Archive for July, 2006

Clerks II is com­ing out! Run for you lives!

For some of you, you’re won­der­ing what I’m talk­ing about. Like my par­ents. If you’re like me, you know that Clerks II is a sequel to Clerks, the 1994 film that cleaned up at Sun­dance and made a star of direc­tor Kevin Smith, who, upon find­ing out his film had been selected for Sun­dance, had to close up the con­ve­nience store he was work­ing at at the time. It was a great rags to riches story, very Capra-esque.

At the time I loved Clerks. At the time.

After repeated view­ings I think it grows less and less funny, but that first time that you see it it is hilar­i­ous, usu­ally. It’s very much a guy com­edy, though, I don’t know many girls that like Clerks.

And then he started mak­ing movies, none of which really did as well as Clerks. It’s like the story of a band’s 2nd album : the first album took 8 years to make, the 2nd, 3 months. And they’re never as good.

He made Mall­rats, Chas­ing Amy, Dogma and then Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. After that came the worst of the worst, from what I hear, yes I haven’t seen it, Jer­sey Girl.

And now, with fail­ure star­ing him in the face, he comes full cir­cle with what made him pop­u­lar. A Clerks sequel.

Lame!

We’re get­ting a new James Bond film, with a brand freak­ing new guy play­ing James Bond, later this year. Yipee.

If you’re like me and kind of lost inter­est in what James Bond does along about when Tim­o­thy Dal­ton took over, you prob­a­bly won’t care about this new film either. But I like the old school James Bond films, they’re fun and have their silly kitsch fac­tor about them. And go ahead and make fun of me, but after Con­nery my favorite Bondie is George Lazenby. Yes, I like On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice, ‘cause the movie rokkks, man. It’s got one of the bet­ter story lines and it’s the deep­est you ever get into Bond’s char­ac­ter, since he gets mar­ried and all. And then she dies, which is gold, man.

But I’ve got a the­ory about all this James Bond stuff.

It started out with the last Bond film, Die Another Day. It was the 40th anniver­sary of the Bond jug­ger­naut and they had a scene where the then-current Bond, Pierce Bros­nan, was with John Cleese’s Q, and in the scene they’re walk­ing through Q’s work­shop and they have a lot of dif­fer­ent gad­gets and weapons that Bond used over the decades. Bond picks up the shoe dag­ger from From Rus­sia with Love and looks at it like he has no idea what it is, just this quizzi­cal look. He puts it down after pon­der­ing it a moment, but it sparked some­thing in me. And I think I fig­ured out who “James Bond” is.

Another thought — in the new film, Casino Royale, new Bond, the butt-kicking Daniel Craig, is shown earn­ing his two zeros the only way that he can earn them — by assas­si­nat­ing two peo­ple. Later on Judi Dench’s M speaks with Bond. Now, if this were some sort of ori­gin story, as it’s being pur­ported to be, shouldn’t M look a lit­tle bit like Bernard Lee, who played him for decades before he died? If we’re going waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back to tell how James became who he is, why is M a woman? I don’t think MI6 from 1964 would want any­body else but Moneypenny.

Because there are many James Bonds, and the name is a pseu­do­nym for some­one else hid­ing behind the persona.

And it’s backed up by the line said by Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice -

James Bond: [to the cam­era)) This never hap­pened to the other fellow.

It makes sense. If Daniel Craig has to earn his ‘00’ title then Judi Dench can be there, since Daniel Craig’s “James Bond” is circa 2006, not 1964. And it explains why Bros­nan can eye a dag­ger shoe like a dork.

It totally makes sense. And you know me, I’m never wrong. Ever!