The inimitable.
Posted on 01/24/2005 12:47:20 PM PST by r5boston
Moviegoers can thank Austin Powers for killing off the martini-quaffing sexoholic, writes Tanya Gold.
Last week James Bond was fired. His nuclear pencil gathers dust beneath Whitehall. There is no news of 007 number six and the production of Bond film 21, due this November, has stalled. There is trouble at MI6, minister: the martini-quaffing sexoholic is suffering an existential crisis and it can't be cured by an intelligent Rolex or a gondola that can drive on land.
Eon, which produces Bond, and MGM, which finances his capers, are bickering. It is rumoured MGM wants an action-movie franchise - Spiderman in a tux - that sprouts money. As Bond said to Dr No: "World domination; same old dream; our asylums are full of men who think they are Napoleon." Eon, however, is fighting for the Cold War relic, the "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" and gentleman spy who flowed from the pen of Ian Fleming.
Why is Bond in crisis? He is a corpse; the hero of a dead time and a dead place called postwar Clubland. Fleming was an Eton-educated journalist who worked in British naval intelligence during World War II, where his professional apogee was evacuating King Zog of Albania from Nazi-occupied Europe. Bond was his fantasy alter ego, a libidinous killer who thought women were "for recreation". Bond slapped bottoms and peered at his watch during sex; he killed women he had slept with and, worse, he told one dewy-eyed poppet: "I never miss."
This was acceptable in 1952, when Bond was born on the pages of Casino Royale; but feminism castrated Fleming's hero. Today, any responsible GP would refer him to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. We know, though Fleming didn't, that Bond won't be polished off by Soviet crocodiles, but by AIDS. He had a weird predilection for girls with silly names. He had an Electra, a Honey, a Christmas, a Pussy and an Octopussy. He probably had a Decapussy, or did I dream it?
Fleming created two villainous organisations to wound his baby Bond. The first was Spectre (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), a gaggle of freelance megalomaniacs who wanted to take over the world for fun. Today they would be politicians. Spectre grins on the news every day. You voted for it.
Fleming's other nemesis, Smersh (aka Death to Spies), was a mutant strain of the KGB. Smersh is as frightening as eating toast. Bond always has a vodka martini and a chuckle with the Reds at the end, because, for Fleming, the Cold War was just a disagreement between Western gentlemen.
At the end of The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond escapes into a tented pod with a beautiful KGB agent. He boasts to M that he is "just keeping the British end up, sir". Recent Bonds have experimented with a psychotic heiress, a renegade British agent and a media baron. The authentic candidates for modern Bond villains are, of course, Islamist fundamentalists but it's hard to imagine even 007 peeling back a burka or keeping the British end up with an al-Qaeda operative.
Our tolerance for snobbery has withered. When we hear James musing to a baddie "Red wine with fish; that should have told me something" and explaining that "certain things just aren't done - like drinking Dom Perignon '53 above a temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit", we don't fawn and sputter onto satin sheets. Bond behaves like an ancient gay dress designer, clinging to his final (crystal) marble.
Everywhere, Fleming's fastasies are dust. We've seen the faces of intelligence operatives because they flog their books at literary festivals. We know from Spycatcher that the British secret service spends its time watching Irish grandmothers and destabilising Labour governments - and faking dossiers for Downing Street. The spying game has been demystified.
But Bond's final bullet didn't come from feminism, the government, or the poor entertainment possibilities of modern terrorism. In the end Sean, Roger, George, Timothy and Pierce were vanquished by just one man - Austin Powers. Bond's satirical twin, who danced and shagged and bit his way through three blockbuster Bond spoofs, finally achieved what Smersh could not. Austin's silly ruffled shirts, his encounters with Dr Evil and the Fembots and, most particularly, his plaintive cry, "Do I make you horny, baby?" did for the straight man. Some things just can't withstand satire, least of all a crumbling spy who puns badly. MGM will find a new aspirational hero for us, one who won't make us hurl into our popcorn: a gay Bond, a black Bond, a paraplegic Bond, an obese Bond, a Welsh bond. Any Bond but James Bond.
Women still love James Bond, or any other man who embodies the persona Ian Fleming portrayed so well in his work. The studio is making a mistake.
I like Domino, Bambi and Thumper.
My guess is that little Tanya has had too many dissappointing relationships... Perhaps she should stick to listening to Alaniss Morisette albums.
Rubbish.
Good riddance to the Movie Bonds. I read all of Ian Fleming's work long before I saw the movies. I saw two or maybe three of them before I never watched another...totally different character. In the books, Bond thinks and talks and works his way out of problems. In the movie, he just always has just the right gizmo from Q to create just the right big explosion.
I just hope Clive Owen gets to be the next Bond. Ewen MacKenobi seems to specialize in ruining franchises while Jude Law is just gay.
Part of the problem is that the mostly crappy Bond films that are made now bear almost no relation to the mostly excellent Bond films that were made in the early years. Compare the excellent spy thriller "From Russia with Love" to the idiotic "Die Another Day" and it's no wonder that the Bond franchise has hit an awful rough patch.
This is a big mistake. Last time I checked Bond movies still did very well. I recently that they wanted to make a gay Bond, in which the dumba$$es in the studio offices will kill off a profitable franchise if they do so, or let the PC types kill Bond off.
Sorry but there's really no deep explanation for why the Bond series has died. The truth is it died because they lost all the creativity. Bond adventures used to be unique, and most importantly so were their stunts. With the last 8 or 9 Bond movies when you watched the trailers you could rattle off which previous Bond movie that stunt was in, and the last few they started re-ripping off stunts they'd already rerun. At that point Bond was dead. Jackie Chan didn't help either, he's made a minor career of ripping off Bond stunts but doing them at a more exciting pace and with cheaper vehicles.
All things come to an end, and 20 movies is one hell of a run.
Gotta agree with you on Clive Owen.
Pierce Brosnan brought bond back and now MGM is going to kill him again.
James Bond was a parody of himself. Don't blame Austin Powers for making Bond more and more ridiculous. All you have to do is take a look at the names of his most famous female conquests (Electra, Honey, Christmas, Pussy and Octopussy) to see how ludicrous the whole enterprise is now.
Problem is Bond movies are expensive as hell, it takes a lot more money to do well when production and advertising costs almost 200 mil.
The inimitable.
Plenty.
Well, “Die Another Day” came out 2 years ago. It cost $180 million in production and marketing and raked in a worldwide $430 million. That’s pretty good. Better than “Alexander the Gay”.
There were Bond imitators and parodies right from the beginning - OUR MAN FLINT, the Matt Helm movies, MODESTY BLAISE, WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY, not to mention the Woody Allen version of CASINO ROYALE which was one big not-so-in joke on the whole series. The Austin Powers movies are just the latest in a long string, and there's a reason it's called the sincerest form of flattery. The Bond movies never took themselves seriously, at any rate - Bond was a smooth and ironic dude, not an idiot. But why bother arguing with a feminist? Just take out your Walther PPK and shoot her.
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