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.

Octopussy (1983)

Although by 1983 it had become apparent that Bond movies no longer took place in anything resembling the real world, the signs of the times in our world, especially its political temperature, continued to influence the films. Thus although Octopussy seems primarily concerned with diamond smuggling in the style of Diamonds Are Forever (1971), it taps into the nuclear paranoia of the early 1980s and turns out to involve a maverick Russian general (and these guys are always mavericks, oddly enough) and his desire to provoke World War 3 by exploding a nuclear weapon in an American airbase during a circus performance which means Roger Moore has to defuse the bomb dressed as a clown. Which is essentially what Bond had become at this time.

Ghost Town (2008) *

A lead role for Ricky Gervais in a Hollywood movie is the most prominent feature of this otherwise rather ordinary romantic comedy. Although Gervais plays a misanthropic dentist for the majority of the film, even after the life changing incident in which he dies for seven minutes and acquires the ability to see dead people, there is a certain inevitability about his eventual conversion to caring about people a bit more than he used to, even if they are dead, but especially if it holds out the promise of a rapprochement with Tea Leoni, the archetypal sexy neighbour. Bits of the film seem improvised to accommodate the Gervais style, and there’s a dim receptionist character at the dentist’s office who is comically underused. Maybe she’ll be more prominent in the deleted scenes.

A View to a Kill (1985)

The Bond films continue to be diverting in the Roger Moore years even after they’ve ceased to be interesting. This 1985 entry is formulaic in the extreme: the good girl is incarnated by the dreadful Tanya Roberts who’s unable to act her way out of a paper bag, the bad girl is played by Grace Jones who’s offered little in the way of dialogue, has a last minute change of heart to cope with, an unexplored affection for Jenny Flex (Alison Doody) and ends up exploding to save the day. There are any number of well-mounted chase sequences, a prominent visit to the 007 stage, here represented as an interior mining set that gets to be flooded, and an eccentric appearance from Christopher Walken as the bad guy who is at least having fun even if the audience is not. There is a sense that the film and the series are coasting but the ship is sinking, and there are some appalling lapses in judgment, especially the Beach Boys number that turns up during the pre-credits teaser.

The Living Daylights (1987)

Timothy Dalton is my favourite Bond (at the moment), and this film has long fascinated me since I discovered that it harbours an unwritten Bond novel within it. There are any number of longueurs in the film during which Bond is offscreen, or waiting for Kara to turn up at her apartment or travelling to Tangiers and so on, which could form an intense interior monologue, a case study of what Bond is, what he does, why he does what he does, his developing relationship with Kara, and so forth. And all of this has been suggested to me by the intensity of Dalton’s performance. There are a few barriers to the production of this novel however, not least of which is that the Bond literary copyright is held by Ian Fleming’s executors and the copyright of this movie is held by a different company, and, you know, I can’t just write this novel in the sure and certain knowledge that it can’t be published, because what would be the point of that? But it tasks me, it does, like Melville’s white whale. It’s a small obsession.

Licence to Kill (1989)

The emptying out of the Moore years is made complete by the final Bond film of the 1980s, and the most violent, the one that had the most trouble with both the MPAA in America and the BBFC in Britain. Personally, I like this smoking, violent, badass Bond intent on revenge against the drug lord (the excellent Robert Davi) who fed his best friend to the sharks. It returns the Bond of the films to the Bond of the books, which is where he belongs. It’s an interesting lesson that the producers of the Bond films seem to have to keep learning: that whenever they rely on Ian Fleming for material the films work the best, and as soon as they go too far in the direction of fantasy (the invisible car of Die Another Day (2002), young women strangely attracted to the aging Roger Moore, etc) they lose touch with what draws an audience into the world of Bond in the first place: we come for the formula, but we stay for the variants on the formula, but there is a limit, even in the world of Bond, as to how far those variants can go away from Ian Fleming and his sociopathic, masochistic, chauvinistic, snobby, violent creation.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Of the Roger Moore Bonds, this is my favourite and has been since I first saw it when I was 10. On a plot level it’s nothing more than a remake of You Only Live Twice (1967), but what elevates it above Moore’s first two entries in the series is the size of the production. This is a classic every penny of the budget is on the screen movie, from the building of the 007 Stage at Pinewood to accommodate “Int. Day. Supertanker Hold Plus Three Submarines”, to the exotic locations. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, but for once it holds true here. Also, the widescreen Panavision frame makes a welcome return, there’s a kick-ass title song, and it’s all very 1977 Silver Jubilee Britain is best. There is something about Roger Moore’s Bond that needs this amount of scope in a way that Connery’s Bond was better suited to the intimacy of From Russia with Love (1963) than the Spy Who Loved Me trial run of You Only Live Twice (1967).

Burn After Reading (2008) *

The Coen brothers hate repeating themselves, and the chances of them following up the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (2007) with another critic-pleasing, highly suspenseful, Academy-raiding thriller were extremely small. And so it proves. Instead the film is a callback to one of the Coen’s favourite subjects: idiots and the idiotic things they do, all set in the guise of a sort of spy thriller full of sort of intrigue set in sort of Washington DC. Superbly cast with actors who are enjoying themselves but not in an indulgent way, Burn After Reading is to me more like Tropic Thunder (2008): proper film comedy assembled by filmmakers who know what they are doing. Even though the film has at least a dozen principal performers with complex relationships between them, you are never left confused because each one of these characters and their relationships are properly set up. Writing has been perhaps one of the areas where the Coens haven’t received as much credit as they should, and it is the quality of the film literacy on display here that means this isn’t one of those “minor” Coen films at all. In fact, I fail to be convinced by this lesser and greater Coen film argument entirely, as if because Barton Fink (1991) won the Palme d’Or that makes it a better film than Intolerable Cruelty (2003), a film I liked a lot more than other people seemed to. If you like a director (or as is now the acknowledged case with the Coens directors) you are going to have to take their entire careers on board when it comes to a consideration of their talents.

