No Time to Die (2021)

It’s hard to believe it’s been twenty months since I set foot in a movie theater. It’s perhaps harder to accept that it wasn’t a superhero movie that brought me back to the box office – though two, Black Widow and Shang-Chi, have been released since my last outing with Birds of Prey in February 2020. I hadn’t missed a Marvel movie until this year, yet nor had I missed a James Bond vehicle starring Daniel Craig. Fifteen years and five films after Casino Royale, I had to see this supposed swan song in all its IMAX glory.

It isn’t Craig’s best – that honor still and forever goes to Skyfall, as perfect a Bond movie as you can get – but No Time to Die is a fitting conclusion to this iteration of the character, thematically consistent and perhaps the most Fleming-esque of the Craig era.

 

Five years after defeating the forces of Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is called back into the fight after Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) kidnaps a defecting scientist (David Dencik) and his powerful bioweapon. The chase for Safin finds Bond crossing paths with his old friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), a new 00-agent (Lashana Lynch), and his old love Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) before the trail leads back, as it always does, to Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz).

 

As much as the Craig-era Bond films have struggled to fit all its disparate parts into one unified narrative – we all remember how Spectre tried unsuccessfully to weave its antecedents together – the films have been at their best when considering the psychological toll that Bond’s life is taking on the man. Casino Royale intimated that Bond’s callous womanizing stemmed from a deep personal trauma, while Skyfall showed us that happened when Bond’s closest relationship (with Judi Dench’s M) got too close. No Time to Die picks up on the unlikely ending of Spectre, in which Bond ostensibly rode off into the sunset with Madeleine Swann, but it wisely reminds us that Bond has been down this road before, in more films than just Casino Royale. There are numerous nods, for example, to (and this may be a very light spoiler) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which for many is the gold standard for Bond. (Appropriately enough, it was #007 when I ranked the films in 2014.)

 

But No Time to Die is conscious of its place as a finale of sorts, and so we get reunions with Felix Leiter from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and with the Blofeld of Spectre; there’s even a wink-nod at Skyfall with a portrait of Judi Dench and a well-timed cameo from her porcelain bulldog. These references tie Craig’s tenure together more authentically than Spectre’s stubborn insistence that it was all connected, but the true payoff is in Craig’s Bond getting a better understanding of himself. He’s cognizant of his own flaws, sensitive to his blind spots, and determined all the same to save the world as only he can. When one character asks him if he knows the worst thing about himself, he quips, “My timing?” He’s become self-aware and, in the process, self-realized. Having taken Bond from his roots to his ultimate self, it’s only fair that Craig calls it a day and leaves the character for the next – and, perhaps not insignificantly, seventh – incarnation.

 

No Time to Die is, then, a kind of grand tour through the Craig era, but it has its eye on a more distant past, going back to Connery’s 1962 debut and to the Ian Fleming novels of that era. Safin is not, as the rumor mill had hoped, secretly Doctor No in disguise, though his island lair may as well be the good doctor’s; with its hazmat-suited servants, nuclear generators, and vaulted ceilings, one half-expects Joseph Wiseman to saunter out in his Nehru jacket. Meanwhile, the lair’s retractable bay doors are straight out of the film version of You Only Live Twice, while the denouement and a certain Jack London epigraph are airlifted from the novel of the same name. The 1967 film, scripted by Roald Dahl, was somewhat less than faithful to Fleming’s 1964 original, which saw Bond stalking Blofeld in a poison garden; here, it’s Safin who becomes the lethal horticulturalist, while Bond has no Tracy to avenge but comes bearing equally personal motivations. Indeed, I came out of No Time to Die – as I often do when a new Bond film arrives – finding myself lunging for the Ian Fleming novels on my bookshelf. 

One wonders what Fleming would have made of this latest Bond film. Once you get past the big-budget trappings and the unfathomable gadgetry, I imagine Fleming would find something very familiar in Daniel Craig’s interpretation, globetrotting yet guarded, equal parts damaged and damaging. There’s so much in this film that works, thanks to the distinctive persona Craig has crafted for Bond. Once you have a character as solid as this one, the rest is a breeze, especially by the time the film makes its way to Cuba for an unforgettable sequence costarring the inimitable and infectiously fun Ana de Armas, late of Knives Out with Craig. Where she was timid and prone to fits of nausea as domestic worker Marta Cabrera, de Armas is a far cry from Knives Out here as Paloma, who winkingly exaggerates her naïveté while nervously downing a vodka martini. It’s almost criminal that she has only the one sequence, though one wonders if she too might recur down the road.

The unlikely star of the film – though perhaps not so unlikely, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while – is Hans Zimmer. After a forgettable title track by Billie Eilish, Zimmer runs away with the film, giving us a rousing score that had me stomping my feet with excitement. When he’s not winking at previous soundtracks, Zimmer is remixing and reinventing Monty Norman’s Bond theme with fearless aplomb. Thomas Newman did a fine job with Skyfall (though he revisited his own footsteps too closely with Spectre), yet throughout No Time to Die Zimmer makes a compelling case for the next Bond maestro. If Inception was a kind of proto-Bond for director Christopher Nolan, its Zimmer score was only the beginning; his love theme here is reminiscent of Inception’s showstopper “Time,” while his 007 action beats would be equally at home in Nolan’s ski lodge setpiece. David Arnold’s score for Casino Royale famously winked in the direction of Bond as we know him, and Zimmer takes us over the finish line with dexterity. 

