A Conservative Look at James Bond

[Bond77]

A few months ago I posted an article series that claimed to take a "conservative look" at Goldfinger. Now we have this - a conservative look at 007. The theme of this article is that James Bond has been overwhelmed by leftist influences and political correctness that makes for an underwhelming product (i.e. Quantum of Solace).

Regardless of your political leanings, I think people will find this interesting. A large political divide is a occurring here in the U.S. (perhaps the same in is happening in the U.K. too), and every element of society is under suspicion of being influenced too heavily by one side of the political system or the other. Apparently, even 007 has been caught in the mix.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mwals ... ore-399657

[Kristatos]

Don't think I need to read the article, it's a statement of the bleeding obvious. Plus, I don't want to give that creep Breitbart the traffic.

[katied]

Breitbart? more like B@stardbart.

[Dr. No]

Not familiar with Breitbart. IT was funny, an excerpt from another book. I guess every one has their own rendition of Bond scrip at this point. Odd that the people in charge of Bond have such trouble finding idea for one.

[Kristatos]

Not familiar with Breitbart.

He runs a conservative "news" site that is not above doctoring footage, most notoriously in the case of the conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles who supposedly infiltrated ACORN's offices dressed as a pimp and prostitute and got advice from them on how to set up a brothel. Except they didn't, they filmed the sequences of them in costume separately and inserted them in to make it look like that's what was happening. There's a difference between presenting the news with a conservative slant like Fox News does, and outright fraud, which this was (the courts convicted O'Keefe of fraud and the only reason he didn't serve prison time was because Breitbart bailed him out).

[Bond77]

Breitbart? more like B@stardbart.

The point of posting the article wasn't to make a statement about Andrew Breitbart, nor was it to make a political point. The point was to show how James Bond (an entity I believe most people who frequent dcinb.com are interested in) has become a topic of discussion in realms where commentary on the fictional agent isn't so prevalent.

[Bond77]

Not familiar with Breitbart.

He runs a conservative "news" site that is not above doctoring footage, most notoriously in the case of the conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles who supposedly infiltrated ACORN's offices dressed as a pimp and prostitute and got advice from them on how to set up a brothel. Except they didn't, they filmed the sequences of them in costume separately and inserted them in to make it look like that's what was happening. There's a difference between presenting the news with a conservative slant like Fox News does, and outright fraud, which this was (the courts convicted O'Keefe of fraud and the only reason he didn't serve prison time was because Breitbart bailed him out).

This is certainly a controversial topic, and there is room to hold O'Keefe's methods in question. However, what needs to be brought up when discussing this episode is that a major organization (ACORN), that was receiving funds from the United States, was more than willing to aid and abet prostitutes. That element of ACORN has been heavily scrutinized by people and institutions on both sides of the American political spectrum, and that is why ACORN has fallen (deservedly) by the wayside.

With all that said - if you are an American liberal/progressive leaning person then you probably are not going to like Breitbart. Just as if you are a American conservative then you won't like his counterpart David Brock at Media Matters for America. And with all that said, I am willing to look at any James Bond commentary regardless of the source.

[Bond77]

Dr. No,

I think what you got out of the article is what I got out of it, and I think more and more people are wanting traditional approach to James Bond.

[Kristatos]

This is certainly a controversial topic, and there is room to hold O'Keefe's methods in question. However, what needs to be brought up when discussing this episode is that a major organization (ACORN), that was receiving funds from the United States, was more than willing to aid and abet prostitutes.

But they weren't. O'Keefe falsified the footage to make it look as though that's what was happening, under Breitbart's direction. He filmed seperate inserts of himself and his girlfriend and spliced them into a conversation with a low-ranking ACORN official. I don't think it's "a political point" to say that fraud and slander are wrong. It's the sort of thing that The Daily Show might do for laughs, except they tried to pass it off as genuine footage. By the time the deception was revealed, the damage had been done.

[Blowfeld]

The article in question.

Excerpt from David Kahane’s Rules for Radical Conservatives: ‘For Four Eyes Only’
by Michael Walsh

So my agent called me the other day and said she’s putting me up for the newest James Bond movie and would I come up with a “take” so I can go in and pitch. Of course I said sure, because if there’s one thing I know, it’s James Bond movies. I’ve been watching them since I’m a kid, caught up with all the old ones on Netflix, and actually have a friend who’s a friend of the guy who wrote three of the best of them, which by Hollywood’s way of measuring these things means that I practically wrote them myself.

