David Lynch--He Understood Things

I don't think I understood what being an auteur was until maybe my 20's. but when I got the idea of it, I understood David Lynch was definitely one of those. He had a particular vision, an understanding of the art of composing a mood, playing on the sensorium, introducing something new. He understood that art, like life, was about mess and attractive compulsions. He understood there was something wrong with bigotry: those people needed to fix their hearts or die. 

From the weirdness of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks to the dignified treatment of The Elephant Man, he found the human and copacetic in the alienated and estranged. 

He is best remembered through the lens of people who knew him, and the picture of a rare, exceptional director who made an enormous impact emerges. Unique: like no other. You simply have to come see his work so you will know, and let it touch you. 

(All props to the new treatment of Dune, but am I going to forget this? Nope. Not as technically brilliant and high budget, but theatrically intense.)

Is the Odysseus Discourse on X an Op?

 

No cap, if the commenter is just fooling with us, this is totally goated. After all the "Gen Z" don't write cursive, don't write checks, can't read entire novels, don't know what a rotary phone or a Walkman are stuff, pretending not to know the first thing about Homer would be, um, EPIC!

How does Christopher Nolan even find these wild things man? Does he even speak like, Greek? 

What even is this:

Yes, because when Ulysses, as he was then called, was a big old book in the early 20th century, it was written by an entire American not a notable Irish...

Grrr. I do not believe this discourse. I picked up The Iliad and The Odyssey both in one of their many, many English translations, from the used books at a Salvation Army thrift store when I was like, eight years old. I already had some acquaintance from sword 'n'sandals movies and Classic comics what I was looking at. I wanted to read the Big Kid Books. The serious grownup literature.  Are there young people seeing "Odessey SUV's" and hearing about "Achilles' tendons" and going around with no idea what those names are all about?

What Faustian bargain has our youth unaware of Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships?  What have they gotten in return? Joe Rogan and Mr. Beast? 

What do kids get read to them these days? Do they know what the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales even are? 

I feel weirdly conservative when I say that kids should learn of Achilles and his wrath or Odysseus and his peregrinations and feel like Keats looking into Chapman's Homer--like some part of the ancient past had the power to totally blow their little minds. Knowing ancient mythology and the names of ancient heroes is only additive for appreciating so much of what came after: Frankenstein in the context of Golems and Galatea, the Wicked Witches of Oz through Circe. Bryan Johnson and his desire not to die through Gilgamesh. 

Every human story spawns a replay of an old game in which not a single one of us is an NPC, but all of us are everyday heroes, with a tie to something greater than ourselves. Is that the missing puzzle piece? Are the youth fooled by false narratives because they haven't been schooled on the existing really cool ones? 

These kids today, they don't know what the old heads have been saying. This is why they are so disrespectful. Which I know from my reading goes back at least to Aristotle. At least! 

But now, these kids need to know about gorgons outside of Versace labels and all that. (They can't be missing out on The Kraken, Percy Jackson, I mean, these ancient stories are still out there--anime, and whatnot, right?) I'm happy to send kids to Padraic Colum and Edna St. Vincent Millay (I'm an old soul!) and let them go wander into a world where we had belles lettres before no one knew how to write thank you notes. What harm would it even do?

(None.) 

Streaming Finds: The Tangle

 

Sometimes when browsing streaming movie offers, you just find a thing you have to share, and The Tangle is exactly that thing. If you liked Blade Runner and Person of Interest, and enjoy locked room mysteries, this is going to tickle your tentacles. It's a noirish mystery regarding the murder of a sort of special agent in a speakeasy where she couldn't have easily been murdered by just anybody--

But whodunnit, in a digital meets meatspace world where digital poets and sheepish AI might be suspects? 

The dialogue has the Romantic poets, Phillip K. Dick and Heinlein all shooting through it. I may have called one character "Temu Trinity" at one point (also may have said "The coffee spoon is a lie"), but I'm sorry. I think there's conscious Matrix tribute in here, also. As in homage, not theft. 

Anyway, get your sympathetic neurosystem ready and onboard this film. It's a weird universe, but actually, kind of a straightforward mystery, and if you love mysteries, the ending has some fun no shit Sherlock vibes. 

