mjmooney

Hmmm. If Fleming was gay, maybe. But as far as we know he wasn't. I think the key phrase in the above paragraph is "the same view”. I know it could be taken to mean "just women is not enough", but I think it simply means "just one woman is not good enough". But who knows.

I cant understand why reading the books would change your mind. We are basing this thread on the movies we have watched for the last 40 years. Its the idea of James Bond we have seen on the screen. Wether you have read something different in a book is totally irellevant I'd say. The new movie might be closer to the books, but its far from the charming, smooth movies we have seen for ages. I guess that is true for the vast majority of Bond movie fans. Personally, I read ALL the books (all the Fleming ones, that is, the rest don't count) before seeing ANY of the films - which naturally colours my perception of all things Bond.

YOLT can't be done fully and faithfully without wrecking the series, IMO. It's tragic, but YOLT has to based around Bond avenging Tracy, which means either: quite clearly Lev you are an expert but surely with Casino Royale they effectivtly went back to the begginning and thus all the possibilities are open again However, the producers have generally avoided whole-cloth remakes of earlier films in the series (the two prominent exceptions being the pair of Moore films with little/no Fleming plots: The Spy Who Loved Me (remaking the film You Only Live Twice, even using the same director) and A View to a Kill (somewhat obviously Goldfinger)... arguably the second half of Die Another Day is a remake of Diamonds Are Forever, also). That the reboot in CR wasn't total (keeping Dench as M, most notably), I think indicates that the producers don't totally view CR as outside of the series, so why would they remake the SPECTRE trilogy (especially since they still may not have the rights to Thunderball...) if some portion of the idea that it's all one series is kicking around? Of course, "Never Say Never Again" was Thunderball, but that wasn't made by the Bond "establishment".

YOLT can't be done fully and faithfully without wrecking the series, IMO. It's tragic, but YOLT has to based around Bond avenging Tracy, which means either: quite clearly Lev you are an expert but surely with Casino Royale they effectivtly went back to the begginning and thus all the possibilities are open again Exactly. Which is also why I just wish they'd gone the whole hog and set it in the 50s, 4½ litre supercharged Bentley and all.

Unibond is in a league of its own.

That's it, Levi on Mastermind, special subject James Bond. Two minutes starting from NOW....

Craig was good in Casino Royale - roughly true to the spirit of the book, although I'd have liked it even better if they'd not tried to make it contemporary, but set it in the 50s as was intended. In fact I'd love to see many of the Fleming novels re-filmed (anything not by Fleming doesn't count for me) with Craig, sticking closer to the books - You Only Live Twice in particular cries out for it as the original film was NOTHING like the book.

Has Ian Taylor got an actual job at the Villa?

Trim returns to VillaTalk after appearing on "Ten Years Younger".

Connery. But I agree that Craig was good, and probably closer to the Bond of the books. Brosnan was OK. Moore should have been strung up by the balls for the effrontery to try and be Bond. But then I'm old enough to have seen Moore on TV playing Ivanhoe, Bo Maverick, and The Saint, all of which ruled him out as a Bond for me.

Ahh...Follett. I liked Code to Zero and The Third Twin. He uses plenty of expletives though ... This is the first one of his I've read, and of course it's totally unlike the rest of his stuff, being mediaeval and all that. It's OK so far, but a bit erm, unchallenging. Don't know if I'll finish it.Bumped. I didn't finish it. I also started Iain Pears' "An Instance Of The Fingerpost", which was well-written but I got really bored with it - just didn't care about the characters, so I abandoned it. Cartwight's "The Song Before It Was Sung" was excellent. Since then I've also read Jed Mercurio's "Ascent" - about a Korean War Soviet fighter pilot who becomes the USSR's candidate for the first moon landing. Clever stuff and quite enjoyable. And also John Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" - which I thought was AMAZING. Philip Roth apparently called it "the best English novel since the war", which sounds like hype, but he may have a point. A million miles from the Ludlum type of spy novel, and quite unlike most of JLC's other stuff, it is heavily based upon his own relationship with his con-man father. I literally couldn't put it down, first one of those reads for years. Recommended. Just started on E. L. Doctorow's "The March". Looks promising.

Krikey! It seems the Kooks have kounterfeited the Kinks' koncept of kommencing all "c" words with "k"! Sounds like a load of krap.

Existing thread?

Anyway, it should be "who is the MOST evil?" as there are more than two choices.

I guess you left out Hitler as too obvious. Pol Pot could have been in there though. But on sheer number of deaths you have to go for Stalin.

3.24? Three-twenty-FOUR? Not 3.25, or 3.30? How anally-retentive is THAT?

Just do a Google images search on Marge Simpson with the content filter turned off. NSFW !!!

How about Snow White? Or Cruella deVille, if that's your sort of thing?

Burrell. Disclaimer: This does not imply any sympathy on my part for the Royal Family.

Betty Rubble does it for me. Don't know what she sees in that Ernie Wise look-alike.

"Value" is an entirely human construct. Hence no. 1.

Jole Blon - Gary "U.S." Bonds (with Bruce Springsteen)

Pope "a Catholic" shocker. It's a "guilty pleasure" type song, I reckon. I sort of hate it, but it has a certain cheesy something, rather like Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey" or Lobo's "Dog Named Boo" - I HATED them at the time, but now they are imbued with nostalgia. The joy did not last, 'cause the bastards ran too fast....

Limpid calls in arbitration in his dispute over Virgin users' blocked access to VillaTalk.