Bond films - the awards

With the epic year-long trawl through the Bond franchise coming to an end last Sunday evening it is high time that I made use of my time to make a list of my highlights and lowlights of the series.  And so with almost no further introduction - I present the winners of my awards for the Bond film franchise.

Best Bond:

Sean Connery.  It could so easily have been Roger Moore, but the raised eyebrows and super-hammy performances of his latter years in the role underlined how well Connery did to keep things away from cliche for so long.  Connery defined the role, Connery is the benchmark against whom all others are tested.  Connery wins.  No one can beat Connery at this - suave factor 10.

Best film:

A very hard category to call.  Re-watching them all again has given me a new appreciation of a series I thought I thoroughly knew.  I used to think Live and Let Die was great - now I'm not so sure.  Goldeneye was my first Bond experience - but now I've realised the plot makes little sense.  On the other hand I used to think The Man with the Golden Gun was trite, I've found a new appreciation of its straightforward plot and tense finale.

A few years ago I probably would have put You Only Live Twice in consideration - its quintessential Bond-ness defines the series and was the blueprint for Mike Myer's excellent parody Austin Powers.  But 50 years have aged it badly.  Its misogyny and casual racism would play very poorly to a modern audience I suspect.

As such the winner is... Octopussy.  I doubt that many Bond purists would quickly agree, but on a pure film level it is superb.  The plot is tense and has real danger to it.  The opening sequence is horrifying and the whole sequence culminating in Roger Moore's sad clown diffusing the atomic bomb is brilliantly paced - you almost let yourself believe that Bond could fail.  Maud Adams is one of the least meek Bond girls there ever was, and the bad guys are actually believable in their motives and actions (surprisingly rare for a Bond film).  Set aside the pointless and distracting references to tennis and brace for an occasional 'British Empire' moment - but aside from this Octopussy is one of the best scripted films in the series that gives Roger Moore a final hurrah before his reign as Bond quickly crashed downhill.  It's today's winner.  Tomorrow?  Who knows...

Best theme tune:

Goldfinger



It's almost impossible to look past Shirley Bassey's finest hour.  Sure, Live and Let Die is probably a better song, but every Bond theme song that's ever been written is and will always be compared against Bassey's gravely high notes layered against that wailing eerie brass section.  Tina Turner giving it both barrels in Goldeneye is probably the closest we've seen in more recent years, and Tom Jones does his best with Thunderball - but nobody does it better than Shirley.  Goldfinger, hands down.

Best Bond girl:

This is a very tough category, as it depends what you want from a Bond girl.  If you want a character who's Bond's match then you can't really look beyond Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies or Maud Adams as Octopussy.  If you want someone who's going to be a witty sassy sidekick then it's probably Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.  If you want a femme fatale, then it's clearly Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.

Having said all that, maybe you're just looking for someone who's straight-up gorgeous.  So I'm going for Rosamund Pike as Miranda Frost in the otherwise utterly awful Die Another Day.  So sue me.

Best Bond Moment:

So much to choose from, but in spite all the love I've handed out to the classic films of the 1960s and 1970s here so far - I'm going to plump for a moment from Skyfall.  After the awfulness of Quantum of Solace, the makers of Skyfall seemed in conciliatory mood and so after holding back for most of the film finally revealed a classic of Bond-gone-by, pulled out the steel strings and gave us Monty Norman's classic.  Oh how the cinema I was in did sigh with approval!

Low point:

Doubtlessly the nadir of the entire series is the moment in Moonraker when Bond is chased around Venice in a gondola - and some pigeons are so surprised that they do a double take.  After that point I'm surprised they made any more.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - a fable for an America lost

The start of a new year is always an inspirational time to remember that one can go to the cinema on a lazy Saturday afternoon.  With the awards seasons in swing and the Oscars around the corner, it is traditional for the 'good' films to be released at this time of year.

I would image that writer / Director Martin McDonagh is confident his latest film is worthy of such consideration.  Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (yes, that really is its name) is a story of right v wrong, forgiveness v revenge, light v dark and death v rebirth set against the foreground of post industrial rural America adrift in a world that has left previous certainties behind.  Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a woman who's daughter was raped and murdered less than a year prior to the film's opening.  The town's police have made almost no progress in investigating the murder, and have a better reputation for assaulting prisoners than solving crimes, so Mildred resolves to hire three disused billboards outside the town and express her frustration publicly.

In Trump's America this act takes on a political dimension mirroring the election of the 45th president, overwhelmingly voted for by disenfranchised post-industrial communities in the 'fly-over' states.  The vote felt like a scream of pain into the abyss.  Without any real policy or plan, Trump offered himself up as the anti-establishment candidate, a vote for him was billed as a cathartic vote against the Washington elites.  Like Trump, will Midred's billboards actually make any difference to those who so eagerly put them in place?  Probably not - but she doesn't seem to care.  To her, the act of defiance in the face of the establishment is an end in itself.