 

It was a gamble to try to tell one story across five films, rather than tell more standalone stories about the world’s greatest spy. Before his untimely passing at 56, Fleming came to that concept late in his novel series, with his final three books forming a kind of “Blofeld trilogy.” No Time to Die is, finally, the successful culmination of that ambition, and it gives a suitable arc to these versions of Fleming’s characters. Whether it’s an ending or a transition may be for the casting directors to decide; let’s hope, however, that the MI6 crew – Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, and Naomie Harris – opt to stick around for that sense of internal continuity. Yet if you find yourself wondering, as the credits roll, what comes next – stick around. There’s no postcredits sequence, but there is one final guitar riff and the words “James Bond Will Return.” So too will I; after twenty months, it was fun to go to the theater once again and tell the coronavirus that now was no time to die.

 

No Time to Die is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language, and some suggestive material.” Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Christoph Waltz, and Ralph Fiennes.

Spectre (2015)

While Skyfall was for a lot of us the fulfilled promise of the Bond update kickstarted by Casino Royale, a kind of “And we’re back” (as Mark Kermode has, as always, so eloquently put it) Spectre is the second half of that sentence, a sort of “...and we’re here to stay.” To be fair Spectre isn’t the triumph that Skyfall was – recall Skyfall made #2 on my definitive ranking of every Bond film ever, though it’s too soon to rank Spectre. But it’s a worthy successor, a fine if occasionally too personal 24th installment.

After receiving an order from the late M, James Bond (Daniel Craig) follows a trail of criminals to the den of a mysterious figure (Christoph Waltz), heretofore presumed to be dead, and his organization known as SPECTRE. An encounter with an old friend leads Bond to Dr. Madeline Swann, who will help Bond and Q (Ben Whishaw) take down SPECTRE, while the new M (Ralph Fiennes) and his aide Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) work against the surveillance project of rising bureaucrat Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott).

I’m going to go so far as to label Skyfall transcendent – breathtakingly beautiful and tightly narrated, with all the action you’d want from a Bond film without the foolish frivolity toward which the franchise is occasionally prone. It’s so good that I daresay Spectre never could have lived up to it, in the way that Thunderball could never have been as good as Goldfinger. Taken on its own merits, though, Spectre is good enough.

Starting with the pre-credits sequence, a staple of any Bond flick, Spectre doesn’t disappoint. In a long-take opening (whose CGI trickery takes away none of the punch of seeing Bond really do his stuff), director Sam Mendes takes us into the heart of a Day of the Dead celebration, cuing up the thematic content of the film with a lovely bit of eye candy in the form of Bond’s effortless heroics. Like Skyfall’s opener, it moves through a number of sub-setpieces rather quickly, lacking only a snide one-liner to cap it all off.

The rest of the film’s action is top-notch: a car chase through Rome, a fistfight on a train, a ski chase in which neither participant is actually skiing, and then two variations on the escape-from-the-compound trope. All of these play very well within the narrative, striking a great balance between the Bourne-inflected realism of the Craig era and the gentle absurdity we’ve seen in older films, but they’re played to delight, not to strain credulity. Indeed, they serve as nice reminders of what film we’re watching; just when the film starts to take itself too seriously, we’re treated to a nice bit of levity, like Bond surviving the collapse of a building by landing on a sofa.

There’s the rumor – an evergreen, really – that Spectre is Craig’s last outing as Bond. Much as we’ve heard that one before, Spectre does feel in a lot of ways like the end of an era. It pays off a lot of narrative threads from the last three films, including the most delightful amplification of the roles of M, Q, and Moneypenny. Largely absent from the early Craig films, this supporting cast gets a great opportunity to shine in their own subplot, from which Bond is largely absent but which manages to be as compelling as his conflict with Waltz’s villain. If it’s Craig’s swan song, I hope Fiennes, Whishaw, and Harris stick around – the MI6 gang are as interesting as they’ve ever been.

On Waltz: he’s every bit the scenery-nibbler we’d want out of a classic Bond villain, a fine successor to Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva. There’s an intriguing way that Waltz unites both the campy classicism of the Connery era with a very contemporary sensibility vis-à-vis surveillance and anonymous terrorism. And if this is the last Craig film, it’s clear that the filmmakers are eager to tie it all up in a way that I don’t actually think was necessary. It doesn’t detract from the film, though it is a little distracting how overt this move is. There’s a beat where those who hadn’t recently seen Casino Royale might be a little dizzied by the reappearance of that film’s Mr. White, and there’s an unconvincing move to tie Skyfall into a larger narrative (when it works just as well, if not better, as a Goldfinger-esque standalone).

