John Logan is a hack...Y/N?

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Christoph Waltz, the actor now working on the latest Bond film 'Spectre' was recently quoted widely in the media has saying that he was excited about his new character role (it won't be 'Blofeld' the usual Spectre biggie) because the writers were not hacks.

Any Given Sunday, the movie credited as having Logan as its writer, is one of my personal all-time favourite movies but that doesn't mean John Logan ISN'T a hack writer necessarily.

A little research into that movie and where it really came from and how it was developed will give people more than just one perspective on the role of Logan in these sorts of productions. I mean, hey, I don't know the guy personally and I have no exact knowledge of how he works - for all I know he may be something special.

But I seriously did not like the last Bond movie at all; it was the very essence of hackneyed, in my own view. And it doesn't help my opinion for me to never be able to run too far from the personal belief that Logan re-worked Desmond Bagley's 'Running Blind' to get the eventual screenplay of 'Skyfall.'

Now like some of you, I have seen the early scenes for 'Spectre' and they do look very different to Skyfall - much tighter organised, much more dramatic, and so very very very much more stylish in their visual components. Craig is looking and moving incredibly well, without all of that silly lip-pouting or whatever expression he was seeking to effect before.

But the Sony hacks (internet and computer passcode breaking) worry me... And I have heard from a little bird that Spectre is just going to turn out to be some neo-Nazi private gang - a dreadful letdown on McClory's original envisioning of this 'unregulated, private strike force.'

Whatever you might think of Tarantino - and I think he's a nutcase to a VERY LARGE DEGREE - he's a risk-taker and Inglourios Basterds shows what a risk-taker he is because it is a simply dreadful piece of rubbish... But he also has the passion that comes with nutcase territory in the movie industry...

Logan doesn't have that. Either the nutcase aspect or the risk-taking instinct. So what are we going to get as the so-called 'twist' ending in the otherwise widely leaked Sony screenplay? Christoph Waltz as Bond's childhood friend/cousin/brother and a Nazi test-tube child? That's ridiculous.

But, very unfortunately, this is the kind of nonsense that the modern media has the pop audience believing is some kind of reality. I mean to say, everyone knows Israel hacked the White House and TV5Monde - but the public is meant to believe it was 'Je Su IS IS...' For gawdsakes.

Even Tarantino would not have the balls though, I imagine, to go the limit on 'Spectre' top characters - and suggest that Waltz is the private psychotherapist for the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia, and that Spectre is a (rogue?) arm of the US MIC.

Difference between hacks and others, I suppose.

 

[49greg]

It seems like I am always going tangent from the OP, but I've never seen Any Given Sunday, but I always think of he old 1970s documentary about motorcycle racing "On Any Sunday" when I hear of it.

Sorry.

As for my opinion of the Bond Movies, I haven't seen the last few. They just got to be too much chase, explosion, chase, explosion, chase chase explosion. And the chases are way to far out to be real, at least real without lots and lots of preparation. Not a lot of plot or snappy dialog. ("I expect you to die, Mr. Bond." Hated that movie, but loved the line.)

I recently watched Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball. Very very different.

Heck, as I've pointed out before, in Dr. No, Bond invaded the island with a dugout canoe, wearing slacks and a polo shirt and carrying nothing more than a tiny handgun. Yet he won in the end, with a big explosion.

Seems to me that's far more impressive than doing it with all the fancy equipment they add on nowadays.

 

[lovecraft68]

Any Given Sunday sucked so my opinion was already hack.

 

[someoneyouknow]

It seems like I am always going tangent from the OP, but I've never seen Any Given Sunday, but I always think of he old 1970s documentary about motorcycle racing "On Any Sunday" when I hear of it.

Sorry.

As for my opinion of the Bond Movies, I haven't seen the last few. They just got to be too much chase, explosion, chase, explosion, chase chase explosion. And the chases are way to far out to be real, at least real without lots and lots of preparation. Not a lot of plot or snappy dialog. ("I expect you to die, Mr. Bond." Hated that movie, but loved the line.)

I recently watched Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball. Very very different.

Heck, as I've pointed out before, in Dr. No, Bond invaded the island with a dugout canoe, wearing slacks and a polo shirt and carrying nothing more than a tiny handgun. Yet he won in the end, with a big explosion.

Seems to me that's far more impressive than doing it with all the fancy equipment they add on nowadays.

I hadn't known this until recently, but the books Ian Fleming wrote had to be watered down for the movies. They were truly misogynist in nature and very violent.

