With a new Bond movie coming this year, it feels appropriate to ring in 2020 with a new book about Ian Fleming and his master spy. And one that I contributed to.
Over the last few years, the Literary 007 website has been collecting essays around what Fleming called the Seven Deadlier Sins. Everyone knows the Seven Deadly Sins of Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath. But Fleming wrote that even worse than those were Avarice, Cruelty, Hypocrisy, Malice, Moral Cowardice, Self-Righteousness, and Snobbery. Literary 007 asked writers to consider one of these Deadlier Sins and discuss how it manifested in Fleming's life and especially in the Bond novels. I got to write about self-righteousness and I'm really happy with how that essay turned out.
Now that all seven essays are done, they've been collected into a volume called Ian Fleming's Seven Deadlier Sins: A Collection of Essays. It's available in paperback and electronically. It's a cool book with some meaningful things to say not just about Fleming and Bond, but also about human nature.
This movie came up on an episode of Nerd Lunch that I was on last year and it got me curious to see it. I remember when it came out, but I'd skipped it because a) it was during that whole glut of disappointing, early '90s comics/pulp movies, and b) I've never cared anything about the comic strip it's based on anyway. But then I learned that the plot involves Brenda Starr's getting in an argument with the cartoonist who draws her, so she disappears from the strip and he has to enter Cool World or whatever to bring her back. As low as that put my expectations, there was no way I could be disappointed. I figured I could at least watch a little and turn it off partway if it was unbearable.
Shockingly, I love every minute of the thing.
I've never read Brenda Starr, so I don't know what kind of tone it had, but certainly there are some outlandish things about the concept of a glamorous, adventure-having reporter. What's great about the movie is that it neither downplays nor ridicules those elements. It celebrates them and holds them up as sources of pure joy. Brooke Shields is amazing in the role as an absolutely perfect fashionista. And so is Timothy Dalton as the dashing, eye-patched Basil St John. Eddie Albert from Green Acres is basically playing Chief O'Hara in an early scene, but the real scene-stealers are Jeffrey Tambor and June Gable (Joey's manager Estelle on Friends) as a couple of KGB agents. The movie is funny and I laughed out loud many, many times. I kept waiting for the movie to turn on me, but it never did. Even the weird cartoonist-entering-his-work plot makes a kind of sense as a story about a passionless, mercenary artist who discovers the joy in what he's doing and falls in love with his subject.
The movie's not available on streaming, but I found a cheap DVD and blind-bought it. I'm glad I did, because I'll be watching this over and over again.
Operation Kid Brother (1967)
I stumbled across this one a couple of years ago when I was doing that whole James Bond series here on the blog, but just now got around to watching it. It presents itself as a parody of Bond movies, but I don't know if it really is. No more so than You Only Live Twice was anyway, which came out the same year.
This one stars Sean Connery's younger brother Neil as a gifted plastic surgeon who's also the younger brother of a famous secret agent. The movie is goofy about how much it wants to suggest ties to Bond continuity, so the main character is actually named Neil Connery even though it's clear that his older brother is supposed to be James Bond. And the two government representatives who recruit Neil are played by Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell, who are still clearly playing M and Moneypenny, even though their names are now Commander Cunningham and... well... Maxwell (Max, for short).
There are bunch of other Bond alumni reprising similar roles, too. Anthony Dawson is the head of the evil organization Thanatos, for example. Dawson is most recognizable as Professor Dent in Dr. No, but he also played the faceless Blofeld in From Russia With Love and Thunderball. His number two in Thanatos is played by Adolfo Celi, who was SPECTRE's Number Two in Thunderball. And From Russia With Love's Daniela Bianchi is again an enemy agent who falls for the hero and switches teams.
Neil Connery the character is an amazing man who's not just the world's top plastic surgeon. He also has super-hypnotism powers and is an expert archer and hand-to-hand fighter. My only disappointment with him is that Neil Connery the actor was sick when it was time to dub his lines, so the character has a bland voice with no trace of a Scot accent.
Operation Kid Brother isn't a great movie. It learned some of the wrong lessons from Thunderball, so several sequences are pointlessly overlong. And none of the bit actors are very good. But it's such a weird, fun little movie that I had a great time with it anyway. And it also gives us Ennio Morricone's (working with Bruno Nicolai) version of a Bond score. Well worth checking out for Bond fans.
Return to the Lost World (1992)
I actually watched this last week and forgot to mention it. There aren't really any surprises in this sequel to the Lost World adaptation from the same year. That movie ends by unsubtly foreshadowing how the gang's going to get back together and then they do exactly that in the second movie. And because part of the first one's formula was Professor Challenger and his rival's overcoming their differences, Return opens with them feuding again so that they can repeat the same beats in their relationship.
The special effects aren't any better this time around, either, but I did enjoy Return just slightly more than its predecessor, simply because I wasn't comparing it to Arthur Conan Doyle's novel anymore. Not enough to make me recommend it, but at least I was able to stay more-or-less engaged.
Stripes (1981)
Continuing from last week's watching of Airplane! and Caddyshack, we showed David a couple of more '80s comedies. He's a big Bill Murray fan, so Stripes was a necessity, even though it's not my favorite. There are some great gags, but I always lose interest after the characters graduate basic training. The movie should have ended there and lost the whole, tacked on, weaponized RV plot.
That would have given more time to sell the animosity between Murray's character and the drill sergeant, which is pretty loosely sketched out. Sometimes they seem to admire each other and other times they hate each other, but it's all as the plot dictates, not because it feels like a real relationship.
Big (1988)
Diane's birthday was this week and she requested that we watch Big. It's been a long time since I've seen it and I'd forgotten how much of a revelation Tom Hanks' performance was. This was the moment when we all started realizing that he was capable of much more than Bachelor Party and Volunteers (as much as I like those movies). He's really phenomenal in this, especially in the early scenes where his character is afraid and still getting used to his grown-up body.
