Bond #25: NO TIME TO DIE

Might as well start with Casino, yeah -- kick it off with the whole shebang. Live and Let Die is *really* fucked up, I'd almost say skip it -- when the racism is just one of the problems with it, well, there you go. (Similarly, Dr No is extremely hard going.) But Moonraker continues things from there well enough.

imo the man with the golden gun is more racist than live and let die, which is buoyed considerably by its blaxploitation vibe and in which the racist white sheriff is a long punchline. said racist white sheriff becomes a goofy but lovable racist sidekick in golden gun

oh fuck you're talking about the books, sorry lol

the books are super fucked up

Yeah I was about to say, let's not confuse our mediums here.

I will say that whenever people complained about how they changed things from the books, not only was it in many cases for the better, but in one case -- The Spy Who Loved Me -- Fleming explicitly laid down a condition that if an adaptation was made the only thing that could be used was the title, nothing else. So they just remade You Only Live Twice and made Moore's best 70s Bond film as a result.

why the condition for just the one book?

Due to its poor critical reception at the time -- also it's a very atypical book in all compared to the rest: first person narration, the 'me' being a woman who Bond eventually rescues. He doesn't show up until more than half way through it, IIRC!

It's a fun book if you're interested in a peak at Fleming's weird ideas, and well-written as usual. But yeah, very skippable. The movie's fun - maybe the only 100% successful Moore movie - but I don't consider it an "improvement" as it's effectively a different story with the same title. Goldfinger, otoh, seems to have been written by someone who understood exactly what was wrong with the book and how to fix it.

(peek, sorry)

Goldfinger screenplay co-written by an interesting writer and critic called Paul Dehn, who also wrote the screenplay for the The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and a number of the Planet of the Apes movies(as well as the lyrics to the faux folk song 'O Willow Waly' that features in the film The Innocents). Dehn's long-term partner was James Bernard, who wrote the music for most of the classic Hammer horrors.

http://variety.com/2018/film/news/bond-25-danny-boyle-directing-1202727654/

Ugh.

Cilliam Murphy is....

Bond

I'm gonna call it and say Danny Boyle will make a Bond movie that'll be better than the last three.

yeah i am willing to roll the dice with Boyle.

Boyle I think is good with dynamic action, the problem with Mendes was while he made everything look like a painting, his compositions I thought were a bit too "big" if that makes sense and for all the movement within the frames everything seemed very inert in a lot of ways bc he went oversized. I can't put my finger on it precisely idk. He wanted to do elegant vv pretty action and it was just DOA. He was trying to achieve the same end result as Bird and McQuarrie did with MI 4 and 5 and it just didn't work. Boyle I trust to actually achieve something a bit more in keeping with what Martin Campbell did in Casino Royale.

I agree with what you said about Mendes, but obviously John Logan was a major problem as well. The villains in the last two Bonds were shite, the plots messy, tonally they were all over the place, a mix of the blunt killer Bond of CR and QOS with silly Q-teasing Bond, featuring the old Bond cars and the old Bond cliches and the old Moneypenny (sort of).

Logan's gone, thankfully. Not sure if Purvis & Wade are working with Boyle and Hodge or if we get the first Bond since Tomorrow Never Dies not co-written by the pair.

Yeah definitely can't take away from John Logan's influence, I think there's a balance the best Bonds achieve between serious business and casual humor that the last couple especially failed at. They were trying to be very impressive and they were also the most glaring examples of a perfectly decent franchise trying to Dark Knight things up a bit. Okay the Cumberbatch Star Trek was probably worse actually.

Well, well

https://variety.com/2018/film/news/bond-25-danny-boyle-exits-1202911993/

Time to stop making auteur wishlists for the Bond director gig.. The Broccolis will always want to ghost direct!

there goes their shot at making this at least quasi interesting

Thought the revive would be about the rumours that Idris Elba is lined up to play Bond.

