The Hollywood Projects

Hollywood Project #4 - Stanley Kubrick

2010-03-09T21:18:00.004-05:00

When Pierce Brosnan drove onto the lot at the legendary Pinewood Studios, England, to shoot scenes for Tomorrow Never Dies, he might have noticed a lighter than usual press platoon. Bond movies had been filming at Pinewood since, well, ever and usually dominated the eyes and pens of the British movie press. But for this shoot, all focus was on another building on the lot where a tiny, intimate marriage drama was in principal photography. All the press wanted to know was what Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were up to. What was the plot of Eyes Wide Shut? What was Stanley Kubrick making? By this point, Kubrick had become a myth and a legend. He had lived in seclusion in the English countryside longer than he had ever lived in his native America. He was a recluse who had made his last picture at Pinewood 13 years earlier, and that one nearly a decade after the one before. It didn't matter what he was making; Stanley Kubrick behind a camera was a headline.

Kubrick is a tough sell for some people. He made personal movies that moved to his own internal rhythms, and he didn't really care if a mainstream audience could follow along. And so, in response, many audiences didn't. I can relate. My first real experience with Kubrick came when I was 18 years old and on the very edge of welcoming my daughter into the world. My wife and I had rented movies to wait out another sweltering Georgia summer weekend inside, a necessity since she was overdue and carrying ten pounds worth of extra person around her waist. We chose horror movies for reasons that probably made sense at the time, and one of those was The Shining. I had never seen it before and I remember feeling lost and alienated and more than a little put out by this movie that refused to be a standard romp through a haunted house. I paused it at the halfway point and got up for a soda. Before I could start the second half, my daughter arrived. It would be nearly ten years before I finished the film.

By that time, The Shining was (almost) the last Kubrick film that I hadn't seen. A front row, 35mm viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey had changed my entire outlook on Kubrick, film storytelling, and pretty much everything. I'd started devouring Kubrick movies and watching them on loop, feeling like I'd cracked some kind of code. The funny thing about Kubrick the filmmaker and, by some accounts, Kubrick the man, is that the closer you get to an answer, the more you realize how little you actually know. His movies are like puzzles that have questions for answers.

I'm not alone in this. Kubrick never won an Oscar, his movies were rarely huge blockbusters, he infuriated writers whenever he was forced to work with them, and critics and audiences argued the value of his films for years or even decades after release. He divided his audience, always. And yet, of his small resume of feature films, four appear on the AFI's list of the 100 best American movies ever made, and nine of them show up on IMDB's top 250 user favorites, surprisingly suggesting that audiences have embraced his work even more than the critics. It's not a strange thing to hear Kubrick singled out as one of the best American filmmakers. Ever.

I tried once before to launch a Stanley Kubrick Project, but I chickened out. I didn't feel up to the task of ranking a batch of classic and near-classic films from such an intellectual filmmaker. I felt like maybe I should stick to sci-fi and spy movies until I got my sea legs, but then realized that if I waited around to feel adequate in the shadow of Stanley f'n Kubrick, I'd be writing this piece through a Ouija board. Fuck it, I'm going in.

Name: Stanley Kubrick

Birth: July 26, 1928 in New York City

Death: March 7, 1999 (heart attack)

Parents: Jacques and Gertrude Kubrick

Life: Stanley Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, the son of a doctor. From all accounts, Stanley was an intelligent student, but struggled with his studies. Kubrick's difficulties caused him to bounce around between relatives and school districts, and when that didn't work, Kubrick's father introduced his son to a variety of hobbies to encourage focus. These hobbies included jazz, chess, and, most interestingly, photography. Kubrick became fascinated with the camera, and while his grades didn't improve, he showed enough aptitude to sell an unsolicited photo to Look magazine and soon earned his way onto the publication as a full-time photojournalist.

Kubrick married his high-school girlfriend, Toba, in 1948, but the couple grew apart during the filming of Kubrick's first feature, Fear and Desire. Kubrick would marry twice more in the next few years, finally settling with actress Christiane Harlan, and he would stay with her for the rest of his life.

Frustrated with the Hollywood environment, Kubrick moved to rural England in the 1960s and rarely left again, reportedly due to an intense fear of flying. He was famously private, hiding his life the manor walls and obsessing over his work.

His quiet life ended just so. He died in his sleep of a heart attack just four days after screening a finished cut of his final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Trademarks:
- Most of Kubrick's films are based on novels, and he worked on the screenplay adaptations for all but one of them (Spartacus).

- He liked to use wide shots, long tracking shots (and reverse tracking shots), and often used a close-up that features a character staring directly into the camera to reveal madness or anger.

- Famously used classical music to score his films and frequently juxtaposed the music with unusual elements, such as space travel or violence.

- Sex, war, and dark comedy are subjects in most, if not all, of his films.

Number of Eligible Films: 13

What's Out: We won't be looking at Kubrick's early short documentary work, such as Day of the Fight (which he based off a photo essay he produced for Look magazine) or The Seafarers (an industrial film promoting a sailor's union.) Also out is Flying Padre, a short documentary about a priest/pilot that sounds like it could make for a pretty bitchin' TV show. Short films, especially industrial commissions, just don't compare well to his feature work.

Notes: I'm sure that were Kubrick alive he'd hate the idea of someone reducing his life's work to a series of rankings, but that's what we do here so I'm going to give it a shot. Still, there will be a few format changes to accommodate the subject.

First of all, Kubrick has a shitload of ideas and themes and just... business going on in his movies, and I'm never going to have the room to talk about it if I tie myself up with bullet points. I'm going to have a few, and maybe some headers, but I'm going to go freestyle for a lot of these essays.

I'm also switching to a Mondays-only format for this Project and the foreseeable future. I've been struggling lately to find the time for my personal projects in between posts here, and I don't want my work here to suffer. Cutting back on posting seemed like the best solution.

That's it. I hope you're as excited as I am to dig into Kubrick's work and please check in next Monday for the first film in the Stanley Kubrick Project.

The Last 'Most Favorite' List of 2009 - Part 2

2010-03-01T22:38:00.004-05:00

Holy crap, it's been two weeks since my last ~~confession~~ substantial post. I've been royally snowed under with work lately. I've got new projects at my day job, no less than three personal writing projects at home, *cough*MassEffect2*cough*, and a huge horror movie festival in downtown Durham. Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula. For reals.

That's the past. Now, it's time to finish this thing, and by that, I mean my top seven favorite movies of 2009. I have to clear this piece out to make room for Hollywood Project #4, starting next Monday. Yep, I've picked the director, lined up the films, and sketched out the rough draft of my rankings. I'm ridiculously excited to talk about this guy, because he's obviously one of the all-time gotta-see filmmakers. I'm also changing up my usual presentation, starting with the introduction. It always interests me to see how artists that should have nothing to do with one another can share common ground, so from now on I'm going to find a link between my previous Project and the new one, and I'll do that in Monday's post. This new Project should be a lot of fun, and I hope you'll take the trip with me.

Officially closing out 2009, here are my favorite movies. There are some crowd-pleasers on this list and a couple that I'd call sRiUs @rt. All are worth checking out, for sometimes wildly different reasons.

7.) Up in the Air

More than any other movie on this list, Up in the Air is a picture of its time. The film couldn't be more 2009 if it had a date stamp in the bottom corner. George Clooney plays a professional downsizer, a man whose only job is to tell you that yours is over. But even as his industry enjoys a boon in These Tough Economic Times, the high costs of air travel and doing business in person threatens to take Clooney off the road he loves so much.

The poster is half-right. The movie is about connections, but it's also about disconnections and the frustration, uncertainty, and terror that come with feeling like you might be all alone out there. Clooney's character prides himself on dishing out pleasing bits of emotional comfort food while breaking the bad news, but he keeps his distance from the rest of the world partly because he's afraid that someday he'll be on the other end, hear the same kinds of lines, and find out just how full of shit he really is. It's a classic, and classy, character study that I'm still unpacking months after my first viewing.

The film's misleading ambivalence about Clooney's job and the economic climate irritated some, but I think the movie draws a solid mark on the young career of director Jason Reitman. He brought us Thank You for Smoking and Juno, but this is the first movie where I felt like his voice was the star of the show and the film is even better for it.

6.) Up

Pixar has slowly cornered the market in mastering stories that should be impossible to tell. I think we can all get behind the idea of toys coming to life when the humans leave the room. We can clearly see the movie in a father fish swimming across the ocean to rescue his lost son. But how about a rat with a dream of opening a Parisian restaurant? Or a Buster Keaton romance about a junk robot left behind when the Earth is destroyed? These ideas are still high concept, but not nearly as accessible to an audience. The movie doesn't play out in your head when you hear the pitch. In other words, if Pixar didn't have the power to make it happen, these movies would never have been made.

Up is the latest in Pixar's string of perfect, impossible stories. An elderly man uses a million balloons to fly his house to South America. In any other hands, it should have been a disaster, but Pixar delivered a movie absolutely stuffed with comedy, heartbreak, and an opening sequence so touchingly tragic that people will talk about it for years. That sequence alone will likely win the studio another Oscar for Animated Feature and helped to lift Up to only the second ever Best Picture nomination for an animated film. Not too shabby for a movie featuring a hundred talking dogs.

5.) The Hurt Locker

Nobody saw The Hurt Locker in theatres, which is a tragedy because the film begs so obviously for a huge screen and booming speakers. This isn't your typical indie tearjerker that plays to golf-clapping crowds. The movie is a big bag of raw, jangled nerves in which every scene sets out with the goal of topping the last one. The film wants you to chew your fingers down to the knuckle. It wants to kick your ass.

Jeremy Renner breaks out as a US bomb disposal specialist stationed in Iraq, but the real star of the show is director Kathryn Bigelow, who finally received the notice with this film that she has long deserved. She gave the world Near Dark, Strange Days, and Point Break, and she'll probably win an Oscar for this one. If she does, she'll be the first female director to do so. It's a well-deserved honor.

I love this movie, even if I feel a step behind the rest of the internet for having a few reservations. Call it my No Country of Old Men for 2009. There are scenes in the middle that I can't quite get behind, and the script gets a little unfocused. It doesn't really matter, trust me. This is truly one of the best films of the year and one that will live forever on DVD.

4.) The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Or "how I learned to get over myself and embrace Terry Gilliam."

I've struggled for years to seriously get behind Gilliam's work. I love a few of his films, of course. Brazil is an unquestioned classic and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my favorite films of the 90s. He's made some great films, but the rest of them often leave me scratching my head, wondering why he would make some of these unusual, offputting choices. I'm one of the dwindling minority who thinks that the last 30 seconds of Time Bandits, yes, derails that film, or that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is kind of a mess, and believe me, these are unpopular stances for a serious film nerd to take. The critical community reveres Gilliam like a wise and mad prophet, and whenever the director gets a bum deal from a studio or, well, life, it only serves to energize and unite his fan base around him, even in the wake of his 2005 one-two sucker punch of The Brothers Grimm and Tideland.

Now comes this movie, an incredibly personal essay about the burden of imagination in a world that only looks anymore for the junk behind the curtain. I've been stirred. The brilliant Christopher Plummer stars as a traveling showman with a mystical past, scouring the world to tell his stories and save some souls as his audience grows smaller and less interested by the minute. If you're looking for similarities between Plummer's forgotten storyteller and the director himself, don't be afraid. You're meant to find them. Gilliam has pulled the heart right from his chest and thrown it onto the screen, and I found myself completely taken in by what he has to say. This isn't a perfect film. It's messy and the seams are showing, most obviously in the cobbled together performances of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell stepping in for the late Heath Ledger, but the film glorifies those seams and revels in its mess. The point isn't to create a slick entertainment, but to create something real from something patently false, to find a true emotion and then draw it from whatever audience he can cobble together. I loved the seams in this movie, and its message has me looking back at Gilliam's previous work and giving it a second glance. Check this one out as soon as you can.

3.) A Serious Man

A Serious Man is the movie on my list most likely to start an argument between viewers, because it will mean many different things to many different people, and possibly to no end (spoiler alert?). This movie will infuriate as much as it uplifts, which is sometimes how you tell the great movies from the curiosities.

Joel and Ethan Coen have a lot on their mind as they tell the story of Larry Gopnik, a Minnesota math professor who suddenly finds the world quite literally turned against him. The story, whatever there is of it, chronicles his search for answers, but not necessarily his discovery of them. Many critics saw A Serious Man as a tale about the meaning of life and the lack thereof. I saw it as a biblical game of chicken between God's wrath and poor, poor Larry Gopnik, a game that rarely works out for the everyman.

I'm really not sure what else I can say about the film. People will like it, or they won't. The filmmaking is careful and clean, but every frame is packed with meaning and red herrings. It's like watching a great book. By the way, my money is on the dybbuk in the first reel. The farmer's wife had it right.

2.) Fantastic Mr. Fox

I knew two things for certain at the beginning of 2009. One, Wes Anderson's schtick had worn out its welcome in my movie universe, and two, Pixar owned animation. Nothing on this earth could have swayed me from those two absolute, irrefutable facts. Nothing. At. All.

Who knew? Seriously, who knew? Who knew that Anderson's vintage kitsch visuals would translate so perfectly into the homemade, Rankin/Bass world of Mr. Fox? More to the point, who knew that it would come together with so much life, more than I remember finding in Anderson's last two live-action films. Combined.

Before the release, the only buzz to be found on Fantastic Mr. Fox was a provocative piece in the LA Times that painted Wes Anderson as kind of a weird duck of a director who couldn't even be bothered to show up to his own film shoot. There was no hype, no interest. It was a quiet autumn release for what seemed to be an unremarkable film, an animation also-ran, and then suddenly everything changed. Critics jumped over each other to praise the film, and commenters all over the map began to declare Fox as, really?, one of the best pictures of 2009. And they were right.

