James goes rogue like Sarah Palin
I sat through 100 minutes and man I am a ailin’
But seriously . . . noisy and incomprehensible, the new Bond film can’t be recommended. It seems to have something to do with South American water futures and a clandestine shadow organization–a nefarious agency of evil hitherto unknown to MI6, the CIA, and, for good measure, the KGB. It’s a cold, impersonal film without a jot of wit or humor or even, god forbid, joy (Bond is in full-tilt revenge mode and the Bond “girl” is surly not sexy). Still, it moves at a fever pitch, and most (Chris) won’t mind suffering through the swift ninety-nine minutes. There was a cool sequence that took place during a mammoth, postmodern production of Puccini’s Tosca, and I did appreciate Forster’s eye for catchy architecture, but that’s about all I got.
See the thread “Bond, James Bond”–post number 29–and tell me this site hasn’t just entered the twilight zone.
I am in the unusual position of disagreeing with both Jeff and Arnab. Jeff because I liked the movie a great deal, and Arnab because I think Bond should be allowed, even encouraged, to evolve (though I will always treasure the image of Vijay Amritraj swatting a villain off a motorcycle rickshaw with a tennis racquet in ‘Octopussy’, a monument to the era of high Bond kitsch, and to a willingness to humiliate an Indian national hero for a minor laugh line).
Some minor SPOILERS follow…
There are lots of things to like about this iteration of Bond and really only the title music to hate. There is no equivalent to the wonderful dialogue on the train between Bond and Vesper in ‘Casino Royale’ but in partial compensation, this time we get a real car chase with the Aston Martin rather than the abbreviated version in the earlier film.
So, first off, the grand plot is not at all complicated and is at times even poignant. When was the last time the dastardly goal of a Bond villain appeared to affect real people? The scene in the Bolivian desert, as water dries up and the villagers are left with nothing is remarkably powerful. And I rather like the return of a SPECTRE-like organization (now named Quantum) which meets at opera performances and is unknown to national spy agencies.
Second, the movie is not the pure action-fest that one might imagine. Like its predecessor, all the action is front-loaded into the first 45 minutes, after which the movie slows down and explores Bond’s character, his relationship with M, and the relationship between Bond and Camille (Olga Kurylenko) as both “damaged goods†seeking some measure of peace. Once again Daniel Craig inhabits a very different Bond from the one we are used to. Ruthless, to be sure, with a barely-concealed anger that drives the action sequences. But the hard-edged banter remains, with moments of humor to break the tension. There is less dialogue than in ‘Casino Royale’, and more of it is delivered by M than Bond, but what there is crackles. Bond has a great line to Camille before she exacts revenge, simultaneously professional and tender. Every other revenge-inspired action hero out there (Damon’s Bourne, Bale’s Batman) is a caricature compared to Craig’s Bond.
And, as a bonus you get fine performances from Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, and Mathieu Amalric, plus a car chase, an air chase, a roof top chase and an exploding hotel. What’s not to like?
jeff, i swear to god your comment in that thread wasn’t there last night when i posted in it (i had to search for the thread to find it). and i didn’t post my comment here because it’s not about this film, which i have not yet seen, but a meta bond comment. also, i don’t like you.
Keeel Bond, now!!!
I know Arnab, there’s some time glitch somewhere within the site (maybe only yesterday), but I thought I’d take advantage of it. It seemed like fun at the time. I know you like me, but you can keep spouting such nonsense if it keeps your public persona beyond reproach.
watched it tonight. entertaining enough, though during a couple of the fight scenes i wasn’t entirely sure what was going on.
one thing i actively disliked about this film, and it is a continuation of a similar motif in the previous one, is how corruption and evil is racialized. both films tell us that all politics is corrupt and venal but in both films the enactment of the most spectacular physical brutality is the job of the third world sub-villains: the african general who goes around chopping off people’s arms in casino royale and the bolivian general here who kills fathers and rapes mothers, sisters, and waitresses. these people are both brutish and finally inconsequential to the real plot of global politics, which is orchestrated officially (bond and company) and unofficially (the quantum group) by brits and europeans who bear all the familiar marks of civilization (opera, champagne and caviar, bespoke suits). one part of this may well be true in a realpolitik sense, but the other part is offensive and gratuitous.
