Overview of Bond 22

MI6.co has a good wrap up of the current news on Bond 22, which begins filming this week. There’s info on the casting, including villains and Gemma Arterton, locations, and more.

The Late Jack Lord has a birthday

The first Felix Leiter would have been 87 years old today.

Villains confirmed: Taubman and Amalric in

After weeks of rumors, Marc Foster has confirmed the casting of French actor Mathieu Amalric as the main villain of Bond 22, and Swiss actor Anatole Taubman as the main second villain.

Hat tip to CBn.

New Year’s Presents?

A reminder: autographed copies of The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book are available. Please pity the poor author. Also, they’re great gifts and people love them.

The Misrepresented Vicar

This is all over the RSS feeds; it’s been on the CNN site, everywhere.

A FORMER Bond girl turned vicar is helping hard-up families in Merseyside build new homes in a pioneering skill-swap scheme.
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Rev Shannon Ledbetter is masterminding the £1.9m project that will see a series of houses built in an area blighted since the 1981 Toxteth Riots, in Liverpool.
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Shannon appeared alongside heart-throb Pierce Brosnan in the 1997 James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies.
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The former model sported a £250,000 PVC dress in the movie and has appeared on the covers of numerous glossy magazines around the world.

Blah blah blah. Habitat for Humanity is a good cause, and she’s obviously playing the Bond girl card to get media attention, but give me a break. Aren’t vicars obligated to be honest?

If this woman was in Tomorrow Never Dies at all, she was a background extra; they threw a dress on her and told her to walk around; probably in the huge (huge! and crowded!) Carver party scene in Hamburg. (Presuming she’s not just lying outright, that’s the only place for a nameless woman in a glamorous gown.)

And if she wants to be a Lyin’ Misrepresented Vicar to promote her cause, fine, but is no news service professional enough to do the minimum amount of fact-checking? It’s like “Bond” is the get out of jail free card, anyone can claim to be a Bond girl. Hey! Me too! I’m a Bond girl! I totally drove on the same highway as Bond did in LALD. Ten years later. I did!

Update: I originally titled this post “the Lyin’ Vicar” but have changed it because Shannon Ledbetter herself has commented here that she has not been the one spreading this spurious tale. I am grateful for her input.

Married Bond Girls

In the novel Casino Royale, Bond thinks about his preference for dating married women, because they have similar needs to keep things simple and have a life apart from him. In the movie Casino Royale, which, of course, sought to get back to Fleming’s roots, Daniel Craig’s Bond expresses a similar sentiment:

Vesper Lynd: Am I going to have a problem with you, Mr. Bond?
James Bond: No, don’t worry, you’re not my type.
Vesper Lynd: Smart?
James Bond: Single.

True to his word, Bond seduces the married Solange. So I started thinking, have there been other married Bond girls?

Although Bond is often connected to other men’s girlfriends, he has almost always stayed away from wives. Sean Connery’s James Bond was never tied to a married woman, nor was George Lazenby’s (except his own wife, of course). It was up to Roger Moore’s randy Bond to break that ground, and it was merely a kiss. In The Spy Who Loves Me, Bond and Felicca share an embrace while waiting for her husband, Max Kalba. But their lustful kiss is interrupted by an assassination attempt.

The next married woman to find her way to Bond’s arms is Paris Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Before Solange, these are the only married women in Bond film history. So it took the film Bond forty-four years to match the three that the literary Bond was already seeing in the first book!

Roger Moore happy to admit he was too old for A View to a Kill

Nice interview here with Roger Moore.

First, he tells us something that many of us believed; that Daniel Craig is a very fine James Bond:

“I have seen Daniel Craig in a number of films. He is a thundering good actor. The movie (’Casino Royale’) showed me that he is one hell of an athlete,”

In regard to AVTAK:

Moore, who was 58 when the movie came out, described the film as the least favorite of his Bond roles. “I was only about 400 years too old for the part!” he quipped.

Read the whole thing.

Contrary to what Bond says in TWINE

Christmas comes but once a year.

Have a merry one.

More information on Fleming the spy

This is interesting stuff. I haven’t previously followed it closely, but more and more information is emerging about Ian Fleming’s role as a real life spy during World War II. It explains the credible feel of the novels even when plot elements are absolutely ridiculous.

The current news is about a woman who, after her step-father’s death, found papers indicating he was a spy working under Fleming.

Her painstaking inquiries led to her writing a book, now published, called Berlin to Bond and Beyond – The Story of a Fleming Man.
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It tells how Terry had been recruited by Fleming as an intelligence officer and posted to various European countries under the guise of a foreign correspondent with the Sunday Times.
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Fleming ran an intelligence agency called Mercury which used foreign correspondents working for the Sunday Times’ parent company Kemsley Newspapers, for which he was foreign manager, as spies.
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The former SIS and MI6 agent Anthony Cavendish described the relationship in his book Inside Intelligence. He wrote: “At the end of the war a number of MI6 agents were sent abroad under the cover of newspapermen. Indeed the Kemsley Press allowed many of their foreign correspondents to cooperate with MI6 and even took on MI6 operatives as foreign correspondents.”
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Fleming lived for a period in St Margaret’s Bay in a house he bought from his friend Noel Coward, who, it was revealed recently, also acted as a spy for the British in Europe and America.

Australian Courier Mail bitches and moans about Aston Martin

Here’s the headline: Starring role for Aston

Great, right? We’ve been hearing for a week or two that the Aston Martin is definitely back for Bond 22. It’s not a major news story, as far as I’m concerned; I mean, it’s more or less the default—the real news would be if it weren’t back.

But here’s the subhead: LET’S hope the Aston Martin gets a longer role in the next James Bond film than it did in Casino Royale.

Shut! Up! What do you people want? The Aston Martin was gorgeously showcased in Casino Royale. No car company could be happier with product placement. The lavish attention focused on the cars in this film was arguably more lingering and loving than that focused on Solange.

First, the worship of the 1964 classic. Then the introduction of the new car; “I love you, too, M.” then the long scene in the parked Aston Martin with the defibrillator. Then, the thrilling car chase, culminating in a world-record setting car roll. What did they want—a leisurely drive in the country? Geez Pete.