Moonraker (1979)

And so, inspired by the success of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), they decided to remake The Spy Who Loved Me in space. Although it can be argued that Bond has already been a bit science fictiony, this remains the only (thank God) full scale attempt to go out there. Even though Moonraker is a lot less fun than Spy, and has rather too much extremely poor comedy (double-taking pigeon, anyone?), it remains a terribly pleasurable watch. The French have a word for it and that word is jouissance, a pleasure that can be too much to bear and a concept that cannot successfully be translated into English. But as a way of coming to terms with a film that is both poor and great, often simultaneously, it’s the best that I can offer.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

Characteristically, the Eon Production team know when they’ve gone too far in one direction, even though the previous film that’s caused all of the doubts has been wildly successful, as Moonraker was. And so For Your Eyes Only marks a welcome return to a more contained, Eurocentric Bond. A lot of the film is terrific, particularly the action scenes, but they and the film itself are weakened by Bill Conti’s terrible disco hangover score. Unusually, Bond doesn’t bed the young Lynn Holly Johnson (a rare instance in the series where the older man, younger woman thing became too creepy even for the filmmakers), but Carole Bouquet’s Melina is an entirely different proposition; in fact she may be the first proper post-feminist Bond heroine, who remains indifferent to Bond’s advances until the very end of the film after she has avenged the deaths of her parents, and who throughout the film uses a crossbow at key moments to save Bond’s life by dispatching some of his enemies. Melina is the first successful attempt to take on board a “stronger woman” role after two disappointing dry runs with Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) in Spy and Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) in Moonraker, who were both promoted as “modern” Bond women, but were in the end fatally compromised.

Next week: Bond in the 80’s.

Gomorra (2008) *

Uncompromising and complex, an explanation of how a crime syndicate can obtain dominance in an area and keep it, and build on it, and become influential in legitimate business, but all told in a detached, handheld manner very much along the lines of Salvatore Guiliano (1962), and all unglamourous, unHollywood, very real. The film starts with the exchange and counting of money, very little is explained, no less than five stories start up and run simultaneously, but connections are left up to the viewer. An anti-Scarface that lets the old guys in bad tracksuits turn the tables on the young guns rather than the other way around. The Camorra, the Neopolitan Mafia that this film is about, would rather that this film had not been made, and the book from which it has been adapted not been written, and the man who wrote this book was dead, instead of under hiding with a police escort which is where he is now. Clandestine organisations don’t like publicity, and isn’t it interesting that the current President of Italy is more interested in evading prosecution himself than seeking to prosectute the Mafia gangs which permeate and damage and corrupt Italian society at every level?

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

The Bond series is marked by a curious obsession with doubles, but doubles that mostly go unremarked by anyone, especially Bond himself, that comes across one of them. Charles Gray had turned up as Henderson in You Only Live Twice (1967) but here returns on the other side as Blofeld, and no one notices. Maud Adams graduated from her death as Andrea Anders in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) to her resurrection as the eponymous heroine of Octopussy (1983). Martine Beswick moves from her Gypsy Girl cameo in From Russia with Love (1963) to a more serious our agent in foreign climes part as Paula Caplan in Thunderball (1965). To say nothing of the team of American actors living in Britain (Ed Bishop, Shane Rimmer, etc) who keep turning up in successive Bonds in small different roles. And this is when the films themselves aren’t obsessed with doubles, from the fake Sean Connery dispatched by Robert Shaw at the start of From Russia with Love (1963) to the wax dummy of Roger Moore that turns out to be crucial to the denouement of The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).

Live and Let Die (1973)

Roger Moore’s first two Bonds of the 1970s are banal, flat and uninteresting. The chase scenes in both which ought to be highlights are instead deflated by horrible attempts at comedy, mostly involving one of the worst character actor performances of any films of the 1970s from the appalling Clifton James as Sheriff JW Pepper. Having inspired a thousand or more imitators in the 1960s, when it came to the 1970s Bond initially followed trends started elsewhere. This means that Live and Let Die is the blaxploitation Bond, and not in a good way. All of the supposedly black stuff in the film is cringeworthy from the black cab driver with the jive talk and the excessive sideburns, the soul food restaurants Fillet of Soul, the voodoo shop, the rather camp Baron Samedi, to the best, most authentic, bullshit voodoo ceremony that Pinewood Studios and extras casting can manage.

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

The other trend that Bond picked up on is the martial arts/kung fu craze that followed in the wake of Bruce Lee’s success. Fortunately or not, Roger Moore is rescued from a kung fu school by two high-kicking 14 year old girls. This humiliation is just one of many in this pointless farrago. Scaramanga’s darkened funhouse is plain embarrassing and it is painfully obvious that all of the nonsense about solar power has been added to the script so Derek Meddings has a big model set to blow up at the finale. On a different note, I’m reasonably convinced that this is the first Bond film I saw in the cinema at the age of 7, taken to it by my father. I guess you have to start at the bottom sometimes. The Bond series has also been obsessed with rebooting itself, but the Moore years are unusual in that the reboots happen within Moore’s tenure rather than at the end. The first redo leads to the brilliance (and brilliant redundancy) of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the second to the old school Bond pleasures of For Your Eyes Only (1981), and the third to the awful comedy of Octopussy (1983) and its successor, which returns Roger Moore to the dead end of non-achievement with which he commenced his 12 years as Bond in 1973.

Infernal Affairs III (2003)

Reviewing Hong Kong police thrillers. This is my second time watching the third film in the trilogy, and I remain divided on the question of whether or not making the film so difficult to comprehend is down to filmmaker incompetence or my own failed perceptions and inability to follow the plot. Or maybe this disorientation is meant to mirror the disorientation of Lau Kin Ming (Andy Lau) as it becomes clear as the film draws to a close that some directorial slight of hand has been at work. Still, at least my reading of the plot (concerning who’s a cop and who’s a criminal) coincides with online plot summaries that have been difficult to track down, so I might be ready at some stage to declare the trilogy a work of genius. If only Andrew Lau and Alan Mak had done a Coppola with Part III and made a film that clearly wasn’t as good as the two that had preceded it, instead of making a film where it’s kind of hard to tell.

Escape from New York (1981)

I don’t like Escape as much as the two films that surround it in Carpenter’s filmography, The Fog (1980) and The Thing (1982), but it definitely has its moments, and it is, of course, rather more fun when watched with John Carpenter and Kurt Russell’s excellent commentary track selected.