More interesting than the director is whether the script goes ahead without Purvis & Wade as planned

God, please

Danny Boyle would've made a fun Bond sure but I do still look forward to Ken Loach's take on the iconic spy

— Italian Alex Pareene (@pareene) August 22, 2018

Loach, Gareth Evans or Joanna Hogg, all fine by me

i know this never will happen and never would've happened but i would've liked to see a soderbergh bond

Don't know if Craig has any sway but as they worked on Logan Lucky together I wouldn't rule it out.

FWIW would love to see what Paul Verhoeven would do with it.

james gunn’s available iirc

Albert Brooks

Brad Bird

i was gonna say it's a little redundant but basically any m:i director not named jj abrams would've prob made a good bond film

Verhoeven doing a PG-13 action film would be a waste.

omar otm

Based on how well the fight scenes were staged in the last WHAS, I'd go for David Wain

i know this never will happen and never would've happened but i would've liked to see a soderbergh bond

https://resizing.flixster.com/Kngkfhcif-r24cJqI7_IaokXdHE=/206x305/v1.bTsxMTE3MzcwNjtqOzE3ODU5OzEyMDA7ODAwOzEyMDA

Just get a good cinematographer and stunt coordinator and a journeyman director.

that’s irrelevant unless the atrocious writers are replaced as you said before!

like, Boyle & Hodge wld have been meat & potatoes, but Skyfall was watery gruel with plaster in it & Spectre was a greasy turd with a paper umbrella stuck in it at a jaunty angle

still get angry when I think about Spectre.

maybe this is naive but I don't understand why you'd spend millions making a movie and not go to the trouble of making sure your screenplay isn't total garbage, how hard can it be?

bond movies are copyright-maintenance exercises where the scripts are product ads strung together with action setpieces

why bother thinking to hard about the scripts when showcasing jaguar and patek philippe or whatever is much more important

yes, sure, but is it actively more expensive/time-consuming to have a not shit script?

well, at the very least you gotta find a decent writer who wants to do it, can do it for the budget the broccolis are willing to pay, and is available to turn in a final draft for the date they need to hit in order to meet their release date, so it probably is, yeah!

the problem with the last pair in particular was the sense that they really wanted to make critically approved action masterpieces as opposed to making great Bond films. So they made them ponderous and weighty and full of all kinds of Nolan hand-me-downs w/r/t motivation and "the past haunting the present" and all that bullshit.

Quantum of Solace for all its faults was less a disaster than it was more of a throwback to the more mediocre (and yet still entertaining) Connery/Moore Bond films.

quantum is gorgeously filmed except for the action sequences which are nonsense. it v rapidly evaporates from memory but i really enjoy it when it's on

skyfall and spectre both suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

i have probably posted both of those opinions 10000x before

no Bond film should ever involve the villain appearing on one end of a very long room and taking a ten minute walk towards the camera while delivering a monologue, I'm pretty sure Torgo from Manos Hands of Fate walked faster than Silva in that scene.

lol guys i’m not talking about making everything weepy and “meaningful” like skyfall i’m talking about basic dramatic techniques for generating suspense and interest

nope sorry yr overruled

lol

I saw this last night and really enjoyed it. My first theater experience since Invisible Man. I rank it just below CR in the Craig Bond canon.

I do have some nitpicks to mention:

- The ineffective bomb followed by the ineffective assassins -- another of Blofeld's harebrained schemes I guess. Too similar to the random hotel assassins they added to the Connery/Moore movies for my taste.

- Lucifer Boat's plan changing from the thematic targeting of families, to being a standard Bond villain.

- Bond conveniently running into a dangerous place instead of spending a few extra seconds to walk around it.

- The movie saying it's really Bond's child around 3 times, and expecting it to be a big reveal the third time.

i forgot to mention another thing my 12-yo said that i had to stifle a laugh at. at the beginning where we see lea seydoux and bond in the water, at the beach, we pull out for a wide shot and he goes “wow, great colour grading”

Another nitpick: the Swann/Safin connection didn't amount to anything. Bond already had the Foxdie in him from the birthday party.

i thought that was a different strain cooked up by obruchev on safin’s orders that just killed spectre agents (not sure how the dna part of that is supposed to work unless spectre is all related to each other…)

