The Screengrab : ian fleming

Morning Deal Report: And Another “Thing”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:50:00 GMT

Just as every generation apparently needs its own version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Universal has decided the time has come around again for The Thing. We last saw the outer space critter in John Carpenter’s 1982 version, and now the studio “has set Battlestar Galactica exec producer Ron Moore to write the script and commercials director Matthijs Van Heijningen to direct the re-imagining… It is set in a Norwegian camp and chronicles how the shape-shifting alien was first discovered and overcame the inhabitants of that camp.”

A new James Bond movie is on the way – sort of. “The writer who took on Daniel Pearl will tackle the creator of 007,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “John Orloff, who penned Par Vantage's A Mighty Heart, about the slain Wall Street Journal reporter, has been brought on to pen the screenplay for Fleming, a biopic about Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.” We’re hoping Orloff doesn’t slight the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang years.

Amanda Seyfried is A Woman of No Importance. That’s not a judgment call; it’s just that the Mamma Mia! star is set to headline a new adaptation of the Oscar Wilde comedy. “Donald Zuckerman's producing and Bruce Beresford's directing from Howard Himelstein's script,” Variety reports.

Related:
Goldeneye: James Bond's Birthplace
Diablo Cody Unwraps Jennifer's Body

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

8. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)

One of the biggest hits and best-received films in the series, and deservedly so, even though it's now underrated, partly because of the sequence in which Sean Connery, as Bond, is supposed to pass for Japanese by means of eye makeup and a modified Beatles wig. Actually, the location shooting is a pretty good commercial for Japan, and in Connery's last appearance as Bond before his first official retirement from the role, his relationship with the Bond girls is sweeter-spirited than ever before. Roald Dahl did the script, which has some nifty lines, and Little Nellie may be the niftiest of Bond's gadgets to date. This is the first in the so-called "Blofeld" trilogy and the first film that lets us get an actual good look at the SPECTRE uber-baddie. Here, he is played by Donald Pleasance with a scar, an accent, and a pussycat; only the pussycat would be adopted by any of the actors who would pick up the role in the films to come.

7. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

Although some felt it went too far over the top with its invisible car and ice palace and whatnot, Die Another Day, after three bland and disappointing efforts by Pierce Brosnan, was not only the best James Bond picture in years at the time of its release, but also a reminder of how much fun Hollywood blockbusters can be when they're smart, cool and light on their feet. Filled with clever 40th Anniversary references to past 007 adventures, Brosnan’s special agent swansong featured no bimbo nuclear physicists, but rather a taut, ripping yarn with some dark, topical undertones (a North Korean villain, the capture and brutal imprisonment of our hero in the opening minutes of the film, a bizarre opening title sequence featuring sexy girls and, uh, “enhanced interrogation” techniques), as well as a pretty cool old-school evil henchman (the diamond-faced Mr. Kil!), the best Moneypenny scene ever, a wicked pissah ice field car chase (with not one but two fully-loaded, weapon-packed spy cars) and a creepy CGI character that looked unnervingly like Madonna. (As for Halle Berry’s performance as Jinx, well...let’s just say it fell somewhere between Oscar-worthy and Denise Richards.)

6. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981)

Arguably the best 007 movie of the Roger Moore era (and, this being the Screengrab, there probably will be plenty of argument), For Your Eyes Only scores on numerous counts: (1) not the best theme song ever, but certainly more hummable and memorable than, say, “Tomorrow Never Dies” or “You Know My Name” (Huh? What? Exactly!) (2) but definitely one of the best chase scenes ever, featuring skis and motorcycles on a bobsled track (!!!!) (3) the pre-credits death of Blofeld! (4) a relatively coherent, relatively un-winky storyline, including perfectly respectable performances by Topol, Julian Glover and Carole Bouquet as the lethal, crossbow-wielding Bond babe Melina Havelock (5) again...crossbows!!! (6) a breathtaking ascent up a pants-shittingly scary mountain followed by one of the all-time great bad guy fortress battles (7) an uncharacteristically ambiguous ending where Bond doesn’t exactly lose but doesn’t exactly win either, and finally (8) for all the abuse he gets for being old and cheesy and not Sean Connery, Moore was nevertheless the James Bond of my formative moviegoing years -– my Bond -– and these, in my opinion, were his finest two hours.

