Welcome to our special presentation of a COOL DETECTIVES Live Tweet, playlist curated by our very own Greg McCambley. We’ll start with some Peter Gunn and follow that up with a potboiler of a Dick Tracy feature from 1945 called Dick Tracy, Detective.
INITIATE THE COOL DETECTIVES LIVE TWEET @ 9pm ET. Follow #Bond_age_TV hashtag.
This is the director’s cut of my original essay about Dr. No. It has been enhanced for your reading pleasure. (Also, welcome #BeyondTheCover blogathonners!)
by James David Patrick
Adaptation is a tenuous, often thankless creative endeavor. A screenwriter’s given a pre-existing project, most often a book, and told to adapt a complex, multilayered narrative for the big screen. The result, by nature, is a comparatively brutish, SportsCenter highlight clip reel of the novelist’s original intent. If the screenwriter dares to make innovative choices to streamline the original work, she risks alienating the pre-existing fanbase that catalyzed the adaptation in the first place. Budget limitations, eccentric actors, demanding studio heads also insert themselves into the equation, more often than not further limiting creativity. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed an entire movie about his tortured inability to adapt Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief into a feature film. Kaufman turns his character’s writer’s block into a quasi-thriller that blends fact with fiction and blurs the lines of reality. Charlie Kaufman is also one of only a handful of people in the entire business of moviemaking that would be given the creative freedom to combine adaptation and fabulist memoir in a wide release feature film.
To use a recent example of high-stakes adaptation (that resulted in far less hallucinatory delirium), consider the cinematic choices made at the beginning of the Harry Potter series. Consider how those choices carried on throughout the eight-movie cycle, the design of the Hogwarts castle, the casting choices for primary roles, the score, etc. With only a few exceptions director Christopher Columbus’ stylistic decisions in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone remained throughout the seven-film cycle. Even though Harry Potter screenwriters defaulted to J.K. Rowling’s books as narrative blueprints whenever possible, the movies required concrete visual and aural choices to translate a book to the big screen. These are the images the mind’s eye filled in while reading the books. Nobody saw the same Hogwarts or the same Ronald Weasley, no matter how vividly Rowling’s prose conveyed the stuff of her imagination.
(more…)Because #Bond_age_ can never resist beating a dead horse or running a theme straight into the ground — pile driver style — we’re changing our regularly scheduled programming to exchaust the short-lived 80’s “assassination game” genre. This was, of course, when games that simulated covert warfare and pretend murder were completely culturally acceptable and showcased in mainstream entertaining for the whole family. It’s the equivalent of cinematic lawn darts.
This time slot was once meant for Party Moore presents… GOLD, but quite honestly I can’t locate my Gold DVD to make the digital rip for you fine folks. I might be mistaken, but I assume that you don’t have Gold DVDs of your own. Therefore, as replacement programming, we’re following up Greg’s fine selection of T.A.G. The Assassination Game with the similarly themed GOTCHA! starring Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino. (Yes, THE Linda Fiorentino… with a pretty amazing Russian accent! Thank me later. I’ll pencil a thank you session into my Google calendar right now, actually.) This is an essential 1985 movie (or at the very least an essential movie to riff) in which someone actually utters the line: “Who do you think you are? James Bond or something?” It’s another tale of college hijinx gone wrong when Anthony Edwards gets mistaken for a special agent and wrapped up in the game of international espionage! It’s GOOSE ACROSS THE IRON CURTAIN! Make sure to stockpile your Grade A Top Gun, Revenge of the Nerds (maybe even some Revenge of the Nerds II) and ER jokes for the occasion.
Sidenote: An original GOTCHA! poster with Linda Fiorentino’s legs is only $20. In case you need a Christmas present for me. I’m just saying.
Tune in Wednesday at 9pm EDT for the GOTCHA Live Tweet. Follow #Bond_age_ hashtag.
Sometime before 9pm push play on the Spider Video player so that it has an opportunity to load. Pause the video when it begins. The video won’t play until the entire file is loaded. Seriously. I’m not joking. Show up early. Press play.
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To celebrate Timothy Dalton’s 70th birthday (on March 21st) I’d planned to live tweet THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS. But then I thought that The Smolder might feel a little left out. For all of the other Bond actor’s birthdays we’re live tweeting non-Bond movies. Why shouldn’t he get the same, uh, consideration. So then I’d planned to slot in FLASH GORDON! Because who doesn’t want a live tweet of Flash Gordon? WHO I ASK YOU! But as it turns out, the Flash Gordon I’d planned to use has a botched aspect ratio that made my head hurt watching it for five minutes. I test these things out for you guys. I’m on that wall. You need me on that wall. But I don’t own Flash Gordon. Womp womp. Which means I needed to find another Timothy Dalton live tweet prospect IMMEDIATELY. So on Tuesday morning I’m scanning T-Dalt’s resume on IMDB looking for something interesting that’s either available online or in my DVD collection. After a couple of less than interesting prospects (Dalton’s been in some really random stuff, you guys), I came up with…
What better way to celebrate The Smolder than with a movie based on a comic book that nobody actually wanted to release? And then when they did release it, the creator of the original comic publicly lambasted it and pretended it didn’t exist? Timothy Dalton playing a character named The Stranger! The Stranger wears an eye patch! And occasionally resembles Zorro! Brooke Shields gets to play an empowered woman but gets a script written for a total ditz! It’s Brenda Starr! It’s considered one of the worst comic book adaptations in history! “Danger has a new shape!” That’s a tagline in the trailer! Really! I hope all those exclamation points got you pumped up for the occasion.
Join #Bond_age_ on Wednesday, March 23rd at 9pm EST for the Brenda Starr Live Tweet! Follow #Bond_age_ hashtag.
Social media exploded on Monday with wild conjecture about the next James Bond. When my Twitter timeline flooded, I knew that one of two things had happened. Either Daniel Craig had made another statement suggesting he’d cannibalize himself than play Bond again or an online rag had posted more clickbait about a high profile actor who called his stockbroker and inquired about the fiscal utility of high yield bonds. (Is “fiscal utility” a thing? Because it certainly sounds important.)
The fuel for the most recent bonfire was a comment from Tom Hiddleston to the Sunday Times where he said playing Bond would be an “extraordinary opportunity” if “it ever came knocking.” The question arose in reference to a Time Magazine poll about which actors readers would like to see as James Bond. There were more than 100 candidates on the list. Tom Hiddleston was one of them. Angelina Jolie appeared on the same list and, well… she has a few barriers to entry. Like having been born in Los Angeles to American parents. (You thought I was going to talk about the ovary situation, didn’t you?) Online publications jumped on the Hiddleston comments claiming the actor was asking – nay, begging – to play Bond, like a short, impish schoolboy in the back row of the classroom trying to get his teacher’s attention to go potty.
The Interwebs have been ready to boil over ever since the Guardian ran the big, bold headline: “Daniel Craig: I’d rather slash my wrists than play James Bond again.” Social media latched onto this headline without investigating further, and thus the notion that Craig was absolutely positively done with Bond became etched in Internet stone. (more…)