Word: worlds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world's a movie, and young men have their favorite characters in it. At first the infant, amidst his mewling and puking, finds time for admiring a DC superhero--Batman, Superman or another. Then, the whining schoolboy serves his apprenticeship to a star athlete. Only in adolescence, however, do maturing young men, be they lovers or soldiers, recognize the virtues of British secret agents...
...those in the latter set (this writer included), the release of a new James Bond film is met with eager anticipation, followed by boyish glee. It is almost like Christmas, but rarer. And Bond's latest, The World Is Not Enough, is no exception...
James Bond films--the first of which, Dr. No, premiered in 1962--were well-suited to the Cold War's ideological fervor. It must have been great fun to watch Bond outwit and outclass hapless Commies. World is the third Bond film since the end of the Cold War and, while its Russophobia is still pronounced, the conflict has lost most of its prior urgency. Avarice and vainglory have replaced zealous patriotism as the cardinal passions of Bond's adversaries...
...womanizer. This may be true, but it doesn't give Bond girls nearly enough credit. While most women in Bond films are, so to speak, "charmed" at least once by Bond, they are by no means undiscriminating. For instance, upon Bond's arrival at an Afghanistan construction site in World, a foreman, terse with unrequited affection, tells him that Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), a shapely airhead-cum-nuclear physicist, is a lesbian. Suffice to say, Bond proves the unlucky foreman wrong...
Also, most Bond girls pursue challenging careers in traditionally male-dominated fields. Pussy Galore was a pilot; Holly Goodhead, an astrophysicist; Xenia Onatopp, a world-class terrorist...