It's a little weird that Elizabeth Perkins isn't more weirded out than she is when she finds out she's been sleeping with a 13-year-old, but that bit of creepiness aside, Big holds up as a lovely, touching movie.
Zorro (1957-61)
Almost done with Season 1 and things are getting pretty bleak for our hero. He manages to pull out some kind of victory each week, but they're smaller and smaller as the Eagle gains more and more power, even taking over Don Diego's home. Can't wait for the season finale.
Opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Since I finished the Young Indiana Jones episodes with 10-year-old Indy, I took a break from the show this week to watch the prelude section of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. So now Indy has his hat and his scar and I'm ready to watch him go to war in the rest of the TV series.
It was jarring to see the character in such an action-packed adventure after the educational journeys of the TV show. And I wonder what kind of tone the Teenage Indy episodes will take. I remember plot details, but not so much the overall feel.
Underground (2016-present)
We finished Season 1 and Oh My God. I'm loving this show.
Last week, I was concerned that the show was going to drag out the drama around some secrets in a relationship that I otherwise really like. But instead, it ripped that Band-Aid right off and forced the characters to deal with the repercussions. Or at least to start dealing with the repercussions. I have no doubt that it's going to come back to bite them, but at least there's no prolonged lying and delaying the inevitable. Excellent work, show.
More than that, though, I love how the final episode of the season pulled out some awesome twists while wrapping up some plots and teasing the direction of the show in Season 2. The new season is in progress as I'm writing this, but I've got the episodes so far queued up on my TiVo and ready to go.
The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley
Watching the Disney Zorro TV show got me curious to finally read the original story and it's a good one. The 1920 Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks closely follows the novel's plot, so there weren't a lot of surprises in the novel, but there are some.
For one thing, Zorro's mask isn't the kind that's traditionally associated with the character. Fairbanks' mask influenced the popular image, but the mask in the novel is like the one on the cover above. It covers Zorro's (or Señor Zorro, as he's always called) entire face so that he has to lift it in order to eat, drink, or kiss. I'm not a fan, but I'm curious to see if McCulley changed it in the stories he wrote after the Fairbanks movie.
An even bigger surprise was that McCulley keeps his readers in the dark about Zorro's secret identity until the very end. Don Diego is all in the novel, but the reveal that he is also Zorro is meant to be as much of a shock to the audience as to the other characters in the book. That's as impossible for modern readers as keeping the Vader-Luke relationship a secret is for first time Empire viewers, but it's still cool to imagine how the original readers must have reacted.
Related to that, it was also news to me that The Curse of Capistrano is a complete novel with a definite ending and no set up for sequels. McCulley ends the book with Zorro's enemies defeated and his identity revealed, since it's no longer needed. But since the success of the Fairbanks film created a demand for more Zorro stories, I'm curious to see how (or even if) McCulley dealt with that in future installments.
Jam of the Week: "Carter & Cash" by Tor Miller
I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it, just because of it's light beat and playful melody, but I didn't immediately understand the reference in the title. It was calling to mind Tango & Cash, which led me down the completely wrong trail. And then I realized that it was holding up June Carter and Johnny Cash as an example of enduring, faithful love and I fell for the song even harder.
I don't usually celebrate blogiversaries, but ten years feels momentous enough to mention. Ten years ago today, I thought that I needed a better web presence than the crappy site I'd made for myself and Blogger seemed cheap and easy, so I started this thing. I wasn't sure what I was going to call it (and went through a couple of names before settling on this one) and I wasn't sure how it would be any different from my LiveJournal, which was a thing people used to do. Ten years later, I'm still experimenting and tweaking as I go, but I'm thankful to have a corner of the Internet that's all mine and that people seem to appreciate. Thanks to everyone for reading!
In celebration, here are posters for ten movies that were the tenth in their series. Please enjoy and make sure to grab some cake before you leave.
Fantastic. Hard to see the final fight through my tears, though.
Actually, I could say that about most of the Rocky movies anymore. Something about where I am in my life right now helps these movies hit me hard. Exceptions are III and IV; not that I don't love III, but it's not as emotional for me as the others. I rewatched all the numbered ones and finally saw Rocky Balboa for the first time shortly before watching Creed and loved the whole experience, but I wonder if I wouldn't have liked Creed even more if I didn't have all the others in such close proximity to compare it to. Especially Rocky Balboa which was pretty much perfect and a bigger surprise.
Still, wonderful movie.
12. The Martian
I have a knee-jerk, negative response to survival films, mostly because I dread spending two hours with just one character. I know that that's almost never the actual case in these movies, but it's a Pavlovian reaction by this point. Many reviews told me that The Martian spends a lot of time with the people who are trying to rescue Matt Damon, but I still had to push myself into the theater. And of course I'm glad I did.
Damon's character faces his problems with intelligence and humor. That's true of all the characters, really, so the whole movie is refreshingly positive and inspirational. It's the movie that Tomorrowland was trying so hard to be. The drawback is that its lightness dilutes the tension and suspense somewhat, but The Martian is inspirational science fiction first and survival thriller second. It totally succeeds at that primary purpose.
13. Trainwreck
A drawback to seeing this later than a lot of people is that it couldn't possibly live up to the hype I was hearing. It's a funny movie and I cared about the characters, but I wanted to be laughing harder than I was, not just chuckling quietly. A very good romantic comedy, but not one I'll be revisiting a lot.
14. Ant-Man
Another very good superhero movie from Marvel. I love that it has its own tone and stands apart from the other Marvel films, while totally fitting in with them at the same time. I had a lot of fun with it, but the bar on Marvel movies has been raised so high at this point that I'm sort of disappointed if I'm not losing my mind over how awesome they are. Not fair, but that's where I am.
15. SPECTRE
As huge a Bond fan as I am, I was frankly unexcited to see SPECTRE. The trailers emphasized themes that have been thoroughly explored in the previous three Bond films: distrust, Bond's going rogue, etc. And the lackluster theme song did nothing to draw me to the theater on opening night. That said, once I saw it, I immediately went back the following night.
