Deathmatch 2024 - Sideswipes

[plankattack]

I’m voting for Klebb and Flo - how could one resist a show with that title (as someone continually suckered in by titles and credit sequences, I cannot resist).

I find Tatiana the most irritating of Bond girls, a walking “Oh James” cliche but without the Benny Hill-esque slapstick of Goodnight. But to show what a dummy I am, Tatiana did win a couple of match-ups in her group because I kept thinking Tatiana was the name of the girl in GE. Which says something about me, and arguably even more about the series of which we’re all fans.

[Jim]

June 28.

You are running out of Bond films where the female lead survives, or it’s already revealed what happens next (not that you are bound by that, nor any shred of decency, reality, physics, biology, mathematics, religious studies, home economics, humanity, jiggerboo nor taste). Complexities also emerge with returning villains, but you could ignore the events of any preceding film and bat out some brainmolestingly poor, lethargic rubbish anyway. With that in what passes for your mind…

Diamonds are Forever

Oh dear. You choose, but you lose.

Pre-Diamonds are Forever Blofeld. Hm. The premise is that this Blofeld has no connection to the events of OHMSS, which Diamonds are Forever strongly suggests anyway. You have eight episodes (and please, no more) in which to explore how that monumentally effete wazzock Ernst Blofeld formed SPECTRE, being a boy band that embezzles from its management rather than the more traditional reverse, rewarded himself with a yacht full of seamen, received from Colonel Boitier / Bouvard / Butch Jackie B vital lippy application tips and bra-sizing guidance, developed a pash for fluffy white pussies (Cheapmund Freud, analyse this (analyse this this this this)), holed himself up in a spurty volcano with a strapping blond lad and a gargantuan metal phallus, went epic on the cosmetic surgery and eventually took up a residency in Las Vegas, where he behaves like a marginally less psychotic Liberace, and makes multiple copies of himself for… company?

Anyway, this Blofeld would never have murdered Diana Rigg. Forcibly transplanting a copy of his oily, leering face onto her body for shatteringly complex erotomaniacal psychosexual penthouse fun, certainly; but murdering – no. Pivotal twists abound in Episode 3 – “Come Blo My Horn” – which explores how The Notorious ESB came to so hate martial music via an upsetting moment with a ruddy-cheeked bandsman and his instrument. There’s a major (but pointless) fanfiddling digitally constructed cameo in Episode 7 which goes by the provocatively girthsome title “Hans is well jel because 007 has turned up in m’volcano wearing only his pyjamas (VERY good evening, Mr Bond!!!XOXOXO!!!) but with his face creosoted and I AM VERY CONFUSED, IS IT A SEX THING?”. Episode 8 – “Here Come Wint & Kidd (…urr)” – dealing with their… recruitment, will be problematic in some of the more backward States of the Union, and Wales. The flashbacks to their “White Tigers, Black Scorpions” Vegas dinner theatre act (the audience is the dinner) will become canon, as well as banned for being, y’know, “snuff”. That bit with Bambi, Thumper and all those oil rig workers is… well, it’s there.

Obviously to feedforward convincingly into its parent film, this prequel series must look budget-slashed cheap, with production values rarely exceeding those of a nativity play, and be divinely dreadful in many fabulous ways, but at least there’s nothing in any episode suggesting Ernie B is Bond’s step / half / whatever brudder. Even when barrel-scraping, some standards must persist. Often misperceived as utterly shambolic, sluggish, offensive and thin complacent tat rather than a devastating insight into how nationless terrorism for profit exploited post-War capitalism in the nuclear age, as La Rochefoucauld observed – average minds usually condemn whatever is beyond their grasp. The camp old twat.

(Pause for breath, and another swig)

Or

Post-Diamonds are Forever Tiffany. Hm. Because! She’s that kinda spunky gal (accordingly, a horrendous cliché). (Also) Because! She’s concerned that the freshly-founded Greenpeace might board the liner to try to roll the now-totally-useless-to-her Moby Bond back into deeper water. (Also also) Because! She must avoid having to deliver feeble Mankiewiczian woman-loathing “jokes” about blowholes, sperm whales and, I dunno, jizz dugongs, this time it’s Tiffany who abandons Bond in a hedge. Needs quite a big hedge, mind.

