Deathmatch 2025 - Sideswipes

Special Interest
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There’s that “universal” again. Obviously there are plenty of Bond fans who think anyone who doesn’t love 007 is crazy, but if you discount those enthusiasts, then yes it’s entirely reasonable to expect some people to like the films and others not to, for whatever reason they choose.

“Dismiss” is an interesting word because it could imply “reject” or “denigrate” but it could also mean “ignore” or “neglect with indifference.” My kids – aged 22, 20 and 17 – are in the latter camp. I’ve shown them Bond films, but at best they earned a shrug and a “whatever.” When pressed to explain my attachment, I found I usually gave answers like, “Long before the Marvelverse, the Bond films were the only place to see wild adventure, larger-than-life action and outlandish spectacle on such a grand scale” or maybe “back before international travel was easy for the average person, the Bond films took us to exotic and glamorous locations as an escape from our boring everyday lives.”

In other words, my explanations all boiled down to “You had to be there,” which just confirmed the conclusion my kids had already reached. I still remember wondering why my Dad was into Westerns when obviously astronauts were way cooler than cowboys; now I realize James Bond is a “Dad thing” in my house and all my kids can manage is a patient smile that says “Well, good for you.” I am realizing that Bond’s appeal to me is at this point chiefly based on nostalgia, which by definition is personal and non-universal. If Bond didn’t resonate with you back in the day, then you can’t feel nostalgia for it now, and if it doesn’t grab a new viewer in 2025 – glutted as audiences now are with superheroes and Fast and Furious films and action-packed, physics-defying film stunts uncomplicated by the additional baggage of a bygone era’s cringey takes on sexual politics, etc – then I guess that just leaves those of who were there and did have fun. And that obviously can’t be everyone.

So yeah, I acknowledge there are legitimate reasons for people to dismiss the Bond films. I have to, since I live with some of them.

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On a related note, Bond always used to have a difficult relationship with serious German media, i.e. not the kiddie pop magazines or the tabloid bunch; those were fine with 007. But in the rest Bond was fairly regularly dismissed as an overhyped spectacle and practically ignored by feuilleton literature and film critique, even by the so-called ‘conservative’ press, Welt, FAZ and the like.

A number of reasons for this: history (the war wasn’t yet 20 years over when GOLDFINGER broke conventions and kicked off a craze), politics (the Cold War was deadly serious here; Germans knew that the first shots would go off here and there was nary a year without an espionage scandal, people shot at the wall or put into East German prisons until Bonn bought them free), cultural (an intellectual attitude that sharply classified between ‘serious’ culture and ‘pop’ folly and wholeheartedly rejected the latter).

For many years Bond either didn’t feature in German feuilleton or was ridiculed; ever more so the more success the films had. This only changed gradually with the involvement of ‘serious’ actors (Dench, Marceau, Carlyle, Coltrane) and what was perceived as auteur directors (Apted, Mendes). Today, it’s possible a Bond film is reviewed in SPIEGEL or Zeit and not be panned.

It might actually be good times to be a Bond fan in Germany - if we had any films to celebrate.

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It’s TRUTH!

Of course there’s people out there that dismiss the series on ideological grounds, and probably a great deal more who just thinks it’s all bollocks. I’m that way about comic book movies and romcoms with Kate Hudson. (I think comic book movies are bollocks and ideologically, I avoid Kate Hudson romcoms).

In a holistic “world of balance” way, with absolutely no evidence, I’d suggest that the percentage mirrors those of us who are “all in” Somewhere out there I’m sure there’s a website called “Notplayingwithevenaquarterdeck” who are having a lifematch.

But with all seriousness…I’d offer the series is old-enough, long enough, and sort of the “establishment” (cutting edge is not a phrase that appears in too many Bond film reviews) that the majority out there are neither out or in. Instead they drop in and out of the series based on the circumstances of that moment - I only do the 70s ones, I don’t like actor X, what have you. And I think these days, in a cinematic marketplace bursting at the seams, it might even be more micro than that, with a whole rash of folk taking a stance on a film-by-film basis.

