4. Tomorrow Never Dies

A brief one about a bond… a James and Matt bond…

On the early evening of January 28, 2003, my then girlfriend (now wife) Anne and I were strolling the aisles of the local Best Buy looking for a new sound system for her apartment. We had started dating the year prior and being involved with me means you end up watching a lot of geeky stuff, whether you fully intend to or not. Like… a lot a lot. It’s in the “required job duties” part of the job description, not the “other duties as assigned” part of the job request. “Other duties as assigned” would be something like laughing when someone says the word “duties.” But I digress… At a certain point, the speakers on the TV just weren’t doing justice to Frodo’s Ring quest, your 450th viewing of Die Hard, or the lightsaber battles I was subjecting Anne to. So after way too much deliberation over way too many days and weeks, we settled on a multifunction audio system that had 6 different speakers and a five disc DVD changer (because who does’t have 5 movies lined up back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back), with the hope that it would more than adequately fill her spacious 10ft by 10ft apartment living room with theater level sound. Crank it up! Hope you like John Williams music, people above us and people below us.

We got home and started setting it up, amateurishly putting all 6 speakers on the entertainment center in front of the room. I’d be willing to bet that 65% of people who get surround sound systems do the same thing, even in 2023. Back in the 80s and early 90s, people (divorced dads and uncles, mostly) used to show off their high-fidelity sound systems with either the opening scene of Top Gun or with an Eagles concert on LaserDisc (no band exudes more divorced dad energy than the Eagles). But for me, being just an uncle at that time, I knew the very scene I wanted to use to test our new sound system and cued up the pretty spectacular (and underrated) James Bond car scene from Tomorrow Never Dies. Even though it’s a 4 door sedan and even though it’s a BMW (instead of the iconic and sleek two-door DB5 Aston Martin), that is a top-tier James Bond car scene.

I love James Bond movies. I always have and I likely always will. I recognize that most of the Bond movies are bad, and nearly all of them are pretty problematic on a variety of fronts, but they’re a guilty pleasure. I just dig them. So did my dad. It was fun to share that with him.

My dad revered the Bond movies the way people now revere the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He’d tell me stories about how he’d skip school to watch a new one when it’d come out. He carried that tradition into his adulthood and would occasionally skip a day of work to watch the latest release while eating a big bucket of popcorn. My dad was pretty much a “keep to your commitments” kind of guy so it always makes me smile to think of him calling in sick to watch a movie all by himself in a darkened theater, something I’ve been known to do on occasion.

We’d talk often about the Bond movies but these were always the big topics:

• Favorite Scenes: He was partial to the Goldfinger car chase. That scene seems tame now, but must have been pretty mindblowing in 1963, what with its wild oil slicks coming out the bumper and ejector seats sending henchmen flying. I always dug the aforementioned car scene from Tomorrow Never Dies, which has some pretty spectacular gadgetry on display, along with some pretty fun soundtrack moments.
• Best movies: He loved Goldfinger. That was the most complete Bond movie to my dad. Connery was never better. He was serious but also dropping great one-liners. His car was tight. The Bond girls were great. Mine (at the time) was Goldeneye, which seemed to capture some of what has made Bond special over the years. It was serious at times, but definitely winked at the camera a lot.
• Best Bond Girls – My dad liked Pussy Galore (no sentence has ever made me wince more as I typed) from Goldfinger. I liked Jane Seymour’s Solitaire from Live and Let Die. I mean… I don’t need to expand on the Bond girls subject do I? There’s a reason why Connery’s “I must be dreaming” line delivery is so iconic. Going to quit on this one before I fall too far behind. …that last sentence sounds like a corny late-era Roger Moore line about someone’s bum Let’s move on.
• Worst Bonds: He wasn’t a huge fan of late-era Roger Moore, which he felt was too campy and wasn’t a fan of Timothy Dalton, which he felt was too serious. “He didn’t even say ‘Bond… James, Bond” in one of his movies, as if that was a mortal sin as dictated by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman My answer was George Lazenby. He wasn’t bad per se, but pales in comparison to both Connery and Moore.

In a weird moment of synchronicity, as I was watching that iconic Tomorrow Never Dies car scene and one of my favorite Bond movies, my dad was having a widow-maker style heart attack about 300 miles south of us in Houston, Texas. No warning. No advanced aches and pains. No “you dodged a bullet, now go to a plant based diet” scare. Just here one moment, gone the next. Not even Bond himself was as efficient.

This post doesn’t have any kind of clever ending or an ending where everything gets tied up in a nice tuxedoed bow-tie. My dad and I liked James Bond movies and we talked about them often. He would have loved the Daniel Craig Bond movies, which started in 2006. I think when it was all said and done, Craig would have either been first or second on dad’s all-time “Best Bond” list. That he never got to witness them is one of those minor tragedies that happens when someone dies. The dearly departed miss out on the big stuff of life like weddings, grandkids, graduations, etc., but they also miss out on the minor stuff of life like the Astros winning the World Series, or a once in a generation political figure winning the 2008 election, or Daniel Craig as Bond.

Of the things he missed out on, “not seeing new Bond movies” is way, way, waaaay down on that second list. But it is on there somewhere… Maybe in the 007th spot