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Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan were relatively well-known TV stars before becoming Bond. Craig, as said above, was somewhat known for stuff like The Trench and Tomb Raider, though I'll agree he wasn't a household name. poo poo, even Connery had Darby O'Gill which, being a Disney movie, did him well enough.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:28
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Pierce was even most famous as, essentially, a fake James Bond.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:31
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Pierce was even most famous as, essentially, a fake James Bond. So Rowan Atkinson is the next Bond.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:54
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Would be potentially interesting if they just decided the next Bond will be period movies in the 60s. Maybe the Uncle movie sailed that ship though.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:55
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I can't lie, that sounds awful.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:56
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The only way a period movie makes sense is if you admit that you have no more ideas for Bond.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:58
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Period Bond would kill the franchise stone dead. I mean, it could be fun, at least for a one-off romp, but if you finally decide that Bond really is tied to his era of origin, that's the kind of thing that loving sticks. See also: Holmes, Sherlock.computer parts posted:The only way a period movie makes sense is if you admit that you have no more ideas for Bond.
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Jun 4, 2016 05:12
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I guess I consider him tied to the origin. I thought the 90s were a low point and the modern Bonds are bumping elbows with Bourne and Impossible. I read the books as a kid decades ago so that's probably a part of it. Craig is so serious about it. e: maybe a more succinctly, I think Bond loses something in the hi-tech computerized drone surveillance cellphone GPS state. I'll admit I only have the Connery movies on tape though. Electromax fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 4, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 05:19
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We need more Bond movies where James invade other genres, like in License to Kill.
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Jun 4, 2016 05:30
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MonsieurChoc posted:We need more Bond movies where James invade other genres, like in License to Kill. Counterpoint: Moonraker
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Jun 4, 2016 05:35
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Nomad175 posted:Counterpoint: Moonraker I pointedly used the better movie as my example.
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Jun 4, 2016 06:00
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computer parts posted:The only way a period movie makes sense is if you admit that you have no more ideas for Bond. Have it go back before the '60s. Steampunk Bond.
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Jun 4, 2016 06:16
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MonsieurChoc posted:I pointedly used the better movie as my example. Except Moonraker is better than License To Kill? License To Kill is just a generic C-grade 80s action movie, at least Moonraker has a style and moxie to it.
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Jun 4, 2016 06:34
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gohuskies posted:Except Moonraker is better than License To Kill? License To Kill is just a generic C-grade 80s action movie, at least Moonraker has a style and moxie to it. Counterpoint: Moonraker is terrible, whereas License to Kill is one of the few Bond films to actually be good in its own right and not just by the standard of "good for a Bond movie". I'd honestly put License to Kill up there with the top-tier of 80s action movies.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:13
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Electromax posted:e: maybe a more succinctly, I think Bond loses something in the hi-tech computerized drone surveillance cellphone GPS state. I'll admit I only have the Connery movies on tape though. Modern Bond is explicitly a reaction against all that stuff and I think it's made the character more interesting and compelling than ever.
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Jun 4, 2016 21:10
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gohuskies posted:Except Moonraker is better than License To Kill? License To Kill is just a generic C-grade 80s action movie, at least Moonraker has a style and moxie to it. License to Kill is loving great, it's one of my top Bonds along with For Your Eyes Only and Goldeneye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyk0jmBx6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t7fBHepPXU edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ujTWhWm5vE
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Jun 4, 2016 21:58
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Darko posted:Yep, it started off decently, and like it was building to a great assassin vs. spy thing, then J.W. Pepper shows up and the movie turns into poo poo. I just watched A View to a Kill for the first time in ages and I wished that Sheriff J.W. Pepper had been the "I'm Dick Tracy!" cop.
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Jun 4, 2016 22:32
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Cnut the Great posted:Modern Bond is explicitly a reaction against all that stuff and I think it's made the character more interesting and compelling than ever.
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Jun 4, 2016 23:38
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He's more interesting in theory, as a theoretical character. But Craig is clearly under instruction to show no emotion for 99% of the movie, including when he's with the woman he loves so much as to give up spying.
