Review: Kong Skull Island (2017)

Bearing in mind that I am the guy who re-watches The Lost World more often than I do the original Jurassic Park, I saw Kong Skull Island over the weekend and got exactly what I expected: a brainless, action-packed good time.

Is the film thin on the ground plot-wise and character development-wise? Yes, quite.

Are the only characters who can be said to have any personality or character arc Samuel L. Jackson's Packard and John C. Reilly's Marlow? Yes.

Indeed, Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty is correct to note that "there are about a half dozen too many characters to keep track of once the film gets underway." True -- I remember almost none of them except the two already mentioned plus John Goodman's Randa. Most egregiously, superb actors Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson are especially underused here -- they get barely any lines and are mainly around to pose attractively in the foreground of tableaux shots.

As David Palmer writes in his negative review,

If ever there was a blockbuster that was the definition of "studio picture" it’s this. Everything feels been there/done that, and even the scenes where Kong is Gronk-spiking helicopters manage to feel lifeless and almost completely devoid of joy. Slow-mo is overused to the point of eye-rolling and [director Jordan] Vogt-Roberts doesn’t seem to give any character direction to his actors.

I agree with all this and yet, unlike Palmer, I thoroughly enjoyed Kong Skull Island. I knew what I was in for and had no expectation that the film would be anything more than what it is: a big, dumb, action movie in which a giant gorilla beats hell out of a bunch of stuff. Nashawaty calls Skull Island "a big, loud, and kinda silly monster mash that feels like a throwback to the late-‘90s Bruckheimer era of gung-ho, budgets-be-damned macho adventure" and I agree.

Skull Island's soundtrack is riddled with hackneyed, over-used Vietnam-era classic rock tracks: The Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today," Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," and of course CCR's "Run Through the Jungle." As Nashawaty remarks, the film's song choices evince "lack of care" and "have as much imagination as a Time-Life Songs of the ‘70s set." I found these choices annoying.

Yet the movie's weirdest musical choice -- which constitutes my single biggest complaint about Kong: Skull Island overall -- is its use of Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" right near the end. That song forever belongs to the apocalyptic montage at the end of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964). To use it in any other movie -- especially as used here, as a straight-faced piece of WWII nostalgia -- ends up feeling macabre and off-putting due to that unavoidable intertextual reference. These filmmakers should have known better.*

My other big problem with Skull Island is its bald-faced Orientalism in portraying the native tribe with whom Reilly's Marlow coexists. Between Marlow's Heart of Darkness-evoking surname and the decision to have the natives never speak -- they just silently nod and gesture throughout -- the filmmakers obviously mean to signal that they are "in on the joke," that they are re-hashing these racist, imperialist tropes knowingly, with a nudge and a wink. Yet the tropes are still damaging, and the film's racist, one-dimensional depiction of the 1970s Skull Islanders is distractingly offensive. They could have been done so differently.

In conclusion, I do not know if I will ever watch Kong Skull Island again, but there is a vastly greater chance of that happening than me ever watching Peter Jackson's overlong, draggy, bombastic, and boring King Kong remake again (believe me, I've tried). The difference lies in aspiration, not execution. Both 2005's Kong and 2017's Skull Island are well-executed blockbusters. But the 2005 film is trying too hard to be an "epic," serious homage to the 1933 original, so despite its great casting and better script, it is, for the most part, slow-paced and mind-numbingly boring.

Skull Island, in contrast, wastes no time getting to the island and the Kong fight scenes, so is a much more worthwhile investment of my time and entertainment dollar. I recommend it for what it is: blockbuster thrills held together with a stupid plot and flat characters -- but with the common decency not to pretend to be otherwise. Its honesty in this regard, which reminds me of Pacific Rim (2013), is refreshing.  

King Kong sez: "Eat my shorts, Peter Jackson."

