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.

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.