Eight episodes follow, charting her crazed efforts during the 1970s to get those di-a-monds back from “space”. Aware that this might require just a smidge of cash to invest in a business that’s developing orbital travel technology, each episode concludes with a telethon-style running total of how much Tiffany has raised through horrifyingly seedy and sleep-disturbing “smuggling” for very dodgy people. Gemstones, trimphones, traffic cones, trombones, pistachios, pensioners, mind-wrecking knock-off pharmaceuticals, gold, mould, cress, bricks, zinc, Dink, cuttlefish ink, polonium, plutonium, platinum, palladium, rhodium, tedium – she’ll shove ‘em all under her wigs / elsewhere (series catchphrase being “It’s In The Case”) if it means she’s that one giant step for Womankind closer to getting a ride into “space” and crowbarring the di-a-monds from that tatty satellite. Tatellite, even. Episode 2 – “Cocaine, John Wayne & Abdominal Pain” - sets the “tone”, as does Episode 3 – “Speed, Sam Snead & Internal Bleed” - and for that matter Episode 4 - “Dope, The Pope & A Rectoscope”. At the end of Episode 7 – “Nuclear Dump, Fred Trump & The Stomach Pump” (wacky thrills at Three Mile Island!) - she’s reached her total! She’s also absolutely destroyed her body!

And yet… and yet… In Episode 8 – “Anthrax, Hugo Drax & Anal Prolapse” – Tiffany secretes past Italian customs (don’t ask how / really don’t ask where) multiple bunches of Tipirapean black orchids for the Drax Corporation (for reasons she doesn’t question; never does, the irresponsible moo). Her resulting investment of almost every single cent she’s earned since 1971 into that company – just the perfect people she needs for her hard-earned journey into “space”! - is tragically all lost, all gone, when some utter, utter bastard murders its CEO and blows up its space station. Failing to recover from this corrosive shock, and thereafter perpetually off her grubby face on black market Quaaludes, Tiffany never discovers who did it. Series ends with an incredibly embittered and physically…um…there?…Tiffany spending her very last coins to take a bus out of town to A New Beginning (using public transport is a start (she’s not a fan, although she does now look like a bus-user (is that the term?), including compulsory seepage)). Seconds after Tiffany finds a “seat”, she slips into the long-gestating and blissfully fatal abuse-induced coma. She dies. Tiffany Case dies on a bus. Seems thematically sound. Just as the bus rounds a corner and disappears offscreen, the di-a-mond tatellite spacejunk crashes to Earth before us and, I dunno, pulps into porridge a fluffy white cat. OMFG, it’s emotionally devastating. (Not the cat thing; all cats deserve that and much worse). Haphazardly directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, with torch songs by Lee Trevino and choreography by probably Gollum, it’s One Woman’s Journey To Find Herself (Although She Would Much Prefer To Find Those F-kin Di-A-Monds).

Your choice. It’s your conscience. There might not be much of it left after this.

• Blofeld - series working title - “Catman Begins”
• Tiffany - series working title - “Hard Case Space Race Cash Chase”

[secretagentfan]

Tiffy. It’s just less depressing than that first debate.

[Dustin]

@Jim

Hard Case Space Race Cash Chase

This, mainly because I want the Hard Case Crime companion novel series - aimed at pensioners and written by I M Anonymous - to feature Chase on their covers in variations on the theme of ‘misadventure and wardrobe malfunction’.

And also because I‘m afraid ‘Catman‘ already has been done by Xratster/YouCorn.pom in numerous iterations, the most prominently their 3.5 minute “previews” - don’t want to get into hot water as long as we don’t own them yet…

[Jim]

June 29

As happens regularly with the Bond series IP, you’ve recently gone completely over the top and must rein it all in. This is also known as pretending there’s an artistic decision behind slashing the budget like something Fred West had a go at, yet still trying to extrude profit from the gullible with such an exhausted concept. You could lie (you will lie) and claim it’s “going back to Fleming” although because this means startlingly explicit racism, “contains scenes of tobacco products” and casting women whose bottoms are shaped like those of boys, probably best not, eh?

Accordingly, in the spirit of such fiscal probity / witless penny-pinching and the rampagingly dishonest promise of a creative reboot, it’s time for

For Your Eyes Only

This one should be easy; they’re such colourful and flamboyant characters.

