Illusion of Competence (Father's Day James Bond Marathon )

He was around from before I was born and will probably survive the coming Iceless Age. All of my life he has been there in times of crisis and conquest; he is the red-blooded American male's last chance. His ability to morph to suit each decade's needs, growing older, then younger, then old again,  and if needed, fake his own death, yet no actor who has played him has yet to die, unless you count David Niven, and I don't. He's immortal yet continually imperiled; through him we learn the best ways to create diversions so you can steal from your enemy, and how to never trust pretty women. He is Bond, James Bond; James like my own father, James Kuersten.

My late dad. My dad, like most dads, loved him, at least in Sean Connery form. I grew up watching those early ones with my dad, thrilled with all I did not understand. I feel close to him now, through Bond and so I dedicate this post to his memory. Father's Day shit. If you get that free trial of EPIX, there's an all-day marathon.

Following a handful of similar but deceptively elaborate plots that seem to bleed across each other (making each particular film hard to remember), Bond films have always rewarded repeat viewing; as we change from children to men our perceptions of the movies change, too, and new fissures of interest are sussed out. As kids the car chases are ripping, the girls hot, the plot incomprehensible; as adults in the digital age, the atomic bomb hijacking minutiae and intrigue grow fascinating in ways that used to be boring - the giant computers and tracking devices are like windows into a forgotten field of technology, like finding the distant relatives of Skynet. In THUNDERBALL (1965) for example it takes about five minutes of real cinematic time to throw a camouflage net over one lousy sunken NATO bomber. Another five to steal a missile and swim it over to an underwater cavern. Now that I'm an adult lost in a world of whiplash editing and every third climax needs to have the world on the brink of extinction and six girls abducted in a closet for us to feel any sense of urgency, I love that the early Bond films weren't about saving the world but stealing code machines from embassies and foiling relatively un-apocalyptic sabotage-blackmail schemes, trying to keep one's wits about them while a seductive Russian spy claims to love you. On pan and scan the copious ocean footage was hard to follow. Now, on the anamorphic, it's a poem.

The widescreen enhanced HD look lifts even mediocre Bonds, for they're generally artful with widescreen deep depth travelogue on-location compositions. We don't have to go now, to Istanbul or Osaka or Las Vegas, we just send Bond, and reach into the screen like a combo diorama and dog door. But Bond needs to go, on our and the world's behalf, even if the world he saves no longer even exists. He takes the risks and endures the long flights and torture and performance anxiety, so we, as men, grant him the good life, the trappings of wealth and power, because he's in the zone. Imagine if your taste buds were so heightened you couldn't even drink champagne unless it was perfectly chilled and just the right vintage and now it becomes clear why we need Bond. A license to kill requires senses so acute you can smell a KGB double agent from a half mile away. Like Roderick Usher, at night Bond can hear the rats scurrying through the walls, or find a bug in his hotel room in under 30 seconds. That's a steep price, the constant upkeep of the body, training, being hit and teased; if we don't have his luck, or way with the ladies, or cat-like reflexes, or perfect hair, we can't begrudge him because he risks his life daily. We can always watch the movies if we need to feel proxy danger, or luxury. But which came first: our impoverishment creating a need for escapism or escapism being used to make us impoverished, making complacent and unquestioning, a kind of slow-motion sleight of hand diversionary tactic?

My first memories of Bond: falling in love with the very kinky edge of THUNDERBALL (Largo beating the naked heaving backside of kept woman Domino [Claudine Auger]) as a little sadomasochistic seven year-old. To me, that was Bond in the 70s, in a wet suit, shooting at a shark or a bad guy with his harpoon gun while a hot girl with a cute mole lounged in the white sand at his side. This was the time of Roger Moore's SPY WHO LOVED ME, which was a colossal hit my parents felt I was too young to see. Then, in the 80s, when sexual harassment was becoming a thing we rented them all from the newly opened video stores at the mall (or from the back room of appliance stores) and saw them over and over, as reminders of the power we were once going to inherit as men, allegedly. My best buddy Alan and I saw them all (MOONRAKER the first one I actually saw in the theater) and when FOR YOUR EYES ONLY came to cable, we must have seen it 500 times. Gradually we learned to appreciate Connery over Moore. The TV game show handsomeness and self-reflexive winking of Moore was reassuring but he lacked the muscularity of Connery, and even Dalton and Lazenby looked like they could handle themselves in a fight. Moore's punches looked like they would hurt only himself, though not in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY! In MOONRAKER, OCTOPUSSY, and VIEW TO A KILL though, he seemed far too old to not be creepy when he gets it on with a girl young enough to be his daughter. He didn't smoke and seldom even drank by then. I had yet to start either vice.

In the 90s,  my whole relationship to Bond changed when our friend Jen (not her real name) brought a rented copy of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE over to our loft one foreboding Friday night in 1997 -- year of my party boy apocalypse. I was so hungover from the night before it carried through the day and into the night - a blackout of shame and regret and paranoia and terror of the idea of going out again, into the night and the swankiness of another expensive bar (we were a hard-partying, very fancy bunch). Once I saw the video rental bag in her hands, I knew it would all be OK. I absorbed the film fully, enraptured in ways I never would have been without her guidance via Lazenby. It was a special event, one we tried to duplicate again and again after, but it never worked, not unlike ecstasy itself, that first big breakthrough is so good you pine for it with a broken heart forever after, never to recapture more than its stale reflection. Meanwhile Brosnan was entrenched, a perfect choice for the Metrosexual Age.

