Failure Of Politics, Politics of Failing-By-Design
Far out. We're coming up to the end of 2021 and I feel like we're not far removed from December 2019. That's weird, right? I'd kind of hoped that I could spend more time here writing up some stuff but even with all the time spent at home with lockdowns I didn't get much done here so apologies.
I've mentioned it before but at some point in the mid-2010s I hit a wall where I felt there was nothing more to be said. I think we have Rupert Murdoch and his media empire to thank for that as it shared in the triple-threat-triple-heartburn era of a Abbott Government, Brexit, and a Trump Presidency across Australia, UK and the USA. You can't take politics too seriously when people clearly a lot less intelligent than you are wilfully dumb things to curry the bogan/chav/redneck vote. It's enough to make you lose faith in democracy, and I guess that gives us insight into how democracy might have failed so hard in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Japan, roughly 100 years ago.
Be that as it may, we live on - but that probably is just a matter of luck.
On 15 December the NSW government removed all restrictions pertaining to the Covid Pandemic. There suits were predictable in that case numbers exploded. People queued up in cars trying to get their drive thru PCR swabs for hours on end. Rapid Antigen Testing kits sold out everywhere and before you knew it, half the city had to self-isolate. If the aim was the throw of the shackles of pandemic controls and let business thrive, it had the unfortunate effect of immediately shuttering businesses because their staff got infected and had to isolate. For 8 days the NSW Government took its hands off the wheel and blindfolded itself. Eventually, an attempt to bring back some semblance of sanity prevailed, and QR code check ins and mask mandates were brought back. Of course by then, the horse had bolted with Pestilence on its back.
So the same people who irresponsibly did the above, turned around and said everybody had to take 'personal responsibility'. I mean, does it get richer than that? Then they said we would all get infected by Omicron at some point and we may as well learn to live with COVID. I mean... hullo. We wouldn't be in those straits had the same government not wilfully chosen to let things go out of control.
On the 19th December when the cases started climbing and shit got scary again, I happened to drive down Oxford Street on the way out to Randwick. I'd say a good 2 out of 3 shop fronts were empty with For-Lease signs in them. Two years of the Pandemic really has done a number of businesses, so I get it. There's a tremendous amount of urgency in trying to kick start the economy and have those businesses come back.
The problem with that mentation is that the businesses can't stay open if people have to self isolate. But I get it. They were trying to privatise the Pandemic, because if there's one thing a Liberal Government hates, it's spending money on things that are the necessities of society.
Seriously. Fuck these idiots.
The Return of Boba Fett
I've only watched the 1 available episode, so I don't really know where it's all going but I will say this. This is a retcon nightmare. I like Temuera Morrison and his Django Fett, as well as how the casting made the Kiwi accent the de facto accent of Clone Troopers. But when you watch this Boba Fett carve its way out of the Sarlacc Pit, one is overcome with a weird cognitive dissonance. I always remember Fett's actor to be a dorky white haired English bloke. And come on, that's not a spoiler. Fett had to get out of the Sarlacc Pit to begin with in order for there to be any series.
I Haven't Seen 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Yet
Thanks to our idiot government, it suddenly became very un-enticing to sit in a cinema for 3 hours. I put the blame squarely upon the shoulders of Domicron Perottet and Brad Hazzard. It was the one film I was looking forward to all year, and here we are. I'm furiously dodging spoilers but, ...what the hey.
Didn't See Bond Either
The thing is, it came out while the lockdown was still going. Somebody said "he dies at the end". So I thought "fuck that. That's too depressing to watch." And I may never watch it. I don't care how good it is.
I guess it's been 60 years since Dr No said "Kill Bond now!" I guess they finally got him. Killed by a sense of obligation to social justice. That's worse than Kirk's death in 'Star Trek: Generations' - another un-asked for character death. The world is full of knowing, smug, fuckwit screenwriters.
I watched a whole bunch of Bond films at the cinema (as opposed to on TV or video) starting from 'The Spy Who Loved Me' through to 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. It was just the done thing, and Bond movies are alway excellent value for entertainment, even when they're bad. And some of those films were real stinkers.
