::Cannibalising this rant from my Quantum of Solace post in order to keep that epic a teeny tiny little bit more focused. Apologies for looking like a lazy bastard by reprinting something as a new post::
As I said yesterday, we saw finally saw Quantum of Solace many days after it opened (which is torture for a Bond fan). While the main reason was sheer lack of the pounds, we also balked at seeing it in the midst of a seething mass of ill-behaved douchebags, which has happened way too often over the years. We went to great trouble to see the movie at our local Vue, which was offering an over-18s only screening, which, according to the jerkoff who wrote that Guardian article, is the kind of behaviour only fun-hating assholes could possibly want. Fine, I'm a fun-hating asshole, but I'm a fun-hating asshole who was absurdly happy last night. Only about forty people attended the screening, but with an employee on hand to keep an eye out for bratty kids (the traditional bad apples that spoil the bunch) sneaking in and causing havoc, for the first time I've ever experienced in a big chain cinema, there was a feeling of happy community as we all got on with watching the goddamn film like we wanted. I've had too many shitty experiences going to the cinema, and it's the main reason I don't go as often as I used to. Quint had a memorable rant on Ain't It Cool News a while back, and I love that the talkbackers were almost 100% united behind him, something that almost never happens.
Paint me as a curmudgeon all you like, hack Guardian loser, but I'm sick of going to the cinema only to have to endure ice cubes thrown at my head (Ocean's Thirteen), kids having a party three rows in front of me (William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), threats of violence (Blade), incessant phone use (The Dark Knight, which was, other than that, a superb experience), or sitting in the middle of what felt like a flash mob gathering designed to create the maximum amount of carnage, misery, noise, and disruption possible (Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was exactly like that scene in Gremlins where they all watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, except scarier). I'll pay the extra pound just for some enforced civility which, of course, didn't need to be enforced because the people who bought tickets were eager to watch a movie without distraction and not have a get-together with their mates. It's fucking science. Kudos to Vue for making the experience feel a little more special than it usually would.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Something Of Boris?
Before I begin to discuss the latest Bond movie in a rambling, incoherent, and spoilery manner, some clarification on what the title of this post means:
We saw Quantum of Solace last night and were not nearly as blown away by it as we were with Casino Royale, which, as I've said before, instantly became one of my favourite Bond movies to date. That's not to say I didn't like it; it had punching, explosions, spies, subterfuge, creepy-looking Euro-villains, and someone getting killed with a tiny pair of nail scissors; how could I not love it on some level?
The good parts included Daniel Craig (of course), who continues to be the most exciting Bond since Connery, with his sexy body, excellent voice, and commanding screen presence. Playing Bond as half wounded romantic, half unstoppable force, it's impossible to take your eyes off him as he slams a variety of brawlers through doors and windows or juts his bottom lip out when he's trying not to let his emotions show. His amoral streak shows up regularly, be it killing various leads (which puts him into conflict with M) or impassively driving a boat while ignoring the unconscious woman at his feet.
That said, more than any other Bond so far, he's also incredibly bratty and cheeky, exposing the members of evil terrorist organisation Quantum at a performance of Tosca by jumping in on their communications chatter, an impulsive move that, despite working brilliantly, ends up with him shot at and framed for murder. Since the previous movie, where he loses the one thing he cares about, he has become even bolder, running from one lead to another without pausing for breath, all the while eluding those chasing him with embarrassing ease. One lovely moment shows him effortlessly outmaneuvering M's goons in a hotel, skipping onto ledges and into lifts while they thunder back and forth in futile pursuit. Considering the brute force on display elsewhere, his cocky playfulness shines through.
Also great is Dame Judi Dench as M, but that's no surprise. It was a magnificent casting decision that has paid dividends over the years, and I dread the day she hangs up her pantsuit. Her relationship with Bond in these two movies is far more interesting than her arc with Pierce Brosnan's Bond, which went from politically correct sneering (oh God I sound like Richard Littlejohn) to "Oh James!" after he saved her life during The World Is Not Enough. Now she's almost a reluctant mentor, trying to tame him and his darker impulses, and unable to believe he is not the monster she assumes him to be.
It's not a Bond film without a sleazy European bad guy out to exploit some natural resource or other, and here Mathieu Amalric (so great in Julian Schnabel's glorious The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) does a great job as Dominic Greene, evoking the creepy malevolence of Christopher Walken's Max Zorin and the weaselly physical presence of Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre, manipulating the Bolivian army and the CIA while pretending to be an environmental saviour. He also reminded me of Klaus Maria Brandauer's Maximillian Largo (from the non-EON Bond movie Never Say Never Again), with his nasty air of sexual inferiority and subsequent overcompensation, and I especially like that the plot, which revolves around acquisition of water utility rights, is compared so often to Chinatown, as Amalric's resemblance to Roman Polanski is notable (at least, I see the similarity. Apologies if that's just my brain being weird again).
I doubt he'll be seen as one of the great Bond villains, especially as he doesn't have a suitably evil/silly name, but he's better than almost all of the Brosnan villains (except maybe Electra King and, at a stretch, Alex Trevelyan). However, the Craig Bond movies have so far lacked any fun henchmen. Okay, so at least we're not getting a genetically altered albino Korean with diamonds embedded in his face, but dopey guy with hilarious bowlcut wig is at the opposite end of the ridiculous/boring spectrum of Bondian henchmannery (sorry for bringing up the truly dire Die Another Day. I'll try to ignore it for the rest of this post).
It's also not a Bond movie without ladies of the hott persuasion, and Britain's New Sweetheart, Gemma Arterton, barely registers as anything other than a startlingly glamorous minion of MI6 who gets to die in a manner reminiscent of the iconic murder of Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. With far more screentime, and an A-plot-mirroring subplot of her own, Olga Kurylenko is adequate without being memorable. After the blinding performance from Eva Green in Casino Royale, it was going to be hard to cast someone to match that, but then, of course, the movie would fail if Bond immediately found someone as alluring and lively as Vesper. Casting someone who spends the entire movie looking very very very pissed off was probably very astute. One thing Kurylenko does well is be as stoic and inhumanly driven as Craig's Bond, and one of my favourite moments in the movie is their long walk through the desert, motivated so totally by revenge and duty that they don't speak to each other.
I was less pleased with the short-shrift Jeffrey Wright got as Felix Leiter. Apparently his role was cut down as there was already too much plot, which I can readily believe. It's a shame as Felix has never been a particularly well-used character, and finally, with an actor of the calibre of Wright in the role, we could have seen some real progression. As it is, he still manages to bring the character to life with little screentime, reacting with barely veiled disgust at the brazenly immoral machinations of his partner, CIA South America section chief Gregg Beam, played with nasty relish by David Harbour. Next time around, please can he get more screentime? Please? What a waste of a terrific actor.
While I was mostly happy with the cast, the film itself is problematic. Millions of column inches have been barfed out commenting on how the Bond franchise has had to reinvent itself in the wake of the successful -- and magnificent -- Bourne series, paring down the craziness, such as those ever-popular orbital lasers and whatnot, and concentrating on character and increased plot momentum, especially as many of the Moore Bonds ambled along for what seemed like hours (though I exempt the hugely underrated Octopussy from that, with its superb mid-film setpiece involving Bond chasing a nuke). For Casino Royale this worked brilliantly. With the majority of the movie revolving around the lengthy poker game, the film felt rooted in something approaching sturdy reality. Except for the first half of the film, Bond wasn't jumping from country to country, which annoyed some but pleased me. We learned more about him, Vesper, and Le Chiffre, all without going overboard with exploding oil tankers or invisible cars. It was all about the game, with its many deceptions. Stripped of all the bullshit, and with the stakes raised, Bond became fascinating again.
Quantum of Solace ditches that entirely. Restlessly jumping from one country to another, it's infinitely more complicated than Casino Royale, and as a result loses a lot of that character-based momentum, despite the frenetic editing and numerous action scenes. The Bourne movies don't feature much action, but they feel exhausting because we care what happens to Bourne. Same with Casino Royale. In Quantum of Solace, we're barely given time to digest even a single bit of information before we're whisked off to another location, be it Haiti, Italy (twice), Bolivia, or Austria. And England. And Russia. I came perilously close to losing track of what was going on a couple of times, though that was probably fatigue (I'd been playing Civilisation Revolution all day; very tiring).
What was touted as a revenge movie (which certainly made me think it would have a simple structure) is labyrinthine, detailing a plan to acquire water resources in South America by convincing the US government and the CIA to sign off on a coup in Bolivia, and that's before we get to Bond's quest to kill the men who made Vesper betray him. On top of that we also have Camille Montes and her plot to kill the man who, yes, killed her parents while she was a child (a disappointingly hoary subplot), as well as evil Greene's plans to kill Camille for some reason or other (I'll admit to missing that one). Beyond even those complications, there is Bond's psychic turmoil, which everyone thinks is making him a murderous crazy person, when in actual fact he has managed to compartmentalise his grief, creating the cold-hearted misogynistic assassin bastard that we all know and love. It's a lot to take in on first viewing, but I guess the best compliment I can give it is that I can't wait to see it again to absorb it properly.
