New James Bond = Daniel Craig.

This is Klaus Maria Brandauer in Never Say Never Again. The girlfriend is Kim Basinger.

The ones from the 60s,70s, and 80s have a certain nostalgia value..

(see also Doctor Who FITEING Obi Wan Kenobi in Shallow Grave)

I should point out that in Velvet Goldmine we are now in retrospect rewarded with the sight of Obi-Wan taking Batman's anal cherry.

The Brosnan movies have gotten worse since GoldenEye. The one with Denise Richards was unwatchable and the Halle Berry movie had some special effects that wouldn't have looked good on a movie from 1985.

http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/warner_brothers/the_perfect_storm/william_fichtner/storm.jpg

William Fichtner!

It's fun to say!

= weirdest-looking bond cast since From Russia With Love?

http://www.rosenbaumcreative.com/walken/gallery/pg3/view4.jpg http://www.jamesbond.com/mmpr/media/henchmen/locque/thumb.jpg

I'm thinking like the Robbie Coltrane or Felix Lighter-type bond associates.

"good" as in "entertaining and decent enough actress to be Jill St. John or Denise Richards-level horrid"

it's worked so well before.

They are, however, going to leave the French dubbed dialog in for the US and UK releases, with subtitles.

In Gujrati.

Looking good - grittier and more atmospheric.

though i just saw layer cake, and that was a sack of shit.

looks much like Goldeneye (in style - no weirdo-invisible cars and stuff that Brosnan got later), I was hoping they'd strip it down some more.

...And Daniel Craig could be an inspired choice. I was disappointed at first because I had only seen him in Spielberg’s self-loathing love letter to terrorists, but having recently seen Layer Cake I found him to have quite the screen presence and some of the dark grit Connery possessed.

The drawback of course is Dame Judi Dench returning as “M.” Her feminist approach creates too many eye roll moments as she’s so obviously there to compensate for forty years of so-called sexism. But I’m quibbling. The producers should be complimented. The last two Bond films made a ton of cash and yet rather than sticking to a lousy formula that was profitable, they’ve scrapped it and started over. That’s no small thing, especially considering the history.

In the early 80’s Cubby Broccoli, coming off the mammoth success of Moonraker, decided to bring Bond back to earth in For Your Eyes Only – my personal favorite – but it was nowhere near as successful. So, it should be interesting to see how this plays out.

My one major concern? Paul-Hate-America-Haggis is listed as one of the writers. He’s already done his bit tearing down the icon of Iwo Jima. What has he done to this icon?

I've often thought that there could be something in redoing the original Bond stories as period pieces now -- picturing an England grinding along in a post-WWII austerity, Bond as blatantly bigoted and viciously cynical antihero searching for some sort of temporary release via his assignments. The film Bonds have barely ever touched this aspect of the character except sporadically -- part of Dr. No, a fair amount of For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights, my own underrated favorite, as I still think Dalton was a great and perfectly cast actor in a promising but ultimately failed script. And trying to convey all the internal reflections and monologues in the books would be hard. But it is interesting, for all of the Fleming 'sweep' in his stories, just how much of a Le Carre character the literary Bond is in the end -- it's a tension that the films understandably lost early on, because the spectacle provided its own rationale.