When Spectre opens later this month,millions of devotees will flock to cinemas, alert for the accustomed rituals of sex, and death and redemption (and explosions)I was sitting at my desk,immersed in the role of the Calvinist church in Dutch history, the regular single flame of my concentration holding impressively regular, and when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen From Russia With savor for a few months. I hopped up from the chair to fix this. The main credits sequence,with its famous theme music booming around the house, alerted both sons from their different rooms, and we were all happily in position well before our favourite line,when the Spectre trainer speaks fondly of the killer, Grant: “Homicidal paranoiac – superb fabric.”I deem that a convincing case can now be made for James Bond having become a religion. You would bear to be retired to remember a world without Bond films, and very long retired to remember a world without the books. When the new film,Spectre, opens later this month, and millions of people (mostly men) all over the world will almost without thinking drift into cinemas to see the same kind of sequence of explosions,drinks, exotic locations, or glamorous dresses and cars that their fathers and their fathers’ fathers experienced in an event on a scale,if not a level of profundity, that can only be compared to the Kumbh Mela.
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Source: theguardian.com