Coming up with a “take” is what we highly paid writers do out here, which translated into laymen’s speak means we work for free until the studio, against its better judgment, decides to actually hire us, and even though we’re not supposed to do this, we do it anyway because beggars can’t be choosers, and when you’re a writer out here O brother are you ever a beggar.

So I thought about it for five minutes and came up with my take, which I’m now going to test on you before I go over to wherever the ghost of MGM is located these days and pitch it to some fresh- faced young executive who’s never even heard of Roger Moore, much less Ian Fleming. I’m calling it For Four Eyes Only: This Time, It’s Personal.

Every Bond film has a killer pre- titles sequence, an exciting but, plot- wise, irrelevant four or five minutes’ worth of nonstop action. Then come the titles, complete with catchy song, then comes the movie proper: Bond gets the assignment from M, heads off to some exotic locale, beds a bird or two or six, gets into some seriously life- threatening hot water, turns the tables, kills the villain, conquers the leading lady, and we go out on a trademark Bond quip, preferably a sexual double entendre. That’s it!



Exciting Pre-Titles Action Sequence. We open in Washington, D.C., where a lame- duck President of the United States has just received some very bad news. It seems that the entire U.S. economy has collapsed overnight, the stock market is plunging, houses are worth less than a loaf of bread, except in Los Angeles, where every house still costs at least a million bucks, and the Mexican peso is laughing at the dollar. Condition red!

The president, a hapless idiot I’m calling George Walker, is in a swivet. Looking like he’s making a hostage video, he goes into the Rose Garden, stares into the cameras and says that, effective immediately, he’s transferring the sum of one billion dollars to a shadowy European financier who’s threatening to destabilize the planet with “fundamental change.”

The president is interrupted by a snickering press corps. He looks down at the notes he’s written on the palm of his left hand, then corrects himself. The sum of one trillion dollars, payable in cash, securities, supersaver coupons, and cereal box tops before sundown, or else . . . as we

CUT TO—

James Bond (Haley Joel Osment), lying on Rehoboth Beach, a lovely on each arm. His next- generation PDA, which he’s cleverly hidden in his swim trunks, starts vibrating. “Why, James,” asks one of the beach bunnies, “are you getting a call or are you just glad to see us?”

Bond leaps into action, then a bunch of cool stuff happens and somehow in a flash he’s grappling with a horde of Ninja assassins in San Francisco, all of whom he kills in the most imaginative ways possible, but which I’ll have to think of later. He enters a room from which an ominous, Central Europeanly accented voice has been heard calling him “Meester Bondt,” but when he breaks through the Krell-steel doors there’s nothing there but a pair of reading glasses, a tuft of white cat fur, and some old French newspaper clippings about an obscure insider trading scandal. . . .



Act One: London. Bond flirts with Moneypenny (Geena Davis), sees M (Harvey Fierstein in drag), and is informed that the world is not enough, that you only live twice, and that tomorrow never dies. Bond stops off to see Q (Crispin Glover), gets some cool new weapons that I’ll have to think up later, then heads for someplace glamorous, ditto, where he meets a girl, plays a few rounds of baccarat, wins big, sleeps with the girl, who wakes up dead. During his interrogation for her murder he’s miraculously busted out of police headquarters by a mysterious Beautiful Woman/Bond Girl who pulls up in a Testarossa. As they drive along the Corniche, they’re suddenly chased by a squad of deadly Mini Coopers.

The Bond Girl, however, is too much for them, and one by one they go plunging off the cliffs, screaming, to their deaths. Only the driver of the last Mini Cooper survives long enough to be interrogated, but when Bond asks him whom he’s working for, the man gets a terrified look on his face, curses Bond in a funny foreign language that mystifies even the multilingual Bond Girl—but which Bond seems to recognize—and chokes himself to death with his bare hands.


Bond and the Bond Girl make love. When Bond wakes up, he finds himself strapped to the bed, naked and looking not at the girl, but at:

GYÖRGY SCHWARTZ. Holding a white cat and chuckling ominously.

BOND: Ut- wo expecto du moi to duo?

BOND GIRL (amazed): I didn’t know you spoke Esperanto.

If Schwartz is surprised by Bond’s fluent command of Esperanto, he doesn’t let on. Instead he replies:

SCHWARTZ: Expecto ich tuo to die- o.

(All Esperanto will, of course, be subtitled.)



Act Two: As we writers know, this is the boring part— seventy– eighty pages of car chases, explosions, deaths of minor characters. You civilians call this part of the film “the movie.”