Roughly, I caught the second half of Roger Moore, both Timothy Daltons, and the first two of Pierce Brosnan. And I was done - or so I thought. There was something about a Rupert Murdoch parody played by the guy who played Sam Lowry in 'Brazil' (Jonathan Pryce) having a submarine base and a bunch of gun-toting flunkies that made the implausible go into total stupidity. I could take an over-the-hill Moore in 'View to a Kill', it was awful but I kept going; I could take the low-octane 'Licence to Kill-you-through-boredom' , and I kept going even then; but I drew the line at 'Tomorrow Never Dies'.
It's really been a credit to Daniel Craig's efforts that I've gone back to watching these things at the cinema. When I think about it, I've gone four in a row with Craig now, so really I just missed 2 of Brosnan's efforts in that string of Bond movies. So I remain a valued customer even after the clunker that was 'Tomorrow Never Dies'.
That being said, these Daniel Craig Bond movies have been something else to what came before. There's a lot more grit and less fanciful sadism, they're less jovial and jaunty, and more motivated with quiet brooding anger than a detached kind of nonchalant killing. The word professionalism invokes a certain image of being a secret agent, but these Bond movies have repainted that picture. It actually looks painful to be James Bond.
Anyway, before I go into the nitty gritty, here is your obligatory spoiler alert. If you hate spoilers, don't read on. What's Good About It
It's a big movie. A heck of a big movie. Every bit of the mooted US$300m budget is on screen. The production design is spectacular - one can only dream of having that kind of lavish budget to spend on things looking so good. It's lit and shot well, it's cut well, the staging of the action is effective and punchy, and the overall aesthetic is of its time. What happened with Bond films of the 80s and 90s was that they slipped behind the times and the lighting would look flat or the effects would look chintzy or the edit would be languid. Next to films made by Steven Spielberg and James Cameron back then, Bond films looked tired and old. This thing looks every bit as polished as any front line action franchise right now, only more luscious and rich.
It's also good to see the bad guy with the name Ernst Stravro Blofeld finally makes an appearance in this incarnation of Bond. It's been a long time since Blofeld was the bad guy. He hasn't been around since 'Diamonds Are Forever'. It's also good that he's played by Christoph Waltz, an actor of considerable villainous charm. It's an excellent bit of casting. Blofeld's absence could partly be explained by just how much of the arch-villain schtick he embodied. Let's not forget, the version played by Donald Pleasance is the entire source material for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. It's exciting to see Bond go up against his old foe, so to speak. In some ways this is what the Daniel Craig Bond movies have been building up to over three films.
This is also the first time we see the rest of Bond's office go into the field at once. It's interesting because it re-grounds James Bond into the institution of government, and as a government agent instead of the seeming one-man lone-wolf agent we're used to seeing.
What's Bad About It
The film feels structurally uneven. It feels like it has 2 third acts. The first is all too brief and too easy, the second, more convoluted but oddly garbled.
Also, this business of Bond being a rogue agent is getting a bit boring. He saves the day so often you'd think the government would understand that Bond temporarily going rogue is the risk they take in even hiring the man, let alone sending him out to do missions. The trope where the government is shutting down the Double-O programme or the MI6 is also getting old. Politics does cast a strange shadow over these Daniel Craig Bond movies, but it just seems gratuitous that the government would want to shut down a highly effective programme even if they had global surveillance tie-ups.
There could have been bit more of Blofeld. As it is, we only really see him at the first turning point about 30minutes in for the scene at the Rome meeting, and then he's absent until late in the second act that feels like a third act. Otherwise it's clues that paint an incomplete picture that barely hints at an unexplained past. Considering the story is a lot more personal than previous incarnations of Blofeld, Waltz is on screen all too briefly.
Lea Seydoux is a bit weak as an actress. There's something a bit blank about her that you don't quite believe her character. I'm always suspicious of casting choices where somebody in their mid 20s plays a specialist medical professional. You just don't get to be those without turning 35. Even ignoring that factor, there something a bit amiss about her performance, most likely because she's not a native English Speaker. I kept wincing at the uneven-ness of the performance.
What's Interesting About It
If the Bond film is anything to go by, our reflected paranoia about terrorism is actually out of control. This has manifested itself in the surveillance state that is now the UK, but also around the world, there seems to be this growing surveillance. Against this context, Bond has to go to some obscure places, or places without such surveillance to prove his worth.