Is it the realism of the latest Bond films that really bothers you, arnab? That they take themselves so seriously? I mean, I agree with you about the racialization of corruption and evil. It’s an apalling logic. But it’s right there in Bond since Dr. No.
i think the classic bond villains are so over the top it’s not possible to take them seriously. this goes for bloefeld as much as for dr. no. whereas, as you note, these films are more realistic. it’s been a long time since i’ve seen dr. no but i don’t remember the villainy being split in the way that they are in these films. dr. no is himself a member of spectre, right? here there are the real villains and the local colour villains. the local colour villains are the ones who do the really nasty stuff and they’re either brown or black.
i think what i don’t like about these films is that slick as they are they don’t seem to me to be particularly distinctive. bond here is just another action hero and these films are just another set of action movies. bond as genre is missing. and it’s not just that it’s not in the old bond genres; i’m not seeing a distinctive new bond genre emerge either.
A couple of really interesting points. On the issue of distinctiveness, I wonder how distinctive the earlier Bond films seemed at the time, at least up until the mid-1970s. When I was growing up watching them, they seemed fairly conventional action films with the addition of gadgets; the treatment of women, and even the leavening of the action with humor, was pretty commonplace. Each iteration tried to outdo the previous one in terms of stunts, but the basic formula didn’t strike me as hugely different from any other action film out there. Now, this was a period in which truly innovative film, that often deconstructed the action genre, was flourishing, so Bond sometimes seemed a type apart, and of course was copied as such. This remained true through ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ but, to me at least, it did seem to change with mid-Moore because the films just froze in time, and even accentuated the most archaic aspects of the early films. They became embarrassing to watch (and, one hopes, to appear in). So, were the early Bond films truly distinctive, or are they just 40 years old, and look it?
As for the racialized versions of evil, that is certainly true. But what I find striking is the contrast between “hot” or “passionate” cruelty, which is practiced by third world sub-villains, and the cold cruelty of the main villains. After all the Ugandan rebel does not in fact cut off the arm of Le Chiffre’s girlfriend in ‘Casino Royale’: he threatens to, Le Chiffre makes no protest, and then the rebel general points out how cold-blooded Le Chiffre is and suggests the girlfriend find herself a new man. In ‘Quantum’, Greene threatens the Bolivian general with castration, but it is done in a calm, matter-of-fact manner. The distinction is not degree of cruelty, but the racialized distinction between hysterical, unthinking cruelty, and the calculated, cold-blooded version.
Where does Robert Davi fit in? Cold cruelty (one of the best), but third world villain.
In Dr. No, the very first murder in the movie (the very first murder in Bond movie history, actually) is at the hands of three local color villains. They’re black men. Pretending to be blind, no less. And they kill a white guy.
it doesn’t really mean a whole lot to me if this has been in bond all along in some way. it bothers me more in the two new ones because these seem to make a larger claim for realism in terms of their representation of global politics etc..
Yeah, that’s what I thought you meant. I won’t Quarrel with you (tee-hee).
Besides Robert Davi, Yaphet Kotto’s ridiculous Voodoo crime boss in Live and Let Die complicates Chris’ interesting taxonomy.
I’m not yet Quantumed, so I’m going to step a little back… but I’m not sure I buy your argument, Arnab, that the more recent two films’ “larger claim for realism” is a sharp divergence from earlier films. I think Chris’ thought on periodization pushes against our tendency to read back to the halcyon silliness of earlier Bond. For all the obvious exaggerations in those first few films, they seem to define a similarly faux-“realist” approach which mashes up current global politics in fantasies of (super)heroics, (post)colonial nostalgia, and so on. I think the Lazenby film was the first time a Bond film got marketed as more ‘realist’ and less cartoon, but certainly not the last. I agree with Chris about mid-Moore’s amplification of the silly — which retrofitted all of Bond into that cartoon sensibility. But the Fleming books, often used as the “authentic” which spurs the alleged “new” realism of various Bonds, seem to thrive at exactly that border between outrageously silly Cartoon and Spillane-edged hard-knuckle realpolitik cynicism.