There's so much heart and creativity on display here that it revitalized my passion for Wes Anderson's films. I intend to pair this one with The Royal Tenenbaums as soon as it hits DVD, but don't worry, it's good for families, too. Hotbox!

1.) Inglourious Basterds

Haters love to burn on Quentin Tarantino, which is completely beyond my understanding. He takes knocks for his dominating dialogue and his fetish for other movies, but he always creates a finished product that's completely unique and unlike any of the trash bin classics that he's pulling from. Every filmmaker borrows. Martin Scorsese liberally lifted from Hitchcock and the Archers for his new flick, Shutter Island. It's called homage, but when Tarantino borrows, it somehow graduates to larceny.

Inglourious Basterds is a my open and shut case. Supposedly remaking Enzo Castellari's 1978 WWII heist movie, The Inglorious Bastards, Tarantino dumped the original entirely and spun his own tale about vengeance, Nazi scalpers, and a wicked villain called the Jew Hunter. What started as a remake turned into no remake at all. If Tarantino wanted to plagiarize, this was his chance. Nobody would have questioned him. You might even argue that stealing was his task, his actual job on this film, and he couldn't do it. Instead, not only did he make his own story, but he actually set it in his own private World War II, and boy did that send his critics to the next level, shifting through contradictory complaints so fast that they could have burned out their clutch. Tarantino is derivitive! Why does he have to be so damn different?

Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's best film since Pulp Fiction, straight up, and it may be even better. It's a love letter to all of Tarantino's usual suspects, but it's also the first of his films to so nakedly embrace his favorite subject – his affair with the movies. He made a film in which every character is a performer, all the world is truly a stage, and the right film at the right time can save the globe. And it's still got some kick-ass dialogue and bad guys getting shot in the face.

I like his war better, anyway.

There's one last piece I hope to have posted before I start the new Project on Monday, but if it doesn't happen, I'll find time to post it in the middle. See you next on Monday for the Project launch!

Hangin' In

2010-02-25T18:59:00.003-05:00

A quickie update for everyone.

I've been snowed under with personal projects and I haven't found the time to write up my favorite seven films just yet. When I have that done, it'll be here within minutes. I'm aiming for Monday night as the big finish.

As you can see in the header, my new Hollywood Project will begin on March 8. I'll have more to say about that on Monday.

To entertain you until then, here's a chimp impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Last 'Most Favorite' List of 2009 - Part 1

2010-02-15T23:23:00.002-05:00

I feel like Facebook owes me an apology. Or I owe you an apology on Facebook's behalf. Or something in that ballpark.

There's this site and the RSS feed, but I know that a lot of people who choose to follow this page do so using the Facebook feed. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way this weekend that while Facebook does show the photos I attach to each post, it won't show embedded video.

My last post began with praise for a great horror spoof film and ended with a gentle reminder of my coming "favorites" list. Unfortunately, without the video, all the Facebook readers saw was:

"Because you just have to see it. Be back on Monday with some of my favorite movies from 2009!"

Yay self-aggrandizing!! I promise, guys, I'm not that much of an asshole.

My favorites list isn't what I'd call essential reading, although I had fun writing it and I hope you have fun checking it out, or, better yet, checking out these movies that I found so entertaining. Again, this is in no way a "best of." These just happened to be my favorites. This is the first half of the list, and I'll post Part 2 on Thursday. You'll notice that I begin with the number 14. I do that as a statement of free will against the monolithic top ten format by proving that lists don't have to fit comfortably on a pair of human hands! Or something.

Why 14? The real answer: I didn't have much to say about number 15.

Allez cine!

14. ) Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans

Yes, the film has at least one title too many and, yes, it started life as a cynical remake cashing in on the questionable name recognition of Abel Ferrara's 90s classic, but somewhere in production, this nightmare went hilariously right. Someone had the good sense to hire Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage, two talents who have searched their whole careers for each other. Herzog is one of the planet's last true renegade filmmakers and Cage made his name, for good or ill, by performing without a net. What they've created together is a surreal, twisted movie that shifts between being an unflinching character study about a corrupt cop to an intentionally hilarious spoof of unflinching character studies about corrupt cops. The movie becomes increasingly unhinged as the drugs and abuse slowly morph Cage's character into a cajun hunchback, spitting out ugliness from behind a clenched jaw. Herzog and Cage tear the whole movie down around the character's ears leaving... what? A comedy? a tragedy? Whatever it is, it's not just a remake.

13.) Public Enemies

A lot of people dismissed this movie simply because of what it wasn't. Michael Mann's romanticized epic about the last of the rock star bank robbers and the rise of the FBI was unfairly attacked for its slow pace and unfocused narrative, but despite the Johnny Depp-centered ad campaign, this was never a movie just about John Dillinger. This is a movie about a time, the last moment in American history where a person could be both a criminal and a folk legend, the rise of the government superheros (they were even called the G-Men), and the desperate, sometimes wicked measures they took to restore order in the heartland. It was a time of shifting morals and Mann portrays both sides of that battle, refusing to swear allegiance to either, while staging some of the best action scenes of his career (although arguably not enough of them.) The gunfights are full of frantic energy thanks to his raw, unprocessed digital photography, from the opening prison break to the battle through the woods in Wisconsin, and Depp's performance is strong enough to remind you that he can play normal just as powerfully as he can insane. This one will grow in status over time.

12.) Where the Wild Things Are

Another movie that failed to find its audience, but this one will live on for generations. The film's burden is that it's based on a beloved, canonized children's book and, yes, barely resembles it. Sure, a fan can find the book's individual pages scattered throughout. They're all in the movie somewhere, but this isn't an adaptation of the book so much as it's an adaptation of childhood. It's a film that really knows what it's like to be a child, and it isn't all wisecracks and poop jokes, no matter what studio kid flicks want to believe. I have two children of the right age and trust me, it can be like talking to an open wound. They're struggling with emotions they can barely understand and can't hope to control, and director Spike Jonze channels that into his Wild Things, monsters that mirror Max's frustrations with his sister, his weakness, and his fear of losing his place in his mother's world. This movie is one long emotional fit, laid bare and bleeding on the screen, and it's not a comfortable experience... but it is kind of brilliant. Ticket buyers wanted comfort food, not an essay, and turned away from this one. Today. Look back in a decade and I promise things will be different.

11.) (500) Days of Summer

There have been a zillion movies about the grand romantic conquest, but there have been almost zero about the far more common flip side. You know what I'm talking about. Guy meets girl, guy loves girl, but she's just not that into him? This movie finally films the void, chronicling the tumultuous 500 days of romance between Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom and Zooey Deschanel's Summer, a relationship that, we know from the beginning, ends in heartbreak.

But really funny. And very honest. But with a musical number.

Actually, it's very hard to sum up the feel of this movie. This is the one where you start out trying to tell your friend all the best bits and you end by saying "oh, just borrow my copy." There's a reason that writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber suddenly have full plates and director Marc Webb was the left field choice for Spider-Man's new helmer. This movie is a career-maker and an instant underground classic.

10.) Moon

It's a rare thing today to find a science fiction film that actually resembles, in any way, real science fiction. If things aren't blowing up or monsters are not involved, the money guys aren't buying. Period. Thankfully, Duncan Jones made this quirky little indie that's enough real sci-fi to get me through the next five alien invasions. It's the future and we're mining helium-3 off the surface of the moon. It's a largely automated affair but it needs a single human being present in case the operation shuts down. Sam Rockwell plays one such human contracted to the moon for three long years and his time is almost up.... and that's about all you need to know. Seriously, it's not worth even watching the trailer or you'll spoil half the fun. Sam Rockwell absolutely kills in this and he was tragically overlooked during nomination season. Plus, any fans of practical effects have to appreciate the care and detail that went into the exterior moon scenes, which are more real and arguably better looking than anything I saw on Pandora. Not enough people watched this one.

9.) Avatar

I've said enough about this film on the Smash Cut Podcast and I feel like I'll be writing about it for a long time to come (especially since I have to update the James Cameron Project once the DVD releases.) It's the new box office champ, a surprising critical darling, the advance soldier in the 3D revolution, and the new king of the high-octane geek cinema universe.

And the script is a little terrible.

If one were inclined to hate a movie for making it to the big time, this is a very easy movie to hate. But, truthfully, I like the hell out of it, ironically for the exact same reasons that I've been using to defend Titanic for the last decade. Roger Ebert (I believe) coined a phrase that I find more true every year. "It's not what a film is about, but how it is about it." Avatar isn't about very much. Some pre-packaged environmentalist propoganda blended with an anti-war film that solves its problems with war. Add in a little Joseph Cambell and bam, instant blockbuster.

But what a blockbuster. The images Cameron created are hard to shake even when his words are hard to stomach, and the filmmaking technology he pioneered borders on witchcraft. Avatar is a groaner of a story, but it's a technical masterpiece (marred only by some questionable use of shallow focus, but that's for another article.) Sometimes that's enough.

8.) Observe and Report

Yes, I placed a nearly-forgotten Seth Rogen mall comedy above the biggest movie in history. What can I say? It's my list, and I liked this movie more.

I think Observe and Report is a movie that everybody - critics, audiences, everybody - just straight up whiffed on. It arrived in the wake of the truly awful Paul Blart: Mall Cop and it just looked like a mean-spirited, sick version of the same basic premise.

Nobody liked this movie. I couldn't stop thinking about it for months.

I can't believe Jody Hill got away with this film, and some might argue that he didn't, but it's Taxi Driver done funny. All the beats are there. Seth Rogen's Ronnie Barnhardt is a lonely, isolated, and mentally unhinged individual looking to make a connection. He chooses an object to fixate on (a repulsive, plasticine clerk played by Anna Farris instead of Cybill Shepherd's campaign worker) and the rest of the movie is spent wondering just when his internal timer is going to go off and trigger the boom. He even befriends a wounded innocent and threatens her "pimp," a fast food manager played by Patton Oswalt. The finale is a geek show of sustained violence, beginning with a direct riff on the best fight in Oldboy and ending with a shock so sudden that you can't believe it just happened. And maybe it didn't. We spend the movie looking at Ronnie's world from his perspective, but why do we choose to trust his perspective? This is a movie I plan to unpack and examine again and again.

On Thursday, my favorite seven from 2009. See ya then.

Inefficient

2010-02-13T13:15:00.001-05:00

Because you just have to see it.

Be back on Monday with some of my favorite movies from 2009!

The Last 'Least Favorite' List of 2009

2010-02-08T19:18:00.003-05:00

Lists are funny things because once you get started making them, it's really tough to stop. My goal with this site isn't to lay down the law on what movie is definitively better than some other one. That's impossible, and kind of dumb. Can anyone really hold up Aliens and say, yes, no doubt, this film is better than Terminator 2? Better by what standard? Is it even a fair comparison? I can say that Aliens is better than Ghosts of the Abyss, right? Or is that even comparing the same thing anymore? Apples to Volvos.

My real goal with this site has always been to patch holes in my own film knowledge by critically thinking about individual batches of films, and to hopefully start a conversation or encourage someone to check out a director or a film they might not have given a second thought to before. But, really, it's all horse hockey. As I keep saying: what we do here is make lists and lists are meaningless.

But then you get to the end of a calendar year and people start throwing out their “best of” lists. How, exactly? Did you see every single movie released last year? Of course not and neither did I, not even close, and I'm sorry but neither did most of these critics. They got way, way closer than I did, true, but they didn't see everything, so how can they know for sure which was the best? They can assume, sure, but they can't know, but that doesn't stop the lists from pouring in. It's tradition.

Since I'm a sucker for tradition and since (meaningless) lists are what we do here, I'm going to give in and join the noise. I'm very late in the game, true, but I wanted to see a few of the films I missed at the end of the year before I put my final stamp on it. I'm not going to say these movies are the best or the worst, but I will say which are my favorites and my least favorites. Take them for what they are, which isn't much.

Today's list is brief. These are my least favorite viewing experiences of 2009, and I honestly just didn't have too many of them. With the invention of the internet and instant access to the streaming, undulating cultural conversation, how is it even possible to see a load of bad movies in a single year anymore? Word of mouth used to take days to make the rounds, but now Twitterers are revolutionizing all the ways you can use 140 characters to say “sucked!” before they've even left the theatre.

Still, these somehow sneaked through my gate.

5.) The Fourth Kind

This movie is a tax on the gullible. A twist on “found footage” films like The Blair Witch Project, pretending to be (wink, wink) based on facts, this half-cooked alien abduction thriller actually cuts grainy video into the movie purporting to be the “real life” incidents that inspired the film. This might have been a nice idea on paper, but the final “real” footage is choked with suspension shattering moments, such as levitation, terrible acting, and a giant flying saucer. Instead of giving audiences the creeps, it just gives them two bad movies for the price of one, which at least provides some value in today's tough economy. Special no-prize goes to the citizens of Nome, Alaska, whose real life tragic disappearances became just another symptom of alien activity for the film, right alongside (no shit) crop circles.

4.) Friday the 13th

If you believe that remakes don't have to suck, avoid this one or risk losing all hope. The original Friday the 13th isn't a sacred cow; it's not even the best film in its own cheapie franchise. A remake could have brought new life to the series, but for a remake to succeed, it's customary to actually, you know, remake the film. Instead, the entire movie is a generic bag of teenagers getting wiped out at a lake house party. Period. That's it. The end. This one could have fit in snugly anywhere between parts 3 and 7 and you'd never know the difference, except for a few bizarre changes to Jason Vorhees seemingly designed to alienate what fan base the series still had. A confusing misfire, strangely fixated on pot as literally everyone's motivation. I think the writers were trying to tell us something.