And so Bond became something to drink to, and who could make hangovers or sobriety disappear in equal measure. This was the era of the TNT Bond marathons, so important in staving off looming male impotence they were even cited by Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY. Pierce Brosnan had taken over after a two film stint by Timothy Dalton, who at the time had some big shoes to fill and people weren't prepared for a Bond who could act, or had the physicality and grace to appear like he could actually do the stuff Bond did and still seem actorly and a little wicked. We had to adjust. And then we disliked that he quit on us.

By then the issue of sexism was too pronounced to ignore, so they cast Judi Dench as M, and made post-modern wisecracks about Bond's dinosaur patriarchal cluelessness. But dismissing Bond movies as sexist is a bit like dismissing MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE as alarmist. The truth is that being a spy has always been about sex (NOTORIOUS, for example), about being a whore for your country, a master of using sex to convince vulnerable people to confide secrets, then leaving them to be killed while you pursue your quarry, keeping your dance card open for the next girl, who can maybe help you kill, who is maybe a spy too, which means both of you are pretending to love each other, so well you might even be in love for real and not know it. So unless a man is super confident, irresistible to women, inordinately lucky, able to keep one hand on his trigger as well as hers even unto the point of orgasm, as well as a great shot and dogged in determination to chase down his man, even at the risk of massive destruction (all those trashed and probably uninsured third world villages), and the death of the girl you just 'turned', that man doesn't stand a chance.

Save the jokes, Mr. Bond

People make satires of Bond but forget one thing - just because you have spies, babes, and gadgets doesn't make us care - that kind of thing gets old quick when its just in service of itself (ala the first CASINO ROYALE, the Matt Helm series, or the Flint series). For best results it must be played dead straight, with nuclear threats. And one must bear in mind Fleming was a big shot in Naval Intelligence and knew all the true stories no paper would ever reveal. So they came out as fiction. And second, people squawk about how no bad guy ever shoots Bond when they have the chance, but if you study the real spies' exploits you learn that a smart enemy never kills someone they learn is a spy, they either try to turn them into a double agent or feed them false information, or failing both, use them as a hostage for ransom or prisoner exchange (or torture in case they might know something). Also, if the spy dies via 'suspicious circumstances' it's a sure sign to his organization that something major is going on wherever said spy was sent. So next thing to come in would be drone strikes, or whatever the era will allow. But if a spy is found half-eaten by alligators or piranha, or strapped into a stolen helicopter and exploded, then they can conjure it up to mere misadventure.


How does this translate to genuine cinema thrills? One thing I've been studying of late is the importance of tick-tockality or Hawksian/Carpenterian cohesive momentum, which involves minimum time lapse edits and very little cross-cutting to other players to create a sense of immanent danger around our main character, creating a space where time elapses normally and we stay with the same character rather than bouncing around all over a plot, this allows for a deeper connection and sense something might actually be at stake. The first six films are the best for best (Brosnan's GOLDENEYE the worst).

CHRONOLOGY / ACIDEMIC GREATNESS RATING:

DR. NO
1962 - ****
Everything is new and fresh. There's no vocal to the opening theme song/credits, and Bond actually acts in a cumulative manner, super cool most of the time, but unnerved by a midnight tarantula visit, and around 3/4 of the way through he starts to really exhibit the stress of continually fending off attacks on his life. His only gadget is a new hand gun and he shoots and kills a man point blank who has an empty pistol, and nearly breaks a girl's arm for taking his picture. That's what I miss most in the new Bonds, that kind of cold ruthlessness. He's the fire you use to fight fire with.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
1963 - ****
These first four were each released a year apart, capturing a very successful momentum marked by an adherence to tick-tockality of an almost Hawksian level and low stakes games (missile toppling, codex triple crosses, gold irradiation) that are more believable and therefore more engaging. Nothing like a sanely motivated super villain to make the proceedings feel actually possible, like we're learning a bit of what goes on in the world that the media never gets wind of.
GOLDFINGER
1964 - ***1/2
This movie used to annoy me because everyone talked about how it was the best Bond but I thought it was the most illogical. Goldfinger kills a mobster who wants to back out of the deal by crushing him up in a big Lincoln, along with a fortune in gold. Odd Job brings the crushed block back to the horse ranch and then needs to 'extract' his gold. Dude, talk about a waste of time and effort all just to show a car getting crushed into a block.  Just shoot him! My dad loved that scene and talked about the 'great piece of music, horns blaring, I didn't think so, and thought Bond (even though I too was drinking mint juleps) a real snob in this, lecturing heads of MI6 on an the "indifferently blended" whiskey they serve him.
THUNDERBALL
1965 - ***1/2 (see above)
Even with the new anamorphic letting us appreciate the underwater stuff, it still stops the picture dead more than once, as does the dumb shit like the spine stretcher and jet pack. Nonetheless, the tick-tock momentum is still in effect, mostly, with a great evil spy lady.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
1967 - ****
Second to DR. NO and the first film as far as tick-tockality -especially the entire first half which seems to unfold almost in real time, ramping up suspense in knowing who to trust as Bond navigates Tokyo, and the difficulty in separating which spies are on his side vs. the other when everyone's playing so close to the vest.