Tropic Thunder (2008) *

Every bit as good as I hoped it would be. It does to stupid Hollywood actors what Zoolander (2001) did to stupid supermodels and the trashy tabloid celebrity-obsessed non-culture in which we all now find ourselves. And it has Tom Cruise in a hairy fat suit but may be a little too pleased with itself for having realised this. At a rough estimate it may be even funnier on later inspection than it seemed at the cinema since it actually has some fairly deep comedic ideas running alongside the endless and mostly good gags. And it probably means that when you read stories about Ben Stiller being a pedantic diva on set on the internet that someone somewhere is just making that shit up. It’s also an object lesson in how to make a proper comedy, and screeners should be sent to the makers of those wretched (fill in the blank) Movie movies forthwith.

Dr. No (1962)

Note presence of full stop after the Doctor. Well, well, just what the internet needs, another blogger wibbling on about the Bond movies and filling their posts with all sorts of anoraky details only interesting to fellow Bond anoraks, who love Bond and all those who’ve ever sailed within her, or in her, or Onatopp of her. Fuck that. Not interesting. I promise: no crappy Onatopp style puns (about from that one); no poor innunendo that makes you grimace like somebody’s just kneecapped you (apart from the title of the posts); the vague possibility that I might have something interesting to say about these films (pretty vague); a firm commitment that I am actually watching every minute of these films, even the weaker Roger Moore efforts that I don’t much like and am somewhat embarrassed to admit I now own.

To begin: although obviously intended for high definition presentation around the time of the next Bond movie (Bond Blu-rays have already been announced for later this year), the scrupulous scanning and correction efforts of Lowry Digital Images bear more remarkable fruit on the first few films in the series than on the later ones which have already been transferred pretty decently to the aftermarket. My memories of early Bond movies in ITV screenings is that they looked like absolute shit; they were quite clearly ancient telecines that had been rerun and rerun until the tapes had started to wear through. DVD resolution only really brings us an exceptional video image though, with, as Lowry Digital staff relate on the excellent featurette on Disc 2 of the Dr. No Ultimate Set, more onscreen detail and texture than has ever been visible on film, even back in 1962. The Blu-rays will presumably up the quality on this even further and deliver some proper film grain as well. It is really startling to see Dr. No with quite so much clarity as this. Does it make the film better? Yes it does.

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

This film leans enormously on the sequenced music of Wang Chung, which dates it precisely but in a good way. It’s the kind of high octane, pedal to the metal cop movie (even though it’s about the Secret Service) that died at the box office in 1985 but has outlasted much else that was released that year. Quality has staying power, and if you make a good film, sooner or later people are going to see it and allow your film a shelf life. In about 2001 I signed an online petition to have this movie released by MGM with a commentary track, a documentary, a sound upgrade and a decent transfer, and in 2003 this actually happened. Pretty cool. But not in the UK, where apparently MGM thought (and still thinks) we don’t like extras on MGM discs. Pretty not cool.

From Russia with Love (1963)

In Basic Instinct (1992), Catherine Tramell delivers an important speech about suspension of disbelief while on her first journey to the police station where she intends to disconcert a roomful of sweaty males with her cunning no underwear strategy. The Bond films have always been about suspension of disbelief, so much so that Roger Moore found himself unable to believe in the character because everybody Bond ever meets around the world from megalomanical supervillains to humble hotel bar staff knows that Bond likes his martini shaken not stirred. Which isn’t going to do you much good if your job description is secret agent. The Bond movies, even this one, are all absurd, they all take place in a different universe to ours even when it may look like they’re trying to represent our own universe, they are all subject to the same easily-levelled criticisms that they don’t make sense on even a very basic level (sample dialogue from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997): Dr. Evil: Scott, I want you to meet daddy’s nemesis, Austin Powers. Scott Evil: What? Are you feeding him? Why don’t you just kill him? Dr. Evil: I have an even better idea. I’m going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death), they recycle the same formula again and again (if you’ve seen You Only Live Twice (1967) you don’t really need to see The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) or Moonraker (1979) since they are essentially the same film), they’re sexist, racist, out of touch, out of date, old-fashioned, we’ve seen it all before, there’s nothing new here, please move along, nothing to see here (this is perhaps why critical response to them can vary so enormously).

And yet I was watching the ski chase from OHMSS (1969) (see below) just last night, and the sheer kinetic energy with which this sequence has been photographed, scored, brought to the screen, and cleaned up by Lowry Digital, was absolutely exhilarating. In short, critical objections to Bond miss the point: despite all of the shortcomings which most Bond fans, including myself, recognise the films have, we are all willing to suspend our disbelief and enjoy visiting this improbable fantasy world because what the Bond films offer is cinema of an almost Bressonian purity: a beautiful man, a beautiful woman, more beautiful women, an evil villain, assorted bad guys, explosions, chases, fucking big sets, and more explosions. It’s formulaic but we don’t care. And there are a lot of us, and we’re growing by the day. And Quantum of Solace (2008) is only going to spread the word of Bond even more.

Goldfinger (1964)

Stephen King in Danse Macabre (1980), his book length answer to all those questions journalists kept asking him about why he wrote this horror stuff, talks about the Set of Reality in serial television. What he means is the difference between scenes that have clearly been filmed on location, and scenes that have clearly been filmed in a studio but are meant to look like a location except they do not, and he mentions the Ponderosa ranch in Bonanza as an example, though he could have referenced that place allegedly outside the house where everybody had breakfast in Dallas. Or the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami at the start of this film. Even in 1964 with Eon Productions having come off two straight successes, they still only had a limited amount of time at the location and ended up rebuilding a Fontainebleau set in Pinewood to finish off the sequence. Poor old Margaret Nolan as Dink, she didn’t even get to fly to Miami, because she delivers her one line on the reverse of Felix Leiter (who as the scene develops goes from standing in front of the real hotel to standing in front of a back projection of it) and this is a studio set and you can tell because the lighting is high key and it doesn’t match the Miami sunshine. This is how it was done because this is how films were made at that time because of a number of factors including the quality of the film stock, the size of the cameras, the size of the lights, how long they had the location for, and so on. Yet now it can look like an amateurish assembly of everything that’s wrong with studio filmmaking. And yet we should remember that since all films were made this way then, no one cared about it at the time and we in 2008 have to suspend our disbelief just to watch the first ten minutes of Goldfinger made in 1964. Tough ask.