The first time, I spent the movie trying to figure out the plot. It felt lighter in tone than the trailers suggested, but was that a decoy? How much could I trust Madeleine Swann? Was Christoph Waltz playing Blofeld or not? I ended up being satisfied with the answers to those questions and looking forward to seeing the movie again the next day.
And I liked it even better the second time. Knowing what to expect plot- and tone-wise, I was able to focus on the themes and characters. I love what it says about Bond and how he's grown since Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. His final confrontation with Waltz' character - the self-styled "author of all your pain" - is remarkable and wonderful. Waltz wants to be so consumingly important in Bond's life, but Bond's not having it. I love that he's matured to that point, even though I absolutely dread the potential repercussions in the next movie.
The reason it's not higher on my list is that not only is it nowhere near my favorite Bond movie, it's not even the best spy movie I saw this year. If you're interested in more detailed thoughts about it, I wrote those up, too.
16. Pitch Perfect 2
Might even like it better than the first one. The humor is still uneven and I really don't care for the way it resets the group's success to zero so that they can repeat their climb to the top again, but the addition of Hailee Steinfeld, Keegan-Michael Key, and for the love of God: Das Sound Machine...
Look, sometimes a sequel just needs to do what the first one did and do it a bigger. I don't say that often, because it doesn't work that often, but it sure works in this case.
17. What We Do in the Shadows
My expectations were too high. The concept is hilarious and the trailer had me rolling, but the movie never made me fall out of my chair in laughter and - fair or not - that's what I thought I was going to get. Still, super funny and highly recommended. Looking forward to the just announced sequel: We're Wolves.
18. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
Don't know if the Maze Runner movies are getting lost in the mass of other YA dystopia adaptations or if I'm just reading the wrong film coverage. It feels like no one's talking about these, though, and that's a shame. They're solid adventure stories with interesting characters who have complex motivations and are played by appealing actors. Ready for the next one.
19. Spy
Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy do it again. This time, they made a great spy spoof that also became one of my favorite Jason Statham movies. What keeps it from being higher on the list is the amount of time it spends on McCarthy in sad, cat lady disguises. It does that so that she can break free of them and be awesome - and once she does, it's great and I love it whole-heartedly - but I had to get through that stuff to get to the great stuff, so that keeps me from loving it.
It also doesn't help that all the US marketing for the movie focused on cat lady. I had to go to Korea to find a poster of McCarthy looking cool. It makes me very sad that US marketers didn't think anyone wanted to see that.
20. Black Sea
An excellent, undersea heist thriller. Not nearly as much about the tension between the English and Russian halves of the team that the trailer would have you believe, but that stuff is certainly in there. My issue with it has nothing to do with the movie itself and everything to do with what I wanted it to be. The thriller stuff is totally in there and it's very good, but ultimately the movie is more interested in the emotional journey of Jude Law's character and that takes the story in a specific direction I was sorry to see it go. If this list were about objective quality and not about my personal reactions, Black Sea would be in a different spot.
No Dickens today, because we would have been covering Thomas Edison's silent version and he skips right over this year's scene even more than most adaptations.
Instead, I'd like to point you towards the Literary 007 blog where they're doing a series on Ian Fleming's idea of the Seven Deadlier Sins. These are evils that Fleming felt were more worthy of punishment than the traditional list. The proprietor of the site asked if I'd like to write an entry and I eagerly snatched up Self-Righteousness. I hope you'll go read as I speculate on Fleming's relationship with the sin, point out examples of it from the novels, and explain why I agree with Fleming that it's an especially odious offense.
This isn't going to be my full run-down on SPECTRE the way I covered the other movies so far. I'll need to watch it a few more times for that. But I have seen it a couple of times now and like Quantum of Solaceand Skyfall, I can at least talk about some initial impressions. There will be SPOILERS.
First, I should say that I wasn't all that excited about the movie. The trailers played up the Rogue Bond angle and mentioned distrust a couple of times, and those are both things that have been thoroughly exhausted over the last few movies. Bond has quit or gone off the grid in every film since Die Another Day and the first three Craig movies could very appropriately be called the Trust Trilogy. Did not want more of that.
And while I know that the quality of the theme song doesn't have a direct relationship to the quality of the movie, the dullness of Sam Smith's number didn't encourage me about the level of inspiration in the film. I ended up waiting a week before going to see it.
Happily, the trailers didn't reflect the actual themes of the movie and even Sam Smith's boring song was improved by one of the best title sequences I've ever seen. (Easily in the Top Three with Casino Royale and Skyfall.) Bond does go off the grid again, but it's not because he doesn't trust anyone. In fact, he's doing it to protect people that he does trust. One of the nicest things about Skyfall was how it reintroduced the idea of Bond's having a support team and that pays off beautifully in SPECTRE. Moneypenny, Q, and Bill Tanner are all trusted team members and become even more so as the story progresses. Bond's even keeping M out of the loop for his own protection, due to the impending governance of the all-seeing Centre of National Security.
The CNS' oversight continues another big theme that was introduced in Skyfall, but not fully explored. Judi Dench's M has to undergo an inquiry because the government no longer believes that MI6s methods are useful. As Mallory says early on, "We can't keep working in the shadows.
There are no more shadows."
M begs to differ and says so during the inquiry. "Look around you.
Who do you fear?
Can you see a face? A uniform?
A flag? No.
Our world is not more
transparent now.
It's more opaque.
It's in the shadows.
That's where we
must do battle." She doesn't get to expand on that, but it's an intriguing thesis and I love that SPECTRE develops it. The real world - especially where security organizations are concerned - does feel more transparent. And that's for the good most of the time, but it makes for dull spy movies.