So… eight episodes of giddy, raw, pure Kristatos (try not to glee-wee), replete with rambunctious, knockabout post-War smuggling fun around the Balkans and the Eastern Med. Pirates of the Mid-Aegean, indeed! Definite crossover possibility in helping Case, T. smuggle into Tirana a most uncomfortable didgeridoo. The trick here is to avoid giving away the colossally unforeseeable plot twist yet to come in the parent film. With an eye to innovative storytelling (and because it halves the cost), Episode 1 will be told from Kristatos’s point of view, then Episode 2 repeating the events from Columbo’s, etc. etc. Therefore, you only need to forcibly excrete four plots from the chain-gang of sunken-eyed “writers”. Such audience as this show could ever lure in will never quite know by the end of it who is more villainous than the other. If you’re thick. Given the coruscating, happiness-munching raw trauma of other BUM series, this one aims lighter, with a memorable running gag involving Jacoba Brink doing something vile to a melon and Episode 5 (and, of course, 6) – “A Locquework Orange” – being delivered wholly by Bunraku. Even Episode 7 (and 8) – “Virgin on the Tasteless” – which as a sub-plot introduces both barely-legal Bibi Dahl bouncing around in a leotard and Kristatos’ (and Columbo’s) verrry questionable attitude to her, is played for laughs (it’s the late 70s, it was ALL OK THEN). You would not want it played any other way, otherwise… hmm.

Yet… the secret ninth episode – “Did… You Just See What I Think I Just Saw?”, is broadcast live on the Dark Web and impossible to record or repeat, and explains how Kristatos got the King’s Medal during WW2. A well-intended but utterly terrifying attempt to make the character interesting. Kristatos… did things. To people. To the remains of people. To whole villages throughout Greece… no, I can’t go into more detail, I’d just howl myself to death. Those who witness this cannot talk of it in public for fear that it is but a product of their diseased imagination and generated by watching too much mole porn. However, a guilty, side-eyed hush descends like a morose mist and pervades for months, nations in mourning not for a lost leader but for a community’s joyfulness of heart and any willingness to bother to go on. Cockatoos lose their chirrup, Partenkirchen its Garmisch, trees their bark and even the rain dare not fall. Flowers are left scattered by roadsides, along with any hope. And the elderly. Faces are cried dry. A generation’s soul lies corroded and beyond emotional repair, much like when they introduced English wine or Scrappy-Doo. All who watch it develop a hollow feeling, both physically and emotionally, gutblasted by what they think they might have seen, but still cannot say for sure… Much like the Moon landing, Shropshire or Giscard d’Estaing, there will be no concrete proof of it ever having happened, but questioning voices will have to be silenced. When it’s accidentally shown on a flight, the ‘plane has to be shot down and the survivors forced to eat each other, and then the fuselage. Tastier choices than chicken or beef, but that’s so very much not the point. There will be rewritten wills, many pointless vigils, midnight hospitalisations and random, justifiable disappearances. Thoughts and prayers, everyone; thoughts and prayers. It’s truly upsetting, enormously unsettling and without doubt illegal. With a talking parrot.

Or

Abandoning Bond along with all the other moist relics in which she only ever took an academic interest, Melina Havelock springs free of thinking she has to please her tedious dead dad and most unlikely mother, sod those two berks, and sets out to make her way in the World. In Episode 1 – “Change of … Character (?)” – and not just because everything that could be said (or requested) about Melina Havelock is already exhausted, barely ten minutes in there’s a huge aspirational song-and-dance number. Yeah, it’s that sort of show (run). A few bland episodes emerge of not much happening (it’s spun-off from For Your Eyes Only, you can’t say your expectations are undermanaged) involving breaking into dementedly happy songs at antisocial moments (standing at the bottom of an escalator and looking around vaguely, parking her car right next to yours in an otherwise completely empty car park, stopping suddenly on a crowded pavement etc.).