There’s what I would say is my biggest critique of Spectre (aside from a disappointing show by the film’s soundtrack, with a forgettable title track by Sam Smith and a score by Thomas Newman, who phones it in a little too much, borrowing heavily from Skyfall both in motifs and, in a few moments, in what sound like actual edits from earlier musical cues): the film tries a little too hard, a little too openly, to unite the previous films together. Maybe it’s just the tenor of the earlier films, where there were loose and insignificant attempts to hold the films together; where the Connery era had SPECTRE as a shadowy bogeyman whom, we assumed, Bond was always already fighting, Spectre attempts to make that unifying thread the stuff of revelation, of narrative twists, but there are ways to do that which don’t show the filmmakers’ hand so baldly. Additionally, we’ve been glad to see Daniel Craig as a more personal James Bond, in that his Bond takes things more personally – mourns the dead more willingly, pursues cases more intensely, and even hooks up with Moneypenny (finally!). He’s been a more personal Bond, but Spectre tries to move that more-personal quality out of the realm of subtext and into the arena of the actual plot, with Waltz’s Franz Oberhauser linked to Bond’s past. While this isn’t a bad move for the franchise (and I suspect the filmmakers have their eye on ways to continue this narrative thread), it comes off as largely unnecessary; the subtext was already there, and excavating it to the surface doesn’t actually do much more for the film.

Here’s the thing, though – it doesn’t take away from Spectre. The move toward the much more personal Bond isn’t hamfisted or sloppy; it’s just not essential for this viewer, but what we have is still quite entertaining. There are a number of frankly breathtaking action beats, fascinating developments in Craig’s Bond, who continues to be the most compelling Bond (even if Sean Connery is still a fan favorite), and moments of pure exuberance that remind you why Bond has endured for more than fifty years and twenty-five films (counting, as we ought, Never Say Never Again). It’s no Skyfall, but then what is?

Spectre is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of action and violence, some disturbing images, sensuality and language.” There is the usual quantity of Bond heroics, including car chases, fist fights, and explosions. One character is facially disfigured in an unpleasant way, and Bond makes out with two separate women (the rest is left to implication). One or two S-words (no, Mr. Connery, not swords) are invoked.

The James Bond Countdown

Welcome back to the ostensible finale of the two-year Double-Oh-Seventh celebration of the James Bond franchise.

What a time for it, too, with Thursday’s announcement that “Bond 24” will be entitled Spectre (release date October 23, 2015 – so expect our review on October 26).  The title has such delightfully ominous associations in the world of 007.  The official plot synopsis:

A cryptic message from Bond’s past sends him on a trail to uncover a sinister organisation. While M battles political forces to keep the secret service alive, Bond peels back the layers of deceit to reveal the terrible truth behind SPECTRE.

With Lea Seydoux and Monica Bellucci as the Bond girls, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw returning as M and Q, and Christoph Waltz and Andrew Scott rumored to be playing the villains, perhaps the most exciting news is that Sam Mendes is back after a franchise high-point with Skyfall.  It seems like he’ll be picking up on plot points from the Craig era – secret organizations, political pressure against MI6, further exploration of Bond’s heretofore unseen past.  All good news, especially for someone who loved Skyfall the way I did.

But just how much did I love Skyfall?  At the end of two years’ worth of reviews, what do I make of the entire James Bond film series?   You’ve come to the right place; after the jump, you can read my James Bond Countdown, ranking all twenty-four 007 movies.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

I don’t want to be “that guy,” someone who extrapolates a grandiose criticism from a very nitpicky observation, but Quantum of Solace is the only Bond film that doesn’t begin with the gun barrel sequence, which should be an immediate red flag that what we’re about to see is either not a Bond film or one that exists in a rough unfinished state, missing a few key components.  Obviously, Quantum of Solace is a case of the latter – an unfinished product with a puzzler for a plot and an apparent attempt to refuse to be the James Bond movie Casino Royale promised.

While pursuing the secret organization who killed his lover, James Bond (Daniel Craig) discovers that one of its members, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), is conspiring with a South American despot to stage a coup and dominate a key world resource.  Bond works to prevent this conspiracy, avenge his lover, and help Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) find her own peace – all while M (Judi Dench) struggles to contain an increasingly renegade Bond.

First of all, the plot of Quantum of Solace is exceptionally thin; Bond encounters the main plot only by coincidence, and he’s only following suspicion of wrongdoing for the bulk of the film.  I much prefer either the classic “mission briefing” mode of storytelling for Bond, or the slowly unraveling grand conspiracy.  Quantum is neither, a mingle-mangle of setpieces that almost feel as though they’re out of order (Bond flies to the desert to uncover Greene’s plot, goes back to the city to not confront Greene, then travels back to the desert).

In a Bond film, those setpieces can be everything, with great action sequences even partially redeeming a bad Bond film.  For me, that’s honestly what sets Quantum of Solace a notch below Die Another Day – Die Another Day had that memorable duel sequence, a half-chase through a Cuban clinic, and an outlandish but still fun hovercraft fight.  Quantum’s action pieces begin promisingly enough, with a great car chase through Siena, but it quickly becomes apparent that director Marc Forster is not as deft with directing action as Martin Campbell was on Casino Royale.  Often Forster will cut away from the action at its most interesting, as when a plane stunt occurs largely behind a mountain.  It’s artistic editing that reminds us how good Forster was in Stranger Than Fiction but how out-of-place he seems in a big-budget franchise.