Bond definitely doesn't (and probably can't) work in places where the threats are real. He can't infiltrate ISIL, he can't go work undercover in places like North Africa, Middle East, the Subcontinent, and East Asia. Strangely, as globalisation advances, the potential for Bond to go undercover keeps eroding to the point where in this film he isn't an undercover spy, he's defining himself as an assassin. That is to say, the Double-O programme is a state-sanctioned assassination bureau whose distinguishing feature is the "licence to kill". Maybe it is, but this brings strange ramifications.
This creative decision skews the action out of espionage where the roots of Bond movies lie, towards a more brutalist Hollywood conception of action. Daniel Craig's Bond has ideological pinnings closer to Steven Seagal movies of the 90s than say, Timothy Dalton Bond movies. It's the old "You might be a bastard but you're our bastard. Go rogue as long as you kill the bad guy" brief.
Consider for the moment that back in the Sean Connery Bond era, Bond would don makeup to look like a Japanese guy (!) to go do undercover espionage in Japan. Or the lovely moment where he kills a guy in the lift in 'Diamonds are Forever', swaps the ID with his victim and tells Jill St. John's character that he just killed James Bond. The Daniel Craig Bond doesn't pretend to be anything other than James Bond when he kills 2 other assassins and then shags Monica Bellucci.
Brothers
It's interesting that Blofeld's back story melds into this Bond's back story. Blofeld, it turns out is foster brother to James Bond. Thus, the four films together takes shape as more of a feud between two men, even though James Bond was not entirely aware that this was what was taking place. It's interesting that to make it personal, the backstory had to be changed into one that denotes fratricidal impulses. Doubly more so because Austin Powers had this area pegged when in the third instalment of that franchise 'Goldmember', it was revealed that Austin and Dr. Evil were brothers. Take a bow Mike Myers.
The Challenges Of Character Realism
The Bond franchise oscillates between character realism and then lighter laughs, depending on the Bond actor. So Connery was a character realist back in the 60s when spy movies were a rage; Moore was a lighter comedic Bond in the 70s and 80s until he wore out the tropes; Dalton was an attempt to go back to a character with gravitas; and then Brosnan brought about a breeziness and TV-honed casualness that echoed Moore. The franchise has gone back to character realism with Craig for four movies now, but the strain is beginning to show.
One of the great challenges of the Bond franchise is staving off the psychopath label from Bond. If Bond is running around the planet exercising his licence to kill too liberally, then he becomes less distinguishable from his foes. after all, what kind of crazy person kills so many people and then carries on a life as if he's a normal citizen? It was particularly apparent with the Brosnan Bond because he had the highest kills of any Bond per screen time, but offered the most light-and-breezy Bond of the lot. If the cognitive dissonance wasn't going off in the directors' and producers' heads, then surely the audience was getting alienated by this problem.
The absence of character realism for Bond leads to the rest of the film becoming less real. At one point I'm led to believe Bond was driving an "invisible car", in one of the Brosnan Bond films I didn't watch. An invisible car! I mean, you know... I'm kind of glad I missed that at the cinemas.
Daniel Craig's Bond has been tackling this problem across four films. With his portrayal, Bond actually feels the weight of his kills. He doesn't quite care for all his victims individually, but the mounting body count wears on his conscience and drives him to drink. In the four films, he's walked away from the job twice. He even admits to a drinking problem in this film. The state of the character is slowly evolving in a way that he was never allowed to do in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
This choice has brought about a very interesting Bond but it is clear he is nearing the finish line. If Bond can - inconceivably - die, then it would be on Daniel Craig's watch. It would be as tragic as Kirk or Solo dying, but for once it would make sense. It would also bring the cycle of films to a meaningful conclusion, a completion of mission that all the other Bond films combined, never possessed or could attain.
We're A Team!
Over at the 'Mission Impossible' franchise, another spy genre off-shoot from the 1960s, Tom Cruise has been ruling the roost and making it more Bond-like in that the hero action centres on himself. It was worse in earlier films, but lately he's been backing off from hogging the screen time - he's been actively sharing it with Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg. They've been making it look more like a team-effort which is more in the spirit of the original TV series, which is a good thing.
