His name is Bond, James Zzzzzz

We are all supposedly so agog as to who will slip into Pierce Brosnan's tux as the next James Bond that hardly a week goes by without some speculative stories as to who his successor might be. The announcement last week that the long-delayed next movie in the franchise will be titled Casino Royale and directed by Martin Campbell, who made GoldenEye, was treated as a significant news story around the world, but does anyone really care any more?

The Guardian doesn't think so, recently quoting Judi Dench's line as M that Bond is "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur" and noting that the public's "tolerance for snobbery had withered". Peter Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety and a former senior executive at MGM, has rowed in with an opinion column headlined: "Is the world really ready for the 21st James Bond?" His view is that "the Bond character is a bit passé", following the spoofs of the character in the Austin Powers movies, and the success of Matt Damon as agent Jason Bourne, "whose central character is far more accessible to today's audience".

Part of the problem, Bart says, "rests with creaky scripts", adding: "The proprietors of the Bond franchise, Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, live in a cocoon of wealth and autonomy. They've been free to take the Bond franchise wherever they want, and they've managed to take it downhill."

Love and laughs in Donegal

With appropriate timing, the romantic comedy Dead Long Enough started shooting on St Valentine's Day in the Donegal village of Culdaff.

The movie features Michael Sheen (from Heartlands, Laws of Attraction and Wilde) and Jason Hughes (who played Warren, the gay housemate in the TV series, This Life) as a pair of Welsh brothers. In the film they return for a stag night to a Donegal village where they worked for a summer 16 years earlier, and they encounter a woman from their past, played by Angeline Ball.

Tom Collins, who made Bogwoman and The Undertones documentary Teenage Kicks, is directing the film, which Paul Donovan is producing for Grand Pictures, the Dublin-based company that made the micro-budget hit, Spin the Bottle. After shooting for three weeks in Culdaff, the production moves to Pontypridd in Wales for a week.

Hammer rises from the grave

Andy Cull, whose south London video store is reputed to rent the largest collection of horror films in Britain, has been signed to write one of the first movies to be shot in 25 years by Hammer Films.

Cull's screenplay, Reason, is one of three projects on the way from Hammer, which in its heyday produced such horror classics as The Devil Rides Out and all those Dracula and Frankenstein movies starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Hammer lay dormant for two decades before being taken over by new management recently.

"Everybody's got a horror label these days," says the new Hammer head, former Screen International editor Terry Ilott. "If you've got an axe, you're pretty much in business. But a lot of those movies are really action films. We've tried to stay away from stalk 'n' slash films and creature features. We think there's a market for intelligent horror, not comfortable psychological thrillers but films that are really scary."

Skinned 'Bunny' dished up

The target of well-deserved derision at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Vincent Gallo's narcissistic folly, The Brown Bunny has attracted far more column inches than cinema admissions since then, principally because of a graphic fellatio sequence involving Gallo and Chloë Sevigny. This rambling, pointless road movie ranks as one of the most reviled films ever shown in competition at Cannes, where it understandably failed to collect any awards, after which Gallo returned to the cutting room and excised half an hour of superfluous footage.

Irish audiences finally will have the opportunity to see The Brown Bunny now that Sony Pictures Releasing has acquired the DVD and television rights for the UK and Ireland.

mdwyer@irish-times.ie