Thunderball (1965)

A lot of what makes Thunderball watchable (about from that guy who gets fed to the sharks obviously) are the underwater sequences. I’ve been trying to think whether or not any film made since this one has ever ended up with the extraordinary underwater melee in which what looks like 50 divers are going at each other with knives and spear guns, all on screen, all at once, no CGI, no special effects. And I can’t come up with one. There are some pretty neat shots in The Abyss (1989) that have a lot of blokes underwater on a submersible, but is that it? Is Thunderball the high watermark (low watermark would be a pun: no puns, remember) of underwater action movies? Maybe so.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Snagging John Barry to work on the music for a lot of the Bond films was definitely one of the smarter decisions that the producers made. For me, the music to this film, in which Bond becomes Japanese by putting on a wig, there’s a giant interior volcano set and a white cat stroking villain, is so good it hides nearly all of the film’s shortcomings. Barry brings a soul to the potential soullessness, a romanticism to the possible routine of Bond’s dalliances with a never ending succession of women, and a driving force to the action sequences. Barry set the bar high, and only David Arnold has stepped up to the mark to meet him there. The most important contribution of Monty Norman, of course, is that bass guitar riff of the Bond theme, which all Bond composers have quite possibly been contracturally obliged to employ at the right moment, and sometimes at the wrong moment, and sometimes not at all (Eric Serra wasn’t asked back after the GoldenEye (1995) score was adjudged too light on proper Bond moments).

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

Would this be the greatest Bond film of them all if Sean Connery had stayed in the part for this one and let Roger Moore take over on Diamonds Are Forever (1971)? The question that haunts Bond fandom. George Lazenby is not as bad as has been suggested, and the extreme, almost avant garde editing of the fight scenes is something to behold, as is that ski chase I remarked upon earlier. I could listen to John Barry’s opening title theme forever and if you don’t start feeling a bit misty when Louis Armstrong promises you All the Time in the World, then you’re probably in the wrong cinema. And it’s only a Bond movie, after all. This never happened to the other fellow, indeed.

Saturday 20th September 2008

With Sox [my sister’s cat] fed, we proceed to [Birmingham International] airport. Dad had already been on a practice run for this yesterday when he took Lou [my sister] and Roz [her friend] to Brum for Lou’s birthday weekend in Barcelona. Check in very quick. Bloke in front had doubts about leopard-skin camouflage stetson; I urged him to go for it. Hilariously, evil bastards at Monarch wanted £25 for legroom seats. So that didn’t happen. Can’t discriminate against disabled anymore, so tall people now legitimate target. Quickly through security after removing all shoes and metal items including belt. Spent most of time browsing shops in departure lounge. WHSmiths had lots of books that looked promising, but hit paydirt with Impulse record shop which had four interesting CDs in a 4 for £20 deal plus a cheapie for £1. Ker-ching! Barely time to urinate before we walk to plane through boarding gate and then building site and then on the taxiway to the plane. I turn out to be in seat 23C next to a couple of couples who spend the whole flight drinking hideously overpriced miniature bottles and cans of spirits and lager whilst I, Mr Boring Seasoned Traveller, paid £1.50 in Boots for a couple of Coke Zeros before boarding. Finally resolved Sennheiser earphone issue: you do need the medium sized attachments for effective noise cut-outage. Time passes in bouts of Stephen King’s Duma Key and Dead Can Dance. Removed shoes for duration of flight. That really works. Usual trolley fest in aisles and piss poor recycled BBC comedy on small fold-down tellies from VHS of all things, the DVD revolution not having reached Monarch Airlines yet. Dinner was cottage pie and a toffee sticky pudding, plus water, plus 2 coffees. Very decent. I start to wane c.1pm and need sleep. It doesn’t come. Good landing smack on time.

Sunday 21st September 2008

With me fed, arrival in Rhodes was curious. Lightning flashes are observed from the aircraft, and there has clearly been an enormous Michael Mann in the city style wetting down of the streets, but no rain is falling now. Hilarious queue for Greek security where first they stamp some passports, then none and the queue speeds up a lot. Case arrives safely. Tigger [stickers] rule! Find ancient Olympic Airways employee who directs me to coach 171. After stopping at every hotel between the airport and Afandou, I arrive and am pleasantly surprised. Edelweiss 1A actually has airconditioning, but no remote to control it. Did find manual and managed to turn it on a bit. Hurrah! 1A is clean and neat and more than adequate. I’m right behind the bar and pool and even though it’s on the main road, you can’t hardly hear anything inside. Provided utensils very basic, will need to supplement (but didn’t). Unpacked very quickly. Had breakfast of Fruit & Fibre and milk. Hilariously discovered I’d picked up the wrong cheese and box from our fridge at home [I chose the ongoing cheese rather than the new one bought Saturday morning]. Still, should be enough to last me the week. Found that the fabled cash and carry supermarket as mentioned by woman online is right next door to Edelweiss. Turned around and walked back up main road find junction I espied on the bus earlier. First located bus stop, and bus times. Then turned left along road and walked towards Afandou village. Cash and carry closed Sunday so I needed another source of food. Road led me to a road that loops through village centre [maybe], and at first convenience shop I found everything I needed: butter, ham, a roll for today and lots of drink. Lots and lots of drink. Said Kalimera to old guy washing pavement. Shop guy spoke pretty good English but I baffled him with apples, bananas request. We agreed on fruit. He had no fruit. Broke 1st €20 note. Walked back hot and sweaty. Had texted Dad earlier; now texted Louise in Barcelona and wrote this. Next: welcome meeting at 12.30pm in the bar.

Jamie, 24, from Kent, cracked bad jokes in the style of someone who’s convinced he’s a standup comedian with potential who gets disabused of this notion every time he does it. He’s nice enough, though. As ever, the welcome meeting, spiced with a small glass of what may have been J2O, was really about selling you trips. Some of the trips are the same as were on offer in the 90s. Couple with kid next to me plumped for island tour by coach, and it is a good trip, but I’ve been there and bought the t-shirt. I drifted away, sun creamed up and headed out in search of the mysterious cut-through, which I didn’t find. I did find the village centre though, and bars and restaurants as recommended online and shall work my way through them, or not, as whim decides. Still seeking short cut I ended up instead on the other leg of the Spanish style road junction and decided to head down and check out the beach. Very sparse. Lots of space. Very few people around as the season draws to a close. Came back, showered, slept and read. Dinner adventure #1 beckons.

