The Spectre trailer premiered this morning (is that title all in caps? Is it not? I need guidance!). There were guns, gadgets, girls, all the usual stuff, but it was backed by something unusual: the theme from On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
The trailers usually use either a souped up version of the James Bond theme or a bit of music from one of the previous films. For Spectre, they've gone to the trouble of arranging a new, 2015 version of John Barry's 1969 classic. That's odd. Obviously, it's a superb piece of music, but why that specific theme? Does Spectre tie into OHMSS in some way?
This lead me back to one of my pet theories about the time frame of the James Bond films. Between 1962 and 2002, it was simple: James Bond was a creature who went from film to film, one after the other, in a straight and linear fashion. We'll have to gloss over the fact that he hasn't aged over the course of forty years, because that's a whole different can of worms, and it plays right into the hands of those idiots who claim that "James Bond" is just a codename.
References to previous films are few and far between but they definitely point to a linear route. Kronsteen mentions that 007 killed Dr No in From Russia With Love. Bond tries to get his hands on his black attache case from that film in Goldfinger. On Her Majesty's Secret Service has an entire scene where Bond fiddles with stuff from previous adventures, and then the death of Tracy is referenced in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only and Licence To Kill. There's a school of thought that believes Robert Brown is playing Admiral Hargreaves from The Spy Who Loved Me, newly promoted to M, in Octopussy through to Licence To Kill. And Die Another Day features an entire raft of self-referential moments, including a scene in Q's lab that may as well have had a caption running along the bottom telling you to freeze frame your DVD for maximum enjoyment.
Casino Royale, though, presented a Bond newly promoted to the 00-Section, so the assumption was: we've rebooted. This is a new Bond without any past, starting all over again. Quantum of Solace continued on directly from Casino Royale.
But then Skyfall came out, and didn't reference either of the two films. And rather than 007 being a new, relatively green agent, he's explicitly back to being an old dog, someone M will really go to bat for ("He's the best we have - though I'd never dream of telling him" she confesses to Elektra in The World Is Not Enough). Meanwhile, Mallory explicitly suggests that Bond simply gives it all up and retires to the Cotswolds or something, which seems a bit much given that he's only completed two assignments at that point.
So I came to think: maybe Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace weren't reboots. Maybe they were prequels. They were flashbacks to a time before the rest of the series started, a bit like episodes of Friends that suddenly feature Fat Monica and Rachel's old nose. You have to take on board the fact that the flashbacks were set in the present day, because if they suddenly set a James Bond film in 1961 it would be weird (plus you'd have that whole question of exactly how old is 007 anyway, given that he's been an operating agent for the best part of six decades). Remember how the Enterprise of Jonathan Archer's time was much more advanced looking than the Enterprise of Jim Kirk's time, even though technically it took place decades before? It's like that. Bond had access to computers and mobile phones in Casino Royale and a while later in Dr No he was sticking hairs over door jambs - just go with it.
It's perhaps best to think of the Bond films as running into one another, assignment after assignment after assignment, that just happened to be filmed and released over the course of fifty years. If you add up the timescale that way all 24 Bond films happen over the course of a couple of years.
Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are the flashback episodes then: how James Bond earned his stripes. After Quantum, we move onto Dr No, and the rest of the series proceeds from there. After Die Another Day, the next film in the timeline is Skyfall, and from there we move to Spectre.
Ah, but what about Judi Dench's M. I hear you cry? Simple: there are two female M's, one who promoted James Bond, and one who took over in GoldenEye. They both happen to look a lot like the venerable Dame Judi, but Henderson in You Only Live Twice looks a lot like Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever and we all accepted that. Something terrible happened to Judi Dench I after Quantum of Solace, and so Bernard Lee's Sir Miles Messervy took over for Dr No (he does actually mention that's he's not long been in charge - ok, he says he's in charge of MI7, but that's not the point). Then, after Robert Brown's M/Admiral Hargreaves retires, Judi Dench II takes over. Female M never actually got a name (I'm ignoring Barbara Mawdsley from the awful Raymond Benson novels on the basis that it's a really awful name and the books are really awful) and so she could be two separate people. We're also expressly told that her replacement is Gareth Mallory, not Sir Miles, so Skyfall can't take place before Dr No.