So fun and recommended. 

The Perfect Stocking Stuffer Doesn--HELLO!

 

Do you recognize that amazeballs pattern from at least two cinematic somewheres my horror-loving darlings? Of course you do! This shit is iconic. 

I was perusing my favorite category of accessory (the bags of holding) and saw this! You might not get it by Christmas, but people have birthdays, you know! And we will have a Christmas again next year, probably. Unless some Grinch steals it, which we know by now is very improbable. Which is also true for several other Xmas-related disasters. 

(Apropos of which, I work customer service and have experienced reverse-Grinches respond to "Happy Holidays!" with "You mean 'Merry Christmas!'" Nah. I was throwing in "Happy New Years" for free but now I'm taking it back! You don't KNOW me!) 

Anyways, this item comes in several styles that are pretty Goth/Steampunk-compliant. And you can always tell your friends that you are just doing Orthodox Xmas if your presents aren't in the post by 12/25. Oopah! 

We Are Back with a Fa-la-la-Ness

 Christmas is a time for giving, and I feel like giving some Christmas cheer this year by talking about Xmas-themed horror movies. We basically keep a scary light on from October 1 to New Year's in this house, so I wanted to spread the reason for the season (it sure gets dark in winter and scary shit happens) with my people. 

Anyway, I'm starting with a noble mess of a movie--A Creature Was Stirring. Keeping it real. stay for Chrissy Metz acting like nobody's business in a weird movie about the family ties that bind, and definitely wonder what the hell happened between how this movie started out and the ending. 

I don't believe the people making this movie knew how it was going to end before it did. Because um. 

Whut? 

It doesn't have a twist like "Conclave" has a twist, but like, it's twisted. There is no Christmas morning gift, here.

You know what does have one thought--in a really dark way? 

Grizzly: Predator

I know I am not living my best life.

I am also in no hurry to start.

I think "The Collector" is required watching.

I'd never even heard of this movie, which is probably ridiculous, and everyone else already knows about it. I only caught it today on some antenna-based movie station, which probably had it as a "horror" genre film in line with the coming Halloween holiday--which falls short of its meaning. But this tense, well-acted, psychological thriller starring Terence Stamp ("Kneel before Zod!) and Samantha Eggar actually is a brutal story about a Nice Guy who kidnaps a woman and basically works through so many dynamics of misogyny and abuse that it is practically a handbook of what fucks woman-blaming Manboys be.

This might not be a movie for everyone. It represents a stalker and kidnapper who has isolated a target and cut her off from everything, controlling her behavior--not always through violence, but sometimes through manipulation and even seeming pleasant at times. Such a stalker! He buys art books, makes tea, buys toiletries! He provides a place for his victim to stay and proclaims he's a gentleman and pretends he's above violence, but the drama between his need to control and her desire to be free is tense and real.

The title comes from his hobby of collecting butterflies. There is a deep scene where he shows his victim his collection, and she comes to the realization that she has been collected, like a thing to be had, dead, just like they are.

I'm not going to give away all that unfolds, but it is grim and sad and still and all, compelling and revealing. I'll admit I was rooting for a way for a happy ending to somehow come out of it.

Spoiler alert--no, watch the movie. The movie and the novel, by John Fowles, are available at Amazon. And probably elsewhere if you skulk about more than I did.

The November Man: A Netflix find I watched In the Theater

I have a soft spot in my heart for action movies--I have watched and enjoyed (because of my ability to post-phone criticism) openly illogical and over-the-top shoot-em-ups like all three Expendables movies, because I grew up watching Rambo and Commando and all the Steven Seagal movies and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action movies, and so, so much more. I viewed them as a nice break from the teen slasher movies.  So I am forgiving of mindless action flicks. The November Man isn't technically an action film, but it isn't exactly the post-Cold War thriller it wants to be.

If I judged it on action movie terms, it is too slow-paced and has unnecessary character details. If I judged it as a spy thriller, well, it has some plot holes that are just awkward, and the movie has a real dilemma because it has at least one scene where an actual atrocity is committed by the Pierce Brosnan character (who we're supposed to sort of like, I guess) in order to shame his former protégé-turned-assailant about his inhumanity. He slices an innocent young lady's leg, after having held a gun on her.