Similarly with the evolving Bond, they've managed to develop Q, M, and Moneypenny so that they are doing more spy-agency-like things. It has the benefit of showing these kinds of protagonists as being part of a functioning social set, even if that social set is made up of other spooks. It contextualises the actions as work. What's more telling is that it shows just how obsolete the Bond figure has become. In the old days of 'Goldfinger', Bond had to fight the bad guy in front of the ticking bomb and disarm the bomb himself. In this stage of civilisation, the equivalent of the bomb is embedded in technology in such a way as to need hacking - so it is Q who ultimately hits the switch that saves the day. More realistically, Bond couldn't have done that bit.
Bond, at that moment in the story, is diverted on to a mini-adventure of his own where he has to save the girl from a collapsing building, but it's hardly the same thing as saving the world from surveillance hell. Call it, the villain-twirling-his-moustache-at-the-rail-tracks moment. Because we're invested in Bond, we feel it's a big deal, but under rational analysis, it's actually nerdy-geeky Q and ever-responsible-and-loyal bureaucrat M who finish the big deal. It is as if the film itself is admitting that even in the tallest fantasies, the limitations of one person are such that they cannot overcome institutionalised evil. Maybe it's a big step back for hero action movies, but it just might be a big step forwards for our understanding of the surveillance state. It's not going to get undone with a flourish of the pen in legislature or a judicial decision in some high court.
Bond's Euro Anxiety And Buying British Bonds
The Daniel Craig Bond movies have concentrated more on a European threat more than anything else. He isn't facing off against Russian agents in this day and age, and he can't go undercover in other ethnic groups, so naturally Bond's villains have come from the ranks of Europeans. It is probably not surprising given the overall anxiety in the UK about its place in the EU. These Bond movies vividly illustrate just how deep the unease run in the UK about the European Union as a project - it is with great suspicion and distrust.
As the last vestige of the Great British Empire, Bond is more icon of a flag-waving Cool Britannia. With its roots in the 1960s, it has something in common with Mods and the Who with their Union Jack draped garb. The anachronism is further magnified by the nostalgic fetishisation of Aston Martins and period English vehicles. The whole point of the Bond movie is to brand Great Britain, and continue to bear that standard in the mass consumer market place. The endorsed goods come hard and fast while everybody gets around dressed to the nines. It's a weird continuum where nobody looks bad or dresses bad. Great Britain needs to keep the branding going lest it sink in the flood of goods coming out of Europe.
I have to say the product placement in this one was just a bit much.
It's hard to write something new about James Bond movies in light of 50years of Bond movies. One ca imagine it's even harder to come up with a new script and a new threat. This current Bond movie is getting rave reviews from otherwise difficult-to-please people so it's interesting that the Bond Movie that brings up the half-century is still hitting its mark.
What's Good About It
Some of the action set pieces in this one are more visceral and tense than in 'Quantum of Solace'. The title sequence is pretty cool, but maybe not as cool as the one on 'Casino Royale'. That one was pretty special. At least in this one, like it is in 'Casino Royale, the action has a sense of space and time in which things take place. The frenetic post- 'Jason Bourne' action seqeunces in Quantum of Solace were pretty ridiculous.
Some of the stunts in the earlier part are great. The action towards the climax seems more like a re-run of the sot o action we used to see in the early Die Hard movies. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in the context of a Bond movie. Bond is a man of action after all.
What's Bad About It
It's been said for many years that James Bond the character is a sociopath, and may even be some kind of psychopath. the man never really changes. The moments we've seen Bond change as a result of the action are few and far in between. The greatness of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' with George Lazenby lies with the ending which strongly suggests Bond is transformed. There really isn't an equivalent moment in Roger Moore's tenure, which in most part was about a glib one liner in the face of immensely awful violence.
Once again, having gotten to the third film, Daniel Craig's Bond is showing the strain of being unable to transform. In the absence of the glibness he's got fewer means to charm, and at this point in the Bond franchise, he's actually a standout for having the least charm.
What's Interesting About It
There have been all kinds of articles about James Bond in the 50th anniversary of Dr. No coinciding with this film. One of the most interesting was the graph put together in the Economist.
Look, I'm no Nate Silver, but I do put trust in what numbers say about players. :)
As you can see, as thuggish as Daniel Craig's Bond might seem, he had nothing on the kill total of the Pierce Brosnan Bond. The Bond with the least kills and by extension, the least action was Timothy Dalton, which tallies with my impression of his low octane Bond Movies. Craig's Bond is about on par with Connery' Bond in terms of kills per movie, which flies in the face of Connery's complaint that Bond these days is about the killing. If Mr. Connery could have a whinge about Craig's Bond using his own Bond as a yard stick, it would be that Bond seems to gets laid less and drinks more.
