The ONLY James Bond: Sir Sean Connery dies at 90
- Thread starter DJCandle
- Start date
Talked to pops yesterday morning. He said one of his fave memories of Connery's work is seeing one of his movies on one of his first dates in the '60s. His date enjoyed the movie too.
Pops didn't care much for Pierce Brosnan in the role. Said he appreciates the physicality that Daniel Craig has brought to the role and franchise. Makes for more exciting films (fight scenes, etc).
Pops didn't care much for Pierce Brosnan in the role. Said he appreciates the physicality that Daniel Craig has brought to the role and franchise. Makes for more exciting films (fight scenes, etc).
I can appreciate Craig and Brosnan far more than Moore & Dalton. Idk why but those guys never grabbed my attention like that.
League of extraordinary gentlemen deserved a sequel
One of my dad's funniest running commentaries (movies & tv) is his take on if the action star is believable or not. Or if they're too old, or small in stature to be a true tough guy. He's always got something to say about Tom Cruise movies, haha. "Isn't he 5'7" and in his late-50s now?"
My feedback to him over the years ... "It's a movie ... suspend your disbelief. Shit!"
Agreed. I need to go back and rewatch it. Enjoyed it back in the day.
Good point about reboots and remakes. The guys on The Watch podcast have said over the years the reasoning behind the countless reboots & unwarranted remakes of franchises is because the I.P. (intellectual property) is so valuable or coveted. They know that if something was a hit in the 80s or 90s ... they can bring it back and hope for nostalgia with parents who enjoyed it when they were young, and who in turn will see it with their kids, and/or buy the merchandise, etc. Especially pre-covid with all the box office to be had.
They don't want to risk quality content ... new ideas & stories (i.e. - their money) ... and instead give us sequels 20 - 30 years later.
Bullshit, ain't it?
No wonder so many people these days appreciate all the damn good prestige TV series of the past 20 years. So many gems compared to the tired box office retreads.
Kaboom
Get Out was new Knives Out...
And hugely successful
Don't get me wrong Fargo was a great reboot reintroduction...
Watchmen really showed you can flip an existing property and make it completely new
One of my dad's funniest running commentaries (movies & tv) is his take on if the action star is believable or not. Or if they're too old, or small in stature to be a true tough guy. He's always got something to say about Tom Cruise movies, haha. "Isn't he 5'7" and in his late-50s now?"
My feedback to him over the years ... "It's a movie ... suspend your disbelief. Shit!"
Wisdom
Hollywood can do a fairly decent job turning a questionable dude into a superhero ala Michael Keaton in Batman (who was my fav btw), but he’s right. It’s some that you just struggle to believe in cause they don’t have had certain quality needed.
Wisdom
Hollywood can do a fairly decent job turning a questionable dude into a superhero ala Michael Keaton in Batman (who was my fav btw), but he’s right. It’s some that you just struggle to believe in cause they don’t have had certain quality needed.
Agreed. That old man wisdom. Good point about Keaton. He was believable in the role and had presence (30 years ago as Batman). Good to see his career resurgence over the years. It was cool seeing all the shine he got with that Birdman role. Getting that $ later in his career with assorted roles now.
Agreed. Great to see the praise Watchmen has earned.
Agreed re: Fargo too. Props to Hawley and the assorted casts for pulling it off for 4 seasons now. People were unsure what it would look like revamping a 1996 movie nearly 20 years later in season 1. Hell ... Martin Freeman and company did their thing. Did the right amount of paying homage to the original.
yeah it was extremely underrated
Sean Connery Is the Reason We Have Action-Movie Wisecracks
By Bilge Ebiri
The late actor’s ability to deliver the perfect rejoinder shaped the Bond franchise and genre cinema at large. Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images
“He had a pressing engagement.” “He blew a fuse.” “[He’s] playing his golden harp.” “She had her kicks.” “See you later, irrigator.” Sans context, these lines might not sound like much, but coming from the lips of Sean Connery, they helped define the James Bond mystique and made the dry wisecrack a mainstay of genre cinema. Later Bonds adopted the cinematic quip and made it their own; eventually, so did the Ahnulds, the Slys, the Bruces, and in horror, the Freddys and Chuckys. But Connery’s ability to deliver the perfect rejoinder, the perfect kiss-off, endured beyond Bond. (Even SNL’s “Celebrity Jeopardy!” sketches, in which Darrell Hammond’s surly, savage Connery went remorselessly after Will Ferrell’s Alex Trebek with your-mom jokes and willful misreadings, captured a bit of this quality.) It even lay at the heart of Connery’s comeback in later years.