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE
1969 ****
The idea to make George Lazenby's first appearance 'the one where he gets married' is a bit of a misstep. It makes him seem weak. But the whole down the Alps chase is all so well done it achieves greatness (when Bond's pursuers prove dogged and resourceful, the chase can last half the movie). Lazenby's a bit of a cypher but that works when he goes undercover as a snobby genealogist sent up to Kojack's window on the world. He needs to be a bit of a blank slate to achieve such ease with impersonations. That said, Bond in a romantic montage? Emma Peel and Satchel Mouth or no, it's just not done. 

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
1971 - ***
The song is over quick. The intro finds Bond tracking Blofeldt clones played by Charles RIDE WITH THE DEVIL Gray; Connery's back and looks great, rested, but the 70s has begun. Bond gets slugged from behind with the regularity of old Jim Rockford. And the two mincing coded gay assassins are kind of, what is the word, antiquated?

 On the plus side, two of the most voluptuous Bond girls ever:  this is one of the first movies my brother and I ever taped on our dad's new VHS, and Jill St. John's sexy double agent gave me a lifelong love of chokers above plunging necklines. Sporting a similar looks is another hottie, Plenty O'Toole (Lana Wood - right), a cooler for the casino owned by Willard White. Together they became my feminine ideal and that's why I've never been drawn to the skinny models preferred by my old roommate. Other than that there's a great car chase around real Vegas streets and overall a certain Rat Pack swagger, with good use of tick-tockality and Bond actually uses teamwork with the CIA. Still, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, and St. John's voice lacks musicality.\

LIVE AND LET DIE
1973 - **3/4
One of the weakest climaxes ever, just voodoo, tarot readings, piranhas, gators, and Yaphet Kotto as a heroin distributor named Kananga inflating like a balloon, though before then there's a great boat chase my brother and I used to watch endlessly (the second thing we ever taped), and we still talk like the tobacco-chewing Louisiana sheriff ("what are you some kinda doomsday machine, boy?") And the Bond girl is interesting as she's a psychic whose powers will disappear once she loses her virginity, a pleasure Kananga intended for himself. Heh heh.

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
1974 - * /?
I've never really given this a full chance, too boring - I mean this rich killer constructs an elaborate funhouse just to chase Bond through so he can use a golden gun? A little effort, people! Christopher Lee is the only redeeming feature. Plays like a long episode of FANTASY ISLAND rather than a real Bond movie. (Or so I dimly remember) and not just because of Herve Villachez.

SPY WHO LOVED ME
1977 - ***1/2
The producers realized they should take their time rather than deliver another glorified TV movie, and the result is easily the best of the Moore Bonds. I was eleven years old when THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was in theaters and it was an aching sweet thorn in my side. It was PG but my parents figured Bond was too risque for us. The cool kids and parents all went on dates with their wives or others to see it and then came back and told us all about that underwater car and Jaws. Torture. I imagined Jaws with a monocle and a Prussian hat and black gloves, like the one-armed prefect of police in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. I was disappointed he just looked like a big dumb German farmer. He's a novelty and a fine comic actor, but not menacing. Now when I see it I'm constantly fascinated by how my childhood imagination of this film, based on word of mouth recounting, as was the style of the pre-internet, pre-VCR, pre-cable time, differed. But that doesn't mean it's not great. And Moore's perfectly tailored. 

MOONRAKER
1979 -  *1/2
Rated G. Am I right? Now my parents had no more excuses. I missed the party, though. Bond seems very old and tired suddenly, like he should be home watering his garden not being spun around in a G-force simulator or pretending he could punch a grill like Jaws' and not break his hand. The girls he meets and seduces seem like Valium-zonked call girls, paid to pretend he's a spy, tagging along as he goes from room to room, uncovering little clues his butler sets up around the mansion. It's G so Bond doesn't even carry his own gun, Drax has to supply him with hunting rifles and lasers as needed. He doesn't even drink or smoke. Not even tea.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME had been such a huge hit, so popular, the underwater sports car thing so cool, so perfectly in tune with the vibes of JAWS and STAR WARS, that for the follow-up they made the mistake of trying to deliver more of the same instead of doing something new. Now instead of a car that becomes a submarine, it's a gondola that becomes a comical parade float. Richard Kiehl returns as Jaws and gets a Pippi Longstocking girlfriend and becomes a good guy, like Arnold in T2. The biggest crime, so rare in any Bond movie, is that the filmmakers and Moore presume our love and laughter without bothering to really earn it. And Drax is a dreadfully dull villain. The girls are all in that later 70s mode, wearing dowdy old peasant blouses or LOGAN'S RUN and ZARDOZ cast-offs, waiting around for old rich dudes to just start making out with them, like WESTWORLD for guys with British spy fantasies. Dumb sight gags abound and repeat: an old, coughing man sees a floating coffin and throws his cigarette away; the password to get into the secret lab is the notes from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. That's just off the top of my head.

Thank god the 70s were almost over, and all the variety show schtick that resurged from its watery Vaudeville grave would descend once more. With cable there was no longer a need to appeal to the elderly, children, and everyone in between all at the same time. Rated G would soon mean strictly for children. But it's still the 70s here and we have the sort of movie where we get a tour through a priceless antique glass exhibit and know in a few scenes it's gonna be trashed in a moving brawl. And bouncy music plays after every lame innuendo, and Kiehl survives everything with a flustered genial slow burn like Wiley Coyote after his latest trap backfires. Still there's one great moment: a slow Carnivale clown stalk that in its weird shambling silence recalls the previous year's HALLOWEEN!


FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
1981 - ***1/2
Return to basics! Smart move, Mr. Bond. A very welcome resurfacing of one of the lost Bond archetypes, the ultimately good-natured rogue with criminal connections who helps Bond against a bigger threat, here played with robustness by Topal.
OCTOPUSSY 
1983 - *
Louis Jordan looks way too old and tired to be a convincing villain. Was he cast to make Moore seem vibrant? More than anything, Jordan seems like he just wants a nap, not world domination. All the lessons of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY are forgotten. Maude Adams was hot in Playboy but dull as dishwater as the titular circus spymaster. Half the film is wandering around some Turkish harem, like Bond and Jordan are two rich old sex tourists. The other half is incoherent nonsense on a circus train with a cache of pilfered Russian baubles, and some swipes from the Hitchcock playbook, fumbled.
A VIEW TO A KILL
1985  - **
Long considered the worst Bond, I'd argue it's only the third worst - mainly since Christopher Walken is great as the bad guy, and aquamarine-eyed Tanya Roberts is in it, over whom I have always been delirious (I was of the right impressionable age when she had a Playboy cover spread with photos from BEASTMASTER in 1982) And there's a zeppelin!

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS
1987 ***1/2
LICENSE TO KILL
1989 - ***
Timothy Dalton's Bond has been slighted over the years but we've forgotten why now (at the time we felt he betrayed us by walking away after only two films) but his time has come. DAYLIGHTS especially is a stripped down Bond with real and strange escapes and KILL makes hilarious use of Wayne Newton as a preacher using yoga as a kind of mind control for a MOONRAKER style conglomerate of hottie New Age chicks and there's a great down the mountain tumbling car wreck climax.



GOLDENEYE
1995 - ***1/2
After a lengthy absence, a new Bond for a new decade. Famke Janssen makes her mark though her dumb name 'Onnatop' demeans an otherwise furious and crazy (and aptly named) Russian assassin who gets off on machine gunning and spine crushing. Pierce Brosnan makes his debut and he's devastatingly handsome with mussed dark black hair that he inherited from his predecessor Dalton. We also see the first 'hacker' in Bondland (played by Alan Cummings). After being used to Russians or SPECTRE agents in lab coats and ties we've got lollipop sucking nerds as legitimate threats to national security and use of EMPs (Electro-Magnetic Pulses) and Joe Don Baker is a believable CIA agent, bringing grumpy ex-military crime drama resonance to where it belongs. Not a lot of forward tick-tockality though. Lots of scenes inside the KGB as it's undermined by a villainous general, and the final girl wandering around a remote spy satellite control station enduring the juvenile antics of Alan Cumming. There are some actually witty lines ("That's close enough" Bond says after Onnatop jumps up and starts climbing on him) and I dig that the bad guys are colorfully diverse, allowed to be human, and witty rather than simply cardboard megalomaniacs.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES 
1997 **1/2
This used to be one of my favorites, saw it in the theater with one of my aforementioned Faxy friends whilst getting sober, and when you're getting sober you really feel the action deep in your gut. But nowadays parts of it irk me: Jonathan Pryce--great in BRAZIL--is a colossal bore (and sports terrible socalist dentistry) as a prissy media mogul in the Charles Foster Kane- Rupert Murdoch vein, crafting a war with China for the nefarious purpose of filling a 24 hour news channel (which is why the paranoid amongst us know CNN cover the missing Beijing airliner so much). Pretty clever, but sunk by Pryce's way-too-pleased with himself delivery as he says awful things like "what kind of havoc shall we create with the world today?" and "I'm having fun with my headlines." At least he says, "Thank you," to his aides instead of just shooting them. Meanwhile, as if Moneypenny on her own wasn't bad enough, Dench's M delivers terrible puns like "you always were cunning linguist, James,  (and Q looks so old and rheumy he should have retired 20 years ago) and clunky expository dialogue abounds. For another thing, there's almost no female hotness: TV's Lois and Clark star Terri Hatcher is the first babe--the one who always dies early--as the way-too-fussed-over rich bitch lavender wife of Jonathan Pryce's hissy media mogul villain. She's sexy if you think Brody's wife in HOMELAND is sexy. I don't, but mainly because they both remind me of the same ex-colleague - j'recuse! Michelle Yeoh is great in the fight scenes but speaking perfect English distracts her from adding any kind of sexuality (though we fans knew her and loved her already from SUPERCOP 2). She's a lithe dancer-action star, not a buxom love machine. When she rubs noses with Brosnan, there's no question who spent the longest time in hair and makeup.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH -
1999 ***
My problem with Brosnan in this one mainly is the hair, and the Panama suits, it being the 90s only excuses so much. I saw this opening weekend with my very first AA sponsor when I was counting days. I loved it! But if your hair is still perfectly moussed after a knockout brawl, Mr. Bond, I would suggest you avoid work that requires such regular proximity to open flames.

But this is also the one with Sophie Marceau as the deliciously evil villainess. Her stylist is without peer. Playing a Turkish-Serbo-whatever national oil baroness, Marceau ably melds styles from the west, east, north, south, and middle into a fabulous modernist wardrobe, my favorite since Jane Birkin's in SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE! And I don't care, Denise Richards IS a believable atomic scientist. She's so hot she should be handled with specially insulated tongs.