Small point, but I quibble with reynolds’s take on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as the first Bond to edge its way toward realism. I’m not sure what marketing reynolds is referring to (trailers? posters?). If I recall, some of the early teasers make explicit the self-referentiality of the Bond franchise (there’s one poster that has a black silhouette with a question mark over its face, calling attention to the figure of Bond as role in need of filling). I mean, a dwarf whistling the theme song to Goldfinger? That’s realism?
Jerk!
No, you’re probably right–I should’ve avoided marketing, maybe. But it was, in production and in reception, constantly batted around as the most faithful to the novels, set in contrast to prior outings (perhaps initially as a way to offset the anxiety about the loss of Connery) as a Bond with a new edge. And critical reception then, and far more since, has read the film’s emphases away from its still-present in-joking and innuendo and toward its more “serious” plotting, more sober attention to the violence (particularly in the film’s end), and so on. (In fact, I think you have been one such advocate for this film, John.)
And realism is never the right term, not with this one nor with Casino or Quantum. Perhaps we’re talking tone — the approach toward violence, toward a sense of real characterization rather than surface-level shtick (compare Savalas’ Blofeld to the subsequent Charles Gray?).
To me, silliness reigns supreme in (even) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Certainly there is nothing funny about chemical and biological warfare. But putting such a threat in the hands of some two dozen babes (each of a unique national flavor) who are controlled, via their cosmetic cases, by a twisted, bald villain who cut off his own earlobes, reminds us that we are in the familiar and reassuring space of absolute kitsch.
Did I mention the dwarf whistling “Goldfinger”?
I think arnab’s point still holds. The latest Bond films are trying to be more like the Bourne films, and less like Octopussy.
And speaking of tone: ahhhh, the dulcet tone of Louis Jourdan saying “Octopussy…Oc-to-puss-eee”
Okay–but the film ends with Bond’s wife assassinated on the road. Close-up on bloody Diana Rigg and bullet hole in windshield. No dwarf-whistles will undercut that fairly dramatic shock, and I think such tonal dischord is pervasive through this particular film, and even (more tunefully) evident throughout the series.
And less like Octopussy… well, all right. But they still have supervillains who cry bloody tears, and the Minister of Silly Walks as Q.
Wow, you people know your Bond.
i think john’s point holds as he agrees with mine.
mike, i think it’s more than just tone. the geo-politics of these films have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. they’re not metaphors, whether silly (moonraker) or more familiar (goldeneye). quantum, and greene enterprises (or whatever that guy’s company is called) could be real. the central plot of this film (the stuff in bolivia) is very close to actual events (the imf requiring the privatization of water rights before extending a stabilizing loan). this is why the continued cartoonization of the third world villains feels more off to me than in the earlier films (though i’m sure they don’t all fall into this schema).
What are the political ramifications of a bloody Diana Rigg? To me, that’s sheer melodrama. And if you want to suggest that melodrama makes any kind of claim to realism, you’re in big trouble buddy.
Did I mention gold balls?
The political ramifications of Diana Rigg’s death: Patrick MacNee goes rogue, and chaos ensues.
You’re always policing the limits of melodrama. And now you’re forcing me to have a more coherent position than “Arnab is not right.” I think that position is statistically a winner, and I want to stick with it.
And I think chemical and biological warfare are HEEElarious.
White people have names like Lenny, while black people have names like Carl. White people are all like “well, pardon me, do you have any grey poupon?” While black folks are all “Hey, bro, gimme some skin. yo’ sister sure look fine.”
Also, white people, particularly Russians and East Europeans, like to sit in leather chairs, deep in underground bunkers, and kill thousands of distant folks by means of laser beams and satellites and other heavy tech. splendid.
black folks, on the other hand, like to get their hands around the necks of the folks they kill, preferably in dirty rooms filled with chickens, and watch the tongues loll and eyeballs swell. Or they like knives, close up and groovy. solid.