There's nothing much we can add to comment on all this horror, misery and rampant criminality......except to pray for it to end one day......
But since we started this blog to celebrate our love of films and books.....we'll stick to our mission and turn back to movies......though the news here is also sad.....
As a lifelong Bond fanboy, this hurts badly, reminding us that while James Bond may stand as an ageless cultural icon, the flesh and blood actors who brought him to life are mortal.....
Sir Roger, we admit, was never our favorite Bond......for us, Sir Sean was the ultimate embodiment of the character......but for seven films over a period of twelve years, Moore became Bond for an entire generation of moviegoers....though they varied wildly in quality, we wouldn't have dared miss any of these movies. They weren't Connery Bonds, but they were always damned fun to watch....you could tell Roger had a good time in them....and so did we..
Wisely, he made no attempt to imitate or duplicate Connery's sardonic brutality.....he simply channeled Bond through the one-cocked-eyebrow, cheeky, oh-so-British persona he'd honed and burnished through years of playing 'The Saint' on television. We know it didn't sit well with the Connery Faithful.....but audiences embraced his good humor, his willingness to let them in on the absurdity of it all and besides, visually he perfectly looked the part, the tuxedo'd movie-poster Bond come to life.......better actors may have played Bond (as Moore readily agreed), but nobody posed as Bond better than Roger.
What we did love about him.......from the start, he well understood his place in the cinema universe (as an impossibly handsome, somewhat talented Brit smoothie) and he cheerfully surfed the waves of movie and TV stardom, never failing to appreciate his astounding good fortune and enjoying every minute of it. Nobody could effectively ridicule Moore better than Moore.....his own cheerful self-depreciation became legendary......only Bob Hope topped him when it came to making enthusiastic fun of himself..
And yet, we find him a tad under-appreciated......whenever called upon, he could step up his game and adapt to any seismic shifts in the Bond films......after the wobbly, slapdash cheesiness of "Live And Let Die" and "Man With The Golden Gun", the films returned to spectacle-laden, epic Bond-making with "The Spy Who Loved Me" and Moore subtly toughened up his portrayal to go along with them. (You see the best example of this in "For Your Eyes Only", which briefly returned Bond to more gritty, violent Ian Fleming-type adventuring after the sci-fi lunacy of "Moonraker.")
We'll always fondly remember one of Sir Roger's early Bond moments......as Yaphet Kotto snarls to his minions "Take this honky out and waste him!", Moore raises one amused, quizzical eyebrow asking in fluent deadpan, "Waste...... is that a good thing?"
So we bid a sad farewell to Sir Roger Moore.....a true Knight of the realm who entertained the entire world throughout his lifetime.....and then later devoted his life to make the world a better place, representing UNICEF. We'll miss him.
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