Tradecraft: Rob Cohen Spies Again

xXx director Rob Cohen is eyeing another high-octane, extreme sort of spy movie. Deadline reports that he'll follow up his I, Alex Cross reboot with Bullet Run. I couldn't begin to do justice to the high concept premise hatched by writer Andrew Hilton, so I'll defer to the trade blog's capsule summary: "The head of an elite private protection team and his former CIA agent wife infiltrate the closed borders of Iran to abduct a man who killed their daughter. The extraction goes awry and they force to rely on their world-class driving skills and a fleet of high-performance street cars to travel 200 miles through a hail of bullets to keep alive the man they really want dead." I'm not a fan of xXx, but I am a fan of high performance cars traveling 200mph through a hail of bullets in the Iranian desert. Therefore I'll reserve judgement.

The Spy Star of the Summer: Finn McMissile

Michael Caine may have starred in more spy movies than just about anyone over the years. His latest spy role is his biggest in decades—and one with a bit of a twist.  As previously discussed, in Pixar's Cars 2, he plays a spy car.  The conceit of Cars and its sequel is that anthropomorphic cars are the characters. I still haven't seen the original, but I don't believe there are people in this world.  So when thinking of possible new characters for a sequel that might sell lots and lots of toys, the notion of spy cars must have been an obvious one! Caine plays Finn McMissile of British Intelligence. Though the design probably owes as much to Sixties BMWs as the Aston Martin DB5, James Bond's famous car is clearly the inspiration for the character.  As seen in the second trailer, Finn has lots of tricks up his sleeve—everything you'd expect of a good gadget car. (Plus, his Beemer-like grill makes a great mustache!) Obviously, those gadgets feature prominently in the new Cars toy line. Disney has made a mint in merchandising off of the Cars brand, and the cynic in me suspects that the whole reason for a sequel was to sell more toys. But really, what better reason than to sell spy car toys? I would have absolutely loved this movie if it had come out during my childhood—and the toys.

I'm guessing that, like me, just about everyone reading this blog grew up with one version or another of the Corgi James Bond Aston Martin. (My own model from the late 80s or early 90s was probably the most boring; it wasn't gold like the original and it didn't have the tire slashers like the slightly later version or the newest one, and the Bond figure and the guy who got ejected were both just hunks of brown plastic, not painted... but I absolutely loved it nonetheless! Still do, in fact.) Since the current Bond movies aren't really targeted at kids and the Aston Martin in the last one didn't feature any gadgets, it's only right that Disney provide this generation with a cool spy gadget car toy. But they're not offering just one. Instead, there are many, many iterations of mini Finn McMissiles to be had, in different scales and with different functions. The Secret Spy Attack Finn McMissile is a very traditional spy gadget car, sort of like the AC Gilbert Goldfinger Aston, but with a big plus: not only do missile launchers pop out when you push the buttons, but it talks in Michael Caine's voice!



This one is crazy. They call it the Zero Gravity Finn McMissile, and it's a remote control car that drives not only on the floor... but on the walls! That's just what every parent ever has wished for, right? A remote control car that their kids can drive on the walls. And it seems to make a horrible noise, too... even better for aggravating mom! You've gotta check it out:



Then there are some smaller ones, like the "Submariner" version (clearly influenced by another Corgi classic, the Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me) and the "Lights and Sound" version, which is pretty self-explanatory. I just love that spy cars will be the must-have toy again, right up through Christmas! But maybe coolest of all is this life-size remote control version. No, that one's not for sale, unfortunately. But it's doing a promotional tour of the country, so it's possible you might be able to see it in person. (Though you might feel kind of weird about that if you don't have kids.) Check out the pictures on the Disney fansite Stitch Kingdom. Looking at ones like this one, from the rear, you get a much better sense of the design than you do from the trailers. I love how they just added fins to a very recognizable DB5 back end, right down to the Bond-inspired license plate!

There's also a YouTube video here of the life-size touring cars, including Finn.

