In what must certainly be considered the best news to come out of the Bond camp since the Daniel Craig sported a black tactleneck a Spectre teaser, Danny Boyle has confessed to signing on as director for the next James Bond film. Since this is a page about James Bond, we here at #Bond_age_ feel obligated to share our enthusiasm.
We try not to get too worked up about these early nuggets of news, but since we’ve been sweating out the Christopher Nolan rumors, Danny Boyle’s confirmation turned the #Bond_age_ HQ into a Bacchanalian scene of euphoria last night. This is why you, too, should be excited.
Danny Boyle on the Trainspotting 2 press tour.
Danny Boyle’s a chameleon. The best Bond directors do not insert themselves or their agenda into James Bond. I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that could pinpoint Boyle’s directorial aesthetic. While that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it’s far from it. Some of the same things could have been said about Stanley Kubrick and he turned out alright. To distill this into neat #Bond_age_ reductionism, Boyle is a more talented Martin Campbell. He’s also rather eccentric in his film choices. He’s directed existential sci-fi (Sunshine), horror (28 Days Later), black-as-night humor (Shallow Grave), and some Bollywood (Slumdog Millionaire). Some have called him erratic, but I’d prefer to call him whimsical. Bond’s a different story. The genre’s already in place. He just has to do what he does best.
Boyle’s way with actors and characters in his films most excites me about his Bond potential. I’ve been beating this dead horse for years, but the best James Bond movies give 007 time and space to be James Bond — to drink, to gamble, to woo, to adjust his tie without anywhere particular to be. If it’s also true that Boyle is working on a script with his Trainspotting co-screenwriter John Hodge, this could be the best of all worlds. A character-fueled director working with the writer responsible for arguably his best film.
Also, allow me to remind you (in case it’d slipped your mind) that this wouldn’t be Danny Boyle’s first Bond adventure.
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One more tidbit that should be of foremost concern for any James Bond fan heading into Bond 25 — what of David Arnold? Arnold scored every Bond film from Tomorrow Never Dies through Quantum of Solace when Sam Mendes discharged him in favor of his own personal composer, [Jerry Seinfeld]NEWMAN![/Jerry Seinfeld] — thus representing Sam Mendes’ greatest crime against humanity. So. Do you know who wrote the score for that little Danny Boyle helmed Bond short film? That’s goddamn right. David Arnold.
If David Arnold’s back (and I think we can fully expect it), that’s already the best gift Danny Boyle could have given us 20 months before the curtain drops on Bond 25.
Since this all came from the mouth of Boyle, we’ll have to wait for EON’s official confirmation. In the meantime, I’m more than happy to take Danny Boyle at his word. Because it’s the only news upon which we can hang our hats.
There’s a basic premise with the 24th James Bond movie: you either love it or you hate it.
I am, of course, among that former group, among those who believed the fourth Daniel Craig 007 movie was a brilliant James Bond film and refuse to hear all those who speak negatively about the movie.
It all harkens back to a day in November 2015, where I was in a place I can’t reveal, holding the hand of a woman whose identity I can’t also reveal, and the welcome white dots traversed the black screen, leading to the first *proper* Daniel Craig gun barrel sequence.
I think of Spectre as a proper 50th anniversary Bond film, even more so than Skyfall. The return of 007’s most remarkable nemesis, cleverly portrayed by Christoph Waltz; the elegance of that white tuxedo with the red carnation, a thrilling pre-credits sequence and some humorous gags reminiscent of the Roger Moore era. A lightness had return to the Craig era.
I loved everything people hated. But let’s start with the music department. Thomas Newman provided a soundtrack that touched me to the bones, from the sleuthish “Vauxhall Bridge” to the African vibes of “L’Americain” and the romantic piano in “Madeleine”. In many ways it is very similar to Skyfall, And yes, at first I complained about the score. But as soon as I saw how the music aligned with the images on the big screen, my ear was more eager enough to catch the subtleties and enjoy the brilliant ways Newman’s score combined with the beautiful shots by Hoyte Van Hoytema. The pairing of sound and image in shots of the train through the Moroccan desert rank up there with the work of Phil Méheux, Michael Reed and Ted Moore. They’re some of my favorite visuals in the entire series.
I’d also like to consider the ultra-hated “Writing’s on the Wall” by Sam Smith. The lyrics expressed Bond’s inner sanctuary. Images of the naked actor, intertwined with female bodies and octopus tentacles, appear in the main titles by Daniel Kleinman. The melody mixes drama, romance, weakness and strength – making it unique among the series. The use of the instrumental section of the theme as Bond and Madeleine unleash their passion is second to none!