Most frustrating is director Marc Forster's pacing. While the plot is so ambitious and globe-trotting that it literally never rests for a second, it doesn't help that Forster has cut the action scenes down so much that while we might get more fightyboomboom in this movie than in Casino Royale (if measured in minutes), none of the scenes last long enough to make an impression. It's not just a case of the usual overediting; while Canyon was annoyed by it, I thought it was bearable, though the end of the boat chase made little sense. Luckily for Forster, seeing Eagle Eye, with its utterly incomprehensible chases, makes any subsequent car chase look like it was filmed by Peter Hyams and edited by Frank J. Urioste. [/action movie nerd]
No, the real problem is that instead of a few memorable and lengthy scenes, we get numerous tiny moments that are good but ultimately forgettable. Compared to the wondrous free running scene, or the beautifully designed airport sequence (which built momentum as brilliantly as anything in the Bourne movies), there is nothing comparable in Quantum of Solace. The on-foot chase through Siena gets better as it progresses, finishing with an awesome rope-swinging battle, but ultimately just isn't long enough to be truly satisfying. It's the same with the brutal fight with a knife-wielding assassin (which takes far too many cues from the awesome Bourne vs. Desh fight in Bourne Ultimatum), the dogfight (which made very little sense), and the boat chase. The finale could have been longer as well; I have to say that considering the hotel where Bond has his final battle gets totally destroyed in the space of about five explosive minutes, I'm thinking fuel cell technology is definitely not the way to go.
It got to the point where, during the Tosca sequence, the editing of the action was either made as impenetrable and anti-exciting as possible by Forster because he wanted to intercut the usual carnage with operatic excess as some kind of statement, or because he was just bored with putting action in the movie. He also managed to wreck the flow of the Siena chase by intercutting it with the Palio di Siena horse-race, an event he seems to think is worthy of inclusion despite having nothing to do with the plot. While I'm impressed at the epic sweep of these two sequences, and am grateful to him for adding some glamour to Bond's adventures (something that has been lacking for a while) it smacks of pretension, with Forster adding extravagant distractions to the movie where more focus would help.
That's not to say that the action isn't well filmed. Everything looks great and hyper-exciting, with special praise for Craig who really sells the action, which I suspect reflects well on second unit director Dan Bradley, who gets a credit in the opening sequence, a rarity even for the most complicated of movies. Though I don't know how much of the action was handled by Forster or Bradley, I suspect that Bradley is responsible for much of it, seeing as how he has been a stunt coordinator on some of the most exciting movies of the past few years, such as the Bourne films, Spider-Man 2, and Art School Confidential. It's just a shame that the beautifully photographed and staged action got edited into irrelevance.
I will give kudos to Forster for making this the best looking Bond ever. Some scenes are unarguably gorgeous, and the decision to go back to Ken Adams-style excess really pay off in the finale. It's an interesting trade-off, sidelining the action in favour of visual splendour, though maybe not a trade-off I would make. Goldeneye and Casino Royale director Martin Campbell is derided by some as workmanlike or uninspiring; Harry Knowles seems to have a vendetta against him, but perhaps that's because Campbell replaced his buddy Robert Rodriguez on The Mask of Zorro. Fair enough, but seriously, considering the variable quality of Rodriguez' movies, we should be grateful Campbell turned out such an impeccable and thrilling adventure movie. As for his Bond movies, he has done excellent work rebooting the series twice, and doesn't get enough credit for directing actors. No matter how exciting it was, Casino Royale worked because Daniel Craig and Eva Green were a heart-breaking and convincing match, bringing genuine romantic emotion to the franchise for the first time since On Her Majesty's Secret Service (and was significantly more affecting as both actors are better than George Lazenby or even Diana Rigg, who is great nevertheless). Compare that to Pierce Brosnan's barely convincing feelings for Electra King in The World is Not Enough, or Paris Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies. Craig and Green worked wonders with this material, given confidence by Campbell's sure hand and a terrific screenplay.
Still on the subject of Campbell (sorry), he's willing to allow an action scene to breathe, to fill up the screen for however long it takes for the mini-story of that conflict to play itself out. As a result he's created two of my all-time favourite Bond scenes, the St. Petersburg tank chase and the free running chase, both of which last for a significant amount of time. Quantum of Solace is that rarest of Bond films; one without an iconic action sequence or moment that makes you remember the movie even if the contorted plots fall away the minute you leave the screening.
These are off the top of my head: Casino Royale had the free running, Tomorrow Never Dies has the bike/helicopter chase, The World Is Not Enough has the Thames boat chase, The Living Daylights has the Afghanistan plane finale, From Russia With Love has the brutal proto-Bourne fight with Red Grant, Goldfinger has the never-bettered Fort Knox battle, Moonraker has the much-derided gondola chase (and wacky space-station laser battle), and You Only Live Twice has a bunch of ninjas attacking a fricking rocket launchpad hidden inside a volcano, people!!! Hell, even The Man With The Golden Gun has the incredible car stunt. There's only a few Bond movies that lack that one scene that blows your mind. Quantum of Solace has several contenders, but none of them are given a chance to really shine, which would be fine if that meant more focus on the characters, but as there is so much going on (in a shorter running time than Casino Royale), that's not the case, with Camille's sub-plot seeming to be especially hackneyed and underwritten.
Speaking of The Living Daylights (which I adore), by now, with Bond allowed to do more than be a n00b, we see that Craig's interpretation, as a post-romantic stoic killing machine, bears a resemblance to Timothy Dalton's humourless incarnation, especially as Bond goes rogue in this movie just as he did in Dalton's second movie, License to Kill (which I definitely do not adore). Thankfully, Quantum of Solace is infinitely better than that pile of doo-doo, but the lack of humour has stuck in the craw of many critics, who are now pining for a return to the wise-cracking playboy Bond of old. Of course, these same critics had turned their back on the series numerous times in the past, stating that the formula was outdated, so I won't even be treating their whining with the traditional pinch of salt, but though Quantum of Solace seems to be doing well at the box office, I do fear that a backlash might be in the offing, with the same audiences that embraced Casino Royale changing their minds after seeing the new deadly serious installment.
Hopefully the efforts of writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis (not to mention the uncredited Joshua Zetumer) will convince that Bond will continue to grow with each movie, generating an increase in audience empathy that has faded in the past when Bond movies appeared to be generated by some kind of robotic production line. The Bond of Quantum of Solace is almost impenetrable, but M and Camille give us enough of an insight into his thought processes that we feel for him as his grief threatens to consume him. While I'd argue he's not as far along as those characters think, he certainly has difficulty dealing with his emotions, and the final, ambiguous shot doesn't give us a hint as to whether he is unable to get over his sadness over Vesper's death and betrayal, or if he has, but those feelings have been replaced by psychic tumult caused by exposure to extreme levels of death and destruction, not to mention the realisation that the Quantum organisation is an enormous, potentially world-threatening hazard.
Still, I'm grateful that moment was left to the viewer to decode. Though I think Paul Haggis has done some of his best work on these two Bond films, he still manages to overegg the pudding with depressing regularity. After his miserable and unsubtle work on Crash (aka "AUDIENCES! RACISM IS TEH BADD!!!") and Flags of Our Fathers ("AUDIENCES! HEROISM IS KIND OF A NEBULOUS CONCEPT AND HEROES MIGHT NOT BE SO HEROIC AFTER ALL BUT HEY IT'S THE LABEL THAT COUNTS!!!"), he has tainted both Craig Bond movies with obvious statements about what he considers to be the theme of each film.
With Casino Royale there were the continual references to Bond's arrogance, and Quantum of Solace is marred by a particularly egregious speech from Giancarlo Giannini, who says the word "forgive" about 65 times in the space of a minute. M barks the word out a few times as well, just in case we missed the point. Apparently Bond has to "forgive" Vesper, and himself, before he can move on. For all the explosions and violence and sexual tension, Haggis tries his hardest to turn the film into an installment of some godawful, pedestrian TV show, with some dime-store psychology threatening to overwhelm the proceedings. The excellent actors make that shit work, but someone has to find Haggis and tell him that his signature style is tired and weak and please can he trust the audience a bit more, instead of pointing at his themes with a neon-green foam finger and screaming, "THEEEEEEEEEME!!!" Poor Giancarlo Giannini. Brutalised in the first movie, and then forced to beat Bond over the head with embarrassingly anvillicious dialogue.
It sounds like I hated it, but I really didn't. Though it didn't match up to Casino Royale (I didn't expect it to), the drop in quality was much smaller than the drop between Timothy Dalton's two films (i.e. precipitous) or Brosnan's first two (almost as bad, but saved by the inclusion of the reliably awesome Michelle Yeoh). The franchise still has massive potential, and if this installment didn't rock my world, it still managed to keep me hooked and hopeful for the next one. Fingers crossed they'll find a director who is willing to let the film breathe a little bit.
That was a lot to write. If you've made it this far, congratulations. Take it away, Jack White and Alicia Keys!