This whole thing is so long in the tooth now, that I think the number that outright dismiss the series may even be dwindling - the series has done enough laps that if one entry offends you, well you’ll find another that ticks all your boxes. Bond treats women badly - Bond’s gone all modern man - Bond doesn’t end up with women at all - over 25 films you can find an entry that doesn’t run counter to your worldview.

True - but like the masses perhaps, it’s almost not hip enough to take a hard stance either way.

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How many intersections might there be between fans of Bond and other series?

Are their more compatible with Bond or less?

For me:

Bond & Indiana Jones? Yes.

Bond & The Fast and the Furious? No, never liked the latter.

Bond & M:I? Sure.

Bond & Twilight? Argh.

Bond & Harry Potter? Why not.

Bond & Star Wars? Yep.

Bond & Star Trek? Yep yep.

Bond & Superman? Oh, yeah.

Bond & Marvel? Um, partly.

So what is it? Generational? Genderwise? Total coincidence?

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Maybe “generational” is the answer because for me, certain things came along at roughly the same period in my young life and got their hooks in me for good. Bond and Star Trek? I found them both around 1973 or 74, when I was 8 or 9 years old. And I’m still a big fan of both, or at least the stuff available to me then. For the most part I feel both franchises have subsequently moved on without me into territory I care little about, but the old stuff is still near and dear.

Bond led me to The Saint, to Steed and Emma, to Maxwell Smart, to James West. Indy came later for me, but he carried Bond’s DNA (literally so in The Last Crusade) so he won me over quickly. Star Trek connects (in a roundabout way) to CS Forester’s Hornblower, which connects to Sabatini who connects to Errol Flynn. I can’t claim it was a direct path from one to the next, but eventually they all made their way into my affections and the links probably matter on some level.

Superman predated all of them; I can’t even remember a time before I knew who he was, and adored him. And Batman was close behind.

I think to the extent these franchises can continually reinvent themselves, they either persist or not with each new generation, each of whom may find a different element to love than I did. Bond has been many things over the years, and with the character defined for me by Sean and Roger, I may have next to nothing in common with a 20-something fan of the Craig version, who may love Bond as much or more than I do, but in a different form. I could spout off reams of trivia about Kirk and Spock but not be able to name 3 characters from more recent shows, just as fans of those shows wouldn’t know anything about TOS.

Maybe I was already too old to get into Harry Potter when he showed up. Maybe I’m not hip enough to see the appeal of the Fast and Furious films. Maybe I so conditioned by Dracula and Barnabas Collins to see vampires as monsters (if sometimes sympathetic ones) that it’s just too much of a leap for me to accept hunky teen versions who sparkle like Tinkerbell. But surely there’s a generation now for whom “vampire” means something else entirely.

It occurs to me almost everything I’m really a big fan of is something that came to me in the first 15 to 20 years of my life, which either means that nothing since the early 80s is any good (a tempting position, but silly, I know) or that the things we’re most into are often the things that come along when we’re most receptive and suggestible. They don’t have to have anything in common except the fact that they push our buttons. If someone had asked 9-year-old me how they should spend a few million bucks on a piece of entertainment to appeal to me, I couldn’t have given them better instructions than “have a superspy fight an army of bad guys in a high tech hideout inside a volcano” or “give me a masked crimefighter who has a fleet of cool vehicles and a cave full of gadgets and fights colorful villains” or “put a swashbuckling captain and his crew on a spaceship where they can meet monsters and aliens and giant machines that slice up whole planets.” All that stuff just came at the right time for me. To my kids, it might as well be a documentary on cheesemaking.

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That‘s it.

And sorry, Jim, I did not want to hijack the thread, I was just wondering about groups of people dismissing Bond and whether they would dismiss other series, too - and why that might be.

Yes, it’s Saturday.