My only issues with the script were the omission of dialogue that could have helped us understand, for example, how Madeleine had become so important to Bond. Between them there were more actions that words, and words were certainly needed. Compare their conversations to Bond and Vesper in Casino Royale, or Bond and Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Each of those films provided better establishment for their respecitve relationships. Still, Léa Seydoux is a great actress and her talents overcome some of these scriptural deficiencies.
Spectre offered an interesting reworking of the shadow organization for the 21st century. Blofeld tried to achieve world domination in a more subtle way, by controlling the intelligence networks. Even though I loved Silva as a character, he lacked ambition beyond killing an old lady in Skyfall. Here, we have Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s plot tied into Bond’s past and lifted from Ian Fleming’s short story Octopussy. Spectre even borrows a lightened version of 007’s torment at the hands of Colonel Sun in Kingsley Amis’ only Bond novel.
The action scenes were also well played. The gags in the Aston Martin DB10 with the failing gadgets. The thrilling helicopter fight over the Day of the Dead parade. The well-choreographed snow plane crash. The fight with Hinx on the train. All of these scenes brought back images of classic 007.
I also loved the last scene. Craig’s Bond deserved, at least once, the classic triumphalist ending, girl in hand. If he retires from the role, that final image would remain justifiable sign-off for his four-film cycle.
All in all, I consider Spectre the best film from the Craig era and perhaps the best since The World is not Enough. Even though Irecognize the merits of Casino Royale, I can’t help but be thrilled by every frame of Spectre. I felt like a kid in a candy store of Bond delights.
Nicolás Suszczyk was born and lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He became a James Bond fan at eight He studies journalism and runs the 007 fan sites The GoldenEye Dossier and Bond En Argentina.
First Bond Movie: GoldenEye on TV, Tomorrow Never Dies on the big screen.
Favourite Bond Actor: Pierce Brosnan
Favourite Bond Girl: Eva Green to marry, Famke Janssen for an occasional fling.
How I discovered #Bond_age_: Discussing Bond with unknown people worldwide.
First, the necessary introduction, for old time’s sake.. This ditty about Spectre marks the 24th essay in a 23-part series about the James Bond cinemas. I encourage everyone to comment and join in the conversation.
Of [In]human #Bond_age_ #24: Spectre and Blofeld, the Villain Bond Can’t Quit
by James David Patrick
The title of this essay came before the essay itself. And of course it was a scene from Brokeback Mountain that initially inspired it. Jack Twist turns to Ennis Del Mar and tells him, “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Recreate that scene with James Bond and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Let me help.
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!)
Of [In]human #Bond_age_ #1: Dr. No’s Adaptation: How a Giant Squid Helped Define James Bond
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.
It’s time to take a cold, hard, steely, Smolder-style look at the 24th Bond movie after months, nay, years of speculation. From a #Bond_age_ perspective the journey from #Bond24 to #Spectre felt like an interminable marathon. Remember when we did a whole podcast about the tactleneck in the first teaser poster?
Good times.
Daniel Craig’s fourth Bond film promised us many things in advance. Daniel Craig promised a lighter Bond. Mendes promised a continuation of the Skyfall narrative. The teaser trailer promised us snowbound Craigers! (Skiing, maybe?) The end to a decades long legal feud between EON and Kevin McClory (who most surely returned from the grave after the release of Spectre to sue someone) promised the return of the global shadow organization SPECTRE – and presumably at some point the man with the master plans and the original grumpy cat, Blofeld.
SPECTRE had been decommissioned Bond property since McClory successfully lobbied for the rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld after Ian Fleming turned the screenplay he and McClory had penned for an early version of Thunderball (then called Longitude 78) into the Thunderball novel. In 1965 EON licensed the rights from McClory for 10 years. When the rights reverted back, Bond lost his long time nemesis. Consequently, in a grand symbolic gesture during the pre-titles of For Your Eyes Only, Bond dropped a Blofeld-type character down a smoke stack. The scene had no bearing on the narrative of the film and existed solely to raise a collective middle finger at Kevin McClory. “We don’t need no stinkin’ Blofelds!” it suggested.