That's how you do it, Chris Cornell / Madonna / Garbage / Sheryl Crow / Tina Turner and Bono / Patti LaBelle / A-Ha. (Wow, the last good Bond theme was A View to a Kill?)
We saw Quantum of Solace last night and were not nearly as blown away by it as we were with Casino Royale, which, as I've said before, instantly became one of my favourite Bond movies to date. That's not to say I didn't like it; it had punching, explosions, spies, subterfuge, creepy-looking Euro-villains, and someone getting killed with a tiny pair of nail scissors; how could I not love it on some level?
The good parts included Daniel Craig (of course), who continues to be the most exciting Bond since Connery, with his sexy body, excellent voice, and commanding screen presence. Playing Bond as half wounded romantic, half unstoppable force, it's impossible to take your eyes off him as he slams a variety of brawlers through doors and windows or juts his bottom lip out when he's trying not to let his emotions show. His amoral streak shows up regularly, be it killing various leads (which puts him into conflict with M) or impassively driving a boat while ignoring the unconscious woman at his feet.
That said, more than any other Bond so far, he's also incredibly bratty and cheeky, exposing the members of evil terrorist organisation Quantum at a performance of Tosca by jumping in on their communications chatter, an impulsive move that, despite working brilliantly, ends up with him shot at and framed for murder. Since the previous movie, where he loses the one thing he cares about, he has become even bolder, running from one lead to another without pausing for breath, all the while eluding those chasing him with embarrassing ease. One lovely moment shows him effortlessly outmaneuvering M's goons in a hotel, skipping onto ledges and into lifts while they thunder back and forth in futile pursuit. Considering the brute force on display elsewhere, his cocky playfulness shines through.
Also great is Dame Judi Dench as M, but that's no surprise. It was a magnificent casting decision that has paid dividends over the years, and I dread the day she hangs up her pantsuit. Her relationship with Bond in these two movies is far more interesting than her arc with Pierce Brosnan's Bond, which went from politically correct sneering (oh God I sound like Richard Littlejohn) to "Oh James!" after he saved her life during The World Is Not Enough. Now she's almost a reluctant mentor, trying to tame him and his darker impulses, and unable to believe he is not the monster she assumes him to be.
It's not a Bond film without a sleazy European bad guy out to exploit some natural resource or other, and here Mathieu Amalric (so great in Julian Schnabel's glorious The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) does a great job as Dominic Greene, evoking the creepy malevolence of Christopher Walken's Max Zorin and the weaselly physical presence of Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre, manipulating the Bolivian army and the CIA while pretending to be an environmental saviour. He also reminded me of Klaus Maria Brandauer's Maximillian Largo (from the non-EON Bond movie Never Say Never Again), with his nasty air of sexual inferiority and subsequent overcompensation, and I especially like that the plot, which revolves around acquisition of water utility rights, is compared so often to Chinatown, as Amalric's resemblance to Roman Polanski is notable (at least, I see the similarity. Apologies if that's just my brain being weird again).
I doubt he'll be seen as one of the great Bond villains, especially as he doesn't have a suitably evil/silly name, but he's better than almost all of the Brosnan villains (except maybe Electra King and, at a stretch, Alex Trevelyan). However, the Craig Bond movies have so far lacked any fun henchmen. Okay, so at least we're not getting a genetically altered albino Korean with diamonds embedded in his face, but dopey guy with hilarious bowlcut wig is at the opposite end of the ridiculous/boring spectrum of Bondian henchmannery (sorry for bringing up the truly dire Die Another Day. I'll try to ignore it for the rest of this post).
It's also not a Bond movie without ladies of the hott persuasion, and Britain's New Sweetheart, Gemma Arterton, barely registers as anything other than a startlingly glamorous minion of MI6 who gets to die in a manner reminiscent of the iconic murder of Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. With far more screentime, and an A-plot-mirroring subplot of her own, Olga Kurylenko is adequate without being memorable. After the blinding performance from Eva Green in Casino Royale, it was going to be hard to cast someone to match that, but then, of course, the movie would fail if Bond immediately found someone as alluring and lively as Vesper. Casting someone who spends the entire movie looking very very very pissed off was probably very astute. One thing Kurylenko does well is be as stoic and inhumanly driven as Craig's Bond, and one of my favourite moments in the movie is their long walk through the desert, motivated so totally by revenge and duty that they don't speak to each other.
I was less pleased with the short-shrift Jeffrey Wright got as Felix Leiter. Apparently his role was cut down as there was already too much plot, which I can readily believe. It's a shame as Felix has never been a particularly well-used character, and finally, with an actor of the calibre of Wright in the role, we could have seen some real progression. As it is, he still manages to bring the character to life with little screentime, reacting with barely veiled disgust at the brazenly immoral machinations of his partner, CIA South America section chief Gregg Beam, played with nasty relish by David Harbour. Next time around, please can he get more screentime? Please? What a waste of a terrific actor.
While I was mostly happy with the cast, the film itself is problematic. Millions of column inches have been barfed out commenting on how the Bond franchise has had to reinvent itself in the wake of the successful -- and magnificent -- Bourne series, paring down the craziness, such as those ever-popular orbital lasers and whatnot, and concentrating on character and increased plot momentum, especially as many of the Moore Bonds ambled along for what seemed like hours (though I exempt the hugely underrated Octopussy from that, with its superb mid-film setpiece involving Bond chasing a nuke). For Casino Royale this worked brilliantly. With the majority of the movie revolving around the lengthy poker game, the film felt rooted in something approaching sturdy reality. Except for the first half of the film, Bond wasn't jumping from country to country, which annoyed some but pleased me. We learned more about him, Vesper, and Le Chiffre, all without going overboard with exploding oil tankers or invisible cars. It was all about the game, with its many deceptions. Stripped of all the bullshit, and with the stakes raised, Bond became fascinating again.
Quantum of Solace ditches that entirely. Restlessly jumping from one country to another, it's infinitely more complicated than Casino Royale, and as a result loses a lot of that character-based momentum, despite the frenetic editing and numerous action scenes. The Bourne movies don't feature much action, but they feel exhausting because we care what happens to Bourne. Same with Casino Royale. In Quantum of Solace, we're barely given time to digest even a single bit of information before we're whisked off to another location, be it Haiti, Italy (twice), Bolivia, or Austria. And England. And Russia. I came perilously close to losing track of what was going on a couple of times, though that was probably fatigue (I'd been playing Civilisation Revolution all day; very tiring).
What was touted as a revenge movie (which certainly made me think it would have a simple structure) is labyrinthine, detailing a plan to acquire water resources in South America by convincing the US government and the CIA to sign off on a coup in Bolivia, and that's before we get to Bond's quest to kill the men who made Vesper betray him. On top of that we also have Camille Montes and her plot to kill the man who, yes, killed her parents while she was a child (a disappointingly hoary subplot), as well as evil Greene's plans to kill Camille for some reason or other (I'll admit to missing that one). Beyond even those complications, there is Bond's psychic turmoil, which everyone thinks is making him a murderous crazy person, when in actual fact he has managed to compartmentalise his grief, creating the cold-hearted misogynistic assassin bastard that we all know and love. It's a lot to take in on first viewing, but I guess the best compliment I can give it is that I can't wait to see it again to absorb it properly.
Most frustrating is director Marc Forster's pacing. While the plot is so ambitious and globe-trotting that it literally never rests for a second, it doesn't help that Forster has cut the action scenes down so much that while we might get more fightyboomboom in this movie than in Casino Royale (if measured in minutes), none of the scenes last long enough to make an impression. It's not just a case of the usual overediting; while Canyon was annoyed by it, I thought it was bearable, though the end of the boat chase made little sense. Luckily for Forster, seeing Eagle Eye, with its utterly incomprehensible chases, makes any subsequent car chase look like it was filmed by Peter Hyams and edited by Frank J. Urioste. [/action movie nerd]
No, the real problem is that instead of a few memorable and lengthy scenes, we get numerous tiny moments that are good but ultimately forgettable. Compared to the wondrous free running scene, or the beautifully designed airport sequence (which built momentum as brilliantly as anything in the Bourne movies), there is nothing comparable in Quantum of Solace. The on-foot chase through Siena gets better as it progresses, finishing with an awesome rope-swinging battle, but ultimately just isn't long enough to be truly satisfying. It's the same with the brutal fight with a knife-wielding assassin (which takes far too many cues from the awesome Bourne vs. Desh fight in Bourne Ultimatum), the dogfight (which made very little sense), and the boat chase. The finale could have been longer as well; I have to say that considering the hotel where Bond has his final battle gets totally destroyed in the space of about five explosive minutes, I'm thinking fuel cell technology is definitely not the way to go.
It got to the point where, during the Tosca sequence, the editing of the action was either made as impenetrable and anti-exciting as possible by Forster because he wanted to intercut the usual carnage with operatic excess as some kind of statement, or because he was just bored with putting action in the movie. He also managed to wreck the flow of the Siena chase by intercutting it with the Palio di Siena horse-race, an event he seems to think is worthy of inclusion despite having nothing to do with the plot. While I'm impressed at the epic sweep of these two sequences, and am grateful to him for adding some glamour to Bond's adventures (something that has been lacking for a while) it smacks of pretension, with Forster adding extravagant distractions to the movie where more focus would help.