I appreciate that the Bond movies are addressing the tension between transparency and shadows, but I'm also eager for MI6 and its Double-Os to move back into the darkness where they can work uninhibited by anything but the filmmakers' imaginations. So I'm encouraged at the direction that the series looks to be headed in. They've tried transparency with the big, public MI6 building and it hasn't worked. At every turn, the villains have proven that they can't be fought on an open field. I'm hoping that as a result of SPECTRE's activities, the next Bond movie gives Her Majesty a truly Secret Service.
I love how SPECTRE ties all four Craig movies so far into a continuing story. It does this far from perfectly, but the Bond films have become truly a series, with Christoph Waltz' character revealed as the mastermind working behind-the-scenes on all of them. I also love that Waltz himself is a big liar and that yes, he's Blofeld. He needed to be. I didn't want SPECTRE without him.
More specifically though, I love the kind of villain that Blofeld is in this movie. He's such an attention whore. He couldn't stand being less important than Bond to his father as a kid and was crazy enough to let that shape his entire life. He has planned and schemed for decades to utterly ruin Bond and cannot wait to reveal himself. In fact, he says this explicitly. He's so happy to confess that "it was always me. The author of all your pain." At long last, his revenge is complete.
Except that Bond couldn't care less.
That's so rich and glorious. It denies Blofeld the importance in Bond's life that he so desperately craves, but it also puts a wonderful cap on Bond's emotional journey since Casino. The Bond of Casino and Quantum would have gone after Blofeld with everything he had. But he's matured since then. To the point that he can find a tape labeled "Vesper Lynd - Interrogation" and not even be tempted to look. Because of the events of Quantum of Solace; because of the time that passed before Skyfall; Bond has moved on and is looking for something else in his life.
That lets SPECTRE be the most whimsical of the Craig movies, which was something else I was looking forward to after Skyfall. What's the use of reintroducing all these traditional elements to the series if you're not also going to reintroduce the humor? We've had our dark, gritty Bond and I was a huge fan. But I'm also happy to see one who can smile and crack a joke.
Sadly, I don't think it will last. What's going to make Blofeld a compelling, recurring villain isn't that he shares an origin story with Bond; it's that he's absolutely not going to let Bond ignore him and live a happy life. I fear for Madeleine Swann and suspect that we're headed for a Tracy situation all over again. I have 0.25% doubt that this is what's going to kick off the next Bond movie, but I'm glad that whatever happens next will get covered there and that - for now anyway - Bond gets a happy ending.
Before SPECTRE comes out this weekend, here's my ranking of all the Bond movies so far (minus the '60s Casino Royal spoof). I'm guessing that some of those rankings will be controversial. For instance, I have Quantum of Solace pretty high and I'm bucking conventional wisdom that Die Another Day is the worst ever. Let's talk it out in the comments if you want.
1. Casino Royale
2. From Russia With Love
3. The Living Daylights
4. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
5. For Your Eyes Only
6. Quantum of Solace
7. Dr No
8. Thunderball
9. The Spy Who Loved Me
10. GoldenEye
11. Skyfall
12. Licence to Kill
13. The Man with Golden Gun
14. The World Is Not Enough
15. Never Say Never Again
16. Goldfinger
17. Live and Let Die
18. A View to a Kill
19. Tomorrrow Never Dies
20. Die Another Day
21. Octopussy
22. Moonraker
23. You Only Live Twice
24. Diamonds Are Forever
Just for fun, here's my list based on the accumulated rankings of the individual parts I've been measuring: women, villains, theme song, cold open, gadgets, henchmen, and title sequence. As usual, there's a complicated, Top Secret algorithm for assigning a total points value to each movie. Here's how they fall when measured that way.
1. Thunderball (77 points)
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (72 points)
3. Casino Royale (69 points)
4. Goldfinger (48 points)
5. From Russia With Love (46 points)
6. Never Say Never Again (45 points)
7. The Living Daylights (36 points)
8 and 9. [TIE] The Spy Who Loved Me and Skyfall (35 points)
10. A View to a Kill (33 points)
11. Tomorrrow Never Dies (31 points)
12 and 13. [TIE] The Man with Golden Gun and For Your Eyes Only (24 points)
14. Live and Let Die (22 points)
15. Quantum of Solace (21 points)
16. GoldenEye (20 points)
17. Moonraker (14 points)
18 and 19. [TIE] Dr No and Octopussy (10 points)
20 and 21. [TIE] The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day (7 points)
22. Diamonds Are Forever (6 points)
23. You Only Live Twice (4 points)
24. Licence to Kill (0 points)
And for completeness' sake, here are the final Top Ten lists of the various categories.
