Although we finally have a new James Bond star in Daniel Craig, Casino Royale screenwriter Paul Haggis (Crash) still has his work cut out for him in making sure the screenplay is equally fresh. In next week’s issue, Entertainment Weekly’s Joshua Rich offers Haggis five unsolicited suggestions:
1. Get Real. No more invisible cars and ice chateaus. If 007 is seen at the casino playing baccarat instead of poker, he’ll seem woefully out of date. Take a page from the Bourne movies and try some real-world intrigue, actual locations, recognizably human relationships between characters, and plausible fight scenes involving hand-to-hand combat instead of fanciful gadgetry.
2. Get Badder. Where are the memorable Bond villains of yesteryear? The movie needs someone roiling with personality, like Goldfinger, Blofeld, or for that matter, the Oedipally driven killer Craig played in Road to Perdition.
3. Get Better Buddies. Bond needs sidekicks who are equals, or at least near-equals. Think Halle Berry’s Jinx in Die Another Day. Or think Ron and Hermione, only grown-up.
4. Go Darker. James Bond’s not the most introspective guy, but heroes forced to confront their own guilt, bitterness, and vengeful feelings have done well lately (like Spider-Man‘s Peter Parker). Plus, that makes them more compelling when they finally go medieval (like The Matrix‘s Neo or even Tony Soprano).
5. Assassinate Product Placement. It’ll never happen, but we can dream.
How would you shake and stir the 007 storylines?
Ok, good suggestions on the whole but number one undermines the essence of Bond. Make the next film gritty with tons of realism sprinkled throughout, but leave room for some glitz, unnecessary but attractive female characters and impressive technology. Take the Batman Begins route with the technology and tell us all Bond’s gadgets are government throwaways.
I strongly agree with 1. It needs to have a sense of reality to it. The stories so far have been fantastic, but spy thrillers like Bourne are much better because they are about real reactions to extraordinary circumstances.
As for 2, I think what they really need is a continuous Spectre arc, something interesting that speaks of a large corporation with money behind of it masquerading as a terrorist organization just to keep money flowing in. Use it over three or four films… let us see Bond take it apart, scheme by foiled scheme, until they are bankrupt and truly desperate.
3. Jinx was a LOUSY Bond partner. She was a repeat of many Bond-girl clichés and… no. Give us Felix and some of the other 00 agents. Give us Bond finding out someone’s a double-agent in the second act, and using their confidence (and their deceit) to his advantage in the third act.
Beware of 4. Spider-Man is a wise-cracker, and that’s part of how he deals with the darker aspects. The audience does not want a Bond film to turn into Requiem For A Dream.
I think 5 is almost necessary. For one, it involves the prestige. Bond lives a wealthy life. Show him in his apartment, a lonely little life filled with books, because he can’t stand television and has even less interest in women outside of sexual gratification.
6. Knock off the cornball quips. One of the things that damaged Brosnan’s perfomance. He was quipping and chuckling where he should have been silent. He’s supposed to be confident, charming, and likeable as a spy. The first part of that is necessary to wooing women. But the quipping just sells him to an audience that’s already fascinated by him. Make him appear charming and likeable, not antagonizing villains. Let them think he’ll sell out to buy time. In short, this goes back to 1, be REAL.
Another point–
Do you remember the episode of Millenium, where 4 demons discuss being spotted by a human, not realizing that each one encountered Frank Black? The last story involves one of the demons wooing a woman, letting her see his demon side, and her loving him anyways… and then betraying her deliberately to send her to suicide. Frank sees the demon, recognizes what he is, and just says, “You must be so _lonely_.”
James Bond is very, very lonely.
I agree with David. The one flaw the Bond movies of late have had are memorable villians. Every villian can’t be Goldfinger, but some of the villians in the 80s could’ve been better and more memorable.
Jinx was OK, but bring back Felix Leiter. He’s in Casino Royale, the novel.
As for the card game, keep it baccarat. We are talking Bond.
I would shake things up by using None of the suggestions you made. Keep it James Bond, the reason the franchise is so successful is it has always stayed away from those suggestions..
“I would shake things up by using None of the suggestions you made. Keep it James Bond, the reason the franchise is so successful is it has always stayed away from those suggestions..”
EXACTLY. PERIOD.
James Bond was out-dated in 1963 when Dr. No came out. The public doesn’t watch Bond wanting an accurate reflection of society.
It’s called escapism for a reason.
You really DON’T have to follow a formula. Bond is a successful license, but the FORMAT is wearing thin. When people speak of what they love of Bond, they usually speak of Dr. No, and Connery.
And License to Kill may have been a departure from format for Bond in some ways, but it was riddled with clichés from JCVD movies. The big explosion of an oil rig at the end kida says it all– the big climax of the Bond film is the kind of thing that, in real life, barely makes the evening news.
The quips, the one-liners– reduce Bond to ‘Otter’from Animal House. Which is ridiculous, as Bond is really cool. He isn’t irresponsible, and an M that thinks so doesn’t get him. He cares about things, but less than most people expect him to. He isn’t a ‘loose cannon’; loose canons in the spy game don’t live long. He’s a GAME PLAYER, and people who play games with him tend to lose.
He’s an Englishman and very secure in that. He doesn’t waste a lot of time impersonating people of other nations. He wants to do the job and then move on. But he’s also a bit lost in his own identity as a playboy. Like Bruce Wayne, he’s putting on an act, but he doesn’t have the death of his parents to keep him grounded in reality. He enjoys his leisure but when work’s in fron of him, he’s focused on it.