That's not to say that the action isn't well filmed. Everything looks great and hyper-exciting, with special praise for Craig who really sells the action, which I suspect reflects well on second unit director Dan Bradley, who gets a credit in the opening sequence, a rarity even for the most complicated of movies. Though I don't know how much of the action was handled by Forster or Bradley, I suspect that Bradley is responsible for much of it, seeing as how he has been a stunt coordinator on some of the most exciting movies of the past few years, such as the Bourne films, Spider-Man 2, and Art School Confidential. It's just a shame that the beautifully photographed and staged action got edited into irrelevance.
I will give kudos to Forster for making this the best looking Bond ever. Some scenes are unarguably gorgeous, and the decision to go back to Ken Adams-style excess really pay off in the finale. It's an interesting trade-off, sidelining the action in favour of visual splendour, though maybe not a trade-off I would make. Goldeneye and Casino Royale director Martin Campbell is derided by some as workmanlike or uninspiring; Harry Knowles seems to have a vendetta against him, but perhaps that's because Campbell replaced his buddy Robert Rodriguez on The Mask of Zorro. Fair enough, but seriously, considering the variable quality of Rodriguez' movies, we should be grateful Campbell turned out such an impeccable and thrilling adventure movie. As for his Bond movies, he has done excellent work rebooting the series twice, and doesn't get enough credit for directing actors. No matter how exciting it was, Casino Royale worked because Daniel Craig and Eva Green were a heart-breaking and convincing match, bringing genuine romantic emotion to the franchise for the first time since On Her Majesty's Secret Service (and was significantly more affecting as both actors are better than George Lazenby or even Diana Rigg, who is great nevertheless). Compare that to Pierce Brosnan's barely convincing feelings for Electra King in The World is Not Enough, or Paris Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies. Craig and Green worked wonders with this material, given confidence by Campbell's sure hand and a terrific screenplay.
Still on the subject of Campbell (sorry), he's willing to allow an action scene to breathe, to fill up the screen for however long it takes for the mini-story of that conflict to play itself out. As a result he's created two of my all-time favourite Bond scenes, the St. Petersburg tank chase and the free running chase, both of which last for a significant amount of time. Quantum of Solace is that rarest of Bond films; one without an iconic action sequence or moment that makes you remember the movie even if the contorted plots fall away the minute you leave the screening.
These are off the top of my head: Casino Royale had the free running, Tomorrow Never Dies has the bike/helicopter chase, The World Is Not Enough has the Thames boat chase, The Living Daylights has the Afghanistan plane finale, From Russia With Love has the brutal proto-Bourne fight with Red Grant, Goldfinger has the never-bettered Fort Knox battle, Moonraker has the much-derided gondola chase (and wacky space-station laser battle), and You Only Live Twice has a bunch of ninjas attacking a fricking rocket launchpad hidden inside a volcano, people!!! Hell, even The Man With The Golden Gun has the incredible car stunt. There's only a few Bond movies that lack that one scene that blows your mind. Quantum of Solace has several contenders, but none of them are given a chance to really shine, which would be fine if that meant more focus on the characters, but as there is so much going on (in a shorter running time than Casino Royale), that's not the case, with Camille's sub-plot seeming to be especially hackneyed and underwritten.
Speaking of The Living Daylights (which I adore), by now, with Bond allowed to do more than be a n00b, we see that Craig's interpretation, as a post-romantic stoic killing machine, bears a resemblance to Timothy Dalton's humourless incarnation, especially as Bond goes rogue in this movie just as he did in Dalton's second movie, License to Kill (which I definitely do not adore). Thankfully, Quantum of Solace is infinitely better than that pile of doo-doo, but the lack of humour has stuck in the craw of many critics, who are now pining for a return to the wise-cracking playboy Bond of old. Of course, these same critics had turned their back on the series numerous times in the past, stating that the formula was outdated, so I won't even be treating their whining with the traditional pinch of salt, but though Quantum of Solace seems to be doing well at the box office, I do fear that a backlash might be in the offing, with the same audiences that embraced Casino Royale changing their minds after seeing the new deadly serious installment.
Hopefully the efforts of writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis (not to mention the uncredited Joshua Zetumer) will convince that Bond will continue to grow with each movie, generating an increase in audience empathy that has faded in the past when Bond movies appeared to be generated by some kind of robotic production line. The Bond of Quantum of Solace is almost impenetrable, but M and Camille give us enough of an insight into his thought processes that we feel for him as his grief threatens to consume him. While I'd argue he's not as far along as those characters think, he certainly has difficulty dealing with his emotions, and the final, ambiguous shot doesn't give us a hint as to whether he is unable to get over his sadness over Vesper's death and betrayal, or if he has, but those feelings have been replaced by psychic tumult caused by exposure to extreme levels of death and destruction, not to mention the realisation that the Quantum organisation is an enormous, potentially world-threatening hazard.
Still, I'm grateful that moment was left to the viewer to decode. Though I think Paul Haggis has done some of his best work on these two Bond films, he still manages to overegg the pudding with depressing regularity. After his miserable and unsubtle work on Crash (aka "AUDIENCES! RACISM IS TEH BADD!!!") and Flags of Our Fathers ("AUDIENCES! HEROISM IS KIND OF A NEBULOUS CONCEPT AND HEROES MIGHT NOT BE SO HEROIC AFTER ALL BUT HEY IT'S THE LABEL THAT COUNTS!!!"), he has tainted both Craig Bond movies with obvious statements about what he considers to be the theme of each film.
With Casino Royale there were the continual references to Bond's arrogance, and Quantum of Solace is marred by a particularly egregious speech from Giancarlo Giannini, who says the word "forgive" about 65 times in the space of a minute. M barks the word out a few times as well, just in case we missed the point. Apparently Bond has to "forgive" Vesper, and himself, before he can move on. For all the explosions and violence and sexual tension, Haggis tries his hardest to turn the film into an installment of some godawful, pedestrian TV show, with some dime-store psychology threatening to overwhelm the proceedings. The excellent actors make that shit work, but someone has to find Haggis and tell him that his signature style is tired and weak and please can he trust the audience a bit more, instead of pointing at his themes with a neon-green foam finger and screaming, "THEEEEEEEEEME!!!" Poor Giancarlo Giannini. Brutalised in the first movie, and then forced to beat Bond over the head with embarrassingly anvillicious dialogue.
It sounds like I hated it, but I really didn't. Though it didn't match up to Casino Royale (I didn't expect it to), the drop in quality was much smaller than the drop between Timothy Dalton's two films (i.e. precipitous) or Brosnan's first two (almost as bad, but saved by the inclusion of the reliably awesome Michelle Yeoh). The franchise still has massive potential, and if this installment didn't rock my world, it still managed to keep me hooked and hopeful for the next one. Fingers crossed they'll find a director who is willing to let the film breathe a little bit.
That was a lot to write. If you've made it this far, congratulations. Take it away, Jack White and Alicia Keys!
That's how you do it, Chris Cornell / Madonna / Garbage / Sheryl Crow / Tina Turner and Bono / Patti LaBelle / A-Ha. (Wow, the last good Bond theme was A View to a Kill?)
Saturday, November 8, 2008
How We Waited Out The Election
Only now, as the smoke clears and the euphoria dies down, do I realise how much the wait for November the fourth had turned my mind into a stagnant pond, a Moebius strip of re-thought thoughts, cognition turned into a chore thanks to the insane worry over something I literally had no control over (at least Canyon could vote, an act that made her justifiably happy). Two days later, and look at me! I'm all florid and shit, like what I was previous, like.
During that interminable wait, we tried to keep ourselves occupied and not just keep reading the same four websites (though we enjoyed it all) and getting even more obsessed than usual with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Our efforts bore some pleasant fruit (the cherries and strawberries of the week) and some disappointing fruit too (mangoes, sharon fruit and unripe bananas, metaphorically speaking).
Burn After Reading
I had high hopes for this after the excellence of No Country For Old Men had erased disappointed memories of the previous four Coen Brothers movies (yes, I'm not crazy about O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Man Who Wasn't There), but it was frustratingly slight. Being more of a fan of their hyper-weird comedies than their dramas, with The Big Lebowski at the top of my faves list and Raising Arizona close on its tail, I was hoping this would be similarly unhinged and frenetic, but instead it was like Fargo with more jokes, which is a problem considering I don't really like Fargo that much. At least, not as much as many seem to.
Of course, mid-level Coen Brothers movies still have a lot to recommend. Almost all of the performances were great (though weirdly Malkovich did my head in with. His. Stilted. Fucking. Line. Readings. And. Laboured. Fucking. Profanity.), with special kudos to the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (who broke my heart). That said, why did they bother casting Tilda "Goddess" Swinton for a part that had about twelve lines? Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to see her on screen in any capacity, but she seemed ill-served. Here's hoping she becomes a Coen repertory player and turns up again, except with something to do other than be annoyed with the men in her life.