The willful cutting of the camera’s gaze away from the action is just one of the places where Quantum stubbornly refuses to be a Bond film, completely missing the memo from Casino Royale.  In Casino Royale, Martin Campbell and the crew showed us how to update Bond while staying true to the (let’s be honest here) formula of the franchise – disfigured villain, suave (super)hero, sultry siren with a curious name, big-stakes plot.  Casino Royale added in “psychological realism,” shook it up (never stirred), and turned out an invigorating fresh approach to Bond.  Quantum seems to have taken the lesson as “be as un-Bond as possible.”  Dominic Greene isn’t disfigured beyond his small stature, which is probably meant as a comment on the banality of evil, but it doesn’t work when the script asks him to become a physical threat to Bond.  Gemma Arterton’s turn as Agent Fields feels like a bad gag when she refuses to tell Bond her first name, which the credits reveal is “Strawberry” – it’s a wonderful gag with a wink toward outlandish predecessors like Pussy Galore and Xenia Onatopp, but the movie dangles it in front of us like a cat toy on a string.

The best material in Quantum, it seems, is elsewhere – off camera, in the credits, or nestled in the viewer’s imagination.  The saddest thing about the film is its unlived potential, glimmers of what the follow-up to Casino Royale should have been; there are disparate plot threads involving a Bond driven mad by revenge, Felix Leiter’s attempt to work against a corrupt CIA, M’s begrudging willingness to trust Bond, and the parallels between Bond and Camille’s quest for vengeance – but these are presented in mere outline form, painted with the broadest of strokes.  Any one of these could have made a compelling backbone to the second in a new era of James Bond, but crumpled together as they are, the whole ends up being so much less than the sum of its parts.

Let’s be fair – Quantum of Solace was damaged by the 2007-2008 Writers’ Strike.  Forster and Craig are on record as saying that they personally tuned up the screenplay between takes, and that almost certainly accounts for the lack of cohesion or semblance of narrative structure.  Essentially, it’s like taking a blacksmith to task for not being a computer engineer – to which I have to respond, however, that it would have been better to wait for Steve Jobs.  Quantum would have benefited immeasurably from a professional writer’s eye, and I would rather have waited for a true successor to Casino Royale.  What we get instead is a Godfather III, more epilogue than proper sequel.

Quantum of Solace fortunately ends with one of its best sequences, in which Bond finally confronts the double agent responsible for his lover’s death and (minor spoilers) steadfastly refuses to kill him.  He and M have a semi-touching conversation about revenge before she asks him to return to the agency.  “I never left,” he answers, trudging away alone in the snowfall.  If Casino Royale ended with the promise that James Bond truly was back, Quantum of Solace at least accounts for its own missteps in this moment by reassuring us that Bond hasn’t gone anywhere and is perhaps finally ready to inherit the mantle suggested by Casino Royale.

Of course, we know that’s what ended up happening.  Consider Quantum a speedbump on the road to Skyfall.

Quantum of Solace is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, and some sexual content.”  The violence isn’t quite bloody, but especially in the last sequence you can really feel some of the more visceral bits.  It’s not as intense as Casino Royale, though.  Aside from one brief encounter, Bond doesn’t sleep with the Bond girl, and any other sexual encounters are only mentioned, not shown, though there is an attempted sexual assault.

We’ve reached the end of a two-year journey through the Bond canon, but don’t hang up your tuxedos just yet – James Bond and The Cinema King will return with a special bonus feature on December 7, 2014!  (And you don’t have to wait until then to read a review of Skyfall – we did that ages ago.)

Casino Royale (2006)

After Die Another Day nearly killed the franchise with excess, Casino Royale is exactly the course correction audiences needed, expected, and desired from James Bond.  Perhaps the greatest thing about Casino Royale is how it desperately wants the audience’s faith in the franchise, coupled with how brilliantly the film achieves that goal.

Casino Royale reboots the franchise to the early days of James Bond (Daniel Craig), newly minted as Agent 007 in the 00 division of MI6.  In the wake of his pursuit of a small-time bombmaker, Bond follows the trail of clues to the Bahamas, then Montenegro, where he is enlisted in a high-stakes poker game against terrorist financier Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen).  Armed with $15 million courtesy of treasury agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), Bond must bankrupt Le Chiffre, an expert poker player who already knows Bond is coming for him.

From the black-and-white precredits sequence, which almost makes one wish the whole film had been shot monochromatically, what is immediately striking is just how visceral Casino Royale is.  Doubtless this is the casualty of living in the shadow of The Bourne Identity (released the same year as Die Another Day), which is widely credited with injecting a healthy dose of gritty realism into the spy film genre, but Casino Royale never seems like it’s aping someone else’s act; rather, the film succeeds by adapting the lessons in realism from Bourne into the preexisting template of what a Bond film should be.

