Bond is back! Well, he will be...

Picture: Twitter/007

We have known for some time that the next Bond film in the official canon will be the 25th, mostly because the last, Spectre, was the 24th, and also because Eon Productions had been cleverly trailing the hashtag #Bond25 ahead of today’s somewhat slick streamed “reveal” from Goldeneye, the Jamaican house where James Bond came to literary life at the typewriter of Ian Fleming.

In truth, today's event didn’t actually reveal all that much that wasn’t already known or strongly rumoured: Daniel Craig will return for the fifth and final time as 007, Ralph Fiennes will be back as M, Ben Whishaw will again play Q and Naomie Harris will return as Moneypenny. All solid bets there and little different to the days when Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewellyn and Lois Maxwell played, M, Q and Moneypenny against successive Bonds. Perhaps a little surprising, though understandably with no plot-revealing context to explain, is that Léa Seydoux will return as Dr Madeleine Swann, Bond’s love interest in his last outing.

Picture: YouTube

With the principal cast assembled with director Cary Joji Fukunaga at Goldeneye, little was being given away about the plot, beyond co-producer Barbara Broccoli saying that: "Bond is not on active service when we start the film, he is enjoying himself in Jamaica, [which] we consider [to be] Bond's spiritual home. We have built an extraordinary house for him, he starts his journey here. There is quite a ride in store for Mr Bond." Beyond that, and the fact filming would be done in Jamaica, Norway, Italy, London and Pinewood Studios, there was nothing more forthcoming. There wasn't even a reference to the rumoured title of "Shatterhand".

In the past, Bond productions have been signalled with a press event at Pinewood, but today's streamed event, fronted by Radio 1 DJ Clara Amfo, had a makeshift feel about it, which will not do much to settle Bond fans' anxiety about a delayed film and a script that has only recently had scribbler-du jour Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame added to the writing team. The only additional details we could glean is that Rami Malek, fresh from winning an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, will also appear, presumably as a baddie since he appeared on video during the reveal declaring that he "won't give Mr Bond an easy ride".

Picture: YouTube

Although the reveal, taking place today, April 25, was clearly a clever wheeze by the Bond PR team (“Bond 25, the 25th - geddit?”), the exercise was much needed. After director Danny Boyle walked away from the project, and Fukunaga was appointed some time later, producers Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson have had to mount some spin control as an information vacuum has developed. Bond films have, in recent years, been released in November ahead of the Christmas season, but with principle photography only just starting, it’s a safe bet that the pledge today of 25 appearing “early next year” will be closer to Easter 2020. All seemed calm today, but Broccoli and Wilson know that the stakes are high for a film that could have even been out before last Christmas, had Craig been tied down to committing to it sooner, and the directorial situation not become so messy under Boyle (with reported differences of opinion over plot direction including Bond being killed off).

Much has been made of the fact that it will be almost five years between Spectre and 25, with Daniel Craig passing his 50th birthday in that time. Looking lean and buff today during the reveal, his age shouldn’t be a issue for the new film, but given that Bond should, ideally, be played by an actor in his mid-30s, the idea of Craig bowing out with this film is probably the right one, shame as it would be, seeing as he has, against expectations, been an excellent 007.

Picture: YouTube

But if the weight of expectation is heavy on Craig’s shoulders, it’s nothing compared with that weighing on Fukunaga and now-veteran Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who are joined by Scott Z. Burns and Waller-Bridge to deliver the script. You don’t stretch the world’s longest running film franchise to 25 movies without raising the stakes of failure. By and large the Bond canon has been of a high quality (Octopussy not withstanding), and the introduction of a grittier approach with Craig has ensured that his four so far are right up there with the best of those by Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan. Connery, in particular, is still regarded as the benchmark: I recently rewatched Goldfinger and From Russia With Love and, despite being the second and third oldest, respectively, they still held up extremely well. But don’t discount Lazenby’s sole outing, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, or Dalton’s brace, all of which took the Bond character closer to Fleming’s literary ideal. Craig may be short(ish), blond and blue-eyed, but he has carried off Bond as a steelier individual than Brosnan’s exquisitely suited smoothie, perfect for an age when Matt Damon’s younger Jason Bourne started to show old Bond a few new tricks.