The establishment here are personified by the police, played with no small amount of swagger by Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell.  Harrelson is police chief Willoughby, initially the antagonist identified as the bad guy of the piece by Maldred's billboards, Rockwell is Dixon - the redneck racist who drinks, fights and lives with his oppressive mother.  Each seem trapped by the hopelessness of an America fallen into ruin.  Even though Harrelson's character is the more likeable and seems genuinely crestfallen at his own inability to find a killer, an illness allows him no peace or escape from Ebbing's terminal decline.

Like McDonagh's superb In Bruges, Three Billboards plays out like a modern fable.  Characters are possessed of great wisdom when required, characters are possessed of great stupidity when needed too.  Vengeance is shown to be something that's an incredibly strong force, but ultimately hollow and only part of a cycle that leads to more violence.  Each of Hayes, Willoughby and Dixon try to get vengeance over someone or something they perceive to have wronged them - each fail.  Each of those characters are reborn in a sense, perhaps seeing the world in a new way.  When the final scene fades to black with our our anti-heroes heading towards an uncertain future, the fact that they're questioning their motives at all shows how far they've come.  Three Billboards is a wonderful fairy tale that channels a lot about what has gone wrong in America in the 21st century.  It's a deeply moving on an emotional level, but never stops being blackly humourous as we are encouraged to laugh into the face of the abyss along with its characters.  An excellent start to the year in cinema.

Titanic - About time too

It took me a long time to get there, but give me a lazy Saturday evening in and a Netflix subscription and I'll end up watching anything.  For the first time in my life last Saturday, I watched Titanic.

Titanic is of course James Cameron's 1997 critically and commercially-acclaimed blockbuster.  The film launched the careers of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio into the A-list, from which they have never come down.  At the time of production it was the most expensive film ever made, and remains in the (inflation-adjusted) top three 20 years later.  Adjusted for inflation, Titanic is the 4th highest grossing film of all time.  It won 11 Oscars, and has been watched repeatedly by my girlfriend, my mother, my sister and I imagine by most of the rest of the world multiple times before I finally got around to it last weekend.  In short - I am going to assume you know what Titanic is.

You will know the plot too of course.  Kind of like Towering Inferno meets Romeo and Juliet, Titanic tells the story of high society's Rose (Winslet) and free spirited ne'er-do-well Jack (DiCaprio) meeting and falling in love aboard the doomed passenger liner.  Her family don't like it, but they don't care.  Then the story almost comes to a head with Rose' evil betrothed trying to kill Jack, then a massive iceberg tries to kill them all.  For 3 hours.

It's a strange film to watch.  Mostly because you know what's going to happen, and the fact that this knowledge renders large portions of the second act's plot irrelevant.  The film's third act is when the ship actually sinks.  This starts after 105 minutes - still over 100 to go.  The tone here is very strange.  On the one hand the film feels like Towering Inferno on a boat, with crashing waves, exploding windows, plates hurtling down from shelves and people falling to presumed far away deaths.  However on the other hand the film tries to remember that this was a real disaster, and upon its release survivors were still alive.  The cutting back and forth between genuine heartfelt tragedy and tragicomic disaster schlock is off-putting.

20 years on and the special effects still look amazing - the huge budget was not wasted and the strange tone does nothing to detract from one's ability to marvel at the technical achievement on screen.  Aside from a few moments of CGI early on when the ship is in harbour, the fact that real sets were used is a lesson to film makers of the current and future eras.  Cameron famously pushed the envelope with the creation of his movable replica of the ship, hundreds of extras, gallon upon gallon of water and his furious temper asserting that everything should be exactly the way he wanted.  The result is a technical marvel that in the current era of cheap CGI will rarely be attempted again.

The plot's main driver is Jack's fate.  We know that Rose survives the disaster as the whole story is told from the point of view of old Rose in the modern era.  Does Jack survive and live happily ever after with her?  Nope - but then you and everyone else in the world already knew that.  I'm not going to be a cynic here.  The love story is genuinely touching and well put-together.  Add in two incredibly charismatic actors, one insanely popular song layered over the soundscape, a huge great 'heart of the ocean' necklace metaphor, end on marriage in death, fade to white - bank $2 billion.  Easy right?  Well no, no it isn't.  Whatever you might of James Cameron, he is one of the most technically innovative film-makers of the last 30 years, and with Titanic he deserved his successes.

Well that's that gap in the film knowledge patched up.  Next?