Let that sink in: This movie has a female character who exists just so that the main character can brutalize her to prove a point in a very dumb way to another male character, because...

Uh, no movie. I will not play along with that. There is no "why" other than convenience.  We are never told what happens with her by the way--spoiler alert! Because technically, why should we care what happens to her so long as the lesson is learned!

I don't want to give away too much of the twists. Brosnan is good, he always is, here in a kind of "past-it and jaded, being a spy was never like "Bond" anyway", sort of way. Bill Smitrovich is impressive, and his character is not a good one. But he still owned it.

The acting is not any of the problem here. It's the story and the framing.

 Some of what happens makes no logical sense--and I have to be snotty--really? The movie has one of those awful "dude walking away from exploding car" cliché scenes--yawn. Car chases and the necessary accidents exist in a world where, apparently, cops and emergency vehicles don't.  Surveillance drones just fling about over major cities like no one would notice. Women seem to exist to be victims. Cats walk through walls. Being suspected of being semi-traitorous does not get you at least a suspension from a managerial position at a spy agency (well, I presume that shouldn't be true...). People just punch up intimate data about other people via a password over their phones or laptops (I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's bordering Snowden territory--way-too-easy.) The machina is all too deus-like for my taste.

This is a movie I'd have appreciated as a Netflix find for having some psychological drama and good acting, but on the whole, as a first-run viewing, it isn't great. Interesting and watchable--but not great.

Netflix finds: Byzantium

Deep down, I think I always wanted a feminist vampire story where women were vampires and Dracula could fuck himself. Where vampires weren't  magically titled or fabulously rich, but just lived as folks do. This is what Byzantium is like.
Gemma Atherton owns as the mother/older sister "Clara" and Saoirse Ronan is luminous "Ella". It's a two hundred year old tragedy/love story. It's off-beat, and that is what is good about it. I totally recommend it.

May the Fourth Be With You!

This is kind of a significant holiday in my mind, even if it isn't a national holiday. (My sort of drunk neighbors across the street celebrated Derby Day, because it involved Bourbon beverages and because they could not wait for Cinco de Mayo, also known as the day we venerate fermented agave products. They may have not known what to drink for Fourth Day, but the answer is, whatever, so long as the force is with you. I have the force with me, because I Drink, or Drink Not--there is no Dry.)

The reason I like remembering Star Wars in a holiday sort of way, though, is because it was, yea, verily, the movie they now call Episode Four that was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. Oh my, yes. My cousin Joan took me to the Crest theater which was one of those old-timey affairs with one, count'em, one screen.  If you had to pick one movie to be your first in-a-theater movie though, you could have done far worse.  I was a little kid, so every image imprinted on my impressionable brain, and a lot of things were decided.

Leia was awesome, because she knew what she was doing and was like, the leader of the rebels, which naturally made her the hero of the movie, thank you very much.

Luke Skywalker was awkward and was very lucky to run into Obi-Wan Kenobi, or he would have been totally stuck shooting wamp-rats and watching his toenails grow.

I totally decided things about what is a cute boy because Han Solo.

And the scene where they ended up in the trash compactor has given me anxiety to this day--not because the walls were closing in. Oh, no. I am a person who would be at home in a straitjacket--give me hugs or give me agoraphobia (hashtag, TMI). It was the dirtiness that bugged me. It was wet and there was squishy bits. I to this day do not like being in close contact with squishy dirty things.

I also think it isn't surprising that I saw Obi-Wan as a grandfatherly figure and thought his death was terribly sad from Luke's POV. But it wasn't until I was older that the destruction of Alderaan seemed like the enormity that it actually was.  And now this is, to me, about as symbolic of the badness of the Dark Side as the corruption of Anakin and the slaughter of the Younglings--the Dark Side brings destructive senseless shit.

I think you understand why anyone would want to be a Jedi when you are young, but you don't get the Dark Side and why it sucks so hard but still appeals to some, until you get older. In other words, Star Wars has been a big part of the prism I view my reality through.