Naomie Harris' Moneypenny is also a different Moneypenny to the one from Dr No to Die Another Day; perhaps she's Moneypenny's daughter, like in the 1967 Casino Royale (there's a fifteen year age gap between Harris and Samantha Bond, so it's not inconceivable). And there have definitely been three different Q's - Major Boothroyd (Peter Burton/Desmond Llewellyn), John Cleese (who was presumably sacked after Die Another Day for being rubbish) and Ben Whishaw.
To bring it back to Spectre, which appears to follow on from Skyfall, that would make this the re-introduction of the criminal organisation, not its introduction - that already happened in Dr No. Perhaps Quantum has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Perhaps it was just a cell of SPECTRE all along. And so the use of the OHMSS theme is deliberate: Christoph Waltz says, "It was me James; the author of all your pain" - exactly the kind of thing someone who was responsible for the death of both Vesper and Tracy would say. In my timeline, Bond was still married to Tracy and widowed, only after he fell for Vesper (when Daniel Craig was a one year old, apparently - again, don't be too welded to the actual passing of time in the real world).
The one problem (every single reader: ONE problem?) with this theory is Felix Leiter. Unfortunately, Bond meets him for the first time twice: once in Casino Royale, where he doesn't recognise him at the gaming table so he's clearly a complete stranger, and once in Dr No, where Bond outright says "I've heard of him, but never met him." We'll just have to gloss over this. I mean, nothing about Felix Leiter really makes sense over the course of the series (is he fat or thin? Old or young? Blonde or brunette? Black or white? CIA or DEA? Effective or incompetent?) so we'll just have to handwave this one away.
Of course, this is all just stupid conjecture. When Spectre finally comes out in October it'll probably turn out the whole thing is set in the far future, and Monica Bellucci is a cyborg, and Christoph Waltz is Bond's long lost son. Until then I am clinging to my little theory.
Showing posts with label Casino Royale. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Casino Royale. Show all posts
Wednesday, 22 July 2015
Monday, 17 February 2014
Gallic Charms
I have a controversial idea. This might sound scary, but bear with me. I think there should be more French people in Bond films.
It's an odd deman, considering James Bond is a British icon. Despite the entente cordiale there's still a fractious relationship between the UK and France; we can't just look past a thousand years of attacking one another. They find us arrogant and rude; we find them, erm, arrogant and rude. The only thing we can properly agree on is that everyone else in the world is just awful.
However, here at Anya's Woolly Hat, we deal with facts, and the fact is, almost every time a French person turned up in a Bond film, the film was much better for it.
Leaving aside the brief hors d'oeuvres of Gallicism that was Mitsouko's Mme. La Porte, Thunderball delivered our first French dish in the form of Claudine Auger's Domino. Saucy, flirtatious, and seemingly incapable of wearing much more than a bikini, Claudine made a stunning impression. The fact that she wasn't burnt to a crisp by Fiona Volpe's hyper-awesomeness shows how good she must have been.
Moonraker, in 1979, was actually filmed in France, and in a manner that probably entitled the producers to tax breaks, the cast was filled with a certain ooh la la. Michel Lonsdale - or Michael, as he is credited in English-language productions; I'd love to go up to him and say "alright Mike?" and see how he reacts - took the part of Hugo Drax, and he was amazing. It's hard to convey how genuinely creepy and evil Drax is when Lonsdale seems to do so little. He manages to curl his tongue around the dialogue and twist it into a threat. "You appear with the tedious inevitability - pfft! - of an unloved season," is a pretty good line on the page, but that little snicker in the middle makes it terrifying. And his address to the perfect people aboard the space station is the greatest villain's speech in Bond movie history, bar none.
Filling out the lower ranks of the cast are a load of Euro-babes playing Drax's girls - I am slightly obsessed with the one with the perm - and Corinne Clery playing Corinne. As anyone who's read the excellent novelisation James Bond and Moonraker will know, this character was a Valley Girl called Trudi Parker in the original script. The casting of Ms Clery changed her into Ms Dufour, but nobody thought to change the dialogue, a source of frustration for Christopher Wood. He laments in his autobiography that Corinne was just too sophisticated for his dialogue, which makes me thankful we didn't see his original vision of a blonde bimbo bouncing around the chateau. It shows how casting a French actress can immediately add class and style to the most uninspired characters.
