I never, ever thought this would happen: I am obsessed with the new James Bond movies. Not because they're good -- or as good as they portend to be -- but because now that the filmmakers are like so over that smarmy, non-character-driven gibberish of yesteryear, I actually have standards for the films. Ooh, how progressive, how realistic, Bond actually has feelings now.
Great, now I can spend the whole running time looking for logic and probability problems, as well as over-the-top breaks in the realism of the world they've created.
As much as anything, I mull over how a "smarter" iteration of the Bond narrative will reintegrate the bodies of "Bond Girls."
Their are a few fundamental elements that make Bond Bond and not some memory-undeprived British Jason Bourne. Those elements being: Gadgets, cars, martinis, and sex with awesome-looking women. I'm OK with that, so long as the contemporary ladies get to be character-driven, too, and if the realism of the new Bond world isn't broken with names like "Holly Goodhead" or "Chew Mee."
(Incidentally, sometimes I think the camera spends almost as much time in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace caressing Daniel Craig's body as it does the bodies of the women present. Is it me, or am I forgetting slow-pans up the, uh, sturdy frame of Roger Moore?)
Of course, if the reboot's filmmakers truly want to be realistic and progressive, they could try to avoid "Women in Refrigerators," a term derived from an event in Green Lantern that refers to female characters in superhero comics who exist expressly to be killed or maimed as a plot device to propel the male protagonist’s story forward. (Because really, how can human sacrifices -- for all intensive purposes -- be symbols of liberated female sexuality?)
Quantum of Solace, the second film of the Bond reimagining, fails wholly on this count. Director Marc Forster was so desperate to get his Goldfinger homage in (wherein a woman's deceased body is found coated with gold), that he introduced a character who had no business being around just so he could kill her off and steady his camera on her naked, lifeless, oil-covered body (can't find picture! grr).
The character is Fields*, an attractive redhead sent by M to reel Bond in from, well ... let's just say he's gone rogue-r than Sarah Palin on the campaign trail. Over Fields' dead body, M discloses that she was "just an office girl ... she filed reports." Seriously Dame Judi, er, M? You sent an office girl to retrieve that dude who just headbutted three guys to death in an elevator? Riiight. How dare the filmmakers have you look so careless.
*Yes, "Strawberry Fields" in (and only in) the credits. Blurgh.
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