And indeed, Blofeld had lost his utility. In the years that followed, Blofeld would even become representative of the campiest aspects of the Bond series, the most ripe for parody – as evidenced by Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. While there are elements from many Bond villains contained within the Dr. Evil character, the primary influence is unmistakably Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. I’ll save any further Blofeld editorialization for my full #Bond_age_ essay on Spectre. Suffice it to say that use of the original, farcical Blofeld character would be impossible in the gritty and grounded Craig era. A new Blofeld would require… innovation.
No more beating around the Blofeld. Let’s come right out with it. My one sentence review of Spectre and then we can all go send me disagreeable tweets. Spectre is not a good movie, but it is a good, hearty, old-fashioned Bond movie… until it isn’t. Spectre builds hope, and then burns it to the ground. Like when Halle Berry backdives into a sea of CGI in Die Another Day, I can pinpoint exactly when Spectre thumbs its nose at audiences. Your ultimate opinion on the film will depend on your ability to look the other way in that particular moment, to dare follow the rabbit down the rabbit hole… or more accurately, to follow Bond into yet another Fever Dream.
Royale-les-Eaux, France. A gaunt man enters a pissoir and approaches its other occupant, who lounges nonchalantly against the urinal’swall.
—Mr. Bond?
—Yes.
—I’m Lieutenant Mathis of the Special Police. These are my credentials.
—They appear to be in order.
—Come with me.
It’s probably the strangest opening scene in the history of Bond movies. And this odd meeting leads into a uniquely picaresque adventure, one in which Ursula Andress kills James Bond twenty minutes before the film ends, a sexually insecure Woody Allen will attempt to avert a nuclear explosion using Alka Seltzer, and 007’s usual final-battle alliance of US Marines, submarine crews, or friendly ninjas will be augmented by cowboys and Indians, sheepdogs and seals… and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Welcome to 1967’s Casino Royale.
You know, Skyfall wasn’t the first Bond movie in which our hero’s ancestral home goes up in flames. Right at the start of Casino Royale, an alliance of world powers attacks the mansion of our hero, James Bond, an ageing World War I veteran. (Perpetually 35-ish no more.) Only such drastic invasion of privacy can motivate Britain’s happily retired super-spy to take on one last mission. David Niven plays this reluctant Cold Warrior as a gallant Edwardian gent, “Sir James Bond 007.” The mainstream Bond usually sleeps with women in the employ of his enemies; his bedfellows then die for their troubles. Faced with the same situation, Niven politely declines the advances of SMERSH’s Deborah Kerr, causing her to, of course, reform and trade espionage for a nunnery.
Niven’s Bond harkens back to the roots of Fleming’s character in wartime and prewar imperial Britain. Nostalgia for British strength and leadership is writ large in this fussy, fatherly Bond; Niven lends the role his aura as the star of movies such as In Which We Serve and A Matter of Life and Death. Dismayed by contemporary “joke shop spies,’ he defeats SMERSH drones with nothing more than a shotgun and a pair of suspenders before heading back to base and declaring that all British agents will henceforth be known as James Bond 007, “to confuse the enemy.”
It’s an onscreen gesture that addresses Bond movies as a real-world media phenomenon. As Robert von Dassanowsky comments in his essay on Casino Royale, “By the release of Goldfinger, everyone wanted to be Bond; now everyone was.”
Among the numerous Bonds we find Terence Cooper’s “Coop,” the British Secret Service’s most sexually desirable agent, as selected by Miss Moneypenny. We see his Bond in a line-up of rival candidates – subjected to, and evaluated by, the female gaze, years before Daniel Craig swaggered forth from the surf. (And Niven’s renaming directive affects Moneypenny too, meaning that 1967’s Casino Royale also gives us a moment where 007 goes to bed with 007, completing the narcissistic circle implicit in every Bond film).
There’s also Woody Allen as a villainous, neurotic Bond living in the shadow of his famous uncle; Daliah Lavi as “The Detainer,” a female counterpart to Cooper; an unseen 007 who has “gone into television”; and Joanna Pettet playing Niven’s daughter by Mata Hari. (Her mother, Niven tells us, was “a great little dancer, terrible spy… whereas young Mata is a terrible dancer, might be a great little spy”).
If that wasn’t enough, we also have Dr. No‘s original Bond girl reinvented as another 007: Ursula Andress plays Vesper Lynd as a ruthless femme fatale who successfully murders one of our heroes and yet somehow manages to find herself literally on the side of the angels at the film’s end.