Carole Bouquet's Melina came next, an actress about as Hellenic as a croissant ("But I'm half-Greek," she purrs, in an accent straight out of 'Allo 'Allo). Bouquet's steely determination could have been off putting but her undeniable beauty and glimpses of humanity made her a great choice. She carried herself with intelligence and grace, convincing us that she was both an expert markswoman with a crossbow and also a highly qualified marine archaeologist (is marine archeologist an actual job?).
Fast forward to 1997 and we get Sophie Marceau's Elektra, and I have to reign myself in now from just typing "AWESOME" over and over. Marceau was sexy, frightening, provocative and disturbing - sometimes all within the same line of dialogue. "You can't kill me - you'd miss me," is delivered with a smirk and a flirt, even as she's calculating how to send Renard off to destroy Istanbul. I love Sharon Stone, the original choice for Elektra, but she would have been far too obvious in the part. Sophie Marceau keeps us guessing about her character's motives throughout, even after we've found out she's the super villain.
And then there's Eva Green as Vesper. I admit, the accent isn't great. She's just a little bit too English, while at the same time being a little bit too foreign. But her many other assets overwhelm this flaw. She's gorgeous, but in an unconventional way; for me she's at her best when she's not made up, in the "tuxedo" scene or on the beach with Bond. That's not to say she's not stunning when she strides into the Casino in a tight black dress. She's funny - never underestimate how hard it is to find a Bond Girl who can do comedy; just look at Halle Berry's eye rolling delivery in Die Another Day. She's clever, and she's heartfelt, and she's just wonderful. She does everything she needs to as Bond's first love.
Mathieu Almaric, our newest French villain, is very different to Drax. He's oily and weasly. I like that. I like that he's not all grand gestures and pontificating. I love the way he fights, all scrappy and desperate, grunting as he swings the axe at Bond, a bit desperate. Dominic Greene is not a great villain, but that's due to the script, not Almaric's performance.
Lastly, Berenice (Lim) Marlohe as Severine, and once again I have to hold back from gushing. She's barely in Skyfall, but she makes a hell of an impression - just that shot of her staring out of the apartment building, hair blowing in the wind, would blow you away, and then she turns up dressed as a dragon lady in Macao. It's all an act, and the way Marlohe lets the cracks show is wonderful. In a film full of great performances, this was the one that surprised me the most, and the one I was most grateful to have. Severine is the best "villain's girlfriend" in the series, and I wish they'd release the scenes she was cut out of - her excised entrance at the airport looks fierce as hell.
As you can, see there hasn't been a single incidence of a French person being in a Bond film where they haven't been eighty kinds of amazing (and before you say anything, Patrick Bauchau is Belgian). More French villains please. More French Bond Girls. It's a decision that no-one will regret. Not even Nigel Farage.
It's an odd deman, considering James Bond is a British icon. Despite the entente cordiale there's still a fractious relationship between the UK and France; we can't just look past a thousand years of attacking one another. They find us arrogant and rude; we find them, erm, arrogant and rude. The only thing we can properly agree on is that everyone else in the world is just awful.
However, here at Anya's Woolly Hat, we deal with facts, and the fact is, almost every time a French person turned up in a Bond film, the film was much better for it.
Leaving aside the brief hors d'oeuvres of Gallicism that was Mitsouko's Mme. La Porte, Thunderball delivered our first French dish in the form of Claudine Auger's Domino. Saucy, flirtatious, and seemingly incapable of wearing much more than a bikini, Claudine made a stunning impression. The fact that she wasn't burnt to a crisp by Fiona Volpe's hyper-awesomeness shows how good she must have been.
Moonraker, in 1979, was actually filmed in France, and in a manner that probably entitled the producers to tax breaks, the cast was filled with a certain ooh la la. Michel Lonsdale - or Michael, as he is credited in English-language productions; I'd love to go up to him and say "alright Mike?" and see how he reacts - took the part of Hugo Drax, and he was amazing. It's hard to convey how genuinely creepy and evil Drax is when Lonsdale seems to do so little. He manages to curl his tongue around the dialogue and twist it into a threat. "You appear with the tedious inevitability - pfft! - of an unloved season," is a pretty good line on the page, but that little snicker in the middle makes it terrifying. And his address to the perfect people aboard the space station is the greatest villain's speech in Bond movie history, bar none.