Obviously, it wasn’t merely the dialogue that made Scottish Connery’s 007 so compelling. A former body builder who possessed just the right amount of self-awareness to deliver those dainty, cherry-on-top one-liners, he had animal unpredictability and urbane grace in equal measure. The latter reportedly didn’t come naturally to him; he learned it from his first Bond director, Terence Young. No matter. The Sean Connery on screen was a guy who could ease into a tux or opine about champagne, and boy, did he also look like he could hold his own in a bar fight.
That was ideal for Bond, but of course, Sean Connery, who died on Saturday at the age of 90, was a lot more than Bond. Indeed, he was the rare 007 actor (he occupied the role from 1962 to 1971, and revisited the character in 1983) who managed to reclaim and redefine his image beyond the superspy. It took some time, and it definitely took some aging. Connery did some of his best, most daring work in the years following Bond, when he was desperately trying to shed the character — The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Robin and Marian (1976), Time Bandits (1981), even the much-reviled Wrong Is Right (1981) — but that period now feels like his wilderness years, as if the manly ideal he represented in the 1960s had been overtaken by a more sinister and uncertain climate, leaving him behind his times. (And who knows what was going on in his private life? I’ve heard rumors of a scuppered memoir, resting in a vault somewhere, deemed too scandalous to publish.)
We don’t think of Sean Connery as having range; indeed, we sort of think of him as proudly not having range, keeping that lilting, shing-shong ackshent of hish even when playing an Egyptian-Shpaniard. (There is, by the way, a 65,000-member subreddit dedicated to Connery’s accent.) Upon seeing George Lazenby show up in a kilt and lace jabot highland ensemble in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — the first Bond film sans Connery — a friend’s mom once remarked, “Sean Connery would never be caught dead in that.” But maybe she hadn’t seen John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), in which a pony-tailed Connery shows up in a red futuristic mankini, and, at one point, dons a big old wedding dress (admittedly, he does not look happy).
When I was a kid in the 1980s, watching Thunderball and Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice on the ABC Sunday Night Movie, the word on Connery was that he had never quite managed to shake the shadow of 007. But then, right around that time, the man came back, an elder statesman finally embracing his age, and actually showing some versatility. There he was, as the compassionate, intellectual monk-detective (!) Brother William of Baskerville in the underrated Name of the Rose (1986). He also made the ludicrous, Junior Tolkien dialogue of Highlander (1986) surprisingly seaworthy. Those movies weren’t hits at the time (at least not in the U.S.), but 1987’s The Untouchables, in which he played the hard-ass veteran street-cop who takes Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness under his wing, was. (“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” Again, nobody could deliver that kind of tough-guy poetry like Sean Connery.) So was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), in which daffy academic Henry Jones’s relentless dinging of his action-hero son effectively turned a Spielberg-Lucas fantasy blockbuster into a Hope-Crosby Road picture.
By then, his comeback was in full swing. I will never forget his entrance during the 1988 Academy Awards, amid colorful beams of light and clouds of fake smoke and, of course, the James Bond theme, to present the Best Visual Effects category; the place went bananas. (That audience also knew that he was a lock to win Best Supporting Actor later that night.) “The name is Connery, Sean Connery,” were the first things he said, over the roar of the crowd. It was almost like an acknowledgement that he could only free himself of the 007 thing if he found a way to coexist with the whole 007 thing.
Along the way, there were other great turns in movies like 1989’s Family Business and 1990’s The Hunt for Red October and The Russia House (an anti-Bond spy movie if there ever was one). He worked for years after, but for my money, Connery gave his last truly great performance in 1996, playing the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz and survived, in Michael Bay’s The Rock. It’s an ideal role for him, partly because The Rock is one of the most quotable movies ever. There’s nothing like Sean Connery delivering lines like, “Losers always whine about their ‘best.’ Winners go home and fuck the prom queen,” and his macho weariness makes a great foil for Nicolas Cage’s excitable milquetoast chemist. But his character is also a former spy, and the quote of Connery’s I will most remember from that film is yet another Bond callout. “I was trained by the best: British intelligence,” he says, with a perfect, apathetic twinkle. There was still a bit of Bond in there, but Sean Connery was free.
