News and Notes
Commentary From the Editors
Monday, December 21, 2009
Karl Lagerfeld Can Make Any Occasion Scary
Our friends at WENN sent us many photos of Karl Lagerfeld this year.Has a fashion designer ever looked more like a James Bond villain?
Lagerfeld at a festive holiday party with the director of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, Prince Albert II, and Princess Caroline.
A giddy Lagerfeld enjoying Paris Fashion Week with Pixie Lott and friends.
"I will strangle Bond with my bare fingertips." Lagerfeld in St. Tropez in July.
Lagerfeld relaxes with his henchwomen at a Paris movie premiere in June.
"Chuck Berry. You are dead to me." Lagerfeld haunts the rock legend and Princess Caroline at a benefit in Monaco in March.
But which is the acolyte? Lagerfeld pays homage to Chairman Mao at an Andy Warhol exhibition in Paris in March.
Can't wait to see what 2010 will bring!
Learn more about Lagerfeld >>
Learn more about Blofeld >>
Labels: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, James Bond, Karl Lagerfeld
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 10:33 AM0 comments 
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Happy 10th Deathday, Desmond "Q" Llewelyn
Llewelyn played the crusty, exasperated civil servant in 17 different Bond films, from From Russia With Love in 1963 to The World Is Not Enough in 1999, just before his death.
He worked with five Bonds in all: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan. He was succeeded by John Cleese as a new 'Q' in the 2002 film Die Another Day.
Good luck to you, Mr. Llewelyn, wherever you are!
Labels: Celebrity Deaths, Desmond Llewelyn, James Bond
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 12:47 PM0 comments
Monday, November 09, 2009
James Bond Hates Foie Gras?
It seems to me that I distinctly remember James Bond liking foie gras.
Nonetheless, here he was protesting it in Britain over the weekend.
Labels: James Bond, Roger Moore
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 7:15 PM0 comments
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Why G.I. Joe Doesn't Exactly Exist
We've added a profile of G.I. Joe, just in time for the movie being released this weekend.Histories of the doll make it pretty clear that Joe's creation in 1964 was a direct response to Barbie's popularity with girls. Hasbro freely admits they coined the term "action figure" because they were afraid boys wouldn't play with "dolls."
I was halfway through the profile before I realized that there is not, and never really has been, any one individual character or doll named G.I. Joe. From the start Hasbro had different versions of the doll -- soldier, sailor, pilot, marine, etc. -- and at first they gave them all nicknames. Soon enough they gave up on the nicknames and just released them all under the name of G.I. Joe. None was THE G.I. Joe... though in the early days there was a main cleancut doll who seems (to me) to have been the "real" Joe.
The dolls died out in the 1970s but came back in the 1980s, with a TV cartoon that cranked up a whole separate backstory in which "G.I. Joe" is the name of an umbrella organization of fist-fighting adventurers and soldiers. Their main enemies are the terrorist group COBRA, bad guys with capital letters in the tradition of James Bond's SPECTRE and SMERSH. That G.I. Joe strain that gave us the movie coming out this weekend, with Channing Tatum in the alpha-Joe role of Duke and Dennis Quaid as good-guy General Hawk.
And nobody named "G.I. Joe."
Labels: Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, G.I. Joe, James Bond
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 8:57 PM0 comments