Top 10 Cold Opens
1. GoldenEye
2. Casino Royale
3. The Spy Who Loved Me
4. Moonraker
5. Thunderball
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
7. A View to a Kill
8. Goldfinger
9. The Man with the Golden Gun
10. The Living Daylights
Top Ten Theme Songs
1. Skyfall
2. A View to a Kill
3. "Surrender" (end credits of Tomorrow Never Dies)
4. "You Know My Name" (Casino Royale)
5. The Living Daylights
6. "Nobody Does It Better" (The Spy Who Loved Me)
7. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
8. Diamonds Are Forever
9. You Only Live Twice
10. From Russia With Love (instrumental version)
Top Ten Title Sequences
1. Casino Royale
2. Skyfall
3. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
4. Dr No
5. Thunderball
6. Goldfinger
7. GoldenEye
8. From Russia with Love
9. The Spy Who Loved Me
10. Die Another Day
Top Ten Gadgets
1. Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me)
2. Aston Martin DB V (Goldfinger and Thunderball)
3. Jet pack (Thunderball)
4. Iceberg boat (A View to a Kill)
5. The Q Boat (The World Is Not Enough)
6. Aston Martin V8 Vantage (The Living Daylights)
7. Glastron CV23HT speed boat (Moonraker)
8. Acrostar Mini Jet (Octopussy)
9. Crocodile submarine (Octopussy)
10. X-Ray Specs (The World Is Not Enough)
Top Ten Henchmen
1. Baron Samedi (Live and Let Die)
2. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
3. Grant (From Russia with Love)
4. Nick Nack (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Zao (Die Another Day)
6. Gobinda (Octopussy)
7. May Day (A View to a Kill)
8. Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker)
9. Naomi (The Spy Who Loved Me)
10. Oddjob (Goldfinger)
Top Ten Villains
1. Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
2. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Never Say Never Again)
3. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (From Russia With Love and Thunderball)
4. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
5. Maximilian Largo (Never Say Never Again)
6. Francisco Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun)
7. Dr. Kananga (Live and Let Die)
8. Le Chiffre (Casino Royale)
9. Raoul Silva (Skyfall)
10. Doctor No (Dr. No)
My Favorite Bond Women
1. Tracy Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
2. Vesper Lynd (Casino Royale)
3. Melina Havelock (For Your Eyes Only)
4. Camille Montes (Quantum of Solace)
5. Kara Milovy (The Living Daylights)
6. Wai Lin (Tomorrow Never Dies)
7. Paula Caplan (Thunderball)
8. Tatiana Romanova (From Russia With Love)
9. Natalya Simonova (GoldenEye)
10. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
I don't do a lot of advertising here (in fact, you may have noticed that I've taken out all the ads from the site), but this is pretty cool and I haven't quite left Bond behind for October. English ceramics manufacturer Royal Doulton is celebrating the release of SPECTRE with a Jack the Bulldog figure that not only replicates the one M gave Bond in Skyfall, but also includes "a few cracks to his face and some charring to the union Jack flag draped over his back."
Here's the full press release:
Models of Bulldogs were first made by Royal Doulton in the 1940s and by this decade the breed had come to symbolise the steely determination of the British character. The ceramic versions created during the Second World War, featuring flags and hats representing the army, navy and air force, honoured the bravery and determination of military personnel and the UK’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
Royal Doulton’s Jack the Bulldog, famous for his cameo role in Skyfall, returns to the screen once more.
Jack survived a traumatic explosion with little more than a few cracks to his face and some charring to the union Jack flag draped over his back. Bequeathed to Bond by ‘M’, he now makes an appearance in the new James Bond movie SPECTRE.
To mark his role in the film, Jack has the reference number DD 007M.
I really wanted to get through the Bond films before October and we totally did it. Now it's time to be like Bond and Melina, quiet down, and have a little rest.
At least until tomorrow when we start the Countdown to Halloween. After all, that's why we had to be done by October in the first place.
During production of Skyfall, regular Bond composer David Arnold was working on the music for the 2012 Summer Olympic ceremonies, but he contends that it was something else that lost him the Skyfall job. And he's probably right. Director Sam Mendes had worked with composer Thomas Newman on every one of his films except Away We Go, which used original songs by singer Alexi Murdoch. It made sense that he'd want to work with him again on Skyfall, and indeed Newman has also written the score for Mendes' SPECTRE.
For the theme song, Sony recommended Adele to Eon Productions. They agreed and Adele wrote the song with Paul Epworth, who'd produced her 21 album. The music is oh so cool and sinister, but Adele's voice and the lyrics turn it into a positive song about two people - Bond and M, in the film - who help each other overcome their obstacles. It's cool, it's sexy, it's uplifting. I've been dreading the decision about whether to let it bump "View to a Kill" from Number One on my list, but now that I'm here, I have no problem doing that.
Daniel Kleinman is also back in top form after a lackluster credits sequence in Quantum of Solace. As Bond - wounded in the teaser - goes over a waterfall and sinks to the bottom of a river, the theme song starts and a hand grabs Bond. It then becomes a giant hand, pulling Bond into a hole of swirling sand.
The rest of the credits could be a dream Bond has as he's dying. There are images of him as a shooting range target with blood pouring from a hole in his shoulder. Later, the same Bond-targets are on fire, burning into nothing.
But there's a cool narrative through the credits sequence, too. Image leads to image, so we're underwater with some women and guns are falling around us, then we move through the cloud-like sand and the seaweed becomes a forest of trees with a cemetery and falling daggers. The cemetery leads us to the gate of the Skyfall estate, which leads us to the house, which has a crack in it, which is filled with Bond's face, and then we zoom into his eye. And on and on. The whole thing is weird and beautiful with some images - like the targets and the Skyfall house and gate - reappearing as the drowning Bond's mind returns to them.
I can't quite explain why he's hallucinating about Chinese dragons, but that country does figure heavily into the movie and the dragons look great, so who's complaining.
I loved most of Arnold's stuff on the movies he did, but Newman is great too. He's certainly a lot more free with the Bond Theme than Arnold was on the last two films. That's appropriate though, since Skyfall is getting the series back to basics.
The fanfare to the Bond Theme pops up by itself a couple of times: when Bond catches the train during the cold open and again at the end when Silva blows up the Aston Martin. There's also a nice, acoustic guitar version playing as Bond leaves the casino in Macau.
The first time we hear the full Theme is when Bond's air support shows up at Silva's island. That seems like a curious place to put it, since Bond isn't doing anything cool at the time. But then I thought about how Skyfall is reintroducing the idea of any kind of support to Bond's world. After lone-wolfing it for two movies, Bond now has a team to work with: particularly Moneypenny and Q. Playing the Bond Theme as he's being rescued then becomes a subtle way to reinforce the idea that he's really not Bond without his friends.
The other two times we get the full Theme are total nostalgia blasts: When Bond takes the Aston Martin out of storage and when he faces his new M in the new (old) office. That last time leads into the closing credits which feature a David Arnold remix of the Bond Theme that then leads into a medley of Newman's various pieces for the film.
Sadly, the gun barrel sequence is at the end again for the second film in a row. I don't have really strong feelings about that, but I also don't see the point in moving it. It's starting to annoy me.
