A twilight world of haunted houses on
blasted heaths, billowing
curtains, priest holes and craggy old retainers, grown men struggling
with oedipal longings and alcohol addiction, a slender plot about a list
of names and a china English bulldog, an accused Great Actress, superb yet ridiculous, reciting Tennyson's
rallying cries to a lost people torn between technologically advanced modernity
and their sentimental loyalties to a myth of nationhood - what is this
we have, yet another re-working of
a Bronte novel, a missing scene from the Olympics opening ceremony, or just more teenage vampires?
I hear a gunshot on the
Scottish moors; a man and a woman get out of their car and stand in the whisky-coloured heather beside a
trickling burn. Is it mother and son on holiday in
the Highlands, searching for their roots? Maybe it's Richard Hannay
from The Thirty Nine Steps on the run from master criminals in
1915?
No, the year is 2012, and the man is Bond, James Bond, as we have never seen him before and should never, ever, have to see again.
In a feat of heroic acting against the odds, Daniel Craig doesn't lose Bond's masculinity or credibility (or put on a funny voice like the Batman, rasping long after everyone's realized he's Bruce Wayne), 007's upper lip still twitches with humour, not emotion, thank god, but he has to fall through the treacly vortex stirred by the director and screenwriters, hooked on the currently pseudo-Freudian, psychobabbling, whinging interpretations of action heroes, like men afraid of their own shadows.
No, the year is 2012, and the man is Bond, James Bond, as we have never seen him before and should never, ever, have to see again.
In a feat of heroic acting against the odds, Daniel Craig doesn't lose Bond's masculinity or credibility (or put on a funny voice like the Batman, rasping long after everyone's realized he's Bruce Wayne), 007's upper lip still twitches with humour, not emotion, thank god, but he has to fall through the treacly vortex stirred by the director and screenwriters, hooked on the currently pseudo-Freudian, psychobabbling, whinging interpretations of action heroes, like men afraid of their own shadows.
JAMES BOND TAKING HIS MOTHER ON HOLIDAY IN THE HIGHLANDS
Detail of Morning in the Highlands: The Royal Family Ascending Lochnagar, by Carl Haag. Watercolour, 1853, in The Royal Collection
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