Bond #26

We...got nothing right now. But a placeholder for the eventuality, since:

https://deadline.com/2022/06/james-bond-daniel-craig-next-007-reinventing-barbara-broccoli-1235053969/

they're finally going to make him gay

Bond power couple Babz Broccoli and Baz Bamigboye

what if bond were a cute little puppy who didn’t murder ppl for his government and just hopped around in a field for three hours

BradNelson as the new Bond

would watch, it would have an excellent soundtrack and I can't wait for the Hayley Williams theme.

Bring Craig back, but totally abandon the glowering moroseness of the last four movies - in fact, pretend that none of that stuff happened at all. Hard reboot, back to the louche smirking and clownish gadgetry of the Roger Moore era.

Would still love to see Moonraker as a period adaptation

Otherwise, it's not Bond that needs fixing but the scripts and tone, i.e. they need to be less morose and more jolly (but not too jolly)

Or - the tone of the Brosnan movies, except good

They hit the right tone with You Only Live Twice and Live and Let Die. Let those be their starting point.

those are interesting bond movies to pick as examples of the right tone. yellowface in you only live twice throws the whole thing off for me but it is otherwise awesome. live and let die is the only moore movie where he’s as brutal as connery and it works

i would take a million more bond movies like for your eyes only and the living daylights, personally

They hit the right tone with You Only Live Twice and Live and Let Die. Let those be their starting point.

But maybe minus the air-raid-siren racism...

xpost

it's gonna be like that dylan movie where different actors play Bond at different parts in his life... susan sarandon, yahoo serious, josh groban, etc.

I just don't want to be denied the "and, funnily enough, that was how I escaped the rockets on the island, and why i ended up having this radical plastic surgery" scene

I guess I have a soft spot for You Only Live Twice because it's the first Bond movie I ever saw (my folks took me to the drive in to see it, must have been about 68-69). I agree about the racism, but Roald Dahl wrote the script, plus it was the 60s, so no surprise. On the plus side, the gadgetry and locations were fantastic. The scene of Bond being rescued from an underwater casket has stayed with me for more than 50 years.

It was a double feature with Thunderball. Those were the days.

Would still love to see Moonraker as a period adaptation

Still my number one dream. Would absolutely kill for the whole initial sequence at the club and the bridge game.

i would take a million more bond movies like for your eyes only and the living daylights, personally

My two favorites from when I first got into Bond as a whole in the eighties, easy. And pretty rewatchable, based on my dive into them all again the other year. (Separately, with the exception of some choppy efforts for the Craig ones, every current Blu-ray/4K version of the films is absolutely top flight in terms of supplemental materials, commentary and so forth, building up over time via their initial 90s laserdisc efforts, and Roger Moore's own separate commentaries on his films, which he freely admits to being more general memories of his experiences each time rather than a marching-through-shot-by-shot effort, are amazing examples of a louche raconteur who met almost everybody having the gift of perfect storytelling.)

For Your Eyes Only was the first one I saw — I was 10; my dad took me — but I have absolutely no memory of it. These days I find Diamonds Are Forever weirdly compelling; I think it's one of the darkest and most perverse (in both sexual and non-sexual ways) ones in the whole series.

i don't remember what was good about for your eyes only but i do remember it had a ski chase scene that felt like it was 40 minutes long

xpost Bond in Vegas is something they really should go back to in the future, there's no reason NOT to. And having Crispin Glover's dad and a top LA session pro jazz bass player as the team of killers throughout the movie is one of those retrospectively meta choices that's kind of insane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Glover

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putter_Smith

xxxpost

About ten years ago I watched Roger Moore give a speech at a Unicef event, and halfway through the speech he somehow segued from talking about Sudanese child soldiers to a playful routine about his wife threatening to divorce him, and it was just the most astonishingly fluid segue between disparate subjects and tones -- but utterly smooth and finessed, but still human. It became a running joke that we aspired to segue as smoothly as Roger Moore

Diamonds Are Forever is without question in my top three. It’s just so fucking fun, and funny.

Stepping back a bit

Bring Craig back, but totally abandon the glowering moroseness of the last four movies - in fact, pretend that none of that stuff happened at all.

Here's the thing about the Craig cycle I haven't seen talked about much -- literally all five films have him dealing one way or another with double-agents or moles in MI6 or the CIA. No wonder he was morose!

diamonds are forever sucks ass

lol

Yeah, I encounter that opinion often.

sucks ass

I mean, there are still things Bond hasn't done in the previous 25 flicks.

Lol

Pretty sure my first Bond was the one with Benicio Del Toro, which is another favorite.

License to Kill, a truly of-its-time entry. Still, Wayne Newton as a corrupt televangelist? Great!