Top Ten Theme Songs
1. Skyfall
2. A View to a Kill
3. "Surrender" (end credits of Tomorrow Never Dies)
4. "You Know My Name" (Casino Royale)
5. The Living Daylights
6. "Nobody Does It Better" (The Spy Who Loved Me)
7. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
8. Diamonds Are Forever
9. You Only Live Twice
10. From Russia With Love (instrumental version)
Top Ten Title Sequences
1. Casino Royale
2. Skyfall
3. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
4. Dr No
5. Thunderball
6. Goldfinger
7. GoldenEye
8. From Russia with Love
9. The Spy Who Loved Me
10. Die Another Day
Raoul Silva has some henchmen, but they're not memorable or important. He's all the villain Skyfall needs. Other movies have given us anti-Bonds before, but one cool thing about Bond's changing with the times is that his evil opposites change too. As Bond grows more complicated, so do they. Roger Moore's cartoonish Bond got Scaramanga, who was nothing more than another womanizing assassin. Since Brosnan's Bond was commenting on and questioning his role in the world, Alec Trevelyan provided a voice for that, challenging Bond with tough, thoughtful questions. The major focus of Daniel Craig's Bond has been his relationship with M and his trust issues in general, so Silva shows us what happens if that gets out of control. Silva is the proto-Bond, at least of Craig's version. He got too close to M and it drove him mad.
M tells Bond that Silva's sin was "operating beyond his brief." That doesn't sound too serious, especially considering all the times that Bond's done that himself. Silva's only crime was hacking the Chinese government without orders, and for that M gave him up to them in order to retrieve some other agents and ease the transition of power from Britain back to China. It seems totally harsh for his crime, but that's the point. Silva's obviously unhinged, but that's the result of his being betrayed by M, not the cause of it.
Javier Bardem does great things with Silva. He's crazy, but Bardem isn't just playing him as a generic madman. There's a reason for Silva's insanity and Bardem lets that shape the choices he makes playing the character. He's unpredictable, interesting, entertaining, and constantly goes right to the top without ever going over it.
The only thing I don't like about him is his escape plan. It's just not believable, because Silva's accounted for too many random variables that he could neither control nor predict. There's no way he could know the exact time that Q would plug in Silva's laptop, for example, which starts the perfectly timed chain reaction.
Not that any of it matters anyway. The whole point of the elaborate escape is to put Silva in the courtroom with M, which he could've orchestrated in countless other and much simpler ways. The escape is just a way for the movie to show off a big, but sadly unnecessary set piece.
Top Ten Villains
1. Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
2. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Never Say Never Again)
3. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (From Russia With Love and Thunderball)
4. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
5. Maximilian Largo (Never Say Never Again)
6. Francisco Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun)
7. Dr. Kananga (Live and Let Die)
8. Le Chiffre (Casino Royale)
9. Raoul Silva (Skyfall)
10. Doctor No (Dr. No)
Top Ten Henchmen
1. Baron Samedi (Live and Let Die)
2. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
3. Grant (From Russia with Love)
4. Nick Nack (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Zao (Die Another Day)
6. Gobinda (Octopussy)
7. May Day (A View to a Kill)
8. Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker)
9. Naomi (The Spy Who Loved Me)
10. Oddjob (Goldfinger)
Returning to form for the movie series, Bond has sex with as many women in Skyfall as he did in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace combined. The first one almost doesn't count though, because she never speaks and doesn't even get a name. The credits just call her Bond's Lover.
But her namelessness is the point. She's not an important person to Bond. She is however important to illustrating his frame of mind when he's shot by Eve and goes missing in southwest Turkey. He goes at it like crazy with her up against a wall, but afterwards he's totally distracted; drinking a beer and staring into the distance as she cuddles him. It's the same with his drinking right after that. He throws himself into it to the point that he's drinking with literal scorpions, but is totally empty once the experience is over.
I like Eve Moneypenny a lot. Naomi Harris is a great actress and brings a lot of nuance to a role that needs it. A small part of me wishes that Moneypenny hadn't tried field work before becoming Mallory's permanent assistant, because the temptation is to think that she failed at it. That's not really it though. She tried it, had a horrible experience in the teaser, then tried it again and had a better time. But she ultimately decides that it's not for her and there's no shame in that.
Harris and Craig sell this. There's no judgment in him when he says that field work isn't for everyone. And there's no judgment in herself when she decides that she agrees. She's confident in her decision and has found her niche.
I love that the flirtation between them is already there and that it's mutual. They're friends. They might have become more than that, but her new job eliminates that possibility. It's a great relationship and I'm excited to see more of it.
Séverine kind of breaks my heart. The first time I saw the movie, it took me a while to warm up to her. There's something wrong about her confidence when she meets Bond, like she's obviously posing. Which of course she is. The more she talks, the more terrified you realize that she is. As Bond says, she's doing her best to hide it, but isn't succeeding. Bérénice Marlohe is amazing in the role and it kills me that Bond isn't able to save her.
He doesn't even give saving her a real try. He's in full-on blunt instrument mode by the time he gets on the boat with her. He knows he's very close to the person behind the MI6 bombing and doesn't bother trying to sneak onto the island. He just lets himself get captured as usual and never mind any collateral damage. It would be interesting to go back and watch earlier films when Bond's allies are killed and see if there's a way he could have saved them had he not been so focused on the villain.
I could've talked about M in any of the "Women" posts for the last five movies, but chose to discuss her in the "Allies" section instead. With Skyfall though, there's an effort to explore her not just in relation to Bond, but as a full character.
Bond's apparent death hits her hard and the first shots of the movie after the credits are of her in shock. Then she feels even worse after the deaths of eight people in the MI6 bombing. Her confidence and trust in herself are severely shaken. She's lost the control that she tried to hard to hold onto in the cold open.
It doesn't help that others are questioning her too, starting with Mallory, the chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He offers her a GCMG (Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George) if she retires quietly, but she's not biting. Her pride won't let her. "I'll leave when the job's done."