Filling out the lower ranks of the cast are a load of Euro-babes playing Drax's girls - I am slightly obsessed with the one with the perm - and Corinne Clery playing Corinne. As anyone who's read the excellent novelisation James Bond and Moonraker will know, this character was a Valley Girl called Trudi Parker in the original script. The casting of Ms Clery changed her into Ms Dufour, but nobody thought to change the dialogue, a source of frustration for Christopher Wood. He laments in his autobiography that Corinne was just too sophisticated for his dialogue, which makes me thankful we didn't see his original vision of a blonde bimbo bouncing around the chateau. It shows how casting a French actress can immediately add class and style to the most uninspired characters.
Carole Bouquet's Melina came next, an actress about as Hellenic as a croissant ("But I'm half-Greek," she purrs, in an accent straight out of 'Allo 'Allo). Bouquet's steely determination could have been off putting but her undeniable beauty and glimpses of humanity made her a great choice. She carried herself with intelligence and grace, convincing us that she was both an expert markswoman with a crossbow and also a highly qualified marine archaeologist (is marine archeologist an actual job?).
Fast forward to 1997 and we get Sophie Marceau's Elektra, and I have to reign myself in now from just typing "AWESOME" over and over. Marceau was sexy, frightening, provocative and disturbing - sometimes all within the same line of dialogue. "You can't kill me - you'd miss me," is delivered with a smirk and a flirt, even as she's calculating how to send Renard off to destroy Istanbul. I love Sharon Stone, the original choice for Elektra, but she would have been far too obvious in the part. Sophie Marceau keeps us guessing about her character's motives throughout, even after we've found out she's the super villain.
And then there's Eva Green as Vesper. I admit, the accent isn't great. She's just a little bit too English, while at the same time being a little bit too foreign. But her many other assets overwhelm this flaw. She's gorgeous, but in an unconventional way; for me she's at her best when she's not made up, in the "tuxedo" scene or on the beach with Bond. That's not to say she's not stunning when she strides into the Casino in a tight black dress. She's funny - never underestimate how hard it is to find a Bond Girl who can do comedy; just look at Halle Berry's eye rolling delivery in Die Another Day. She's clever, and she's heartfelt, and she's just wonderful. She does everything she needs to as Bond's first love.
Mathieu Almaric, our newest French villain, is very different to Drax. He's oily and weasly. I like that. I like that he's not all grand gestures and pontificating. I love the way he fights, all scrappy and desperate, grunting as he swings the axe at Bond, a bit desperate. Dominic Greene is not a great villain, but that's due to the script, not Almaric's performance.
Lastly, Berenice (Lim) Marlohe as Severine, and once again I have to hold back from gushing. She's barely in Skyfall, but she makes a hell of an impression - just that shot of her staring out of the apartment building, hair blowing in the wind, would blow you away, and then she turns up dressed as a dragon lady in Macao. It's all an act, and the way Marlohe lets the cracks show is wonderful. In a film full of great performances, this was the one that surprised me the most, and the one I was most grateful to have. Severine is the best "villain's girlfriend" in the series, and I wish they'd release the scenes she was cut out of - her excised entrance at the airport looks fierce as hell.
As you can, see there hasn't been a single incidence of a French person being in a Bond film where they haven't been eighty kinds of amazing (and before you say anything, Patrick Bauchau is Belgian). More French villains please. More French Bond Girls. It's a decision that no-one will regret. Not even Nigel Farage.
Friday, 7 February 2014
Starting the Hat
I used to be a moderator on a set of James Bond forums, back in the mid Noughties. I was pretty good.
At first it was fun. It's always nice to chat about your hobby with other like minded people. Then it took a downturn.
It was around the time Daniel Craig was cast as 007. In 2014, this seems like a bizarre thing to write, but his anointment as the sixth James Bond was horribly controversial among fans. Things got really bad, really fast. You were either pro-Craig or anti-Craig, and you couldn't be on the fence.
I was on the fence. Years of watching Bond films made me trust the producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson (or Babs and Mickey, as they were fondly known). If they saw something in this man that said 007, then who was I to argue? After all, they'd seen his audition.