Bond-adjacent, meantime, but the five 1960s entries of the French OSS: 117 series of films are up for $25 from Kino Lorber for the next couple of weeks:

https://www.kinolorber.com/product/oss-117-five-film-collection-oss-117-is-unleashed-ooss-117-panic-in-bangkok-oss-117-mission-for-a-killer-oss-117-mission-to-tokyo-oss-117-double-agent-3-discs-blu-ray

I've gotten increasingly interested in all the knockoffs and caper films of the 1960s from all over the place in the wake of Bond-as-phenomenon, building on the examples MST3K used to tackle in the early 90s. I picked up this from Vinegar Syndrome the other day and it sounds absolutely fucking ridiculous in the best way. I mean, Serge Gainsbourg as the leader of a bunch of "bald, turtleneck wearing assassins"? FUCK yes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220301162539/https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/the-unknown-man-of-shandigor-deaf-crocodile

“Bless your hearts.”

The great wars begin.

I dug Modesty Blaise, obvs. Also the Avengers.

the reasons i do not love diamonds are forever are: 1) it’s homophobic and 2) connery visibly doesn’t give a shit. depressing. not even the car chase through vegas has any life to it

I haven't watched it in years, but it never read as homophobic to me. Yes, Wint and Kidd are gay assassins, but they're not mincing stereotypes as I recall — they're just a gay couple who murder people in some surprisingly dark and sinister ways. It's sort of like how the bikers in the first Mad Max movie (and even in The Road Warrior) are gay, but they're not evil because they're gay, they're evil and gay.

ehhh i don’t love it

evil and gay is a whole trope that is p often indistinguishable from evil bc they’re gay throughout… the history of art idk

License to Kill is the best Bond movie inbetween OHMSS and Craig’s Casino Royale, and the most Fleming-adjacent of the non-Connery movies. I’ll fight ya on this. Props to the first half of Living Daylights, but the whole Afghanistan section is awful.

"every current Blu-ray/4K version of the films is absolutely top flight in terms of supplemental materials, commentary and so forth"

One thing that struck me about Dr No on modern media is how lovely it looks. Along with From Russia with Love and the driving-through-Switzerland sequences in Goldfinger the first film works just as well as a travelogue.

Which was presumably a lot of the appeal back in the 1960s, moreso than nowadays, because package holidays to Spain were still relatively new at the time. I learn that BEA started package flights to Spain in 1957, and Jamaica was probably a lot more expensive. You had to be a high roller to holiday in Jamaica and own a Rolex and a Bentley in 1962. It's fascinating how the modern Bond films still manage to make the world look exotic and exciting despite the fact that e.g. Norway and Southern Italy are just four hours and £120 away on a low-cost airline. That's the power of coloured filters and smoke machines. They make the world look exotic again.

It strikes me that in the films James Bond has only visited New York once (in Live and Let Etc), perhaps because to US audiences New York isn't exotic. For the same reason he hasn't visited Luton or Slough, or Akron, Ohio. Perhaps it wasn't the kind of place Ian Fleming's social set fetishised. Ditto Moscow, which only ever appears in establishing shots. Perhaps the new Bond could go there, now that we're at peace with Russia and the cold war is a distant memory. NB I wrote this response in 2004, I've only just found it in my drafts folder.

There's a bizarre detail in the Wikipedia entry for Dr Etc:
"Rider is described in the book as having buttocks like a boy, which brought a response from Fleming's friend Noël Coward that "I was also slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile's bottom was like a boy's. I know that we are all becoming more broadminded nowadays, but really old chap what could you have been thinking of?""

This raises the question of whether boy-like buttocks was a requirement when casting the role, or not. After looking at some images of Ursula Andress I don't think it was.

That was one thing that the modern OSS 117 films with Jean Dujardin captured (the travelogue element, not buttocks). They were stagey, but the location footage was attractive. To this day I still occasionally think of Rene Coty because of Nest of Spies. It's an inherently funny name. I had no idea who he was when I first saw the film, beyond the fact he was President of France, but the name just sounds small.

I remember reading that Criterion's initial laserdisc version of Dr The Rest of the Name was withdrawn because the commentary track was too cutting:
https://hmssweblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/the-banned-007-commentaries-what-was-the-fuss/

The Connery films are frustrating because none of them are 100% good all the way through. The closest is You Only Live Twice, and that has masses of padding and some unfortunate makeup. The second half of Goldfinger consists of James Bond sitting in a chair chatting with Goldfinger, I can barely remember Thunderball because it's so boring, No is a low-key detective film, the first half of From Russia with Love feels like a different film to the second half. And Diamonds are Forever feels like a post-modern joke. It has all the elements of Bond strung together in the right order but none of it feels real.

