52 replies to this topic

[PLEASUREMAN]

SPOILERS

The big question with Skyfall was whether this James Bond movie was going to do better than 2008's limp, dour, and inexplicably titled Quantum of Solace.  The big answer is:  not enough to matter.

Skyfall is an interestingly cynical affair.  It includes hat tips to both the traditional Bond franchise and the new, excessively politically correct version embodied by Judi Dench's M (a carryover from the Brosnan era).  Yes, there's a new Q, and he's an implausibly young Cillian Murphy look-a-like.  Yes, there's a new Miss Moneypenny, and she's--get this--a sassy and sensual black woman.  Yes, the villain is a sinister, brilliant white man, and of course he's gay.

Skyfall wants to have it both ways, giving fan service to devotees of the old movies and books while announcing proudly that this is the century of marriage equality and race-neutral casting (after all, there's nothing more quintessentially British than black people).  Reviewers seem pleased, but what's the point?  If you want to get with the 21st century and all its dreary liberal cliches, why not ditch that old cocktail swishing fossil Bond and create a new franchise centered around a gay arch-feminist like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?  We all know that scrawny, screwed up lesbians are the cutting edge of mystery and suspense (which makes it sound more interesting than it actually is).

Sam Mendes (of American Beauty fame), tries to make the jumbled, ADD plot seem memorable by lingering on iconic shots of characters--M standing ruefully behind a row of caskets, Bond gliding along a lantern-strewn Shanghai river, a silhouetted fight scene against an animated neon display, stuff like that.  But these impressive shots only serve to increase your awareness of the movie's emptiness.  Bond seems to do everything he's supposed to do, but without any real motivation or interest.  He struts through a casino, has a guarded conversation with a femme fatale, flirts with the woman assigned as support, gets captured by the villain, fights on top of a train, etc. etc. etc.  The movie at times feels like a pastiche of every Bond movie before it.  The only thing left out are the cheesy, double entendre names.

If it settled for ripping off the old Bond movies it could still amount to a guilty pleasure, but Skyfall wants to rip off every other stale movie cliche as well.  A brief, incomplete listing:

• Q is a bespectacled, gawky computer nerd who invented hacking or something.
  
• MI6 traces a security intrusion to a computer inside the building!
  
• An encrypted hard drive unleashes a virus complete with taunting messages (Ghost Site 2.0).
  
• The bad guy planned to get caught!
  
• Bond meets someone at a museum without knowing what his contact looks like.
  
• An officious politician lectures a sympathetic character.
  
• A mansion belonging to Bond's parents is preserved under dropcloth for decades even though no one lives in it.
  
• Bond barricades himself with booby traps for his last stand against the bad guys.
  
• Bad guys shoot at a reflection in a mirror, then get attacked from behind.
  
• A confrontation on a frozen lake ends when Bonds deliberately breaks the ice they're standing on with gunfire.

The pity is that Skyfall isn't without a few good moments, confirming that this didn't have to be such a stale movie.  When the malevolent Javier Bardem begs Judi Dench to shoot herself and him, there's a moment of pathos that the movie hasn't lived up to.  The madman's deserted city-island is another hint at the existential crisis of a betrayed spy, but the meat of that story seems left back in the cutting room.

The good moments are usually the actor and director working uphill against an unmotivated screenplay.  Some of it is just confusing.  Bond pulls the old DB5 out of storage, and it's complete with ejection seat and machine gun headlights--but how could Craig's Bond have ever driven such a contraption?  After he miraculously survives a fall in the opening sequence, Bond slums in the third world for no evident reason until word of an attack on MI6 compels him back to work.  Bond's new black female sidekick comes on to him completely out of the blue, as if she realized it was time for someone to get seduced.

Is the series going backward or forward?  Dench's M is ushered out in a rushed death scene so that Fiennes can take over, leather tufted door and all, with Moneypenny at an anachronistic secretarial post outside.  It gives Skyfall a strange send-off.  One half expects Sean Connery to step through it in the next movie.

Craig's angrier Bond clashes with the nostalgia, and his forced humor shows the actor's inability to wear well through a franchise.  I'm not sure there's really a point to this franchise, other than what you can gather from the very frequent shots of the VAIO logo.  I suppose this really is the James Bond for our age.

[Negrito Eichmann]

Why they fucking with Dench? Unban Dench. I'm going to see this on thursday and I hope it isnt too pc'd.

[Nder Kruger]

This latest installment of Bond should be contrasted with the series of films and books so far.

888 warning (10,747 words), but still an enjoyable read:
http://www.counter-c...-of-james-bond/

[PLEASUREMAN]

It actually reads pretty well for what it is:

Quote

As Julius Evola might have put it, Bond is spiritually virile. He is a self-contained, self-actualized man who appears to be a self-indulgent hedonist, but is in fact fundamentally detached from the pleasures and distractions that obsess and enthrall most men.

