Shaken and Stirred

When it comes to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, there may not be another James Bond film that is more divisive amongst fans. Tending to have people falling on either the love it or hate it side. . . there are good arguments to be made in both camps – yet that is not something to be settled here today. No matter where you fall within this conversation, if you’re a Bond fan, the 2017 documentary Becoming Bond, written, directed and produced by Josh Greenbaum, is for you. As playful as any Bond film (and perhaps as implausible), George Lazenby (star of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – and the only actor to play 007 just once) narrates us through his fascinating life (including when Sean Connery decided to step away from the character. . . only to return once more after Lazenby decided not to put his John Hancock onto a seven film deal that included a one million dollar signing bonus – preferring freedom and a life over fame and fortune).

To be completely honest, when a producer acquaintance of mine, Noah Lang, who I met at the St. Lawrence International Film Festival several years ago, contacted me and was wondering if I would watch a documentary he was producing on ‘mudding’, I was wholly unaware of the term. Defined in the Urban Dictionary, “To go out in the mud in the back of a truck or jeep or other 4x4 vehicle and spin in the mud until all occupants are covered in mud”, directors Andrei Bowden-Schwartz and Sam B. Jones focus this topic on a family living in Orlando, Florida.

Matt Herron’s Audition is an exciting and original quasi-documentary that fuses together footage from an audition process where fifty couples (yes, that’s one hundred actors) vie for the final position of being the leading man and woman in a movie; the footage the couples film are then taken and spliced together to form the narrative movie they are auditioning for.