Moore's Bond drank the least and killed fewer than Connery, Craig or 'Killer' Brosnan. I sort of expected him to get laid more, but that doesn't seem to have been the case. George Lazenby's Bond had a better track record in his one appearance, than the averaged efforts of the others.
For my money, I suspect the Brosnan Bond movies are more up my alley judging from the body count - but I remember being so appalled by 'Tomorrow Never Dies', I never went to see the rest of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies after that; I gave up on Bond movies until they rebooted with 'Casino Royale'. 'Quantum of Solace' sorely tested my patience. If the Brosnan Bonds are anything to go by, - and as Sick Boy observes in 'Trainspotting' one day you have it, and then you don't - I wouldn't put much stock in the next two Bond movies being any good, even with Daniel Craig doing his damnedest.
The 40-year-old actress - who recently expressed an interest in appearing in the British spy film franchise - is set to be offered a screen test for the follow up to Quantum of Solace which will star Daniel Craig as James Bond.
A source at EON, the production company which makes the James Bond films, said: “Jennifer has all the qualities we are looking for in a Bond girl. She has to be beautiful but she also needs to have brains.
“It helps if she’s athletic and able to keep up with intense stunt work a Bond movie demands.
“It is likely she’ll be called in to meet producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson soon.”
Jennifer previously said of her Bond aspirations: “I get offered funny, quirky, pretty roles. But I’d love to do an action movie. James Bond - glamour. Daniel Craig. Sh*t-loads of fun.”
I sure hope this won't come to pass. Before I totally dismiss this notion I have a confession to make and it is this: while I loathed 'Friends' and thought none except the chudly Matt Perry could actually act on the show, I was always impartial for Aniston's ass.
There, I said it. I'm not an ass-man, but Aniston's ass in that tight black outfit as she jiggled around to the dumb theme song of 'Friends' was a 'bit-of-awright'. Otherwise, I'm not entirely impressed with anything she has done and on the whole her charms are that of the girl next door. She's certainly no great shakes as an acting talent. The best thing I heard is that one "wouldn't kick her out of bed... until the next younger starlet came along".
Her string of movies are equally unimpressive, in direct proportion to her minute acting chops. She says they're the only roles she gets, but I've never had an inkling she was capable of more than the soap suds she's had blown her way. She's show-biz but distinctly TV for a reason.
Oddly enough she chose to wait until she was 40 to do a nude photo session, which suggests prudery and emotional repression that has given way to over-confidence or joy at the results form the plastic surgeon. Or it's a faint admission that straight acting is not going to help her career from here on in so she's had to take her clothes off, just to keep her profile up. We'll never know. So, to see her put herself forward as a Bond Girl candidate and then be willing to screen test is a little rich.
Halle Berry's stint aside, over-aged Bond Girls are a bit of a downer. Terry Hatcher was plain yuck. Maude Adams wouldn't cut it today. One has to wonder if the producers seriously see any merit in casting the forty-something Aniston in the next Bond Movie. Even Kim Basinger was still in her 20s for 'Never Say Never Again'.
Then again it might be the role she proves me wrong. I roll my eyes in anticipation (of the worst).
It's Now Official 'Australia' is a flop. With a budget of $197million, the picture has taken in a paltry $3.4million in its first weekend at the US Box office.
Figures quoted from US entertainment newspaper Variety said the movie made a paltry $3.4 million on its Thursday opening in the key market.
That worked out at a per screen average of $1318, compared to the $35,055 per screen earned by teen movie and box office leader, Twilight.
Talkshow queen Oprah Winfrey has promoted the movie on her show.
Thanksgiving weekend is a traditionally tough weekend in the US, and Australia is also competing with the Reese Witherspoon comedy Four Christmases (renamed Four Holidays in Australia) and Transporter 3.
Australia is the most expensive movie ever made in this country, with a price tag of $197 million.
On its opening day in Australia on Wednesday, it made the respectable figure of $1.3 million.
The new James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, made $2 million on its opening day the week before.