 DIE ANOTHER DAY
2002 - ***
 Halle Berry tends to be fierce only in dramas, and mousy in action films Too much 'good' acting only gets in the way of a Bond film. But there's a good plot about genetic alterations that turn a North Korean army brat into a posh Brit using conflict diamonds and reflected sunlight in a bid to invade South Korea before his father finds out. There's a nice visit to the Ice Hotel, and a sword fight that tracks all around a posh British fencing club, providing such a nicely emblematic mix of privilege and destruction that not even Madonna's leaden presence, or the cliche'd use of the Clash's "London Calling" can detract from its splendor. And Miranda Frost looks great in fencing gear!

CASINO ROYALE
2006 - ****
I was blown away at first sight--Craig is easily the best Bond and most believable killer since Connery. With those haunted sunken eyes and scowl, he seems genuinely dangerous and competent. But as an 'origin' story, CASINO ROYALE becomes harder to enjoy as years pass, the way it pains me to watch young teenagers make the same mistakes over and over. I can't save him myself)=. At least we learn why he would never trust a dame from now on (Eva Green redefines sultry as British treasury agent Vesper Lynde). "Does everyone have a tell." - Everyone has a tell - everyone except you, which is why you suck at poker, Erich, unless you're freshly unlucky at love. This also has a bit of ball torture which delivers 50 years later or whenever on the threat of Goldfinger's space age gem-cutting laser and makes us fear for his future erections (did it leave him sterile which is why he never worries about protection?) Never trust a girl who doesn't have a tell. Now it pains me to imagine him getting it on with Vesper after his balls are smashed numerous times by the evil Le Chifre.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE
2008 - **
This might have been a good Bond movie once, but some insecure editor whittled it down, shortening nearly every shot and cross-cutting like coked-up Eisenstein between bullfights, races, post-modern operas, and rich men and women taking off their coats at a coat check. There's also some vile sexual assault undercurrents and political disillusionment very out of place for a Bond film. Disillusionment with the system and our hatred for sexual violence is why we turn to Bond! We don't need to hear there's no use fighting evil! Disheartening. Don't ask me to pick between RIO BRAVO and THE SEARCHERS because it will be RIO BRAVO every time. Every fucking time.

On the other hand, the whole 'who can you trust even after they show you the right code signs' harkens back to the Connerys as does the idea that a pretty girl who invites you into her car might be CIA, SPECTRE, KGB or anyone else pumping you for information to bring back to their handler, so don't presume anything even after you sleep with them. Lastly, the post-internet and cell phone age has changed Bond in ways both good and bad, but inexorable, and the film itself seems to miss the old ways. I don't mind the ping pong around the globe bit because that's the way the internet age is - information flows so fast it's at the risk of outrunning our boy if he doesn't keep it at Jan De Bont levels.

That said, part of the escapism of Bond is to imagine that actual smart, brave, good people are at the helm of our intelligence organization. Here both the British government and American CIA are hopelessly corrupt, in bed with 'Quantum' a world conglomerate of third world puppet topplers. But there is a lot of fire in the climax, and a great airplane through a canyon chase. This is the movie where I first fell in love with Gemma Arterton, even if she does have only five fingers on each hand (she was born with six!) but of course she gets three scenes before she's offed cruelly to make yet another harsh un-Bondian statement.

SKYFALL
2012 - ****
In SKYFALL there's not even enough time for a second, nonkilled Bond babe; M and Javier Bardem are the closest we come. It's a shrinking network, but the return to the old ways pined for in QUANTUM are unleashed with a cathartic vengeance. Try not to muck it up, 007. Things are looking good for the next film, with a new M and a new Q, both of whom seem well-suited to the post-cheeky age.

Non Salzman-Broccoli Bonds:
CASINO ROYALE - *
NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN *
One's a lame overdone 'everything but the chicken soup' disaster, the other a remake of THUNDERBALL with age and urine jokes, a balding Bond, and Kim Basinger at peak lusciousness (she is shown in wet negligees and almost sold at auction to a slavering Arab). Stravinsky's Rite of Spring plays on the soundtrack and James Fox is a very cranky boss who only cares about budgets and reigning in Bond's drinking. Similarly cliched and idiotic plotlines abound and Klaus Brandauer, a fine actor in his own right, ranks with Louis Jordan as far as looking too old, tired, and generic as the villain, and the idea of putting video arcades into the ritzy parties, casinos, and hotel lobbies is really ill-conceived. Both films are worth seeing once though, just to realize how many mistakes the main Bond films avoid as they blast their way to boffo box office. Reign on, Cubby and Harry, and James. The future may be written on silicone chips, but the credits are still on bouncing silhouettes of guns and girls. And we'll always need a real man to kill the rich, even in our dreams.