3.) Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

This collection of poorly constructed fight scenes and awkward dialogue barely hangs together as a movie, but it will live forever. This movie will last longer than the average cheap-video-game-knock-off-meets-lukewarm-kung-fu-action-film-by-way-of-stereotypical-renegade-cop-film because of its unrelenting, unmerciful hilarity. This is a midnight movie, an exercise in “can you believe this?” filmmaking that will be beloved by stoners and connoisseurs of bad movies for years to come. Chris Klein as Charlie Nash must be seen to be believed. Weeks after this movie hit theatres, fan videos of Nashisms were making the round on YouTube, but the studio quickly pulled them all, I guess to keep the street cred alive for this turkey? Huge mistake. If the movie ever embraces its true awfulness, this could be the next Showgirls. You heard it here first.

2.) Gamer

If you can stomach Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's "epilepsy as a visual style" method of directing... or if you didn't mind the misguided and self-defeating potshots at gamers and gaming culture... or if you're not offended by the cutesy references to Blade Runner that dare to suggest this movie's message is anywhere in the same stratosphere as that film's examination of free will... can we all at least agree that the abuse of women in Neveldine/Taylor films has got to stop? The presence of a character named Rick Rape (with appetites to match) only brought back painful memories of Neveldine/Taylor's action “masterpiece” Crank, and its message that if you just rape a woman enough, she'll think it's hot.

F these guys. It's rare that I hate a movie this much.

1.) The Unborn

Yes, I've seen The Exorcist, too. Saying “but this time it's Jewish” doesn't mean you're done. You still have to write a script.

Actually, there's a good idea at the heart of this thing, but you'll struggle to locate it beneath the layers of unnecessary jump scares, nonsense editing, and silly violence. A movie this bad has no business exploiting the Holocaust just to fill out the backstory. Gary Oldman looked embarrassed to be on set, and he was in TipToes.

The Unborn was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've had watching a movie in a long, long time.

Thankfully, there were so many better movies on my 2009 list. Next time, some of my favorites!

Final Thoughts - The James Bond Project

2010-02-04T18:34:00.003-05:00

So that didn't work out as planned.

I'm not talking about the vesper martini, although that's totally on my fail list. When the James Bond Project launched, I promised that the final post (hint: this one) would feature my first run-in with Bond's official drink, but then the skies dumped a blanket of snow and tauntauns on North Carolina this last weekend, and my plan fell apart.

Now, I've lived in Canada. Yes, a temperate, wet corner of Canada, but Canada nonetheless. I'm not afraid to brave a snow storm, especially not when booze is on the line, but the people serving that booze were not so hardcore. When I finally found an open bar, the "I wish I was home right now" server wasn't about to let me go off menu, especially not in search of a drink made with now-fictional ingredients like Kina Lillet. I settled for a chocolate martini, which, judging by the look on my girlfriend's face, might as well have been concentrated estrogen.

By the following night, even that place had barred the doors, leaving a Mexican grill and its menu full of margaritas as my only option. Oh, I drank, but I never found the drink. When the ice thaws, I'll be tripping over vespers, but not this weekend, not today, and not in time for this post.

In other words, insert that old cliché about best laid plans, because it also applies to my journey through this project. As a lifelong Bond fan, I thought it would be a breeze to talk about all the great Bond films the franchise had produced in its nearly five decades of life. I figured I'd hit "the good stuff" fairly early. Imagine my surprise when I was still swimming in mediocrity halfway through. There are less decent movies than I'd thought, and only about five or six that I could recommend as films without hesitation. I still love Bond, but it turns out that I don't really love a lot of his movies.

So what's the big deal, then? Why the fan following and the 20+ years of continuity for a series with so many sinkholes? Superman and Batman faced reboots after four movies. Spider-Man only made it to three. Jason Bourne got one well-received trilogy and now faces the threat of a prequel (a reset by another name.) Harry Potter's story will end with the final book. Dirty Harry, John McClane, Rocky, and Rambo are all retired or nearly so. Why has James Bond alone endured all these years, virtually unchanged?

The answer begins in the long parade of actors playing Bond, interchangeable enough to make Eli Whitney proud. OK, we love this Bond or that Bond more than this other Bond over here, but let's be honest; the character is larger than any single actor. The producers can throw a new face on the franchise every decade like a fresh coat of paint and the public will still show up. There's no need to perpetually reboot and revamp as long as Britain produces a suitably dark and charming hunk at least once a generation.

This Dial-a-Bond approach gave the franchise room to grow into its roots, allowing a canon of characters and gimmicks to establish itself. The series may be as shallow as a tide pool, but good luck finding another franchise with this level of reverence for its history. The death of Tracy Bond still scored a reference in Tomorrow Never Dies, nearly 30 years after the character was shot. Lois Maxwell remained as Moneypenny, even as her Bonds grew younger. An entire film (Die Another Day) was assembled from scratch using only in-jokes and references.

So what does 40 years of hero continuity leave you with? Plenty of time to explore the villains, which may be the real key to the franchise's success. Longtime producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli demanded that each Bond film feature a villain more dastardly than the last, and he wasn't shy about chasing trends. If nuclear fears were on the rise, Bond would go after a rogue warhead. Energy problems in the 70s? Bond thwarts a plot to hoard limitless free energy from the world. Bond has taken a tour through our changing landscape, from the Cold War to the digital age, from distrust of the media to the planet's dwindling oil and water supplies. Is there even a precedent for such a hero, willing to stand up, put his life on the line, and sock our collective fears square in the jaw?

Oh, right.

Call it a ten-cent diagnosis, but somewhere in the back of our lizard brains we like to feel that we're in charge of things when, of course, we rarely are. Cartoons like James Bond are laughable in their perfection, but they empower people to feel like their place in the world isn't as fragile as it sometimes seems. These characters reflect our own natures, and stand in for us when tragedy and crisis keep the world from making sense.

And as long as James Bond continues to fill that role, the character's popularity could last for another 50 years. Or more.

So where does Bond go from here? I don't think anyone is exactly sure. The new Daniel Craig films are still struggling to find their sweet spot between new-style action and nostalgia. Casino Royale got it right, Quantum of Solace not so much. The third film will set the pace. Personally, I fear that the less Bond-like the character becomes, the larger the risk of permanent damage or a fall into irrelevancy. Although, to put it mildly, nobody ever made a fortune betting against the series. (Poor George Lazenby even lost one.) The only thing I can safely predict is that James Bond will return. And I'll toast my martini to that, chocolate or otherwise.

Bond #1 - Goldfinger

2010-01-25T16:47:00.004-05:00

Without this film, there’s no Bondmania... and maybe no more Bond.

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Sean Connery

SETUP: MI6 suspects a wealthy businessman named Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) of illegal gold smuggling, and they’d like to know how he’s doing it. James Bond takes the assignment after crossing paths with Goldfinger in Miami, a meeting that left a young woman murdered by a spray-on golden tan.

BUT IN REALITY: Goldfinger is indeed smuggling, but it’s the last thing the Brits should be worried about. The real concern is Operation Grand Slam, Goldfinger’s scheme to detonate a nuke inside Fort Knox, back when US currency was still backed by gold. Bond alerts the authorities, triggering a major ground skirmish outside the fort. The bomb is defused (with 007 seconds left, of course) and Bond survives to confront Goldfinger in a private airplane, where the villain is sucked out a window to his death.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Goldfinger’s only disfigurement is mental: a driving obsession with gold. He smuggles it, collects it, murders with it, and even wields a golden gun long before Bond’s nemesis Scaramanga.

THE MUSCLE: Goldfinger employs Oddjob, a thick, mute, Korean wrestler with a razor-rimmed bowler hat that can cut the heads off of stone statues. Burly, silent, and armed with a deadly gimmick weapon – Oddjob is the model for all the best Bond henchmen to come, including Jaws.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Two of the most famous Bond Girls in franchise history are in this film. The first is Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), famously killed by gold paint suffocation in the first act of the film. Jill’s sister, Tilly (Tania Mallet), shows up in the middle of the film to avenge her, but she meets a brutal end at the hands of Oddjob and his bowler hat. Instead of decapitation, the hat hits her with enough impact to break her neck and she drops dead in mid-stride.

Once secure in Goldfinger’s clutches, Bond meets the infamous Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). Pussy is no-nonsense, a crack pilot, and also possibly a lesbian, but Bond manages to seduce her anyway (disturbingly, see below). She immediately joins the winning team, selling out Goldfinger and aiding the feds.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: The first classic “Q scene”. Bond visits Q in the gadget room, where he receives his gear for the upcoming mission. Q delivers two things of note here. First, the hands-down, number-one, best Bond gadget of all time, the original Aston Martin DB5, and second, his most famous line: “I never joke about my work, 007.”

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: The ‘60s Bond films are each guilty of at least one embarrassing lapse in judgment, but Goldfinger is so chock full of casual misogyny that I can’t choose just one moment. Bond dismisses a girl from a chat with Felix Leiter by slapping her on her ass and explaining that it’s “man talk.” He later shoves Jill Masterson by the face to get her away from his phone call, which she finds hilarious. He more or less forces himself on Pussy Galore in Goldfinger’s stables which, of course, converts her to Bond’s team (and possibly to men). Audiences at the time ate this stuff up, but these are uncomfortable moments in an otherwise great film.

BOND’S BEST ONE-LINER: “You expect me to talk?” Not a great line, but the setup for the most famous line in Bond history: “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

WORTH MENTIONING: For once, Bond is on the wrong side of history with his musical taste, telling Jill Masterson she should never listen to The Beatles without earmuffs on…The great Gert Frobe didn’t speak English and had to play the part of Goldfinger by speaking his lines phonetically. His voice is dubbed in the final release... This film was the Avatar of its day, grossing so much money so quickly that it entered the Guinness Book of World Records. This overwhelming audience response became known, inevitably, as “Bondmania.”

OVERALL: Goldfinger is a quintessential Bond film, a movie that perfectly represents what the series is and what the franchise strives to deliver. It has action and adventure, gadgets and absurdities, sophistication and class, a world-stomping villain and a legendary lady. Goldfinger is also a required Bond film for any newcomers who want to know the series and find out what the noise is about. If only one James Bond movie survives into the next millennium, this would be the one. It’s too iconic to die.

This may seem like a surprise to some, since Goldfinger has no big aspirations to cultural infamy. It’s a saccharine piece of pop entertainment, a fantasy film built around a superspy too good to be true and a supervillain too big to exist. Auric Goldfinger (even his first name begins with AU) is like a psychotic from Batman’s rogues gallery, singularly obsessed with sticking to a theme. He collects gold to do what? Spend it? Then he’d have less and his enemies would have more. Besides, he’s got too many possessions in need of gold plating. It the ultimate insult when he kills Jill Masterson with gold paint; he must be really angry with a girl if he’s willing to part with gold to end her life.

The film’s lasting power comes from the broad, well-crafted script from Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn, but also from the magnetic performance of Sean Connery, who finally fully realizes the Bond character after spending his first two films working out the kinks. Goldfinger gives him a challenge worthy of a mega hero, lines worth saying, and then plenty of room to maneuver. The film would be nice enough with another actor, but Connery carries it on his shoulders up and over the finish line, just as Harrison Ford with Indiana Jones or Johnny Depp with Pirates of the Caribbean. Connery will never be topped as Bond, and that’s because it’s not a competition. Bond is his role, and Goldfinger proves that. Everyone else is just playing the part.

The James Bond Project

1. Goldfinger

2. From Russia with Love

3. Casino Royale

4. Goldeneye

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

6. Tomorrow Never Dies

7. Octopussy

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #2 - From Russia with Love

2010-01-22T10:06:00.006-05:00

The second Bond movie and the second best ever made.

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Sean Connery

SETUP: A Russian SMERSH operative named Tatiana Romanova contacts MI6 with a fantastic story. She claims to have fallen in love with James Bond from a file photograph and wishes to defect to be with him. Even better, she’ll throw in a top-secret Lektor Decoder if Bond travels to Istanbul personally to pick her up. Is it a trap?

BUT IN REALITY: Obviously, yes, of course it’s a trap, but SMERSH is innocent. The villainous SPECTRE organization, led by former SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb, has cooked this whole thing up in an effort to steal the Lektor, make a tidy profit by selling it back to the Russians, and in the process avenge Dr. No's death by killing Bond. Poor Tatiana is caught in the middle as SPECTRE plays one side against the other, and when the plan goes down, Bond has to escape across land and sea to get the Lektor, Tatiana, and himself back into friendly territory.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) has no physical deformities, save for a passing resemblance to Yoda, but there are some mean-spirited suggestions that she's is a lesbian and that basically counted as a mental illness at the time.

THE MUSCLE: This is one of the rare Bond movies that allows the henchman to steal the show. Donald ‘Red’ Grant is an Aryan, muscular assassin trained specifically to kill Bond. He spends the first half of the film acting as Bond’s guardian angel to keep SPECTRE’s plan intact, but once Bond has the Lektor, Grant moves in for the kill. His final battle with Bond is one of the action highlights of the entire series. A true classic villain, played with perfect menace by Robert Shaw.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Tatiana (Daniela Bianchi) fits the early Bond Girl profile perfectly. She begins as a femme fatale, playfully luring Bond to his doom. Once she’s rolled in the sheets with our hero, her heart miraculously thaws and she repents of all her wicked ways. The role is rather standard, but Bianchi brings quirk to the performance and ends up as one of the most memorable Bond Girls from the Connery era.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Not the first appearance of Major Boothroyd/Q, but the first appearance of Desmond Llewellyn in the role. He delivers Bond a stylish briefcase, which is like a one-stop shop of gadgetry. Throughout the case are a bundle of hidden objects, such as gold sovereigns, throwing knives, tear gas canisters, and even a sniper rifle. Bond gets his mileage out of the case, using it in almost every critical moment and turning it against Red Grant in their final showdown.