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Jun 4, 2016 23:55
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Strategic Tea posted:He's more interesting in theory, as a theoretical character. But Craig is clearly under instruction to show no emotion for 99% of the movie, including when he's with the woman he loves so much as to give up spying. In relation to this, Bond saying "I love you" to whatever her name was during the Spectre torture scene was probably my least favorite scene of any of his four movies. The delivery was bad, it was completely unearned, it came out of nowhere, just cringey all around.
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Jun 5, 2016 00:09
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Chairman Capone posted:In relation to this, Bond saying "I love you" to whatever her name was during the Spectre torture scene was probably my least favorite scene of any of his four movies. The delivery was bad, it was completely unearned, it came out of nowhere, just cringey all around. It also took a huge messy poo poo all over the ending of Casino Royale, and the rest of the movie in general since CR is about Bond having the humanity beaten out of him. And I'm not saying Bond can't get further character development, but it was just so odd seeing them backtrack three movies of characterization with insultingly little setup.
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Jun 5, 2016 02:51
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DStecks posted:It also took a huge messy poo poo all over the ending of Casino Royale, and the rest of the movie in general since CR is about Bond having the humanity beaten out of him. And I'm not saying Bond can't get further character development, but it was just so odd seeing them backtrack three movies of characterization with insultingly little setup. the ending of quantum of solace belies that, though. a humanity-free bond would have killed that operative in a heartbeat
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Jun 5, 2016 04:52
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Homework Explainer posted:the ending of quantum of solace belies that, though. a humanity-free bond would have killed that operative in a heartbeat He's not completely inhuman, just utterly broken. At the end of the day, Craig's Bond still has a strong moral streak that nothing can beat out of him. This is the thing I've found myself souring on the most about his take on Bond- I don't think James Bond should be a good person deep down inside, and Craig Bond is.
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Jun 5, 2016 05:02
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Well the ending of Skyfall has MI6 bungle everything, kills off M, then sends us back to a man behind a desk with a padded door while the theme plays. It's literally saying 'welp MI6 sucks and they sure made a mess, introspection over, now back to your regularly scheduled cool guy in a tux'. In that sense I think it's a trilogy and Skyfall was the end.
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Jun 5, 2016 12:43
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I think the end of Skyfall is clearly setting up an end to the weird conspiracy world and inviting us back into the "normal" Bond world of going on a mission for one self-contained movie. Except Skyfall made a billion dollars and they got Mendes back (and got the rights to Blofeld) so they had to throw all that out the window and make a movie to tie everything together, whether it made sense to or not.
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Jun 5, 2016 13:04
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I still don't understand why they made Bond and Blofeld sort of adopted brothers.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:58
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marktheando posted:I still don't understand why they made Bond and Blofeld sort of adopted brothers. What's more I can't understand why they did that after Austin Powers did it first.
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Jun 5, 2016 17:43
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Cacator posted:What's more I can't understand why they did that after Austin Powers did it first. Retroactive parody.
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Jun 5, 2016 17:52
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Because of a misguided trend of making the world revolve around James Bond and mistaking the shoehorning of weird connections into his otherwise mostly unexplored past for exploring his character. Like most trends, it started with something good, the involvement of Vesper in the events of Casino Royale. People dug that 007 had allowed himself to fall in love in a way that felt different from previous Bond Girls. Then it circled around to tragedy and explaining why 007 is a cold-hearted SOB and bam, magic. It was even good enough to drive the initial thrust and stinger of Quantum of Solace even if the main plot had preciously little to do with it. But the thing is, it takes time and effort to build up a new relationship on screen. That gets in the way of the stuff people pay to see in a James Bond movie, doesn't it? But we like the emotional torque of having Bond be involved with people he knows and who know him, perhaps more than he likes. So what do we do? Well, there's like, a whole life James Bond lived before he became 007. That's kind of a mystery, isn't it? Let's delve into that. Skyfall should have been the warning that this was not tenable. What the hell does anyone care for Bond's parental estate out in the middle of nowhere, watched over by a "warden" type of guy who shows up telling of a deep personal connection with 007 of which we see nothing on screen. It's a cheat, plain and simple, telling instead of showing. An excuse, the film going "We don't have time to tell this part of the story, please just go with it". And we shrugged and went with it, not that it really mattered either way