5. DR. NO (1962)

The first James Bond movie. (Though the first screen version of Bond appears in a 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale, in which Barry Nelson, as "Jimmy Bond", goes up against Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre -- part of it can be found on the DVD of the 1967 Casino Royale adaptation. The TV show was supposed to be the first of a series of small-screen productions for which Ian Fleming actually whipped up a number of original story outlines, but nothing came of it.) Looking at Dr. No today, it's remarkable how many of the key personnel were in place from the start: the director, Terence Young (who also did From Russia with Love and Thunderball, and, more importantly, the editor Peter R. Hunt and the production designer Ken Adam, the composer John Barry, Bernard Lee as M and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny, and of course the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli. (They would produce the films jointly until 1975, when Saltzman dropped out; after Broccoli died in 1996, his daughter Barabara took over the franchise.) The screenplay is credited to Richard Maibaum, who would work on another dozen Bond movies as well as another lavish Cubby Broccoli production based on Ian Fleming material, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (The script reportedly also included significant contributions from the playwight-screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, who asked that his name not be included in the credits. Oddly enough, he had no problem with his name being included in the credits of the 1967 Casino Royale.) The movie also introduced several of the gimmicks and gambits that would define the series, not the least of which was the way it managed to simultaneously stroke and defuse the audience's Cold War tensions by introducing the sinister organization, SPECTRE, which, it was explained, was always trying to start some shit between the East and the West; presumably, if James Bond could ever wipe these bozos out once and for all, the East and the West could just ignore each other while quietly going about their business. The list of potential screen Bonds reportedly considered is said to have included Cary Grant, James Mason, David Niven (later the star of Casino Royale), and a twenty-eight-year-old male model named Peter Anthony who was selected the winner of a talent contest the producers threw for the sake of the publicity, and also maybe because they didn't have any better ideas. Sean Connery, who could just barely act at this stage of his career, is said to have given an audition that wowed the filmmakers, not with his technique or talent but rather with an undefinable but undeniable quality that clearly marked him as having been put on this Earth to play the part. Another look at the movie suggests that the quality might be defined thusly: he radiated the insolent, arrogant confidence that Bond was supposed to have by virtue of his class and superior breeding, yet at the same time was such a rough hewn bruiser of a male animal that the sheer power of his presence beat the snobbery out of that conception. And he looked good in a tux. The movie also starred the twenty-six-year-old Swiss actress Ursula Andress as the shell-collecting, knife-wielding heroine Honey Ryder, and here the filmmakers' genius may show through even more than it does in the casting of Connery. At the time, Andress' English was in such a sorry state that she required dubbing by two other women, Nikki van der Zyl to provide her speaking voice, and Diana Coupland for her singing. Clearly, it was worth it to get that iconic image of Andress emerging from the surf like Venus reporting for duty on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover shoot. As Matthew Barney, who cast Andress in his 1997 Cremaster 5, has said, that scene represented the birth of a new kind of female sex symbol, doll-faced and curvaceous but in an athletic, physically assertive way. That's why there may be no better way of appreciating the seismic effect that the Bond films had on the culture at large than to go back and read some of the original reviews of Dr. No and goggle at how many (male) critics expressed their bewilderment at why that awful butch creature had been allowed into the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oh, James Bond, why do we love you so? Batmen and teenage wizards and swashbuckling archaeologists may come and go, but film after film, decade after decade, 007 never dies.

Maybe it’s because the character has no real end or beginning: despite the so-called origin story “reboot” of Daniel Craig’s 2006 Casino Royale, Bond is timeless. Though technically the agent was born sometime between 1918 and 1924 (to Andrew and Monique Delacroix Bond...thank you, Wikipedia!) and went on his first official mission circa 1954 (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang creator Ian Fleming’s literary Royale), Bond movies are always happening right now, reflecting the tastes and mores of their time, from the swingin’ sexist hedonism of the 1960s to the gritty post-Bourne “realism” of the Craig administration.

Bond, after all, is more of a concept than a character, a periodic excuse for hacks and auteurs, Oscar winners and supermodels, giants and dwarves, skiers, skaters, scuba divers, Wayne Newton, Madonna and everyone in between to make big, stylish, international action flicks, swill cocktails and blow stuff up real good, like the Olympics and the Cannes Film Festival crossed with a monster truck rally and New Year's Eve at the Playboy mansion...and who the hell can say no to that?

And so, in honor of the upcoming Quantum of Solace, the supervillains of the top-secret organization SCREENGRAB gathered in their hidden mountaintop fortress to compile a plan for world domination and, while they were at it, the following list of THE BEST & WORST JAMES BOND FILMS OF ALL TIME!!!!!