MOST EMBARASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Bond’s randy Turkish ally, Kerim Bay, takes him to a gypsy camp to lay low. By a stroke of luck, they arrive just as two gypsy women throw down in a catfight/deathmatch for the hand of the chief’s son. The ladies rip clothes and claw at each other while Bond gives the situation the gravity it deserves. Bond asks the chief to settle their argument, and he does so by giving both women to Bond for the night. Even better, none of this is relevant to the plot or ever mentioned again.

BOND’S BEST ONE-LINER: After Rosa Klebb fails in her attempt to assassinate Bond with a shoe-knife: “She had her kicks.”

WORTH MENTIONING: Final appearance of Sylvia Trench, who was meant to be Bond’s frustrated regular love interest. Somewhere between this movie and Goldfinger, Bond lost her number... The novel was one of John F. Kennedy's personal favorites, and the film is reportedly the last he saw before his death... First film appearance of the villain Blofeld, although he's not mentioned in the credits.

OVERALL: Yeah, this was a close one.

From Russia with Love is one hell of a spy movie, a textbook Cold War potboiler improved by the presence of a superhero. And, make no mistake, that’s what James Bond is. The villains set up their scheme like a rat trap, coaxing the agent in with a prize (the code machine possibly, the woman definitely) and then quickly snapping the trap shut around him. The rest of the film is about watching the impossibly crafty Bond slip through the bars and dodge the broom without so much as mussing his hair. Maybe Bond can’t spin webs or hulk out, but his superpower is that he’s more awesome than you.

And he needed to be. As much as I admire Dr. No, it barely holds together as a movie. The tone is uneven, it’s bogged down with details, and really only succeeds in suggesting Bond as a character. From Russia with Love was the game-changer. Bond was cool. Bond was very cool. In fact, it’s this movie, not the superior sequel, that branded the attitude and slick machismo that made James Bond a megafranchise. There’s a reason that EA looked to this film when looking to sell a retro action game to the modern market.

Notice that I called From Russia with Love a spy movie and not an action movie, and that's important. The film drags in its early scenes, there mostly to pad out a story that boils down to “go get something and then bring it back.” In fact, it’s these dead scenes – the intrigue in Turkey, mostly – that hold the movie back from an even higher rank, because once it gets moving, it flies.

I love the train scenes in this movie. I love Robert Shaw’s Red Grant, and the way he adds tension to even a casual conversation in the dinner car, or how carefully he stalks Bond throughout the course of the movie, like the slasher in some teen horror movie. I love the exploding briefcase and the late-film chase (quietly lifted from North by Northwest’s cornfield by swapping a bi-plane for a helicopter.) I love Tatiana and her conflicted loyalties, and Rosa Klebb’s shoe knife, and the opening hedge maze with its doomed Bond lookalike. Mostly, I just love this movie.

But there’s one Bond movie I love even more.

The James Bond Project

1. ???

2. From Russia with Love

3. Casino Royale

4. Goldeneye

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

6. Tomorrow Never Dies

7. Octopussy

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #3 - Casino Royale

2010-01-18T18:24:00.005-05:00

Not to be confused with anything starring Woody Allen.

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Daniel Craig

SETUP: Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a financier posing as an international bank for terrorists, loses a large sum of his clients' money in a stock fixing scheme foiled by a rookie British agent and, feeling the pressure, organizes a mega-stakes poker tournament as a means of winning it back. MI6 believes that if Le Chiffre loses he’ll have to turn himself in for protection, handing all of his clients to the British in the process. M (Judi Dench) sends the best poker player in MI6 to join the tournament and ensure that Le Chiffre comes up empty. In an astounding coincidence, that poker player is that very same rookie agent, a man named James Bond.

BUT IN REALITY: Actually, that’s pretty much it. Bond smokes Le Chiffre in the tournament while falling for his own treasury agent partner, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green.) An assassin named Mr. White kills Le Chiffre before he can defect, and Bond quits MI6 to spend his days sailing and sunning alongside Vesper. To no one’s surprise except maybe Bond’s, Vesper betrays him and hands the casino winnings over to Mr. White, then drowns herself before giving Bond any answers. Bond pretends that he doesn't care, but rescinds his resignation and begins the hunt for White and his shadowy organization.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Le Chiffre’s left eye (the evil one!) occasionally drips blood due to a “derangement of the tear duct.” And also, ew.

THE MUSCLE: The story begins with a chase scene, as Bond hunts Le Chiffre's personal bomb maker, Mollaka (Sébastien Foucan.) The filmmakers transform what could have been a stock stage-setter into one of the film's highlights by allowing Foucan, co-founder of the parkour movement, to lead Bond in an athletic, eye-popping run through urban Madagascar. In a sharp bit of screenwriting, we learn everything we need to know about our new Bond just by watching him react. When Mollaka takes a flying leap over a wall, Bond bulldozes through it. Mollaka scrambles up a construction site, Bond reasons out a faster way. Mollaka seeks cover in an embassy, so Bond invades the building, drags him outside, and shoots him while setting off a fire bomb to cover his own escape. By the end of the chase, we know that Bond is blunt, smart, and a ruthless killer. And he hasn't even said a word.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: To use a sports analogy, Vesper Lynd is the face of the Bond Girl franchise. She's the most famous of Bond's lovers, at least from the novels, and her betrayal and untimely death serves as a primer for the young secret agent as enters the global stage: Don't trust anyone. Never get close. As finally brought to life here by Green, Vesper is sharp-tongued, witty, and a soft foil for Bond's brutish assault on the poker tournament. Their romance is maybe a bit rushed but coming from a series where seduction often boils down to a popping cork and an erection one-liner, it's surprisingly believable.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Q is conspicuously absent from the Daniel Craig Bond films, and even Craig himself has remarked that there may not be a place for the usually comical character in the current climate of the series. Bond does get a fancy car from the quartermaster’s office, but its most high-tech gadget is a state of the art med kit featuring emergency defibrillators.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Changing the high-stakes game from baccarat, as it was in the novel, to the more mainstream Texas Hold ‘Em poker, a quote unquote sport usually played by people in funny costumes at high roller tables in Vegas instead of by the richest and most dangerous men and women in the world. The switch was intended to allow audiences to follow along with the action, but it comes across as a cheap concession to a temporary ESPN fad.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: “I won't consider myself to be in trouble until I start weeping blood.” -- Bond’s unsubtle jab at Le Chiffre when asked if he's feeling the pressure of the game.

WORTH MENTIONING Before Daniel Craig, the filmmakers seriously considered making a radical youth move by casting Henry Cavill, who was just 23 at the time... The rights to the Casino Royale novel were sold separately by Ian Fleming, which accounts for the four decade delay in bringing the story to the screen as part of the official series. The story has been filmed before, however, most famously as a spoof starring Peter Sellers and Woody Allen. Before that, the story appeared in 1954 on the American TV program Climax!, this time with American agent "Card Sense" Jimmy Bond in the lead.

OVERALL: Casino Royale is a very good movie that just barely misses the mark of a great movie. I blame Paul Haggis.

Let me explain. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Haggis as he seems like a great guy. He's had a strong career as a writer and a director, he's loved by the best in the business, and he has balls of solid brass. I respect all of this, which makes it difficult to admit that his screenplays burn me up. From the cartoons Hilary Swank calls family in Million Dollar Baby to the infuriating revisionism of In the Valley of Elah to pretty much all of Crash, I can't find a single one of his films that I love without at least some reservation, and that includes Casino Royale.

For just about its entire running time, Royale is a slam dunk. The script does a great job of implying the character we all know while allowing this rookie Bond to stumble and fail, gradually finding his footing and locking down his defenses until he's fully arrived. Martin Campbell, no stranger to launching a new Bond, leaves the camera on Craig as much as possible, giving the actor a chance to sell every moment of anger or indecision in his face and eyes. As I took screenshots for this entry, I couldn't believe just how often Craig is left alone in the frame. He is the movie. This is a hero-making film.

And yet somehow the movie fumbles its most important element, Bond and Vesper's relationship. I said before that the romance is believable, and it is, but it's also lifeless, dull, and goes on for much too long. There's a screenwriting philosophy that says your movie is over when the last question is answered. Well, that happens nearly a half hour before the end of Royale's running time. Le Chiffre is dead, the tournament is over, and the heroes are in love, but now we have to go on vacation with them? For the rest of her life? Yes, the extended romance is just there to pack emotional punch for the betrayal, but it halts the momentum and wears out its welcome long before the action starts back up. Lessons could have been learned from On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the efficiency with which the Tracy Bond story becomes part of the main narrative, not just an addendum to it.

All that aside, Casino Royale still serves up a smart, observant take on the Bond character, one that builds slowly and pays off with a great final shot and a recognizable theme song. The film recreates the Bond legend from scratch while still leaving room for the series to feel Bond-like, something that's sorely missed in the direct sequel, Quantum of Solace. And, honestly, the third act diversion seems to work for some people. Obviously, I think those people are wrong, but I think a first-time Bond and a flawed script coming in at #3 is a nice consolation prize. Being "almost the best Bond film ever made" will just have to do. I'm looking at you, Paul.

The James Bond Project

2. ???

3. Casino Royale

4. Goldeneye

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

6. Tomorrow Never Dies

7. Octopussy

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #4 - Goldeneye

2010-01-12T00:42:00.005-05:00

You know the jokes people make about James Bond? Well, he's heard them too.

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Pierce Brosnan

SETUP: Bond and his partner Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) invade a Russian chemical plant during the cold war, but only Bond survives to complete the mission. Years later, Bond's interest in a suspicious woman named Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen) leads him to a stolen helicopter and a Russian doomsday weapon code-named “Goldeneye.” These scenes are supposedly unconnected.

BUT IN REALITY: These scenes are totally connected. Goldeneye is in the possession of Onatopp's boss, Janus, an arms dealer descended from Lienz Cossacks, Russians betrayed by the British and executed by Stalin after World War II. Bond tracks Janus and discovers his true identity: Alec Trevelyan. The former agent plans to unleash the Goldeneye on London for profit and revenge, but Bond puts a stop to it and promptly drops Alec from his own satellite.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Bond escaped the Russian plant by setting off explosive charges earlier than expected. It worked for Bond, but not so much for Alec. The defecting agent thought he had six minutes to fake his death, but instead had only three. The result was a bomb blast to the face and a healthy, villainous dose of scar tissue.

THE MUSCLE: Xenia Onatopp kills with sex or, specifically, with her iron vice thighs during sex. But say you're feeling adventurous and think, hey, you'll just knock her into some walls or something and that'll show her. Well, she's also a masochist and your struggling is just going to encourage her. Bond never takes that chance and she dies from sudden impact with a tree.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco) is a Russian computer programmer, and the sole survivor of the Goldeneye theft. She's beautiful, of course, but surprisingly capable as far as Bond Girls tend to go, a trend that would continue from the 90s to the present day. She's also brash, pushy, and not afraid to call the men in the room on their bullshit. I'm a fan.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: As with the Timothy Dalton transition, the film gives Brosnan a traditional scene down in Q lab, complete with Super Dave-style sight gags in the background. The movie is light on gadgets, but Q still provides a new BMW, a leather belt containing rappelling wire, and a ballpoint pen grenade that features prominently in the finale.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Xenia. Onatopp. Or maybe the cartoonish hacker character played by Alan Cumming that dies in a Tex Avery moment, quick frozen by a burst coolant pipe.

Or maybe it's Xenia. Onatopp.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: “The writing's on the wall,” spoken moments after the pen grenade explodes. It's corny, but there wasn't a lot of gold in this film and this line made Q laugh, so what the hell?

WORTH MENTIONING: “Goldeneye” is the name of Ian Fleming’s estate in Jamaica where he wrote most of the Bond novels and short stories... Minnie Driver has a tiny cameo in the film as a tone deaf Russian singer... For the first time, we hear what happened to Bond’s parents as Alec mentions the climbing accident that took their lives. Years later, continuity crisis is narrowly averted when Sean Connery chose not to appear as James Bond’s father in Die Another Day as had been rumored.

OVERALL: Reconciling the jingoistic, adolescent history of James Bond with an audience increasingly concerned with social and political responsibility, while still making sure enough things go boom, is one hell of a juggling act, but Goldeneye never drops it. In my opinion, the film is a minor miracle. It reinvigorated the franchise back before “reboot” was a Hollywood buzz term, and it successfully launched Pierce Brosnan as the Bond for the 90s generation. And it did so behind a shockingly self-loathing screenplay.

Wrong or right, the mid 90s was a time of reevaluation on the globe, in the workplace, in the bedroom, everywhere. The Cold War had finally thawed and with it the unspoken edict that we had to maintain the social contract exactly as our parents had kept it, lest we show those damn Commies the gap in our collective resolve. The dreaded political correctness crept into the conversation, and then dominated it. No more meaningless sex, no more “charming” workplace flirtations, no more wrong-headed mistreatment of minorities or foreign cultures, and for god's sake, put away the stick when talking about overseas policy.

What's a guy like James Bond to do?

Serious conversation preceded the release of Goldeneye about what role James Bond played, if any, in the modern landscape. Six years and a Soviet Nation had passed since the character had been seen on screen, and some argued that it was time to let the venerable spy finally retire. James Bond was the past.

The Goldeneye screenplay, churned out by a small army of writers and brought to the screen by workman director Martin Campbell, faced these critics head on in a movie that's often celebratory and more often apologetic. Moneypenny calls Bond on his sexual harrassment. His new boss (*gasp* a woman!) calls him a misogynistic dinosaur. His contacts laugh at him for staying with MI6 when he could earn much more as a freelance player in the new global climate. He's even held at gunpoint by the villain in an attempt to coerce his female lead. The whole thing plays like James Bond's Very Bad Day.