BMW Concept Car Debuts in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

The next Mission: Impossible movie, directed by The Incredibles' Brad Bird and produced by J.J. Abrams, already boasts a pretty impressive cast including Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Josh Holloway, Michael Nyqvist, Lea Seydoux, Anil Kapoor and of course Tom Cruise.  Now the BMW Blog reveals another intriguing new star in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol: the BMW Vision EfficientDynamics hybrid concept car.  BMW describes the exotic looking car as a "near-production-ready vehicle ... combining the performance of a BMW M model with the fuel consumption and emissions of a modern small car."  While you'd think that a jacknife doored space car that's not even on the roads yet (and may well never be) would be a tad inconspicuous as a spy car, when the car in question is that cool looking, I'm sure not going to complain!  (And we're not even sure it will be Ethan Hunt driving this thing.)  There's precedent for it, anyway: when Casino Royale was made in 2006, the Aston Martin DBS wasn't on the market yet, but that didn't stop Her Majesty's Secret Service from getting their hands on one.  The blog reports that the prototype car has been spotted on the film's set in Vancouver (and has the picture to prove it) and was also seen in Abu Dhabi around the time the production was filming there late last year.  Perhaps self-confessed gearhead Tom Cruise has a particular agenda to promote hybrid sports cars in his film; Knight and Day featured a memorable chase sequence involving Smart Roadsters (and bulls).

The BMW Blog also reports that the fourth Mission: Impossible film will also feature some of the company's latest 6-series models.

Read more about the BMW Vision EfficientDynamic concept car here, and watch a nifty 3D animation of it.

Pixar Does Spy Cars

Hm.  The first Cars was one of the few Pixar movies I never saw.  The trailers and the basic concept just didn't really grab me.  But the trailer for the sequel certainly does, for obvious reasons!  Pixar has decided to introduce spy cars into the mix.  Michael Caine plays Finn McMissile, a superspy car who looks kind of like James Bond's classic Aston Martin DB5.  (None of the cars of Cars seem to actually be based on real makes or models, though.) This could be fun, and will definitely spawn some very cool toys.  (After all, spy cars are the coolest toy cars!) Dark Horizons reports that Jason Isaacs and Emily Mortimer also join in on the fun as spy jet Siddeley and spy-in-training Holley Shiftwell, respectively. The animation definitely (and unsurprisingly) looks better than that in the upcoming Sean Connery CGI movie, which also features an animated spy car.  Pixar regular Randy Newman scored the first Cars, but from the look of this one, I really hope they tap their other go-to guy, Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles, Alias, Mission: Impossible III), to score the sequel!  Spies (and presumably their cars) are certainly in his wheelhouse...

Judging A Book By Its Cover/Book Review: DK’s New Bond Set

The holidays are just around the corner (if you can believe it), and while we may not have a new James Bond movie to look forward to this year, that still means some new merchandising from DK. The publisher has made the most of its Bond license, publishing not only specific movie tie-ins like Bond On Set: Filming Quantum of Solace (review here) and Bond On Set: Filming Casino Royale, but also staggering those with a new James Bond Encyclopedia (review here), which has already been revised once, and frequent updates of their trusty warhorse James Bond: The Secret World of 007 (review here), which is certainly the best first book on 007 for young Bond fans today. (It also appeals to those of us older fans who never matured much beyond 11 and still get a kick out of cutaway drawings of gadget-stocked vehicles). Their latest offering is physically (if not content-wise) the most ambitious yet: a set of four matching hardcover volumes, each exploring a different aspect of 007's mystique: Bond Cars and Vehicles, Bond Girls, Bond Villains and The Book of Bond, the latter (not to be confused with Kingsley Amis’ must-have tome of the same name) focusing on the famous secret agent himself. Bond Girls and Bond Villains both hit bookstores last week.