THE WORST:

10. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

Okay, so I’m in the minority on this one (since Daniel Craig’s superspy debut also appears on our “Best” list)...and it’s not just that I think blonde and Bond don’t mix (because really...who cares?). But, c’mon...after an admittedly righteous parkour chase through Madagascar, the movie spends A LOT of time stuck in the titular casino. Gambling scenes in Bond movies usually last about five minutes, because we all know who’s gonna win...only THIS time, the poker tournament goes on and on and on...and unlike, say, the battle of wits in the similarly high stakes card game in The Sting, Bond here finally wins his tournament by flashing a straight flush. A straight flush! Dude, anybody can win with a straight flush! Winning with a pair of twos...now THAT would have been superspy impressive! So anyhow, with the snoozy foregone conclusion of the trendy Hold ‘Em showdown out of the way, director Martin Campbell lightens the mood with a scene of Craig getting repeatedly smacked in the nuts (possibly to make Pierce Brosnan feel less bad about getting booted from the franchise), and then, the big finale is...a fantastically exciting hovercraft chase? ...a massive secret agent melee aboard a flaming death zeppelin? Nope...the big finale is Bond watching his girlfriend drown. Whee!!! Sorry guys...action, drama and Craig’s scowly killjoy puss may have worked in Munich, but in the 007-verse? Not so much.

9. TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) & THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Pierce Brosnan made four films as Bond. The first, Goldeneye (1995), came out six years after the previous one, and was gratefully accepted by those who had given the series up for dead but couldn't bear the thought of living without it; Brosnan's swan song, the 2003 Die Another Day, is probably the liveliest of his short reign. Tomorrow and World came between them and are what passes for the meat in a thin sandwich. Both were directed by talented but slumming directors (Roger Spottiswoode and Michael Apted, respectively), and both are laden down with sad excuses for romantic foils (Teri Hatcher and Denise Richards) and disappointing villains (Jonathan Pryce as a power-mad media mogul and Robert Carlyle as a notorious terrorist who turns out to be merely the cat's-paw to the true villain, played by Sophie Marceau). Both movies belong -- to the degree that anyone would want them -- to Brosnan's female co-stars, Marceau and Michelle Yeoh. Brought in to supply a teensy taste of the action acrobatics of Hong Kong movies, Yeoh gets to kick up a little dust and show Brosnan up in a few scenes, though it's disappointing that she ends up being turned into a damsel in distress, calling to James for help. The spectacular Marceau is luckier; she starts out wittily pretending to be an imperiled little thing and then gets to blossom in a scene that reveals her to be a sick chick who could throw a scare into Rosa Kleb.

8. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

With his suave, urbane presence, Pierce Brosnan was ideally suited to the role of James Bond, so much so that he was originally offered the role after Moore retired, only to turn it down due to his commitment to Remington Steele. It was Brosnan’s bad luck that by the time he assumed the role, the creative well was beginning to run dry. Never was this more apparent than in his fourth and final 007 vehicle, Die Another Day. Brosnan was just fine, but the movie around him -- yeesh. To begin with, much was made of the presence of recent Oscar-winner Halle Berry as the “good” Bond girl Jinx, but her performance was so bad (witty banter just doesn’t work when it’s over-enunciated, Rudy Ray Moore-style) that the studio-generated hype about a spinoff movie quickly became laughable. And who could forget those villains, eh? You know -- the, uh, English guy who was actually a Korean who got plastic surgery, and the dude with the diamonds in his face. Not exactly Oddjob or Rosa Klebb, that’s for sure. Then there’s the villain’s ice lair (which one reviewer called “Ronald McDonald’s Fortress of Solitude”), and a chase scene involving an invisible car, an idea that’s too silly even in the context of a James Bond movie. The final nails in the coffin are the double contribution of Madonna, who not only contributed the travesty of a title song -- perhaps the series’ worst to date -- but also appeared in a cameo as a British (this was her British phase, remember) fencing instructor, in which she proceeded to suck all the energy out of the room simply by showing up. But don’t cry for Brosnan -- all the money he made from playing 007 has allowed him to appear in films in which his looks and charisma have been put to much more interesting use. Put it another way -- if sitting through Die Another Day was the price we had to pay to get The Matador, it was worth it.

7. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)

The title character -- Scaramanga, the master assassin with the island hideaway, the pet dwarf manservant (Herve Villechaize), and the superfluous nipple -- is played by Christopher Lee, who clearly enjoyed one of his first prominent roles where he didn't have to bite his co-stars on the neck. Lee is the only thing this one has going for it, though; it's a dull son of a bitch. This was Moore's second time out as 007, and he seems to have responded to the discovery that he hadn't been fired after his work in the first one by switching to autopilot. The Bond girls here are Britt Ekland, a once-promising starlet on her way to a career as tabloid and tell-all memoir fodder based on her relationships with Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart, and Maud Adams, who would return to the franchise nine years later to play the title role in Octopussy. (If you'd given the performance that she gives here, you'd want a do-over, too.) And, oh, joy, Clifton James is back as Sheriff J. W. Pepper, an act of hubris on the moviemakers' part that rivals George Lucas' refusal to flush Jar Jar Binks. Even John Barry fell down on the job; he would later say that the score here was "the one I hate the most," though at least the producers declined the title song offered to them by Alice Cooper, thus giving Alice one more thing he has in common with Johnny Cash. For topicality, there's an energy crisis theme, and no movie better illustrates a dwindling of reserves of energy than this one.

6. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

As soon as A View to a Kill hit the street, it was clear that something had to give. So the producers eighty-sixed Roger Moore and attempted a newer, more serious approach to the character. The man chosen to embody that new approach, Timothy Dalton, has been trying to live down the results ever since, but Dalton is a good actor with a handsome shell and a dashing presence, and it's not the worst thing you can say about someone in his position here that he let his contempt for the material show. (After twelve years of Roger Moore, it was kind of reassuring to see someone who had it in him to feel contempt for any material at all.) The producers also scaled back on the harem girls, the feeling being that the age of AIDS demanded a Bond who was at least serially monogamous. The problem is that the villains -- the hedonistic Jeroen Krabbe and the rampaging Joe Don Baker -- now seemed to be the only people having any fun. Then movie may perhaps be most notable for a sequence that plays very strangely today, the one in which Bond, in Afghanistan, lends a helping hand to the heroic, scrappy forces of the Mujahideen.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Quantum of Vodka: James Bond’s Top 007 Cocktails

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Everyone knows “shaken, not stirred,” but as S. James Snyder reports in Time magazine, James Bond’s taste in adult beverages is not limited to the vodka martini he first ordered in 1962’s Dr. No. Fans of Ian Fleming know that wasn’t Bond’s original drink anyway, a point the 2006 reboot Casino Royale picked up on. “Reverting to the original recipe from Fleming's first Bond book, Craig's 007 ordered a drink he dubbed the Vesper — a hybrid martini that is three parts gin and one part vodka, mixed with a half-ounce of Kina Lillet. Ordering the drink, Bond's words in the film were an exact echo of the dialogue in Fleming's 1953 Casino Royale story.”

That’s far from the first time Bond has shaken up his booze order onscreen. “Audiences noticed when, in 2002's Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan saddled up to the bar and placed an order for a mojito. Sisson says the drink was already becoming popular in Miami, where he was working at the time, but that Bond's affinity for muddled mint launched the mojito to national stardom.”

Snyder goes on to provide recipes for seven of Bond’s favorite cocktails. You’ll no doubt recall the Mint Julep from Goldfinger and perhaps even the Rum Collins from Thunderball, but Bond’s most shocking drink order comes in License to Kill: “Bond rendezvous with Pam in Bimini and both order a Bud with Lime. But before 007 can take a swig, he must fight off a henchman with a gun, knocking over the beers in the brawl. Bond's cheapest bar tab ever: $3.50.”

Related:
The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs
Goldeneye: James Bond's Birthplace

Take Five: Halloween

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:45:00 GMT

When a franchise has legs, the people who own it whip it so hard that those legs inevitably come off. That doesn't keep them from flogging its backside, of course; there have been eleven Friday the Thirteenth movies, eight Freddy Krueger flicks, and so many James Bond movies that they're starting to use grocery lists written by Ian Fleming on the back of cocktail napkins as their source material. The Saw franchise is already on its fifth installment, despite the fact that the first movie opened roughly three weeks ago, and I'm pretty sure they were filming the sixth and seventh movies at the craft table of the set of the fifth one. Compared to this level of sequel overinflation, you might think that the venerable Halloween franchise is a virtual model of restraint. That's what I thought, anyway, when I decided to watch every single one of them in a row. Frankly, I didn't even think there was enough of it to make a Take Five; I was completely convinced that the ultra-bizarre Halloween III had killed the thing off until Rob Zombie decided to bring it back with his 2007 remake of the original. It turns out there were five more sequels before the White Zombie frontman took a swing at reviving Michael Myers. A chilling prospect, but lucky you: this Halloween, you won't have to read my mini-reviews of each one. The first five will do, but believe me: simply living in a world that has Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers in it should scare you more than anything else about the holiday.