--
* Unless, of course, they were misguidedly trying to "steal the song back" from Kubrick on purpose, a hubristic and futile attempt which utterly backfires. How can anyone who has ever seen Strangelove forget that sequence and song?

Review: The Jungle Book (2016)

I saw Disney's live-action version of The Jungle Book directed by Jon Favreau, and overall I was visually impressed, if disappointed as a political progressive and a feminist.

To start with the good stuff, though, the film's digital effects are astounding, its script and direction quite capable, and while there were no real surprises -- the film telegraphs every development quite clearly -- I had a good time watching the film in the theater.

As others have noted, The Jungle Book's single greatest achievement is its computer generated images (CGI) of its various animal characters. I have written and presented on the topic of CGI animals in film, and just last year had a discussion with several film scholars about how very few digital animal performances in film manage to cross the "uncanny valley." But The Jungle Book's creatures look quite believable, setting a new high bar for realistic-looking CGI animals in major studio releases.

As Rajeev Balasubramanyam insightfully notes, the new version attempts to deracinate and deterritorialize its Rudyard Kipling source material, taking a stalwart of British imperialist literature and turning it into a kind of bland, globalized, Indiana Jones-esque theme park ride.* As Balasubramanyam writes:

While the CGI-rendered jungle looks very real, it does not feel much like India, or indeed any single place. Favreau’s jungle is more of a global one, resembling a composite of familiar scenes from The Lion King then Avatar, and then perhaps Arizona, or Rajasthan, or the Sahara. Anything that smacks of cultural specificity has been eliminated

I agree with Balasubramanyam's reading and would add that the film makes clear its deterritorialized position from the very start. The opening Disney logo comes up, including that aerial shot that swoops backward over the ramparts of the iconic Disney castle as "When You Wish Upon a Star" plays. Then it continues its track back under an archway of jungle flora to reveal the words "The Jungle Book" etched in stone, and finally pans right across a waterfall to establish the film's "jungle" setting. That is, there is no fade to black or cut of any kind between the "magic kingdom" corporate logo and The Jungle Book's establishing shot. It is all one continuous take. The movie literally takes place inside a Disney theme park. It is neither a real jungle nor even a strictly real place, it is Disneyland or Walt Disney World.

It is also a completely homosocial, males-only environment. Before seeing The Jungle Book, I braced myself for lots of racism and imperialism, and that stuff is surely present in the film. For example, the main "good" animals, such as Baloo (Bill Murray) and Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), are all white-sounding and/or British, while the film's chief villain, Shere Khan, is one of the few creatures voiced by a black (albeit British) actor, Idris Elba.

Yet what really bowls me over is the film's sexism. There are only two speaking female roles in The Jungle Book: Mowgli's angelic, fiercely loyal wolf mother Raksha (Lupita Nyong'o) and the vile sexual seductress of a snake, Kaa (Scarlett Johansson). That's it. Devoted, perfect mother or slithering, murdering whore. Yay, Disney!

Kaa sez: "I want to fuck-- I mean eat -- you, my delicious little morsel."

In addition -- and perhaps this is somewhat unavoidable when making a film of this kind -- I feel that there are several shots of Mowgli (Neel Sethi) running around and posing in The Jungle Book that folks like Jared Fogle would jerk off to. And if the cinematography doesn't already encourage thoughts of pedophilia and sexual predation, Mowgli's scene with Kaa makes the sexual stakes of his adventures clear. This reboot of The Jungle Book franchise features no human female love interest for Mowgli -- that is surely being saved for the sequel -- but Kaa's erotically charged scene reminds us that sexual women are dangerous beings who threaten to eat us alive. Better to remain in a state of immature arrested development, safely ensconced with our male friends. Thank God Baloo the bear shows up just in time to pulverize that slutty snake! (What is this, one of those fucked-up animated sequences from The Wall?)

Anyway, all in all, I recommend that you catch The Jungle Book in a theater if you like state of the art special effects or want to see a sexist, racist, but superficially enjoyable and extremely well-made movie about a boy's adventures with talking animals in a jungle environment that feels more like the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom mining cart chase than it does any real-world locale.