That's just no good at all. It's not like it was a story that had an underlying international audience that was interested in it as a subject matter or content. It's not as if it was 'Lord of the Rings' where 2 generations of kids grew up acquainted with the story. It's not like it's a marvel comic either. Instead, the damn film is called 'Australia', and its title on the posters has a typeface that is so obscure and parochial that it wouldn't evoke a rat's fart overseas. It's no wonder it got soundly beaten by a James Bond movie, even on its home turf of Ostraya. It's as if they went into a casino, found the longest odds and plonked down their $197million on that one bet.
While her debonair Australia co-star Hugh Jackman has the media wrapped around his little finger, the same cannot be said for Nicole Kidman.
Her appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman is doing the rounds on YouTube and the results ain't pretty.
Call it baby brain, but Kidman appeared unable to string a sentence together. Things went from bad to worse when the veteran talk-show host insisted on talking about anything but Australia, repeatedly questioning Kidman about husband Keith Urban and New Zealand.
Kidman was forced to respond "I made a film called Australia - not New Zealand". Letterman quipped: "Right, are they making a film called New Zealand?"
The bumbled interview pales in comparison to the attacks from the overseas press on Our Nic. Leading the charge was Melanie Reid, a columnist with The Times in Britain.
"Australia the movie … has one huge problem: it stars Nicole Kidman," Reid wrote. "She's one of the most overrated actors in the world, a woman who has been the kiss of death in practically every movie she has starred in."
In a review, New York magazine savaged Kidman's performance. "In one scene, she haltingly sings Somewhere Over The Rainbow to an orphaned half-caste; but watching that big immovable forehead, I thought of another bit from The Wizard Of Oz: 'Oiiil caaan.' "
I've only seen the trailers, so I won't judge the film, but I did get the feeling she was miscast. She's looking too old and not sounding English enough. The time she might have gotten away with it was 10 years ago. The film actually needed a fresh face, but instead they cast Kidman who is young and fresh in surname alone these days. In this day and age of globalisation, you have to go find the right actor with the right background to get past the bullshit detectors in the savvy audience.
I mean, even in the same age group, wouldn't Kate Beckinsale or a Kate Winslet been a better choice? Apart from the fact that they're actually English and can act. When you think of the vast number of actresses out there who could have played this role, you start to think, maybe this was the single worst decision Baz Luhrmann made with this film.
Okay, time for a baseball metaphor: Casting Kidman for this role is a bit like, you're rebuilding a pitching rotation from scratch and you sign a league average pitcher who once fluked a Cy Young season to be your ace. It's a wing on prayer that that pitcher's going to turn into an ace but you're betting on hope (and track record). If she was like any of this year's free agent crop of pitchers, I'd say she was Bartolo Colon 2008. Sure he's won the Cy Young once, probably about the same time Kidman won her Oscar - which goes to show the voting members collectively know squat about what they see in either baseball or movies.
Bottom line, this picture needed somebody much better than Kidman.
To Cringe Or Not To Cringe
The brazen Australiana-on-parade approach of the film's trailer kind of had me sinking in my seat as I waited for the Bond Movie last week. It's not like the Bond movie was selling itself on how British it was - it was selling itself on Bond-being-Bond. The parts where it is Bond's charm that he's British, well that got established a long time ago that it's simply not an issue. People from all over the world like Bond because he's Bond - not because he's British. The thing with the trailer for Australia is that the Australia being portrayed on screen doesn't exactly include a lot of contemporary Australians today. Contrary to it being an inclusive film because it tries to deal with the Stolen Generations, the bottom line is, "my people" were the guys dropping bombs and blowing up navy ships. I didn't feel particularly included by that, I can assure you.
The point about Bond is that Bond is only a fragment of what constitutes the National Branding of the UK. There are the various Rock acts, the theatre, the films, the comedy, the TV shows all of which go to define a broader sense of the Gross National Cool and therefore the National Branding of the UK. Just how cool is this Gross National Cool of the UK? It's so cool German car makers have appropriated it to make their own version - the current best-seller Mini Cooper.