A centerpiece scene between Bond and Trevelyan tips the film's real agenda. Alec, still masquerading as Janus, agrees to meet Bond and chooses a particularly meaningful spot, a graveyard for Soviet icons. Statues of Lenin and Stalin lie scattered about, forgotten and useless. Here Alec lays out his motivation for betraying his country, one relic to another. He explains how he risked his life to topple regimes, only to be told later that it was all for nothing. Alec wants revenge and money and all the usual perks, but mostly he just can't accept the world changing without his permission. Bond doesn't have that problem. Despite all the tremors in Bond's world, he's still the same character he's always been, unflinching. He won't change, can't change, but he can protect us from people like Alec who don't want to accept the world on its own terms. Alec needs to remake his environment. Bond has no such problem. If he doesn't quite adapt, he certainly endures.

Alec asks Bond if “all those vodka martinis silence the screams of all the men you've killed, or if you've found comfort in the arms of all those willing women for the dead ones you failed to protect.” Bond stays the same, lonely and haunted, so that the rest of us don't have to.

A hawkish cop out? I don't think so, but we can debate if you like. At the least it's a point of view, an original thought in a franchise that had been largely on auto-pilot since sometime before the Beatles rocked Ed Sullivan. Pierce Brosnan would go on to make three more Bond movies, none of them quite as remarkable as his first. Martin Campbell would return to the franchise many years later for another restart, another undisputed classic.

The James Bond Project

3. ???

4. Goldeneye

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

6. Tomorrow Never Dies

7. Octopussy

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #5 - On Her Majesty's Secret Service

2010-01-07T18:10:00.004-05:00

For any George Lazenby haters out there, this won't be your favorite post.

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: George Lazenby

SETUP: Bond prevents a mysterious woman's ocean suicide, then fights off her bodyguards. Later, Bond meets the same woman (Diana Rigg) at a casino and saves her again, this time from a gambling debt. The woman’s father, a smuggler, approaches Bond and makes him an offer: if Bond “tames” his daughter, he will help Bond locate the elusive criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas.)

BUT IN REALITY: Blofeld has taken over the Swiss mountain resort of Piz Gloria, and schemes to blackmail his way into a noble title by unleashing a virus on the world’s livestock. Bond wrecks Blofeld’s plans, but finds himself actually falling for the smuggler's daughter, Tracy. When the danger has passed, Bond marries Tracy and retires from spy work, but Blofeld takes his revenge by shooting Tracy just moments after the ceremony. The film ends with a weeping, devastated Bond holding his dead wife and talking about how they have “all the time in the world.”

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Blofeld’s disfigurement changes each time he appears in the series. Here he tries to masquerade as a member of a lost line of nobles by taking on their traditional family trait: missing earlobes.

THE MUSCLE: Irma Bundt (Ilse Steppat) is den mother to the brainwashed patients at Piz Gloria, which fronts as an allergy clinic to hide Blofeld’s true plans. She spends much of the movie as a shrieking chaperone, keeping Bond from getting too close to the girls, but shows some talent in the murder department when the need arises. In fact, it’s Bundt that takes the fatal shot at Tracy Bond while Blofeld drives the getaway car. And she never even pays for the crime.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: “Teresa was a saint. My name’s Tracy.”

Teresa Di Vicenzo lost her mother when she was a child and spent the rest of her life rebelling against her father. She’s educated, strong, well-traveled, has a flair for gambling, drives fast cars, and flaunts a scandalous past. In short, she's perfect for Bond. When the story begins, Tracy is just an assignment. By the time she’s saved his bacon in Switzerland, she's his fiancee. The plot requires Bond and Tracy to fall in love mostly during the chase scenes, but her death still hits with an emotional gut punch, something that the Casino Royale filmmakers wish they could say about Vesper Lynd. But that's another review.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Q barely shows up in the film, mostly just to satisfy continuity, but for the first time in the series he’s allowed to act like Bond’s friend. He attends the wedding and seems generally pleased to be invited... but then breaks down and complains about Bond’s handling of government property.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT:

OK, Lazenby does kind of rock this outfit, but the kilt doesn’t really represent the look that Connery’s Bond was famous for, and is maybe a subtle dig at Connery, an actual Scotsman, for bailing on the character. Worse, this outfit is part of Bond's alias at Piz Gloria, the effete intellectual Sir Edmund Hillary. Bond plays the role, dubbed, as a gay man and seduces girls at the retreat by convincing them he just needs a good snuggle under some LSD lights to change to his mind. By far the worst sequence in the movie, and about 10 minutes too long.

BOND’S BEST ONE-LINER: “This never happened to the other fellow.” Bond’s first line of the film after Tracy’s bodyguards rescue her from being rescued, which Bond follows immediately with a direct smirk at the camera. See, Bond’s not played by Sean Connery anymore, so...

WORTH MENTIONING: Lazenby was a complete unknown when he was hired for the role and the public, in love with Connery, had a hard time accepting him in the role. The box office suffered. Lazenby still had an offer to return, but the actor declined, believing that the Bond character would become obsolete in the 70s. Connery returned for Diamonds are Forever and Lazenby never quite achieved the career his performance in this film seemed to promise... Bond’s last line -- “We have all the time in the world.” – is one of the most famous quotes in all of the Bond series. It’s the name of the film’s love theme, and appears as the epitaph on Tracy’s grave in the opening few moments of For Your Eyes Only.

OVERALL: What a bizarre, uneven, wonderful film. The only Bond movie that truly embraces the “psychedelic” 60s (the film was released in 1969), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is at times just as unwieldy as its name, yet still delivers some of the most memorable moments in the film history of the character.

George Lazenby gives a criminally underrated performance, asked both to fall in love and to suffer crushing tragedy in between gunfights, ski chases and an absurd(ly awesome) bobsled finale, and he actually sticks the landing. Yet, for some reason, he's thought of as the punchline, Johnny No-Name who kept the seat warm for Connery and, eventually, Roger Moore. Even today, there are fans who dismiss this movie based just on its star or its premise.

This is insanity.

OHMSS is the first film in the series to allow weakness anywhere near James Bond, and he's stronger for it. By the end of this film, Bond is no longer the unthinking superman he had been under Connery. His decision to quit, and the inevitable result, give the character some necessary depth (incidentally the same depth Connery had been looking for before he quit.) The films have used this as a jumping off point for the Bond character, looking to this event for the answer to why he drinks, womanizes, and detaches himself via witty one-liners. After this film, Bond makes sense.

OHMSS is definite top five material and fans who love classic Bond should give it another look, although I just can't rank it any higher while the uncomfortable Piz Gloria seductions weigh down the middle. Tracy so would have disapproved.

The James Bond Project

4. ???

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

6. Tomorrow Never Dies

7. Octopussy

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Specks on a Glass Slide

2010-01-04T10:56:00.002-05:00

There is an illness in my house. The upstairs is closed to me, taken completely by the disease. A grim silence hangs the air, broken sporadically and suddenly by unholy wails or the screaming of children. Darkness creeps down the stairs like a fog, laying siege to the line I've sworn to defend.

The Thing that was once my girlfriend reaches its trembling hand from beneath a burrow of blankets to take what meager tea and ice water offerings I can muster, but I don't dare linger. I spent last night on the couch, huddled against the cold, praying that I wouldn't show... signs, while begging the Almighty to let me see another dawn.

In other words, Bond is delayed.

If only there was genetic research that could eliminate disease...

Resolution

2010-01-03T21:36:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year to everyone who visits this little window into my madness. There's lots of content coming in the next couple of weeks ("year end" and "decade end" lists, the final 5 in the James Bond Project, plus more.) In the meantime, enjoy this video that I think captures the true spirit of the holiday.

2010 is going to be a great year.

Bond #6 - Tomorrow Never Dies

2009-12-28T21:11:00.003-05:00

Pierce Brosnan's second Bond film is nearly his best, a movie that perfects the late 90s Bond action fantasy formula that brought the series back to life.

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Pierce Brosnan

SETUP: The HMS Devonshire sinks, seemingly brought down by the Chinese as it accidentally crossed their territorial waters. Tensions explode, but M (Judi Dench) suspects foul play. Specifically, she's got her eye on Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a global media baron whose conglomerate stands to make billions off the scandal. Bond gets the call to investigate Carver, starting with the mogul's wife (and Bond's jilted ex), Paris.

BUT IN REALITY: It was totally Carver. The mogul sent a scrambled signal to push the Devonshire off course and used a stealth ship to ensure it sank. The goal? It's complicated, but it ends with a Chinese coup and exclusive broadcast rights to the communist nation for Carver's company. Bond and Paris team up, but they only succeed in getting Paris killed. Thankfully, Chinese superagent Wai Lin arrives and the spies attack Carver, destroy his stealth ship, and stop a shooting war before it begins.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Carver has no physical deformity, unless you count a shameful Susan Powter haircut. Aside from the usual megalomania, Carver's real tic seems to be narcissism, as his scowling face is stamped all over his company billboards, logos, and banners. He's made the news an entertainment show, starring him.

THE MUSCLE: Carver has a stable of henchman that includes bad-ass magician Ricky Jay as a cyber-terrorist and the awesome Vincent Schiavelli as a German pain specialist, but he instead relies on an expressionless lunkhead named Stamper (Gotz Otto) as his right hand. Stamper gets a few decent moments, but never really cuts loose. Forgettable.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Paris (Teri Hatcher) is an old flame of Bond's, now married to Carver. She could help Bond by providing key information, but refuses, tragically accepting her choices and sticking with her unhappy marriage.

Yeah, right. That lasts for about a scene before Paris is knocking on Bond's door and begging to be rescued from Carver's clutches. Unfortunately for Paris, her disloyalty gets her killed and puts Bond on the run. It's then that Bond meets up with Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese agent working to prevent the undermining of her government by Carver's yellow journalism. Lin is, of course, a martial arts specialist and an all-around ass-kicker, and her performance turns into one of the film's many highlights.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Q, disguised as an Avis employee, equips Bond with a remote-controlled BMW, a very sweet ride and centerpiece of the film's best action scene. Bond outmaneuvers a small army of thugs while hiding in his back seat and messing with what looks like a proto-PSP, firing missiles, dropping caltrops, and generally having the time of his life. Great car.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: I love Jonathan Pryce. I really do. Brazil, Glengarry Glen Ross, Infiniti commercials. Usually he's such a great actor to watch, but he hams it up so hard in this movie, spoofing everyone from William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch to Bill Gates, and devouring any and all scenery that gets within his gravity. All he's missing is a big twirly moustache and a bunch of rolled 'R's to complete his epic villainy. The movie survives, but his campy performance nearly derails the show.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: The villains get all the best lines in this movie, but Bond does all right with his send-off for Carver. As a drill closes in for the kill: “You forgot the first rule of mass media, Elliot! Give the people what they want!”

WORTH MENTIONING: The stealth ship is based on an actual Lockheed design, built in the 80’s, but officially turned down by the US government. . . The film's original title was Tomorrow Never Lies. A typo on a script title page stuck and the film was renamed. . . A planned scene would have featured Ricky Jay flinging his trademark playing cards at Bond, but Jay claims that the scene was cut when he actually nicked Pierce Brosnan in rehearsal.

OVERALL: Pierce Brosnan's first film as James Bond (which we'll see on this project shortly) was a strange, iconoclastic blend of revision and self-loathing, a movie that looked to forge a new future while apologizing for its past. It was unusual and different, and it made a hell of a lot of money. Sensing the public's acceptance of Brosnan, the Bond producers dumped all that messy guilt and decided to return to basics by making an unapologetic, ludicrous action movie.

This film is pure formula, a marriage of the classic Bond fantasyland nonsense with the bam whiz effects-driven style of late 90s blockbusters, and it works effortlessly. There's no pretension or secret shame on display. It's James Bond saving the world from a madman, armed only with a gun, a smirk, a one-liner, and a remote-controlled car.

The only real difference between this film and classic Bond is the choice of Carver and his media empire as the villain, a surrender to the digital age we all knew Bond had to face some day. Computers had been the enemy before (Oh, Zorin and his wicked microchips!), but this film correctly nails that the real threat of the internet age isn't in the weapons, but in the words. When news is consumed and discarded at the speed of Twitter, well played misinformation can topple the best laid plans of even the world's strongest government. Two words for the doubters: Death Panels.

The film's plot is fanciful and far-fetched, but it retains credibility by hitting just a few inches from the bullseye. Someone like Carver could exist, and today headlines from major American news channels are ground to pulp within moments as bloggers search them for bias. We've lost our faith in the media, and it comforts us to think an agent like James Bond might be out there keeping the news as fair and balanced as possible.

The Brosnan films went downhill after this, moving first to the uneven The World is Not Enough before cranking out the awful Die Another Day. Brosnan would never again see a Bond movie this good, a near-perfect example of pop action and big entertainment that would make Ian Fleming proud.

The James Bond Project

5. ???

6. Tomorrow Never Dies

7. Octopussy

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #7 - Octopussy

2009-12-21T19:14:00.005-05:00

And the 7th best Bond movie (at least according to me) is...

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Roger Moore

SETUP: A clown dies at the border between East and West Germany, a knife sticking out of his back and a replica Faberge egg in his hand. The dead clown is actually lost British agent 009, and MI6 needs Bond to uncover the rest of the story. When the real Faberge egg shows up at auction days later, marked “Property of a Lady,” Bond steps in to track the owner and find 009's killer.

BUT IN REALITY: Russian General Orlov (Steven Berkoff) wants to detonate a nuke in West Germany, an event he believes will force the west into disarmament and clear the way for his own troops to invade. He's been smuggling state treasures to fund his scheme via Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), an exiled Afghan prince and a real SOB.

Bond is captured by Octopussy (Maud Adams), a cult leader with a traveling circus that serves as the front for the smuggling operation. Bond romances her and escapes, battles the bad guys on a circus train as it moves the bomb across the border, and defuses the nuke just in time. The Russians execute Orlov as a traitor, and Khan dies in an airplane crash as he tries to escape from Bond. Octopussy, meanwhile, sees the error in her ways.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Kamal Khan is no longer welcome in his native Afghanistan for reasons the film never makes clear. He's moved his operations to India, taken residence in the Monsoon Palace, and spends his time hunting and playing backgammon with loaded dice. No scars or disfigurements to speak of.