Act Three: Varna, Bulgaria. As usual, Bond awakens in bed. The Bond Girl is beside him once more. By now, though, she’s in love with him, so she’s no longer working for Schwartz; her heart belongs to the man she calls, in her delightfully piquant former Yugoslavian accent, “Shames.”

“Shames,” she says, “he’s going to kill us. So make love to me, like it was the last time.”

FADE OUT and FADE IN

“I know,” says Bond, lighting up a cigarette and then remembering it’s no longer politically correct to smoke. Steeling himself for the torturous ordeal he knows is coming, he stubs it out on his manly torso, singeing his chest hair. The Bond Girl falls in love with him all over again.

“Nada vas me mein selbst thru went have,” said an ominous voice. It’s Schwartz, dressed as Harvey Fierstein as M in Act One. Suddenly it’s all terribly clear . . .

At this point, we think that Schwartz is going to kill Bond and that will be that. After all, that’s what any real- world super- villain would do. But since this is a movie, we now need the obligatory scene in which he gets to explain himself.

Accordingly, he tosses a dossier at Bond and the Bond Girl. Bond glances through it, smiles a cruel little smile—

BOND (in English): You’re a Hungarian Jew . . .

SCHWARTZ: Mm- hmm.

BOND: . . . who escaped the Holocaust . . .

SCHWARTZ: Mm- hmm.

BOND: . . . by posing as a Christian.

SCHWARTZ (switching to English): Right.

BOND: And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.

SCHWARTZ: Right. I was fourteen years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.

Dr. No

BOND: In what way?

SCHWARTZ: That one should think ahead. One should understand that—and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a—a very personal threat of evil.

BOND: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

SCHWARTZ: Yes. Yes.

BOND: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

SCHWARTZ: Yes. That’s right. Yes.

BOND: I mean, that’s—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

SCHWARTZ: Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t . . .you don’t see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all.

BOND: No feeling of guilt?

SCHWARTZ: No.

BOND: For example, that, “I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.” None of that?

SCHWARTZ: Well, of course . . . I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in the markets—that is I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would— would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.

Is that dialogue great or what? The scene continues:

BOND (in perfect Esperanto): Permesso zu smoke- o?

SCHWARTZ: Naturalmento, Bondo- san.

Bond reaches into his jacket pocket and fishes out the GLASSES we saw in the first scene. In a bit of absolutely gratuitous near- nudity, the Bond Girl takes them to Blofeld Soros Schwartz and puts them on him: they fit perfectly!

Bond jumps out of bed, wrestles with Schwartz, the two of them go crashing through a window and land on the deck of a speedboat with its motor running, killing the guy who was going to help Schwartz escape. The boat careers about the Black Sea, or whatever it’s called, as Schwartz and Bond grapple manfully with each other, but—I forgot to tell you—Schwartz has injected Bond with some sort of slow- acting poison and he gradually becomes weaker until it looks like the final curtain when all of a sudden he quips:

BOND: Me dankt dass Christmas kommen only once- o per jahr- o—

At which Schwartz suddenly starts laughing so hysterically that Bond is able to muster just enough strength to KICK HIM OVER THE SIDE OF THE BOAT and into the mouths of some hungry sharks that he’d been keeping as pets in an earlier scene that I haven’t written yet.

I’m telling you, you can’t make this stuff up.

[Bond77]

This is certainly a controversial topic, and there is room to hold O'Keefe's methods in question. However, what needs to be brought up when discussing this episode is that a major organization (ACORN), that was receiving funds from the United States, was more than willing to aid and abet prostitutes.

But they weren't. O'Keefe falsified the footage to make it look as though that's what was happening, under Breitbart's direction. He filmed seperate inserts of himself and his girlfriend and spliced them into a conversation with a low-ranking ACORN official. I don't think it's "a political point" to say that fraud and slander are wrong. It's the sort of thing that The Daily Show might do for laughs, except they tried to pass it off as genuine footage. By the time the deception was revealed, the damage had been done.

They were found to be aiding and abetting prostitutes. Unless you are referring to the California case, where Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Jerry Brown found no instances of fraud. He also claims he has no ties to Gloria Allred either, but that's another story. On top of that ACORN was found responsible for voter registration fraud, and its founder was found to have embezzled over $900,000 from the organzation. According to authorities in New Orleans, where a main ACORN offices is located, there is a investigation under way that ACORN directors embezzled $5 million.

I reiterate that yes, O'Keefe's methods should be scrutinized along with anyone else calling themselves "investigative journalists". What remains is that ACORN was a corrupt organization, and that it unfortunately still operates under a new name - Community Organizations International.

