Posts Tagged ‘films’

11
Jan
2010
Categories
Media

Bond 23

From The Guardian:

The [23rd James Bond film] would be Mendes’s first proper action film – the director is best known for taut relationship dramas such as his 1999 debut American Beauty, for which he won the Oscars for best film and best director, and last year’s Revolutionary Road. However, he has dabbled in more high-octane fare before: on the 2005 Gulf war tale Jarhead, as well as the 2002 gangster flick Road to Perdition.

Well if it’s true it would make perfect sense, and would point ever more clearly to Bond 23 being the third part of a trilogy that kicked off with Casino Royale.

<spoilers ahead>

At the end of that film (and indeed the book as it was a fairly faithful adaptation), the treacherous Vesper lay dead and Bond retreated into the emotional shell that sees him through the rest of the series with the immortal words ‘The job’s done and the bitch is dead’. They were lifted directly from the book.

It’s only when he meets Tracy – an equal – that he is finally able to let down his guard where women are concerned.

Quantum of Solace picked up an hour on from the end of Casino Royale, and followed Bond on his quest to track down the Quantum organisation, which was ultimately behind Vesper’s death (through revenge of duty? Who knows – it could be a little of both). In the closing scenes he confronts Vesper’s betrayer in a Moscow flat, but apart from leaving him more or less alive we know nothing of what happened between them or the content of their discussion.

Bond 23, then, must surely repeat Quantum’s trick and pick up the story an hour later as Bond sets out to use the information he learned in the flat, find a way to reconcile himself to Vesper’s betrayal and finally become the a fully-formed, rounded character who can leave this thread behind in Bond 24 and beyond.

The 23rd instalment will be Bond’s final counselling session. So who better to direct than Mendes? A man who, in the words of The Guardian, is ‘best known for taut relationship dramas’?

That’s what Bond has been since Casino Royale.

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21
Nov
2008
Categories
Media

Quantum of Solace: review

2008-quantum-of-solace.jpg

‘007 goes rogue’ is how they billed it. The last time they did that – License to Kill – was one of the series’ low points, portraying a cold, heartless character, and a story that lacked many of the franchise’s cornerstone features.

Well, Quantum of Solace doesn’t do that, but the three star ratings it garnered in most of the press reviews weren’t far off the mark. There’s still no Q, and there are no gadgets beyond an impressive array of Sony phones that run software years ahead of their time. There’s no Moneypenny and the villain – a fay environmentalist called Dominic Greene – has all the menace of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. His sidekick is more Bob-a-Job than Odd-Job.

There are some genuine edge-of-seat highs, like a prop-driven aerial dogfight and the much-hyped car chase, which really is brutal, exciting and loud. But in trying to emulate the Bourne films by putting you right in the middle of a fight or the Aston Martin’s driving seat it becomes confused and hard to follow. Bourne simply – sadly – did it better. Perhaps because it did it first and now we’re always comparing.

Never is the more evident than those times when director Forster stops trying to copy the competition and goes his own way, producing something so grand and impressive as Bregenzer Festspiele opera house scenes and the graceful gunfight that ties them off.

If the crew had been brave enough to do this throughout and create something entirely their own it would have been a stand-out entry in the franchise. In parts, though, it feels like a best-of. MI6 has dumped Windows and switched to whatever operating system they used in Minority Report, Agent Fields gets the Goldfinger treatment, although this time with oil, not gold paint. The eco hotel in which the climactic battle takes place looks for all the world like Ken Adam’s Fort Knox (Goldfinger) or the power station (green energy again) in The Man with the Golden Gun. And Quantum itself is the modern day Spectre.

That this is a more intelligent Bond isn’t in doubt, and it has once again stripped away the clutter of the Brosnan era to produce something more in tune with the rough, stark, more authentic From Russia With Love.

I left the cinema feeling a little disappointed, but suspecting that this would be a film that repayed rewatching. Two days later, I’m convinced that’s true, and already looking forward to the DVD.

And also to the third part of what is looking increasingly like a trilogy. We still don’t know what Bond found out from Vesper’s boyfriend, what Canadian intelligence has to do with all of this, or who heads up Quantum (or quite what it is). There is clearly a new Blofeld on the scene, and it wasn’t eco-warrior Dominic Greene.

Quantum of Solace:

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15
Feb
2008
Categories
Journal, London, Media

Brief Encounter at the National Theatre

Brief Encounter at the National Theatre

The National Theatre did a special Valentines screening of Brief Encounter last night. It was a chilly outdoor showing, projected onto the wall of the Fly Tower, which looks out over the Thames, to an audience sat about in deck chairs, cocooned in blankets and rugs.

I’d never seen it before (although I thought I had), which was probably for the best. Despite our checked tartan blanket the wind was whipping up around our legs, and I think if I’d known the story and not been so keen to sit it out and see how it ended I might have suggested we left shortly after Celia Johnson’s first cigarette.

But despite the cold, it was utterly captivating, and it left me wondering how I’d managed to get this far through life without having seen it before. Like I had with Casablanca. It’s the story of Laura and Alec. He comes into the tea room at the station where she’s waiting for her train. She gets some grit in her eye and he helps to remove it. One chance meeting leads to another and soon they’re having illicit lunches together and trips out to the country, all the while telling their respective partners half-truths about what they did with the day.

But their relationship was doomed from the start. This was 1945, and such behaviour would have been quite shocking. One lie led to another and another until finally something had to be done to draw it to a close. A few weeks of irresponsible happiness had killed all feeling Laura had for her husband, and she was left, by the end of the film, trapped in an unhappy relationship, which had ultimately been torn to pieces by something so incidental as a piece of grit in her eye.

It drew a capacity crowd. The deckchairs were full before we get there, and so we perched on the side of a flower bed, while other lay right in it, using the neat box hedges as pillows. Some others, better-equipped than ourselves, had brought sleeping bags and garden chairs, and they sat there wrapped up tight, snacking on the tea and bath buns being served up to get us in the mood.

The free guide they gave out included a review from The Monthly Film Bulletin of December 1945, which gave it high praise. ‘There have been few better British films than Brief Encounter even at a time when our studios are taking their place in the vanguard of this great contemporary art‘.

Only half of that statement still holds true. British cinema may no longer be in the vanguard of great contemporary art, but that there have been few better films than Brief Encounter is as true today as it was at the end of the War.

Brief Encounter at the National Theatre

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