Wrote down bus timetable times and actually found the cut through to Afandou Centre, which is deviously unsignposted. May have found a sort of bakery near square, but that’s a long way to go for bread. Wandered back streets a little, eventually ended up at Four Seasons Restaurant with fabulously friendly owners/waiters, a big Greek bloke and a small Greek woman, 7 months pregnant. I had Grilled Chicken Breast Fillet in a pepper sauce with garlic bread and cheese. Delicious. Came with rice, chips, veg and mushrooms in the sauce. Very nice. Had weird-looking cappuccino for dessert. It came in a tall glass with a pile of squirty cream on top and a straw. And it was hot. €14 excluding tip. Wandered back over the cut through hill in darkness, tried to find nearer road [to Edelweiss] without success. By amazing chance, the TV in the pool bar was tuned to the Ryder Cup, but I was so tired I was completely unable to take advantage. Nine hours of sleep ensued.

Monday 22nd September 2008

Up at 7, had breakfast, ablutions, then to supermarket for bread, the fresh stuff not yet stocked on shelves. Great. Found brown-looking stuff with “unique taste” that smelled awful but at noon turned out to be adequate, if a little cakey. It’s true that the Greeks don’t really do bread. Made up brown stuff as rolls, proceeded to bus stop. Met Northern couple who were opposite me, they’ve since moved rooms for one with a safe. We proceeded to Lindos, with diversions. Common sense has raised its head since I last visited in 1995, and now the buses terminate at a car park outside Lindos up the hill from the square. A smaller, free shuttle bus now moves people from the terminus to the beach to the square. Much more sensible. I marched down to the square and wandered the streets of Lindos, looking for views and perspectives I hadn’t shot on my previous visits. Ended up down on the beach for lunch sat in a chair with a table that both looked unused. Thankfully the rapacious sun lounger guys ignored me and I could eat in peace. Wandered up to the tomb of Kleoboulos (the new monument I visited may not have been this tomb) whoever he is and then back to Lindos square. Took the free bus up to the terminus and waited for the not free bus. On the way down to the beach earlier I was toyed with by a very cute kitten with a collar. Cats run wild here and they’re all hardy, slim types, not bulky mature cats like our Thomas [our cat]. Lent my bottle opener keys to some Dutch or German blokes who’d bought bottles and carried no openers with them. They were Dutch or German, so that was their excuse. Bus back took us on a guided tour of Kolimbia, which would appear to have been claimed by Deutschland. Eventually got back via supermarket, which now has fresh bread so great; I had to pick up a stick thing in a liitle market in Lindos. Pause.

Nothing much to report of a quiet night in. Until the Billy Joel kicked in around 10pm. Nice. And then we had another storm with rain, thunder and lightning, but I was mostly out of it.

Tuesday 23rd September 2008

If Kolimbia has been claimed by the Germans it would appear Afandou has been ceded to Italy. There was a crowd of Italians waiting for the bus to Rhodes Town this morning, and me. It was standing room only all the way in. I was standing in the trough by the rear door and was first off the bus when we arrived half an hour later. First I found the information place looking for info about the medieval festival. Bugger all there. Then I went hunting for record shops and found Manuel Music Center first. It turned out to be the best of the three. I earmarked some stuff for credit card action on Friday and then spent the rest of the morning leafing through the vinyl in the basement. It had been picked pretty clean and there wasn’t anything essential. Found a never released in the UK Michael Nyman CD soundtrack in the bargain CDs and then augmented it with a Cibo Matto CD (yay!), a mid-price Vangelis CD and my out on a limb choice of a Guesch Patti CD from 2000, with what looked like a bonus CD glued to the front (this turned out to be the case). Shamefacedly, I then repaired to McDonalds for lunch. Strikingly, the woman serving the counter in Manuel Music had a fag on the go, and McDonalds patrons could smoke! Then tracked down X Musicland, which wasn’t what it was 14 years ago; the vinyl had gone and the choice was smaller, and also Top Ten, which was very weird, a small sidestreet shop run by an older woman.

I then proceeded to the Palace of the Grand Masters in time for the tour of the walls at 2.45pm, except a) the Palace was being repaired and the whole frontage was clad in scaffolding, and b) the tours appear to have been replaced by morning access to the walls from 8am to 11am Tuesdays to Saturdays. All very odd. Back to do that on Friday. I then occupied myself with taking pictures of German tourists; Germans abroad love to have tours organised for them. There was a mime dressed as a pirate and the first of two urchins armed with squeezeboxes. The whole Old Town looked awfully familiar. I then wandered the tourist traps of the most ridiculous [Socratous] street in Old Town, with shops that go on forever and ever. Amazingly, tucked under a stairwell, I found a bottle of Emery [wine] that I have fond memories of from years ago. I then left Old Town and wandered up outside the walls with the two harbours on my right. Appallingly, one of the deer that guards the entrance to Mandraki Harbour has been removed for refurbishment, and the remaining stag statue looks more than a little forlorn.

I relocated Lawrence Durrell’s home in the Turkish cemetery, and far from the neglect apparent last time, now it was all done up and home to a literary association, so hurrah for that. I then repaired to the Yacht Club and spent an hour lounging on a deck chair till it was time to walk back, buy a ticket and squeeze on the Lindos bus. It was No 19, the same bus I was on yesterday when I returned from Lindos, with the same driver. And he was decent enough to drop me off alone (just about) at Afandou Oasis again. Once more, it was standing room only on the bus and I had a heckuva job squeezing to the exit, but I made it. Time for another quiet night in.

Wednesday 24th September 2008

My poor feet are suffering a bit so I’ve decided to have a quiet day in. Very lazy morning with reading and sleeping, then a jaunt down to the Afandou beach in the afternoon. Very little going on. The sunbed didn’t do my back any good either. The Italians, who all seem to be staying at the Hotel Blu, have their own separate beach facilities, to which strangers are not welcome. They also have on beach boule tournaments. Have finally sussed out fruit situation in supermarket. You have to get it weighed separately and sticky labelled before taking it to the tills. Finished off 2nd half of dry Emery wine I bought yesterday. Must have been good as it sent me to sleep early. Now that I can’t get to the Tsambika monastery, I’m spending the next two days in Rhodes Town instead.

