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Solitaire, on the other hand, does absolutely nothing for uncomfortably long stretches of time here. I think there was a brief, split-second shot of her after Bond severs the ropes with his watch, but that's negligible stuff.
Spectre? I'll look.
EDIT:
This one you mean
It appears to be a semi-nude/nude woman scratching her back, but I can't find any more information than that.
I'm referring to everything from the moment they get into the lair. Kananga even makes passing remarks about her and she says absolutely nothing the entire time.
Watch this from the start:
And notice that she's completely left out of the script the entire time until Kananga dies. "Spaced out" is a stretch on my part upon watching that, because she does look around and have a genuinely fearful expression, but to me it still seems as if she was completely neglected by the script the entire time. She's just standing there looking forwards and occasionally around her.
Also, for some reason her personality shift, while making complete sense, is a bit jarring. I understand that she's just a psychic and not used to all the combat situations, but seriously, she goes from being supremely confident while in Kananga's employ (for all of one or two scenes) to a damsel in distress for the rest of the movie.
I still like her, but the only useful thing she does afterwards to my memory was when she pretended to slap Bond so he could work off the attack and hit a few thugs. She's getting saved for the rest of the movie, lol. In fairness, this was kind of a thing in the 70's. Part of why I like Goodhead is because she's not just the helpless damsel in distress for most of the movie, unlike all the other Bond girls of the decade.
I've never really thought much about it because Solitaire was indeed essentially a damsel in distress from the moment she was challenged by Kananga in his Fillet of Soul location (once he realized she'd lost her powers). I always chalked it up to the fact that she was terrified of the voodoo stuff (being a believer and all that) and so essentially was paralyzed by fear at his lair after being essentially offered up as sacrifice.
At the risk of offending Seymour's fans, she didn't come across as much of an actress in the film to me either (in the dramatic moments), and so I can perhaps understand them keeping her role limited.
For me, it feels more like lazy/neglectful script writing, completely independent of Seymour's talents or anyone else's. Surely they could've given her a few hostile lines in response to Kananga to show that she was completely with Bond now?
Bond is his usual overtly confident & chatty self, but he just doesn't show the fear outwardly due to his training. If I'm not mistaken, something similar happens at the dinner table in DN (Honey is pretty much silent for most of it).
I too used to think Seymour's Solitare was one of the more attractive, better Bond girls in the series when I was young, but now I find her one of the least interesting and kind of an example for the need to create the tougher, more independent females for upcoming films.
She comes across somewhat cocky in her first meeting with Bond and somewhat confident with Kananga, but once the romance thing starts she turns into a quivering damsel in distress.
I started wondering this because, in our view of Bond's apartment in SP, we can see that he has a very plain home with nothing hanging up, and many boxes around. In SF we learn that, during Bond's hiatus while "enjoying death" MI6 sold his home and put his items into storage. I think what view we get of his apartment in SP is Bond's home in the process of being put back together, as we can see that the stacks of books, boxes and portraits not yet hung up were what was kept in storage for months as opposed to what some seem to think, basically that Bond just has a very bland and empty apartment. The fact that Bond is only just getting things hung up again (maybe he was just in the field a lot and was rarely home) makes it seem like the time between SF and SP had to be a small one, maybe a few months, in addition to Moneypenny just giving Bond artifacts from Skyfall, which would again not take a large span of time to get to him.
Decoration, no matter what he tells M.
His look of amazement when Moneypenny
Asks if he's just moved in.
In my world Bond is too busy visiting married women and defending the realm to bother too much on his home.
@Thunderpussy, I never get the sense with Dan's Bond that he's interested in that either, as from what we see he does have a small amount of property and only essentials, a TV, some books and random kitchen utensils with a chair and couch. But as I said above, I think the main reason he looks like he's just moved in is because he has. I think Mendes and co. were showing us Bond getting his stuff set back in his old flat once the business with Silva was over and, as we can see, the moving in is still a work in progress.
Again, I don't think the way the apartment looked was as it always does, though because Bond doesn't own much it wouldn't be too different. I don't think Dan's Bond goes nuts with decoration (he's a sensible man and doesn't care for triviality), but I think we are catching him getting his stuff out of storage and setting it back up post-SF, to connect those films. There's no other reason why he has boxes strewn around, the TV not set up to anything, books piled around and portraits unhung on the walls.
There's a thread on the gap between SF and SP: https://www.mi6community.com/discussion/16454/timeline-of-events-between-skyfall-and-spectre
@Milovy, I don't take Bond's response of "No" to confirm that he wasn't moving in. I think he took Moneypenny's question as asking if he just got his flat and was moving in, but it's the flat Bond has always had and so he technically wasn't moving into a fresh place, but refitting a property he'd already owned.