When Daniel Craig came along this is why his movies, despite the explosions, are much darker in nature. They run more closely to the books.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

I think 'SYK's comments tend to be what modern era audiences believe about Craig and his renditions of the Bond character.

And, I could speculate that this places SYK's age at NOT greater than fifty...(?)

49Greg, I have to agree with you certainly that the older Bonds were much different.

Thunderball, of course, being the obvious beginning of the gadgets, gear, and technology angle.

Whatever course the producers and the screenwriters take, at least if it's an entertaining one I'll be happy - but too often, the plot lines and the spoken lines are trite.

As far as 'dark' is concerned, there is no way that the Craig flicks are dark, other than in the sense that this is the kind of 'dark' meant for general modern adult public consumption nowadays. The main issue being that if you are going to place the story/action in a present-day context (which they did do, in Casino Royale) then, you can't go around suggesting the supposed 'torture' sequences are innovative or 'shocking' TODAY as they somewhat were when the original book came out. So what then, exactly, makes them dark? I don't get it.

Homosexuality -? Not dark. Sadism/standard sadism -? Not dark. Some kind of test-tube sibling 'evil/lunatic' half-Bonds -? That's just plain stupid.

For me it's like, 'so what?'

I mean we are talking about one of the greatest money-spinning movie franchises of all time here. Surely, it can be more stylish, more in tune with actual high(er) society, and with far greater depth and subtlety over the peril Bond and his dames are supposed to be thrown in the deep end of?

To me, thus far, they have been paying Pharrell Williams and Kanye (I'll just copy Mohammed Ali) West, and pretending this, a high style spy fiction writer, gets you.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

I have read all Ian Fleming's Bond books and they are an espionage delight with wry comedy and we'll plotted story lines.


The early movies were faithful to the books and fantastic but once Sean Connery left, the movies have become blander and more and more implausible.


I will go on watching them but with little expectation that they will rival Thunderball or Dr.no.

 

[slyc_willie]

I hadn't known this until recently, but the books Ian Fleming wrote had to be watered down for the movies. They were truly misogynist in nature and very violent.

When Daniel Craig came along this is why his movies, despite the explosions, are much darker in nature. They run more closely to the books.

The first few Bond movies with Sean Connery attempted to stay true to Fleming's ideal. One has to remember that Fleming wrote to a decidedly male audience, during a time when men were head of the household and women were secretaries, nurses, mothers and sex objects. At least from a literary point of view (and, to a great extent, in real life as well; this was all before the civil rights era). So yes, in the modern view, they were misogynistic. At the time, however, they were what the audience supposedly wanted.

The films Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball exemplified Fleming's rather overly dramatic view of the intelligence field and combined it with a comic book style of grandeur. James Bond was Doc Savage and The Shadow taken to the next level, and inspired later creations such as The Destroyer, The Avengers (not to be confused with the Marvel offering by the same name) and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

The books and films were almost ridiculously over the top, which is part of the reason why they were so popular. Bond was, literally, a "super-hero." He encountered ridiculous odds, used cool gadgets (which would never work within the confines of real-life physics, but who cares?), killed the bad guys, saved the world, and managed to boink a few hotties in the meantime. No matter what, he always saved the world and scored himself numerous amounts of grade-A pussy. What guy wouldn't admire that, or want to be that?

Then, of course, there was the comical Roger Moore era (although, I did like Live and Let Die and For Your Eyes Only; the rest were just cheesy), which, in my opinion, greatly diminished the Bond mystique. Hell, Moore could barely stay in shape throughout his tenure as Bond. His neck wrinkles were pretty nasty.

And then we had Timothy Dalton who, according to me and apparently no one else in the world, reminded me a lot of the Bond from Dr. No. He was dark, serious, and made me believe he had earned that coveted License to Kill. But, after The Living Daylights, it went downhill rapidly for him. Unless I'm mistaken, that three- or four-run of Bond movies with Dalton were the lowest-budgeted films in the series (in adjusted dollars, I assume).

In 1995 we got Pierce Brosnan, long lauded as "the next great Bond," and as far as I'm concerned, Goldeneye ranks right up there with the original Bond films from the early sixties. It was well-written, political, had a classically ruthless villain and a badass henchman (er, henchwoman; thank you, Famke Janssen, for convincingly playing a psychopath who has an orgasm whenever she kills someone). The fight scenes were nicely choreographed and the tech was cool and spectacular.

