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 vi...