As directionless as Melina herself, the series has to improve and make futile attempts to render her interesting. For example, in 1990 she joins Octopussy’s Circus (“Now nuclear bomb free for 91 days!”). Multi-tasking as a crossbow act and hairy lady (a competitively priced, rights-free Chewbacca “homage”), some episodes will start with her looking into a mirror and checking how the moustache is progressing. The series playing to the strengths of her well-developed character (long hair and… being able to stand upright, most of the time), there’s a massive, desperate twist at the end of Episode 6 –“Look, There’s Really Nothing Left To Work With Here” – when, due to sharing her surname with a woke-cancelled suppressor of the Indian Mutiny, she is banished from Octopussy’s island (with a packed lunch) and falls over a rock (it was “being able to stand upright most of the time”, remember?). Unconscious, but her subconscious bitterly regretting having abandoned the avenging-my-parents angle as that might have given us something, and now femtoseconds from a more interesting death than she merits, Melina imagines herself going back in time, through the means of shoddy writing. Mindmashed, she ends up marrying, I dunno, Hitler or someone and this misconceived, anorexic drivel only escapes cancellation due to the baffling popularity of Episode 7 in which (in death dreams) she cartwheels naked across Montana to raise funds for a turtle hospice. As life gratifying ebbs away on the scorched plain, the visions become ever more random and tonally disconnected (it’s For Your Eyes Only crossed with Octopussy – that’s inevitable, just cope, it’s almost over). Episode 8 starts by exploring what would have happened if within the first ten minutes of the show, she had instead resolved to continue her roaring rampage of revenge against the Russians, which concludes she would have been shot in the head by teatime, so she was going to die anyway. The final scene of this last episode fills time with a barely-sentient Melina (some claiming this is no change) imagining giving birth to a fully-grown Michael Dukakis whilst having that dream about being late for an exam. Screen then fades to grey, then to black when the solemn end credits play out (wistful cover version instrumental: Bring Your Daughter to The Slaughter (kazoo solo – Milovy, K.)). Then! In a savage body-horror move there is a sudden cut to packs of rabid jackals tearing at her rotted cadaver, slitripping the viscera and coughing up furballs and mawfuls o’spleen. Just need to make sure she’s finally dead. Not so sing-y now, are yer? Jazz-hands your way out of that one, fuzzface.

(Should you think that being ripped apart by ravenous jackals is far too harsh a fate for Melina, a) you’re wrong, it makes her interesting and she was going to die anyway, the Russians have tanks and machine guns, she has a wooden crossbow and b) I must have given you more with which to sympathise than the film ever did, yay me, so I get to be Jesus, and c) she stopped at the bottom of an escalator, looked around vaguely and GOT IN THE WAY and I have no mercy for such scum. Said Jesus).

• Kristatos - series working title - “Remember Me? Please?”
• Melina - series working title - “A Series of Close Shaves”

[Dustin]

Close Shaves - mainly because accounting discovered a zillion shaving videos on YouTube that we shamelessly intend to bootleg. Thus we‘ll only need a couple of production stills of Milena shaving her teeth we‘re going to ‘animate’ - mirror and intercut with the shaving footage - and we’re good to go for a season. Might even squeeze a Christmas special out of it if needs be.

[secretagentfan]

Option 2, just because I‘m too much of a girly man to stand the unspeakable unspeakability of Kris Tatos.

Melina - or as friends call her: MEH - always had a special place in my memory for that scene photo in which she went without intimacy coordinator in that Bunuel film (printed in a German book about James Bond films, surely just accidentally).

Of course, that jackal scene is too much for me as well. So I will talk myself into believing she is still looking into the camera after luckily going downstairs on the boat - because she damned well knew what was going to happen, and she really was a spy for the Russians, deep undercover, so deep that even the Russians forgot about her, and actually, she deprogrammed the ATAC, so it wouldn’t have been of any use anyway, she just enjoyed that old man getting sunburned and nibbled by sharks. It was all an endurance test for Bond, and M thanked her for it by giving her that parrot.

[Jim]

June 30

Trepidatious about what could be done to this one as it’s my favourite and I wouldn’t really want anyone to muck about with it too much. If you hurt it, I shall hunt you down. I have a particular set of skills, mainly “being annoying”, “punctuation” and “the inability to write a one clause sentence”. Accordingly, imagine what I would inflict upon your colon.

Thunderball

Follow Emilio Largo through his eight episodes cross-cut between his escape from Sicily to New York to establish his own family business, and then decades later his contaminated possession of power in the 1950s and his murder of his own brother… no, hang on. Well, some of that could happen, especially the killing of his sibling Keith by “harpoon”. Largo’s years as an international mercenary, peep-show booth wiper and gynotikolobomassophile are all fun and games until someone loses an eye. How he actually does lose an eye involves that cigar-and-ice thing he’s so keen on, although as Episode 4 – “For Your Eye Only” – demonstrates, he wasn’t quite so keen at the time. The scene in the pangolin-abundant Kabul wet market where one is sure one sees the Delectado being stubbed out into his eyeball is only suggested by clever editing and direction. The bit where we all see feeble dissolute gem-lusting snivelling local princeling Khan, K., being served it as a mid-morning snack is, however, right in your face. If not in Largo’s any more.