because at the end of the day, the character didn't really do much plotwise and didn't really attempt to illuminate James Bond's mystery past too much, either. It was okay, kinda cheesy, a character seemingly more intended to answer the inevitable "Who kept the lights on?" style of story-logic questions instead of actually serving the plot arc, but whatever. And then, for some reason, this little pile of nothing gets picked as the central pivot Spectre should turn on. James Bond's past, his arch-enemy, and the shocking, shocking secret that binds them together! What must have seemed like epic tragedy at the conceptual stage became a telenovela plot in execution, and one the movie presented as if it was the hugest deal in the history of huge deals that change everything (because every movie in a series these days must have a huge deal that changes everything). Except...it's kinda not? Can anybody here tell me why the two of them being brothers mattered, when Blofeld's actions up to that point would have been perfectly well-explained by him being, well, a supervillain hunting the man trying to stop his evil plan? To me it doesn't, and that deflates the whole twist, because...it doesn't twist anything. It doesn't change James Bond's reasons for doing what he does, nobody cares why Blofeld does what he does except insofar as it needs to stand up to only the most basic scrutiny when he explains his latest evil scheme, and it sure doesn't change their interaction going forward. Part of it is that they hedged their bet from the start. Adoptive brothers. Never actually close. Blofeld always wanted to get rid of James. There is no change, no growth in this relationship, it explains nothing about either of them that isn't explained by other, more obvious factors, and it adds up to nothing once it is revealed. I mean, it's not even brothers, but look at 006 and 007 in Goldeneye. Their relationship is not exactly great cinema either, but at least we get to see them at a time when they worked together, when they trusted each other...and we see the bitterness between them when they meet up again. 006 driven to an intense hatred of 007 for being left behind, 007 having long accepted 006's death as "part of the job" and now being forced to come to terms with seeing him as a threat that must be taken down, those are character beats where their relationship - and how it changes in the story - actually matters. So Spectre is a failed attempt to go beyond this year's adventures of James Bond, Her Majesty's martini-slurping assassin, and get into James Bond the Myth, a man so raw and tragic of fate that he lost his dad as a teenager and gained the undying enmity of a budding supervillain, because This Time It's Personal. And I humbly submit that only so many times can it be personal to a character like James Bond; sure I like to have a sizzling, medium rare Character-Driven steak every now and then, but not for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. You can't pull this card every movie or even every second movie; much like how, allegedly, many aspiring comic writers in the 90s were intent on writing The Last Punisher Story where he stops killing people or finds True Love or dies, Spectre's writers wanted to do previous movies one better rather than put in the work of making this year's thrilling-but-ultimately-exchangable James Bond formula movie. Would it work better if it truly was The Last 007 Story, that's it, no more movies after this, let's stick the key in and break it off? Maybe. The movie does flirt with that in parts, but can't commit because, you know, movie franchise, see you for the next one in 2017 everybody! So whatever earthshattering drama it wants to be about it can't be about, because those parts will need to be reversed next time, undermining both this and the next movie. tl,dr: It must have sounded good in the elevator pitch.
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Jun 5, 2016 18:03
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Cacator posted:What's more I can't understand why they did that after Austin Powers did it first. In fairness, assuming that most people would have forgotten Goldmember is not a bad assumption.
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Jun 5, 2016 18:15
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DStecks posted:Period Bond would kill the franchise stone dead. I mean, it could be fun, at least for a one-off romp, but if you finally decide that Bond really is tied to his era of origin, that's the kind of thing that loving sticks. See also: Holmes, Sherlock. I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point, but that's a weird example to choose, because...   These are both pretty drat popular.
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Jun 6, 2016 13:37
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I'd love an Elizabethan James Bond where he takes on the Spanish Armada, with Francis Bacon as Q and Francis Drake as M.
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Jun 6, 2016 14:11
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thrawn527 posted:I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point, but that's a weird example to choose, because... Sherlock Holmes stopped being an eternally contemporary character after the end of the second world war, and both of those shows are from this decade. I'd call 70 years sticking.
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Jun 6, 2016 14:22
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DStecks posted:Sherlock Holmes stopped being an eternally contemporary character after the end of the second world war, and both of those shows are from this decade. I'd call 70 years sticking. Alright, fair enough. But if we're looking at how James Bond would react to this happening in the modern era, a character who, in the modern era, is not beholden to his period setting isn't the best example. But again, I agree, having a Bond movie set in the 60's would likely kill the franchise, and probably be seen as parody.