THE MUSCLE: Khan employs Gobinda (Kabir Bedi), an Indian riff on Odd Job. Just like Goldfinger's favorite butler, Gobinda wears distinctive headgear (a Sikh turban instead of a razor-rimmed hat), is mostly silent, and can crush dice into powder using only his bare hands. Bond tosses him off Khan's airplane in the film's final moments.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Both roles belong to Octopussy. Octopussy's background, borrowed from the Fleming short story, has Bond letting her British father commit suicide rather than face a humiliating court martial for crimes against the state. She repays the favor by keeping Bond alive, even though he's a threat to her smuggling operation. Khan loses his mind about it, but she won't budge. When the time comes, she betrays Khan and Orlov (who, to be fair, have already betrayed her) and helps Bond defuse the bomb.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Bond drags Q all the way to India just to deliver an acid-tipped fountain pen, but Q sticks around long enough to give Bond a fake alligator submarine as revenge – one of the all-time dumbest Bond gadgets. I can see him now, sitting for hours on that long, lonely plane ride, sketching ways to make the world's best superspy look like a tool.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: The movie, and one of its stars, is named Octopussy. Embarrassing enough, but forgivable because they stole it from an Ian Fleming story. It was his bad idea first, and the series is nothing if not slavishly loyal to his work, or at the very least, his titles.

No, the real embarrassment here is the depiction of India, from the disgusting dinner scene that may have inspired Spielberg in Temple of Doom, down to the Q lab scene where snake charmers and rope climbers have been turned into hilarious gadgets. No exotic culture survives a Roger Moore Bond movie unscathed.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: As Bond crawls, bleeding, from the river onto a tour boat. “I'm with the economy tour!”

WORTH MENTIONING: Moore had planned to leave the role after For Your Eyes Only and James Brolin was very nearly cast as his replacement, but when Connery was signed to star in Never Say Never Again, Moore was brought back to compete with him. Moore won. Octopussy was the bigger success at the American box office... Bond's tennis pro sidekick Vijay was played by Vijay Amritraj, a real-life tennis star... Maud Adams had previously romanced Bond, and died, as Scaramanga's lover in The Man with the Golden Gun.

OVERALL: I know, it's hard to believe. Can a movie that features Bond in a clown suit and a gorilla suit, an octopus cult, and a swinging Tarzan yell be one of the best Bond films ever made?

Octopussy just is what it is. And that's good. The film stinks of Moore-era campiness, and I'll admit that's hard to look past, but in there is a Bond story remarkably close to the bizarre Cold War potboilers Ian Fleming churned out. I believe the author would have approved.

Let's talk about the clown suit. Yes, Bond wears one in the film's climactic moments, improbably the exact suit 009 was wearing when he died, a bit of visual callback that evokes dread from the audience, not laughs. As Bond replays 009's final moments, harried by the circus mob, trapped on all sides, he desperately pleads with the NATO generals to look past his outfit and see the danger, with only seconds left until a nuclear detonation wipes out the city, and the evidence.

That scene is just one of a few remarkably well-crafted set pieces that elevate Octopussy to heights that, well, a movie called Octopussy should never reach. From the clever backgammon sequence with Khan to the Indian safari (in which Bond, of course, is the hunted game), the film's story is simply well executed.

There's a lot of dissension among critics, some who rank Octopussy as the worst of the Bond films. I wonder, are we talking about the same movie? In a field that includes Moonraker and A View to a Kill? Octopussy is silly, yes, but no more so than The Spy Who Loved Me, which rakes in praise without a strong primary villain or even a single scene that rivals the climactic circus showdown on display here. (Seriously, the finale of The Spy Who Loved Me is a budget-friendly scene in which Bond just stares at a globe until everything turns out all right.) Bottom line: I'll take this film every single time.

I could do without the gorilla suit, though.

The James Bond Project

6. ???

7. Octopussy

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #8 - The Spy Who Loved Me

2009-12-17T20:21:00.003-05:00

See, I don't have an agenda against Roger Moore.

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Roger Moore

SETUP: Two nuclear submarines, one British and one Russian, are stolen straight from the sea. Figuring that the subs must have been tracked, both governments take interest in a man selling a black market tracking system in Cairo. British agent James Bond and Russian agent Anya Amasova (Agent “Triple-X”) descend on Cairo with competing missions to retrieve the tracking system and find out who stole their subs.

BUT IN REALITY: The subs were stolen by shipping magnate and all-around psychopath Karl Stromberg (Curd Jurgens) using his gigantic sub-swallowing supertanker. He commandeers the subs to launch nukes at New York and Moscow, hoping to trigger a nuclear holocaust so that he can begin a new civilization under the sea. Bond and Anya steal aboard the tanker where Bond stages a mutiny with the rescued sailors. Bond tricks the subs into destroying each other, then raids Stromberg’s aquatic lair “Atlantis”, providing Stromberg with a brutal death at sea.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Stromberg is singularly obsessed with ocean life, perhaps feeling more at home in the sea than on land because of his webbed hands and feet. We never get a great look at his little mutie flippers, but they keep Stromberg from basic niceties, like shaking hands with Bond.

THE MUSCLE: Fittingly for a film set at sea, Stromberg employs steel-toothed henchman Jaws (Richard Kiel). Jaws is the real star of the show, played for genuine scares here and not saddled with the comedy beats he'd have to manage in Moonraker. Incidentally, Steven Spielberg’s little shark movie had arrived two years earlier, leaving some doubt that the character's name was a coincidence.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) is every bit Bond’s equal and one of the all-time best Bond girls. For once, Bond's love interest isn’t quivering in a corner waiting for the hero to rescue her. Triple-X takes an active role in the film's action, and even shows Bond up once or twice. (Well, until she is captured, but shit happens.)

Better yet, there's some legitimate tension built into their relationship. We see Bond kill Triple-X's spy lover in the film's opening sequence, causing Triple-X to swear revenge on his murderer. As we watch Amasova and Bond fight together and fall in love, we're waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Triple-X to realize she's flirting with her sworn enemy. When she finally does, Amasova promises to kill Bond as soon as the mission is over, making her the default femme fatale as well. Of course she changes her mind in the film's final moments, but the tension gives her relationship with Bond a slight note of complexity and enhances the movie.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Q supplies Bond with the Lotus Esprit, the submarine car that was a big hit with audiences at the time. Late in the movie, when Bond needs to rescue Anya from Stromberg’s lair, Q returns with a jet ski that fits in a gym bag.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Yep, Triple-X is Bond's equal in every way. Every way except that she can't drive a stick. That's right, Russia's top agent is just another woman driver who can't seem to get a truck into gear, even when threatened by an angry Jaws. Bond, wallowing in his masculinity, gives her unhelpful one-liners from the passenger seat until they finally escape.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: Watching a henchman plummet to his death, surrounded by feathers from a chicken truck collision – “All those feathers, and he still can't fly.”

WORTH MENTIONING: The music that plays while Bond and Anya are stranded in the desert is the Lawrence of Arabia theme... Steven Spielberg was approached about directing this film, but he was in pre-production on Jaws and it was decided that he shouldn't be hired until it was known whether he was any good... Jaws was originally scripted to die in the film's climax, ironically eaten by a killer shark. The producers correctly guessed that Jaws might be an audience favorite, so they quickly rewrote the ending and allowed the henchman to survive.

OVERALL: I've said before that Roger Moore has one very specific note he can play. His style is a chemical, a particularly volatile one that can wreck a formula if you mix him with the wrong ingredients. But sometimes you can get the formula just right and it all comes together. The Spy Who Loved Me is exactly that rare mix, and it holds up as one of the best of the 1970s Bond movies.

Moore was in his third film as Bond and here he finally manages to shake the last of Sean Connery's influence from the role and really make it his own, dragging the plot along for the ride. There's not a scene in the film that seems fit for Connery's Bond. There's a dry wit at play in the borders of every scene, and every setup reeks of Moore's personality, as if the actor simply conjured a fantasy world in which his Bond belonged. It's Moore as The Singing Detective.

The most impressive thing about The Spy Who Loved Me is the balancing act that the script demands. It has to be quirky at times, even corny, while still holding on to its sustained menace. One scene on a train works particularly well. Bond and Triple-X banter and jab at each other with a sitcom-like rhythm, until Bond opens a closet and comes face to face with Jaws. His appearance cues a shrill train whistle and an intense, oddly silent battle begins. I've seen this film a number of times, and the scene never fails to get a reaction, but, sure enough, as soon as Jaws is sent out of the train window, a Bond one-liner resets the mood and releases the tension. Well played.

This isn't my favorite Roger Moore Bond movie, but it's close. Unfortunately, Stromberg is completely upstaged here by his hulking minion and there's a a bit too much familiarity between the supertanker and the shuttle-stealing spacecraft from You Only Live Twice. Still, it's a worthy addition to the top ten and a great place to kick off if you're interested on seeing just why Roger Moore was a 70s icon. You could certainly do worse.

The James Bond Project

7. ???

8. The Spy Who Loved Me

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

My Ass and the State of It

2009-12-15T21:07:00.002-05:00

James Bond will return....

Thursday.

There was no way to post a Bond movie yesterday, or really anything at all, unless I wanted to do it standing up. I just spent the weekend sitting in a folding chair with little back support, no neck support, and only Rachel's moral support. And I'm thankful for the experience.

I attended the legendary Butt-Numb-a-Thon 1138 (or BNAT) in Austin, Texas, this weekend, and had my world soundly rocked.

The annual event is for Harry Knowles, self-proclaimed Headgeek of the internet and the founder of Aint It Cool News. I've been lurking on that site since the dark ages, so when this year's BNAT application went up, Rachel and I gave it a shot and miraculously got in.

BNAT is a 24-hour film festival with no breaks between the films, a mix of obscure vintage films and world premieres. It's Movie Geek Christmas. It's sweet, sweet torture. It obliterated my ass.

In (basically) one sitting, we saw:

1. Faust (1926) - Not as great as Murnau's Nosferatu, but an awesome achievement in mood, atmosphere, and nightmarish expressionism. A beautiful print combined with a live organ score. Fucking insane.

2. The Lovely Bones - This isn't really Peter Jackson's best work, although there are some big money performances from Stanley Tucci and Saoirse Ronan.

3. Girl Crazy - Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a slight comedy that clips along nicely thanks to some well-designed musical numbers and a big Busby Berkeley finale.

4. The Red Shoes - One of my absolute favorite movies of all time. Seriously. It also happens to be Martin Scorsese's favorite movie, which foreshadowed our next film...

5. Shutter Island - A predictable script made better by Scorsese's confidence and DiCaprio's performance. The scenes with Jackie Earle Haley and Ted Levine steal the show.

6. Le Magnifique - Starts as an early 70s James Bond spoof, then turns into a more personal comedy about a struggling author trying to woo Jacqueline Bisset. The switch makes it a classic.

7. Micmacs - Jean-Pierre Jeunet's first film since A Very Long Engagement. Babelfish tells me this translates to "Intrigues," which is a sly joke of a title for a story about a "family" of discarded people who decide to use a junk pile and their talents to bring down two arms dealers. Very funny and quirky.

8. Frozen - A neo-Lifeboat from horror director Adam Green. Three friends on a ski trip get stranded in a lift chair with no hope of rescue and a storm closing in. Sent me out of the room and literally caused one attendee to faint.

9. Centipede Horror - No fucking way I was going to watch a Shaw Brothers gore movie about centipedes, sexual orifices, and all the possible combinations at 3 or 4 in the morning. Sat this one out in the lobby.

9 1/2. Iron Man 2 trailer premiere - Looks great, but it was just a teaser. Not sure yet if Favreau has topped his accidental classic.

10. The Candy Snatchers - A bizarre exploitation flick about three sleazeballs who decide to kidnap a teenage girl and do awful things to her while angling for a diamond ransom. Not enough soap in the world to feel clean after watching this.

11. Kick-Ass - The film doesn't release until April 2010, it was a total surprise that we saw it, and yes, it blew the lid off the place. I'm not sure how this movie will play in front of a mixed audience, but my crowd of superfans ate up every bite. Two signs that this movie ruled. 1.) A speaker malfunction killed the screening for almost half an hour, letting the audience cool down... and it didn't make a difference. When the film started back up, it's possible that we liked it even more. 2.) During that half-hour cooldown, I didn't hear one single conversation about Iron Man 2. I'm not saying IM2 failed to impress. I'm saying that Kick-Ass simply held its own and then some. Hit Girl is going to explode... and cause a shitstorm of controversy.

12. Avatar - Obviously I was interested to see what James Cameron had here, but I think we saw it at the wrong moment. The crowd was sleep deprived and nothing could have followed Kick-Ass and lived. I will say that I liked it, it actually had tolerable 3D, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. (I won't add it to the James Cameron project until it's out on DVD.)

In the midst of all of these screenings, I had the fortune to meet several great writers, directors, and actors, and I met a ton of really great film nerds from all around the world. It was a hell of an event.

Oh, and Rachel chugged a beer with the guys from Broken Lizard.

And there was no way I was sitting in front of a computer to make a post yesterday, so that's that. Thursday is our next Bond movie, and it's a good one (a Roger Moore one, if you'd like a hint.)

See ya then.

Bond #9 - Thunderball

2009-12-07T22:24:00.003-05:00

The last great classic Bond before the madness began to set in. Today's entry is...

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Sean Connery

SETUP: SPECTRE lifts two nuclear bombs from the British by replacing a fighter pilot with a look-alike. In an astounding coincidence, James Bond vacations at a ritzy health spa and stumbles across the plot just as it’s going down. Once the nukes go missing, Bond tracks the pilot’s beautiful sister to Nassau to find out what she knows.