By Bilge Ebiri
The late actor’s ability to deliver the perfect rejoinder shaped the Bond franchise and genre cinema at large. Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images
“He had a pressing engagement.” “He blew a fuse.” “[He’s] playing his golden harp.” “She had her kicks.” “See you later, irrigator.” Sans context, these lines might not sound like much, but coming from the lips of Sean Connery, they helped define the James Bond mystique and made the dry wisecrack a mainstay of genre cinema. Later Bonds adopted the cinematic quip and made it their own; eventually, so did the Ahnulds, the Slys, the Bruces, and in horror, the Freddys and Chuckys. But Connery’s ability to deliver the perfect rejoinder, the perfect kiss-off, endured beyond Bond. (Even SNL’s “Celebrity Jeopardy!” sketches, in which Darrell Hammond’s surly, savage Connery went remorselessly after Will Ferrell’s Alex Trebek with your-mom jokes and willful misreadings, captured a bit of this quality.) It even lay at the heart of Connery’s comeback in later years.
Obviously, it wasn’t merely the dialogue that made Scottish Connery’s 007 so compelling. A former body builder who possessed just the right amount of self-awareness to deliver those dainty, cherry-on-top one-liners, he had animal unpredictability and urbane grace in equal measure. The latter reportedly didn’t come naturally to him; he learned it from his first Bond director, Terence Young. No matter. The Sean Connery on screen was a guy who could ease into a tux or opine about champagne, and boy, did he also look like he could hold his own in a bar fight.
That was ideal for Bond, but of course, Sean Connery, who died on Saturday at the age of 90, was a lot more than Bond. Indeed, he was the rare 007 actor (he occupied the role from 1962 to 1971, and revisited the character in 1983) who managed to reclaim and redefine his image beyond the superspy. It took some time, and it definitely took some aging. Connery did some of his best, most daring work in the years following Bond, when he was desperately trying to shed the character — The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Robin and Marian (1976), Time Bandits (1981), even the much-reviled Wrong Is Right (1981) — but that period now feels like his wilderness years, as if the manly ideal he represented in the 1960s had been overtaken by a more sinister and uncertain climate, leaving him behind his times. (And who knows what was going on in his private life? I’ve heard rumors of a scuppered memoir, resting in a vault somewhere, deemed too scandalous to publish.)
We don’t think of Sean Connery as having range; indeed, we sort of think of him as proudly not having range, keeping that lilting, shing-shong ackshent of hish even when playing an Egyptian-Shpaniard. (There is, by the way, a 65,000-member subreddit dedicated to Connery’s accent.) Upon seeing George Lazenby show up in a kilt and lace jabot highland ensemble in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — the first Bond film sans Connery — a friend’s mom once remarked, “Sean Connery would never be caught dead in that.” But maybe she hadn’t seen John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), in which a pony-tailed Connery shows up in a red futuristic mankini, and, at one point, dons a big old wedding dress (admittedly, he does not look happy).
When I was a kid in the 1980s, watching Thunderball and Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice on the ABC Sunday Night Movie, the word on Connery was that he had never quite managed to shake the shadow of 007. But then, right around that time, the man came back, an elder statesman finally embracing his age, and actually showing some versatility. There he was, as the compassionate, intellectual monk-detective (!) Brother William of Baskerville in the underrated Name of the Rose (1986). He also made the ludicrous, Junior Tolkien dialogue of Highlander (1986) surprisingly seaworthy. Those movies weren’t hits at the time (at least not in the U.S.), but 1987’s The Untouchables, in which he played the hard-ass veteran street-cop who takes Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness under his wing, was. (“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” Again, nobody could deliver that kind of tough-guy poetry like Sean Connery.) So was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), in which daffy academic Henry Jones’s relentless dinging of his action-hero son effectively turned a Spielberg-Lucas fantasy blockbuster into a Hope-Crosby Road picture.
By then, his comeback was in full swing. I will never forget his entrance during the 1988 Academy Awards, amid colorful beams of light and clouds of fake smoke and, of course, the James Bond theme, to present the Best Visual Effects category; the place went bananas. (That audience also knew that he was a lock to win Best Supporting Actor later that night.) “The name is Connery, Sean Connery,” were the first things he said, over the roar of the crowd. It was almost like an acknowledgement that he could only free himself of the 007 thing if he found a way to coexist with the whole 007 thing.