That lesson is to step away from all the theatricality of the Bond films because they often made the character a pawn in a larger-than-life aesthetic catastrophe.  Take Moonraker, which tried to up the scales by sending Bond to outer space but succeeding only in escaping the gravitational pull of being watchable.  Consider the other space laser in the Bond canon, Die Another Day, a frigid mess unwilling to commit to tonal consistency.  No, it’s impossible not to hear the voice of director Martin Campbell, who had helmed Goldeneye to great success, shouting at the previous films, “Look what you’ve done to the place!”  You can’t tell me that it’s an accident that Campbell was summoned back to right the ship, because as before he excels at exactly this sort of thing.

Once more, Campbell is asked to introduce us to a new Bond, Daniel Craig.  Dubbed “James Blond” by viewers focusing on entirely the wrong aspect of his performance, Craig brings an icy exterior to Bond, his sense of humor coming less from a place of self-confidence and more from a Dalton-esque disdain for his enemies.  Where Connery and Moore delivered the one-liners with a wink and a slight smirk, Craig manages to be deadly serious about being clever, something that really comes out in subsequent viewings beyond the initial shock of thinking he’s not very funny.  We have to remember that this is an early Bond, a prequel reboot (a preboot?), and Craig does a first-rate job of giving us glimmers of the Bond we expect to see while layering in psychological nuance.

Something we’ll really see developed in the Craig era is the relationship between Bond and M.  Judi Dench is held over from the Brosnan films, and thank God for that because she’s bloody brilliant.  From her very first scene in Casino Royale, which finds her refusing to let her assistant get a word in edgewise, Dench is inspired casting, continuing her force-of-nature portrayal of the head of MI6.  Her relationship with Bond is especially compelling, not quite maternal but oddly affectionate nonetheless.  M is clearly confident in the abilities of her newly-promoted protégé, initially without cause, and this faith in Bond is much more engaging than the steely nature of the male Ms before her.  I’ll never complain any time Judi Dench shows up anywhere, and the apparent continuity contradiction of her presence shouldn’t bother anyone in the slightest because her M is a fantastic addition to the Bond canon.  (If it truly distresses you, just imagine that “James Bond” is a codename and not a real name.  It’ll also explain why a secret agent is so flippant about using his real name.)

I could take a few paragraphs to say effusive things about Mikkelsen and Green, but the thrust of it is that they fit perfectly with the more grounded ethos of Casino Royale and their performances are delightful updates on the “Bond baddie” and “Bond girl” (respectively).  What I’m more struck by, though, is how effective a director Campbell is, measurable by his dexterity with purely visual language.  There are many sequences that proceed without dialogue, yet the film communicates it all deftly.  We don’t need to be told, for example, that Bond is putting on a façade each time he plays it cool, because Campbell gets a hell of a performance out of Craig.  The brief moments of running commentary during the poker games feel slightly abrasive because the film works so strongly with the visual, even for someone who knows little about card games.  The action sequences – which, incidentally, are stellar – bear the mark of solid direction, both for remaining exciting and for slickly refusing to call attention to themselves.  Bond’s chase-parkour-siege sequence early in the film never flounders, and it’s to Campbell’s credit that he stages a stairwell fistfight with as much dexterous grace as Bond’s attempt to discern Le Chiffre’s ‘tell.’

If I have a complaint about Casino Royale, it’s that it ends twice when the first conclusion would have sufficed.  But the second ending does set up a vital piece of Bond’s character – his detached womanizing – and gives us the dynamite last shot in which 007 finally delivers the one line you’ve been waiting the whole time.  Once those five words get spoken and the film cuts to black with the musical sting you’ve also been anticipating (I won’t spoil either, but true believers know which ones I mean), I can’t imagine anyone not feeling a strong chill of accomplishment up the spine with an awed murmur of “And we’re back.”  “James Bond will return,” the credits promise in that noble tradition, but Casino Royale has demonstrated that Bond has already returned.  And we’re back.

Casino Royale is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violent action, a scene of torture, sexual content and nudity.”  While the violence isn’t pervasive, it is quite intense when it happens; the fight scenes are very well choreographed, and they feel very visceral, including a scene in which a nude Bond (nothing is shown) is assaulted with a carpet beater.  Bond has romantic encounters with two women who don’t show anything more than their neckline.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Quantum of Solace (2008) on November 7, 2014!

Monday at the Movies - January 28, 2013

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, two animated features – both nominated for an Academy Award, no less.

