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Comments
Same thing with AVTAK. One of the goons even looks like Rob Reiner.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees Rob Reiner and Roger Moore fighting in that one.
It is always my first reaction when seeing that scene. I have to constantly tell myself that Moore isn't fighting Reiner. It messes with my mind.
"You didn't like North? Die!"
Nolan is a decent choice, but he's not the most dynamic director, his films tend to be quite dull visually.
This is why Edgar Wright is my number one choice, he's an A list director who technically hasn't made a big budget franchise film yet. He has the right sensibilities, unmistakably british, and would probably be closest to the lewis gilbert/ guy Hamilton bond.
I tend to see Moore fighting Lou Costello and guitarist Carl Perkins in AVTAK.
Perkins and Costello Meet Bond
:D
She gets a bad rap from people who probably haven’t looked at her work.
I've though exactly the same about both those things every time I watch it!!
And when the coppers slam the breaks on during the 'salt corrosion' scene in TLD, and the top of the car goes flying forward. WTAF!!!!
The first season of Killing Eve certainly had a bit of Fleming in it. Globe trotting oddity mixed with cold blood. Villanelle is a bit of a female Bond without the moral compass (and if anyone wants to do a female-Bond-but-it's-not-called-Bond-and-instead-we're-finally-going-to-do-a-good-original-action-spy-series-with-a-female-British-lead franchise, Comer would be my #2 pick after Emily Blunt).
However much I liked S1 of Killing Eve and Fleabag, I don't think a Bond script mainly written my PWB is the way to go. She's just too out there (that's a very bad description) for Bond and outside pressure would probably be that she needs to make it her Bond. I don't see her just doing a meat-and-potatoes mission movie. At the end of the day, Bond doesn't need to be formally daring or clever, in my book.
She could bring some dialogue wit that’s needed in the series. That’s Purvis and Wade’s biggest writing problem. I could see her writing Bond 26, not directing it. Whoever’s writing Bond 26, all I want is Purvis and Wade NOT writing it.
She could be too out there for sure — though can you imagine a Roger Moore delivery on her Twatnav joke?
She has written two Flemingesque characters (Fleabag herself is *very* Bondian, like a ‘broken-wing’ Tracy turned up to eleven but with Bonds own hedonistic side turned up to eleven.) and would only have to tone some elements down. I also suspect her interview where she mentions not liking homework — and therefore not researching Bond before writing it — is a bit of a wink and a nod. She’s of an age and culture where she’s absorbed Bond as part of her cultural growing up. ITV Moore, Dalton at Easter, and Brosnan on the screens when she was a teen. Then Craig as a young adult.
I think she could do really well, especially if given someone like Cavill, who does know how to do humour whilst remaining the straight man. Much like Moore and Brosnan, but I think he is likely to manage to be more serious than either. Playboy Bond didn’t get much of an outing under Craig, but I can see that working in this reinvention. Hedonism to a degree, because you don’t expect things to last forever. A Cold War mentality that still underpins the forty and thirty somethings to this day in various ways.
PWB actually talks about it herself in the last episode of the NTTD Podcast, and you feel it throughout the film. Maybe it would work better in the next actors run, but it was jarring at the end of Daniel's in my opinion.
It's an increasingly common writing decision in big movies. I've noticed later Marvel movies have also had similar moments.
Shocking.
That's absolutely a very common way of writing films that are supposed to be four-quadrant blockbusters. Give it stakes, but don't make them permanent. Give it gravitas, but undercut it with a quip.
PWB is slightly different though. Or rather the projects she has full control over are. Fleabag also has quips and undercutting humour, but it is also emotionally devestating in places and sometimes that is just down to her acting. So maybe the problem is that the words on the page off as hackneyed, where she may have been able to give it the right context if she had been on set or even delivered it herself. Which in turn kind of rules her out for Bond again, because AFAIK she doesn't direct and I can't imagine they would let her "showrun" a Bond film...
Undercutting the pathos of a scene with some sort of humour (the fancy term for it would be bathos I suppose) isn't necessarily bad in itself. If done right it can work to great effect or make some sort of point. It just depends.
Never particularly liked how it's been done in Marvel films, I was half sold when they did it in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and I was fine the minimal times it was done in NTTD.
I always felt Connery did the quips better than Moore. Attitude and timing are required for delivering a clever line. Not all actors do it well.
I recently saw a video of an actress absolutely murdering a cheesy line in a play I had written. She was so intent on expressing her character's indignity associated with the line, she delivered the line with such bad timing and expression, a good laugh was lost.
I also fault the director on that one.
As a fan, I sometimes lose the perspective of how hard it is to actually land a line perfectly on stage or screen. I sit at home or in the theatre and think "Well, they could have done this or that or the other line" better. And then you spend some time to think about it and talk to people who actually write and direct and perform and you realize that there are a myriad different things that can go wrong. A perfect line not delivered correctly. A great delivery murdered by bad direction. A great on-set moment, ruined in the edit. It all has many more moving parts than I generally care to think about.
Specifically with regards to Bond and @Venutius's distinction between black humour and wisecracking, I am also reminded of Stephen Fry's comment about the difference between British and American humour:
This of course doesn't really apply to Bond, who's never embarrassed, but there's still something in there about the way the British and Americans approach humour (which is strange for me to observe as a German, who of course don't have any humour at all...) and the constant pull of Bond becoming too American...
Ooh, which film was he in?