Nobody Knows Anything

Yes, a slight pause caused by my inability to get to a cinema to see Quantum of Solace and thus round off the Bondathon neatly rather than have it stagger unnecessarily into another week. Unfortunately this meant that it staggered unnecessarily into a few more weeks than it should have done. Alas. It does mean, however, that there have been three cinema visits in November, marked below with an *. There may also be strong language. And that I can start to watch some films again that don’t have the phrase “shaken not stirred” anywhere in the dialogue. When we left the Bondathon, I’d just been showing some love to Timothy Dalton, who wins whenever anyone asks me who my favourite Bond is. And they’re expecting me to say Sean Connery because everybody else does. Anyway: the Brosnan years.

Goldeneye (1995)

Martin Campbell set a template for the Brosnan period that, sadly, subsequent directors felt bound to follow rather than bringing too much of themselves to the project. In many ways, directing Bond can be a pretty thankless task, since it’s common knowledge that some action sequences have been dreamt up years in advance and then glued into the films as and when necessary. Pierce Brosnan, originally considered as a replacement for Roger Moore in 1987, is in 1995 a better age to play Bond and at first it seemed he would be in the role for years. What GoldenEye does is “plus” the action so Bond no longer uses a Walther PPK (or whatever handgun was popular at the time) but instead fires a machine gun, and drives a tank in a chase scene rather than a car. This lack of finesse may have dismayed some but James Bond in a tank demolishing what seems like most of St Petersburg was definitely one of those scenes we didn’t know we wanted to see, but are damn glad we have.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

The plussing continues in the next film with a lot of absurdist fun with jets and Michelle Yeoh brings a whole bunch of Hong Kong kickass to her customised action scene (finally released uncut in the UK). Elsewhere, Jonathan Pryce brings a fair slice of ham to his Rupert Murdoch/William Randolph Hearst style media mogul intent on starting a war rather than merely reporting on it.

The World is Not Enough (1999)

Yes, I know they cast Denise Richards as filmdom’s least convincing nuclear physicist, but what came to my notice here was how much travelling Bond does and has done. In a fairly typical example of the series, Bond travels by land, sea, air and ski through many countries. Almost like Alan Whicker back in the days when commercial travel wasn’t as wide spread as it is today, James Bond travelled the world in a kind of extended travelogue for the tourism industry. Spying in Bond movies has always been about neverending motion, whether Bond is on the trail of the bad guys, or the bad guys are after him. Bond movies have always prioritised exotic locations over, say, the day to day dreariness of Harry Palmer or John Le Carre’s creations. This may be one of the keys to Bond’s international appeal: if he hasn’t been somewhere close to where you live, he may swing around next time.

Die Another Day (2002)

The invisible car! That sunk Brosnan as Bond! Even though Die Another Day was more successful financially than the three Bonds that preceded it, the press reviews were much harsher and whereas you would think this wouldn’t affect the producers or the decisions they make, that’s where you’d be wrong. Which is odd because if there’s one thing we know about the Bond movies, it’s that they are critic proof. Although Roger Moore’s period as Bond was marked by less bums on seats than Connery’s reign, the films continued to make enough money to finance the next one. No, what really sank this film was an over-reliance on CGI. Bond films have been about both doing it for real, and then cutting to Bond in front of a blue screen to make it clear that it isn’t real. Even in the digital era, Die Another Day is marked by any number of shots of Brosnan close up in a scene at which the actor wasn’t present when everything else was filmed. But Die Another Day went too far, the action had become too silly, Madonna played a lesbian(?) fencing coach, and The Bourne Identity (2002) was released and looked more like a proper Bond movie than this did.

Casino Royale (2006)

Which meant, somewhat inevitably, that Bond had to go through one of its periodic reboots. Brosnan was out, a younger Bond in the Batman Begins (2005) style form of Daniel Craig was in (how did Bond become Bond?), Bond could now become more like Bourne and in turn become more like Bond used to be, especially since the film rights to Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), had now, after a lot of lawyers had got rich, reverted to the Bond producers, CGI was to be put on the backfoot and used mainly as a rig removal tool to emphasise reality rather than fantasy, and in a shocking move, the screenwriters would actually adapt Ian Fleming’s novel rather than borrowing a couple of names and a situation or two and making everything else up. When Craig delivered the line, “The bitch is dead,” at the end of the film, I experienced a warm glow at the inclusion of one of the key sentiments of Fleming’s original text, which I had read just before I saw the film for the first time. The fresh approach to Bond is definitively demonstrated by the outstanding free running foot chase that opens the film, minimal CGI, lots of it done for real, and Bond shooting someone dead in cold blood. It was like the Brosnan years had never happened, and Bond, instead of being like Bourne, was back to being Bond again. Daniel Craig, the joker in the pack of the Bond reboot, turns out to be its smartest card. Now, could they manage not to fuck up the second film?

