haynestown

In case you’ve just been roused from your Thanksgiving Day coma, it’s afterglow week now. The four days of Frankenmeals, football rivalries, and marathons (the eating kind, not the running kind) are over.

While I recovered from the brute force assaults to my glycemic index, I was able to catch quite a few of yet another kind of marathon. Yes, I’m talking about MOVIE MARATHONS. Hour after hour of movies, then the sequel, then the third sequel, then the…well, you get it. Lord of the Rings. Back to the Future. And of course, James Bond.

I’ll admit, I’m a big 007 fan. Not so big that I have tuxedo pajamas or a Walther PPK pistol, but I do enjoy the movies. I’ll also admit they’re a bit predictable, and usually follow this storyline:

– Bond gets an assignment.

-Bond gets the girl.

-Bond gets the girl killed.

-Bond meets another girl who’s often the bad guy’s girl.

-Bond almost gets killed by long, villainous speeches and ridiculously slow death machines.

-Bond kills the bad guy, and then celebrates by spit-roasting the girlfriend.

-Roll credits

I don’t mean to spoil the ending for you, but you’ve now seen practically every 007 movie. Different bad guys. Different locations. Common themes. And they got me thinking. There are things people notice about the movies and other things, I wonder, is it just me?

For example: Any guy with time on his hands and a DVD player can tally up how many people Bond has killed over the course of twenty-four movies. Depending on whose count you go with, it sits right around 400. That’s enough to think twice about replying to a Craigslist ad looking for evil henchmen.

Also, after taking down two more ladies in Spectre, he’s now hooked up with 57 women while on screen. Hopefully the team at MI-6 has given the old dog an STD screen by now. And a vasectomy.

Everyone knows he loooves the martinis. And, to be precise, he loves a drink every eleven minutes when averaged out. If Bond really drank that much, he wouldn’t be killing anything but his liver.

But it’s the subtle stuff that eats at me, probably because I travel a lot and have run into the everyday problems that the movies just gloss over. Luggage. New Shoes. Time gaps. Somethings not 00-adding up!

How the hell can he fly to, oh I don’t know, Tunisia, with no luggage and then magically appear the next morning in a tailored suit? And that night in a tuxedo? Where the f… would he find a store in GooliGoomba village that has Aeropostale, much less Armani? Did Khali-tick-tick-Hana stay up all night sewing? You can’t buy that off a rack. Just once I’d like to see him sporting un-hemmed trousers or some real desperation shit from Coming to America.

Same goes for shoes. I doubt there are many Church or Fratelli Rosetti stores in the Patagonian desert. But hey, I guess if we’re supposed buy that he can ski right through a building, we can believe anything.

Or not. Again…new, slim-cut suits and new leather-soled shoes. How can he do all that parkour on the rooftop gymnastics shit, or even run across a shopping mall in brand new shoes without busting his ass or at least popping a pant seam?

I’m not buying it. Nope.

But I’ll still buy a ticket to the next movie all the same. Oh, James…you had me at hello.

If you’d like to more 007 facts, here’s where I got a few of mine:

http://time.com/james-bond-spectre-007-deadliest/