Quote

Bond’s pleasure is greater than that of other men – but paradoxically he is free of desire in a way most men are not. His constant brushes with death have given him a unique perspective: he is keenly aware of the impermanence of things, and of what matters and what does not. Bond enjoys food, drink, and sex so much precisely because of their unimportance. Other men, who have never faced death, place too much importance on these things and – again, paradoxically – are less able to enjoy them.

Quote

In later films, as actor Desmond Llewelyn aged into a lovable old codger, the Q character was softened a bit and given more to do. But early on he is as mechanical and charmless as the gadgets he dispenses. He is man become technics, who cares more about his inventions returning “intact from the field” than about Bond’s body returning intact! This, indeed, becomes a running joke and Bond seems to take delight not just in belittling Q’s gadgets but in demolishing them.

(mlad researched this!)

[Dibs]

Was supremely disappointed with this shit as a Bond movie. Hell I went in it with 0 prior trailer knowledge and expectations and after the last one I wouldn't work up any expectations in the first place, but this movie.... the SWPLest Bond indeed. Black sassy Monneypenny. Gay villain. What needs to be the climatic fight is basically a Kevin home alone sequence, a lone derelict mansion surrounded by wide open clear cut steppe, the squad of the villain approaches it leisurely on foot, then the wacky child's games begin. Was expecting Joe Pesci to be among the soldiers.

Then that whole Q thing, why do we get another 20-year-old smarmy skinny jeans wearing know-it-all hipster as Q? He was as insufferable as the faggot hacker from Die Hard 4 with his magical universal hacking cable. And then they start the whole CSI hacking sequence: It's a cluster of nerves! It twitches, it's organic, it fights me! Wait....Zoom in! Enhance! What's this? A word? It's the password! The virus taunting them was pretty oldschool, was surprised it wasn't in 1337 code though and Zero Cool didn't pop out.

And of course the villain. Parallel to doing his various nefarious criminal deeds he has been hatching a 2deep4u inception plan for 15 years of how to kill M, just to completely waive all 3 of his chances to actually kill her. Oh and of course he was a faggot, caressing Bond's thighs, cheek and chest when he had him tied up. I bet both enjoyed it.

[Frontier]

One day I pray that some bright bulb will say, "Fuck it, reboot the series, and set it in the 60s, Mad Man style."

[PLEASUREMAN]

Dibs, on 11 November 2012 - 06:30 PM, said:

And then they start the whole CSI hacking sequence: It's a cluster of nerves! It twitches, it's organic, it fights me! Wait....Zoom in! Enhance! What's this? A word? It's the password! The virus taunting them was pretty oldschool, was surprised it wasn't in 1337 code though and Zero Cool didn't pop out.

Ahaha yes, I forgot to mention the part where James Bond himself spots a matching sequence of letters in adjacent columns of hex code (how could this possibly work).  It was easily the dumbest computer hacking scene not in the movie Hackers.  Bond:  "This--this looks like a PCI bus!  FASCINATING!"

[Dibs]

PLEASUREMAN, on 11 November 2012 - 06:39 PM, said:

Dibs, on 11 November 2012 - 06:30 PM, said:

And then they start the whole CSI hacking sequence: It's a cluster of nerves! It twitches, it's organic, it fights me! Wait....Zoom in! Enhance! What's this? A word? It's the password! The virus taunting them was pretty oldschool, was surprised it wasn't in 1337 code though and Zero Cool didn't pop out.

Ahaha yes, I forgot to mention the part where James Bond himself spots a matching sequence of letters in adjacent columns of hex code (how could this possibly work).  It was easily the dumbest computer hacking scene not in the movie Hackers.  Bond:  "This--this looks like a PCI bus!  FASCINATING!"

To be fair, the MI6's computer cluster had a killer refresh rate and ran on RISC architecture

[Bumbling American]

Quote

why do we get another 20-year-old smarmy skinny jeans wearing know-it-all hipster as Q?

[Saucer-Lord of the Illuminati]

He's hacking the webs! All of the webs!

[omape (a faggot)]

next james bond will be pakistani i guarantee it

[Frontier]

Bindi, Jamerjee Bindinasahapatufulmee
:sittarized Bond theme kicks in:

[Bumbling American]

Frontier, on 11 November 2012 - 07:36 PM, said:

Bindi, Jamerjee Bindinasahapatufulmee
:sittarized Bond theme kicks in:

I can just hear Shirley Bassey singing "Shit River" to the tune of "Goldfinger"

[Blarg]

Good review.  The cinematographer should win an academy award though.