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) – One of the best things I can say about Steven Spielberg’s Tintin adaptation (the first in a purported franchise) is that in many ways it’s the “Young Indiana Jones” movie we never actually got to see.  Based on the iconic comic series by Hergé, this film finds Tintin (Jamie Bell) on an adventure to uncover lost treasure amid the mystery of identical model ships.  Tintin recruits the help of the besotted Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) before the sinister Sakharine (Daniel Craig) can unearth the secret of the Unicorn.  Under Spielberg’s direction (and John Williams’s rousing score), the comparison to Indiana Jones is particularly apt because Tintin is littered with action sequences that require only a fedora and a whip to fit into Indy’s canon; though the stakes are often quite low (we know, for instance, that Tintin is untouchable and free from danger), the spectacle Spielberg creates is thrilling and a treat to watch.  The animation style, somewhere near that “uncanny valley” of digital resemblance, may be off-putting to some viewers, but I found the quasi-realistic renderings mostly undistracting, adding to the slightly surreal atmosphere of the movie.  Digitally painting over the actors both approximates Hergé’s style while allowing actors to take on roles beyond their “type” – casting Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, for example, as the identical bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson is visually unlikely but possible (and fantastic) in Tintin.  All told, Tintin was more fun than I was expecting, a welcome relief from Spielberg’s recent “heavier” work and a reminder of the childlike awe his movies can bring.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with “childlike.”)

The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012) – In a post-Depp world, we’ve seen an infusion of piratical adventures featuring swashbucklers of every ilk (even Doctor Who got in on the act with “The Curse of the Black Spot”).  But Band of Misfits is by far the most irreverent, throwing anachronisms to the wind like so much topsail being unfurled.  Rendered in the claymation style popularized by Wallace & Gromit, The Pirates stars Hugh Grant as the luxuriantly bearded Pirate Captain, whose quest for the coveted Pirate of the Year Award is waylaid when Charles Darwin (David Tennant) discovers that the Pirate Captain’s parrot is actually a presumed-extinct dodo.  Along the way, the pirates run afoul of the pirate vendetta of Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton), as well as the Pirate King dressed suspiciously like Elvis.  If all of this sounds like it doesn’t fit, you’d be right, but that’s the brand of humor served up by director Peter Lord; in typical British fashion, cheekiness is the order of the day, governed by “It just is” logic.  The Pirate Captain is an out-of-type choice for Hugh Grant, who’s usually more at home as the foppish and awkward elite in love, but he lends the requisite confidence and swagger to the Captain.  Historical buffs may quibble – after all, Darwin never trained a monkey to speak using an infinite supply of notecards – but surrender to the ludic whimsy of the film is required.  If one can believe it, The Pirates (recently nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Film) takes itself less seriously than the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and that’s such a good thing.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Skyfall (2012)

One of my favorite narrative devices is Chekhov’s Gun – that plot element that is introduced solely because it’s going to pay off later.  If you see a gun, you know it’s going to be fired (or used in some other meaningful way).  Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond film, is littered with many such rewarding moments, leading me to label it “Chekhov’s Bond.”

And oh, is that a good thing.  Skyfall is one of the best Bond films in recent memory, even surpassing Casino Royale in several important ways.

After a brush with death in a fantastic pre-credits sequence, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is called back into active service when a series of intelligence attacks puts the life of M (Judi Dench) in danger.  It’s up to 007 to stop Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) and find out just why he wants M dead – fortunately, Bond has the help of quartermaster “Q” (Ben Whishaw) and slinky secret agent Eve (Naomie Harris).

Since Daniel Craig was cast as the sixth (official) Bond, Skyfall is the film for which we’ve been waiting.  Sure, Casino Royale was breathtakingly realistic in its prequel treatment of the iconic superspy, but its plausibility lacked a certain Bond-iness.  No Q, no one-liners to speak of, and no martinis:  Skyfall restores all of these to the Bond mythos and, without spoiling anything, sets up an exciting fresh-but-familiar direction for the franchise. 

There is much about Skyfall that feels familiar.  There are nods to bygone Bonds – Goldfinger’s Aston Martin appears, the explosion at MI6 recalls The World Is Not Enough, and there’s a cryptic allusion to Jaws – but these feel organic rather than forced, acknowledging the long legacy of the series on this, its fiftieth anniversary (Dr. No debuted in 1962).  Yet these references are not what makes Skyfall such a return to form; rather, there’s a sense that this is, finally, a Bond movie and not a Bond prequel.  Silva is more a Bond villain than Le Chiffre or Dominic Greene, the return of Q’s gadgetry is unexpectedly welcome, and when Craig adjusts his cufflinks after a spectacular action sequence he brings to life a Bond worthy at last to stand beside Connery and Brosnan.

Craig isn’t the only one doing a marvelous job here.  Though Bond films haven’t always been renowned for their spot-on acting, Skyfall is filled with talented stars who are as compelling as anything this side of the Oscar season.  Craig maintains the gravitas established in the last two films but cuts loose enough to bring that Bond sense of humor to bear, wisecracking in the middle of an interrogation and punning his way through a final confrontation.  And Bardem is a suitably creepy foe, his blond locks and impeccable scheme distinguishing him from his “other” villainous role in No Country for Old Men.  Whishaw and Harris too are welcome additions to the series, with their roles set up for future appearances.