The spy killed by Andress is one of my favourite Bonds, Peter Sellers as baccarat expert Evelyn Tremble. This hapless nerd is recruited to become 007 and defeat Orson Welles’ villain at the card table, but he finds that being a studly superspy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When a temptress drugs his glass of champagne, he uses an antidote pill which fails to work; his bulletproof vest is “a little tight around the poison capsule compartment,” and although he can shoot the cork off a champagne bottle from across the room, he needs his thick, black-framed National Health Service glasses to do so.
The Evelyn Tremble suplot serves as a commentary on the boys’-own dream of being Bond, as a competent but ordinary man fails to fill the shoes of an impossible übermensch.
When Andress seduces and recruits him, Sellers’ Bond shows the uncomfortable, feigned nonchalance of a man dating out of his depth, and floundering. (—Martini? asks Vesper. —What about them? replies Tremble). Just as Moneypenny evaluates the male agents for sex appeal, once again it is a woman who subjects Bond to her gaze: Andress of the famous bikini is now fully clothed, photographing Bond in a series of increasingly ludicrous costumes as she gets the measure of him.
VESPER: Stand still!
[holds a light meter to EVELYN’s face]
I’m going to give you a five hundred at f2.
EVELYN: That’s the nicest thing that anyone’s ever said to me.
Sellers’ character tries to show off with press-ups and clowns around to hide his own discomfort; Andress takes the lead and he can barely manage to follow. At least he has the chance to dress as Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, and Toulouse Lautrec during his love scene, which is more consideration than anyone in a proper EON release ever got.
Inducted into the secret service, Sellers does slightly better with Jacqueline Bisset’s SMERSH floozy, but she still gets the better of him in the end. It’s only really in his drug-addled dreams, where the women are merely figments of his imagination, that “Evelyn Tremble” achieves true Bond-ian swagger.
Echoing Ian Fleming’s text, Sellers’ Bond later faces torture at the hands of Orson Welles’ Le Chiffre. (He is tied to a chair with no seat before enduring a psychedelic assault, a reminder that this parodic Casino Royale is more faithful to its origins than one might credit.) Poor old Evelyn Tremble thought he might be able to impersonate James Bond. Instead he’s driven out of his mind, then shot to death by the woman he was trying to rescue. (And you thought Daniel Craig felt betrayed by Eva Green.)
Here, 007 dies by the hand of the original Bond girl, in both senses: Ursula Andress of Dr. No playing Vesper Lynd from Fleming’s first novel. It’s small consolation for Tremble that, as the film’s closest thing to an Everyman, his ghost gets to condemn Woody Allen’s Bond to hell in the closing credits. Those credits include Mike Redway’s song, “Have No Fear, Bond Is Here,” which rounds off the movie’s closing whirl of soap-bubbles, deadly gunfire, and broad comedy:
The formula is safe with old 007
He’s got a red-head in his arms
Though he’s a lover,
When you are in trouble
Have no fear, look who’s here:
James Bond!
They’ve got us on the run
With guns
And knives
We’re fighting for our lives
Have no fear, Bond is here
He’s gonna save the world at Casino Royale
The jaunty tune seems doubly ridiculous, as Bond and his namesakes have been killed in a nuclear explosion. (It’s hard to tell whether the blast saves the world from Woody Allen’s villain or if it represents a kind of implied apocalypse in the style of Kiss Me Deadly.) As far as subversion of the Bond persona goes, it’s as if Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale concluded with What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding instead of the Monty Norman theme.
The 1967 Casino Royale takes a lot of flak for incoherence and apparent self-indulgence. And don’t get me wrong – this is a very silly, very self-indulgent film made by people burned by the real-life business of Bond.
BOND: (searching for Vesper) You haven’t by any chance seen a young lady in a green dress?
CONCIERGE: Would that be a lady with a black bag over her head being manhandled by two unsavoury gentlemen?
BOND: Could very well be.
CONCIERGE: She went that way, sir.
You have to be in touch with your inner eight-year-old to appreciate the movie’s mix of flying saucers, Dr. Caligari-meets-the-Keystone-Cops, go-go booted gladiator women, and French cops with Scottish accents. But Casino Royale is jester and carnival: a season of masquerade and festivity. It is the unreasonable, indulgent, frustrating quality of filmmaking that allows chaos to provide a serious and highly prescient commentary on the ludicrous and increasingly self-referential pageant that the Bond series would become. The movie is a true burlesque that goes where no “official” Bond film ever could – and you should rightfully christen it your new favourite Bond.