Those familiar with the DK brand are probably aware that the publisher’s hallmark is presentation, and their books focus a lot more on visuals than on content. They can sometimes be frustratingly sparse on information (excepting the aforementioned Encyclopedia, at least) but generally stunning in design. This new quartet is true to form, yet somehow more so in both respects. The content is thinner than ever, yet the presentation yields by far the nicest looking Bond volumes in some time. Being, admittedly, somewhat superficial myself–and a very tactile bibliophile–I’ve been known from time to time to flout the storied axiom and judge books by their covers. To me, not only what it looks like, but how a book feels and even smells often provides as much pleasure as actually reading it. (Clearly, I will never abandon my tangible library even as literature at large becomes reduced to ephemeral bytes on a Kindle or iPad.) Yet I do generally keep these physical book reviews separate from the ones in which I evaluate books' contents. With DK that’s almost impossible. The presentation is the point. How the page looks is at least as important and (clearly in this case) often even more important than the words that are printed on it. Therefore, I will combine my traditional book review with my “Judging A Book By Its Cover” review, and address both aspects at once.

Starting, appropriately, on the outside, these are certainly eye-catching books. They’ll look good faced out together on endcaps at bookstores this season (wherever brick and mortar bookstores still survive, that is) and they’ll look great with their spines lined up next to each other on your shelf. The spines (perfectly flat, not subtly curved) are especially well thought out, with each volume sporting a different suit from a deck of cards at the bottom: Cars gets a club, Girls a heart (naturally), Villains a spade (equally naturally) and The Book of Bond a diamond. The title treatments are uniform, with the word “Bond” standing out in large white caps on each spine. Besides the “Bond” and the heart or club, these spines will stand out because they’re shiny. Not shiny like a grade school library book, like your regular DK hardcover when stripped of its dust jacket, but shiny in a very unique way. The books are cloth-bound, like all the best hardcovers, but the cloth is silky. If you run your hand over the cover, you’ll feel the fine grain of the threads coating the boards. If you rub the books together while pulling one from the shelf, you’ll hear it. (There’s a new sense for my physical book reviews to address!) Since they’re all silver or gold colored to begin with (with black spines), the effect is nothing short of shimmery. It’s very cool. (Enlarge the photo of the spines above for a better idea of the texture I'm describing.) The squarebound corners are hard edges, and the boards themselves are thick. It gives the book weight (which I always like in a hardcover) and makes it feel durable. It also adds overall thickness, which benefits volumes this slight. (Each one clocks in at around 130-150 pages, but it’s not so much the pages as what’s on them that qualifies as slight.)

Opening the very attractive cover and turning past the equally attractive solid colored endpapers (red for Cars, tan for Girls, purple for Villans and blue for Bond) to said pages inside, I’m sorry to report that the seasoned Bond fan will learn nothing new from any of these books. I suppose I shouldn’t have been expecting that, but my hopes were particularly high for Bond Cars and Vehicles since, surprisingly, there has never before been a book devoted specifically to that potentially rich subject. Dave Worrall managed to devote an entire, fantastic volume to just one particularly famous Bond car (and another to all of them, but only in miniature form!), but no one has yet written about all the marvelous Bond cars together. I was hoping this would be it. Sadly, it’s not. You will learn nothing new about your favorite Aston Martin or Lotus, and in fact you won’t even see them all covered. (GoldenEye’s BMW Z3 is a shocking omission in a book called Bond Cars and Vehicles!) You won’t even get any of DK’s famous cross-sections. (I had imagined the book would be mostly comprised of those!) Instead, you get lots of photographs, accompanied by rudimentary text (“A slap with his machine pistol–and boom!–one dead henchman and another Bond car totaled. Would Q regret fitting that burglar protection system in Bond’s Lotus?”). They are, however, very pretty photos, and I must admit I’ve bought other books and magazines before simply for pretty photographs of Aston Martins. And while most of them looked familiar, a few pictures were even new to me. Where else can you see a lovely two-page spread of Mr. Big’s pimped-out ‘71 Cadillac Fleetwood 60 Special by Dunham, parked in front of Harlem’s Fillet of Soul restaurant? (Of course, the car frustratingly isn’t identified, but it’s still a very nice picture. Once again: presentation without information.) The all-photo format keeps this volume of a piece with its companions, but I sincerely hope that DK will one day revisit this subject with more of the childlike glee usually on display in their books, focusing on cool cutaways and schematics–and the makes and models of every vehicle pictured.

