It’s a funny thing about the 00s, in that they have such short expectancy. And yet every little thing surrounding them just keeps right-on evolving. All six of the leading men who’ve portrayed 007 are still very much alive. Meanwhile, James Bond’s legacy, which seemed so stunningly anemic just a few short years ago, is suddenly rejuvenated (thanks in large part to the Skyfall). And so here now, in that spirit, IFB presents a ranking of all six Bonds – past and present – in terms of each actor’s relevance, if not his ability to put a new stamp on the franchise.

1. Sean Connery. Connery represented the epitome of suave, and – as such – his Bond was both a chauvinist and a lothario. Yet he somehow managed to bring class to the role. Sean Connery had that brogue, if not the bone structure and chest hair to go with it. But he also carried himself with unprecedented poise. You could see it in the way he’d shoot his cuffs or light a smoke. Whatever “it” was, Sean Connery most definitely had it. In fact, one might even argue that there wouldn’t be a Bond had it not been for Mr. Connery. Rumor has it United Artists wanted Cary Grant cast in the role, but Albert Broccoli kept steering them toward the Scot (Keep in mind, Grant was not only an American, he was also only willing to agree to a one-picture deal). Connery may very well have proven himself a ripe and mangy bastard, but he cast a looming shadow that has yet to disappear.

2. Daniel Craig.  All anyone needs to know about Daniel Craig’s portrayal of 007 is this: The guy has only appeared in three James Bond pictures to date, and two of them are among the top five Bond films of all-time. Daniel Craig represents the reinvention of 007 as a callous blunt-force object. Granted, he’s been the beneficiary of great writing. But great writing has also been the beneficiary of him. For it is Craig’s Bond, perhaps more so than any other, that underscores the vast importance of simply playing it as it lays. Over the past five years, Daniel Craig has transformed the MI agent into a stone-cold killer with steel jowls. What’s more, Craig’s got those stunning, deep-set eyes … the kind that might very well have rendered him a pretty boy, had it not been for that scowl.

3. Roger Moore. Roger Moore’s tenure began auspiciously, as producers could not agree on whether to cast him. And who could blame them, really? Studio execs had just been taken for a ride thanks to Connery, not to mention the whole mess with Mr. Lazenby between. There was pressure now …. mounting pressure to find a permanent replacement. It was a make-or-break moment, not only for said actor, but for all of James Bond’s financiers as well. Choose the wrong man, and critics might say it was all just Sean Connery. Choose the right man, and you breathe new life into Bond’s gills. To that end, Roger Moore represented a more refined 007, if not a chivalrous step down. And yet, Moore not only proved himself completely worthy of the mantle, he also exorcised the ample specter of Mr. Connery in the process.

4. Pierce Brosnan. An unfortunate pattern had emerged by the time Mr. Brosnan came along – a good-Bond-bad-Bond scenario via which filmmakers had gone from Connery to Lazenby, then Lazenby to Moore; from Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton, and then from Dalton onto Brosnan. History was on Brosnan’s side. But it had nearly six long years to put James Bond back on the screen. To his credit, Pierce Brosnan was able to reinvigorate the Bond mystique. He was not only good, but exceptional as 007, despite never reaching the elite heights of Mr. Connery or Craig. Brosnan was, is, and always will be the one and only Clinton-era 007 – for better or for worse, a stunning reflection of said values.

5. Timothy Dalton. Dalton was a Shakespearean actor by trade, a lifelong student of the theater who more than likely should have stayed there. He brought very little to the role in terms of breaking hallowed ground. Timothy Dalton was a place-keeper, so to speak, slotted in at the last moment when Mr. Brosnan couldn’t wrangle free from Remington Steele. Dalton’s was a stunningly bland era, marred by regrettable one-liners and mediocre press reviews. He would almost assuredly land square at the bottom of the barrel, had it not been for a virtual unknown by the name of …     