Even with that cast, the film never seemed to come alive, though the central point, that of lampooning the arrogance and solipsism of a bunch of self-regarding twerps who think their pitiful lives have some greater meaning, when in fact all they are little more than a bunch of horny morons, was beautifully done, perhaps even more so than the previous times they have tried to make that point (No Country, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.). I've had more fun thinking about the film than I did watching it. That said, Brad Pitt is a better comedic actor than I thought possible.
I'm grateful to the Coens for proving that.
Quantum of Solace
Casino Royale is possibly my favourite Bond movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, leapfrogging over The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me and Goldeneye, but poverty has delayed us going to see the latest movie. Instead I've been rewatching this over and over again.
We might still see it this week, once I've sold a kidney, following the wonderful news that Vue Cinemas have instituted over-18's only performances for people who don't want to put up with hordes of little shits treating cinemas like the local bus depot. A black man is elected President of the United States and a cinema chain (in our home town, no less) finally realises moviegoers have been staying away because of the behaviour of a bunch of oiks, all in the same week? This truly is the golden age of civilisation. Speaking of which...
Civilisation Revolution
If anything stops me blogging, it will be this game. In its previous manifestations it was already the greatest game ever made (yeah chess, thass right. What have you done for me lately?), but now it's less fussy, faster paced, and filled with endearing silliness. Canyon has been forced to put up with my wasting hours on the hellishly addictive thing, so much so that I'm now responding to her conversational gambits with a reflexive "Follum follum!" If you've played it, you know what that means.
Tropic Thunder
It's taken us way longer than we would have liked to see Ben Stiller's attack on Hollywood, and it was not even worth the wait. Despite the odd great moment, the whole ambitious exercise falls flat with upsetting regularity. Though Robert Downey Jr.'s performance is just as amazing as we had heard, he didn't actually seem have anything funny to say, and we ended up laughing at Jack Black's cold turkey shenanigans instead. Stiller's original concept for the film is hugely appealing, but the execution of it just didn't seem to click at all, with the plot drifting along from one lengthy and ultimately unfunny scene to another, seemingly without direction or purpose. It made Zoolander look like a tightly plotted Preston Sturges movie (I say that as a fan of Zoolander who thinks it sometimes ambles when it should be sprinting). While Adam McKay's movies mostly come alive in the editing room, this never takes shape, and no amount of amusing scenes with Tom Cruise dancing and swearing can save it. Dispiriting stuff, though I'm hoping to see a longer cut soon that might justify that brilliant idea, and maybe even give Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson something to do other than be straight men. Zoolander got funnier with each viewing, so maybe something similar will happen here, though I doubt it.
Compare that to Pineapple Express, which we watched again, and is now, definitely, my favourite comedy of the year. Considering it's a stoner comedy it's built with the same care that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg lavished on Superbad, progressing with logical beauty from scene to scene with only a couple of moments at the end of the second act that show they love their McKee a bit too much. It's not a deal breaker at all, though, and the Hot Fuzz-style genre mash-up of the final act is even more satisfying second time around, with kudos going to Rogen's repeated declarations of, "Nice!" whenever anything goes his way (such as the hilarious respawning machine guns in the underground lair).
In comparison, Tropic Thunder looks like a first cut mess, something you would show to a studio head to reassure them that the money is on the screen. How talented individuals like Stiller, Etan Cohen (partly responsible for the magnificent Idiocracy) and Justin Theroux could botch this is beyond me. The latter name is especially troubling. My previous excitement at his participation in Iron Man 2 has withered completely. Let's hope he's better off without the improvisational scenes between the leads that appear to have derailed the film so badly.
Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham
Is this the best comic on the market right now? In terms of superheroism, perhaps it is, though of course it has been great since Geoff Johns jumped onto the title early in the previous incarnation. Johns is always great value (especially lately; he's on fire), but JSA is better than ever, making me retroactively like Kingdom Come more than I originally did. However, the main reason is...
...OMG Hawkman is a TOTAL BADASS. Trust Goody-Two Shoes Jay to get in his way though.
Hunger
Turner Prize-winning director Steve McQueen's meditation on Bobby Sands' hunger strike has been damned by some of the UK press for daring to portray the Republican struggle in a noble light, which is hilariously inappropriate as that is absolutely not what the film is about at all. While, yes, it is set in The Maze and follows Sands' strike from conception to death, and while it shows in horrific detail the back-and-forth mental and physical combat between the imprisoned IRA soldiers/terrorists/politicians (delete as applicable) and the guards, it's pretty much an abstract exploration of what art is. Prisoners daub the walls of the cells with shit, flood the corridors of the prison with urine, and, eventually, stage a protest that turns their bodies, as depicted by McQueen, into a time-lapse photo of living, breathing decay. Even the poster shows one of the "paintings" by a prisoner (a nod to previous Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili?).
This is, as far as I can tell, the one reading of the movie that explains the peculiar structure. The first third of the film concerns a new prisoner (Davey, played by Brian Milligan) learning the ropes of prison life and the protests therein via his cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), the middle third is the much-debated conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about mortality and politics, and the final third is an impassive, minimalist depiction of Sands' lengthy death with Davey and Gerry disappearing from the movie altogether. Bear in mind, except for the middle section, there is almost no dialogue, with only a minimal amount of verbally communicated information giving background on what is happening. There is barely any character development, but then that's not what the film is about. It's about their acts, their attempts to say something with little more than their bodies as the conduit of their emotion and rage. Much of what they do has little effect. The shit paintings are blasted away and the urine is washed up in a shot of audience-patience-defying length. Only the deaths of the hunger strikers seem to have any effect, though that is relegated to a few title cards at the end of the movie giving a few nuggets of information about the subsequent years.
Getting angry about the movie for glamourising the strike (shurely shome mishtake; it's nigh-unwatchable) or having a pro-IRA agenda seems wrong-headed, though I understand many people are never going to allow themselves to move on from those horrible years during the struggle. However, in the terms of the film, that struggle is less important than McQueen's interest in the way the prisoners and hunger strikers express themselves, with the only scene that debates the details of the Republican battles and the morality of politicised suicide being the notorious static art/anti-art shot of a drab room and Sands and his priest smoking and talking for twenty minutes, which, while hypnotic and superbly played, stands in contrast with the bleak, almost silent beauty of the rest of the movie. McQueen seems to be staring into his soul and wondering why he is an artist, and how his art compares to something as drastic as turning the place you live into a hellhole using only the waste products of your body, or allowing yourself to be brutalised just to make a statement and to psychologically affect those who torture you. Isn't art meant to affect the people who experience it? Isn't making a person beat you to a bloody pulp the most extreme way to do that? Where does that leave McQueen and the rest of the YBAs?
Can you tell that I thought it was amazing? There's a lot to digest (really, no pun intended), especially as it is attracting some fascinating debate, as in this excellent piece from Frieze magazine. It's definitely on my end of year best film list, and strongly recommended for anyone who can handle the body horror.
I'm unsure as to whether admitting that I spent the last couple of weeks doing all of that in addition to habitually checking on Obama's progress makes me look more or less sad. I could lie and say I also went sailing, if that helps. Of course, now we're waiting for his press conferences as if they were episodes of Friday Night Lights, as we tuned into CNN last night to see him talk about getting a shelter dog (which made Canyon almost swoon) and expressing condolences over a journalist's damaged arm (which almost finished me off). Compared to that slavish devotion to the President-Elect, acting like a couple of lovestruck groupies, six hour marathons of CivRev almost look cool.
During that interminable wait, we tried to keep ourselves occupied and not just keep reading the same four websites (though we enjoyed it all) and getting even more obsessed than usual with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Our efforts bore some pleasant fruit (the cherries and strawberries of the week) and some disappointing fruit too (mangoes, sharon fruit and unripe bananas, metaphorically speaking).
Burn After Reading
I had high hopes for this after the excellence of No Country For Old Men had erased disappointed memories of the previous four Coen Brothers movies (yes, I'm not crazy about O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Man Who Wasn't There), but it was frustratingly slight. Being more of a fan of their hyper-weird comedies than their dramas, with The Big Lebowski at the top of my faves list and Raising Arizona close on its tail, I was hoping this would be similarly unhinged and frenetic, but instead it was like Fargo with more jokes, which is a problem considering I don't really like Fargo that much. At least, not as much as many seem to.
Of course, mid-level Coen Brothers movies still have a lot to recommend. Almost all of the performances were great (though weirdly Malkovich did my head in with. His. Stilted. Fucking. Line. Readings. And. Laboured. Fucking. Profanity.), with special kudos to the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (who broke my heart). That said, why did they bother casting Tilda "Goddess" Swinton for a part that had about twelve lines? Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to see her on screen in any capacity, but she seemed ill-served. Here's hoping she becomes a Coen repertory player and turns up again, except with something to do other than be annoyed with the men in her life.
