When should they have stopped making Bond films?

Disagree whole heartly with this assessment. I thought it made the first movie better by enhancing the depth of the first one. When I was done watching it I was left with even more curiosity of the first flick. Not too mention the 2nd one might be the most beautifully shot film ever, it was an absolute eyegasm.

But I guess you can tell I'd have beef with that by my avatar lol

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Also. They should stop Bond now, before the next one. Looks full wokie. Bond will not do well under politically correct overlords.

I actually felt it made the first one shallower, if I consider it cannon, which I don't. But then, I've seen the first one probably 30 times. Who knows, maybe more.

Unless of course, you like "wokie", as millions of us do.

I love wookies. Haters gonna hate.

There are also millions who don't. If Bond flips from "school boy fantasy" to "after school special," this could be a turn-off. Blockbusters need broad audiences. This is a delicate matter, given that Bond is a sexual dinosaur and borderline sociopath.

I also want Bond to be the flawed character that he is. I don't understand why so many people seem to prefer protagonists that are flawless goody two shoes nowadays. Plus I think it's fiction writing 101 pretty much, that a flawless protagonist is not interesting.

That could be either Connery or Moore.

yep, and I loved how it didn't confirm or deny on whether Deckard was a replicant or not. For me he isn't (and I know I'm in the minority on this, even Ridley Scott said in an interview he was), and both movies give me permission to keep that interpretation.

Back to Bond though, other franchises are not anchored to the 60s cold war the way Bond is, they are free to flex and adapt, and completely change protagonist if they want.

I agree that stopping at Thunderball would also have been a sensible cutoff point, and then keeping the remaining books set in the time they were written, and not doing any more after that - but what would my childhood have been without Roger Moore's bond? I still remember xmas day 1983, Moonraker on the TV - it didn't get better than that!

The real problem is when they don't do anything interesting with his flaws, disregard them altogether, or (worst-case scenario) treat them as virtues, which is...most of the time. The reason Casino Royale worked so well is that it actually does engage with Bond's flaws - if anything, the fact that it's an origin story of sorts makes him even more flawed than usual. As a result, there is appreciation to be had with seeing him undergo the kind of character arc he rarely gets to have in his other films, but if you try to actually map an arc onto a Bond film then most of them don't measure up and end up being fundamentally hollow as a result.

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Well, the reason we love the HULK is that he gets to get mad and break stuff. His flaws (he's a man with refined taste, considerable wealth, always has the right thing to say, and has an actual license to kill) are still flaws that we love, which draw us to him. He's bad, but he's cool.

If Bond is to be fun, the we a bound to revel in his vices as virtues. It is fantasy, after all. And Bond movies are bloody ridiculous affairs.

I like that too, but that is a different type of Bond. One Bond is a deadly Bugs Bunny (Roger Moore plays Bugs to Donald Pleasence's Yosimite Sam). The other Bond is a gritty broken protagonist, tilting towards anti-hero. And even when Bond is gritty and flawed we still want to see him get laid, wise crack, drink liberally, gamble millions on a whim, and look damned good in a tuxedo, as he is still a surrogate for the audience's masculine aspirations and we want to have fun.

Imagine a James Bond with PTSD who murders his neighbor like Jason Bateman in American Psycho, who wets the bed with nightmares, who cries uncontrollably when he gets a psych eval, who has erectile dysfunction and can't perform in the sack, who screams at women who spurn him at the casino. This would be the perfection of putting his flaws into full relief, but it would also be no fun.

At his lightest, Bond is Bugs Bunny. At his heaviest, he has a sheen of grit, but he doesn't get so dirty that we still don't want to "be" him.

A Bond in stasis is a perfectly acceptable thing, it just puts a cap on how good any one Bond film can be. It also gives it a moderately high floor, though, when in moderately competent hands.

That's true I see your point there. I guess I would still rather have a flawed Bond, even if the flaws were disregarded or treated as virtues, because I still thought that would be more interesting than a flawless character still. But I see the point that the flaws are worth exploring.

I recently watched the 1967 Casino Royale and in that one Bond seems afraid of sex for example, so maybe the woke crowd is looking for a Bond along those lines.

Yes, that's what we're looking for, you nailed it.

Well is the woke crowd perhaps being double standard-ish about having a problem with Bond's flaws? I feel that if the gender was flipped and Bond was a female spy/assassin, who was promiscuous with men, then the woke crowd would consider the character progressive. But because it's a man, it's considered regressive. Is that a double standard?

Lashana Lynch is confirmed as the new 007, right?

According to this article, Barbara Broccoli says Bond will not be a woman after Craig:

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainme...2%20she%20said.

It's a good question. For one thing, I think "the woke crowd", and yes we know that's not used as a compliment, is not one opinion, a hive-mind, a single voice. The more thoughtful among us realize that we are in a time of transition where we're figuring all these things out. It's the first time, really, that the game has actually been kinda open to everyone and so everyone is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, or rather what makes actual sense. A lot of people are hyper-charged and angry and kinda wanna constantly attack the white male majority in culture, but people who are truly "woke" (sigh) know that that is not the way. But the path is what it is. Will there be double-standards along the way? I'm sure. Will the old way take an absolute beating to many's dismay. You betcha. But it ain't like everyone else hasn't already been enduring that. And we will get to common sense eventually. We're just living through the growing pains right now.
To specifically answer your question about Bond, in the context of this, I think a "female spy/assassin" doesn't have to be written the way a male one would be. We'll be making sense when women writers are prominent in mainstream film and women are actually written the way women think and feel and act instead of the way men either fantasize/want them to or, in the case of best-intentions, think they do. Which is how it has always been. The overwhelming majority of on-screen women in film history have been written by and directed by men. So it's possible we've almost never seen how a woman would be genuinely portrayed as a spy/assassin or any other character. I mean, chaste/promiscuous, for example, is a false dichotomy about women invented and perpetuated by men. Maybe as we see women characters actually written and shepherded by, ya know, actual women, we as a society will learn to think differently about women IRL. I mean, that's why it's so important to have this period of growing pains in popular culture, because it is through popular culture that we learn to think and re-think how we feel about damn near everything.

Probably agree with this, I don't think we would have miseed much since the end of the Moore era, with the exception of Goldeneye.

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Oh okay, well there are women writers who write male characters, and if women writers do that, then is it so bad if male writers write female characters? I feel that both female and male writers have written the opposite gender, and they should keep on doing so, unless that really is a problem?

Also when you say chaste/promiscuous is a false dichotomy in women was invented by men, chase and promiscuous are the opposite of each other, so which one is the false one, or how can they both be false, if they are both opposite, if that makes sense?