TKID4 here, back from an extended vacation exploring the finest spider holes Anbar province has to offer, thanks to a generous grant from the Kiegals Institute for Oriental Studies.
There's a new bond in town. James Bond, that is. Octagenerian Pierce Bro'ham has been replaced by a blond haired, blue eyed dashing metrosexual named Daniel something in the role of the world's most famous and syphillitic adled spy. The studios appear to be moving the Bond character towards a softer, more gentle world, where the secret agent is more adept at selecting velvet curtains than tunneling under iron ones. According to industry insiders, the former Bond Brosnan is upset at the manner in which studio execs notified him he was out. The Irish lothario whose four Bond film portrayals put $1.5 billion worth of Goldfinger's gold bullion into the pockets of Hollywood underwriters was apparently canned over the course of one brief phone call. Brosnan reflected on the call from his yacht positioned off the coast of Gibraltar:
"I was polishing my shoes, which are themselves spy shoe phones, and when the L.A. suits rang me, telling me I was finished, out, fired...that sort of business, I told them to 'toss off' and I hung up and went back to polishing. Later that evening I went out for a cafe' and was unexpectedly accused of sporting blackface, as the polish from my shoe phones had masked my complexion. Needless to say, I covered my faux-pas by quipping that I had just come from a nighttime raid of the fortress of Dr. Goldfeld, which was partially true. It was more of a nighttime raid of my pantry for a box of goldfish."
While Brosnan was planning on taking the Bond character to an edgier, darker place, screenwriters plan on placing the new modern Bond in quirky scenarios where the emotional side of the middle aged single male will be explored. Rumors abound of a Bond who enters therapy after being slowly lowered by a rope into a shark tank one too many times. And when 007 contracts Mata Hari's revenge afer a particularly dicey covert-op in Guatemala, he is comforted by Raoul, a London florist who knows what it's like to have been loved, but to never have loved another.