Thursday 25th September 2008

Nasty shock awaits when I get to the bus stop at 9am, there is me and about 40 Italians. Would it be the case that such a giant crowd means no bus is going to stop at Afandou Oasis until such time as the crowd has completely dispersed? Yes, it would. A whole bunch of the Italians disappear in taxis, which, being wealthy but somewhat mean Italians, is what they should have done in the first place. In the meantime, a coach driver at 10.30am takes pity on me {I’m now the only one left standing there) and I arrive in Rhodes too late to walk the walls of the Old Town. But not too late to proceed to Manuel Music Center and work my way through the A-Z rock CDs. Unfortunately, circa 12pm, my diabetic carbo need started to kick in and I had to take a break for sustenance. Had to walk an awful long way to score some Coke Zero 1.5 litre style. After break, trotted back into Manuel Music Center, completed the A-Z search and piled €100 worth of CDs on my credit card. I then took a long detour out to the west of Rhodes Town to the beach, and made a circular tour of the northernmost point of Rhodes, then back down the other side to the Yacht Club where I found myself on Tuesday. I arrived super early for the bus, scored myself a seat, and then got up to leave the bus well before we arrived at Afandou Oasis since I’ve now got the times down. My dinner plans for the evening are currently under reconsideration since a giant thunderstorm including lightning, torrential downpours and hail (great chunks of ice) has rather suddenly appeared, not quite from nowhere since the weather and visibility and sunlight have all been dispersing since mid-afternoon. It’s a storm with a vengeance; the only thing I know about such things is that this level of rainfall will not hold and this storm will pass. The tricky bit is whether there are any more of them. The rain it did not stop, so out I did not go.

Friday 26th September 2008

After yesterday’s embarrassing incident with the Italians, I was determined not to go through all that again. My alternate strategy was to leave my studio at 7am, march over the cut through hill to Afandou, passing a dead cat on the way, and catch the 7.30am bus from there to Rhodes. It arrived at 7.45, fashionably late, and I set down in Rhodes c.8.30, so it sort of worked. Once again, the bus took a different route in than any I had previously been on. I opportunistically got off the bus early and quickly found myself lost in the Old Town for the first time this morning. I eventually made my way to the Palace of the Grand Masters to pick up my €2 for the town wall walk. This certainly lived up to billing as it delivered great vistas across the Old Town as well as a sense of how much work it would all need to bring it up to date. I had the walls practically to myself; there was one other bloke and a couple of Japanese tourists. After descending absurdly dangerous steps at the other end of the walk, I got lost in the Old Town again. I eventually found my way out though and headed over to the commercial port to take some pictures of the enormous cruise liner, the Costa Fortuna [I’m not making this name up!], that was moored there. I bought a sponge loofer thing off a boat that kept moving as I was trying to find the best one. Then the rain came down again in a torrential downpour for an hour, during which I finished gift shopping and got a bit damp. The downpour fortuitously allowed me to find places off the beaten track. It was amusing to note how the hour long downpour turned all of the traders in Socratous Street into umbrella salesmen. I found the Romeo Taverna & Grill as recommended by the AA and inadvertently stumbled into a willkommen meeting for a group of Germans who’d clearly arrived the previous night. The rep’s presentation went on a bit, but was clearly more prepared and organised than our more humble English efforts in this area. Once again, there’s nothing the Germans like more than an authority figure telling them what to do. In the meantime, I was the half eleven rush at the Romeo, basically ordered off the menu and the burger and garlic bread were cheap and good. Result. I redid the circuit of the west, north and east beaches, but there had been some storm damage at the Yacht Club and as my perch was no longer really available, I gave it up as a bad job and returned to Afandou. In the evening, I ventured out again alongside the road in the dark with motorists speeding past me, passed the dead cat, climbed the cut through hill and ended up at the Four Seasons again. This time I had a Mythos beer [my beer of choice this week], more garlic bread this time without cheese, and a fantastic pork fillet in a creamy, mushroomy, garlicky sauce with a baked potato. It was all good; the big debate is what to have tomorrow and whether or not I have enough money to pay for it, though as they take MasterCard this may be a moot point. This late night meal made me very sleepy though, so it was off to dreamland for me. Final day tomorrow.

Saturday 27th September 2008

Long enough sleep but today begins the long unwind. Various bits of food are finally used up and seen off. The packing is rigorously organised as each bit of the room is scrutinised and rescrutinised for leave behinds until there is nothing left to pack. Although it’s more than a bit anal, my checklist makes it very easy. For the first time this week, I cracked open the patio door and gave the studio a pile of fresh air. The inevitable consequence of this was that a giant insect buzzed in. I may have swooshed it out again with a towel, I may not. Cats are very miaowy this morning. Since I packed up ahead of schedule, I decided fuck it, I’m gonna book out of here early, so I delivered my questionnaire to the rep who provided leaving details in return. Our hilarious pickup time is 2am. Left my case in the bar; Anna [owner] seemed terribly keen to unlock the safe I’d locked earlier in the week [and been unable to reopen]. Got to bus stop perfectly timed to catch bus to Lindos, standing all the way. I’d switched my rucksack to my travel bag, not too heavy. On arrival in Lindos, I walked down to the square and headed for my favourite spot halfway down the path [to the beach] for lunch. A boat was in, and there was lots of donkey traffic. Post-lunch, I found a spot by a boat on Lindos beach and lolled away the afternoon reading and also overhearing the travails of three young female Londoners who seemed to have been flooded in their apartment during the great downpour, or one of them, the poor bastards. You don’t expect to escape floodland Britain and end up flooded on one of the driest islands in the Med during one of the driest summers they’ve had. Around five, I left the beach and walked up the hill to the terminus, bought my ticket and was directed to the one leaving in five minutes. Result. Back at the pool bar, I swapped clothes in the pool loo and transferred some items to my case, read a bit, chatted a bit, and then over the cut through, past the dead cat, to the Four Seasons Restaurant. Had giant Coke Light rather than a Mythos, soup of the day which was tomato, onion rings and garlic bread (which was probably a tactical mistake), and then grilled chicken breast fillet with pepper sauce again, another Coke Light and that was it. Am officially low on euros so paid with MasterCard. Wandered up to the town square to see if anything was happening. It wasn’t. Did pass the Afandou equivalent of Rosie’s in Solihull where all the young people appeared to be gathering, being thrown out, riding around on mopeds without helmets, etc. Cats were a bit scampery this evening. Returned over the hill, said last rites over the dead cat, returned to the pool bar. Drifted in and out a bit, ordered my first and last drink from Don, yet another diet Coke, pint-sized. Decided to reignite brain by writing this.

