Tom Hardy rumored to be the next Bond… Yeah I could see that.

In contrast with my usual stance, I’d also welcome a revisit of older Bonds. “Thunderball”, “You Only Live Twice”, etc., set in their original period. “The Man from UNCLE” showed that retro spy movies can work if you care enough about the material…

Call it escapism, but I’d rather watch a fresh take on the classics than modern-day Bond these days. It would also free writers from trying to fit a Cold War hero into a 21st century setting, which let’s face it has become more and more forced with the latest iterations.

This connects to something I was thinking about yesterday, about my own writing. I think, and I touched a bit on that in my guest post for Susan, that old-school adventure should make a come back. Well written pulp stories that are not comedies, yet know what they are and don’t take themselves too seriously.

I’d like to see a comeback of serious adventure stuff, and when I say serious, I don’t mean the movie itself, I mean to take the project seriously and with respect. Respect the story, and respect your audience. Don’t make a fifth Indiana Jones, make a “Tales of the Gold Monkey” movie! Or do something new, something engaging, and fun, like “Romancing the Stone” was… Make Bond pulpy again. Set it back in the 60s, and run with it.

A great example of a movie that does exactly that is “Memoirs of an International Assassin”. It takes the basic concept of “Romancing the Stone” with a clever twist, and delivers brilliantly on everything it sets to be: there’s action, adventure, a dash of espionage, and it’s tremendously funny at times, without being camp.

“Memoirs…” plays with its tropes in a very confident way, because it knows what it is, and perhaps more importantly, what it is not.

I think the world is starved for light-hearted action-adventure. Perhaps it’s time we swing the pendulum away from gritty realism, and get back to the fundamentals:

Entertainment.