HALLOWEEN (1978)

Often credited as the movie that kick-started the whole slasher-film genre, Halloween doesn't really deserve that title. For one thing, it's too good. Tautly directed by John Carpenter, and featuring performances by genuine movie actors like Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, Halloween was likewise a big-budget picture with a canny script, a plausible if terrifying villain, and actual production values. The future would belong to movies like Friday the Thirteenth, which would be released a few years later and combine all the low-budget qualities of an indie production with the bloody aesthetic of Carpenter's best work, but none of the smarts or skills. If it can't lay claim to being the progenitor of the genre, though, Halloween can at least say that it's one of the best; it still holds up years later, and makes what came after that more of a waste.

HALLOWEEN II (1981)

Literally picking up where the first movie left off, Halloween II had the advantage of being written by Carpenter and his partner Debra Hill and the immediacy of the same characters and situations, but that's about it. The filming was put in the hands of the far less competent Rick Rosenthal; the producers tinkered a lot with Carpenter and Hill's script; the movie looks dismal and kluged-together despite a much higher budget; and, in keeping with the new slasher aesthetic ushered in by the likes of Friday the Thirteenth, it forsook tension, mood and suspense for low-budget mysticism, cheap shocks, and gore, gore, gore. It cost twice as much as its predecessor but made half the money, and it would stand as one of the most disappointing sequels of the era -- until people got a look at the next installment.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)

Almost as if to prove to the millions of people who hated Halloween II that they didn't know how good they had it, the next sequel, made a year later by the mysterious Tommy Lee Wallace, was bad enough on its own: its plot was incomprehensible, its pace was glacial, its story made no sense, and with the exception of cult favorite character actor Tom Atkins in the lead role, its cast was a dud. Worse still, though, it had absolutely nothing to do with the previous movies. Michael Myers was nowhere to be found, and the story -- involving a tycoon who intended to turn the heads of all the children of the world into slithering insects with the aid of high-tech Halloween masks (no, really) -- had no apparent connection to the first two movies. Wallace claimed he was trying to turn the franchise into a sort of horror anthology, a la "Night Gallery"; but he didn't seem to have told anyone beforehand, nor was he able to adequately explain why.

HALLOWEEN IV: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS (1988)

So thoroughly did Season of the Witch tarnish the reputation of the Halloween franchise that it would be six years before producer/propertyholder Moustapha Akkad gave it another whirl. He apparently spent those six years looking for someone who would answer "yes" to the questions "will you put Michael Myers back in the movie?" and "will you take a check?"; that someone Dwight H. Little, and the movie he made featured an answer to the first question right in its title. The plot, such as it is, features the comatose Myers arising to kill and kill again; the movie brings back Donald Pleasance to add a touch of class, but other than that, its new cast, new creative team, and new focus bring absolutely nothing to the table. In some ways, it's even worse than Halloween III; at least that movie had some ideas, even if they were all bad ones.

HALLOWEEN V: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1989)

Made roughly three seconds after Halloween IV wrapped, the fifth installment ended up competing with its predecessor, which was just then being released on home video. To be honest, I have a lot of trouble telling the two apart: the cover art is indistinguishable, the plot is identical, and both movies feature a fucked-up-looking Donald Pleasance collecting another paycheck. If you're still keeping track at home, this is the one that introduces some additional supernatural mumbo-jumbo, with Danielle Harris suddenly discovering, after two movies, that she has a psychic link with her uncle Mikey; other than that, they're pretty much the same movie. Halloween V is the movie that introduced me to the directing talents of one Dominique Othenin-Girard, and, subsequently, caused me to never again seek out said talents.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Friday the Thirteenth

Take Five: Take Four

Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes:

3 UP

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – for years, David Fincher has been one of Hollywood’s most gifted filmmakers, with last year’s Zodiac his best film yet. With Button, Fincher turns his camera on an honest-to-goodness work of literature (an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, fer chrissakes), but don’t expect a workmanlike Tradition of Quality-style adaptation. Button re-teams Fincher with Brad Pitt, who continues to improve as an actor by seeking out adventurous material, and this story gives him his biggest challenge yet, not only playing a character from childhood through old age, but playing him while aging in reverse. It’s the kind of story that requires a visionary to pull off, and I can think of few better candidates for the job than Fincher. Every year, there’s at least one high-profile movie that I actively root for to be great, and this year, it’s Benjamin Button.