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Jun 6, 2016 14:25
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It's not like Holmes as a franchise was ever really dead though. There was a small explosion of Holmesiana in the 70s (Seven Percent Solution, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, They Might Be Giants) and in the 80s you had the Jeremy Brett run which was arguably definitive, etc. Come to think of it, did Holmes enter the public domain around the 70s? That would explain a lot.
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Jun 6, 2016 17:39
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Why do people online keep mentioning a female Bond? It'd be like gender swapping Wonder Woman. Feminism is essential to WW; ugly chauvinism is essential to Bond. Strip away the juvenile male empowerment fantasy and you have a completely new character shooting guns and driving fast cars. (Actually, would there even be fast cars? That's part of the fantasy too.) Harriet Palmer, though, I could see.
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Jun 6, 2016 18:15
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Jack of Hearts posted:Why do people online keep mentioning a female Bond? It'd be like gender swapping Wonder Woman. Feminism is essential to WW; ugly chauvinism is essential to Bond. Strip away the juvenile male empowerment fantasy and you have a completely new character shooting guns and driving fast cars. (Actually, would there even be fast cars? That's part of the fantasy too.) "Ugly chauvinism" really only fits the Connery Bond, though. Lazenby falls in actual love with a kickass Action Girl in his only showing, Roger Moore is the gentleman spy who's visibly uncomfortable whenever he has to act out leftover Connery "putting the woman in place" scenes, Dalton protects a woman for most of his first movie and is backed up by the first Bond girl smart enough to pack Kevlar and a pump-action in his second movie, and Brosnan, while arguably closest to being a Connery caliber douchebag to the female characters in his movies, is regularly called out on his dinosaur status within the movies themselves and even then not as blatant about it as Connery. I mean, take the Tomb Raider movies, strip out the contractually obligated tombs and ancient doodads, and then tell me that this ultra-suave, gadget-loving, jet-setting, constantly running into ex-lovers version of Lara Croft is not a genderflipped James Bond with the serial numbers hastily filed off. Then immediately forget the Tomb Raider movies again.
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Jun 6, 2016 18:29
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Jack of Hearts posted:Why do people online keep mentioning a female Bond? It'd be like gender swapping Wonder Woman. Feminism is essential to WW; ugly chauvinism is essential to Bond. Strip away the juvenile male empowerment fantasy and you have a completely new character shooting guns and driving fast cars. (Actually, would there even be fast cars? That's part of the fantasy too.) Because little girls need role models in cinema, and that role model needs to be a boozing, womanizing sex addict whose job is to violently kill people without emotion. Gatac posted:I mean, take the Tomb Raider movies, strip out the contractually obligated tombs and ancient doodads, and then tell me that this ultra-suave, gadget-loving, jet-setting, constantly running into ex-lovers version of Lara Croft is not a genderflipped James Bond with the serial numbers hastily filed off. Yes, but in the end she's not James Bond. Genderflipping the character is enough to make it a completely new character in this case. Because Lara Croft subverts her gender role, while James Bond embodies his to a ridiculous, dangerous degree. Cnut the Great fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 18:32
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Cnut the Great posted:Yes, but in the end she's not James Bond. Genderflipping the character is enough to make it a completely new character in this case. That's my essential argument. You can genderflip Superman into Superwoman, who believes in "truth, justice, and that thing we don't talk about anymore," and nothing is lost. Or Batman into Batwoman. But there are sexual politics deeply embedded in James Bond, just as with Wonder Woman, and that makes them basically unflippable without undermining the entire point of the character. I grant that it'd certainly be interesting to try to substitute the female gaze for the male gaze, and have the main character go around seducing a couple of Bond Guys per movie. It'd be neat to see how the world would respond to that. I don't like James Bond that much, but I would probably enjoy seeing a truly analogous Jane Bond, just once. But "make James Bond a woman who is just as terrible as James Bond" isn't really the pitch people are offering.
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Jun 6, 2016 18:56
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Sounds like Haywire
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Jun 6, 2016 19:13
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