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) *

Maybe in future years, the French will discover Kevin Smith as the great underrated comic genius of American cinema that he is and all the internet saddoes, hugely jealous that Smith is living the life they all wish they could live if only they weren’t such a sad bunch of do nothing motherfuckers sat like losers in their parents’ basements, will have long since passed from this world into virtual second lives where they will no longer be able to bother anyone with their unwelcome brand of sarcasm and frustration and resentment. In the meantime, Smith will continue to make smart, obscene, joyous, straightforward, somewhat bizarre male wish fulfillment films like this. I was a bit put off by the whole let’s do the whole porno film in the coffee shop where Seth Rogen works thing because that really did seem like one too many trips to the small water fountain of inspiration that marked Smith’s debut Clerks back in 1994. This was more than made up for by the relentless vulgarity of the dialogue and the onscreen fun the cast was having. And Traci Lords turns up in another one of those sending herself up roles that may one day see her welcomed into the Hollywood bosom (so to speak), instead of suffering permanent ostracism in the land of B-movies and straight to DVD. If the film wasn’t as tasteless as it is, then it couldn’t also be as life-affirming as it ends up being. And if very little of this has anything to do with the harsh reality of real hardcore porn production, well, it’s not meant to; that’s another movie, and not the one Kevin Smith has made.

Michael Clayton (2007)

In which the main screenwriter of Bournes 1, 2 & 3 gets to earn his directing chops with a film that may appear to be a searing indictment of legal firms and the corporate paymasters they’re all too ready to jump into bed with, but which unfolds as more of an Elmore Leonard style dissection of the film’s characters and the actions and motivations that occupy them, from Tilda Swinton’s sweaty armpits betraying the truth behind her glacial, apparent business competence to George Clooney’s ultimate decision to sway the outcome of the million dollar lawsuit one way or the other as a result of what has been done to him and his friends by the other characters in the film. Subtlety reigns, it’s like the 1970s all over again.

In Bruges (2007)

Is it still good? Yes. Is it still funny? Yes. Is it an Irish fable? Well now, that’s an interesting idea, isn’t it?

Quantum of Solace (2008) *

To the vexed issue of continuity. In an ongoing series, especially one that has stretched over 46 years, earned billions and may have been one of the principal motivations that drove Sony to its purchase of MGM in 2004, it is inevitable that things will change (actors will want to stop playing Bond, or have to be forcibly uncast when they want to continue playing Bond), but the Bond formula will demand that things must also stay the same. So balancing the desire to change with the times and yet maintain the key contents of the Bond recipe that draw an audience back again and again is the difficult task of the custodians of the Bond enterprise. In terms of continuity, it is ridiculous to make Casino Royale in 2006 the story of how Bond first became 007 while retaining Judi Dench as M from the “later” Brosnan years. Continuity, and fanboy obsession with it, has plagued the Bond series and many other cultural icons (such as Batman or Spider-Man or The Simpsons) for decades, but in a world of corporate-owned properties where there are vested interests in maintaining their presence in the marketplace, continuity has to be grappled with though can and has been ignored whenever it’s convenient to do so. The Judi Dench as M issue doesn’t make sense, but it does work, and if it works, don’t try to fix it. Oh yes, and they didn’t fuck the second film up, though someone should really sit Mark Forster down and get him to watch Bullitt (1968) because that is how you film a car chase, rather than the hideously incoherent way he chose to open the movie. Though it did work. But it could have been better with a few more wide shots.

Body of Lies (2008) *

So does the tentative romance between Leonardo DiCaprio and Golshifteh Farahani that threatens to derail the film deep in its second act have any wider purpose, or has it been placed there as a plot function to drive the third act? Alas, the latter seems more true. What’s particularly attractive about the film is that even though the title warns you upfront that this is a movie about deception, you don’t cotton on to the depth of the deceit until it’s too late, and it’s forehead-slapping time as you realise how effectively you have been lied to by the filmmakers. Good movie.

Casino Royale (2006)

Which I watched again to bookend the Bondathon, and also to check out how carefully the plot threads intended to establish the new shadowy organisation Bond must face have been delicately woven into the fabric of the action. And, you know, “I’m the money.” “Every penny of it.” And so forth.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Films, Ridley Scott, Kevin Smith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.