2. A Christmas Tale – Unlike Benjamin Button, the latest film by the great French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin is something of a known quantity, premiering at Cannes to almost universal acclaim. But even if it hadn’t already screened, my hopes for this one would be through the roof. In the past few years, Desplechin has become one of my favorite filmmakers, and he’s coming off his finest work yet, 2004’s Kings and Queen. Factor in that Christmas Tale re-unites four of that film’s stars- Matthieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Devos, and Hippolyte Girardot- and I’m sold. That the film’s IMDb recommends the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen shouldn’t be held against it.

3. The Brothers Bloom – as I stated in my Trailer Review earlier this week, I’m in the pro-Brick camp, so naturally I’m excited for Rian Johnson’s follow-up project. But he’s also assembled an irresistible cast (I love Brody and Ruffalo as brothers, and Rachel Weisz is always best when she plays daffy), so I’m extra-stoked for this one. Could we be witnessing the rise of a major American filmmaker? Here’s hoping.

3 DOWN

1. Defiance – tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Ed Zwick directs a film about an outsider who aids a group of minorities in fighting about those who oppress them. That the minorities are Jews and the time period is during World War II only makes Defiance’s Oscar-grubbing even more blatant. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. RockNRolla – you know, I was under the impression that the abject failure of Revolver coupled with the divorce from Madonna meant that the moviegoing public would get a break from Guy Ritchie. Alas, that beautiful dream wasn’t to be. It was nice while it lasted though…

3. Bedtime Stories – Adam Sandler’s comic persona might be juvenile, but he’s always been at his best at unleashing his rage onscreen in decidedly un-kid-friendly ways. Less successful are his attempts to warm the heart, which makes the idea of a Sandler family comedy all the more misguided. The presence of Adam (The Pacifier) Shankman in the director’s chair doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

WILD CARD

It’s not as odd as Scott’s choice of Oliver Stone’s W. (what could be?), but I’m pretty conflicted about Quantum of Solace. What made Casino Royale so damn good is that it combined a kickass James Bond thrill ride with a legitimately compelling story. But although hiring director Marc Forster hints that the producers might be trying for that same balance of action and drama, I have my doubts that lightning will strike twice. Add to this Forster’s lack of experience in the action genre, plus the fact that unlike Casino this one doesn’t have an Ian Fleming novel to provide a solid narrative foundation, and Quantum has a lot to live up to. Sure, it might be diverting, but after Casino Royale, that just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. However, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this.

Goldeneye: James Bond’s Birthplace

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

GoldenEye was the 1995 James Bond movie that introduced Pierce Brosnan as 007, but it was not based on one of Ian Fleming’s books. Instead the movie took its name from the beachside villa in Jamaica where Fleming made his home and wrote all of his James Bond novels. (There was also a 1989 TV-movie about Fleming called Goldeneye, starring Charles Dance as Bond’s creator.) BBC reporter Gordon Corera, who allows that it “may not have been my most arduous assignment as a security correspondent,” recently toured Goldeneye. From the videos posted on the BBC site, it appears to be about the most agreeable place to dream up superspy adventures imaginable.

“Goldeneye is still a beautifully secluded spot which provided Fleming with many of the themes that were so important to the books,” writes Corera. “The house had its own private beach where Fleming would swim and snorkel, and the love of the water would be transferred from the author to his hero. Fleming set many of his books in Jamaica and the country was used as a location for the film Dr No and others.”

In one of the videos, Corera gets a tour of the Green Grotto, a series of caves on a nearby hideout that were used as Kananga’s hideout in Live and Let Die. He also gets a look at the private beach from which Fleming did all that swimming and snorkeling, inspiring many of 007’s underwater adventures. It’s actually an awful lot like Screengrab headquarters, so I’m not envious, but if you’re looking for a spot to write your own spy series, there’s good news. “Goldeneye is now a luxury resort owned by Chris Blackwell, who grew up close to the house and worked as a location manager and an extra on the first Bond film Dr No before founding Island Records.”

We checked out the resort’s website, and it turns out that you can stay in the Ian Fleming house for a mere $2500 per night. That’s in the off-season, of course. There are more affordable options, including a villa in Goldeneye Village for $660 per night. “Deep verandas, doors and windows that open wide inviting cool sea breeze, Goldeneye offers the best kind of out door living. Our aim is to make guests feel they are being entertained in the home of a good friend.” Hey, if we had good friends like that, we wouldn’t need your stinkin’ resort.