For that opening long take in which we are drawn into a virtual Disney theme park is the most meaningful shot in this entire movie. That first shot carries The Jungle Book's primary message: that we will all be watching Disney products for the rest of our lives, and after we die, our descendants will do the same. Like Mowgli, none of us is ever going to grow up and none of us is ever getting out of the jungle. We live in Disney's world now. Our great-grandchildren will pay sixty five space credits to see 4D versions of Star Wars Episode Twenty Six and Captain America: Infinity Civil Galactic Guardians of the Galaxy Meets Valhalla and Jungle Book 9: Mowgli Carter of Mars.

That's us, dangling from the limb. Disney is going to eat us.

UPDATE 5/2/2016: It took a day for this to sink in, bit I have realized another annoyingly retrograde aspect of The Jungle Book's shitty sexism: the film uses the word "man" to refer to humankind. Mowgli is a "man-cub," the village is the "man-village," etc. I assume it's the same phrasing used in the original Kipling texts, but that was 1894, this is fucking 2016 for Christ's sake. Even Star Trek: The Next Generation made the change from the original series' iconic yet sexist opening phrase "To boldly go where no man has gone before" to "To boldly go where no one has gone before" way back in 1987. Get with it, people!

--
* For a deeper dive into the differences between Kipling's original stories, the 1967 animated version, and this latest one, check out this insightful post.

EW #12: The Searchers (1956)

The Searchers' Ethan Edwards is "rootless, homeless. Like the Indian corpse whose eyes he shoots out, 'he travels between the winds.' There is no starting over for Ethan, no erasure of the past, no reinvention of self, no America." 
-- Jim Kitses, Horizons West pp. 94, 97

John Ford's The Searchers is one of the best Hollywood Westerns ever made, and also one of the best and most culturally significant American films ever made.* It well deserves high placement on any "Top Films" list including Entertainment Weekly's. It makes sense to me that The Searchers would be EW's (or anyone's) highest-ranked Western. As Owen Gleiberman explains, "That John Ford’s dark Western The Searchers (#12) ended up as high as it did testifies to our feeling that the film’s darkness was ahead of its time – that the movie now seems front and center in the culture more than many older Westerns."

Set in "Texas 1868," The Searchers tells the story of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a Confederate veteran who returns to the frontier homestead of his brother, Aaron (Walter Coy), Aaron's wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan), and their children, Lucy, Ben, and Debbie. A young man of mixed blood named Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) also lives with the family. We learn that Ethan rescued the infant Martin from a massacre, but now he doesn't like to talk about it and seems uneasy around him. Martin calls Aaron "uncle" and Martha "aunt" but Ethan insists the young man address him as "Ethan" rather than "uncle."

Martha's marriage to Aaron is passionless. Several early scenes -- hell, the film's opening shot! -- clearly show that it is she and Ethan who are truly in love, though this is not (verbally) acknowledged. "Is Ethan punished for his covetousness. or for a sin of omission?" Jim Kitses asks. The film never answers this question or explicates the Ethan and Martha backstory, but Kitses is correct to assert that "this wrong marriage [between Martha and Aaron] inflects the tragic action of The Searchers." **

Soon after Ethan's return, Aaron, Martha, and Ben are massacred and Lucy and Debbie kidnapped by a Comanche war party led by Scar (German-American actor Henry Brandon). Thus the titular search begins as Ethan and Martin spend the whole movie -- seven years -- looking for Lucy and Debbie, tracking the elusive Comanche war band who took them.

I won't reveal details of the film's plot twists or ending, but suffice to say that Ethan goes further and further off the rails as events of the film progress. He is a violent, ruthless man to begin with then actions like barging impatiently out of a funeral service, shooting out the eyes of a dead Comanche, and luring a minor profiteer to a brutal shooting death reveal Ethan to be borderline psychotic.