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Last exercise of my Austen powers (am I sorry? No) for a bit, new game starts Monday.

September 7

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the Bond series’ current state still provides more creative opportunity than where it found itself in the hiatus after 1989.

  • Truth
  • Fiction
0 voters
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Truth.

Starting from a position of two eras with growing box office power, proving that even after a flop and a long hiatus and political changes the series can still recover and thrive, the current situation is the best possible one.

But its future is still very risky, especially with an entertainment world which has changed so much and a political chaos too volatile to count on.

We like to think that it all will work out somehow like it has always been the case, but will it?

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1989’s long break was an escalating fight for the control over Bond where the players on Eon’s side, Cubby and his kids, stayed effectively the same - while a host of studio executives and investment figures tried wrenching Bond out of its longtime corporate structure and establish full control over the property.

In the end, after legal battles and attacks from the sidelines by the rival Sony/McClory, they all merely stalled the project and the only demonstrable outcome of it all was Dalton bowing out and Brosnan coming on board. They might have possibly had this by 1990 had cool heads prevailed.

But creatively GOLDENEYE was far more conventional a Bond film than many realised. The cast was largely new, the traitor plot too. And giving the whole a prologue six years in the past. But the tone and the feel of the film wasn’t that different from the series. Yes, a new generation of producers had taken the wheel - but they’ve been doing Bond films all along for decades. The entry was visibly related to what came before and would come after.

Which had been the aim all along, going on with the series, not starting a new one.

Theoretically, Amazon could do everything differently now, no obligation to keep any old hat around. You could kick every Bond convention and tired old trope. And it’s fairly likely they will do some things differently just to show their plan isn’t reheating leftovers of a 60 year old dish.

Then again, so far the visible evidence - Pascal, Knight, Villeneuve - and the noises coming from Amazon, no female Bond, the usual suspects as possible contenders, so far don’t suggest a revolutionary approach. None of that would have surprised us had it come out of Eon house a year ago or three, would it?

We can be fairly confident Bond will act in a London/SIS environment under M, with some support by gadgets coming out of the depths of the in-house labs and battling some hopefully uncontroversial threat. It’s likely not going to be ‘realistic’ and topical only in a restrained manner that allows for worldwide distribution.

Perhaps the biggest chance for change may be the Bond business concept where Amazon could now at once invite different promotion ‘partners’ for bigger fees and keep the production budget within a bracket. Not that it would matter, Amazon could burn however much they wanted on Bond. They did burn a kingdom on a LOTR series and just threw money at it when the show proved unpopular. They will likely do the same with Bond and chances are they could afford to do another 25 films before they needed a profit to show.

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I don’t know if it’s universally acknowledged, but I do believe it’s true.

Circa 1995 we’d seen diminished profits with the Dalton era, followed by an extended hiatus which gave some onlookers the impression things had changed too much, too fast. Which together with pressure from the studio I think pressured Eon to steer back towards the tried-and-true with a more formula-faithful plotline and a lead actor who seemed practically factory-assembled to exactly match the public’s conception of Bond.

Now, we’re on the other side of nearly 30 years of box office success, more than half of it during an era that basically abandoned the old formula and redefined how a Bond (film or actor) could look or behave, and still made record profits. That’s got to be encouraging to anyone with “bold” new ideas. Plus as a last gift to the new management, Eon killed off the Craig incarnation, so there’s no loose ends to tie up and a built-in excuse for reimagining the whole thing from scratch.

On the other hand, none of that means Amazon WILL make bold choices or go in interesting new directions, or that they won’t retreat at the first sign of trouble. But in terms of *potential," yes there’s plenty more now than there was back then.

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It’s TRUE, exactly as DavidM has said. For me, the only question is this one above. I think EON did a lot of legwork in widening parameters wih the first 2 films of the last era, and while I enjoy SF alot, the further we move away from it the more I rue its decisions to bring back some of the things that had been proven to be dispensable, getting away with it on that occasion but unfortunately not IMHO, in the entry that followed.