Goldeneye - Watching it again is weird

My girlfriend and I have recently over the last 6 months or so been rewatching all of the Bond films.  It hadn't really occurred to me that I had anything interesting to write about this before last week, when we finally arrived at the first Bond film I actually remember coming out.

Goldeneye was released in late 1995 after a hiatus of 6 years during which time various legal wranglings and confusion over who would take over the production of the Bond franchise stalled any filming.  Bond was successful then as it remains now, and after the quick-fire production of the Bond movies during the Moore / Dalton era it was considered quite a set back that it took so long to transition to the next actor to play the iconic role.

However from my point of view at the time this wasn't the case.  License to Kill was released in 1989, when I was 10 and before I was really aware of grown up films.  By the time I was aware that James Bond existed, the films that were already out seemed like an ever-present canon.  Time stretches forever when one is in one's teenage years, and since no Bond film was released for my entire secondary school education (Goldeneye was released just after I started my A Levels) it felt like something otherworldly.  A new Bond film?  But Bond films are a thing that were made in the past, not now!  Weird how a teenage mind world isn't it?

Of course it wasn't just this.  There are other reasons Goldeneye felt so different.  Looking back and re-watching the series it is even more clear.  This was the first Bond film to be made in the post-Soviet era, the first film with Judi Dench as 'M', the first in which someone uses the internet.  It really feels like Bond films were entering a new era.

The other thing I noticed when watching Goldeneye for the first time in probably 15 years last week, is just how much the plot doesn't really make any sense.  We open in Monaco with Bond being tested by an MI6 stooge, he races a mysterious woman in a Ferrari who he then flirts with in classic Bond trope stylee.  Bond then follows this woman for no reason other than that he's a bit of a stalker, and then she's involved in the theft of a helicopter, which is then used in the theft of the 'Goldeneye' device.  There's no real reason for Bond to be involved in any of this at all.  It then comes to pass that the ultimate point of having this device is to steal money, which is sort of a bit small fry really.

Notwithstanding this though, Goldeneye is a well-made film.  We have memorable characters, well-directed action sequences and exactly the right balance between danger and tongue-in-cheek.  The product placement is there, but not out of control. It checks off the Bond tropes nicely and does very well to handle the transition into the post-soviet era.  Making 'M' a woman is a nice way to encapsulate Bond's dissonance from a world now not sure what to do with its Cold War era spies.  Where does Bond fit in now the Russians are on side and casual sexism isn't considered acceptable any more?

Plus on top of all this, Goldeneye was one of the first films to ever involve a video game tie-in.  Talk about making a giant leap into a new world.  Goldeneye definitely isn't the best Bond film, but it is none-the-less a classic.

Get Out - comedy / thriller / horror. All that and more.

Took a rare trip to the cinema back in April (and rarer still these days that I am blogging about it - even if it is 5 months later).  I had a free weekday evening and so I did that thing that I do enjoy doing, watching a horror film in the dark at night.  Better still when one has to walk home at midnight in the dark.  All about there scares innit.

Get Out stars Daniel Kaluuya as Chris, a guy who has been going out with Rose (Allison Williams) for a few months.  Naturally Rose wants Chris to meet her parents.  However he is reluctant.  She is white, he is black; Chris is cautious about how they will react.  Rose's reassurances about her parents' ludicrous liberalism put Chris mostly at ease, but his nagging doubts aren't about to vanish at any point.  This is America after all, and race is as much an issue today as at any point in its history.  What could possibly go wrong?

The film continues into 3 acts, each with a very distinct tone.  We go from borderline cringe-comedy, to spooky mystery, to slasher horror, with the end of each act clearly signalling the transition to the next.  Everything is tied together with a playfully comic undertone as Chris stays in touch with his friend (comic relief) Rod throughout his entire time with Rose's parents.  From this we pretty much know that nothing can really happen to Chris as he navigates his way through the minefield of parental hyper-liberalism - Texas Chainsaw Massacre this is not.  One could criticise this as undercutting the horror elements of the story, but I think it actually helps create a playful tone that reminds us that horror films are meant to be entertainment.  Carefully done, it is possible to create a light tone around sinister ideas.  Black comedy is after all a thing, and Get Out is nothing if not that (but with a lot more horror).

I distinctly remember Kaluuya starring as the lead in the best episode of Black Mirror's original run back in 2011, but I can't recall seeing him in anything else.  A strong performance in both these roles surely sets him up for more work in the future.

My opinion is that this isn't quite the game-changing thriller is was billed as in some parts earlier this year, but it is an extraordinarily good horror / thriller.  Of particular note is the film's tone, which is shifting but well-crafted to great effect.  I await with great interest to see what writer / director Jordan Peele gets up to next.