Do you get the joke? I'm abbreviating the names, but the abbreviations are longer than the originals, so it's pointless and counterproductive. That's the joke. It would have been quicker to write Dr No than Dr Etc. The humour comes from the absurdity. Something about the next Bond film. The next Bond film. They usually draw inspiration from current trends in action films, but what is the current state of the art in thrillers? There isn't one. The cinema has been gutted by COVID and all the big films recently were superhero movies. Meanwhile the world is heading in a grim direction where actual real-life billionaires act like supervillains and thousands of people are slain daily, while a real-life Bond would presumably help Saudi Arabia attack Yemen, or disrupt peace marches in Lebanon, or spread favourable publicity on the World of Tanks forums about British howitzers etc.

Box Office's Mojo's page for 2021 is fascinating in how it illustrates the size of China's Box-Office - COVID totalled cinema in the West for most of the year but China continued, with the result that e.g. the third-highest-grossing film of 2021 didn't even open in the United States:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2021/

It raises the question of how Bond can be tailored for the Chinese market. If e.g. he stops a crazed Hong Kong dissident from exploding a chemical bomb in Beijing, would the Chinese authorities approve of that, or would they dismiss it as obvious pandering?

The Living Daylights does have "You were fantastic - we're free!", "Kara, we're inside a Russian airbase in the middle of Afghanistan."

Hahah if Amazon Studios thinks they're going to fuck with Broccoli/Wilson and get away with it, they clearly don't realize who they're dealing with:

If Salke indeed wanted Rapaport in the job, there was one big snag. MGM’s crown jewel is the James Bond franchise, which is controlled by Barbara Broccoli. Sources say Broccoli made it clear that she needed an experienced movie executive at the helm of MGM’s film division. The sources also believe that Salke put her foot wrong with Broccoli by mentioning a possible Bond TV project, which Broccoli would not want. And following the acquisition of MGM’s distribution arm, they say, Broccoli was not impressed when weeks passed during which Amazon did not communicate with the longtime marketing and distribution executives who Broccoli sees as vital to handling the Bond films, leaving them in doubt as to whether they would keep their jobs. (A source says one of those executives, the late Erik Lomis, fought to move Creed III out of a crowded November to a March release date, giving Amazon a hit that has grossed $250 million.) Salke says, “We have deep respect for Barbara and Michael” — a reference to Michael G. Wilson, her Bond producing partner. Broccoli did not respond to a request for comment.

News update -- nothing:

Producer Barbara Broccoli said there is “a big road ahead” before the character was “reinvented for the next chapter”, and that executives “haven’t even begun” the process of modernising the franchise.

She added that the next film would have to reflect the way the world has changed in the two decades since Craig was confirmed as the sixth 007 and pointed out that Bond has often been reinvented.

“I go back to GoldenEye when everyone was saying ‘the cold war is over, the wall is over, Bond is dead, no need for Bond, the whole world’s at peace and now there’s no villains’ – and boy was that wrong!” she said, adding that modernisation is necessary whenever a new actor plays the part.

With Craig they “wanted to focus on what a 21st-century hero would look like”.

She added: “Daniel gave us the ability to mine the emotional life of the character … and also the world was ready for it. I think these movies reflect the time they are in, and there’s a big, big road ahead reinventing it for the next chapter and we haven’t even begun with that.”

I look forward to more Bond, but can’t imagine what form the next phase of the project will take.

AI Bond, the ultimate superspy

Bond freelancing with his buddies Monk, Ham, Rennie, Johnny and Long Tom.

Sure it turns even further away from the source material, but I'd love a new take where each movies finds Bond being inserted into a different shitty streaming, tech or venture capitalist firm each movie to slowly assassinate the C-level from within.

Gah, ignore my typo and terrible grammar. That's what I get for starting the post half an hour before I finish it thanks to a series of interruptions.

Congratulations to the next Bond, who will doubtless be AI:

https://variety.com/2025/film/global/james-bond-amazon-mgm-gain-creative-control-1236313930/

Can't wait for the tendentious prequel streaming series about whoever the new M or Q is!

I'd love a new take where each movies finds Bond being inserted into a different shitty streaming, tech or venture capitalist firm each movie to slowly assassinate the C-level from within.

So, per these developments, a documentary.

The shock announcement — which is sure to shake and, indeed, stir the industry

Please stop.

itt: user jmm requests a quantum of solace

I'm out. I think I'm done with any new Bond movies unless he ends up at Slough House.

Jack Lowden as a not very effective clumsy Bond could be a nice reboot