Bond Girls Are Forever (2002)

hyped garbage

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This 46-minute look at the history of an essential part of the Bond phenomenon is certainly entertaining and at times even wonderful to watch: along with clips from several Bond movies (accompanied by their own music score), we get interviews from several former Bond girls who are now gracefully aging, intelligent women (Honor Blackman, who was around 75 when this was filmed, looks amazing for her age and still has that characteristic toughness in her voice). Most of them fully embrace their long-standing popularity, but there is one (Maud Adams) who seems to want to cut off most connections to the past. The documentary is also a good reminder of how many strong female characters have been introduced in this series; of course there also have been films like "The Man With The Golden Gun", with one bimbo and one victim, but in total the Bond series is not sexist, even if the Bond character himself is. However, there are too many omissions (among the most important ones: Carole Bouquet is not seen at all, and both "Goldeneye" girls are seen only in clips) for "Bond Girls Are Forever" to qualify as the definitive documentary on the subject. (**1/2)

Miriam D'Abo, Olivia's sister, narrates this documentary as she interviews some of the women who were Bond girls. The girls in the doc all enjoyed being able to show off their femininity, to be beautiful and, in some cases, to show off their strength. It's interesting to see the four main eras of Bond girls, from the relatively placid girls of the Connery age to the forced sex slaves of the Roger Moore era to the de-sexed Dalton girls to the tougher girls of the Brosnan films, from the perspective of the actresses who lived through them. Strangely though, some of the films are ignored, You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and From a View To a Kill, and with the exception of Ursalla Andress, Honor Blackman, and Carey Lowell, the interviews are too short. Miriam D'Abo is also not the first Bond girl that you would think of to host a documentary on them and a club that includes some ninety women over twenty some films should probably have more than an hour dedicated to them. Despite all this, it's still a satisfying hour that brings up some interesting points to buffs.

Originally created for TV's American Movie Classics to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the first James Bond film, "Bond Girls Are Forever" (2002) collected film footage and new interviews with the leading ladies of those first twenty or so Bond films. The short documentary was slightly revamped in 2006 to include information about the film "Casino Royale". The documentary was co-created and is narrated by Maryam D'Abo, who played one of the more helpless and overall useless Bond girls in 1987's "The Living Daylights" opposite Timothy Dalton. She tracks down most of her Bond movie sorority sisters (a comparison made in the film) to discuss the significance in their lives and careers of having appeared in the series. There's certain repetitiveness to her discoveries, however for hardcore Bond fans the opportunity to see these women again is both exhilarating and disappointing, given the overarching mystique and fantasy elements of their presence in their respective films. The feminist criticism of the series and the empowerment of female characters within the past several entries is discussed, however the absence of Grace Jones, Roger Moore's adversary in "A View to a Kill", was felt by this viewer (as well as the other Moore era actresses Carole Bouquet, Barbara Bach, and Tanya Roberts). Though "Bond Girls are Forever" is a far more interesting entry into the Bond legacy than many other shows made about the phenomena there's a shallowness about it that's equivalent to many of the characters several of the women interviewed portrayed.

With a title like this one, you'd expect the usual, fluffy, ET-type of superficial clip flick. To my surprise, however, this retrospective/interview documentary, hosted (quite well) by former Bond girl Maryam D'Abo, turns out to be highly watchable, and not just for all the requisite clips of attractive women in bikinis. D'Abo, who co-wrote the script as well as hosted the interviews, does an excellent job of 'bonding' (ouch!) with her fellow eye-candy compatriots, and it really is fun (and interesting) to see the evolution of the role over time.Since the film was made some 40 years after Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore rolled in the hay with Sean Connery, and that image is firmly fixed in our cultural consciousness, it is somewhat disconcerting to see her now, white-haired and pushing 80 (but still regal). On the other hand, most of the more recent vintage actresses seem to have aged surprisingly well, and (at least to my mind) come across even sexier today than they did in their films. This is not the least because they are allowed to speak their minds without a script. Surprise, surprise, instead of just being decorative, many of them come across as being thoughtful, gracious and eloquent.The interviews with D'Abo were filmed casually, usually in public settings such as restaurants, bars or parks, but with extremely high production values. And since the film was made with the support of the franchise owners, there are more than enough clips from the original films to satisfy even hard core fans.While this was shot in 2002, AMC is running it in rotation now with the Bond films themselves, so I'd suggest that you set your Tivo to record it for you so that you can watch it at your leisure.