Spectres and Apparitions

Daniel Craig's fourth outing as James Bond, Spectre (2015, directed by Sam Mendes), has a valedictory quality to it, as if it intends to sum up the previous three films and tie them up in a tidy bow. This is a film haunted by the ghosts of past Bond films, both in the text of the film's action set-pieces and in the way it establishes a continuity with its predecessors. I don't know if Craig is planning to make a fifth Bond film, but if he isn't, this is a film where he can exit the franchise and not look back. Craig has his transcendent Bond film, something the last three Bonds never managed. If his last turn in the role (if it IS his last turn in the role) is less than transcendent, well, there's no shame in that.

Note: here there be spoylers.

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Bond and Back

With apologies to Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg and Daniella Bianchi and Ursula Andress and all the other bombshells who have worn the mantle of "Bond Girl," the most important woman in the Bond franchise is Judi Dench, who has played "M" since Goldeneye and retires from the role in Skyfall (2012, directed by Sam Mendes). This is something of which the makers of Skyfall are acutely aware. The relationship between Bond and M in the Judi Dench years has been a complicated one, one that is founded on mutual respect and a prickly balance between duty and personal feeling. M is the only woman in the series to whom Bond's charm means nothing. She's the only woman that Bond doesn't chase. Dame Judi's predecessors in the role (including Bernard Lee, who played M eleven times) left nothing like the same impression and had nothing like the same relationship with Bond, either personally or thematically. When she first appears on screen in GoldenEye, she tells Bond, point blank, "I think you're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War..." She tells another operative at MI6 "...if I want sarcasm, Mr Tanner, I'll talk to my children, thank you very much." Dench is a master at the cutting witticism. She meets Bond not as an equal, but as a superior. She also mentions: "You don't like me, Bond. You don't like my methods. You think I'm an accountant, a bean counter more interested in my numbers than your instincts." In GoldenEye, she's the new blood, doing things differently than the old guard. In Skyfall, she is the old guard, and she has a different point of view, defending her use of agents and espionage networks before a parliamentary subcommittee in light of a world where the enemy has no face and no state. She's making an argument for the necessity of not just James Bond and his ilk, but for the relevance of the Bond films themselves.

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Dominos in Drag

(*with apologies to Van Morrison).

Thunderball (1965, directed by Terence Young) is the James Bond movie with which I have the least familiarity. I think I've seen it exactly once, and that on cable way back in the early 1980s. Thunderball is the first Bond film to be filmed in 2.35:1 widescreen, and I know that I've never seen it wide before. And yet, Thunderball somehow took root in my movie consciousness in spite of this. Part of this is the remake, Never Say Never Again, which I've seen several times (and remains the only one of the Connery Bonds I've seen in an actual movie theater). Part of it is Tom Jones's theme song, which is in heavy rotation on my iTunes; I think it's the best of the Bond themes, bar none. But the movie itself? It turns out that I had forgotten most of it in the thirty years since I first saw it.

It's...interesting. All of the associations I have with the movie, the ones that have nothing to do with the movie itself, overlayered the experience of watching it. Certainly, the baggage I bring to the movie isn't its fault, but it's there none the less.

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Crush Me With Your Thighs.

I have to say that after long periods of watching very serious movies with subtitles, I start to long for the simple things in life, specifically action movies that blow shit up real good. Right now, I'm sitting on a trio of very serious movies from Netflix, and I haven't been able to get into any of them. So I took a flier for the first part of March and went for the comfort food movies.

In the blowing things up real good department, I must express a certain amount of dissatisfaction with Hancock (2008, directed by Peter Berg), in which Will Smith plays a disaffected superhero trying to turn his life around. The movie is frontloaded with mayhem, but its big climax is surprisingly toothless. I mean, you have two superheroic characters in this movie, but at the end, in a shootout at a hospital with some common robbers, neither of them has any powers. This is a failure at a fundamental level, in so far as when you have superheroes, you need supervillains. Otherwise, you're just rehashing those Marvel Comics TV series from the 1970s where there was no budget for the heroes' heroics, to say nothing of any villain's villainy. In a Will Smith blockbuster? There's no excuse. Also, I wish the movie had forgotten about Will Smith and did something more interesting with Charlize Theron. All in all, a missed opportunity at every level. I watched this on Netflix's instant watch service, which seems an appropriate way to watch this, because I have the least amount I can invest in it other than time.

I'm trying to remember the last film by James Cameron where I didn't have to preface my enjoyment with some kind of apologia. Aliens, maybe. Certainly not True Lies (1994), a bang-up Schwarzeneggerian epic compromised by a deep and nasty streak of misogyny. This is a bit of a surprise, given that Cameron has traditionally featured strong female characters in his films, but this film, even more than The Abyss, seems informed by the director's serial marriages and divorces. It manifests itself in a "family values or else" storyline and in a casual use of the word "bitch" that starts to draw blood as the film unspools. By the time Jamie Lee Curtis's character finds her own inner strength, the film has gone to great lengths to degrade her and even then, her inner strength is defined by her husband and her strength has been fetishized. It's bad shit, and an unfortunate undercurrent for a film that, at its core, is a state of the art (in 1994) example of action filmmaking. The comedy bits mostly work--especially those involving Bill Paxton, who gives a particularly selfless performance here--and the big set-pieces are generally scaled and executed with aplomb. Pity.