Based in the OHMSS Blofeld’s universe, Episode 7 – “Wake Me Up Before You Largo” – explains how they encountered each other (and also what happens to Blofeld’s earlobes), although doesn’t resolve why they were both hanging around those docks beyond the graphene-thin claim of being interested in “shipbuilding”. The final episode – “How Emilio Can You Go?” – despite telling the tale of how SPECTRE came to be, including the away days workshopping its name, modern slavery statement (they’re pro) and sustainability values, plays out as a light romantic comedy set along the Amalfi coast of the early 1960s, all Lambrettas and limoncello, as Largo woos Domino. His lack of depth perception means he cannot see that she may have motives of her own…

Or

Domino… Right. OK.

Included in a special premium subscription package for the terminally exploitable is a half-hour minisode, filmed in black and white. And red. Lots of that.

Minisode: Domi (short for Dominic) No has a rough childhood, not least at the hands (literally) of Uncle Julius and that gentleman’s penchant for sadistically testing the limits of the human body. His fifteen-year-old nephew’s human body. With those sharp metal claw things. Despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the drilling and the sawing and the hacking and the… sharpened metal hooks, Domino emerges from the wantonly upsetting ordeal as one of Dr No’s more successful experiments / guesses, a bee-yoo-ti-ful woman, although Dr No was really trying to make some shelves. Despite the… surgery, biological experiment / physiological freak Domino is most upset to learn of her uncle’s death during an agree-to-disagree encounter with 007. She vows to avenge herself on Bond…

…offscreen. A perpetual spectre haunting Bond, never quite in view, the author of all his pain.

For it is she who murders Sylvia Trench after that second date with Bond, bludgeoning her repeatedly around the head with a rusty putter and floating the corpse downriver. However, nobody misses her, she’s written off by the police as a woman of ill repute and Domino’s attempt to frame Bond is thwarted…

For it is she who arms Machine-Gun Granny with a massive gun but the silly old fudge simply can’t shoot straight and Domino’s attempt to have Bond cut to ribbons is thwarted…

Time to rethink strategy

[A lengthy and boring (it’s recorded underwater) narration delivered by Nick Faldo in Episode 1 – “Randomino” – explains away the depiction of Domino in Thunderball as an attempt to seduce Bond INTO DEATH. It fails only when she accidentally spears Largo instead because everything was wobbling about (fnarr) on the Disco Volante and it was all shaky and sped-up outside. Expressing how glad she is that Largo died is not untrue, because he had become useless to her, the redundant cycloptic blob. One last chance on the Skyhook to cut Bond’s cord and let him fall, but this is averted by 007, more rapidly than usual, tiring of his prize and dropping her from a great height into a hedge. Tremendously fine shot, although he didn’t know there was a hedge down there. This only enrages Domino further.]

For it is she who pays the assassin to crawl above Bond’s bed and try to kill him via the baffling medium of cotton (rather than say “Guns and knives and knives and GUNS!”). This plan doesn’t meet its Key Performance Indicators and Domino’s attempt to have Bond’s insides all burned out is thwarted…

For it is she who slips the copy of Playboy into Gumbold’s newspaper in order to distract Bond, but her attempt to have Bond masturbate himself to death is thwarted…

For it is she who makes the car turn from one side to the other in that Las Vegas alley, but Bond still makes it out alive and although Domino’s attempt to make Bond look a bit cheap and lazy probably succeeds, undead swine he remains…

For it is she who places the message about the Queen of Cups at Bond’s breakfast table, but her attempt to have Bond charged, convicted, tortured and then executed for lazy cultural misappropriation is thwarted…

For it is she who makes a rare onscreen appearance in the mirror of Andrea’s hotel bathroom (Domino-as-spectre) but her attempt to have Bond smash-cut spook-scared to death is thwarted…

For it is she who convolutes everything to pad out the running time (why does Bond have to engage with Fekkesh? WHY?)) but her attempt to have Bond age to death (he’s beginning to get on a bit now) is thwarted…

For it is she who persuades the Rio hotel manager (Mincing Bob) to steal into the President’s Suite (is he?) whilst Bond and Manuela are out, and steal Bond’s wrist gun so he’s not wearing it when he goes into “space”. However, her attempt to have Bond massive-continuity-errored to death is thwarted…