Harold Ramis, RIP

I think you probably know Egon Spengler was my favorite Ghostbuster. Basically, if I was to reference any of the really awesome comedic films that impacted my formative years and sense of humor today, well, Harold Ramis was a part of them or influenced the people that made them. That is an awesome legacy.  Ramis was an awesome talent who wasn't just funny himself, he made other people funny and made some careers. And damn funny movies. His influence was felt in subversive sarcasm and tables turning on middling bourgois status quo to suggest the status was more FUBAR. And his humor was nasty sometimes but never mean. If that makes sense. He was one of a kind.

Thor: The Dark World. A Review

I have to give it up to the people who are masterminding the order of these Marvel franchise films--they get the comics, they get movies, they've done brilliant casting, and they've managed to make me a raging fangirl, which, admittedly, isn't impossible. But let me just express my feels about Thor: The Dark World a minute before I make some minor admissions and give away a secret that isn't one--

Okay, the elves are kind of stereotypical elves aren't they? I mean, Peter Jackson and them made elves that aren't those kind of elves for the LOTR series, but the elves in T:TDW are more of those Moorcockian/Hellboy 2 kind of elves, a bit, no? With their pseudo-latinate tongue (well, maybe that's a bit Tolkein) and the being weirdly all about elves and fuck everybody else? Yeah. Also, the movie is kind of wasting Christopher Eccleston a bit. Not like GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra kind of wasting of an actor, by simply not being a very good movie, but in the more general "isn't he mostly buried in latex and speaking elvish?" sort of way.

Also, while I like Natalie Portman and I think the two movies she been in have really made Jane Foster a pretty kick-ass smart and vital character, is it just me or does her chemistry with Chris Hemsworth's Thor never seem quite on?  I don't know why it doesn't work for me. It's like an intangible thing. Maybe I'm just projecting my feeling that their long-distance romance is always tinged with a bit of doom.

But you know what I love, right? Exactly. I love the relationship between the heroic, noble, awfully good Thor, and his seriously messed-up little bro, Loki.  The chemistry between Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston as the sniping and fighting brothers who reluctantly team up to avenge their mother (Rene Russo's) death, remove the Aether (an interdimensional MacGuffin that is attracting unwanted Elvish attention) from Jane Foster before she dies from all the bad energy, and probably save the 9 realms.  That works and is worth the price of admission.

After catching Thor 2 Saturday, I rewatched the original and realized the evolution of Loki as a character. He was not quite as compelling as simply the angry young man Loki Silvertongue of the first movie, who discovered that his whole life was a bit of a lie, and that not only was he not Odinson, he was not even really an Asgardian, but a frost giant, and not even a regular frost giant, but an abandoned and unwanted runt that was left to die. The Loki who fell through space at the end of Thor 1 into the Avengers movie became a cocky badass, but here, captive, he continues to work out his pathologies, transforming the illusion his life was into becoming a master of illusions. He fronts that he simply does not understand why everyone is so angry at him. The reality is that he's a wrecked personality doing awful things on purpose. He isn't self-destuctive--he isn't capable of remorse. He just survives and schemes. He isn't good or even necessarily well-intentioned--but he can be likeable for minutes at a time. He's more developed than your average psychopath. (Or maybe I am an unrelenting Hiddleston fangirl. Also a possibility.)

I couldn't not like this one, myself. I recommed it if you've been enjoying the Marvel universe unfolding cinamtically before you of late--like I surely have. Also, saw the trailer from "Days of Future Past" and now I am so having to see that. I love that these movies borrow so much from the comics, but work so well in 3 dimensions.

The Uncanny Valley of the Dolls

When I was just about old enough to actually watch tv and get stories and understand that there was no boogeyman and that there was a difference between fiction and reality, I think the thing that still unnerved me the most was the idea of the thing that should be inanimate--souless!--that wasn't. So it was that I found the trailer for "Magic" with Anthony Hopkins and a twisted-sounding dummy especially unnerving. How close is a dummy, after all, to dolls?  And being a girl, how many dolls did I have? All those smooth plastic faces, some with eyes that closed as their weirdly hollow but weighty bodies were laid horizontally--

There was a reason that stuffed animals could stay on my bed, but dolls had to be placed in the toy chest. I played with my dolls, but I could never love them. They were not "people" even if they looked like people. And perhaps the understanding--the recognition I had--of my rejection of these not quite human things made me wonder how they...saw me.