Amazon have the perfect opportunity to stretch the series’ legs, as it were, and as I mentioned with yesterday’s question posed by the esteemed Jim, this whole thing is so long in the tooth anyway, I’d offer that it’s proven itself indestructible. Whether that’s how they see it, only they know, but I suspect the question isn’t one of what to change or what to keep, but more who do they want to appeal to. If there is intent to introduce the character to a whole new generation (I personally believe that is the major driving factor - this is a business after all), I think it will be seen as more of a wash the reactions of the likes of us.

Of course, that was the thinking behind New Coke, and look how that turned out…

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September 8.

From Wherever Your Luggage Ends Up, With Love.

Bravely, or cretinously, you have decided to fly economy/coach, and find yourself with a dilemma. You get seat B or seat E, meaning you have to spend three rampagingly uncomfortable hours sitting between two other fleshbags. Which would you prefer, all the while worrying whether your suitcase is in Stavanger or Seville?

  • A: Kevin McLory B: You C: Irma Bunt
  • D: Whisper E: You F: Card Sense Jimmy Bond
0 voters
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While asking Whisper to silence Jimmy is absolutely enticing, I would rate the in-flight entertainment even higher to witness Irma Bunt berating McClory for too many bathroom trips („One is enough!“).

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My problem with the Whisper/Jimmy alternative: there is a fair chance that, between Whisper’s girth and Jimmy’s oversized dinner jacket, I’d practically disappear in seat E, turning into one of Ryan Air’s mysterious seat ornaments the art world puzzles over.

Therefore I take seat B and let McClory tap me for a hundred quid while Bunt fumbles with her ungainly large machine carbine, muttering to herself she ought to have booked my seat for it…

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A. I’d spend two hours listening to McClory vent, with the first 15 minutes fascinating but then repeated ad nauseam for the next 105 minutes.

Then I’d get Irma Bunt to “dispose” of him.

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September 9.

Do you want to buy a scratch card, some market stall scent and a meal deal, all for only €7,000, whilst wondering why everyone else has at least seven tattoos and an aversion to salad? Then you’re sitting in the right place - but between whom?

  • Seat A: Elvis Seat B: You Seat C: The Chief of the Snow Leopard Brotherhood
  • Seat D: Krilencu Seat E: You Seat F: Broberhauser
0 voters
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I have to admit, when I first read this, I thought you were mentioning The King, Elvis Presley, not Mr. Insignificant Elvis of Quantum Of Solace. :zany_face: :blush: That initially made me ponder the question, but once I realized it was QOS’s Elvis, I went the other way.

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This is the impossible choice - so I choose Broberhauser because I would love to see him manipulate me to kill Krilencu and then down the plane while giving him the only parachute.

And then I would take that myself.

Damn, he already corrupted me. Am I another stepbrother, too?

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Entirely by chance I happen to know the Chief of the Snow Leopard Brotherhood, a lovely lady of 98 years who still works her garden each day and reaps her own greens. As a sideline, her potatoes are sold in a farm shop with adjacent cafe exclusively catering to City banks providing a unique culinary experience for the financial sector.

Shortly after 1987 the Brotherhood entirely left the drug trafficking business and opened the House of Pain tattoo chain. A franchise doing excellent business without so much as employing a single tattoo artist or having any customers, baffling tax authorities of five continents. Their own YouTube channel documents their business philosophy, coming from humble beginnings to build on diligence, honesty and hard work.

Elvis is just there to sell used scratch cards to collectors.

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Have to sit next to Elvis! He would smile excitedly, or with some humour in his eyes, and without saying a word, he would reinforce how smart, funny, and genuinely amazing I am. And if anyone were to challenge my assessment of myself (such as the Chief of the Snow Leopard Brotherhood), he would give them a withering look, as if they had offered him a business card not worthy of sneer from Patrick Bateman of American Psycho.

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