News Lashana Lynch to be the new 007...
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
- Start date
As a person of colour I just find the casting a bit tokenistic and patronising. I don't need black 007 and black Captain America's or LGBT Spiderman's. What I would like is original characters with those aspects. Hollywood finds it impossible to create anything original nowadays though.
"Canon", "explicitly codified"
Sweet Jesus Henrietta Christ, it's James Bond for fucks' sake, if there were ever something not intended to be take seriously this is it. These are the films with the US marines in space, the cloaked car, the man who kills sharks with his teeth, the underwater base on stilts and the man who has been in his mid thirties since the 1950s.
There is no "canon" here, no continuity, just a lot of generally fun films showing a pubescent fantasy of what spywork looks like based on some (actually not very good - and yes I have the full collection) books which showed a wannabe spies fantasy of spywork. Most Bond films have been at best thematically linked to each other and the source material and to reiterate none of the actors have looked much like the character as described.
For that matter none of them have acted much like the character, except again possibly Timothy Dalton. Thor was a specific character, so was Starbuck, so was Heimdell, yet here we are with two having changed gender and one having changed colour. Yet the world still turns and they remain nothing more than pop fiction creations (at least in the forms we tend to know them).
"Canon", "explicitly codified"
Sweet Jesus Henrietta Christ, it's James Bond for fucks' sake, if there were ever something not intended to be take seriously this is it. These are the films with the US marines in space, the cloaked car, the man who kills sharks with his teeth, the underwater base on stilts and the man who has been in his mid thirties since the 1950s.
There is no "canon" here, no continuity, just a lot of generally fun films showing a pubescent fantasy of what spywork looks like based on some (actually not very good - and yes I have the full collection) books which showed a wannabe spies fantasy of spywork. Most Bond films have been at best thematically linked to each other and the source material and to reiterate none of the actors have looked much like the character as described.
For that matter none of them have acted much like the character, except again possibly Timothy Dalton. Thor was a specific character, so was Starbuck, so was Heimdell, yet here we are with two having changed gender and one having changed colour. Yet the world still turns and they remain nothing more than pop fiction creations (at least in the forms we tend to know them).
Consider the point officially missed by you.
Every single James Bond film produced by EON to date has treated the character of James Bond as a single person with an established history that is carried over from film to film, both before and after the reboot that occurred with Casino Royale, and while each film has given Bond the 007 callsign, it has never been treated as being exclusively his.
Really?
Seems I not only got the point but expressed it better than you?
As for the idea there's a consistent continuity between Bond films......nope. If you imagine that to be the case you've not been paying attention.
There have been callbacks and references, but nothing remotely approaching a continuity, not unless you imagine he's a very long lived chap indeed, one who looks and acts nothing like the character in the source material.
What colour is Felix Leiter by the way?
Moneypenny?
I want an Austin powers and Johnny English crossover.Of course their is Bond canon. It will all be explained when we found their is a multi-verse including one that has a Austin Powers!Jason
I
Both of these statements are objectively wrong as per the films themselves and the individuals responsible for producing them.
You can argue otherwise until you are blue in the face, but the facts are what they are.
Callbacks and references are and were the continuity, because that is how you establish a continuity in the first place.
I was just thinking that Lazenby’s line that this never happened to the other fellow both supports the idea of continuity AND that there are multiple people taking up the mantle of James Bond.
I like the idea of it being not so much a code name as a deep cover legend implanted by hypnosis. If we really want a way to sort out the ‘regeneration’ or Bond.
In the realism stakes of Bond, well, a female Bond would have to be a Jaime or a Jemima. Maybe a Jen. But I strongly suspect the character would have to be changed in almost every single way to prevent a backlash from the very people that it would be done to appeal to. I think most fans of the overall genre really have no problem with BAME spies or female spies...series one of Spooks was very very popular, and we generally loved all three of them. Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson novels...whilst very much a product of their time, or more accurately the time just before that, have extremely good female agents in.
This is all about a specific character, who has somehow remained popular with some gentle shavings at the edges despite being very much a product of his times originally.
Which is why I keep mentioning the Stella Rimington books...there’s a bunch of them, stars a female agent, was written by the first female head of a security service. They aren’t as popular as some other novels, but they keep going...someone is probably sitting on the rights as it is.
But what is wanted is Bond, because Bond is already visible, the work is already done, it has a built in audience. I am not sure I agree with that.
I was just thinking that Lazenby’s line that this never happened to the other fellow both supports the idea of continuity AND that there are multiple people taking up the mantle of James Bond.