Let’s not forget Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney, who play a government official and a helpful groundskeeper, respectively; they’re two reliable actors with long pedigrees, and they add that likely air of dignity they always bring.  But the “breakout” star of Skyfall is Judi Dench, in her seventh outing as M – “outing” being the operative word there, since she gets to step out of the office quite a bit, even more than she did as the hostage in The World Is Not Enough.  Dench gets plenty to do here, lending a hand in a few action sequences and layering emotional depth onto what has usually been a stuffy desk job.  While her talent comes as no surprise, we’re blessed that Skyfall takes full advantage of it.

Director Sam Mendes was perhaps an unlikely choice to helm a Bond film, known more for his introspective American Beauty than anything else.  He brings that same interiority to bear on Skyfall, but he does it without sacrificing any of the big-budget spectacle we’ve come to expect from 007.  Two separate train sequences, a great chase scene in the middle of London’s busiest tube station, and a thrilling shoot-out in a decaying British manor – Skyfall has enough major action pieces to tick off the boxes and more.  Mendes is surprisingly deft with these, controlling our perspective without resorting to any shaky-cam shenanigans.  These are smart, stable action sequences, reminding me once more how much I’d like a Christopher Nolan Bond movie (but then that’s me getting distracted).

Skyfall loses none of the Craig era’s approach toward relevance; Silva’s plot recalls Wikileaks and the worst of chickens coming home to roost, while M’s response is a reminder of how much the world has changed in the last decade (a wry wink, perhaps, to the satellite laser of death from 2002’s Die Another Day).  But Skyfall also emphasizes how much Bond still matters; there’s a very interesting comparison to be made here with The Dark Knight Rises, in that both took their heroes back to Square One to remind them that their true strength lies in their beginnings. 

With a return to form to match Bond’s revisiting of his roots, Skyfall is a great reminder that the sky (at least, post-Quantum of Solace) isn’t falling – rather, it’s the limit.  Whenever we see “Bond 24,” it’s already primed for greatness.

Skyfall is rated PG-13 “for intense violent sequences throughout, some sexuality, language and smoking.”  It being a Bond film, there are many action sequences, plenty of gunfire, and bloody consequences thereof.  Bond also seduces several women, though no nudity is seen.  An F-bomb, a few cigarettes, and several cocktails (including that famous martini) are included, as well.  Ultimately, Skyfall is no less appropriate than any other Bond film.

Stay tuned for Wednesday’s review of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, followed by a Thanksgiving surprise!  (P.S. – I’m aware this is the first Bond Film reviewed on this site – don’t worry, that’s an oversight that will be corrected before long...)

Monday at the Movies - January 2, 2012

Welcome to the first installment of "Monday at the Movies," the first of what should be a more frequent way of updating the blog without the time-consuming aspect of full reviews. Full reviews aren't gone by any means, but they'll be more infrequent and saved for special occasions (good or bad). Check back each Monday for a look at what The Cinema King's been up to and what he's thought during his travels.

(This post will be a bit longer than usual, since I'm playing "catch-up" on the movies I've seen in the last month or so. Christmas is a great time for the movies.)

Fail-Safe (1964) – I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m in love with Sidney Lumet’s work, and this was a bit of an unusual choice for a New Year’s Eve movie choice. But as always with Lumet I wasn’t disappointed. The film’s treatment of measures to prevent an accidental attack on Moscow in the height of the Cold War still carries all the tension it must have fifty years ago, due in large part to Lumet’s capacity to induce anxiety via his careful manipulation of the camera. High marks also to Henry Fonda, who brings his trademark integrity and earnestness to the role of the troubled President of the United States, who has to convince the Russians that the bombers are not sanctioned while wrestling with a number of impossible moral conflicts – which are then asked of the audience at the film’s startling and alarming conclusion. While the film becomes a bit heavy-handed when the President deplores the policy of mutually assured destruction, Fonda’s intense delivery sells it in a way akin to Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). If this film doesn’t grip you and hold on until the very end, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – Stieg Larsson’s runaway bestseller gets a stellar treatment here in the hands of director David Fincher. The book was addicting like very few I’ve ever read, and the film doesn’t disappoint. Fincher keeps the plot moving (despite a few tweaks from the novel) in a quick and cerebrally engaging way, but the real star here is a career-making performance from Rooney Mara as the troubled hacker Lisbeth Salander, who embodies the character and all her subtle quirks opposite a typically stoic Daniel Craig. The suspects in the disappearance under investigation – Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Joely Richardson – all do good work, especially Skarsgard who never disappoints (see Pirates of the Caribbean, Thor, and Mamma Mia for a sense of his range). I’m willing to forgive Trent Reznor for stealing last year’s soundtrack Oscar from Hans Zimmer, because the music here is suitably unsettling, creating a mood perfectly complementary to the visuals Fincher crafts. The film might leave some cold because it’s not standard Hollywood/awards season fare, but it’s a movie which requires thoughtful engagement and a critical understanding of the “man’s inhumanity” theme that pervades the work.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) – I can’t remember the last time I saw a straight action film, one that didn’t play games with the audience or deliberately try to subvert the genre with a series of improbable twists. Pixar veteran Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) does a fine job with this fourth Mission: Impossible film, which fortunately doesn’t require the first three installments to make sense. The acting doesn’t accomplish much beyond providing bodies to live out the film’s action sequences; it’s impossible, for example, to forget that Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise and not Ethan Hunt. But those action sequences are something else indeed, thrilling and exciting in the best escapist tradition. Kudos to Bird for yanking the breath out of my lungs even in moments when I knew that they wouldn’t kill the star, and if the franchise continues like this (even with Jeremy Renner, who seems to be groomed for taking the reins) I may have to accept this mission.