Foxdie

Thank you I was thinking about this the whole time

looking forward to watching this on my phone and complaining about the dialogue

ffs they showed the little nano bot programming rig being loaded with all the spectra agents’ profiles (after a not too subtle switch from the one containing only Bond’s profile) when our socially inept Russian scientist was in cuba

the one red herring that went nowhere was the kid, at the beginning of the scenic auto chase, saying something about mosquitos. I was thinking for a minute “wait, is the kid actually Blofeld’s or a spectre agent’s? is she going to get sick because she’s Mr. White’s granddaughter?” but that went nowhere

so russian guy put every spectre member on it, except for blofeld? why

Blofeld was in prison and wouldn't be at the party. They had a separate plan for Blofeld and it worked

xpost yeah mh i thought the mosquito bite meant she’d been poisoned - maybe they took out that storyline bc too dark or something

Just finished it. I don’t know. Did this feel like a Bond film, really? Even taking the Craigverse into account? I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I kinda feel it just playacted as one.

I thought it was a great one. Though I had the feeling you describe with Skyfall, which felt more like The Dark Knight or something.

It was the most Bondy of the Craigs in some ways - gadgets, quips, villain with ridiculous lair.

finally got to this last night, liked it...okay. didn't really feel the length, which is something. agreed that it was well-directed and looked great. the story was somewhat disadvantaged by my multi-year efforts to forget I watched SPECTRE and my general disinterest in the forced continuity of these films. all pathos relating to Vesper (how long were they even together???) and Madeleine was thus wasted on me. i also just tune out all these nano-bot/magic blood/database-of-everybody plot elements. i've seen em all and man they're all the same.

all of the Bond grunting at M about his bad decisions etc etc, the new 007 character, etc, all seemed like filler almost. like they're all gonna end up on the same side in like 15 minutes, so it seems kinda pointless. but i'm kind of a classicist, and my expectation is that M doesn't need a storyline; M is the person who sends Bond on a mission and chuckles/rolls eyes when Bond celebrates victory with a tryst and a double entendre.

Malek was extremely generic despite all the makeup and the barely-used mask gimmick. he should have tried harder to have an over the top voice or mannerisms... like kept wanting him to talk like Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending. his poison factory lair was a little too vague spatially to work for me as a setting tbh, though i liked the individual spaces a lot. couldn't Q have walked the team thru a 3D model of the island, gesturing at visible things --- "this tower, here, was used to control the blast doors when this place was a missile silo..." a line of dialogue making clear that the Hercules nanobots are carrying little drops of this "farmed" poison might have helped... felt like they couldn't really commit to this concept. also if they are nanobots wouldn't they be vulnerable to things like a wristwatch EMP?

I, too, could have done with a little less killing, or at LEAST less machine-gunning at random in public places. i want my heroes to try and lead the fight out of town to protect people, or at least acknowledge that the bad guys are endangering bystanders by starting a shootout. aside from that, the opening battle in Matera (i believe?) was fantastic and definitely the highlight of the film for me. Havana was also great, though a little harder to follow. i would have appreciated one more big action scene in a beautiful location, rather than all the office tension with M.

funniest action movie logic moment: two bad guy cars are coming to find Bond at Madeleine's childhood home. they see him pass them and turn around; at some point he swerves off the highway and leads them way off on a dirt road chase; after some high speed driving in the woods, he's defeated these two cars, and then instantly like three more plus some motorcycles burst out of the woods and race downhill at them. um... were those guys just waiting up there in case this happened? if only Bond had picked a different random road to turn off on, the entire kidnapping scenario could have been avoided...

so what worked for me? um... the visuals, for sure. craig's intense, battered, convincingly exhausted performance. most of the action scenes. i like Whishaw as Q even though i'm so over movies like this having to do "hacker" scenes. i like Harris as a spy even though being Moneypenny doesn't give her much to do. i like James Bond movies.

What's with all the booze all the time? Are all Bond movies like this and I'm forgetting?