SEE ALSO:
The Amnesiac Bond (Bright Lights 11/11/08)
"One of the many things which makes Daniel Craig the best Bond since Connery is his pain. He’s aware of the lost sense of intimacy that came with having license to both kill and “be a sexual heel.” Connery’s Bond was always civil to the bad guys until they killed a friend or a girl of his, then his steely eyes hardened and the insults started flowing; underneath the tough veneer he genuinely cared. The later Bonds by contrast put up a caringveneer in addition to a tough veneer; they were all veneer. Daniel Craig comes to us with all veneers smashed; the pain of crushed innocence and the rage of a wounded orphan child in his big deep gray eyes, the “non-venerial” toughness returned. "
James Bond Rides the Strip (Bright Lights 1/21/07)
"The nifty thing about this new Bond approach is the way it remains conscious of the Moebius strip upon which it runs. It is aware, for example, that the entire cycle of Bond films–which stretch from the Cold War straight through to the future–actually involve the surpassing of technologies in real life that were created in the older films as sci fi devices. Consider for example the “full circle” of our post-modern nostalgia over the gigantic “futuristic” computers of the old Bond villains like Dr. No–with their reel-to-reel computer tapes and punch cards–which we watch on plasma screens from super deluxe DVD sets or ultra slim laptop computers. And now Bond is actually younger and the futuristic gadgets he thought were so nifty have not just been invented but have been over-promoted to the point of un-coolness, and promptly forgotten, and his boss has become a woman, and suddenly he is newly promoted to the job he’s had all his life, and he is ready to meet the only woman he will ever love… for the SECOND TIME!"

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All Hail the New Flesh Keychain: ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black and white chronicle of the last day and night of a family at Disney World, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and animatronic vampires holding hands around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots (the movie was filmed on the sly without Disney permission), ESCAPE's camerawork delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and instead offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis-ing, David Lynch post-modern artifice-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black and white fuzzy basement expressionism as we watch a nuclear family implode as dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy, and papier-mâché facsimile dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra.

As this dissolving father, Roy Abramsohn is a perfect blend of guarded and agape; thrown for a loop by an early morning phone call (wherein he's fired) taken out on the hotel balcony to not wake the family, sets him off, especially once his little boy locks him out of the room where his family is snuggled up asleep together. Their day at Disney finds the dad haunted by a pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) who giggle amidst themselves, make flirty eye contact with his children, and express vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father breakdown, leaving him powerless to resist ogling them like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge. And why shouldn't it? The mom (Elena Schuber) won't even accept his most rudimentary physical affection, for no reason she can really explain, other than perhaps sensing he's overcompensating --though for what she's too stressed to bother finding out.

Equating the eye of older men being drawn to younger women as analogous not to cougars but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children, the film becomes a reflection of the differing gender drives (one protective/nesting the other seed-sowing) and how one is considered holy and the other vile, each a reprisal against the other; so which came first, the vilifying of the man's attraction to younger women or his wife's treating him like a rotten kid rather than granting him any power or respect as 'the father'? Shut out of the closed circuit of a child-mother pair bond and unable to raise so much as his voice against them, the dissolving father is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media on his role as ultimate signifier. Instead, the father is himself put into the Oedipal exile originally reserved for his son, emasculated by the mother-son rejection and so both weakened and freed from the responsibility of his own actions. Why wouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, who is equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? The older man grants the younger woman a rare chance to try out her seductive powers on a 'safe' target (a wedding ring signifies both a dare and a freebie) and to feel like she's correcting the Elektra-exile she has herself suffered since she came of age to compete with the mom for status as the hottest bitch on the block (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her role as its instigator, the mother sees their shared secrets as a priori justification for her coldness.

This post-70s change in husbandry was instigated by huge films like THE EXORCIST and E.T. with dads not even present for the trials suffered by mother and children. Family men were and are depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, government flunkies, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia); older daughters meanwhile are Lolitas, jailbait, white trash short shorts eye candy harlots out to tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, mom glowers, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to her perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own, these moms are elevated to saints with no time for smiles or joy as they work two jobs to put food on the table and swat away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion that all but ensure the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu. C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?

But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity and no place or time to masturbate can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just creeped out. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia AKA Imaginationland! Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy encourage this escape, or actually enforce it?

Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them.  I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.

Ambiguity might or might not rule!

Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife, runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction (as soon as she's waved them out of sight with she breaks down - it's okay since no one is watching). Dad also runs into a spooky Maleficient-style witch (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, luring him into a midday tryst at the presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect sad desperation. She tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses --and she was one of them, and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.

If this all plays a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier-two Monarch programming. Is the witch some kind of manipulator/ trigger sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability? You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the girls show up he can't get them out of his mind, or the camera's vision. From there, it just gets weirder, approaching flume chutes down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snakes such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. When you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's money's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all do a bit to cement the equation of madness with Disney's subversive use of archetypal psychology, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but I'm guessing it's like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, and eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen." And little moments like the pre-fireworks pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards them and away at the same time until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable and Clift rodeo lassos. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive witch costumes, make-believe, costumed freaks, and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, and aside from a few missteps, such as a scatalogically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped) it's pretty tight with the ambiguity. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease.

If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play. If you go to the beach for a month you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the need to not waste time, to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" unable to shut off her motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred ideal to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work the rest of the year, waiting for that one week off in July, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until you're finally there, and any sense of spontaneity or fun buckles under the pressure.

But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem, hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and I by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney and Epcot (shortly after it opened) the next. Going to Bermuda without him made me feel I had to step in, even at 13 years-old, and be the man of the family, which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room) but at Disney my oldest man of the house status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid so it was about getting as much as you could out of it.

I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time to being 22 they are unable to discover what in advance of seeing it. Once they see a way back into the past, a chance to dive onto the passing train, they take it. They get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by younger women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. This move will only confirm mom's treatment of you as just the oldest child, the perpetually 'in trouble' oldest son as the mom more and more surrenders to an inner animus-domination that has her convinced she's the sole voice of authority in the family. You can try to be free while she glowers and nags, but soon even there the thrill will be gone, the bloom will be off the rose, and the new flesh mouse ears grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. And when you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls you find it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos. Look, you're smiling!