PS. The Flight

Dan very generously provided us with free mineral water as the wait for the coach ticked on inexorably. Eventually, about ten minutes late at 2.15am, the coach arrived with a way too cheery rep and we were transported to the airport where a very curious thing happened. We Brummie travellers were placed in a long slow line behind one check-in desk while an earlier Manchester flight [marked delayed on the departure board] occupied three check-in desks. Only when the Mancunians had all been checked in were we switched to three desks and our Brummie queue began to move. This was all taking a lot longer than it should do, and we hadn’t even passed through security yet. Take off time was approaching. Anyway we checked in our bags and got our tickets, mine was 35A, a window seat at the back which turned out to be okay. As we were queuing (again) to go through security, the exact nature of the Manchester flight delay was revealed. They were meant to be due off at 4.45am, but due to a technical fault on their aircraft, they were instead due off at 3.15pm, 10 and a half hours later. So all the Mancunians had to troop back through passport control, including the young couple who were next door to me at Edelweiss in 1B, trek back down to the departure area, be rejoined with their luggage and shipped off to a hotel for the day (only to come back to the airport and do it all over again). Oh to be able to watch the Olympic Holidays reps who had to face a planeload of sleep-deprived, belligerent Mancunians. The issue here is why the Mancunians were checked in with baggage and passed through security when it must have been clear much earlier that they weren’t going to be leaving on time. By the time we got to the departure lounge, there was only about half an hour to go before we took off, and barely enough time to be gouged for €3.50 for a single Coke Light. Thank you, liquid ban bastards. I spent the flight back in a sleep-deprived daze, drifting in and out. Some excitement was supplied by a passenger who may have swallowed some tea the wrong way and found himself in need of oxygen. Swiftly and quietly through Brum Airport, the Tigger stickers rule.

Infernal Affairs (2002)

Odd that it takes Martin Scorsese 50 more minutes in The Departed (2006) to retell the same story that takes a compact 100 minutes in the Hong Kong original.

Infernal Affairs II (2003)

I’ve only very rarely felt terribly sleepy while in the cinema watching a film. The one that really sticks in my memory is my first viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) on its re-release around the time of The Sacrifice (1986). For those who don’t know, Stalker, while obviously a classic and a film I both respect and admire tremendously, is awfully slow in pace and it got the better of me to the extent that I drifted off several times during it. If he ever knew how many cinemagoers he sent off into dreamland, I like to think Tarkovsky would have been pissed off in that doomladen Russian way of his. The one other time I succumbed to some five minute naps was during an all night screening at the Brixton Ritzy, but I think I can be forgiven this one as it was an all night quadruple bill. Incidents since then have mostly revolved around other people falling asleep during movies, particularly old, crusty-looking dudes who may have been using the cinema as a noisy motel for some daylight kip time. I really don’t understand how it’s possible to get any sleep at all with the aggressive 5.1 sound of a Hollywood blockbuster banging away at you. And yet it is. What I’m trying to say here is that I was feeling awfully sleepy throughout this viewing of Infernal Affairs II and this is precisely the kind of film that it’s a really bad idea not to be able to give your full attention to.

Sunshine (2007)

I’m caught between this first viewing of the film in which you familiarise yourself with the plot, the events, the story and the characters, and the second viewing that this film demands, which I haven’t yet had, when I feel a little more aware after viewing the extras as to whether or not the whole premise of the film isn’t just really stupid. The sun will die on us in this planetary system, but not for billions of years, and since essentially the sun already is a huge bomb, it doesn’t make any sense to reignite it (if you could even do that) with another much smaller, man-made bomb a mere fifty years in the future. The film may be as scientifically silly as the heavily criticised premise of The Core (2003), another film I haven’t seen. However, the characters are interesting, something quite clever is being done with the breakdown in gravitational and temporal rules the closer you get to the sun, and it looks great. The CG effects are both tremendous and more than a little trippy. So there are a lot of plusses; I just didn’t like the film as much as I liked Solaris (2002).

28 days later… (2002)

As I’m clearly on a Danny Boyle kick, I thought it was about time to watch an earlier film, which infamously invented the “fast zombie” that was also heavily criticised in the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004). Made on a low budget with a lot of the film shot on DV, the film is more interesting in its first half hour than later on when it all starts to become more generic and uninteresting. There’s also an absolutely terrible plot point about halfway in which the characters have to traverse a tunnel underneath the Thames unnecessarily when we’ve already been clearly shown that they could just drive over Westminster Bridge. Oops. In a lot of ways, George A Romero is right to criticise the fast zombie motif; a rotting corpse brought to life is not going to retain muscle tone or speed or bodily coherence. 28 days later… just about gets away with it since it doesn’t flat out come and say that the plague victims in the film are zombie zombies.

The Kingdom (2007)

There’s also quite a bit of papering over the cracks in this film, in which a lot of overly familiar action film motifs (the buddy cops who initially don’t get on then bond together to solve the case, the evil master criminal lurking in the background, etc) have been successfully buried by the film’s terrific, original setting and hell for leather, you-are-there, handheld camerawork, copied I think wholesale from Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass’ work on the Bourne trilogy, and influenced more than a little by Michael Mann’s own directorial work (Mann served as co-producer on this film). Even the slightly patronising arrogance with which the Americans discover most of the leads in the investigation of a bombing in a Saudi Arabian compound is subtly undermined in the film’s exceptional all-action third act, when it is made crystal clear to them that their presence in this country has not necessarily been to everyone’s benefit. Quite the opposite. There are enough refreshing notes of terse ambiguity left in the script to make one look out for what director Peter Berg did next. Unfortunately, that was Hancock (2008), a film I haven’t seen because I could see all too clearly exactly how much it had been compromised for a family audience just from a few viewings of the trailer. A drunk, useless superhero is a terrific premise for a movie, and it still is, because by all accounts, Hancock is not the film that delivered on that premise.

Miami Vice (2006)

For the record, this was the Unrated Director’s Cut. The first shock was that the film doesn’t begin in media res as it did theatrically, but with an enormously expensive-looking powerboat race off the coast of Miami. On his commentary track, Mann makes mention that this isn’t really a Director’s Cut since the theatrical version was his cut as well; he does mention that this is a revision of the film two months after release, in which Mann may have been influenced by the reviews that found the film too confusing, which is a nonsense since the film only requires that you give it your full attention rather than checking your brain in at the ticket office. It takes an admirable amount of guts to produce a genuine reimagining of a 20 year old premise from a TV series rather than reenacting the TV series as an empty ironic object full of blokes in Armani suits with the sleeves rolled up. If that’s what the initial audience for this film expected, more fool them. Michael Mann is a much better filmmaker than that, and here he proves it again.

