Who Killed 007?


For the last so many 007 movies, I have felt that the movies were sucking all the fun out of the central character: if there were openings at Azkaban for dementors, the makers of the last few Bond movies would qualify automatically!

The movies started frowning upon 007’s sexist nature: hello, that was part of the fun. Then they started including chicks with brains (think of Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist…or was it a rocket scientist?): c'mon, this is James Bond, you really want women's equality here? Then they started making the movies with a tragic undercurrent: Bond abandoned and left to suffer at the hand of the North Koreans; M authorizing taking a shot at the bad guy and hitting Bond instead; the one girl Bond cared about dies…

And what the film makers couldn’t spoil, the collapse of the Soviet Union did: suddenly, the West could no longer call their enemies by that word (it was all complicated by the need for oil). And so we had to watch North Korean villains, media baron villains, wronged agent villains...none of whom could even remotely come close to the megalomania we expect of the Bond villains. Hello…we want simple evil for evil's sake, not some complicated evil or I-was-wronged evil.

And now with Skyfall, the 007 franchise has sunk to an all time low. Bond looks old enough to be your great great grandfather; doesn't speak in those double entendres we so expect; there are no babes (imagine that!), no fancy gadgets (just a radio transmitter) and no car (yes, that’s right: there is no new car in the movie). Towards the end, it became as bad as a cheap Bollywood movie: the villain enters on a chopper blaring loud music! And he hands M the gun and asks her to kill them both. Yuck! At the end of the movie, they killed off the ugly M: actually, that's about the only good thing in the movie (I never could stand that female but apparently the Brits love their females to be one-foot-in-the-grave old. Who’s the other woman the Brits love? Oh yeah, it’s their Queen).

Methinks they should have also killed off James Bond as well in the latest movie (I don’t mean killed as in Holmes-and-Moriarty dead; I mean killed as in “not alive”) and called it a day on the franchise.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarNovember 15, 2012 at 7:10 PM

    It is all OK. But, I understand that all the bond movies, without exception, are box office winners. So, there.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more