For it is she who casts women far, far too young for all the principal male leads and also persuades Margaret Thatcher to appear in a comedy skit, but her attempt to have Bond investigated by the Vice Squad and / or die of embarrassment is thwarted…

For it is she who conspires with the well-chebbed secretary at Udaipur HQ to wear something low-cut whilst in plain camera view, knowing full well how Bond will behave. However, her attempt to get Bond prosecuted for decades of predatory sex crimes and have him “kill himself in his cell” is thwarted…

For it is she who signs off on Stacey Sutton’s geology “degree” (or cuts the certificate out of the back of the colouring book, anyway), but her attempt to have Bond meet death-by-cretin is thwarted…

For it is she alone on Earth who understands both the majesty of the kazoo and also the plot of The Living Daylights but her attempt to dole out to Bond death by total coincidence, fluke, uh? and confusion is thwarted…

For it is she who massively slashes the budget meaning everything has to be produced in a tin barn in Mexico and whilst on this occasion she very nearly succeeds, thwarted-be her attempt to matchmake Bond to death-on-the-cheap…

For it is she who tends Alec Trevelyan’s obviously fatal pre-titles head wound to bring him back to life, although she has to accept that something’s gone really wrong with his voice. However, her attempt to have Bond finished by death-by-previously-unmentioned-best-friend, is thwarted…

For it is she who teaches Elliot Carver some slick self-defence moves and whilst her incidental pleasure in suppressing the audience into a mass cringe meets its SMART objectives, her attempt to kill Bond by godawful Dad Dancing is thwarted…

For it is she who fixes the exchange rate so that exactly the same amount of money is recovered by Bond as was paid out by King and that’s nonsense, but her attempt to kill Bond through the medium of catastrophic mopey dullards is thwarted…

For it is she who… oh God, it’s Die Another Day… something something something, but her attempt to have Bond murdered through the medium of Laughable Toothy Robocop is thwarted…

For it is she who infiltrates a poison garden off the coast of Russia/Japan to steal some digitalin to have dropped into Bond’s mid-poker drink and to incidentally trigger the unwell-looking sole-resident orphaned child’s obsession with foxgloves. However, her attempt to kill Bond via the medium of death-by-this-could-all-hang-together-with-some-massive-retconning, is thwarted…

For it is she who shakes the camera about a lot, but her attempt (her second attempt) to have Bond killed by centrifugal force, is thwarted…

For it is she who ensures that Silva’s escape is based on so many incidental factors happening in unlikely conjunction with each other, including throwing an entirely empty rush-hour tube carriage at Bond. However, Domino’s attempt to see Bond off by death-by-it-just-doesn’t-hold-up-on-repeat-viewing, is thwarted…

For it is she who, frustrated at all schemes to date failing, finally steps from the shadows and, as her own independent woman and in her married name of Sciarra (there’s been some me-time along the way, for sure) seduces Bond into giving her Felix Leiter’s whereabouts. Standing now over the mangled body of the long-corrupt CIA man who wreaked such havoc throughout BUM, she is reassured that she has probably done the World a favour but contemplates that she really has lost her opportunity to improve the plot of Spectre so very much, we finally reach…

…the endgame of the BUM. BUM’s passage is closed…

…the culmination of all that has gone before in one excessive finale which won’t make any sense so don’t waste your life trying to work it out…

Episode 8 – “Domino Time to Die” – having undergone DNA-replacement therapy, Domino has been changed into demon doll Dou-Dou. As the missiles rain down on Bond, she’s tucked into his waistband. It is she and she alone who is left close to him, at the last blink of life, which is what she wanted all along anyway, but perhaps with less of the atomised obliteration. Be careful what you wish for.

One last vote:

• Largo - series working title - “Mar the Largo”
• Domino - series working title - “Domination”

[secretagentfan]

I finally open my eyes to the (science) fact that the real IP here is Domino, and that EON will now adapt (steal) this idea to remake all the Bond films from the point of Domin(ati)o(n).