Throughout 2006 the battles raged, two diametrically opposed sides who refused to budge. The tiniest mention of something not even related to the new Bond could ignite a war of words. People went ballistic.
When Casino Royale came out - and was a triumph - you'd have thought the battles would end. They didn't. Both sides had spent so long digging themselves in they were stuck there. The anti-Craigs refused to admit they were mistaken; the pro-Craigs became unbearably smug. It was all deeply unpleasant.
I lost my spirit. I still posted, still carried on with all these people I'd been talking to for years, but my heart wasn't in it. The camaraderie was gone. It wasn't helped by a bunch of new people, turned on to the series by Casino Royale, suddenly appearing and saying things like, "hey, is it true there are James Bond books?"
After a while I just stopped visiting.
I miss being able to talk about Bond. I miss people who know what I'm talking about when I say "double taking pigeon" or "Dr No and a load of guano". I have nowhere to let out those stupid ideas and theories and complaints about this series that's been a massive part of my life for twenty odd years.
Hence this blog. Hence, Anya's Woolly Hat.
Why is it called Anya's Woolly Hat? Because of this.
Barbara Bach, in The Spy Who Loved Me, wears this woolly hat to the secret underwater base of the villain, and I think it's one of the greatest moments in the entire series. It's awful, yet brilliant. It's stupid, but fun. It's horribly ugly, but it's stuck on top of an astonishingly beautiful woman. It's ludicrous. It's fantastic.
It's Anya's Woolly Hat, and it deserves to be commemorated.
If you've read my other blog, Round the North We Go, or any of my posts over at the Coronation Street Blog, you'll have some idea what I'm going to write about. Minutiae. Diversions. Rants. Wild theories. Devotional love notes to Diana Rigg. Lots of rude remarks about Talisa Soto's acting. Pointless stuff.
This is my James Bond. Welcome aboard.
At first it was fun. It's always nice to chat about your hobby with other like minded people. Then it took a downturn.
It was around the time Daniel Craig was cast as 007. In 2014, this seems like a bizarre thing to write, but his anointment as the sixth James Bond was horribly controversial among fans. Things got really bad, really fast. You were either pro-Craig or anti-Craig, and you couldn't be on the fence.
I was on the fence. Years of watching Bond films made me trust the producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson (or Babs and Mickey, as they were fondly known). If they saw something in this man that said 007, then who was I to argue? After all, they'd seen his audition.
Throughout 2006 the battles raged, two diametrically opposed sides who refused to budge. The tiniest mention of something not even related to the new Bond could ignite a war of words. People went ballistic.
When Casino Royale came out - and was a triumph - you'd have thought the battles would end. They didn't. Both sides had spent so long digging themselves in they were stuck there. The anti-Craigs refused to admit they were mistaken; the pro-Craigs became unbearably smug. It was all deeply unpleasant.
I lost my spirit. I still posted, still carried on with all these people I'd been talking to for years, but my heart wasn't in it. The camaraderie was gone. It wasn't helped by a bunch of new people, turned on to the series by Casino Royale, suddenly appearing and saying things like, "hey, is it true there are James Bond books?"
After a while I just stopped visiting.
I miss being able to talk about Bond. I miss people who know what I'm talking about when I say "double taking pigeon" or "Dr No and a load of guano". I have nowhere to let out those stupid ideas and theories and complaints about this series that's been a massive part of my life for twenty odd years.
Hence this blog. Hence, Anya's Woolly Hat.
Why is it called Anya's Woolly Hat? Because of this.
Barbara Bach, in The Spy Who Loved Me, wears this woolly hat to the secret underwater base of the villain, and I think it's one of the greatest moments in the entire series. It's awful, yet brilliant. It's stupid, but fun. It's horribly ugly, but it's stuck on top of an astonishingly beautiful woman. It's ludicrous. It's fantastic.
It's Anya's Woolly Hat, and it deserves to be commemorated.
If you've read my other blog, Round the North We Go, or any of my posts over at the Coronation Street Blog, you'll have some idea what I'm going to write about. Minutiae. Diversions. Rants. Wild theories. Devotional love notes to Diana Rigg. Lots of rude remarks about Talisa Soto's acting. Pointless stuff.
This is my James Bond. Welcome aboard.
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