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From my grave to yours: PENNY DREADFUL (Showtime), FROM DUSK TIL DAWN (El Rey)

Two new horror series are worth checking out, presuming you have the patience, the cajones, and the channels on your cable. The Robert Rodriguez-backed new cable channle El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) launched a month or so ago with the From Dusk Til Dawn series, a 10 episode-long retelling/elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanica Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star and staggering beauty Eiza Gonzalez (above, below). And there's Robert Patrick as the disillusioned preacher, and Don Johnson in the Michael Parks part, and a cast of handsome well-spoken Mexican-Americans with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail.

Eiza on the street! 

It all works because it's not that the performances are all that great, but that they are all of a piece, as is so essential for a good horror to work (i.e. John Carpenter's best), they play it deadpan straight while never overdoing it and driving the ordeals into bummer territory. I mention all that because in Showtime's new horror series, Penny Dreadful that level of solid team player dynamics vanishes to be replaced with a bunch of breathing exercise-prepared actors all fighting over every syllable like it's their last chance at an Emmy, only dimly aware there's other actors across the dark expanses.

I'll confess I desperately wanted to like Penny Dreadful, being a huge fan of American Horror Story, this is certainly the British version (and a chronic disciple of Eva Green, especially in Dark Shadows), but the show simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough. Cramming in all the famous literary characters from the Victorian era's (and earlier) literary mythology it never seems to know what to do with them, other then send them walking in ornate garments through gloomy cavernous sets, or into bed for joylessly graphic sex scenes. One missed opp I'm hoping they rectify is the absence of any characters or monsters actually from the real penny dreadfuls, as seen above in my hand-made collage. Instead of the same old Dracula (here a Drac-mummy hybrid) or Jack the Ripper (and no doubt Burke and Hare also soon to shamble forth), or Frankenstein, where's Spring-Heeled Jack? Varney the Vampire? Just because Dorian Gray's an immortal bunburying Sadean doesn't make him a monster, just an aesthete. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned this young fellow playing him, Reeve Carney, has the whole show sowed up in his pocket. While the other characters rant and rave and underplay, Carney's Gray seems genuinely entranced, not in any effusive way but in a delicate, eerily jaded without malice way, and graced with an in-the-moment openness that makes him seem to me one of the few young actors around who seems to understand the importance of seeing as much as being seen and who seems to fully inhale the atmosphere. (the only other one I can think of offhand is, believe it or not, Kristen Stewart).

Meanwhile the murky dim brown Victorian London craftsmaship often runs the risk of choking any life out of things (though the darkness can be very very dark, almost 3-D and it seems thrillingly real, like life before electricity was one long SILENCE OF THE LAMBS climax) and the writers are so busy paraphrasing the eloquent flights of 19th century authors, that the British thesps run unsupervised over actorly monologues until every syllable sings with overly spellbinding oratory. In other words, it's very gay, in its way, especially with Frankenstein and his moist-eyed perfect specimen, though not in a giddy, delightful Tim Curry or Udo Kier way, more a Sal from Mad Men kind of way. And the handful of character must play many parts: Eva Green is a vampire hunter who is also a trance medium, easily possessed by demons and departed angry daughters; Timothy Dalton is the Qatermain / Dr. Ven Helsing / Seward who just wants his daughter back;  Mina, the daughter who's already gone to vamp in presumably Dracula arms; Josh Harntett a Wild Bill Hicock who may also be Jack the Ripper; a brilliant young Frankenstein who is probably going to be Jekyll and Hyde later on (his monster doubles as the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, and The Crow); the vampires also seem to be mummies. I have no doubt Drac will turn out to be another hunky British monologuist impeccably attired in elegantly distressed Victorian fashion who says things like "the burden of eternal life wears me down like a slow watch, like the taste of withered dying opium addicts, their narcotic blood crawling time to a standstill...." Penny, you can use that if you want. That's a-free.

Second Episode is a big improvement - it gets more down to a set of reversals and twists and seems less about getting its lighting as painterly and haunted - the purplish blue mist of London coal fog in gorgeous compositions of ships in harbor and snug waterfronts is impressive, but the centerpiece Eva Green possession monologue, while a brilliant showcase for a brilliant, nervy performer (Green's voice sails up and down octaves while her body writhes and contorts and eyes glare with unholy fire) goes on for like twenty minutes, long past our patience or its own effectiveness, until one forgets even where they are or what's going on. AMERICAN HORROR STORY might pick up and abandon story threads like an impatient schoolkid with a box full of monster toys, but it understands momentum as key, and transgression as a locomotive, and above all it doesn't take itself a tenth as seriously. It even introduces a second female character (Billie Piper), a kind of de facto heroine streetwalker in that she's coughing up blood like a Poe heroine but doesn't complain and not only that, has large measures of bar whiskey for breakfast with Josh Hartnett, who lounges with ease in the saloon window like he's Eugene Goddamned O'Neill waiting for Hickey.