6. George Lazenby. “This never happened to the other fella.” No, no, it sure didn’t, Mr. Lazenby. While scriptwriters might have assumed this throwaway line little more than an homage, long-time aficionados came to view it as a vote of middling confidence. From day one, Mr. Lazenby – the small-time wannabe who literally forced his way onto the lot – was resigned to becoming little more than a brief footnote in Bond’s symphony. The good news is modern die-hards now regard George with a modicum of respect. As a result, the man’s become a major hit on conference circuits, raking in some worthwhile cash along the way. Lazenby was neither the first Bond, nor the best Bond. Instead, he was just a Bond, which – while infinitely more tragic – is obviously good enough for government work.     

The Italian version of Black Sabbath was released as something called I Tre Volti Della Paura, which – literally translated – means The Three Faces of Fear. True to form, Mario Bava’s triple-feature presents three separate works of horror, each of which maintains some eery similarity to the others. All three involve the undead (at least in the American version), all three involve revenge, and all three are highly indicative of the Hitchcockian belief that a slow-ticking suitcase will almost always trump the exploding bomb.

The American Black Sabbath swaps the order of the Italian original, placing the two most similar features back-to-back. This creates an odd mirror effect, allowing the audience to pick up on various cues (i.e., two films, two single women who live alone in a small apartment, both of whom are interrupted by an unexpected phone call, both of whom eventually find themselves struggling just to make it through the night, both of whom have good reason to fear retribution from the dead).

In terms of modern cinema, most of the mechanisms Bava uses in Black Sabbath have since been rendered antiquated, if not wholly obsolete. You’ve got tumbleweed and nickelodeon filters; you’ve got weak dialogue (e.g., “It’s as if she’d been frightened to death!”) set along some creepy discourse (“What’s the matter with you, woman? Can I not fondle my own grandson?”). And yet, this is precisely the type of thing that happens to all great cinema over time. This is how cliches become cliches, for lack of any better way of putting it. Time – and time alone – is enough to reduce even the best ideas into suey.

Despite that, Black Sabbath has managed to find its own freak niche over the years, thanks in large part to Ozzy Osbourne, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen Brothers (among others). The film is certainly an odd, if-not-fascinating detour for anyone who has interest in such things. In fact, it may even be of interest to casual fans of Boris Karloff (This despite the fact Karloff looks and sounds more like an aging Vonnegut in this film).

Beyond that, the problem is not so much that Black Sabbath wasn’t a decent horror film in its heyday as it is that people have just kind of gotten beyond that whole thing (i.e., the creature-double-feature, etc.). To convince an average viewer to sit still for 95 minutes while watching aging cinema like this would be to convince him or her that there was literally nothing else on TV, which may very well be true, but doesn’t make persuasion any easier.

(Black Sabbath is currently streaming via Netflix.)

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“In 1947, Anita Summers, the mother of my long-time mentor Larry Summers was hired as an economist by the Standard Oil Company. When she accepted the job, her new boss said to her, ‘I am so glad to have you. I figure I am getting the same brains for less money.’ Her reaction to this was to feel flattered. It was a huge compliment to be told she had the same brains as a man. It would have been unthinkable for her to ask for equal compensation. We feel even more grateful when we compare our lives to those of other women around the world. There are still countries that deny women basic civil rights. Worldwide, about 4.4 million women and girls are trapped in the sex trade. In places like Afghanistan and Sudan, girls receive little or no education, wives are treated as the property of their husbands, and women who are raped are routinely cast out of their homes for disgracing their families. Some rape victims are even sent to jail for committing a “moral crime” … The blunt truth is that men still run the world. Of the 195 independent countries of the world, only 17 are led by women. Women hold just 20% of seats in parliaments globally. In the United States, where we pride ourselves on liberty and justice for all, the gender division of leadership roles is not much better. Women became 50% of the college graduates in the United States in the early 1980s. Since then, women have slowly and steadily advanced, earning more and more of the college degrees, taking more of the entry-level jobs, and entering more fields previously dominated by men. Despite these gains, the percentage of women at the top of corporate America has barely budged over the past decade. A meager 21 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Women hold about 14% of executive officer positions, 17% of board seats, and constitute 18% of our elected congressional officials. The gap is even worse for women of color, who hold just 4% of top corporate jobs, 3% of board seats, and 5% of congressional seats. While women continue to outpace men in educational achievement, we have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry. This means when it comes to making the decisions that most affect our world, women’s voices are not heard equally. Progress remains equally sluggish when it comes to compensation. In 1970, women were paid 59 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made. By 2010, women had protested, fought, and worked their butts off to raise that compensation to 77 cents for every dollar men made. As activist Marlo Thomas wryly joked on Equal Pay Day 2011, “Forty years and 18 cents. A dozen eggs have gone up 10 times that amount.”