Panic in the Streets (1950) – This, my first experience with the legendary director Elia Kazan, wasn’t a knockout. The premise is promising: investigators have 48 hours to find the murderers of a plague victim before they infect New Orleans with the disease. Richard Widmark is more than capable as a public health official, and a young Jack Palance is appropriately ominous as the murderer, but the film suffers from a split focus, never finding a balance between pursuer and pursued. There are long stretches of film where we don’t see Widmark, for example, a problem which drops a lot of the tension in the film. Compounding this problem is a dated and distracting misunderstanding of germ theory, which makes some of the film’s twists a bit, shall we say, inaccurate. Perhaps in the 50s it held up better, but as the second installment in a TCM double feature with Fail-Safe, Panic in the Streets didn’t raise much commotion for me.

Rango (2011) – I had extremely high expectations for director Gore Verbinski’s first animated film. And being a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the inclusion of Johnny Depp as the star was icing on the cake. Unfortunately, I think my high expectations were insurmountable for the film, which ultimately disappointed me. The story of a thespian chameleon who becomes the sheriff of the town of Dirt, Rango flirts with the western genre without ever doing anything productive with that sporadic flirtation. Depp’s voice acting is first-rate, giving life and nuance to Rango, and the other voices (Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Bill Nighy, and Timothy Olyphant channeling Clint Eastwood) do good work, too. But the story is a bit weak, overladen with scatological humor and other jokes that try too hard. I’d love to have seen what the film would have looked like in the hands of a more capable screenwriter (i.e., someone from the Pixar stable).

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Not everyone was in love with Robert Downey Jr.’s second outing as the master detective, but I was – although not initially. Downey and Jude Law still have excellent chemistry as the eccentric Holmes and his straight-man partner Watson, but the scene stealer here is not Stephen Fry as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (who’s quirky but doesn’t quite gel) but Jared Harris as archenemy Professor Moriarty. Harris is a calm yet psychotic counterpart to Holmes’s intellect, evenly matching our detective at every turn. While the first half of the film struggles to find its footing, the second half rebounds from the uncertainty with a compelling Holmes-v-Moriarty cerebral match that spans several nations. It might be spoiling something to say that the film adapts “The Final Problem” among others, but it’s not spoiling anything to say that director Guy Ritchie does a good job adapting the source material to his own unique style and sensibilities. The standout feature, though, is once again the vast amount of infectious fun that Robert Downey Jr. seems to be having, and I can’t wait for the next film.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Defiance (2008)

It's somewhat surprising to encounter a Holocaust film that breaks new ground and tells a story that hasn't really been told before. In telling the true story of the Bielski partisans, Edward Zwick's Defiance does just that, and decently so at that.

Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber star as Tuvia and Zus Bielski, brothers who lead a group of Polish Jews into the forests to evade Nazi persecution after a series of grisly hunts and raids. As they begin to make camp, more survivors trickle in (the highest number quoted in the film is 1200) and tensions begin to grow between the Bielski brothers, who hold different beliefs about how best to react to their plight.

Aside from the originality of a surprisingly heretofore untold true story, there are two things that really stand out in this fim and are thus meritorious of comment here on this blog: the casting and the pacing. First, the casting. Craig and Schreiber are excellent casting choices, valuable assets to any film for which they're selected. Though they're not quite on the level of Liam Neeson in Schindler's List (still the pinnacle of Holocaust performances for me), they perfectly draw the distinction between their characters - Craig as the level-headed do-gooder Tuvia and Schreiber as the more vengeance-seeking guerilla fighter Zus. The rest of the supporting cast is solid, though nothing stands out like the two powerhouse performances fronting the film.

The pacing, however, is less creditable. The cinematography on the film is beautiful, especially with a good quality television, but at about two-and-a-quarter hours, Defiance starts to feel a little long, dragging its feet in a few places and ultimately sacrificing content for character. For the actors, this is a good thing - they get to hone their craft and turn in a more than decent performance - but for the audience it feels like Defiance is waiting to get started. A few well-done action sequences and several tense moments with Nazi patrols do a fair amount to break this deliberate and unhurried pace, though it felt like a few moments in the film could have been shortened without hurting the overall integrity of the piece.

For good performances and a new facet of the Holocaust, Defiance is a creditable two-some hours on film. For exciting shoot-em-ups, fans of Craig and Schreiber might want to stick with the Bond flicks (Casino Royale more than Quantum of Solace) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Defiance is rated "R for violence and language." Though not as gory as most post-Saving Private Ryan WWII fare, this film does have a few violent shoot-out scenes, as well as occasional objectionable language and brief discussion of rape.