I’m afraid The Book of Bond is even less essential on its own. The text (credited to Alistair Dougall) is kind of odd: it’s written like a children’s book (“A shock was waiting for Bond before he left for Nassau to investigate Strangways’ fate. M announced that instead of the Beretta Bond had used for ten years, he would be taking another gun, a Walther PPK.”), like one of those old Bond annuals from the Sixties, or the A View To A Kill storybook, but it’s not a narrative. From a narrative standpoint, it glosses over crucial turning points, like the murder of Tracy. The chapter on OHMSS concludes its recap with, “M, Q and Miss Moneypenny wished the happy couple good luck and Mr. and Mrs. James Bond truly believed that they had all the time in the world.” Accompanying that Disney ending is a full-page picture of the smiling bride and groom. There’s no mention of what happens next, just vague foreshadowing. Yet the omission isn’t to spare younger readers the shock. No, that comes bluntly on the next page with, “Bond avenges Tracy’s murder by drowning Blofeld in a pool of mud in a Cairo clinic.” What murder? If you don’t know, you’ll be confused, and if you do then there’s really no reason for you to read this recap. The loose narrative depends on the reader having a knowledge of what happens in the movies. It’s kind of like the narrative you get on the back of trading cards. This sort of narrative might have had a place back in the Sixties and Seventies before home video, but now every kid who likes the movies enough to own this sort of book probably has them all on DVD and can watch for himself.

However, as with the first title, it’s rather unfair to judge this sort of book by its text. These aren’t text-oriented books; they’re lavish, glossy picture books with brief (and apparently unnecessary) text accompaniment. The reliable DK layout (credited to Dan Bunyan on the first two volumes) outshines the lack of any substantial prose. This superficial format works alright on The Book of Bond (showcasing all six official Bond actors in multiple two-page spreads), but is best served in the final two volumes of the quartet, Bond Girls and Bond Villains.

As with Bond Cars and Vehicles, there has never before (to my recollection, anyway) been a book focusing exclusively on 007's adversaries, which is kind of weird. While I might enjoy a more thorough dossier on these bad guys and the actors who played them than “The confrontation with SPECTRE’s mastermind proves to be the most volcanic of Bond’s career,” I wasn’t expecting it after reading the first two books in the series. Therefore, I was prepared for what we get, and what we get isn’t half bad. It’s pretty cool to flip through a nicely laid-out scrapbook of Bond’s myriad foes–masterminds and henchmen, men and women alike–from over the years. And it’s equally enjoyable to encounter a familiar shot of Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld stroking his cat or Largo giving orders to his frogmen (this one gets a nice double page spread) or a more unexpected full-page portrait of Necros dressed as a milkman and pointing his pistol. Bond Villains is, like its companions, a picture book, but it’s a picture book on a subject for which we haven’t had one before.

The same can’t be said of Bond Girls, as 007's women have already been the subject of The James Bond Girls by Graham Rye (mostly pictures, like this one), The Bond Women: 007 Style by Tim Greaves (all text, and very informative text at that, making up for what it lacks in its picture-free presentation) and Bond Girls Are Forever by Maryam D’Abo and John Cork, which offered the best of both worlds, combining the pretty pictures of the former book with informative text of the latter in a beautiful oversize volume. But DK’s book on the subject still manages to bring its own spin to the material. Of all the aspects of the James Bond movies, the Bond Girls are probably the most suited to this sort of photo book. The layout is once more superb, and serves these beautiful actresses to their fullest advantage. Four whole pages are devoted to Ursula Andress in her bikini, and why shouldn’t they be? They’re all fantastic images. And just check out that title spread of Daniella Bianchi:

