Darleen's mother gave us a Christmas check early this year. I used part of my half of the money to go see Die Another Day. I thought it was fantastic; probably the best of the Brosnan Bonds (Tomorrow Never Dies would be its competition) and one of the best in the series. I am delighted that 38 years after Ian Fleming's death and many years after Fleming's books stopped being used as source material, the Bond films are still as Flemingesque as ever.

But this is not why I'm posting. I'm posting because, I noticed part-way into the movie, that this 20th Bond film (excluding non-EON productions Never Say Never Again and both Casino Royales) seems to have taken a certain self-referential delight in celebrating how far it has come.

Die Another Day is *littered* with references to not only previous films but the Bond legacy itself. I was surprised to notice this, because I read reviews of the movie before attending, and I would have thought at least one of them would have talked about it. Anyway, it was great for the producers of the film to throw bones like that to the hardcore audience.

Here are the references I spotted. I'm certain I missed some, but that's what Google and the DVD are for.

1. Jinx's first appearance in the film has her emerging from the sea in a bikini, complete with a knife strapped to her waist. This is how Ursula Andress, the first Bond girl, made her first appearance in Dr. No. I can't take credit for recognizing this one (although I'm certain I would have) because this is the one that reviews *did* speak of.

2. My favorite: In an early scene in Havana, Bond looks at a book called "Birds of the West Indies." This was the title of the book that gave James Bond is name, back when Ian Fleming was wrote the very first Bond novel. He was trying to think of an ordinary, boring sort of name, and his eyes fell upon a book on his bookshelf called "Birds of the West Indies" by a man named James Bond. Fleming thought, well, that's a nice boring sort of name, and the rest is history. In the movie, though, I did not see that the book Bond held in its hand had an author's name on it.

3. On a plane, Bond reads an article in a magazine. The caption of a photograph contains "Diamonds Are Forever," the title of Bond film #7, which was the second of Sean Connery's three curtain calls for the Bond character.

4. In the scene with Q, Bond wanders through a warehouse-like room full of gadgets. One of them is a shoe with a knife embedded in the sole. This gadget is straight out of "From Russia With Love," but what's interesting is that it was the badguys, not Bond, that had them.

5. An instant later, Bond says, "Does this thing still work?" He's referring to a personal jetpack sort of device, used in what I think was "You Only Live Twice," but I could be mistaken about which film it was. It was around that time period, anyway.

6. Q gives Bond a watch and says it's his 20th. There haven't been 20 watches in the 20 Bond films, but I think it's pretty clear that Q wasn't talking about watches.

7. Graves makes his pompous public entrance by skydiving with a Union Jack parachute. This is a reference to the *fantastic* opening scene of "The Spy Who Loved Me." Minor spoilers in the footnote below.*

8. The breathing tube/mouthpiece Bond uses comes straight out of Thunderball.

There are a couple more possible references, but I'm not so sure that they're deliberate references as coincidental plot similarities. Minor spoilers in the rest of this paragraph as I explain: The story of "Diamonds Are Forever" also involves a diamond-powered satellite. The climactic end of "The Living Daylights" also involves escaping out of the cargo hatch of a plane. In that film, he escapes with a woman in a car. In this one, he escapes with a woman in a different kind of vehicle, while the cars are dumped out empty.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that there are more references in the Q scene, just because there could be so many previously used gadgets in the background. I wasn't watching for them, though; the writing in that Q scene was so good, I was paying attention to the characters instead.

Incidentally, I still take personal credit for the casting of John Cleese as Q in the new Bond films. (See the Site Journal, entry 3/13/99.) After seeing Die Another Day, I have decided that I deserve even more credit for this than I first imagined. Cleese is absolutely brilliant in it.

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* [Minor Spoilers] Later we learn that Graves's pompous public demeanor was fashioned in deliberate mockery of Bond himself. What better way to do it than to satirize one of his most elegantly Bondian moments in all the films?