out of laziness or ignorance that I plan to draw lines (albeit, in some cases softer, if not broken lines) for comparing films here on cue Goldfinger. Criteria don’t always have to be fun. But they surely should not make users miserable, least of all, because they are gratuitous.

The world already has far too many film critics (be they professional or wannabe) who create irrationally exotic, if not outright reverse-engineered standards otherwise inaccessible to the average, real-world viewer — which, when applied Just so! make any objectively awful motion picture seem irrefutably best-of-the-best.

That’s not me.