The internet is littered with images of scary dolls.  Some of them just are terribly bad fascimiles made by an inartful hand. Some are broken, reproachful, like baby zombies. And some are fashioned to be deliberately grotesque, preying upon the lurid fascinations of the unheathfully-centered mind. Their nearness to human features plays upon the sympathy we have for our fellow sentient--we inbue them with a terrifying inner life, even though they are hollow. And yet, we know there are people among us who are most alive--but are, in fact, hollow inside, as far from our understanding as what we imagine in the highly-suggestable imputed psyche of a doll.

We human beings are artificers. We capitulate our likenesses in various media, in the hopes of capturing whatever it is we think of as the human essence, from cave paintings to selfies.  One of the most unnerving of our enduring fables is the idea of the actually "made" man--the golem, the corpse-pastiche of Frankenstein, the waxwork or clockwork man. The deadly robot. The killer doll.

It's pretty kinky of us that it is the monster we create nearest to our own likeness, that has such horrors, isn't it? What does it say about us?

Necronomicon

Loved ones connect and families reunite as they discover there are things more powerful than death with the help of a very special book.

The New Westerns--2 Guns and Last Stand

I had a long weekend coming, so I took off a couple days and saw a few movies, which always centers me, a little. I like movies. I like tv, or comics, or books, for that matter, but movies are like a treat. TV can be good or bad, at times--a show can have an episode that sucks in an otherwise worthy run. Books can suck with redeeming qualities, or be awesome, with reservations. Comics are comics, and I just enjoy them for what they are--a complicated medium.

But movies? To my mind, movies are a finished artwork. When a movie is committed to film, there it is. It tells its story well or poorly. The actors do a job, or they don't. The director makes the story real, or it doesn't come off well. If a movie isn't doing it for me after like, twenty minutes,  I guess it isn't good.  It should give me something to make me bother with it. It should give me a reason to want to see it. This weekend, I saw two movies I rather liked and which I think had something similar going for them--

I think they are New Westerns. They aren't about the Old West. They are about that terrain, but a new reality. The first I caught was a Netflix find: The Last Stand, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

I don't have to care for Arnold's politics to like action movies in general, or with him in them. And damn it, I do. This is kind of the story of the honest lawman who sees bringing bad guys to justice as his job, whatever the cost. He assembles a posse, which includes the western trope of a drunk sharp shooter in jail and has certain other touches that kind of feel borrowed from westerns. It is not without comedy. The way of the gun is of course, fetishized, but not unrealistically. A young gun is martyred. There is a kind of mythic unreality about parts of it (a race car that does not seem to need fuel--a bad guy who does not seem to understand his 160 lb ass will be pounded by one someone like A Schwarzenegger, old enough to be his daddy or not.) I don't recall how this one did in the theatres, but since it's a 2013 movie I already got on Netflix, I kind of want to recommend it to see it get a new post-theatre life, because it was a good action flick.  

I also want to give a little prop for 2 Guns. 

This is a more intentionally comedic action film, but it also takes place in the American SW and has elements of the Western genre. Both the Denzel Washington and the Mark Wahlberg characters are isolated from their "tribes" and find an uneasy association with one another. Their mutual language is the Way of the Gun, a cowboy Bushido. Their code is, ultimately, independent and outlaw, because they find that the the arbiters of the codes by which they had lived was false. So they make their own way.  And of course, I love the fuck out of both these actors, seriously. 

In both, there are false women and violence is seen as a solution. They aren't great feminist works, if you know what I mean? But they are excellent action movies, and entertaining--although 2 Guns has this scene with chickens I thought was a bit intense. I like chickens. I like eating them, too, but I don't like them, like, being hurt. So, what I'm saying is, there is a scene if you like chickens you won't like, but if you are okay with violence against humans, this is your kind of movie, for sure!