[Bond77]

Thanks for posting that Blowfeld. Now people can see the article and comment on it with out having to visit Breitbart's site.

[Kristatos]

Thanks for posting that Blowfeld. Now people can see the article and comment on it with out having to visit Breitbart's site.

Yes indeed. It's actually not what I was expecting. I thought it would be a straight essay attacking the way Babs and co have politicised the Bond films. Instead, it turns out to be yet another lame Bond parody, of the type that you've probably seen a thousand times before. Austin Powers did it better.

[Kristatos]

They were found to be aiding and abetting prostitutes. Unless you are referring to the California case, where Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Jerry Brown found no instances of fraud. He also claims he has no ties to Gloria Allred either, but that's another story. On top of that ACORN was found responsible for voter registration fraud, and its founder was found to have embezzled over $900,000 from the organzation. According to authorities in New Orleans, where a main ACORN offices is located, there is a investigation under way that ACORN directors embezzled $5 million.

No, they were found innocent of any wrongdoing , whereas O'Keefe was convicted of fraud. In all the cases you mention, ACORN was the victim. They had money embezzled from them, and in the case of the voter registration fraud, they were being scammed by the people who were supposed to be collecting registration forms from them. The reason the Republican Party was so keen to take them down was not because of their lack of business savvy, but because of their success in getting poor and minority voters to the polls - sections of the electorate who traditionally vote Democratic.

[Bond77]

Thanks for posting that Blowfeld. Now people can see the article and comment on it with out having to visit Breitbart's site.

Yes indeed. It's actually not what I was expecting. I thought it would be a straight essay attacking the way Babs and co have politicised the Bond films. Instead, it turns out to be yet another lame Bond parody, of the type that you've probably seen a thousand times before. Austin Powers did it better.

I think I agree with you. Alas, I didn't post the article because I thought it was good, but rather because it dealt with James Bond.

[Bond77]

They were found to be aiding and abetting prostitutes. Unless you are referring to the California case, where Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Jerry Brown found no instances of fraud. He also claims he has no ties to Gloria Allred either, but that's another story. On top of that ACORN was found responsible for voter registration fraud, and its founder was found to have embezzled over $900,000 from the organzation. According to authorities in New Orleans, where a main ACORN offices is located, there is a investigation under way that ACORN directors embezzled $5 million.

No, they were found innocent of any wrongdoing , whereas O'Keefe was convicted of fraud. In all the cases you mention, ACORN was the victim. They had money embezzled from them, and in the case of the voter registration fraud, they were being scammed by the people who were supposed to be collecting registration forms from them. The reason the Republican Party was so keen to take them down was not because of their lack of business savvy, but because of their success in getting poor and minority voters to the polls - sections of the electorate who traditionally vote Democratic.

ACORN was the means of greasing corrupt "activists" and legitimatizing the voting process. Thank goodness they didn't play a part in conducting the 2010 census as originally planned. Go ahead and have the last word if you would like. I want to get back to discussing the article in question, or some other topic related to James Bond. An ACORN discussion was the furthest thing from my mind when I posted this article.

[Dr. No]

I agree we should move this beyond acorn....... But in somewhat hypocritical move i'll add my 2 cents
Acorn may have done some people some good but it was crooked organization run by two rich white guys taking advantage of the poor (of every creed and color) for the interest of the democrats. Republicans community out reach I think is to hand out boot straps so people can pull themselves up that doesn't always work when they have nothing to start with. I know the repubs probably do have some good things too. anyway I am seriously concerned with voter fraud. We got stimulus going to prisoners and dead people apparently who also can vote, I agree we need to make it easier to vote but not at the cost of fraud.

sorry for adding to the off topic problem my next post will be on topic

[Dr. No]

After all of that I don't have alot to add. I think it is interesting how peoples take on Bond hasn't changed much, despite the reboot being pesterd with ads featuring Craig over the course of 2006 through 2008

[Kristatos]

Apologies for the thread drift, but I'm a strong believer in the maxim that "everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts". A lot of the stuff that is written about ACORN is factually incorrect, and when I see someone say something that I know to be wrong, I feel compelled to correct it.

[Bond77]

After all of that I don't have alot to add. I think it is interesting how peoples take on Bond hasn't changed much, despite the reboot being pesterd with ads featuring Craig over the course of 2006 through 2008

I agree. It seems most fans of James Bond want the traditional approach back. What the average movie goer wants from the 007 franchise I guess is arguable, but the drop off in box office from Casino Royale to Quantum of Solace can be considered quantitative evidence that EON is not on the right track.