James Bond

Set pictures from a shoot currently happening in Norway., which include some semi-spoilers. They depict a 13 year old British girl in a rainbow jacket being chased from a hut onto a frozen lake by an armed man in a broken white mask. She's purportedly armed too, according to leaked screenplay details.

This is sounding a little strange. I hope it is a little strange. I hope the film is going down the same path as Spectre and shaking off the constraints of realism even more.

I've seen some not entirely ridiculous speculation that it might be a scene from Madeleine Swann's past, i.e. that incident she mentioned about hitmen trying to kill her father when she was a kid. Here's some video footage of the scene.

If we're going into Madeleine's past then that presumably means she contributes more to the plot than "snuffed for manpain in the first ten minutes." This pleases me.

I've just recently learnt that Adele and Sam Smith... are fantastic singers and I have no idea why we aren't petitioning them to sing Bond 25's opening song together.

I may not watch these films but I think I've rewatched the openings of Skyfall and Spectre more than a hundred times.

It was posited on Fridge Brilliance that Blofeld was that assassin that Madeleine shot.

I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s so Brosnan is my Bond. I've seen all his movies, although I haven't re-watched any of them in many years. I went back and watched some older stuff at various random points, namely Goldfinger and The Man With the Golden Gun. I also remember seeing on TV one Bond movie where a guy got shoved in a room and exploded. That scared me.

I have pointedly not watched any post-Brosnan Bond films because I can be pretty bitchy and everyone saying Craig and his movies were the absolute greatest thing that ever happened to Bond irritated me. I'm sure Craig and his movies are fine but all the talk of a "hardcore gritty Bond" also turned me off. But I'm older now and also bored and just figured it's time I gave them a chance. Well, I'll be doing that after i re-watch all of Brosnan's films to see if my opinion has changed. I remember thinking: Goldeneye was great.

The World Is Not Enough was okay. Great villains.

Didn't like Tomorrow Never Dies

I fell asleep in the theater in Die Another Day

Also, fortunately, all 4 Craig films are on iTunes in a collection for $30 right now.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie-collection/the-daniel-craig-collection/id1076172868

Edited by Nikkolas on Apr 23rd 2019 at 11:50:25 AM

The title for the next Bond movie is coming tomorrow.

Didn't they already reveal the title? I could have sworn...

Lashana Lynch is joining the cast of the new Bond film.

Brosnan is my Bond, too, and that is despite being old enough that I could go for any other Bond. Granted, by favourite Bond movie is still Goldfinger (mostly because of how useless Bond actually is in the movie, it amuses me so much that I am even able to overlook the rapey undertones), but Brosnan will most likely always be my favourite Bond. Only actor ever which really sold the notion that the character is so charismatic that every woman would swoon over him.

Hell, I even have a soft spot for Die Another Day, and that includes the title song. Sue me, I don't understand why it gets so much hatred. In fact I think that the first 20 minutes or so of the movie might be among the best Bond moments ever. Sadly the rest of the movie doesn't hold up nearly as well and fast becomes a convoluted mess. But the truth is that there is little Bond-related which would make me stop switching through the channels if I saw it, but I would always stop to at least watch the beginning of Die Another Day.

I agree, the Korea Cold Open and the sword fight were highlights.

Hey, want some Bond meta? Of course you do.

So, a ways back, we discussed Values Dissonance with respect to the Bond novels and movies. My mind drifted back to this recently, and it's hit me that there's actually one pretty big point of dissonance between the books and the movies - their attitudes toward the Cold War itself. In the books, Bond is an ardent jingoist and imperialist who often acts like he'd enjoy the Cold War turning hot so he could crack some Commie skulls. In turn, the Russians are usually the direct villains, are never depicted sympathetically, and it's implied they want the same thing.

Compare the movies - Bond is still a dark antihero, but there's no evidence he's a bigot or an advocate of British colonialism (compare how in Goldfinger both Bond and Goldfinger think Koreans are disgusting ape-men in the book, but only Goldfinger in the movie - an uncomfortable Author Tract becomes another reason to hate the bad guy with one small change), and more often than not, the Cold War heating up is what Bond's being assigned to prevent, with that possibility being treated as the worst possible loss for every side. The movie villains also tend to be, rather than Dirty Commies, arch-capitalists of the Ayn Rand make-tons-of-money-without-regard-for-morals variety, with their goal in heating up the War being that they would profit off of it happening in some way.