The problem with the National Branding that is being launched by Tourism Australia in tandem with the current 'Australia' movie is that it is inherently retrogressive, and hardly the stuff to send out to the world. Nicole Kidman (she who draws scathing reviews), together with Hugh Jackman (who was only ever really cool when he played the Canadian ex-pat Wolverine) present an Australia that harks back to the Utopian days of... the White Australia Policy and the Stolen Generations. The fact is, we don't have much of a National Branding because we don't make enough stuff that travels out to the world. Our history is too short, and we haven't put anywhere enough effort into our cultural projects to have a proper National Branding. Basically, our Gross National Cool is so low, it's probably in deficit - and we've been living on the credit of Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee for way too long.
Not that those two should define our masculinity or cultural epicentre, but they wouldn't be asked to be if there were more and others. Bond isn't the only British spy character. There's a whole genre of them, and they exist because of genre fiction. And collectively, they make up the spy part of the British Gross National Cool. What have we got? Nothing. Why? because we just haven't done genre fiction in spades. Instead we have 'Home and Away' and 'Neighbours' and 'Water Rats' defining our Gross National Cool, with this latest fiasco of a film to add to the catalogue. It's not that cool.
The point of all this, is that there isn't enough cultural cringe, simply because we don't have a culture industry. And in this light, perhaps it is a little too much to hoist onto Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman... hey, have you noticed they're all -men? ... to shoulder the responsibility of raising our Gross National Cool and National Branding.
This is the power of a franchise movie. It carries the legacy of former films into the new film's marketing. If there are 22 films and you liked 6-7 of them previously, then you're going to feel a strong pull to see that instead of the latest film about... Australia. Well, I live here so I can't get too excited about that, can I? Or should I? I'll find out next week when I'll attempt to go see it.
In the mean time, the eternal allure of a Bond movie is action, glamour, gorgeous women, bad villains who get their comeuppance, a Walther PPK and an Aston Martin. The world's the stage, the fun should be stratospheric. At least that's always the promise.
What's Good About It
It's like going to a wedding. The same things happen at each wedding but the actors change each time you go to a wedding. A Bond movie is a little like that. It satisfies the essential ritualistic plot requirements nicely: car chase, fist fight, foot race, shoot'em up, sneaking around, bedding lovely ladies, and a building goes up in flames in the climax. Aren't these staples of Bond movies?
They're all there. What's missing? 'Q' and gadgets, and you don't really miss them. There's even a dogfight in the air where Bond pilots a DC3 in this one. It's pretty 'out there'. Otherwise, the requisite content of mayhem takes place as if ticking boxes. It was missing a ski-chase, but it did have a sky-dive. It was missing submarines, satellites and snorkels and sharks but it had a love-interest from Russia.
There's a feeling that the MI6 in the current Bond Movies with Judy Dench as M has been brought up to date in their daily operations. Gone are the stuffy offices from previous Bond movies, and they sport fashionable metallic grey columns and contemporary modern architecture everywhere. I don't know if this is great, but it's good that there's a desire to bring the MI6 aspect into the films. With it comes a plethora of organisational demands on the character of Bond. These are all interesting, as they impact on his decision making.
What's Bad About It
The directing of action. It's godawful.
It's a recent trend where action sequences simply cut to the moment, but in doing so a lot of these actions don't make much spatial sense. One of the first sequences where Bond and an enemy agent Mitchell fall through a glass ceiling and end up hanging from scaffolds is an example, where you actually can't figure out where the fulcrum of the lever sits in the room. As a consequence, it looks like Bond suddenly grabs the gun in the nick of time (which you don't see) and shoots the guy while hanging upside down, without actually seeing the bad guy's action.
It seems to be a new trend where action directors simply abdicate their responsibility as directors and just ignore the basics in order to make it 'look' more exciting by adding confusion. It's a terrible ploy because it makes the action not only incomprehensible, but inscrutable to analysis - because there probably isn't any content. Left to right, right to left, up, down, it's all a jumble in most of these sequences. Some times you can't tell who Bond is punching or shooting.
Put it this way, the plot made sense, the action didn't. If the plot doesn't make sense, you can pin that on the writer, but if the action doesn't make sense, then you can pin that on the director. This film was borderline incoherent towards the end and pretty irrational and idiotic in parts - but that's par for the course for a Bond movie. Complaining about those is a bit like complaining that there's too much sugar in candy.
Now there's an idea. Diet Candy.