Even with that cast, the film never seemed to come alive, though the central point, that of lampooning the arrogance and solipsism of a bunch of self-regarding twerps who think their pitiful lives have some greater meaning, when in fact all they are little more than a bunch of horny morons, was beautifully done, perhaps even more so than the previous times they have tried to make that point (No Country, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.). I've had more fun thinking about the film than I did watching it. That said, Brad Pitt is a better comedic actor than I thought possible.
I'm grateful to the Coens for proving that.
Casino Royale is possibly my favourite Bond movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, leapfrogging over The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me and Goldeneye, but poverty has delayed us going to see the latest movie. Instead I've been rewatching this over and over again.
We might still see it this week, once I've sold a kidney, following the wonderful news that Vue Cinemas have instituted over-18's only performances for people who don't want to put up with hordes of little shits treating cinemas like the local bus depot. A black man is elected President of the United States and a cinema chain (in our home town, no less) finally realises moviegoers have been staying away because of the behaviour of a bunch of oiks, all in the same week? This truly is the golden age of civilisation. Speaking of which...
Civilisation Revolution
If anything stops me blogging, it will be this game. In its previous manifestations it was already the greatest game ever made (yeah chess, thass right. What have you done for me lately?), but now it's less fussy, faster paced, and filled with endearing silliness. Canyon has been forced to put up with my wasting hours on the hellishly addictive thing, so much so that I'm now responding to her conversational gambits with a reflexive "Follum follum!" If you've played it, you know what that means.
Tropic Thunder
It's taken us way longer than we would have liked to see Ben Stiller's attack on Hollywood, and it was not even worth the wait. Despite the odd great moment, the whole ambitious exercise falls flat with upsetting regularity. Though Robert Downey Jr.'s performance is just as amazing as we had heard, he didn't actually seem have anything funny to say, and we ended up laughing at Jack Black's cold turkey shenanigans instead. Stiller's original concept for the film is hugely appealing, but the execution of it just didn't seem to click at all, with the plot drifting along from one lengthy and ultimately unfunny scene to another, seemingly without direction or purpose. It made Zoolander look like a tightly plotted Preston Sturges movie (I say that as a fan of Zoolander who thinks it sometimes ambles when it should be sprinting). While Adam McKay's movies mostly come alive in the editing room, this never takes shape, and no amount of amusing scenes with Tom Cruise dancing and swearing can save it. Dispiriting stuff, though I'm hoping to see a longer cut soon that might justify that brilliant idea, and maybe even give Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson something to do other than be straight men. Zoolander got funnier with each viewing, so maybe something similar will happen here, though I doubt it.
Compare that to Pineapple Express, which we watched again, and is now, definitely, my favourite comedy of the year. Considering it's a stoner comedy it's built with the same care that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg lavished on Superbad, progressing with logical beauty from scene to scene with only a couple of moments at the end of the second act that show they love their McKee a bit too much. It's not a deal breaker at all, though, and the Hot Fuzz-style genre mash-up of the final act is even more satisfying second time around, with kudos going to Rogen's repeated declarations of, "Nice!" whenever anything goes his way (such as the hilarious respawning machine guns in the underground lair).
In comparison, Tropic Thunder looks like a first cut mess, something you would show to a studio head to reassure them that the money is on the screen. How talented individuals like Stiller, Etan Cohen (partly responsible for the magnificent Idiocracy) and Justin Theroux could botch this is beyond me. The latter name is especially troubling. My previous excitement at his participation in Iron Man 2 has withered completely. Let's hope he's better off without the improvisational scenes between the leads that appear to have derailed the film so badly.
Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham
Is this the best comic on the market right now? In terms of superheroism, perhaps it is, though of course it has been great since Geoff Johns jumped onto the title early in the previous incarnation. Johns is always great value (especially lately; he's on fire), but JSA is better than ever, making me retroactively like Kingdom Come more than I originally did. However, the main reason is...
...OMG Hawkman is a TOTAL BADASS. Trust Goody-Two Shoes Jay to get in his way though.
Hunger
Turner Prize-winning director Steve McQueen's meditation on Bobby Sands' hunger strike has been damned by some of the UK press for daring to portray the Republican struggle in a noble light, which is hilariously inappropriate as that is absolutely not what the film is about at all. While, yes, it is set in The Maze and follows Sands' strike from conception to death, and while it shows in horrific detail the back-and-forth mental and physical combat between the imprisoned IRA soldiers/terrorists/politicians (delete as applicable) and the guards, it's pretty much an abstract exploration of what art is. Prisoners daub the walls of the cells with shit, flood the corridors of the prison with urine, and, eventually, stage a protest that turns their bodies, as depicted by McQueen, into a time-lapse photo of living, breathing decay. Even the poster shows one of the "paintings" by a prisoner (a nod to previous Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili?).
This is, as far as I can tell, the one reading of the movie that explains the peculiar structure. The first third of the film concerns a new prisoner (Davey, played by Brian Milligan) learning the ropes of prison life and the protests therein via his cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), the middle third is the much-debated conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about mortality and politics, and the final third is an impassive, minimalist depiction of Sands' lengthy death with Davey and Gerry disappearing from the movie altogether. Bear in mind, except for the middle section, there is almost no dialogue, with only a minimal amount of verbally communicated information giving background on what is happening. There is barely any character development, but then that's not what the film is about. It's about their acts, their attempts to say something with little more than their bodies as the conduit of their emotion and rage. Much of what they do has little effect. The shit paintings are blasted away and the urine is washed up in a shot of audience-patience-defying length. Only the deaths of the hunger strikers seem to have any effect, though that is relegated to a few title cards at the end of the movie giving a few nuggets of information about the subsequent years.
Getting angry about the movie for glamourising the strike (shurely shome mishtake; it's nigh-unwatchable) or having a pro-IRA agenda seems wrong-headed, though I understand many people are never going to allow themselves to move on from those horrible years during the struggle. However, in the terms of the film, that struggle is less important than McQueen's interest in the way the prisoners and hunger strikers express themselves, with the only scene that debates the details of the Republican battles and the morality of politicised suicide being the notorious static art/anti-art shot of a drab room and Sands and his priest smoking and talking for twenty minutes, which, while hypnotic and superbly played, stands in contrast with the bleak, almost silent beauty of the rest of the movie. McQueen seems to be staring into his soul and wondering why he is an artist, and how his art compares to something as drastic as turning the place you live into a hellhole using only the waste products of your body, or allowing yourself to be brutalised just to make a statement and to psychologically affect those who torture you. Isn't art meant to affect the people who experience it? Isn't making a person beat you to a bloody pulp the most extreme way to do that? Where does that leave McQueen and the rest of the YBAs?
Can you tell that I thought it was amazing? There's a lot to digest (really, no pun intended), especially as it is attracting some fascinating debate, as in this excellent piece from Frieze magazine. It's definitely on my end of year best film list, and strongly recommended for anyone who can handle the body horror.
I'm unsure as to whether admitting that I spent the last couple of weeks doing all of that in addition to habitually checking on Obama's progress makes me look more or less sad. I could lie and say I also went sailing, if that helps. Of course, now we're waiting for his press conferences as if they were episodes of Friday Night Lights, as we tuned into CNN last night to see him talk about getting a shelter dog (which made Canyon almost swoon) and expressing condolences over a journalist's damaged arm (which almost finished me off). Compared to that slavish devotion to the President-Elect, acting like a couple of lovestruck groupies, six hour marathons of CivRev almost look cool.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Emphatically Non-Hipster Non-Douchebag Recommendation Of The Week: Seth Lakeman
If you’re a live music fan growing tired of the perennial hipster douchebag presence at gigs, I’ve got one world for you: folk! I saw Seth Lakeman at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire yesterday, a virtually full 2,000-capacity venue containing – and I didn’t perform a full head count, but I feel confident in making this assertion – exactly zero hipster douchebags. No-one was there because it was the cool place to be. No-one just went because they wanted to be seen, or to brag that they’d been. It was so uncool, it was cool. Which immediately made it uncool again!
Ain’t technology a marvel? Anyway, the refreshing absence of HDs at the gig inspired me to sort-of resurrect this feature in honour of Lakeman.
I first heard of Seth Lakeman when his 2004 album Kitty Jay was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. I must still have been thinking that the award was still relevant and inspiring (in my defence this was before white male guitar bands were winning every bloody year) because I watched the preview show, which featured Lakeman. I was blown away by his musicianship and haunting, resonant songs, many of which were arrangements of traditional English airs.