BUT IN REALITY: The sister, Domino, knows nothing, but her lover is a sinister SPECTRE operative named Emilio Largo, who schemes to hold the world hostage for $280 million in ransom. Bond infiltrates Largo’s empire, woos Domino, and finds the nukes. As the British and American coalition close in, Largo transforms his high-tech yacht, the Disco Valante, into a hydrofoil to speed his escape. Bond scuffles with Largo as the yacht races through dangerous waters, but just as Largo gains the upper hand, he takes a spear in the back courtesy of Domino.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Largo opts for that timeless villainous trademark, the eye patch, although no explanation for the missing eye is offered.

Largo, by the way, is known as Number Two in the SPECTRE organization, a name (and eye patch) that Mike Myers happily lifted for Robert Wagner's character in the Austin Powers spoofs.

THE MUSCLE: Largo prefers the hands-on approach. He employs an army of minions but won't hesitate to whip out a knife and commit some murders to advance the cause. For special occasions, Largo maintains a swimming pool full of vicious, minion-eating sharks.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: There isn’t much I can say about Domino (Claudine Auger.) She’s attractive but vanilla as the female lead. The more interesting character is the femme fatale, SPECTRE agent Fiona Volpe (Lucianna Paluzzi.)

Volpe is the first woman in the series to assert a little backbone when faced with Bond’s charms. Bond sleeps with her, of course, but unlike Pussy Galore or Tatiana Romanova, Volpe doesn't see sex with Bond as a life-changing experience. On the contrary, she uses the tryst to trap Bond and rob him of his gun, and after he's figured her out, Volpe taunts him with the knowledge that, yes, she’s still firmly rooted in Team Evil. Bond’s reaction is memorable: “Well, you can’t win them all.”

Unfortunately for Volpe, all of this feminist empowerment doesn't last long because it's still, in fact, Bond's movie. He gets his revenge just a few minutes after the scene when he uses Volpe's body to take a bullet meant for him.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Bond gadgets began to catch on with the public after Goldfinger, and the trend shows. Q travels to Nassau and equips Bond with a huge assortment of toys, including a Geiger counter watch, an underwater camera, a re-breather, transmitters, and an ingestible homing beacon. The pre-credits sequence also features the famous Aston Martin DB7 and a real, working jet pack on loan from the military.

BOND’S BEST ONE-LINER: After Bond shoots a Largo minion with a spear gun: “I think he got the point.”

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: The same film that saw Fiona Volpe take control of her sexuality sadly also features one of Bond's creepier come-ons. Bond forces himself on his spa nurse, locking her into a kiss she literally has to fight to escape from. Later, just after a near-death experience on a back stretcher, Bond blackmails the nurse into having sex with him in exchange for his silence about the incident.

WORTH MENTIONING: About the back stretching incident: Why is there always a “death” setting on movie health machines? Shouldn’t the designers leave a safety buffer? Perhaps the highest setting could be “near death” or “white light/tunnel”, but resist moving all the way into a kill setting?... Thunderball was the basis of the lawsuit that eventually split the franchise and killed SPECTRE as a perennial Bond nemesis. More detail on that incident can be found here... This is the only Bond film to win an Oscar for visual effects.

OVERALL: Thunderball arrived while Bond-mania was at its peak, and the producers cashed in. For a long time Thunderball was the most successful Bond picture in terms of box office dollars, even though its a pretty dull ride for the first half. Thankfully, the situation improves as you watch, and the film’s best sequences more than make up for any gaps in the action.

The highlights of the film are (A.) Sean Connery's easy, charismatic performance in the lead role and (B.) all of the underwater action sequences. Much of the film’s second and third act, featuring murders, double-crosses, sex scenes, rescues, and full-scale warfare, is completely underwater, and the extended, final submerged battle is one of my favorite bits of the entire series.

Still, as I said, there are drawbacks. Largo is a yawn as a villain, especially following Goldfinger’s act, and the plot is mostly Bond-by-numbers with some silly coincidences built in. The half-hour health spa sequence stretches all credibility, as Bond just happens to be in the neighborhood as a vast, well-orchestrated heist takes place. It’s not hard to see why Sean Connery was beginning to chafe at the idea of coming back to the 007 role every year or two and was looking to do something, anything, different. Zardoz different. Neither of his final two Bond films came close to this quality, making this his last, best hurrah as the superspy.

The James Bond Project

8. ???

9. Thunderball

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #10 - Dr. No

2009-12-03T23:35:00.003-05:00

I missed Monday completely due to a minor mishap. Holiday posting is a tricky thing. We'll be back on track this coming Monday, for sure. In the meantime, we open the top ten with...

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Sean Connery.

SETUP: A British agent named Strangways disappears while investigating strange transmissions in the vicinity of Jamaica. James Bond, a Double-O agent working for MI6, arrives to track down the missing spy and uncover the source of the transmissions.

BUT IN REALITY: Strangways had tracked the rogue signals to Crab Key, a secluded island owned by a man named Doctor No (Joseph Wiseman), but was killed before he could report his findings. Bond discovers that No is using nuclear reactors (somehow) to drop US and Soviet rockets into the ocean, presumably to hold the world hostage or force a global showdown or some such thing.

Bond slips onto Crab Key, escapes capture, and sets the reactor to meltdown. He drops Doctor No into the reactor pond, bagging his first megalomaniacal villain bent on total destruction.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Dr. No is a disgraced Chinese scientist who focused his skills on the mad quest to bring the world powers to their knees and prove that they were wrong to dismiss him. His obsession with radioactivity has cost him his hands, which he compensates for with shiny metal replacements, capable of killer kung-fu grip.

THE MUSCLE: Doctor No’s go-to henchman is Dent, a murderous geologist, but he also employs a trio of assassins that masquerade as blind men for no clear reason. Apparently, it’s slim pickings in paradise.

Turning to technology to salvage his evil reputation, No has a flame-throwing tank that he paints like a dragon to scare the locals away from his island.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: After a brief appearance from Sylvia Trench (a character intended to be Bond’s regular love interest, but dropped by the third film), Bond meets the lovely Honey Ryder, played memorably by Ursula Andress. Ryder’s bikini-clad emergence from the water is a classic moment in the series, setting a high standard for all future Bond Girls.

Bond’s femme fatale in this one is Miss Taro (Zena Marshall), a secretary that Bond spots as a double-agent the very moment he meets her. Bond arranges a date, charms her, sleeps with her at least twice, and then tosses her into custody so he can use her house as a trap for Dent.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Desmond Llewellyn hadn’t been hired yet, but Major “Q” Boothroyd (the “armorer” as M calls him) does show up. He contributes only a gun, but what a gun! Boothroyd forces Bond to switch out his beloved Beretta for a new Walther PPK. It’s a good switch for Bond. He'll use the PPK for nearly 40 years, all the way until Tomorrow Never Dies.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Casting the Canadian Joseph Wiseman to play the half-Chinese mad doctor is bad, but not quite as embarrassing as the depiction of Quarrel (John Kitzmiller), Bond’s helpful boat captain sidekick. Quarrel is Jamaican, and a somewhat proud and heroic character. Unfortunately, he’s also portrayed as a backwards, superstitious island native who believes in dragons and has no use for fancy luxuries like charts and maps, seemingly navigating by his gut and the hoodoo in the wind. He’s eventually burned to death, screaming, by the Dragon Tank.

BOND’S BEST ONE-LINER: After surviving a car chase that sends his opponent’s vehicle to the bottom of a cliff, Bond quips “I think they were on their way to a funeral.” This is officially the first Bond film one-liner, the great-great-grandfather of all of those Christmas jokes that would come later.

WORTH MENTIONING: Bond’s American counterpart Felix Leiter is played by Jack Lord, future star of “Hawaii Five-O”… The iconic gun barrel opens this first Bond movie, but it's not Sean Connery playing the role. Instead, stunt man Bob Simmons plays the part in silhouette, making him the first actor to ever play Bond in the official series, a fact of great interest to people who want to win bar bets like an asshole… In No’s dining room, Bond double-takes as he passes a painting. The painting is Goya’s The Duke of Wellington, and it had caused international headlines earlier that year when it was stolen from a British museum. It turns out that Dr. No had it all along.

OVERALL: I’m never sure if Bond purists will be happy that I rank this movie as high as I did, or if they will be pissed I didn’t rank it even higher. Despite its issues, the film has a lot of apologists simply because it’s the first. Without “Dr. No”, we wouldn’t have had 40 years of films to be able to sit back and enjoy, and Bond movies are more than simple entertainment to a lot of people. The character is an institution in international cinema, a modern myth cycle that has a life of its own, spawning countless imitations and celebrations. It all started here. If this film had failed to connect, or had it been a total bore, we wouldn't be talking about the series today. Clearly, somebody was doing something right.

On the other hand, Dr. No’s issues are hard to ignore. The standard Bond formula hadn’t yet been established, and the film openly struggles to find its voice. The action is sparse, and the pacing is sluggish at times. This does leave room for interesting character moments, such as one of my favorite scenes in the entire series, in which Bond returns to his hotel room to find it has been raided by his enemies and he chooses to deal with it by sipping a cold, lonely drink in the dark. Unfortunately, it also drags the film to a halt at times. Dr. No can be a tough watch.

That's not all bad. The film's patient pacing leads to a satisfying third act, including an escape act that takes Bond through an overheated and electrified series of ducts, his crisp and cool demeanor flaking off until he resembles the killer he actually is. The good news is that future films would improve and refine the formula. Ultimately Dr. No is a novelty, a classically-minded thriller that held the rest of the series inside it, all potential. Still, for Bond fanatics, the film is an indispensable classic. Warts and all.

The James Bond Project

9. ???

10. Dr. No

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #11 - For Your Eyes Only

2009-11-23T22:43:00.005-05:00

Today's Bond movie used to be one of my favorites, but we're breaking up. A bit. It's...

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Roger Moore

SETUP: The St. Georges, a British spy vessel carrying a code machine called the ATAC, goes down somewhere off the coast of Albania. The ship's location is unknown and the Russians drool at the thought of stealing the ATAC for their own wicked, presumably communist goals. When a Greek treasure hunter hired to retrieve the ATAC dies, Bond takes the job.

BUT IN REALITY: The sinking was a brilliant bit of sabotage by evil smuggler and KGB double-agent Kristatos (Julian Glover.) He plans to capture the ATAC and sell it to the Russians, stalling for time by pitting Bond against a smuggling rival (Topol.) Bond discovers the trick too late and hunts Kristatos to his mountain retreat before the deal can be made. Kristatos dies in the assault, but the Russians arrive for the ATAC and Bond tosses it off the rock. “Detente.” he says with a smirk. (Surprisingly, the Russians don't empty their clips into his face.)

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: For Your Eyes Only was a reaction to the excess of Moonraker and is deliberately grounded in as much reality as they could find. Kristatos is a very straight, almost mundane villain and doesn't have a traditional disfigurement.

Well, maybe. It's quietly implied that Kristatos is a frustrated pedophile. He sponsors an adolescent skating prodigy named Bibi (also maybe his niece) and she seems to think he wants more than a handshake if she wins an Olympic medal. If she's right, that's a mental disfigurement. And, ew.

THE MUSCLE: This is Locque (Michael Gothard,) the world's most unconvincing assassin.

He's gifted, yes, but James Bond battles Korean wrestlers with razor-rimmed hats and giants with metal teeth, not this guy and his little cup of tea. Locque makes it only partially through the film before Bond drops him off a cliff. There's a brief replacement named Kriegler, but that guy falls off a cliff, too. Come to think of it, a whole lot of people die from cliff-falling in this movie. The mountains are littered with dead henchmen and ATAC machines.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Melina Havelock (the white hot Carole Bouquet,) lost her family to Kristatos assassins in the hunt for the ATAC and she spends the rest of the movie half-asleep in revenge. Yeah, it's a flat performance. At one point she actually shrugs as Bond comforts her. In the final moments, she aims a crossbow at Kristatos and Bond gives her a misguided, completely hypocritical warning about the hollowness of revenge by quoting a pithy Chinese proverb, but then Topol shoots Kristatos and lets her off the hook anyway. Crackling character arc, guys.

The femme fatale is either the Countess (Cassandra Harris,) Columbo's mistress who sleeps with Bond to learn more about him before she's brutally murdered by Locque, or Bibi (Lynn-Holly Johnson,) the 15-year old skater who desperately wants Bond as a notch on her skates. It depends on your definition, I guess.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: A perfectly good Q scene is ruined by this thing.

It's called the Identigraph, it's a souped-up police sketch computer, and it's ridiculous. Other than the Identigraph, For Your Eyes Only a gadget-light film.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: “Now put your clothes on and I’ll buy you an ice-cream.” Bond's final answer to Bibi's attempted seduction.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Margaret Thatcher became British Prime Minister in 1979, so the Bond team couldn't resist giving her a “cameo,” played by professional impersonator Janet Brown. Thatcher's scene is the silliest in the film. She spends most of it carrying on a conversation with a horny parrot, stopping only to chastise her husband for stealing a cookie. For Your Eyes Only is definitely the most straight-faced spy movie in the Roger Moore era, but little bits like this and the pre-credits sequence (see below) are eye-rollers.

WORTH MENTIONING: This film marks the last appearance in the series for archvillain Blofeld, even though he's never named on-screen. In the pre-credits sequence, Bond visits his wife's grave (the first time a Moore movie acknowledges her at all) and winds up dodging an assassination attempt from a bald villain stroking a white cat. The sequence ends with Bond dropping the villain into a smokestack, never to be seen again.