Scenes depicting community rituals like dances, weddings, and funerals hold a place of special importance in John Ford's westerns . . . 

. . . therefore when Ethan Edwards abruptly storms out of this one, it signifies that he is a lost soul, beyond redemption or recuperation, a quality rare to find in a Ford protagonist.

Ford biographer Joseph McBride calls The Searchers "a film of warring dualities" that "gets to the heart of many of the unresolved contradictions that make the Western genre such a rich field for exploring American history and mythology." I think The Searchers gets at the core of those mythological and historical contradictions partly because it occupies the cusp between the Hollywood western's classical and revisionist phases.

You see, most genres or film cycles move through a succession of three broad phases: the formative, the classical, and the revisionist. (Some theorists like to add a fourth phase, the parodic, but I see the mode of parody as already integrated into the revisionist phase, so screw that.)

The formative phase is when the genre does not yet fully exist -- it is being shaped by a process of certain types of films being released, certain patterns and combinations becoming popular, and more of those types of films being made. Westerns have a long history: since some of the first 1890s Edison actualities were of wild west show stars like Annie Oakley, one could say the western genre was nascent in motion pictures from their earliest inception. The Great Train Robbery (1903), one of the first widely seen multi-shot narrative films, is also a western. Therefore one could say that the western's formative phase was also the formative period of Hollywood narrative cinema writ large.

The classical phase of the Hollywood western coincides with the rise of the sound western. Synchronized sound arrived in Hollywood right at the dawn of the '30s, and John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) is usually cited as the inaugural movie of the western's classical period, which lasts through the '40s and into the '50s.  

John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939), the film that launched him to stardom. Stagecoach inaugurates the Hollywood western's "classical" phase. 

Released in 1956, The Searchers is one of the first revisionist westerns -- or at least a proto-revisionist one.

Many film critics and historians cite Ford's own myth-deconstructing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) or Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first major "spaghetti" western, as the tipping point between the sound western's classical and revisionist phases. I can get behind that. Yet revisionist tendencies are present in certain 1950s westerns including The Searchers, Johnny Guitar (1954), and Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950), The Furies (1950), and The Naked Spur (1953).

Revisionist westerns explicitly refer back to, satirize, rework, deconstruct, and/or sometimes radically break with the conventions established in the genre's classical phase. In revisionist westerns, the protagonists' motives get darker, more ambiguous, and less heroic (as in The Searchers, The Naked Spur, and The Wild Bunch). In revisionist westerns, the callous and brutal treatment of indigenous people is at least sporadically questioned (as in The Furies, Cheyenne Autumn, and Little Big Man). Sometimes women play unexpectedly non-traditional or non-domestic roles (as in The Furies, The Naked Spur, and Johnny Guitar). Most revisionist westerns play the classical conventions knowingly or for laughs in ways designed to parody, question, and/or critique them.

In the end, The Searchers walks a fine line between classical and self-reflexive tendencies. Broadly speaking, I would say it is classical in its aesthetic choices (artfully constructed visual tableaux, beautiful Monument Valley scenery, a symphonic musical score) but revisionist in its deconstruction of the character of Ethan Edwards.

McBride describes as "subversive" the particular way in which The Searchers

turns the concept of Western heroism inside out, showing the lone gunman who acts in the name of nascent civilization as a warped, destructive force. Martin gains in stature as the search progresses, becoming a truly modern man, whereas Ethan is diminished, trapped in the destructive patterns of the past. The man with mixed blood, not the white supremacist, is the 'intrinsic-most' American.† 

White supremacist though he may be, Edwards represents both a career high performance for John Wayne and an important iteration of the American frontiersman archetype. This type originates with James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, best known as protagonist of The Last of the Mohicans. He is a white character who "goes native," appropriating an indigenous ethnicity with which he identifies. He traverses the boundaries between the indigenous culture he appropriates and the dominant, Euro-American culture to which he also belongs. The American wilderness hero is, in ecocritic David Ingram's words, "close to wild nature and to the naturalized values of force and violence it represents" but at the same time functions as "an agent of the commercial development of that wilderness." †† That is, he travels and identifies with indigenous people but sells them out to the white man anyway.