Kitty Jay – reportedly recorded at a cost of around £300 – is a wild, windswept, poignant album, full of regret and valour and heartbreak and chivalry and longing, endlessly mournful and mysterious. It’s absolutely essential. Its centrepiece is the compellingly bleak “Farewell My Love”, which is obviously too distressing to make it onto the internet, so here he is performing the album’s title track the first time I saw him live, at Truck two summers ago:
His follow-up Freedom Fields is a more expansive, upbeat record, with more stirring percussion and songs about marching to war and grrr beating those pesky French/Dutch/northerners/whoever we happen to be fighting at the moment! Where Kitty Jay’s inspiration is drawn almost exclusively from Dartmoor myths, Freedom Fields looks to historical struggles and the birth of the idea of Englishness. Although it also finds space for a couple of offbeat songs like the one about a bloke who shot his girlfriend because he thought she was a swan. Here’s the video of “The White Hare”, the big, award-winning, slightly controversial single from Freedom Fields:
Sadly, Lakeman’s recent album Poor Man’s Heaven is no match for the previous two: with one or two exceptions it eschews the exhilarating fiddle-led stompers and emotive guitar ballads in favour of jangly, bland, mid-paced pop-folk, and also demonstrates a frankly disturbing obsession with shipwrecks. Opener “The Hurlers” is one of his best tracks, a dramatic and impassioned plea for freedom, and the gorgeous “Solomon Browne” tells the sad tale of the 1981 Penlee disaster with compassion and dignity, but elsewhere the album fails to hit the heights. It’s not a horrible record by any means. It’s just kind of nice and inoffensive, and it’s not what I want from a Seth Lakeman album. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis thinks Lakeman is aiming for mainstream success with this record, but I firmly believe he’s got a better chance of that if he sticks to what he’s best at.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a recommendation! Here’s “The Hurlers”.
Since Lakeman is touring Poor Man’s Heaven last night’s show, while enjoyable, was not perhaps as good as I had hoped. Naturally the set list leaned heavily on the recent album, and Lakeman seemed oblivious to the fact that the show was lifted whenever he put his fiddle to his chin, which almost inevitably meant an older song. But when they came, they were terrific: “Kitty Jay” and “Lady Of The Sea”, performed solo, were mesmerising, Lakeman’s bow hand a blur, his insistent foot-drum reverberating. Other highlights were “Blood Upon Copper”, “Riflemen Of War” and “The Colliers” (aka “Hold Your Fire”). Through – once again – the wondrous magic of technology, here’s 13 seconds of low-quality video of “The Colliers” filmed on a mobile phone from quite some distance away:
The Empire is a lovely theatre, with conveniently placed bars and beautiful decor, and the acoustics are better than those of any number of other London venues, but it probably isn’t the ideal place to listen to Lakeman’s rousing tales of bucolic English folklore. The lights were unusually good – “Setting Of The Sun” was played amid tumbling prisms of white, blue, red and green light, and the glitterball was deployed sparingly and effectively – but I enjoyed seeing Lakeman at sunset on a farm in Oxfordshire more, and not just because he played better songs back in 2006. If you’re ever at a festival and he’s playing, please don’t assume it’s not worth bothering with that folkie nonsense – it’s his ideal milieu. (I mean, there were hardly even any beards in the crowd last night! Stupid clean-shaven urban types!)
It may not have escaped your attention that Lakeman is a rather handsome gentleman – indeed, round my house he is often known as Handsome Seth Lakeman. As well as the lack of hipster douchebags, the other remarkable aspect of the gig was the number of women in the audience (there was even a queue for the ladies’ toilet, not something I usually experience at sweaty indie venues); when I saw him on Admiral Neck’s favourite show BBC Breakfast recently, host Sian Williams seemed a little red-faced and flustered. It may be that his looks have helped him achieve more success and recognition – Poor Man’s Heaven, which despite Lakeman’s flirtation with dadrock is still a folk record, entered the UK album charts at No8 – than his folkie peers. But I’m sure that anyone attracted by his undeniable handsomeosity will find themselves seduced by his plaintive, soaring vocals, his entrancing melancholy and that hypnotic, uplifting fiddle.
Ain’t technology a marvel? Anyway, the refreshing absence of HDs at the gig inspired me to sort-of resurrect this feature in honour of Lakeman.
I first heard of Seth Lakeman when his 2004 album Kitty Jay was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. I must still have been thinking that the award was still relevant and inspiring (in my defence this was before white male guitar bands were winning every bloody year) because I watched the preview show, which featured Lakeman. I was blown away by his musicianship and haunting, resonant songs, many of which were arrangements of traditional English airs.
Kitty Jay – reportedly recorded at a cost of around £300 – is a wild, windswept, poignant album, full of regret and valour and heartbreak and chivalry and longing, endlessly mournful and mysterious. It’s absolutely essential. Its centrepiece is the compellingly bleak “Farewell My Love”, which is obviously too distressing to make it onto the internet, so here he is performing the album’s title track the first time I saw him live, at Truck two summers ago:
His follow-up Freedom Fields is a more expansive, upbeat record, with more stirring percussion and songs about marching to war and grrr beating those pesky French/Dutch/northerners/whoever we happen to be fighting at the moment! Where Kitty Jay’s inspiration is drawn almost exclusively from Dartmoor myths, Freedom Fields looks to historical struggles and the birth of the idea of Englishness. Although it also finds space for a couple of offbeat songs like the one about a bloke who shot his girlfriend because he thought she was a swan. Here’s the video of “The White Hare”, the big, award-winning, slightly controversial single from Freedom Fields:
Sadly, Lakeman’s recent album Poor Man’s Heaven is no match for the previous two: with one or two exceptions it eschews the exhilarating fiddle-led stompers and emotive guitar ballads in favour of jangly, bland, mid-paced pop-folk, and also demonstrates a frankly disturbing obsession with shipwrecks. Opener “The Hurlers” is one of his best tracks, a dramatic and impassioned plea for freedom, and the gorgeous “Solomon Browne” tells the sad tale of the 1981 Penlee disaster with compassion and dignity, but elsewhere the album fails to hit the heights. It’s not a horrible record by any means. It’s just kind of nice and inoffensive, and it’s not what I want from a Seth Lakeman album. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis thinks Lakeman is aiming for mainstream success with this record, but I firmly believe he’s got a better chance of that if he sticks to what he’s best at.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a recommendation! Here’s “The Hurlers”.
Since Lakeman is touring Poor Man’s Heaven last night’s show, while enjoyable, was not perhaps as good as I had hoped. Naturally the set list leaned heavily on the recent album, and Lakeman seemed oblivious to the fact that the show was lifted whenever he put his fiddle to his chin, which almost inevitably meant an older song. But when they came, they were terrific: “Kitty Jay” and “Lady Of The Sea”, performed solo, were mesmerising, Lakeman’s bow hand a blur, his insistent foot-drum reverberating. Other highlights were “Blood Upon Copper”, “Riflemen Of War” and “The Colliers” (aka “Hold Your Fire”). Through – once again – the wondrous magic of technology, here’s 13 seconds of low-quality video of “The Colliers” filmed on a mobile phone from quite some distance away:
The Empire is a lovely theatre, with conveniently placed bars and beautiful decor, and the acoustics are better than those of any number of other London venues, but it probably isn’t the ideal place to listen to Lakeman’s rousing tales of bucolic English folklore. The lights were unusually good – “Setting Of The Sun” was played amid tumbling prisms of white, blue, red and green light, and the glitterball was deployed sparingly and effectively – but I enjoyed seeing Lakeman at sunset on a farm in Oxfordshire more, and not just because he played better songs back in 2006. If you’re ever at a festival and he’s playing, please don’t assume it’s not worth bothering with that folkie nonsense – it’s his ideal milieu. (I mean, there were hardly even any beards in the crowd last night! Stupid clean-shaven urban types!)
It may not have escaped your attention that Lakeman is a rather handsome gentleman – indeed, round my house he is often known as Handsome Seth Lakeman. As well as the lack of hipster douchebags, the other remarkable aspect of the gig was the number of women in the audience (there was even a queue for the ladies’ toilet, not something I usually experience at sweaty indie venues); when I saw him on Admiral Neck’s favourite show BBC Breakfast recently, host Sian Williams seemed a little red-faced and flustered. It may be that his looks have helped him achieve more success and recognition – Poor Man’s Heaven, which despite Lakeman’s flirtation with dadrock is still a folk record, entered the UK album charts at No8 – than his folkie peers. But I’m sure that anyone attracted by his undeniable handsomeosity will find themselves seduced by his plaintive, soaring vocals, his entrancing melancholy and that hypnotic, uplifting fiddle.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Bad News Follows Good, As Always
The post-election joy party continues, with even more politiblog haunting, even more excited chatter, and even more news watching. Enduring the dour coverage on Fox News was entertaining for a minute or two (a first), but you have to wonder what nasty trickery they're going to employ to belittle President-Elect Obama's achievement over the next few years. I had enough of CNN FutureNews HoloUpdate 3000 on election night, so I won't be watching that network for a while. BBC was fun last night. Jeremy Paxman was interviewing a constant stream of pundits, writers (including West Wing and House writer/producer Eli Attie), elected officials, and spokespersons, asking each of them pretty much if racism was over. Yes, he did it with more subtlety than that, but his interviewees treated it with the short shrift it deserved. And, of course, because it was the BBC, there were the obligatory gaffes. An interview with Alice Walker went haywire as Paxman cut to her sitting in some sort of meditative, head-waving trance, unaware the satellite link was active. That was pretty embarrassing, though the subsequent interview was spiky and interesting enough to make up for it.