That seemed like it was written to contrast Bond's boozeshaming of M with his own constant boozing, but then not presented onscreen as the two being related in any way

Bond has always been a heavy boozer! It's just in recent films that it's been commented on as a flaw.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/13/250474378/if-you-drank-like-james-bond-youd-be-shaken-too

Dr. Indra Neil Guha, a liver specialist, and his colleagues at Nottingham University Hospital in England spent a year poring over Ian Fleming's James Bond books and tabulating how many drinks the suave spy drank a day.

Their conclusion? Even just steadying his Walther PPK might have been difficult for Bond.

On average, Bond consumed about 45 drinks a week, or six to seven a day, the authors wrote Thursday in the Christmas edition of BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal. That's way more than the amount considered risky for men by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

It wasn't just chronic drinking that roughed up Bond's liver. He also went on some mean benders. In Casino Royale, Bond knocked back nearly 20 drinks before going on a high-speed car chase, getting in a wreck and then spending two weeks in the hospital. "We hope that this was a salutary lesson," the authors wrote dryly.

"This man clearly consumed what are considered to be harmful amounts of alcohol," says psychiatrist Peter Martin, who directs the Vanderbilt Addiction Center. "There are data that show that drinking like this, about 100 grams of alcohol a day, is highly likely to be associated with liver cirrhosis and also cognitive deficits." It would also be likely to increase risks for depression and sexual dysfunction, conditions that would not be very Bondian.

nonsense, surely Ian Fleming drank like that, and he lived to the wise old age of *checks notes* fifty-six

never mind

James is so drunk and delusional he just runs out in public and stalks and shoots civilians each day, but in his mind they all appear as agents of SPECTRE so he is unaware of his depravity

https://www.brooklyncomicshop.com/BCS/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Daredevil-169-Signed-Charlie-Cox-Brooklyn-Comic-Shop.jpg

p sure it was the chain-smoking as much as the booze that did for Fleming

james bond would never smoke

xposts to dr casino - rewatching SPECTRE gave me a much better feeling towards madeline, it may not make you like NTTD more but might at least give it a bit more stakes? i think it holds up better in light of the new movie.

i rewatched NTTD tonight and cried during the ending this time, after being pretty much emotionless watching it in the theater

it's funny, in my mind i remember hating SPECTRE, but if i look back at my comments on the relevant thread, they're pretty mixed but not super mad at it. i definitely liked the action scenes. then if you scroll another year down in the thread, i've reached my present day point of remembering it as a terrible movie i have no interest in rewatching. hmmm.

DO IT

The Being James Bond doc/promo thing is now up for a free watch on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oZdJrph3RA

i’ve been on a mythology kick lately & while I was refreshing my memory of the 12 labors of Heracles, came upon the recounting of his death

from wiki:

This is described in Sophocles's Trachiniae and in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book IX. Having wrestled and defeated Achelous, god of the Acheloos river, Heracles takes Deianira as his wife. Travelling to Tiryns, a centaur, Nessus, offers to help Deianira across a fast flowing river while Heracles swims it. However, Nessus is true to the archetype of the mischievous centaur and tries to steal Deianira away while Heracles is still in the water. Angry, Heracles shoots him with his arrows dipped in the poisonous blood of the Lernaean Hydra. Thinking of revenge, Nessus gives Deianira his blood-soaked tunic before he dies, telling her it will "excite the love of her husband".[40]
Several years later, rumor tells Deianira that she has a rival for the love of Heracles. Deianira, remembering Nessus' words, gives Heracles the bloodstained shirt. Lichas, the herald, delivers the shirt to Heracles. However, it is still covered in the Hydra's blood from Heracles' arrows, and this poisons him, tearing his skin and exposing his bones. Before he dies, Heracles throws Lichas into the sea, thinking he was the one who poisoned him (according to several versions, Lichas turns to stone, becoming a rock standing in the sea, named for him). Heracles then uproots several trees and builds a funeral pyre on Mount Oeta, which Poeas, father of Philoctetes, lights. As his body burns, only his immortal side is left. Through Zeus' apotheosis, Heracles rises to Olympus as he dies.

This is now available free to subscribers on Amazon Prime, which is what I was waiting for to finally watch it.

In the UK, that is. No idea about elsewhere.