In his appropriation of indigenous culture, his tracking skills, and his ambivalence toward Euro-American civilization, The Searchers' Ethan Edwards resembles Natty Bumppo, James Fenimore Cooper's woodsman hero.

Joan Dagle writes specifically of The Searchers' complex protagonist that

Ethan's knowledge of Indian culture, including Comanche culture, is extensive and allows him to stay on Scar's trail. More interesting, however, is his identification with Indian culture, an identification which complicates the reading of Scar and Ethan as racial antagonists. [Ethan's] intimate knowledge of Indian beliefs is hard to account for. How does he come to know so much, including religious beliefs, about a people he hates? †††

For a guy who hates the Comanche so damn much, Ethan Edwards sure knows a lot about their customs, beliefs, and funerary practices.

By acting out his racially motivated vengeance, Ethan Edwards shows us the ugly, imperialistic violence that underlies the very notion of the Western protagonist, the very notion of John Wayne. Edwards is both the apotheosis and the deconstruction of the Wayne persona.‡ By contrast, Wayne's role as John T. Chance in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, while beautifully nuanced, is a nostalgic return to the good old days; his Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a ghost, the last of a dying breed, an elegy for the Wayne/Edwards archetype and its foundational role in building the myth of the West.

I have written before of the "depth and beauty" of John Ford's work. Ford is a director of surprising subtlety and tenderness when it comes to the depiction of human emotions. For all his long affiliation with the western, Ford is fundamentally a melodramatic director interested in the emotions of longing, nostalgia, sadness, and loss (unlike Hawks, who is more action-adventurish and bromance-y). Ford is mainly a visual director and is finely attuned to the nuances of love, affection, and relationships, especially when played out compositionally and gesturally. Hence the tenderness of his love scenes, and the real payoff of any well-made John Ford film: for all their superficial formality, they are emotionally resonant and deeply satisfying.

Beautifully composed shots like this one exemplify John Ford's show-don't-tell style of filmmaking. For me, this composition suggests that for Ethan, finding Debbie (who is running down the hill in the background) is a matter of the head, but for Martin it's a matter of the heart and guts.

I understand that for some of my readers, The Searchers' status as a western and/or the presence of John Wayne in the lead role dampens your interest in seeing it. Yet if I were to recommend only one western for the non-fan to check out, it would be this one, Rio Bravo, or The Naked Spur. So The Searchers is in my top three westerns -- I cannot recommend it highly enough.

UPDATE 5/19/2016: BFI's Christina Newland calls The Searchers the "Best Place to Start" if you want to explore the 1950s psychological western, a grouping that also includes Mann's The Naked Spur and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar.

Bonus Afterthought: There is an explicit link between The Searchers and Taxi Driver (itself #42 on EW's Top 100 list). Martin Scorsese famously claimed that The Searchers should have included a scene in which we see Scar and Debbie together during their “married” life. When he and Paul Schrader were making Taxi Driver, which borrows many structural and tonal elements from Ford's influential western, they included such a scene between Sport and Iris. Their Taxi Driver "Scar scene" stands out as one of the few in the film that doesn't unfold from Travis Bickle's point of view.

Martin Scorsese discussing Taxi Driver circa 1997.

Film critic Robin Wood says of The Searchers' missing "Scar scene," which would have spelled out "Debbie's relationship to Scar and Comanche life," that

It is a scene Ford could not conceivably have filmed, and Scorsese and Schrader are quite right in implying (I presume) that its absence definitively highlights the cheating, evasion, and confusion that characterize the last third of his movie.  