Moonlight - a story waiting to be told

Took a bit of time to get around to it, but I have now kept up the record I try to maintain - that of making sure I see the Academy's Best Film award winner as soon as possible.  You may recall that Moonlight was eventually awarded this year's top prize at the Oscars after an envelope malfunction in which L A Land had originally been read out as the winner.  Cue the internet going wild for about 90 seconds as accusations of white washing were slung at the Academy on social media, and then going wild for days afterwards as everyone struggled to work out how something as well-co-ordinated as the Oscars ceremony could have managed to get the wrong name into the hands of the person doing the reading.

Whatever.  We are where we are.  Moonlight won the Academy award for Best Film this year, and rightly so.  It presents a story that feels like it has been waiting to be told for some time, a story of sexual awakening in the unforgiving world of the inner city druglands of urban America.

The film shows us three vignettes from the life of Chiron, at first a young boy, then a teen, and finally a man grown.  As a boy he is timid, confused by his sexuality and in yearning for a role model.  As a teen he is isolated, insecure and picked-on.  As a man he is physically powerful but deeply unsure about who he is and how he fits into a world that isn't sure how to react to him.

Marshala Ali won an Oscar for his performance in the first of the vignettes, when Chiron in a small boy living with his drug-addicted mother in the rough end of his home city.  Ali plays local drug dealer Juan, a character that on the surface we think we know from endless portrayals of people like him in the media and film.  The reality is that he is confused and powerless as everyone else trying to find their place in the world.  One particular scene sees Chiron join in with dinner at Juan's place, a scene that makes a curveball out of our expectations of the characters.  It's perfect in its simplicity, able to completely hold our attention through the power of words.

The film's themes are mutli-layered but perfectly woven.  For me the main thrust was about role models and expectations of ourselves and out lives.  We may have role models who are good, bad, right or wrong, but ultimately we become our own person as a result of everything we see and feel.  And crucially we might turn out to be someone no one ever would have expected - witness the dramatic change in Chiron from skinny kid to muscled young man by the final act, no one meeting him for the first time could hope to guess at the timid and confused upbringing he suffered through.

Yes it is slow, yes the camera lingers on at the end of scenes, yes the silence tells a story - all reasons many people might find Moonlight boring.  But I think this is what makes the film perfect.  It isn't an easy thing to use silence to your benefit, but here it is like an extra character, bringing development where dialogue would just muddy the waters.  A worthy Oscar winner.

Prevenge - novel, gory, comic, brilliant

Catching up with my Lovefilm DVDs recently left me in possession of a rather odd film I couldn't remember adding to my list.  Prevenge comes with a synopsis that should have most people rolling their eyes: Ruth is a heavily pregnant woman who's unborn baby is telling her to kill people.  Gotta love High Concept.

Rather than being simply an excuse for B-movie gore, Prevenge is surprisingly satirical, while being every bit as darkly comic as you would hope.  Amongst the people Ruth murders are a pet shop owner, fitness fanatic, two potential flatmates and DJ Dan - the most disgusting excuse for a man to ever have lived.  Dan acts in just about the most outrageously sexist, childish and vomit-inducing way around Ruth as she pulls him in the shit bar where he's plying his trade.  The audience is encouraged to have little sympathy over his murder as he shouts at his elderly mum in his flat while throwing up into his wig.  Yup - that.

Therein lies much of Prevenge's satire and appeal - what woman hasn't endured horrible sexist 'banter' in a bar and wished they could stick the boot in (ok well Ruth uses a knife - but metaphors innit)?  When women get pregnant they change right?  We are told a mystical connection is formed between mother and baby right?  Well who says that has to be loving and caring - maybe the baby is the next Charles Manson in wating?!

The one person Ruth can't quite seem to kill is the person intrinsically linked to the implied reason for her homicidal rampage, and the reason the father of the baby isn't around.  The story-line veers wonderfully close to the heartwarming towards the end, as Ruth comes to see how her pregnancy is impacting her mental health.  However the film cannot quite bring itself to shift the focus back into the real world (we assume that in the real world Ruth would have been caught many months ago - such is her disregard for covering up her tracks), preferring instead to remain in the bafflingly surreal world of Ruth's actions.  It's a difficult story to wrap up after all, and by letting this bonkers world hang around until the final shot I think the writers did it extraordinarily well.

Alice Lowe stars as Ruth.  She was outstanding in Sightseers, but here she is also the writer and director.  The film was apparently shot in on a short timescale on a tight budget, a triumph for Lowe who's work I will be looking out for the in future.  I fully endorse Prevenge.  It has a tight and engaging script, and is comic, dark and satirical in all the right amounts.  It's exactly what you want to discover when you watch a small budget film from an unknown writer / director.  Go and see it.