The Pierce Brosnan reboot of the James Bond franchise confronts the essential sexism of the action genre Bond inspired head on. It hasn't changed Bond himself, who is just as unapologetically sexist and misogynistic as ever, but it has changed the world around him, which is why when Goldeneye (1995, directed by Martin Campbell) walks through all of the Bond tropes as if it were following a checklist, it all seems kind of fresh. This film provides Bond with a new, female boss. Judi Dench's M is prickly and harsh and doesn't have any time for Bond's charms. Samantha Bond is a radical departure as Miss Moneypenny. She seems to have a life of her own, and even if she IS still mooning for 007, she gives as good as she gets in this movie, as if there has been some leveling of the playing field. The movie-specific female characters are an interesting departure, too: Izabella Scorupco's Natalya has smarts and initiative on her own such that, when the time comes to choose between the love interest or the mission, it's her that does the choosing instead of Bond. And Famke Janssen's sadistic Xenia Onatopp goes into the Bond canon as one of the best evil henchmen. The erotic dimension to her depravity is refreshing for the way the movie puts it in the foreground. It doesn't hurt that Janssen holds the screen better than anyone else in the movie, and the expression on her face as she crushes her victims to death between her legs is an expression I wish someone would put on MY face in the throes of passion.

I wish Sean Bean was as compelling as the evil mastermind behind everything, but there's a kind of petulance in his character that puts me off--and, trust me, I would NOT kick Sean Bean out of bed for eating crackers under any other circumstances as a candidate for giving me that expression. In any event, all of the elements are put together perfectly--did I mention the credit sequence? One of my favorites from the Bond series, with Tina Turner doing the honors on the soundtrack--and even if it's not a transcendent Bond film, it's certainly an archetypal one. Director Martin Campbell saved the transcendent Bond film for Brosnan's successor in the role, some eleven years later.

The Two Faces of The Scarecrow

316. I don't believe I ever saw the full version of Walt Disney's The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (1964, directed by James Neilson) when I was a kid, but I remember its shorter theatrical version very well. That film was titled Dr. Syn Alias the Scarecrow. In truth, there's not a whole lot of difference between the two versions. Admittedly, the theatrical version is a bit brisker of pace, but at the expense of some characterization. In any event, this is variant of the Zorro myth, set in the England of George III. Patrick McGoohan plays saintly Dr. Syn, the vicar of Dymchurch, who, by night, leads a gang of smugglers as the terrifying Scarecrow to help the locals endure the burden of excess taxation. Of course, the king's men come to town to try to catch him and he outwits them in three separate episodes (or acts). It's rollicking adventure that works because Patrick McGoohan is terrific in the lead. As the Scarecrow, he adopts a terrifying, guttural voice that sounds like a bearing about to go bad. This voice is abetted by a striking character design by the costume department, with its twisted smile. As Dr. Syn, McGoohan is saintly, but with a sly twinkle behind his eyes. And he looks like a man who has and keeps secrets. And, oh, my! He was a looker in his youth (note to self: track down Danger Man). His supporting cast of British stalwarts lends the whole enterprise a gravitas that grounds some of the pulpier aspects of the story. This one was a favorite of mine as a kid. I'm glad to see that it holds up.

317. Hammer's competing version of the Scarecrow story changes a few key details for legal reasons--Disney having sewn up the rights to certain aspects of the story--and is a darker film over-all. Captain Clegg (1962, directed by Peter Graham Scott) was re-titled Night Creatures in the US and finally saw the light of day on Universal's Hammer box a few years ago. It, too, is carried on the strength of its lead performance. Peter Cushing's Dr. Syn (renamed "Dr. Blyss" in this version) has a good deal more menace in him as the vicar, and the movie retains the character's piratical past. The movie is a good deal more violent, too, and shows its hand right from the get-go with a memorable marooning sequence in which a man has his ears slit and tongue cut out before being imprisoned on an island. But the overall arc of the film is the same. Its one of Hammer's more handsome films from the period and the filmmakers have given some of Hammer's stock character actors their heads in this one, notably Michael Ripper as Mr. Mipps, who positively beams at the chance to show an impish sense of humor.

The new Disney Treasures tins include volume four of The Chronological Donald Duck. I love me some Donald Duck (you can blame Carl Barks for this). The current volume features cartoons that were a constant staple of Disney's television empire, so I'm very familiar with all of these:

318. "Dude Duck" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
319. "Corn Chips" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
320. "Test Pilot" Donald (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
321. "Lucky Number" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
322. "Out of Scale" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
323. "Bee on Guard" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)

In most of these, Donald contends with Chip and Dale, who always seem to cross his path. I always used to think that Chip and Dale were male and female, especially with the way Chip is sometimes drawn as the more effeminate of the two. Lately, I'm convinced that they're gay. But that has nothing to do with what's on screen. It's just my impression. That's all. We also get a Hewey, Dewey, and Louie appearance in a rare depiction of the trio as teenagers. And a bee. Donald has no luck with any of them. The weirdest of these cartoons is "Dude Duck", in which Donald hops off the bus after a gaggle of human women. I've always been able to accept the anthropomorphism in Disney's cartoon so long as it follows Barks's Duckberg model, in which everyone is an anthropomorphized character. Putting human characters in the frame is just weird.

324. There are a lot of things to dislike about the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace (2008, directed by Marc Forster). It's cut too fast. It has no sense of geography in the action scenes. It is fairly lacking in the series' signature humor. It lacks a baroque, comic-opera villain. This is all true. But I came out of the film liking it none the less. I really like the theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, which has a distinction that the last several theme songs have lacked: it actually sounds like a Bond theme. The credit sequence is much improved over Casino Royale--again, it seems like the credit sequence of a Bond film. And it has a pretty good story. An acquaintance of mine thought that the McGuffin--our villain is cornering the market on water--was pretty lame; but I grew up in Colorado where there's a saying that "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting." So it made perfect sense to me. I LOVE that the filmmakers are re-inventing SPECTRE and SMERSH for the 21st Century (and in a way that seems all too plausible). Oh, and Daniel Craig is inhabiting the role of Bond quite nicely. Oh, my, yes. James Bond will return, the credits tell us. I'm looking forward to it.