Lilo & Stitch (2002)

In the wake of all of the extras I saw last week, I had to watch the film again, and it continues to hold up. It stars Tia Carrere as the voice of Nani, and she turns up in…

Rising Sun (1993)

The launch of a new format provides some subtle clues to what the film companies regard as their major potential sellers. 20th Century Fox launched widescreen VHS with Die Hard, Alien and the original Star Wars trilogy, and this film, which turned up on DVD three years after the format launch, is one of Fox’s first back catalogue releases on Blu-ray. Clearly, there must be some kind of audience out there waiting to snap it up in high definition. This isn’t a cult audience eagerly awaiting the arrival of Donnie Darko (2001); this isn’t an audience that’s set up websites to discuss the fascinating topic of precisely how many minutes of screen time take place in cars driving between buildings during both night and day so Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes can fill us in on the plot and provide what passes for character development in the Michael Crichton universe (this isn’t a diss; I like Michael Crichton’s work a lot). Rising Sun must have been a solid, consistent seller on DVD over the last 8 years for it to reach the head of the high definition queue. Yet as a movie, it’s only solid rather than spectacular, a chance for Philip Kaufman to assure executives made nervous by the NC-17-rated Henry & June (1990) that he’s still a commercial filmmaker. It’s one he made for them, rather than for himself.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) *

So where does that leave Guillermo Del Toro’s highly touted and eagerly awaited (especially by me) sequel to 2004’s original? Del Toro has received extensive critical approval for the films he’s made in Spanish - Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - whereas his films in English have for the most part been more financially successful but subject to a fair number of sniffy reviews. Even though, for someone like myself who’s seen all of them, they have mostly been constructed from terribly similar personal obsessions - clockwork, insects, surrealism, and so on - and in a weird kind of way have fed off each other and enabled each individual project to come to fruition. Hellboy II only started to seem like a bankable idea again (Hollywood watchers will note that this sequel has been produced - maybe uniquely - by an entirely different corporation) after the critical praise dealt out to Pan’s Labyrinth, and the original Hellboy only fell into place after Blade II (2002) was a major hit. Del Toro has made the sequel more him and less Mignola, when what made the original work so well were all the quirky Mignola-style character notes that were especially emphasised in the Extended Cut of the original. So the sequel looks fabulous, every dollar of the budget is on the screen, and yet it’s nowhere near as interesting. It has a straightforward narrative, more old school Dr Who-style running around in tunnels, and an action beat (read: fight scene) every 10 minutes. The emotional heft of the story has been lost, which in the wake of the strong impact of Pan’s Labyrinth, is especially disappointing. All we can hope is that Del Toro will rediscover his mojo with The Hobbit films, and there won’t be quite so much running around in tunnels, except perhaps under the Misty Mountains. And in Smaug’s cave (I think Smaug lives in a cave, right?). Oh.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Maybe Del Toro should take a leaf out of the Coens’ book, and never make a film for them, meaning the studios, although there was Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004), and they’re better than you think, cause, y’know, it’s the Coen brothers. I’m still learning to like the Lebowski, but I’m getting there. It is really unusual for a major studio release, though, and you can see why this film has become a cult and Rising Sun hasn’t.

The Story Room: The Making of Lilo & Stitch (2005)

While it might seem in many ways a minor entry in the Walt Disney canon, recent developments in the world of animation have assigned it another place of importance: it was the Disney studio’s last major 2D animated hit when in 2002 it outperformed the much more expensive (and by no means terrible) Treasure Planet (2002) at the American box office. And this 2nd disc of the DVD release includes an indepth 2 hour exploration (which can be expanded to about 3 1/2 hours with a bunch of supplemental featurettes) of how two first-time writer/directors (though both Disney veterans in other areas), Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, pulled it off.

This release followed in the tradition of the exemplary 2-Disc Special Edition release of Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), where, regardless of the qualities or not of the finished product, a comprehensive 2 hour documentary (amongst many other features) told in impressive detail how and why it had been brought to the screen.

It was at this stage that the Disney villain of the piece, then-CEO Michael Eisner, enters the picture. Propped up by a bunch of unreliable marketing reports (”parents didn’t like changing the discs” - so don’t buy the SE, buy the standard edition, you dopes - duh!), irritating corporate bottom-line-ism and his own personal prejudices, Eisner decided that 2-Disc Special Editions which paid respect to a large number of the artists who created these films were to be shitcanned and replaced with bog-standard, feature-light DVDs packed not very full with crappy DVD games for kids and Gareth Gates music videos for no one.

This wouldn’t have been much of a problem except that at this time Disney had embarked on a series of dedicated 2-Disc Platinum Edition releases packed to the gills with the kind of indepth documentary materials, commentary tracks, DTS soundtracks and the like, the majority of which was clearly aimed at adult DVD collectors like me, and not the kids that Eisner thought should be the Special Edition’s intended market; this is precisely the kind of arrogant, blundering wrongheadedness that was ultimately to cost Eisner his job.

The immediate effect of this was that The Lion King (1994) still came out as a 2-Disc Special Edition, but was curiously denuded of a lot of the kind of exemplary background material that had characterised previous releases in the series. Instead there were any number of plugs for The Lion King Broadway musical and featurettes about how great Walt Disney World was, and wasn’t it about time you paid a visit? And The Lion King had been Disney’s biggest recent hit! It deserved much better treatment than this.

One of the other casualties was the 2-Disc Special Edition of Lilo & Stitch, which at the time of writing has still not been released in the US. Eisner has now gone, Pixar has taken over Disney, and it is yet to be seen whether or not the much ballyhooed commitment the Pixar team have publicly made that they would support a 2D animated feature if they felt it was the right way to tell the story will come true. Let’s hope so.

Lilo & Stitch was the little film that could, it was the last film of the much derided Thomas Schumacher era (appointed Animation CEO in the wake of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s controversial departure, though disappointing returns from Treasure Planet led to Schumacher’s departure as well) to connect with a popular audience, proof that a good story, well-developed characters and great jokes could still win through in 2D at a time when the domination of 3D animation had started to become one obvious future. But, for just one example, as the films of Hayao Miyazaki showed, especially Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), not the only one.