But wait… there’s more:

• the forgotten episode in which Domino dons a blond wig (not the Brandauer one) and tries to tango the strangely like the previous one looking (not so) secret agent (no, its hairpiece can’t grow old with him, or can it?) to death. Even the deadly skinpeal lotion he fingers up while massaging her without consent (but Bond always tries to sneak in wherever he can, it’s the Bond we know and love, right?) only makes his jogging suit crinkle (euphemism). And when Dommy goes for the big finish and turns that into a silly small finish (but still unterwater, only with less frogmen), even that does not diminish him. Too bad that her attempt at drowning him in a pool at the end also leads to being dropped into a hedge. With Rowan Atkinson. Yes, this Bond still is so cruel.

And with June ending, I already feel withdrawal symptoms, so my deepest gratitude for your addictive joy in deconstruction… please return. Soon. Like tomorrow?

[jamesb007nd]

Because you tried so hard and it made me laugh so much, I can only choose the Domino series. Very well done, sir!

[Dustin]

Domination - this is top notch excellent stuff that will keep Eon and Amazon afloat for the better part of the next decade. Cockroaches are going to pay extra Prime fees for the privilege to watch this show in the ashes of the world that was. This is going to be the first blockbuster of the Long Night after the fall, after the centre couldn’t hold out longer, the favourite show of cannibals, rats and all other vermin alike.

[Jim]

@secretagentfan

I finally open my eyes to the (science) fact that the real IP here is Domino, and that EON will now adapt (steal) this idea to remake all the Bond films from the point of Domin(ati)o(n)

That is slightly Dominous, for sure.

[plankattack]

A big Thank You to the esteemed Jim for another Deathmatch and a month of Sideswipes! For the laughs, the effort, the time put in, THANK YOU!

[Jim]

The UnScene

There are a number of things alluded to in several Bond films that we aren’t shown, and this may be for a variety of reasons: edited out / budget cuts / it would embarrass the product placer / Ian Fleming didn’t write it / last-minute rewriting panic / taste and decency / disastrous test screenings / gets around a plot hole and no-one will care really, the internet hasn’t been invented yet, nor the VCR for that matter / certification and censoring / ineptitude / laziness / colossal sexual deviancy.

Which of these could (if not would) have added to the series if seen? Secondly, how would you imagine it playing out?

The UnScene

• Vesper’s funeral
• Bond’s funeral

[secretagentfan]

I go for Vesper‘s final descent (Bond was finally so efficient that he left his body already burned to ashes, so Mi6 did not even have to pay for that - although he is still a few Aston Martin‘s short for breakeven).

With Vesper it could have been an interesting look at who is attending (hey, is that her lover? Get him! Now we can forget about another rogue revenge storyline! And who is that looking like that Christoph Waltz-guy making weird bird noises? Get him, too! But avoid that Galaxy Guardian with the nail fetish, just throw him off a train or something).

Of course, these arrests (hah, terminations really but we’re the good guys) would have had to be done by all the other 00‘s because Bond would prefer to sulk on a boat talking to Mummy. But that would have set up nicely the real interesting movie franchise about those other 00‘s. Maybe someone could even write books about them.

[MrKiddWint]

Sideswipes are now essay questions?

Somebody took the GRE since last time?

Dayum.

[dalton]

Vesper’s funeral is the scene that would be more worthwhile to the franchise, although neither of them are in any way necessary. A simple scene of Bond visiting her grave without having it become a full-on action scene, would have been nice and a good callback to the novels. But, still, there’s plenty of more worthwhile narrative possibilities in Vesper’s funeral.

A funeral for Bond, assuming that we’re going off of his death in No Time to Die, would be pointless and would be further developing the plot of one of the worst James Bond films of them all. The only worthwhile plot point that could be derived from the ending of that film would be the tribunal that should have been set up to bring Mallory to justice for his crimes against humanity.

[secretagentfan]

[MrKiddWint]

While never a big fan of Vesper in life, I find that my disinterest carries over into her afterlife as well.

A Bond funeral would be interesting for what is said, who attends, and how it could be used to continue/reboot the story.

Also, following @dalton, the sequence could end with the arrest of Mallory, thus kicking off the plot of the new film.

[Dustin]

I voted for Vesper’s funeral because it might give an early glimpse of Matera and its beautiful cemetery, lending the Craig era a visual bracket, a kind of fateful place and, for lack of a better word, belonging.

Bond’s funeral… for one thing, I struggle to see what they would bury; chances are if Bond hasn’t had a titanium hip or skull plate there likely wouldn’t be enough biological material left of him to fill two fingers of a whisky tumbler.

Apart from that, Bond had a very fitting funeral in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE - difficult to top that one.