Along the way, there were other great turns in movies like 1989’s Family Business and 1990’s The Hunt for Red October and The Russia House (an anti-Bond spy movie if there ever was one). He worked for years after, but for my money, Connery gave his last truly great performance in 1996, playing the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz and survived, in Michael Bay’s The Rock. It’s an ideal role for him, partly because The Rock is one of the most quotable movies ever. There’s nothing like Sean Connery delivering lines like, “Losers always whine about their ‘best.’ Winners go home and fuck the prom queen,” and his macho weariness makes a great foil for Nicolas Cage’s excitable milquetoast chemist. But his character is also a former spy, and the quote of Connery’s I will most remember from that film is yet another Bond callout. “I was trained by the best: British intelligence,” he says, with a perfect, apathetic twinkle. There was still a bit of Bond in there, but Sean Connery was free.
Who remembers the speech he gave in Hunt for Red October? Even when he wasn’t playing bond Sean the cool was undefined.
I though he passed years ago already. You mean he was still alive all this time?!?
Stop it with that fucking 2020 meme. People die every day. Death is nature its a oart of life. It was his time. You niggas sound like idiots when you do that shit
Wow, did you come up with that yourself? If so, pretty good. If not, thanks for sharing.
Wow, did you come up with that yourself? If so, pretty good. If not, thanks for sharing.
I’m not even going to take credit for it. One of my friends told me.
No, it's you that sounds like an idiot for stating the obvious about the eventuality of death. If you pull your head out of your arrogant ass and stop being such a negative pos you'd discover 2020 has been extraordinary with respect to the number of well known people the Grim Reaper has collected. Now stfu.
Shut up bitchNo, it's you that sounds like an idiot for stating the obvious about the eventuality of death. If you pull your head out of your arrogant ass and stop being such a negative pos you'd discover 2020 has been extraordinary with respect to the number of well known people the Grim Reaper has collected. Now stfu.
Now, now don't talk to your father that way.
Abreast I had one in my life.. You were raised by a "stong" woman IE a single black bitter bitch who couldnt keep a man because her crazy ass kept running them off and she passed her bitterness and combative personalityvon to your bitch ass. Thats why you keep coming at me. You didnt have a fathet in hour household to provide that calm male energy and You mad because You vrew up playing catch by yourself haha You need a posthumous Connery slap you stupid biatch!Now, now don't talk to your father that way.
I know you had one in your life which by the way came about as a result of me busting a few nuts in your mama who was my former and always available side piece. She wanted marriage and I just wanted some ass so don't be mad at me because her meal ticket, me, refused slip a ring on her finger.
Nice comeback did your single bitter string black momma help you write it?I know you had one in your life which by the way came about as a result of me busting a few nuts in your mama who was my former and always available side piece. She wanted marriage and I just wanted some ass so don't be mad at me because her meal ticket, me, refused slip a ring on her finger.
Harrison Ford Remembers His ‘Indiana Jones’ Dad Sean Connery
Harrison Ford paid tribute to Sean Connery, a.k.a. Henry Jones Sr. in the "Indiana Jones" series, who died on Saturday at the age of 90. "He was my father…not in life…but in 'Indy 3,'" Ford said in a statement to Variety. "You don’t know pleasure until someone pays you to take Sean Connery for a...
90? Shit, he had a good run! RIP man!
Craig is the worst ever. Ol sniveling scone and butter eating fag!
Sean Connery, an Icon of Effortlessness
Struggle is the essence of drama, but there are some actors who win audiences over by making everything look easy. Connery, who died Saturday at the age of 90, was the warmest presence, the most natural, the most welcoming of that group.
www.theringer.com
The Sean Connery Syllabus
The actor behind everything from James Bond to Professor Henry Jones—and the inspiration for one of the greatest impressions in ‘SNL’ history—died at the age of 90 this past weekend
www.theringer.com
Sean Connery's Cause of Death Pneumonia, Heart Failure
Sean Connery's death certificate shows he died from pneumonia, old age and heart complications.
www.tmz.com
Sean Connery died from pneumonia and respiratory failure
James Bond actor Sir Sean Connery's official cause of death was listed as 'respiratory failure' brought about by pneumonia, old age and heart condition atrial fibrillation.