Every page of this book is as gorgeous as the women on it. Despite traveling in some well-tread tracks, DK’s Bond Girls holds its own. It’s got a wider range of pictures than Rye’s original book on the subject, which stuck mostly with the most publicized stills from each film. (Which was appropriate for its time.) It lacks any information about the actresses themselves, but in that respect makes a nice companion volume to Greaves’ book, which lacks images. It couldn’t begin to compete with Bond Girls Are Forever, which remains the definitive book on the subject, but what this one’s got that that one doesn’t is portability. I know Bond fans who lug around Cork and D’Abo’s book to conventions collecting actresses’ signatures in it, which I thought was a great idea. But this new book is better for that purpose. (Bond Villains would be great for the same thing.) All of these books are like miniature coffee table books, and sometimes a more manageable size is preferable. It’s nice to have a bunch of photos of Bond cars or Bond Girls all bound together in such a pretty package.

No seasoned Bond fan can expect to learn anything new from this quartet of books. But that doesn’t mean they won’t derive pleasure from them. For presentation alone (which is, I think it’s fair to say, their primary raison d’etre), most fans will feel the need to own these books. And nearing the holiday season, they’ll make ideal gifts for Bond fans of any stripe. The casual fan and the die-hard alike can appreciate sumptuous picture books in lavish binding. (Not to mention a great autograph book to carry around easily to conventions and premieres!)

James Bond's Lotus Esprit Reborn

Lotus unveiled five new models as concept cars this week at the Paris Auto Show, among them a new version of the classic Esprit.  The Esprit was made famous in 1977 when James Bond (Roger Moore) drove it in The Spy Who Loved Me–and it memorably transformed into a submarine.  (This was not a standard factory option on the car.)  This was the beginning of a long film career for the striking supercar.  007 drove two turbo versions in For Your Eyes Only (though one of them didn't fare so well).  As best I can recall, the car's last major role came in 1990's Pretty Woman, when Richard Gere borrowed Jason Alexander's and Julia Roberts told him that it cornered like it was on rails, much to Gere's bewilderment.  The classic model (which had had its corners smoothed, but overall changed its design very little since its Bond debut) was discontinued in 2004.  But now it is set to return in the 2013 model year!

The new Lotus Esprit, as you can see, does not retain the traditional wedge design of James Bond's car, but it does tip its hat to the look of the classic model, especially from the rear view.  The 2013 Esprit, again a mid-engine car, is expected to carry a price tag around $173,000, and will also be available as a hybrid(!).  While I do love his current affiliation with Aston Martin, I really wouldn't mind seeing 007 back in a Lotus at some point in the future.  (This new Esprit actually looks more suited to submersible conversion than the old one.)  And with this aggressive model launch, there are a lot of options for Her Majesty's Secret Service to choose from!

Lotus also unveiled a new version of the Elan, which shares an illustrious spy history with the Esprit.  Most famously, Emma Peel drove a white Lotus Elan on The Avengers.  More recently (and less illustriously), James Bond Jr. drove a car based on the 90s incarnation of the Elan on the eponymous cartoon show. 

View more pictures of the new Lotus fleet at Autoweek.

Connery Back In A DB5 In New Film

Sir Sean Connery is back behind the wheel of a familiar Silverbirch Aston Martin DB5 in his new film... or rather, a videogame-ish animated approximation of the actor is, in a scene from the computer animated Scottish film Sir Billi, for which Sir Sean emerged from retirement to lend his voice (and likeness).  /Film points the way to a YouTube video of a sizzle reel (not an actual trailer) for the film, which is still a work in progress.  They also have a commentary that's worth reading.  It's certainly an oddball project.  Despite whatever faults Sir Billi may have, it's notable to Bond fans for reuniting three iconic elements of Goldfinger: Connery, an Aston Martin and Shirley Bassey, who provides the theme song, as previously reported.)