[PLEASUREMAN]

I should mention the film's moral confusion as well.  The story seems to make a big deal out of the callous choices that Dench's M makes in service to country which affect both Bond and his nemesis.  Dench refuses to apologize for her decisions, considering them necessary judgement calls, and will not resign willingly when her decisions result in uproar in the government.

This last stubbornness is key, because it implies that Dench regards MI6 as her organization, to use as she sees fit and without consideration for the larger goals of the nation--to wit, even if she believed she had not acted in error, stepping down after becoming target of criticism would ultimately better help the agency meet its challenges.  In fact, it's the British thing to do.

But the movie doesn't follow up on any of this, and Dench's death scene is very sentimental, not the reckoning that seems more fitting.

[Mannerheim]

Lots of good points here. Like I said in the other thread I actually enjoyed it, but I can't argue that it suffers from the usual PC casting garbage, obnoxious product placement from Sony and Heinekken, and cringeworthy computer hacking scenes. One element I found redeeming was that the characters I didn't like got the comeuppances I was rooting for; Silva the repulsive, predatory fag gets a well-deserved death, Q the smarmy noodle-armed hacker gets taught a lesson in humility, Moneypenny admits to Bond that she belongs behind a desk after all, and Dench the ballcutting harridan has MI6 prised from her cold, dead hands and turned over to a man like God intended. Maybe it's damning by faint praise but I'm also inclined to like Craig as Bond partly because he looks and acts acceptably masculine, which is rare enough in this age of Shia Labeouf, Seth Rogen, and Twilight.

Lastly I was at least hoping that this movie would get back to the good old tradition of globetrotting to expensive and exotic locales (fucked up so badly in Quantum of Solace, which spent half the running time wandering through the ghettos of Bolivia) and it did not disappoint. I want that damn sailboat, and both Shanghai and the Scottish highlands offer up some respectable eye candy. I'm not saying it's perfect, but overall it leaves me interested in seeing what they'll do next (with presumably no faggot characters, the black chick reduced to a cameo as a secretary, and a white man running the show).

[hate bumpkin]

Here's hoping Idris Elba's James Bond kills the series for good

[S. O. Terrick]

I've never really cared for Bond films, which indulge in the glamorous appeal of the titular character at the expense of believeability and pacing. Even by the puddle-deep standards of mainstream action movies, they are style over substance. I guess they're okay if you were raised on British camp and want a quick nostalgia fix, or if you just really like formulaic villain-takes-over-the-world comic book plots, but I'm not sure what appeal James Bond holds for a general American audience -- let alone a James Bond which has been neutered by liberal revisionism.

[S. O. Terrick]

(gerryma)NDER, on 11 November 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

This latest installment of Bond should be contrasted with the series of films and books so far.

888 warning (10,747 words), but still an enjoyable read:
http://www.counter-c...-of-james-bond/

Ah yes, Counter-Currents, where pop culture and nerdy right-wing overanalysis combine...if you've ever wanted to learn about the unconventional traditionalism of Spider-Man, or the Evolan mysticism of Goku, then you ought to bookmark that shit, because it's fucking hilarious

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However, it would not be accurate to say that from that moment forward Bond is acting for Bond. Rather, he is acting according to his own, personal sense of justice. And it is interesting that what catalyzes this is invariably that good-old-pagan virtue of loyalty, and that good-old-pagan desire for vengeance. This is, in fact, the entire premise of 1989’s Licence to Kill, which is actually an eloquent commentary on the very concept of the “licence to kill.” In the story, M revokes Bond’s licence. But Bond goes rogue, bent on avenging the brutalization of his friend Felix and the rape and murder of Felix’s fiancé. What the title of the film means is that although Bond’s legal licence to kill is revoked, the events of the story grant him a moral licence to kill. This is the stuff of the pagan, pre-Christian sagas.

But what would Jesus do? Who bloody cares?! I’ve been asking myself for years “What would James Bond do?” Bond is my moral compass.

Quote

In short, the Bond villains are “special.” In today’s world these people would all get to sit in the reserved benches at the front of the bus (even Scaramanga with his nipple: remember, not all disabilities are visible). But in Fleming’s world they are accorded no sympathy. In Fleming’s world there’s a healthy horror of physical abnormalities, and a Classically Greek intuition that what’s twisted on the outside is twisted on the inside. The flip side of this is the much-maligned Bondian focus on beauty. (Though what most feminist critics don’t seem to get is that Bond is offered to us as a sex object as well.)

abahahahaahahhaahah

[S. O. Terrick]

Quote

Bond is one of Savitri Devi’s Men of Time, a Destroyer in other words. But he does it with such style, using brains, brawn and gadgetry. A Black Bond? Just like a Black Santa Claus, it just doesn’t work. These are Northern European archetypes – just like the Latin Lover is Latin.

*chortle*