The rest of the movie is largely about her trying to regain her trust in herself, but the tragedy is that she really doesn't. Silva pokes at her big time, but she's confronted with even more failure concerning Bond. She's always recruited orphans because they make the best agents, but by going to Skyfall, she has to face the reality that orphans aren't just convenient demographics or advantages for training. Bond's losing his parents was a serious tragedy in his life that deeply haunts him. When she tells him with her last breath that "I did get one thing right," it's meant to encourage him, but it's also her way of acknowledging the many things that she didn't.
My Favorite Bond Women
1. Tracy Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
2. Vesper Lynd (Casino Royale)
3. Melina Havelock (For Your Eyes Only)
4. Camille Montes (Quantum of Solace)
5. Kara Milovy (The Living Daylights)
6. Wai Lin (Tomorrow Never Dies)
7. Paula Caplan (Thunderball)
8. Tatiana Romanova (From Russia With Love)
9. Natalya Simonova (GoldenEye)
10. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) accuses M of being sentimental about Bond at one point. He's not wrong. We've seen this over and over again in all three of the Craig movies so far. And as becomes clearer in Skyfall, M has a habit of becoming deeply connected to certain agents. It happened with Silva and it's happened again with Bond.
And, also like Silva, she's willing to sacrifice Bond for the greater good. It reminds me of her comment to Brosnan's Bond in GoldenEye about having the balls to send him to his death. She totally does and she proves it in Skyfall's cold open. That shakes Bond. His apparent death shakes M, but her willingness to toss him aside for a mission really affects him.
The first time we see Bond after Eve shoots him, he's in the tropics. He's deeply indulging his hedonistic impulses, but none of it is satisfying him. He's distracted and aimless. He can't leave his job in the past. So as soon as he hears about the MI6 bombing, he's back on a plane and headed home. And the first place he shows up is M's house. It's reminiscent of Casino Royale. He's falling back into old, inappropriate habits, because he's not sure where he stands anymore. He accuses her of distrusting him on the train and though she defends it, he's right.
She knows it, too. That's why she puts him back on duty when he's not ready. Silva spins it as a reason for Bond to distrust M, but that's not it. She's trying to prove - to herself as much as to Bond - that she does trust him. That's what her last words are about. Whatever else they've been through together, she trusts Bond.
It's just that trust is fickle. It's not something that's earned and never questioned again. Our trust in each other depends on a lot of different factors, many of which have nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the person in question. Because M had failed to trust Bond, he now has reason to doubt her. Which is why she confesses to him her history with Silva. Trust is such a tricky, fragile thing and it's cool to see it handled that way in these movies. (Though, having said that, I'm totally ready to move on to a new theme.)
Speaking of new, I like Bond's relationships with his new colleagues. This is the first Craig movie to show him interacting with anyone else at MI6 besides M. And though he and Q argue when they first meet, they're smiling by the end of the scene. His relationship with Moneypenny is also cordial and light. I mean, of course he likes her, but he's remarkably patient with her and I don't get the sense that it's just because he wants to sleep with her. They seem like friends. Hard to imagine the Bond of Casino Royale treating her that way.
One final ally to mention is Kincade, the gamekeeper on the Skyfall estate. It's obvious to me that the screenwriters at least hoped that Sean Connery might come back to play him. He's not needed for the plot, so putting an elderly Scot character in the 50th anniversary movie is totally a stunt. The screenplay hasn't been released, so I don't know for sure, but the way Kincade is introduced - a creak of the floorboards, then we see his rifle, and finally his face - it looks like it's building to a reveal that Albert Finney doesn't pay off. It feels like there's supposed to be something bigger going on there. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. I agree with Sam Mendes' assessmentthat having Connery in the movie - while fun and cool - would have also been a little sad and a lot distracting.
Best Quip
"What makes you think this is my first time?"
Worst Quip
"Put it all on red. It's the circle of life." Honestly, I don't know what's going on here. It sounds like a Lion King joke, but the reference to roulette right before makes me wonder if that's the circle Bond's talking about. But how is that the circle of life? No idea. Don't like it.
Gadgets
Since we have a Q again, we also finally have some gadgets, though they're relatively low tech. The fanciest is a Walther PPK/S with a palm-print reader so that only Bond can fire it. Besides that, there's just a radio transmitted tracking device.
Of course, the Aston Martin DB5 does show up again and it's tricked out with (at least) an ejector seat and machine guns like the one in Goldfinger.
Top Ten Gadgets
1. Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me)
2. Aston Martin DB V (Goldfinger and Thunderball)
3. Jet pack (Thunderball)
4. Iceberg boat (A View to a Kill)
5. The Q Boat (The World Is Not Enough)
6. Aston Martin V8 Vantage (The Living Daylights)
7. Glastron CV23HT speed boat (Moonraker)
8. Acrostar Mini Jet (Octopussy)
9. Crocodile submarine (Octopussy)
10. X-Ray Specs (The World Is Not Enough)
Later in Bond's career, trust issues again arise with M when an agent from her past predicts a tragic end to Bond's future.
Influences
After the close connection between Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, Skyfall was surprisingly unrelated to those films. There's some thematic carryover with continuing trust issues, but the Quantum organization makes no appearance, nor do any other plot threads from those two movies.
Skyfall was released on the 50th anniversary of Dr. No, though, and draws most of its inspiration from the overall series. Like Die Another Day (the 40th anniversary film), there are a lot of things in Skyfall that possibly reference earlier movies. Some - like the Aston Martin DB5 - are very clear, but others are less certain. When Q jokes about not giving Bond an exploding pen, is that just an allusion to outlandish gadgets in general, or is it a specific reference to GoldenEye? What about Bond's hopping on a Komodo dragon's back to escape a pit? Convenient step-stool or purposeful quotation of Live and Let Die?
Moment That's Most Like Fleming
Bond's being an orphan from Scotland is right out of Fleming (although Fleming didn't make Bond from Scotland until after Sean Connery had played him). Other than that though, Skyfall isn't a very Fleming-like movie. In fact, its goal is to move the Daniel Craig movies away from Fleming and back towards Eon Productions.