The scene is a petty bit of revenge from the Bond producers against writer Kevin McClory. Back in the 50s, McClory worked with Ian Fleming on a script for a proposed James Bond TV series that never came to be. Fleming, for some reason, decided that script would make a good novel and turned it into Thunderball, taking sole credit for the work. McClory sued and the result, decades later, was that McClory had the rights to all screen adaptations of Thunderball and the characters in it... including Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

McClory planned to remake Thunderball as Never Say Never Again (the unofficial Bond movie that you won't find on my countdown.) As a preemptive strike, the Bond team decided to officially kill off Blofeld in the Roger Moore Bond series, but had to do so without officially putting Blofeld into the movie. Blofeld's final words are “I'll buy you a delicatessen. In stainless steel!!” That'll show him!

OVERALL: This movie is a fine example of Bond's potential when freed from all the hijinks. For Your Eyes Only is going for realism, and although I wouldn't say the film totally succeeds, it's a welcome effort after the balls-out surreality of the late 70s films.

I used to say that this was the best of the Roger Moore Bond movies for primarily that reason. I held on to this movie like a piece of dry fucking land in on ocean of slapstick, but I'm here to make a confession. Yes, For Your Eyes Only can be a little dull. Actually, it can be a lot dull.

There's a reason Roger Moore movies trended towards comedy, and it's because he's very good at his shtick. Moore knows how to deliver a punchline, do a prim little double-take in a risky (or risque) situation, and he can hold a gun. But serious acting? Actual gravity in the face of global stakes? That's not why you hire him. Moore doesn't smolder or seethe. A great Roger Moore movie is built like an amusement park just for him, where he's never really in danger and every setup is custom built to extract his restrained little grin. That formula spilled out of control in Moonraker, obviously, but For Your Eyes Only overcorrects and drains the fun out of his Bond, and that's not the right answer either. This one is a pretty good movie, but it's just not quite there. Fortunately, at least two other Moore films got the balance just right. We'll be hearing from them soon.

Next up, we begin the Top Ten!

The James Bond Project

10. ???

11. For Your Eyes Only

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #12 - The World is Not Enough

2009-11-19T20:50:00.002-05:00

Today, James Bond faces the oil crisis in...

. . .AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007: Pierce Brosnan

SETUP: Bond recovers stolen money belonging to oil magnate Robert King, but the bills are booby-trapped and blast King through a sizable hole on the side of MI6. Bond discovers the trap was the work of Renard (Robert Carlyle), a terrorist who once kidnapped King's daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau), but failed to get a ransom. Bond thinks Elektra might be next on Renard's list, so he steps in to protect her.

BUT IN REALITY: But who's going to protect Bond from her? Renard takes his orders from Elektra, a good girl who went sour when Daddy refused to pay Renard's ransom. She plans to kill M (Judi Dench) and nuke Istanbul, securing her new oil pipeline's dominance in international trade (it's complicated.) Bond uncovers the plot, shoots Elektra, and skewers Renard with a radioactive rod.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: By my count, Elektra King is only the second female master villain to challenge Bond, and the first to do so without a poison shoe. Elektra uses sex and false vulnerability to convince men, including Bond, that she's a hunted victim and not a power-mad genius. She's pulled this trick before, turning her kidnapper Renard to her side, tearing up her own ear, and “escaping” with a fantastic story and the scars to prove it.

THE MUSCLE: Renard is the red herring villain, supposedly the mastermind but really just Elektra's fanatical follower. He loves her, for whatever that's worth, enough to die in a nuclear explosion and take all of Istanbul with him. And why not? In a sense, Renard is already dead. He survived an assassination attempt, but only just, and the bullet lodged in his brain will kill him eventually. In the meantime, he feels no pain at all.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: The femme fatale is obviously Elektra King, who sleeps with Bond to catch him in her web. Even as Bond connects the dots, her lies turn him around in circles. It takes M's kidnapping to finally set Bond straight and send him on a hunt for King.

The good girl is Dr. Christmas Jones (really), played by flavor of the month Denise Richards. Jones is a nuclear physicist (really) that tags along with Bond after he suddenly forgets how to defuse a nuclear bomb. More on her below.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: After 17 appearances, Desmond Llewelyn makes his final turn here as Q. Shortly after shooting his scenes, Llewelyn died in a car accident and the role formally passed to John Cleese, who shows up here as Q's successor. Llewelyn's exit was too soon for any Bond fan's liking, but he ended the role with the perfect line. As he disappears down a secret elevator into retirement, he quips “Always have an escape plan.” He’s very missed.

For the adventure, Q Branch equips Bond with a high-tech speedboat, an inflatable jacket, an exploding gun, rappel watch, and x-ray specs.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: Yes, Bond ends the movie while having sex with Christmas (really) Jones and speaking the line “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” But that's the best and the worst line.

The real best line probably goes to John Cleese. Bond: “If he's Q, does that make you R?” Cleese responds, “Ah yes, the legendary 007 wit, or at least half of it.”

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Denise Richards was a big deal for about five minutes in Hollywood, and The World is Not Enough arrived with two seconds to go. In fact, you could make an argument that her performance is the reason her star dimmed so quickly. Her acting is definitely a low point in the film, but she's not the only problem.

Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist? Really? Exactly how much disbelief are we supposed to suspend? It feels like Purvis and Wade, the screenwriters, thought up the name, the punchline, and then took the rest of the day off to congratulate themselves. Bond heroines don't have to be showy roles, but it's insulting that so little thought went into a character and casting decision for a major franchise film. If anything, Richards got left out to dry in a role for which she was comically miscast, and the bad decisions by all involved guarantee that for years all people will think of when they think of The World is Not Enough are Christmas jokes and bad acting. A bonehead move.

WORTH MENTIONING: The title of the film is the motto on Bond's family crest... Bond's doctor joins Kissy Suzuki and Strawberry Fields on the list of “Bond women with improbable names never spoken on screen.” Her name is Dr. Molly Warmflash... The film's ending is an homage to the classic Roger Moore movies, which usually ended with MI6 using spy gadgetry to find Bond, only to discover him in bed with a lady. The film even ends with the traditional “James Bond Will Return,” a flourish that's fallen out of fashion since Moore left the role.

OVERALL: The World is Not Enough is a mediocre film that could've been great. The pieces are there, but they never come together and the whole thing ends up as a missed opportunity. The film has a good story built around a really nice twist, a feminist reversal of Stockholm Syndrome that added something completely unique to Bond's usual rogue's gallery of Cold War grotesques and fantasy supervillains.

Unfortunately, the casting never pays off the film's potential. I've already ripped on a certain nuclear physicist, but what about Carlye's performance as Renard, which is so listless that I half expect him to nod off. He was going for cold and emotionless, but the result feels passionless, which is a different kind of thing. His chemistry with Sophie Marceau is limp, and unfortunately their relationship is crucial to selling the story. If it doesn't work, the movie fails, and friends, it doesn't work.

Which is a shame, because The World is Not Enough has Pierce Brosnan's single best performance as James Bond. He's really on fire here, adding nuance and depth to what is basically a static, decades-old hero role. Keep your eye on Brosnan during the movie and you'll see just how much fun he was having at this point in his career and just how seriously he took the role. Watching Brosnan in the role never felt like I was watching him collect a paycheck. He went for broke in every Bond film, but especially here. I just wish it was in service of a better movie.

The James Bond Project

11. ???

12. The World is Not Enough

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Christmas Cheer

2009-11-16T22:20:00.001-05:00

Still behind due to some holiday life issues. In the meantime, how does James Bond feel about Christmas?

Bond #13 - Live and Let Die

2009-11-09T18:44:00.004-05:00

Back on schedule following a tough week. In return for your patience, I offer you the surreal movie that kicked James Bond squarely into the 1970s while introducing a new take on the agent...

...AS IAN FLEMING'S JAMES BOND 007: Roger Moore

SETUP: Three British agents die on the same day in New York, New Orleans, and the Caribbean island of San Monique. M suspects the deaths are linked to the agents' assignments, all revolving around the enigmatic ruler of San Monique, a man named Kananga (Yaphet Kotto). Bond's mission is to succeed where those agents failed.

BUT IN REALITY: Kananga is more than just the wealthy leader of his own island nation. He’s also Mr. Big, streetwise drug dealer and mastermind of African-American organized crime in the states. As Mr. Big, Kananga plans to dump $1 billion worth of heroin onto American streets for no cost, driving his competitors out of business. Once he's the only game in town, the price comes back up and the profit rolls in. Bond gets knocked around by Kananga's vast conspiracy, but turns the tables by blowing up Kananga's poppy fields and inflating the island leader to death with a gas pellet. Really.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Kananga belongs to a sub-category of Bond villains who create their own disfigurement with plastic surgery or makeup, in Kananga's case a prosthetic face. He uses this disguise (and a jive dialect) to organize seemingly all the African-Americans in Harlem and New Orleans under his banner.

THE MUSCLE: Kananga has plenty of money for henchmen, and he's not stingy. He employs Tee Hee (Julius Harris), a grinning assassin with a hook for a hand who terrorizes Bond until thrown from a moving train. Down in San Monique, Kananga keeps the superstitious locals in line with Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder), a flamboyant showman who cannot die. Bond tests the theory by putting a bullet through Samedi's brain, but seems to shoot some kind of Samedi robot instead. It's actually never explained, and Samedi's laughing face appears over the end credits just to add to the confusion.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: The Bond Girl is Solitaire, played by future pioneer medicine woman Jane Seymour. Solitaire is an actual mystic who reads the future for Kananaga using a deck of tarot cards. The power runs through the women of her family until they lose their virginity, a fact lost on Bond until he sleeps with her only to discover that she's now effectively useless to the plot (more on that below). The writers never do figure out what to do with her and she defaults to automatic damsel in distress until Bond can whisk her away in the wake of his victory. The usual.

There's a minor femme fatale in this movie, a CIA agent named Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry.) Her special agent training apparently never prepared her for things like dead snakes or voodoo, leaving her to scream and cry helplessly into Bond's shoulder. That is, until he discovers she's working for Kananga anyway. Tee Hee silences her before she can spill any secrets.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Roger Moore's stint as James Bond is known for gimmicks and gadgetry, but this film surprisingly features no Q scene whatsoever. Q was absent in an attempt to distance Moore's Bond from Sean Connery's, but fans demanded the quartermaster's return in the next film. Despite his absence, Q still manages to ship Bond a magnetic watch, which Bond uses during his final confrontation with Kananga.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: After Bond sleeps with double-agent Rosie Carver, he threatens her at gunpoint and demands information on Kananga. “You won't kill me. Not after what we just did,” she says. Bond: “I certainly wouldn't have killed you before.”

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: If any Bond movie is ever censored by an angry mob, my bet is it's this one. Where do I begin? Do I start in Harlem, where it appears that literally every black person in the city is working for Mr. Big, a known drug lord? Or do I instead look to San Monique, an island entirely populated by gyrating, crazed voodoo cultists and gangsters? The first appearance of JW Pepper (Clifton Webb) and his unique sense of justice?

Or do I leave the race angle completely and come to defense of Solitaire, a woman who is literally tricked out of her virginity by Bond, who constructs a tarot deck out of “The Lovers” and convinces her that the fates have spoken?

WORTH MENTIONING: David Hedison plays Felix Leiter in this film, his first of two performances of the role. He'd return in Licence to Kill, only to be partially eaten by a shark. Ironically, this was a scene written into the Live and Let Die novel, but cut from the film's script... Kananga is named for Ross Kananga, owner of the crocodile farm seen briefly in the film... The title song was provided by Paul McCartney and Wings, arguably the first Bond theme song to become more famous than the film that inspired it.

OVERALL: Live and Let Die is a movie of its own time. It couldn't have been made before or since without morphing into something completely different. Every frame of the film, every note on the soundtrack is 1973, including the racially driven plot which blatantly capitalized on the then-hot blaxsploitation trend in American film. Of course, someone got their facts wrong because blaxsploitation films were mostly about black empowerment, while this movie depicts a powerful black conspiracy brought down by a single white guy from England, leaving me to wonder exactly who they thought the audience would be. It didn't matter. Roger Moore was an instant success as Bond, and fans happily embraced him as Connery's heir.

No wonder. Issues aside, Live and Let Die is a pretty good adventure movie. Bond is constantly captured and thrown off his rhythm, out of his league, and this actually provides suspense, an element Bond movies had long learned to live without. Every time Bond believes he has the advantage, he has it stripped away from him. Sure, we know Bond will win, but we don't quite know how, and the situation seems bleak. It's classic adventure plotting.

I've always enjoyed the bizarre religion found in the film, the only time in 22 Bond films that there's even a hint of the supernatural. Solitaire's skill at reading cards is obviously real, but what of Baron Samedi? He survives Bond's shot, clearly, but his underground entrance is revealed to be a mundane elevator lift. Is he as unkillable like the natives claim, or is he another of Kananga's tricks? It's left unresolved.

The action is impressive and Yaphet Kotto is clearly having fun playing a Bond nemesis. It's a shame that his scheme boiled down to simple drug dealing, but his disguises and cyborg assassins make up for it. Really, the film's bizarre reality works in its favor. This is a story about Bond in a world he doesn't understand, and as it becomes increasingly bizarre and detached from our world, it somehow becomes increasingly consistent and believable, like a voodoo version of Wonderland or Kong's Skull Island (itself a land of backwards racial depictions that almost, but miraculously don't, hurt the film.) I'm not sure the end result is a proper Bond movie, but all things being equal, I like it.

The James Bond Project

12. ???

13. Live and Let Die

14. Licence to Kill

15. The Living Daylights

16. You Only Live Twice

17. Quantum of Solace

18. Die Another Day

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Act Break

2009-11-05T19:14:00.003-05:00

Time got away from me today, so the next Bond movie has been delayed until Monday. See ya then!

In the meantime, enjoy this nugget of cartoon nostalgia.