Overall, though, and despite the pre-production turbulence surrounding Bond 25, Broccoli and Wilson, know what they’re doing and have been doing it a long time. The appointment of Sam Mendes to direct Skyfall and Spectre was a masterstroke that paid off with two gripping, well executed, quintessential Bond films that carried a noirish air about them. Fukunaga has a lot to live up to, and the quality threshold surrounding him is exacting. He has the right cast ingredients, let's hope Wade and Purves’ script, with Waller-Bridge’s help, supports them, and Daniel Craig can leave Bond behind next year in a high. I, for one, can’t wait.

A Bowie biopic? Start cringing now

No sooner have I stopped reflecting on the beatific glow created by Francis Whately's wonderful David Bowie documentary, Finding Fame, on Saturday evening that I discover - belatedly, it seems - that there are ghouls abound planning a biopic about The Dame.

I have form on such things: rock star biopics, in particular, make me cringe. Even the supposedly good ones, like What’s Love Got To Do With It, La Bamba, The Doors or Control. The trouble with them, usually, is that they attempt to animate characters who are or were, by nature, animated already. Even Bowie himself once said "They never seem to get them right." So, did we really need a biopic about Queen, a band whose lead singer took flamboyance and excess to new extremes and which were pretty much widely known already? Frankly, I could have just watched a compilation of clips of Queen playing live, as that is what counted. However salacious an existence Freddy Mercury led, the biopic that got made turned it into something of a cartoon, albeit with a strong central performance by Rami Malik. We didn’t, however, need to see Mercury's life re-enacted when a documentary of the depth and quality of Whately's Bowie trilogy would have served the purpose far better.

Later this year we will get Rocketman, described as "an epic musical fantasy about the uncensored human story of Sir Elton John’s breakthrough years." Made by the same team responsible for the entertaining Eddie The Eagle, and starring Taron Egerton (who played Eddie Edwards) as Elton John, it too smacks of the superfluous. Any serious biographer or documentary maker could do a better job of recording John's life than any live cartoon about him. Which is what fills me with absolute dread about Stardust, the film announced last month that would focus on Bowie's first trip to America in 1971. It certainly won’t be about Bowie's music: Salon Pictures, who are making the film, said in a somewhat terse statement that: "The film was written as an ‘origins story’ about the beginning of David’s journey as he invented his Ziggy Stardust character, and focuses on the character study of the artist, as opposed to a hits driven ‘music’ biopic.” The statement added: "We would like to clarify that this film is not a biopic, it is a moment-in-time film at a turning point in David’s life, and is not reliant on Bowie’s music”. Salon also make the clarification that Stardust will use "...period music and songs that Bowie covered, but not his original tracks." In other words, 'we don’t have the rights to use Bowie's music'.

Duncan Jones, Bowie's film director son, poured ice cold water on the project last month, tweeting: "Pretty certain nobody has been granted music rights for ANY biopic... I would know." followed by "I'm not saying this movie is not happening. I honestly wouldn't know. I'm saying that as it stands, this movie won't have any of dads music in it, & I can't imagine that changing." "If you want to see a biopic without his music," he added in another tweet, "or the families [sic] blessing, that's up to the audience." Bowie's lifelong friend George Underwood (who, as a schoolboy, was the cause of the singer's permanently dilated pupil, leading to the myth that he had different coloured eyes) has also waded in, telling the NME that he was dreading the film: "They never seem to get those right. Although I did like the Freddie Mercury one [Bohemian Rhapsody], but they’re never accurate. All of the books about David are copies of things that just aren’t quite right then it gets worse and worse.” Francis Whately himself has called it correctly, telling the NME that biopics like Stardust will only emphasise the "wrong aspects" of Bowie's life and career. “What I’m glad to have been able to do is make three 90-minute films on David Bowie as a musician, the artist, not anything else. That’s what’s important."

Johnny Flynn, best known for TV's Vanity Fair and Les Miserables is slated to play Bowie in Stardust. As Malek demonstrated in Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, with the right voice coaching and prosthetics, Hollywood can turn you into anyone. But Bowie - just like Mercury - was distinctive throughout his career. It’s what made his career. He went from character to character, constantly reinventing himself, adopting new masks and costumes in the process. Ziggy Stardust was, after all, one of those characters, a vessel for Bowie to play out his imagination through, musically and theatrically, and one of the most powerful memes ever devised in popular art. Frankly, we don’t need an actor impersonating that, even if with the editorial intent of informing the audience. Safe to say I, for one, will be avoiding Stardust like the plague.