I wonder what the reason for these important differences were? Just wanting to avoid the films being banned in Russia?

Hope that pile of word-vomit makes sense.

Edited by HamburgerTime on May 4th 2019 at 2:36:53 PM

More that Book!Bond was written to share the opinions and values of Fleming which the film writers didn't seem to agree with as much I would say.

Ian Fleming was bad about the Cold Warrior stuff even within the context of his own time. Why did Bond become less transparently racist and belligerent? Well, something like nine or ten years separated Casino Royale the book and Dr. No the film. Like, when Bond was first published, the British Empire was still a thing, and it was that nervy, hyper paranoid part of the Cold War where the Russians just recently got the bomb and MI 6 was being turned inside out by KGB moles. Fast forward nine years; the Suez Crisis happened, decolonization happened, Communist witchfinding was out of style, and the Civil Rights era was on in America. When Albert R. Broccoli was marketing the films, Bond calling Koreans ape-men and insulting the intelligence of black people would have immediately offended the general public. The films were always meant to capture sort of like a vague essence of the character while being accessible. Add to that the films being made into the Seventies, and you get a character that becomes necessarily divorced from his Cold Warrior roots. How do you make a war hawk seem relevant during the height of Detente? Bond's attitude toward the Cold War more or less mirrors attitudes during which the work was made: mild Cold Warrior (1962-1967), Detente maintainer (1973-1979), Cold War revivalist (1981), Glasnost enthusiast (1983-1987) and Cold War nostalgist (1995-1999).

EDIT: Also, every Bond film before Golden Eye was banned by the USSR — the Russian market wasn't a factor.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on May 5th 2019 at 12:04:10 PM

Also, it was the fashion at the time not to depict direct conflict between the Western and Eastern powers on film. Even movies that were very obviously about the Cold War would often refer to the bad guys as simply being "a foreign power", rather than naming a specific country.

Still no title for Bond 25 as far as I know.

In the books, the Russians were the villains. The makers of the movies scrapped this...then decided to make the Chinese the villains, probably thinking "they're lower than apes, the're too dumb to care!". Except they never made them the visible villains for some reason.

Edited by Lymantria on May 8th 2019 at 7:09:29 AM

The movies focused more on independent evil masterminds whereas the books focused more on rogue commie agents. It was rare for specifically Russia to be the actual villain, Bond usually had to team up with a technical rival to beat them.

When you say Russia was rarely the villains, are you talking about the books or movies? Because that's true of the books, not the movies. Also, as I said, the producers of the movies thought Russian villains = not okay, Chinese villains = okay, yet they didn't even commit to it. They just briefly showed that the villains were being backed by the Chinese Communists without making them the visible villains. The closest they ever got was in Die Another Day with the North Korean Communists as the villains. That movie was criticised for it, probably rightly so, but I have no idea why the earlier movies decided to have China being the villains and never actually showed it. They sort of did with Dr. No, but even then Red China's involvement in the plot was only implied. Is it racist either way? Yes.

Edited by Lymantria on May 8th 2019 at 7:47:51 AM

DAD was criticized for vilifying North Korea? I thought that was just, you know, stating a fact.

What?

North Korea is a horrifically reppressive dictatorship, generally considered the most oppressed current country. I don't see the issue with portraying hardline members of its military as villains.

Edited by HamburgerTime on May 10th 2019 at 3:53:20 AM

If the movie portrayed North Koreans as Always Chaotic Evil, that's be bad, but I don't think it did since the villain's dad was against his plans and was killed by him for it, and he was North Korean too. Not every work with Nazi villains implies that Germans are inherently evil racists. (Sadly, some real people actually think such things). However...

Sorry, I'm rambling. According to The Other Wiki, "the North Korean government disliked the portrayal of their state as brutal and war-hungry". Make of that what you will. (The South Koreans didn't like the scene where Bond and Jinx have sex in a Buddhist temple).

Edited by Lymantria on May 10th 2019 at 5:17:23 AM

IIRC South Korea also didn't like the idea of them needing a white British guy to keep the North in check.

If 007 wasn't involved, it wouldn't be a Bond movie, so were the saying the South Koreans didn't do enough?