Should under 20s be banned from watching classic Bond?
petelangers
ChinaPosts: 23MI6 Agent
So today I'm watching The Spy Who Loved Me and my teenage son walks in.
"What's this?" he enquires.
"Only one of the best Bond films ever" I scoff back, amazed at his sheer ignorance! "Why don't you sit in on it for a while?"
"Sure" he replies, hypnotized by the shapely silhouettes in the opening credits that weren't really meant for modern bluray and HD.
I'm never watching bond with him again!
When I watch a classic bond I do so with the belief that almost anything is possible and I am willing to overlook some obvious deficiencies to escape into the film. Not a chance...
Look at their clothes!
)
Gunshots don't sound like that where are these sound effects from?
Ha, he punches him and listen to the drum sound effect!
What's this supposed to be a house in the ocean? You can see that's a model! X-(
Finally Jaws comes into shot, the most fearsome henchman of the lot. This will hook him for sure. He'll shut up now. Jaws bites through the chain at the pyramids and the teenager bursts into laughter. At this point I throw him out of the room in disgust.
Has anyone had a similar experience to this? I don't really want to show him reboot bond as it's not bond in my opinion but maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and accept that, just as Roger Moore is my Bond, Craig will be his...
"What's this?" he enquires.
"Only one of the best Bond films ever" I scoff back, amazed at his sheer ignorance! "Why don't you sit in on it for a while?"
"Sure" he replies, hypnotized by the shapely silhouettes in the opening credits that weren't really meant for modern bluray and HD.
I'm never watching bond with him again!
When I watch a classic bond I do so with the belief that almost anything is possible and I am willing to overlook some obvious deficiencies to escape into the film. Not a chance...
Look at their clothes!
)Gunshots don't sound like that where are these sound effects from?
Ha, he punches him and listen to the drum sound effect!
What's this supposed to be a house in the ocean? You can see that's a model! X-(
Finally Jaws comes into shot, the most fearsome henchman of the lot. This will hook him for sure. He'll shut up now. Jaws bites through the chain at the pyramids and the teenager bursts into laughter. At this point I throw him out of the room in disgust.
Has anyone had a similar experience to this? I don't really want to show him reboot bond as it's not bond in my opinion but maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and accept that, just as Roger Moore is my Bond, Craig will be his...
Comments
I think when we are very young and still forming a sense of reality, whatever the current standard of popular culture is perceived as "real", and older evolutionary forms look artificial, so that all we can see is the artifice which distracts and we cannot buy into the story.
I was lucky when I was a lad, because my mother always encouraged me to watch old films when they were on television, and we had a very great television presenter in Toronto in the 1970s called Elwy Yost, who in his introductions would do much to set the context and make the history of a films production sound fascinating many decades after the fact.
I specifically remember watching the Maltese Falcon for the very first time on Yost's show, and appreciating Bogie was the epitomy of cool but didn't Lorre steal the film! It didn't look oldfashioned at all, but I did know to watch for the camera angles and contrasts of light and dark.
So, Pete, maybe you need to talk more with your son about film history in general, and how the magic is made, and how that didnt happen overnight it evolved over a century? Theres a lot of modern filmmaking that evolved out of the innovations in those early Bondfilms.
I reckon my strategy would be to introduced a child to the likes of TSWLM and MR at around 9 or 10, and then slowly introduce the more serious and mature Bond films over the next few years. That was pretty much how my Bond film journey unfolded and it was great.