Also, this weekend I saw Red2. I think this is the only non-stupid movie out of three that have featured Bruce Willis this year. It isn't really a New Western, though. But I sure as hell liked it better than freaking Die Harder than A Very Hard Thing.   But based on a Warren Ellis character, so duh--redeeming fun features. Yay, if you like spy sorts of things. I do. Little bit gratuitously violent, but if you haven't noticed I like action flicks with violence by now, I can't help sort you out any. It has violence. 

Netlix Finds: I Recommend "Act of Vengeance"

I found this to be a compelling movie with a stellar cast and a gripping plot. Imagine a man was determined to be an infamous terrorist, and was to be transported abroad as such--but there is this burning question--is he?  Really?

I found this movie to be well-acted and exceptional on many levels. It directly addresses how we in the West treat suspects of Islamic terrorism, while drawing a line between the Islamist terrorists and law-abiding and deeply spiritual practitioners of the faith. I think this is definitely a movie one should put in their Netflix queue.

James Gandolfini, Dead at age 51

I'm fairly shocked at the sudden death of Gandolfini, best known for his role as Tony Soprano in HBO's award-winning series The Sopranos. As an actor, Gandolfini had a great talent for conveying the inner motivations of the characters he portrayed--a kind of presence where the viewer could imagine wheels turning, perceiving the complexity of the characters through the nuances and gestures his "read" lent them. This was probably best shown through the six seasons of his run on The Sopranos, where his Tony Soprano was a character of almost Shakespearean depth--in some ways amoral, and others, too aware of the unrighteousness of his criminal enterprise, a character as conflicted as a mafioso Hamlet. To make viewers sympathize with Tony, a monster who becomes aware of himself, took an actor who could make the horrible all-too-human. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one of my favorite movies that he was in was The Last Castle, which, if you haven't seen it, by all means, do. His Col. Winter is another character that is difficult to like (and you shouldn't, he's a weak man). But Gandolfini made him compelling to watch.


It's a damn shame--he died far too soon.

A Good Day to Die Hard Is A Weird Movie to Watch

Okay--this trailer has nothing to do with movie I just saw except that the same people and some scenes are in it. But if you were to take this trailer and spread those scenes out in a movie that served as a justification for some family-based schmaltz and some badass oneliners and some actually mentally insulting chase scene about twenty minutes in that makes you feel a little ashamed for watching--

Oh lord, this is not a smart movie. That doesn't mean it isn't an enjoyable movie--you could like it, if gratuitous car-smashing and shit getting blowed up was your deal, but I'm just saying, if you like your action pictures to make any kind of sense, and have any kind of thin pretext to justify the millions of dollars of collateral damage to cars, trucks, all kinds of infrastructure, and whatnot--not.

This movie has adopted the meta-violence attitude as expressed in such movies as The Expendables franchise, of which Willis is a part. But this isn't even a knowing wink at the gratuitous badness of action movie pretexts--the way any old thing is a gratuitous pretext for porn--for example--so much as a nearly played-straight family movie( the what?) tied up in a genre movie with some real lapses in logical sense and an obvious twist and just some sick lack of attention to the laws of physics or the complete ignorance of the limits of the human body thrown in.

What I'm saying is--this movie is kind of enjoyable, but you really got to put your dumb-hat on to like it. Willis's McClain is a cartoon. His son is a non-entity. Their situation is transparently fucked in a way you can't help but notice all at once before they seem to. And if you can suspend your disbelief that a high-speed truck chase after a terrorist attack on a courthouse can occur without a billionty Moscow police turnout including helicopters and such (because if you don't know, Moscow is kind of the capital city of Russia?), okay. Enjoy away. I'm just saying these lapses killed my enjoyment.

It isn't the worst movie--it just isn't all that good. I can't recommend it unless you are bound and determined to see it, and if that's your thing, you are welcome to it. But it is a damn dumb movie.

Skyfall: As Bond as A Very Bond Thing

I had the opportunity to luxuriate in a movie theater and decided that since I hadn't seen any but a bootleg of the first Twilight movie, I'd be totally at sea with Breaking Dawn 2,  so I and the hubs invested in a movie franchise we had a much greater investment in--the latest Bond.