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“People ask what are my intentions with my films, my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the Cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed – master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the Cathedral of Chartres. Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values,’ ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil – or perhaps a saint – out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the
collective building of the cathedral.”

The primary bone of contention surrounding the release of Disney’s Oz this week had very little to do with storylines or big-name actors. Instead, most media outlets felt compelled, if not hell-bent, to zero in on new reports that Disney’s prequel was forbidden use of any property from Warner’s original Wizard of Oz movie … a restriction that not only limited the new film’s possibility, but also led skeptics to question Disney’s motives.

And yet, Sam Raimi’s new Oz overwhelmingly succeeds because it acknowledges all that pretense from the get-go. Keep in mind, the fresh young Wizard is really nothing but a fraud who gives great strength to desperate masses, the devil is an heiress masquerading as a princess, shady hucksters make their fortunes based on murder and deception, and the whole economy is based on building the complex machinery of war. We’re experiencing a brave new Oz here, one in which the constant goal is to convince the lifelong loyalists that you’ve found their true messiah.

I mean, there are some weak points, to be sure. But they all seem very minor in comparison. And so I’ll simply recommend that you go and see this movie. For according to the Great and Powerful Oz, an audience’s only true responsibility is that it “show up, keep up, and shut up.”

Seems like a pretty decent way to spend a Friday.

Zim-zala-bim.

Merry Christmas and Good Night.

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It certainly is one hell of an affair, all this crazy warehouse art fair bullshit. On the one hand, you’ve got a ton of A-list talent showing off their greatest work. On the other, you’ve got all this whacked-out tradeshow nonsense, including cheap swag and corporate kiosks; keynote speakers and group panels. It’s not so much the intersection of two divergent interests as it is a 10-car pile-up somewhere along the side of Art & Commerce.

Either way, it certainly is what’s going on this weekend, thanks to a pair of traveling sideshows – one being held at the newly renovated Armory, the other all the way across town at Pier 92/94. The Art Show at The Armory is celebrating its 25th year, with a pretty unbelievable array of top-notch talent on its roster. The Armory Show, meanwhile, offers a lot more in sheer terms of quantity and quality. The only issue with either being the entire premise just kind of falls flat on its face. I mean, during peak hours, the foot traffic alone is enough to make one question what it is he or she is actually doing there to begin with. Meanwhile, the price of admission is ridiculous and the on-site costs will suck you dry.

As a general rule, if you are attending one of these events as a necessary matter of business, well, then, more power to you. If, on the other hand, you’re an out-of-towner wholly interested in the redemptive power of great art, you’d be just as well served to go birdwatching in the center of Times Square as you would be trying to enjoy a meditative experience in the midst of all this dog and pony.

(The Armory Show and The Art Show at The Armory both run from now through Sunday, March 10th. General admission to The Armory Show is $30. Admission for The Art Show is $25).