Moment That's Least Like Fleming
Sometimes I've used this section to talk about negative aspects of the movie. "Ugh! Fleming never would have done that!" An example from Skyfall would be Bond's digging out some bullet shrapnel that's so unique It Could Only Have Been Used By One Person. It's a tired trope and Daniel Craig's Bond deserves better.
But there's often nothing wrong with a movie's being un-Fleming. They're their own thing and that's good. I was super excited when the end of Skyfall promised a return to the traditional movie Bond in the next one. As much as I've enjoyed the Craig movies, I'm also eager for the nostalgia of returning to the "old ways."
That's another big theme in Skyfall and it's not especially Fleming-esque. The literary Bond never struggled with whether or not he needed to keep up with the times. He always knew that one day his time would be up and that he'd become irrelevant. If that happened before he died, he'd simply be put out to pasture like so many agents before him. In contrast, Skyfall not only has people questioning Bond's age and ability to do his job, but questioning MI6 itself and whether or not it's still relevant in the modern world.
I'm not totally on board the questioning of Bond, because there's too big a leap from the starter spy of Casino/Quantum to the aging agent of Skyfall. But I do like the commentary on the whole concept of a spy organization and M's defense of it. It's not the most interesting theme of the movie to me - that would be the wrap-up to the Bond/M relationship and their trust issues - but I'm glad it's in there.
Cold Open
This is a good one because not only is it action packed with some excellent stunts, but it also sets up the major relationship for the rest of the movie to resolve. Bond shows up at a murder scene, looking for a hard drive and with M in his ear via microphone. It's weird for her to be there and I don't like it. I'm used to Bond having autonomy on his missions. But that's the point. This isn't some kind of new status quo for missions; M is just super invested in this one. She's pushing Bond to move on and try to recover the hard drive, even resenting the time he takes to stabilize a critically wounded agent. Her impatience becomes even more of a problem very shortly.
Back in the street, Bond's picked up by a girl in a car (shades of Quantum of Solace, where Camille did the same thing after a similar scene in a hotel room). We'll call her Eve for now, though her name isn't mentioned until the end of the movie when we learn that her last name is Moneypenny. The car chase turns into a motorcycle chase with M's still screaming to both Bond and Eve about the importance of recovering the drive and the list that's on it. (I'm tempted to be uncharitable about the NOC list plot's already being used in the first Mission: Impossible movie, but it's more than just a MacGuffin in Skyfall, so I'm cutting the script some slack.)
The pursuit moves to a train with Eve still pursuing in her car. Naomi Harris is doing great work as Eve, showing that she's frightened and clearly out of her depth, but absolutely determined to succeed. M's constant demands for reports are getting really annoying at this point, but there's still a reason for this. As the fight continues, M quits talking to Bond, partly because he's fighting, but mostly because the film is increasingly putting us in Eve's point of view. She's the one whom M is pressuring to keep up, so that when we get to the climax of the cold open, the success or failure of the mission really seems to be up to Eve.
If we step back from it though, of course that's ridiculous. That's Bond on the train. He's going to beat that enemy agent and take back the list. The fact that he and the bad guy are about to disappear into a tunnel has nothing to do with it. The only thing the tunnel affects is Eve's involvement in the chase and M's control over the situation.
And that's the big problem. M orders Eve to "take the bloody shot." It's not really that she trusts Eve over Bond; it's that she only trusts herself and her own ability to manage the mission from London. When Eve hits Bond by mistake, M loses the list because she didn't trust Bond to get it back.
Top 10 Cold Opens
1. GoldenEye
2. Casino Royale
3. The Spy Who Loved Me
4. Moonraker
5. Thunderball
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
7. A View to a Kill
8. Goldfinger
9. The Man with the Golden Gun
10. The Living Daylights
Movie Series Continuity
Like I said above, a lot of time seems to have passed since Quantum of Solace. Bond is considered a veteran now and is perhaps aging out of his job. M says he's been playing the game "long enough" to know the rules. And then there's the tricked-out Aston Martin. Is that something that Bond received on a previous mission like Goldfinger? Or is it supposed to be the same vehicle he won in Casino Royale? If it's the one from Casino, he's moved the steering wheel to the right-hand seat. M doesn't seem surprised to see it, so it's another element that implies a great passage of time.
M was established in previous films to be married with kids, but mentions that her husband has passed away some time before Skyfall. We also learn of course that she was stationed in Hong Kong at some point before receiving her current assignment.
[UPDATE: I questioned in another post if this M is supposed to be the same woman as the one who gave Brosnan's Bond his orders. I think Skyfall makes it pretty clear that she's not. Silva tells Bond that he was stationed in Hong Kong from 1986 to 1997. And M confesses that she turned Silva over to the Chinese government as she was transitioning out of Hong Kong, so she had to have been there in '97 as well. That means that if Craig's M lived in Brosnan's world, she would have been stationed in Hong Kong at least during the events of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and probably of GoldenEye (1995) as well. There's no way Judi Dench is playing the exact same character in both the Brosnan and Craig eras.]
As a result of the bombing, MI6 decides that its headquarters are too public and moves to a less conspicuous location. First they go into bunkers that Churchill used in World War II, but by the end they seem to have moved again. The new M's office is above ground, at least.
Tanner is back, still played by Rory Kinnear. He mentions Q-Branch early in the movie, setting up the appearance of the new Q. Ben Whishaw's version has a different relationship with Bond than previous versions, but there's still a nod toward the old conflict when he tells Bond, "Good luck out there in the field. And please return the equipment in one piece."
Bond tells Eve at one point not to touch her ear when she's talking into her microphone. That's a pet peeve of his as revealed in Casino Royale.
And speaking of Eve Moneypenny, I couldn't help noticing that there's a hat rack in her office at the end. There's no hat toss, but she does call attention to it by hanging her coat there. Keeping my fingers crossed for SPECTRE.
