Hollywood ruins Bond, Robin Hood's next

[Mazer Rackham]

Hollywood ruins Bond, Robin Hood's next

Marina Hyde

GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE

Even now, 'Lost in Showbiz' is only beginning to come to terms with the manner in which it passed last Saturday evening. Did I really spend two hours watching James Bond struggle to "move on"? Did I really submit to a secret agent's tortuous bid to "gain closure"?

Am I losing my mind here, or did he actually not even attempt to have sex with that girl? Did he get laid a mere once in two hours and spend much of the rest of it failing to get the audience to dredge the details of the last movie from the most cobwebbed of memory holes? Does he not realisethat the first law of Bond films is that every single plot point is erased from the viewer's mind the second the end credits have rolled? Is he not aware that even people who have seen The Man with the Golden Gun 30 times would sooner be able to sequence the human genome than recall what on earth it is that Scaramanga's up to on that island?

Has he found it? Has he? Has he finally located his precious "quantum of solace", and if so, is there the vaguest possibility that he might actually get his leg over in the next movie, and maybe play around with a few gadgets, instead of hauling his anguish across five continents and making me pine for the emotional levity of Breaking the Waves?

Questions, questions - and yet, unbelievable though it may seem, it could have been so much worse. Director Marc Forster has been in conversation with New York magazine, during which it emerges that the film wasn't co-written by an agony aunt, but by Paul Haggis, whom you may recall gave us Crash, the worst Best Picture ever.

"The idea," Forster says of an early draft, "was that Vesper in the last movie, maybe she had a kid, and there would be an orphan out there. It wasn't anything to insult the franchise. But they felt it wasn't particularly Bond - him looking for the kid. I think Paul thought he justleaves the kid, he doesn't deal with it. But [the producers] thought that would be really nasty, too, because Bond was an orphan himself. If he would find a kid, would he just leave it? They were so vehemently against it.

That was the only time I saw, really, 'No, we can't do that.' They said, 'Once he finds the kid, Bond can't just leave the kid. It's not right.'" Wait . . . Back up. Orphan kid? Orphan kid? I think we can agree this started being "not right" way before Bond has to decide whether to have the world's most winsome double-o sidekick, or leave Curly Sue in the care of the convent nuns or whatever. In fact, if you had to stick a pin in the moment it started being "not right", it would probably be around the point it turned into something that has "Vin Diesel vehicle" written all over it, which could be trailed with the line "He's stealing the Russian nuclear secrets. And she's stealing his heart!"

Still, you may as well cackle and face facts: we have officially entered a golden age of franchise-wrecking, legend-perverting cinema.

The wounds inflicted by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are still too raw, but in any case South Park's Indy-raping has more than taken care of that one. As for rumours that Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes will be a martial arts expert . . . let's not jinx the fun ahead.

Instead, we'll turn our thoughts to Nottingham, Ridley Scott's Russell Crowe-starring, pro-sheriff Robin Hood project, upon which Lost in Showbiz has conferred the working title Russell Crowe: Thieftaker.

"Richard the Lionheart is on his return from the Crusades [when] he took an arrow in his neck and died," the director has explained. His brother, John, becomes king, and Ridley will have you know that John "was actually pretty smart. He got a bad rap because he introduced taxation. So he's the bad guy in this."

Meanwhile, you've got the Sheriff of Nottingham, "who is the righthand man of Richard and witnesses Richard taking the arrow. And so he comes back to England to carry forward Richard's dream about England."

Ridley declares the sheriff caught between "the minority of haves and the majority of have nots".

Lost in Showbiz has said it before. But you really have to doff your cap to anyone who decides that the movie that would really chime with the world right now is one in which we're supposed to root for the guy who robs the poor to feed the rich.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/00 ... 081631.htm

[katied]

Oh god, the whole "Vesper had a kid and now Bond's responsible for him" idea is DREADFUL.No wonder it got thrown out

[Dr. No]

Hollywood already ruined robin hood. Prince of thieves !

my god those were some awful ideas for stories. I wish they had done them so I could read Sweeney and Nash defend them for being brilliant

The mind set fo teh writer and producers is problematic. If this is the kind of thing they think is merited for a story then there really is nothing left of Bond

[katied]

my god those were some awful ideas for stories. I wish they had done them so I could read Sweeney and Nash defend them for being brilliant

The latter more than the former

I do wonder if Purvis and Wade have been hitting the,erm, pharmecueticals if they thought up an idea like that

[Kristatos]

Lost in Showbiz has said it before. But you really have to doff your cap to anyone who decides that the movie that would really chime with the world right now is one in which we're supposed to root for the guy who robs the poor to feed the rich.

Yeah, this movie has been in development for some time. I read an interview with the writers and they sound like a couple of Randroids (Ayn Rand regarded Robin Hood as the epitome of human evil - she was very much in favour of the strong taking what they want and the weak being left to starve). A good review from $cott Holleran on Box Office Mojo is therefore assured.