(I don’t accept the Never Say Never Again notion that women distract him; I think he sees that, in espionage, they are hurdles– jumping over them is perilous, but dancing around them can be helpful to his work.)
I do agree about the technology. It needs to be on the front end of current technology. Explosives the size of a Contac capsule. Remote control cars… sure, okay. But how about cellular phones that can use any high reach object (telephone pole, tree, etc) as an antenna? Credit cards that scan and hack the POS of any computer register they encounter? Bullets that dissolve and destroy themselves beyond ballistic analysis? Aerosol cans that diminsh any use of DNA profiling at a crime scene?
Think practical, step forward, and then make sense of the step, is the way to do technology.
“The quips, the one-liners– reduce Bond to ‘Otter’from Animal House.”
Interesting that you praise COnnery and Dr. No on one hand and then insult them on the other.
Connery and Terence Young came up with the idea of Bond dispatching of someone and then having a quip afterwords.
“When people speak of what they love of Bond, they usually speak of Dr. No, and Connery.”
Also, please don’t speak for me. I’m a huge Bond fan and Connery’s Bond, although the original – is certainly the MOST one-dimensional and will never be anything but.
And last time I looked, Dr. No wasn’t on the top of anyone’s Bond list except Ursula Andress. Most people who blindly love Connery off (generally older women who only watch to get a slight thrill) mention Goldfinger as their favourite.
Looking at the whole series, however, Connery’s films were great with Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Golfinger. He then clunked across the finish line with Thunderball (that is drowned everytime it goes underwater), You Only Live Twice (with some of the WORST special effects ever committed to celluloid) and Diamonds Are Forever (I’m not even gonna bother commenting on his heap, although it’s clear Connery only did it because of the huge sum being donated to his scholarship fund).
Lazenby’s Bond, although a one-off (and the easiest to ignorantly ridicule), had more depth than Connery’s by a landslide. The film is a literal translation of Fleming’s book – that’s why it WORKS. That’s also the reason Casino Royale won’t work – coz they’re modifying it to make the film a) more commercial and b) more ‘young’.
Casino Royale the book is short, succinct and to the point. They’re going to pad it to DEATH and remove any balls it once had.
With the villian not being connected to SMERSH, it makes the entire story rather pointless.
As for the ‘format’wearing thin, also speak for yourself.
Removing Moneypenny and the Q branch completely are idiotic ideas – the feverish attempts of Eon productions to save the franchise that Michael G. Wilson has driven into the depths of boredom since the death of Cubby Brocolli.
When he died, the Bond films died with him IMO. We’ve clearly proven that Brosnan, although a fan favourite (until he actually made GoldenEye), couldn’t even save the franchise from mediocrity.
The Bond movies used to set trends – now they follow them. And they do it gladly, much to the detriment of the true Bond fans.
Madonna’s theme song, anyone? ’nuff said.
“[He] doesn’t have the death of his parents to keep him grounded in reality.”
Where did you glean this completely false bit of information from?
**shakes head**
Here’s the true story, people (from the Bond Informant):
“Bond’s parents are named as Andrew Bond, a Scotsman, and Monique Delacroix from Canton de Vaud in Switzerland (these nationalities had previously been established in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”). Bond’s Scottish heritage was partly a result of Fleming being impressed with Sean Connery’s screen portrayal of his character, whereas Bond’s mother was named for a Swiss girl to whom Fleming was once engaged. In his fictional biography of Bond, John Pearson gave his birthdate as 11 November (Armistice Day) 1920, although there is no evidence for this in Fleming’s novels.
Bond’s father worked for Vickers, an armaments firm, and Bond’s early life was spend abroad. When he was 11 years of age, both of Bond’s parents were killed in a climbing accident and he subsequently lived with his aunt, Miss Charmian Bond in a hamlet called Pett Bottom near Canterbury in Kent. At the age of about 12, Bond entered the English public school of Eton but his career there was brief and he was transferred to Fettes after some trouble with a maid. At the age of 17 Bond left school and briefly attended the University of Geneva.”
I’m sort of amazed that I’d need to follow up “Didn’t have the death of his parents” with the correcting modifier, “at the hands of a back alley murder, and in front of him.”
But, there… Sliiiiiiiight difference between your parents leaving you, blameless to anyone, and “your mom and dad died adventure sporting”. Perhaps, logically, both have difficulty making attachments… but of the two, Wayne is the one who has the burden of surviving following him.
I’m sort of amazed that I’d need to follow up “Didn’t have the death of his parents” with the correcting modifier, “at the hands of a back alley murder, and in front of him.”
But, there… Sliiiiiiiight difference between your parents leaving you, blameless to anyone, you know “your mom and dad died adventure sporting”, and watching them gunned down in front of you while you sit, paralyzed and defenseless.
Perhaps, logically, both have difficulty making attachments… but of the two, Wayne is the one who has the burden of surviving following him.
WTF?? I think this article is BS, at least the “Get Real” part. We don’t go to the movies to see regular people and normal action. We go to the movies to escape from it. We go to see the heroes, the gods of cinema, in a world where unrealistic events and locations are part of the experience. Don’t try to take away the imagination and creativity of the film industry.
offt he subject i think they should bring back grace jones in a bond movie to give a touch from the past, i would love to see her in a bond movie again i think a lot of people would go to see it for the fact that she is a classic actor of the 007 film