The Italian movie star Monica Bellucci has described her feelings upon becoming history’s oldest Bond “girl” at 50 in the movie Spectre. She had thought director Sam Mendes was auditioning her for the grumpy old role of spy chief M. But no. She says: “James Bond is going to have a story with a mature woman. The concept is revolutionary.” Only in the Bond franchise would the idea of 007 being (briefly) with a woman his own age be considered “revolutionary”.
People often ask how James Bond can be made more politically appropriate or up-to-the-minute. Only recently, the commentariat were wondering if Idris Elba could be Bond. Nice idea. But if that idea isn’t a goer yet ... well, what is wrong with having a female villain? What about letting Bellucci (or Julianne Moore, or Meryl Streep, or Celia Imrie, or Viola Davis) have a crack at the only really decent role in any Bond film – the villain?
It’s never really been tried. There was Lotte Lenya’s minor shoe-stabber Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love, and a sort of ambiguous lesser role for Sophie Marceau in The World Is Not Enough. But the idea of Bond being seriously tested or threatened by a powerful woman – who might have one or two good lines? Might even win some preliminary skirmishes? That would be revolutionary.
Please. Stop the wobble
A while ago there was a campaign to make tap water routinely available in restaurants, as opposed to pricey “still” brands. I know what new campaign I want: the reintroduction of matchbooks (discontinued since the public smoking ban) so that we’ve got an emergency wedge when the table wobbles.
This is now an obsession of mine. When there’s an issue with table-wobble, I can’t ignore it. I can’t let it go. People with me in cafes or restaurants groan with exasperation when, with grim-faced determination, I climb under the table with a napkin, a fork, a ripped wodge of pages from a newspaper – anything, desperate to stop the wobbling. And it never, ever works. Even after ripping the tablecloth from the unoccupied table next to me to jam under the table leg, and resurfacing sweaty and red-faced … the table still wobbles. Sometimes the waiter will show up with a tolerant, bemused smile at my eccentricity. He will produce some sort of wooden wedge, which frankly should have been applied before the establishment opened in a mandatory wobble-inspection. That’s all very well. But a generous supply of matchbooks on each table could get the job done.
Zee-town: so random!
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is building his own company town near San Francisco, nicknamed “Zee-town”, so that his 10,000 employees can be housed close at hand. It will be designed by the famous architect Frank Gehry, and will have supermarkets, hotels and apartment blocks.
Facebook’s director of property, John Tenanes, says that there will be public spaces where “random things can happen like in any other city”. Whoa! Random things. JG Ballard should be living at this hour: this writer, who so persuasively imagined how human chaos resurfaces in placidly rational architectural perfection, is the only person fully qualified to imagine what kind of “random” things could happen in Zee-town.
Still, it’s more exciting than other company towns you can imagine based on social media. I like to think of the Friends Reunited town – deserted, with tumbleweed blowing through it, dominated by the ruins of one gigantic school whose alumni were forced to live close at hand, encouraged to develop neurotically close links with each other until mass dysfunction caused them to set fire to the place.