What's Interesting About It
It's one of the problems of movies about Superheroes that the first film that explains how they came to be who they are is less interesting than the sequels. So, 'Superman 2' is more interesting than 'Superman 1'; 'Dark Knight' is more interesting than 'Batman Begins'; 'Spiderman 2' is more interesting than 'Spiderman 1'; and the only exception is the Hulk franchise where both Hulk films are just oddly tedious.
Having said that, in each incarnation of Bond, the franchise simply just got to the action at hand. The only time it vaguely addressed the creation of Bond so to speak was the recent 'Casino Royale'. In this instance, the second film achieves nowhere near the intrigue of the first. Olga Kurylenko's Camille Montes is attractive, cool yet sassy, and very athletic, she is nowhere near as interesting as Vesper from the previous film. Rightfully, Vesper was the one woman Bond loved. In this film, we're just working through the process and progress of his revenge.
If Bond has a greater character arc, then I can't imagine there are more than 3-5 films they can make with Daniel Craig as Bond in this incarnation. That story is needing to be paid off. If the previous sins of the Bond franchise was the endless pilgrimage of mayhem with no character resolution, we're finding out the consequences of actually having a real character arc.
Pretty soon, Craig's Bond is going to have to uncover who these 'Quantum' villains are and find the equivalent of Blofeld and visit righteous vengeance upon their sorry posteriors. And that's it. beyond it remains the endless pilgrimage of mayhem as normal - i.e. it would be back to business of Bond. In a sense the Bond movies with Daniel Craig can't get slack on the character arc because they would lose their meaning. We know why Bond moves in a 'brutally efficient' way. He has to pay off that big motivation across the next couple of movies. After which, we'll ask, "then what?" Hopefully it will be a different world by then.
The Spy Genre Today
We keep seeing movies with spies in them, creating some sort of havoc or another. John LeCarre once described the perfect spy as little grey men with little charisma. Yet we keep seeing charismatic actors hurl themselves across adventures with reckless abandon as bullets fly everywhere and explosions colour the background as they do their charismatic stuff.It reminds me of the mid to late 1980s where you suddenly saw a resurgence of what can only be described as Pro-Military films, which culminated in the the Gulf War experience of 1991 where news reporters inserted themselves into the story as they reported 'live from Baghdad'. Pretty weird to think about, even today.
So here's my question: Do you think you're being recruited? Do you feel like you've been recruited to be James Bond for your cause, all these years?
I wonder how effective a real spy can be today, given that the conflict has split out of one racial hegemony. Part of the reason why spy fiction doesn't grow in say, Japan is because it's really hard to write how a Japanese agent might function in the West when it's easy to spot that your main character is Asian. It's hard enough for them to work in China. This is why they have ninja fiction instead, set in a time without westerners wandering around. The hegemony of culture allows the ninja to play the subterfuge.
Conversely it's hard to operate a James Bond in say, Japan without taking into account that the race+language+culture+custom gap puts him on the outer. In 'You Only Live Twice', Connery's Bond essentially gets around Japan with the help of Testuro Tamba's Tiger Tanaka as local guide.
The essence of the spy is to get closer to the object through subterfuge and appearing to be trustworthy. You sort of wonder how close a blonde James Bond (or even Leo DiCaprio's character in 'Body of Lies') could get to Osama bin Laden, ensconced deep in north Pakistan.
Yet, in a time when Europe and North America seems to have overcome its own inner turmoil - they're all allies now, the need for spies within the same hegemony must have diminished somewhat. That means they need spies to operate outside of the hegemony, and one wonders how effective this could really be, and if there really can be a film about spies going on into the future which feature hyper-caucasian dudes and dudettes at the centre of action.
It's not surprising Bond's current enemies seem to be some kind of Euro Terror mob.
What Are the Russian Communists Complaining About Olga For?
I just couldn't see it. Those people just want to complain until they die. Look, USSR is dead. Get over it. Olga's going where the money is. You want to make movies with Olga kicking bad capitalist American and English posteriors, you can fund your own movies and see how far you go. Knowing the Commies, they'll create a funding body with criteria that resembles what we have in Australia, and proceed to produce a string of money-losing, ideologically sound movies.
The 40-year-old actress - who recently expressed an interest in appearing in the British spy film franchise - is set to be offered a screen test for the follow up to Quantum of Solace which will star Daniel Craig as James Bond.