However, it's not all good news. In the midst of all this, we all found out that Michael Crichton died yesterday after a battle with cancer that he had kept from public attention. AICN has a nice piece on it here, with clips from many of his films, including some he directed. In the later years of his career I stopped reading his novels, as I belatedly realised some of our politics had never really matched up. I think it was when I understood that Crichton's perfect villain would be a sexually aggressive, female, environmentally aware geneticist from Japan who farts nanobots. Of course, it's not lost on me that I stopped reading his books but am currently voluntarily subjecting myself to the seemingly endless flagellation of reading Atlas Shrugged, so I'm one to talk. Believe me, as unpleasant as I find a lot of Michael Crichton's politics, I'd much rather be reading any of his books instead of Rand's whiny shriek. It never seems to end.
Beyond any other caveat or consideration, I maintain that Crichton was the best thriller writer I have ever read, a master of suspense and pace who kept me hooked even when the subject matter was as dry as corporate malfeasance in the aerospace industry (Airframe, which I blasted through in a few hectic hours). For a long time, especially at the crest of his popularity, the release of a Crichton novel was, at least for this jerkoff blogger, an event on a par with the release of a new Spielberg movie, so you can imagine how excited I was when Jurassic Park came out. Having tried to read other bestselling thrillers by dreary, inexplicably successful hacks like John Grisham, James Patterson and Tom Clancy (who I still read even though he's an awful, ponderous writer with even more unpleasant views), I am even more grateful for Crichton's work, which showed those other writers up even when he was not operating at full capacity.
That said, why his books and films featured characters with the most vanilla names ever has always mystified me. Just a random selection of names from his books includes Karen Ross and Peter Elliott (Congo), Norman Johnson and Harry Adams (Sphere), Peter Smith, Tom Graham and John Connor (Rising Sun, with the former renamed Webster/Web in the Philip Kaufman movie), and of course Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant from Jurassic Park. Why the dull names for the main characters? Was it some kind of device to increase audience association? Why did I become obsessed with this? Do I have a problem with boring names? Haven't I got more important things to be worried about? Apparently not. Thanks for temporarily curing me of my woes, President-Elect Obama!
His books and films have been so popular that I often forget he was also the creator of ER, which was, for a long time, my favourite show on TV (until I discovered Buffy). Though he had some right-leaning tendencies in later years (and his response to criticism was less than classy), ER's compassionate air led one to believe he had the same notions. A show so fascinated by the poverty of County General Hospital and the desperation of the board trying to keep it running in the face of corporate indifference has to be run by those of a more liberal mindset, right? Perhaps it was producer and writer John Wells, but I'd like to think that Crichton, a former doctor, agreed.
It's also easy to forget that he directed movies too, some of them genuinely great. Westworld and Coma are terrific thrillers, with the former regularly cited as an influence on The Terminator and, with much less frequency, Stephen Malkmus.
I even liked Runaway, which features Tom Selleck vs. Gene Simmons and his acid-injecting spider-bots! How could that be anything less than awesome, even though it never inspired a song by Stephen Malkmus?
And (really embarrassing admission coming up), I also liked Looker, which featured an uncomfortable-looking Albert Finney going up against James Coburn and his fugue-state-inducing light gun.
Seeing that film at an early age might have been the reason why I have a healthy distrust of advertising, even though most of it is pure nonsense. For that alone, I owe a great debt to Michael Crichton. He shall be missed.
However, it's not all good news. In the midst of all this, we all found out that Michael Crichton died yesterday after a battle with cancer that he had kept from public attention. AICN has a nice piece on it here, with clips from many of his films, including some he directed. In the later years of his career I stopped reading his novels, as I belatedly realised some of our politics had never really matched up. I think it was when I understood that Crichton's perfect villain would be a sexually aggressive, female, environmentally aware geneticist from Japan who farts nanobots. Of course, it's not lost on me that I stopped reading his books but am currently voluntarily subjecting myself to the seemingly endless flagellation of reading Atlas Shrugged, so I'm one to talk. Believe me, as unpleasant as I find a lot of Michael Crichton's politics, I'd much rather be reading any of his books instead of Rand's whiny shriek. It never seems to end.
Beyond any other caveat or consideration, I maintain that Crichton was the best thriller writer I have ever read, a master of suspense and pace who kept me hooked even when the subject matter was as dry as corporate malfeasance in the aerospace industry (Airframe, which I blasted through in a few hectic hours). For a long time, especially at the crest of his popularity, the release of a Crichton novel was, at least for this jerkoff blogger, an event on a par with the release of a new Spielberg movie, so you can imagine how excited I was when Jurassic Park came out. Having tried to read other bestselling thrillers by dreary, inexplicably successful hacks like John Grisham, James Patterson and Tom Clancy (who I still read even though he's an awful, ponderous writer with even more unpleasant views), I am even more grateful for Crichton's work, which showed those other writers up even when he was not operating at full capacity.That said, why his books and films featured characters with the most vanilla names ever has always mystified me. Just a random selection of names from his books includes Karen Ross and Peter Elliott (Congo), Norman Johnson and Harry Adams (Sphere), Peter Smith, Tom Graham and John Connor (Rising Sun, with the former renamed Webster/Web in the Philip Kaufman movie), and of course Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant from Jurassic Park. Why the dull names for the main characters? Was it some kind of device to increase audience association? Why did I become obsessed with this? Do I have a problem with boring names? Haven't I got more important things to be worried about? Apparently not. Thanks for temporarily curing me of my woes, President-Elect Obama!His books and films have been so popular that I often forget he was also the creator of ER, which was, for a long time, my favourite show on TV (until I discovered Buffy). Though he had some right-leaning tendencies in later years (and his response to criticism was less than classy), ER's compassionate air led one to believe he had the same notions. A show so fascinated by the poverty of County General Hospital and the desperation of the board trying to keep it running in the face of corporate indifference has to be run by those of a more liberal mindset, right? Perhaps it was producer and writer John Wells, but I'd like to think that Crichton, a former doctor, agreed.
It's also easy to forget that he directed movies too, some of them genuinely great. Westworld and Coma are terrific thrillers, with the former regularly cited as an influence on The Terminator and, with much less frequency, Stephen Malkmus.
I even liked Runaway, which features Tom Selleck vs. Gene Simmons and his acid-injecting spider-bots! How could that be anything less than awesome, even though it never inspired a song by Stephen Malkmus?
And (really embarrassing admission coming up), I also liked Looker, which featured an uncomfortable-looking Albert Finney going up against James Coburn and his fugue-state-inducing light gun.
Seeing that film at an early age might have been the reason why I have a healthy distrust of advertising, even though most of it is pure nonsense. For that alone, I owe a great debt to Michael Crichton. He shall be missed.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
President Sexy
We did it. I'm in shock.
I can't remember being more proud of my country. It's 5 am here and I'm going to be shattered tomorrow, but I have to stay up for the speech.
He was right all along!!!!!!!
I can't remember being more proud of my country. It's 5 am here and I'm going to be shattered tomorrow, but I have to stay up for the speech.
He was right all along!!!!!!!
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Hawkmonkey Endorses Barack Obama
As I've said before, this blog is in slowdown for a while, but even more so with the election upon us. It's affecting us in all sorts of ways (from horrible panic to sleeplessness to random outbreaks of crying), but it's not just me and Canyon, and maybe Masticator, who I'm sure would be grateful for some event to take Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross off the front pages of the UK papers.
The election has also affected the reincarnated half-Thanagarian reality-anomaly/sock monkey hybrid who is keeping the streets of our town safe at night. I think he's felt strongly about this election for a long time now, but is only now endorsing Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of America.
After many threats and demands, Canyon and I carved that Halloween pumpkin for Hawkmonkey, as his sock hands are not built for sensitive work like that. They're perfect for cracking heads, though, hence our fear.
We used a variety of knives and a screwdriver (no pumpkin sculpting tools around, sadly, which meant we had to improvise, McGyver-style), as well as the evil FridgeKiller, the knife that stabbed a deadly hole in our fridge recently. It didn't do any damage to anything other than the pumpkin, which makes a change, after a recent bagel-slicing task ended in blood and tears. That goddamn knife is possessed.
I must admit, I was reluctant to do this for Hawkmonkey. Regular readers may remember my early support for the Rufus T. Firefly / Dickie Pilager ticket, but that faltered a while ago, what with it being revealed that Firefly is a Freedonian by birth, and therefore ineligible to run, and Pilager, after taking over the campaign, could never get past his association with the evil industrialist Wes Benteen. A shame. Firefly's pro-eating-crackers-in-bed / anti-whatever-it-is philosophy is exactly what the world needs right now, but these silly rules just got in the way. As a result, much as I don't want to, I'm forced to throw my support and formidable political influence behind the duo of Merkin Muffley and Bob Roberts.
I'm not sure they're good for the USA, but Muffley reminds me of my nervy, ineffectual self, and I'm reassured to know that Bob Roberts is there to run things from the sidelines, and after the last eight years we all know that a powerful, sneaky, vicious and immmoral vice-president is vital. Plus, he's a kickass musician. Know hopelessness!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)