I just think that the way the apartment was designed, with storage boxes strewn about, was to show us that post-SF Bond was still taking his things out of storage and putting them back in his apartment once he got MI6 to give him his flat back. The only thing that puts a wrench in that is if M's comment about Bond's flat being sold during his hiatus in SF was true, meaning the apartment we see in SP is a new one he had to get after losing the other one. I'm not sure, really.
A commentary track from Mendes would've gone a long way towards clarity, though!
all she talks to M and must know about Bond's interior design tips.
I love that Bod cares so little about inviting someone to his messy apartment, showing he doesn't give a damn about any of it. It's how I picture Bond to be personality wise, and feels more in line with the character and the feeling I get from him than either of the apartments for Sean or Roger's Bonds, with Roger's place feeling more pedestrian and favorable and Sean's too richly adorned.
In reality I think Bond's home would be as it is in SP, pretty barren beyond the essentials because he wouldn't be home enough to use any of it, and when someone did come around (which wouldn't be too often) he wouldn't care about what they thought of it.
flat. Which was completely empty, except for a bed. As he was hardly ever there.
Yeah, I love details like that about characters you can read in the sets, and it shows that the production team really tried to give that layer to the character. SP's Bond feels real, whereas, despite Sean's Bond feeling human to me too, I can't imagine Bond would ever have an apartment like that with so much stuff in it. What use does he have for it? The flat for Roger's Bond got a lot closer, as it felt more normal, but I just like the barren image of the flat in SP better as I think it more directly tells us who the man is, an opinion that lines up with what we already know from past films in the Craig era.
Bod ?
Bond could shoot straighter, punch harder and ski faster. He could seduce any woman, even gay ones. He knew everything about gold and diamonds, butterflies and poisonous fish.
He wore the best clothes, stayed at the swankiest hotels, drove the most expensive cars, drank the most expensive champagne (and know what year it was bottled). When he travelled he didn't need to look up information on the culture. He already knew the correct temperature for sake, how to ride a camel, and how to kill five hours in Rio if you don't samba.
Bond appealed to us because he knew stuff we didn't, and pulled women we could never pull.
So, my only problem with the Craig era is that they play down Bond's cleverness, his knowledge, his immaculate attention to detail. So, the unfurnished room doesn't do it for me.
it is probably correct in the real world, but cinema Bond has never really lived in the real world. It's why he worked a treat in the 60s and 70s.
Well, Craig Bond is also not full on cinematic Bond (and thank heavens for it). I am fine with some parts of cinematic Bond, but at times the exaggeration is too heavy and a superman is left in the place of a real man. And it's unfortunately rare that cinematic Bond nails the human side in the way Dan has done without a lot of that fluff, including Bond in DN and FRWL (not coincidentally the first films before GF came along).
Bond should know a lot of things, but he should never be an encyclopedia or feel like he has all the answers and can do anything. Obviously he'd be trained to shoot, fight and man a lot of vehicles on land, water and in the air, but we've seen it getting out of hand before in the series with out things, where, no matter the problem, Bond already has a way to stop it. And for me, that's not his character, to be fifty steps ahead.
I guess I just prefer it more when the "tropes" of the cinematic Bond, like the expensive clothes, cars, drinks and other excess are toned down, as those hollow out the character and make him more of a symbol than a man, without a heart. In short, and I seem to be saying this a lot lately, I like touches that tie more to the books where Bond's character is much more interesting and yes, human. He still dresses nice, but he dresses sensibly and with his own style; he still drives a nice care but it's the same one and he has an attachment to it (like Dan's Bond and the DB5 now, really), and he knows things about food, culture and people without going overboard with his knowledge, as if he's reading off a cue card.
Dan's Bond knows a good dish to have at a particular place, can recommend a fine drink and pour it for you, can cleverly get out of any jam with his brains without it seeming like he reads minds and can judge a man or woman with one look because he's been around and dresses timelessly for any occasion, but all that never goes overboard to distract from the character and everything he does connects to his character in a real way; he has dimension. I don't feel that with much of the cinematic Bond outside of how Sean was able to still show the humanity of the character in what was becoming a hollowed out character, and Tim did well too because like Dan his films avoided being overly adorned with the cinematic Bond's touches. He was back to feel and acting real.
So when I see the apartment of Dan's Bond in SP, that ties back to his character that we've known since CR and not the cinematic Bond because that's not who he is on the whole. People can't really expect that Dan's Bond and things like his apartment be molded to line up with the old Bond, as his character has been built a certain way that diverts from that and the clear goal in doing so was to renew more of his humanity as opposed to him being more of a dimensionless icon than a man. Basically, all the things that distract from Bond being interesting have been eroded away, and for me that's a far more interesting experiment in making these films than having Bond whip out gadgets, quip every two seconds and race around in flashy cars while sipping martinis; that never should've been him and I don't find it that compelling.