Funny, but you know that was a moment of breaking the fourth wall for anyone who still did not know Connery left the series.
That reminds me of a knock on effect from gender flipping bond that occurred to me the other day.
There’s no supermodel men. None. We have occasional sports stars have a crack at that sort of position...Beckham. But generally, Bond is literally a way to sell high end fashion to men sometimes. Omega watches etc. All those airline magazines. It’s basically like being the ‘face of Loreal’ for a male actor. That’s a lot of money that goes out the window.
I will stick with first and second gen Lara Croft as my female Bond for now. Even though she is now accused of all sorts.
That’s always the overhang of the Colonial and post-colonial/Cold War era in which bond started though. It’s also why his cover is of an international export company. He’s basically the man from Del Monte with a gun...he isn’t supposed to blend in to the natives, he’s supposed to be a handler if there’s any people already working in a place. (Which we see when we see local agents throughout the series) He’s not even an ‘our man in’ character, because he travels.
When they do try to blend him in, it’s terrible. Even when they dye the bits that show.
He only ever needs to be a plausible visitor to a place, because he’s a LTK trouble shooter basically. You don’t waste a local, in place asset, on an assassination unless you really have to and their time in the field is up anyway. Last thing you want is to draw attention to something hidden.
Besides, it’s part of the conceit...he literally introduces himself by name bloody everywhere, yet somehow no-one has ever heard of him or thought ‘everytime this travelling salesman shows up, shit goes down’ or, they do know him and his reputation really well but always assume ‘no worries, I shall be the one to take down the legendary James Bond, never mind those other twenty madmen’. It’s one of the silly aspects they just run with.
Judi Dench's M first appears long after Bond became a 00 Agent.
Judi Dench's M was there before Bond became a 00 Agent.
There's your "Canon"...
I don't think it would come off as parody, since there have been other double-oh characters before (and their existence is implied by the randomness of the "7"). It's no different than having Star Trek series about ships named Enterprise and Voyager. Given that cinematic universes are all the rage these days, it wouldn't be surprising if they tried to build something like that with Bond.
Indeed. All orchestrated by people whose royalties, ad clicks, and groupies all depend on inflaming social conflict.
Everybody needs to feel superior to someone. That's the appeal of ideology.
Sad, but true. Or forty, for that matter.
Which is one of the more sadly amusing affectations of Political Correctness, since both terms were used concurrently-- and the current usage is used to socially segregate, if not physically segregate. Which is why I refuse to use it. Plus which, it always reminds me of EG Marshall in Creepshow.
Excellent. This is what we need rather than endless reboots, remakes, and re-imaginings.
The problem always is that there isn’t any continuity, except perhaps in one Bonds run, except of course there also is....Q? M? Tracy? Gogol?...between bonds also. The sensible clear break would have been recasting M in Casino Royale, especially after how prominent she was in the Brosnan era (TWINE)
Even when I was watching the Craig S films, I was constantly thinking how really her relationship is with the Brosnan Bond, not so much Craig Bond, Who has been very much defined as a different character.
The idea at the end that he was going off to have all of Sean Connery’s adventures was fun, felt fun, but also didn’t quite work because I still felt that overhang of the modernised MI6 with Dench M, which is very very much a Brosnan era thing (including the ‘real’ SIS HQ) so it does feel...noticeable.
There is never ever a clean break, and there is a continuity.
As to canon...well. It’s an adaptation, or was, originally. So there’s the Fleming Canon (with Amis too) and then there’s the various series since that are all interesting, particularly in their relationship to screen Bond at the time. All the EON UA stuff is sort of its own canon, but it’s the confused one.
At this point it’s out of Fleming adaptations, maybe they should try some of the other books...I liked the Benson ones, but they were Brosnan bonds, sure they could adapt them or the Gardner’s...even the Deaver one off.
I was just thinking that Lazenby’s line that this never happened to the other fellow both supports the idea of continuity AND that there are multiple people taking up the mantle of James Bond.
No.
That's a tired argument made by people who like to think their "codename" theories hold water... which they don't.
I hate how dumb James Bond fans seem to be. The films themselves clearly demonstrate that James Bond is the given birth name of a single person and that we as an audience have seen two separate versions of him: pre-2006 (where he is portrayed by 5 actors across 20 films) and post-2006 (where he is , to date, portrayed by 1 actor across 5 films).... a scenario that is backed up 100% by the individuals responsible for the current creative oversight and production of the series.
And yet you've got fans acting like they can't tell the difference between what is up and what is down and either denying what the films and their creators demonstrate or making up patently nonsensical theories to explain a scenario that has already been officially explained.