These kind of character-based critiques don't concern FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, though as Santinico, Eiza Gonzalez is no Eva Green she's got a certain cold allure, even naked but for a golden bronze tan, brown bikini and Aztec shaman blood queen headdress she's always holding her own, in charge, using her body to seduce and ensnare men, to believably conjure ancient Mayan deities, to pit brothers against each other, and she's no ham. Even big tearful farewells or life and death anxieties are nicely underplayed in the American Carpenter-Hawks tradition, rather than being underplayed in the British style of PENNY. I wish to god PENNY's writers were up to the challenge, rather than confusing graphic sex and death with what being truly dreadful entails.

POST SCRIPT (6/2/14) - Just saw the fourth Penny Dreadful episode and things are picking up, with a detailed evening at La Grand Guignol that managed to weave together nearly all the disparate characters, as well as a climactic absinthe scene that allows the series' hitherto locked closet door to finally burst open. Can't spoil it of course... but I'm in. 

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Rise, SORCERER! The lost masterpiece of 1977 comes to blu-ray.

It's been a long time on its jungle creep but William Friedkin's much anticipated blu-ray SORCERER (1977) has emerged into the clearing and into the flaming oil fire of our American hypocrisy. Distance, time, and the the totality of Friedkin's stunning attention to vivid, lived-in widescreen detail are now revealed in staggeringly beautiful shots: the monstrous grins of the trucks moving through the mist like Travis Bickels through a Kubrick rainstorm; flooding rivers lifting flimsy bridges up off their moorings; crowded Tel Aviv streets rocking from a bomb and the quick soldier reprisal; an assortment of hard-looking Catholic priests counting money in the backroom of a church during a wedding; a white collar Frenchman ducking out on his wife as a swanky Parisian cafe to avoid prison for embezzlement --each character gets their origin exposition, their reason for escaping to the anonymity and weak extradition practices of some nameless South or Central American one-horse town, and each origin packs enough real  hustle and bustle for a film of their own (such as Friedkin's surreal Egyptology opener in EXORCIST); when they wind up in the surreal and savage beauty of some unnamed Central American jungle one horse town depending on nearby oil pipe for survival, the jungle adventure comprising the bulk of the film, and being the kind of thing Warner Herzog seems to go for in his own work but sometimes errs on the side of decency; he perhaps lqacks the insane drive and egotistic bullying needed to smash the world apart in order to capture its plummy essence, which is why he needed Kinski, or a Cage. Friedkin, however, is his own Kinski. We all know the horror anecdotes of the film's troubled shoot, with Friedkin harassing the locals and crew in the paranoid, foamy-at-the-mouth way of the coke head rich Anglo filmmaker from the 70s, but my friend. It was worth it.

What's most interesting is the contrast between the hostile nature of these male characters and the deeply human story (which I mean as the opposite of Fordian sentimentality - human as in 'true' human, bestial, full of long-standing grudges, fears, greed and guts - and sometimes fear, greed and guts is enough). Taking a page from Peckinpah, these men are dangerous lowdown scoundrels who are, in a sense, the only characters tough enough to handle an almost suicidal task - hauling very unstable explosives through 200 miles of rough dirt roads and jungles in the middle of Bolivia, Ecuador or some such remote rain forest outpost.

There are almost no women in the story - the one who gets actual billing in the cast is Anne Marie-Deschodt as the Frenchman's rich wife. As an ironic commentary to Clouzot's original, an elderly barkeep who never speaks but who earns a soft spot in the mens' hearts, like an unofficial den mother (contrasted by Clouzot's firey temptress played by Clouszot's then-wife Véra). It works because this is a movie that is not about desire, but survival. No time for soft stuff.  It's like THE THING or THE GREY. This is not a movie for flowers and song, it's about struggling through the mud, man. It's about the kind of men who are, as we learn in Hollywood, the nasty necessity of the western world. I like it way better than Clouzot's original because the jungle is realer. Clouzot has no interest in capturing the vivid textures of nature, of wheels and dashboards and the rumbling of trucks full of soldiers sent in to quell a riot.

The Tangerine Dream SORCERER score has been some of my favorite soundtrack for awhile and in the blu-ray mix it pulses and throbs like if John Carpenter and Klaus Schulze got together for the score of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, like the best synth scores of the era it never micro-manages our emotional state, the way, say, John Williams or Howard Shore do with their flourishing orchestras, rather the pulsating amniotic eerie music just sets the chilly, nerve-shredding tone and as such is ahead of its time, at least for Hollywood. Don't forget Carpenter's groundbreaking HALLOWEEN score was a year or so away. As far as great scores in America we only knew Ennio Morricone through the handful of films that wound up on TV or the drive-in. The movie scores we kids talked about on the playground (excluding those of GREASE and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) were strictly micro-managerial and orchestral - Nino Rota's melancholic GODFATHER, and above all the pompous thunder majesty of John Williams' scores for JAWS (sure he has the famous shark approach music but he also sticks in pirate jauntiness that deflates all the suspense when the Orca sets out to sea) and STAR WARS (much of it ripped from Holst the way JAWS was ripped from Stravinsky). Tangerine Dream's SORCERER score by contrast never tells us what to feel, it just gives us a way to feel it, a way to mystically transfer this rainy wet misery we see onscreen into an atmospheric alien buzz.

I remember this film when it came out in 1977, being intrigued by the title of this film when it came out around the same time as STAR WARS, thinking it might involve wizards and armies of the dead and so forth - and instead, what, trucks? Good lord, that's false advertising! But now that ignition is thrown in reverse. Victory is thine, you crazy coked-up sonofabitch! So drive!

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