Five More For the Offing:

• New Paintings of Classic Cars by Cheryl Kelley at the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery (Free, through 4/6, 37 West 57th Street)
• NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star at The New Museum ($14, 235 Bowery, through 5/26) 
• They Were, They Are, They Will at the Atlantic Gallery (Free, through 3/18, 548 West 28th Street, Suite 540)
• Works of the Jenney Archive at the Gagosian Gallery (Free, through 4/27, 980 Madison Avenue)
• New York Foundation For the Arts online auction of emerging artists work (Free, ongoing, obtain free membership to browse or buy online via Artspace)

1. The Wizard of Oz (1939). What if God was just a fairytale?
2. Gone With the Wind (1939). Southern madame mourns the sudden death of Dixieland.
3. Citizen Kane (1941). Wealthy magnate comes to find there’s more to life than money.
4. The Seventh Seal (1957). Medieval Knight plays chess with Black Plague, discovers life is really nothing more than a blatant series of maneuvers, each of which is meant to either forward an agenda or prevent a future loss.
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Early man plants the very seeds of own destruction.
6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968). New York City housewife discovers the devil resides not only inside the luxurious Dakota, but also inside of her, her loving husband, her aging neighbors, and just about every other social climber on the planet.
7. Rocky (1976). Self-actualizing boxer comes to recognize his meditative journey as reward.
8. Star Wars (1977). High priests fight for control in a cosmic galaxy secretly guided by an ethereal force which simultaneously happens to be both the impetus and the overriding justification for every action ever taken.
9. The Outsiders (1983). Rival gangs come to find the view is fairly similar regardless of which side of the tracks one happens to be standing on.
10. The Breakfast Club (1985). Eclectic group of detainees unlock the secrets of existence, developing wholly meta outlook on adolescence in the process.  
11. Top Gun (1986). Unrepentant homosexual earns acceptance into mainstream.
12. Wall Street (1987). “Greed – for lack of a better word – greed is bad. Greed is wrong. Greed does not work. Greed muddies the waters and disrupts natural order. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, or knowledge – has marked the downward spiral of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only ruin the economy, but that other malfunctioning corporation we call the U.S.A.”
13. The Fisher King (1991). Poor man rescues rich man, asks for nothing in return. Rich man rescues poor man, thinking this might absolve him of past sins.
14. Natural Born Killers (1994). Charismatic serial killers adjust to newfound celebrity, enlist mainstream media to handle free publicity.
15. Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). Struggling teacher awakens one morning to find his own life may represent the greatest symphony of all.
16. American Beauty (1999). Mid-life suburban housedad decides to bypass the American dream for a much more fulfilling – albeit short-term – existence.
17. Fight Club (1999). White-collar insomniac takes to beating himself up, based on several mounting layers of self-loathing and resentment.
18. Summer of Sam (1999). Rising tensions reach their boiling point in New York City, 1977.
19. Memento (2000). Ante-amnesiac discovers just how quickly the post-modern world simply tends to forget.
20. Match Point (2005). Struggling jock becomes aristocrat, only to find that execution is mostly incumbent on blind luck.
21. The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Dickensian phoenix rises from the ashes, becomes shape-shifting martyr for slow-dying city.
22. Arbitrage (2012). Taut psychological thriller during which every character has one hand stuck inside another’s pocket.
23. Skyfall (2012). Old dog learns new tricks after setting fire to Scottish wasteland of his youth.
24. Iron Man 3 (2013). American icon seeks revenge against Mandarin terrorist.
25. Man of Steel (2013). What if God was one of us?

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“I think that the most important thing for any human being to understand is who you are and why you are on this planet. What is your purpose? For somebody, their entire purpose is to be mother, and to be free to have children and reproduce. And another person need to be architect, and another person need to be baker and bake the bread; and another one, a gardener. I mean, every single human being has his own quality, and the most important is to find your own center in life, and to understand who you are, and not spend energy doubting. The biggest problem, especially with young people, is doubt. Y’know, there are so much things to presume, and you like this, and then you don’t like that; then you try this or try that. And you’re losing so much energy, and you’re losing yourself, and you’re losing perspective on who you are. The moment you find who you are, and you know your purpose, then, ‘This is it.'”