It actually was, as far as being a Bond picture, something different, familiar, and awfully good. I didn't grow up with much of a feel for Bond qua Bond--as such, the movies were action flicks that mostly seemed instantly-dated--my youth was spent in the Moore-Dalton period, and I did look forward to the Pierce Brosnan incarnation if only because I was a fan of Remington Steele  tv show, and kind of thought he'd be a good Bond.

Brosnan was a great Thomas Crowne. He was a better than average Bond.

Craig is Bond I think even more than Connery was Bond. In his three outings, we've actually seen him age into the character, and in this film, his "James" is facing his mortality, as well as the mortality of his era of spycraft. We are invited to watch his "death" as the result of a not-very clean shot by his associate at the order of M, and the credit sequence with theme by Adele (one of my favorite current artists, no less!) is super-typical--the quintessence of Bondy-coolness:


The story is about Bond's attempt to resurrect himself in service of his country, even if he has, in the words of his superior, Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), "lost a step", and his loyalty to M (Judi Dench) is challenged as he finds himself risking his life to protect her against the madman and computer mastermind former agent Silva (Javier Bardem) who has a very personal vandetta against M as all she loves.

I don't want to ruin the twists, although other reviews very well might.  What I will say is that the character of M in Dame Judi Dench's hands is completely humanized in a way she wasn't in previous films. Also, as witnessed in No Country for Old Men,  Javier Bardem has no discomfort embodying a truly creepy villain--in all honesty, although I've seen this comparison elsewhere, I have to give it a Heath Ledger's Joker-like prop for being riveting. You wonder what he will do next. He can't not be watched, and he's difficult to watch.

The movie's arc takes Bond from his death in the initial sequence, to the place where he grew up--Skyfall, the Scottish estate of the Bond family where James lived until shortly after he was orphaned and then, shortly after, recruited, presumably by M, herself. There are themes of the cthonic, the subterranean, and the image of M as a "mother". There might be a question of whether Bond's easy love'm and leave'm sexuality is about abandonment issues, or maybe whether he loves country more than he could really love anyone in a conflicted way--that service is his sense of permanence.

There's a notion that the villain, Silva, is a kind of bad homosexual stereotype because there is a definite flamboyance and sexual come-on to Bond in his threats toward him. I'm conflicted.  Silva is above all an obsessive. If he was ever vain, he's disfigured, so he might be over-compensating. Having been technically exiled by his "death" he can create his own reality and push whatever limits he likes--does that include his sexuality? He used Severine. Is he--bi? (Vixen sucks teeth in surprise and goes, "Oh, wait?)  When he suggests he might use Bond sexually because they are so much alike, and Bond wonders why he's assuming this would be his first time, I'm actually more intrigued by what this tells us about Bond-- in either case, I think the threat of rape is a way for Silva to test Bond's limits and his reply is a way for Bond to explain he can deal with that (in Casino Royale, although he wasn't raped, he took one unholy fuck of a testicular beating.) If the homosexual overtones alarm anyone, it might help to note they resolve things over a nice glass of aged scotch on the head of a tortured girl used as the target in a William Tell shooting match.  (No one technically wins. She loses.)

Yes, there still is a bit of misogyny in the old franchise, although M and Eve (Bond's erstwhile partner) are well acquitted. I don't want to give anything away. We'll see more of Eve and Ralph Fienne's Mallory (I hope they keep Fiennes on)  and I like the young incarnation of Q--more down to earth and less outre ( guns and radios--not exploding pens--although he's supposedly a computer genius, I think he might have done something dumb while encrypting Silva's somethingorother map.  Just saying. But Oh well.)

Anyhow, there was a kind of continuity and reboot feel with this movie. It had lots of Bond traditions (an Astin-Martin?) and seemed to take us more intimately into who Bond is and how he got this way.

I enjoyed it and see it a good sign there's still life in the old spy yet.

Leslie Neilsen, R.I.P. (1926-2010)

He left us so many hilarious on-screen memories. He will be missed.



I think his unique comedic gift was always that he had serious acting chops, and went about comedy in a serious way--the absurd happened around Lt. Drebben, and he took it in stride. His silliest lines were delivered dead-pan.

I kind of want to Netflix all the "Naked Gun" pictures, right now.