The rest of Brosnan's Bond movies, unfortunately, pretty much sucked since the plots were thin and they placed too much emphasis on product placement (BMW, Ericsson, etc.). I'd like to think that ol' Pierce couldn't wait to be out of his contract.

Which brings us up to the Daniel Craig era . . . .

I like Craig. I think he's done, as the Brits would say, a "bang-up" job with the role thus far. Casino Royale gave me hope that the entire Bond run was going to be redone with updated versions. For some reason, I loved the parkour scenes in the first several minutes of the film, and I really liked the showcase of Bond as an agent more cunning than he was thought to be but also more reckless than he should have been. He was suave when he was supposed to be, intelligent when he was supposed to be, arrogant when he was supposed to be, and deadly when he was supposed to be.

It gave me hope.

And then . . . Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall. *sigh* So much hype, so little delivery. I should have known what was in store when I started seeing all the product-placement commercials advertising the movies.

The only good scene, as often shown in trailers, was when Bond drops down from the back of the ruined train . . . and fixes his cuffs. That is Bond. But, alas, it was fleeting.

I don't think Daniel Craig is the saving grace for James Bond. It's not his fault; it's the fault of writers and producers trying to reinvent something that has already been done to death. This isn't a question of whether or not John Logan is a hack writer, but whether the material he's been given can only lead to hack re-hashes.

Sorry to say it, but I think James Bond needs to die. Just have the funeral and get it over with. Move on.

"You only live twice, Mr. Bond."

Twice was three Bonds ago.

 

[lovecraft68]

I have never, nor will ever get the Bond obsession, you want to talk about formulaic and boring...

The only appeal I see is that of the testosterone filled boys or men living through Bond, the looks the money, the girls, he's "cool"

I think that is why I never got him or cared to, I have never cared about being cool. I'm also a fan of realism and not movies where no one is ever smart enough to walk up behind him, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger

15 year old male fantasies.

I'm more apt to write about him getting killed than I am to see one of the ABC movies.

 

[robertreams]

Am I the only one that knows Bond is supposed to be humor and satire?

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Satire it might be now, but it still needs to be entertaining.

Slyc_willie - that's a decent summary and I personally also agree about the parkour sequences.

I think though it's a serious mistake to think Bond begins as satire - Fleming's wife was part of the Harmsworth clan, filled with the Hellfire Club people; nothing unrealistic there at all.

And back in its day, we're talking the true heroes of the early Cold War and East Germany, Stalinist Soviet Communism, post-War profiteering criminality - spies and field operators of all sides risking their lives in a world not yet in the NNP era of military weapons.

 

[slyc_willie]

Am I the only one that knows Bond is supposed to be humor and satire?

In what way? Fleming wrote the original books as an embellished, exaggerated take on the field of espionage, working in some criticism regarding political leaders and international policy. But it wasn't satirical. Now, some of the supporting characters were, but Bond himself was written as a man's man and became a template that later lent itself to numerous other "manly" heroes, as well as an abundance of satires. Unfortunately, that template has become, as Judi Dench said in Goldeneye ". . . a misogynist dinosaur."

Satire it might be now, but it still needs to be entertaining.

Slyc_willie - that's a decent summary and I personally also agree about the parkour sequences.

I think though it's a serious mistake to think Bond begins as satire - Fleming's wife was part of the Harmsworth clan, filled with the Hellfire Club people; nothing unrealistic there at all.

And back in its day, we're talking the true heroes of the early Cold War and East Germany, Stalinist Soviet Communism, post-War profiteering criminality - spies and field operators of all sides risking their lives in a world not yet in the NNP era of military weapons.

Fleming supposedly based Bond on a number of people; some claim it was the 17th-century polymath John Dee, others a WWII spy named Forest Yeo-Thomas, and some maintain part of Bond, at least, was inspired by Fleming's own brother, Peter. Of course, Fleming filtered a bit of himself into the character (he was known to like hand-rolled cigarettes and vodka/gin martinis), and it seems more likely that the inspiration came in many forms over the course of Fleming's own career as a British naval intelligence officer during WWII.

What's done the most damage to Bond is, I think, the desire to maintain the early Cold War-esque ubermensch idea of Bond while simultaneously updating the material around him. So Bond remains the same old stoic Bond while the situations and events he's exposed to become contemporary with the times.

If they really wanted to do James Bond justice, they start over from scratch and place the movies in their original historical context; 1950s Cold War Europe. That would be well worth it, I think.