Wood calls The Searchers an archetypal "incoherent text," a film that does not quite know what it wants to say, a work "in which the drive toward the ordering of experience has been visibly defeated." Yet as Wood says of Taxi Driver and other "incoherent" films of the 1970s, The Searchers is a much more interesting movie precisely because of its ambiguities, abrupt turns, confusions, and contradictions.‡‡

Analogously, Joan Dagle sees The Searchers' circling, non-linear plot structure as integral to the whole point the film is trying to make: that hate and vengeance are inward-focused and self-destructive. Indeed, The Searchers documents Ethan's racism- and rage-fueled spiral into his own personal hell. It ends with him cast adrift, left with nothing once his fury is spent. Ethan -- and the film -- go nowhere.

Yet of course it goes somewhere: deep into the dark recesses of the psyche of a racist, reactionary white man and the community he both saves and plagues. Head-on into the contradictions and incoherences at the heart of the violent American frontier myth. Head-on into America's bloody, racist past (and present).

This guy, whose analysis is otherwise pretty sharp, feels comfortable comparing The Searchers with Taxi Driver in order to declare the latter "simply a better film" than Ford's masterpiece. For me, these two films, while structurally and thematically similar, are far too different -- in period of release, in genre, in tone -- to be comparatively evaluated.

--
* My short list of most essential Hollywood westerns includes Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, High Noon, Rio Bravo, The Naked Spur, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven. I would also include "spaghetti" westerns like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, plus postmodern / revisionist entries El Topo, Dead Man, The Tracker, Meek's Cutoff, and, from what I hear, Slow West.
** Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (New Edition) (BFI, 2007) p. 94.
*** McBride, Searching for John Ford (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001) p. 558.
† McBride p. 560, 564.
†† Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (U. of Exeter Press, 2000) p. 74. Ingram offers an extended discussion of the American wilderness hero type on pp. 74-77 of Green Screen, acknowledging his debt to Richard Slotkin's work in Gunfighter Nation:The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Atheneum, 1992).
††† Joan Dagle, "Linear Patterns and Ethnic Encounters in the Ford Western" in John Ford Made Westerns, ed. Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein (Indiana Univ. Press, 2001) p. 122.
‡ In terms of film noir, the comparable performance, the one that goes to such extremes that it exposes the grim, paranoid, ideologically retrograde conventions and assumptions underpinning its genre, is probably Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
‡‡ Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond (Columbia UP, 2003) pp. 47, 42.

James Bond Franchise Review Part Two

This is the second of two posts reviewing the first twenty-one James Bond films. See also my introductory thoughts about James Bond.

THE MEDIOCRE JAMES BOND FILMS

Donald Pleasence as Blofeld in You Only Live Twice.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

I hate to put any Connery-as-Bond film on the mediocre list, and You Only Live Twice, the fifth entry in the franchise, almost deserves to be at the bottom of the Great list. It has one of the best theme songs ever, the very best villians’ lair (a hollowed-out volcano!), and one of the best fistfights in any Bond film (the fight in the Osato Chemical office building twenty-five minutes into the movie). Yet I am forced to agree with other critics who contend that the pacing of You Only Live Twice is a little slow. And perhaps Connery’s weariness of the Bond role is beginning to show here: by the time the shooting of this film was underway, Connery had announced that he would not star in another Bond picture. Indeed, he did not participate in the sixth Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, though he was wooed back to Bond two more times: for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 and again in 1983 for the Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again.*

Live and Let Die (1973)

Although it is dated and/or marred by its Blaxploitation-influenced depiction of African Americans as heroin pushers and savage voodoo practitioners, Live and Let Die nevertheless counts as a fairly excellent Roger Moore James Bond film. It has one of the best Bond theme songs ever. The speedboat chase and the sequence at the alligator farm are thrilling and iconic Bond moments. In terms of its supporting cast, most notable is Yaphet Kotto as Kananga / Mr. Big, who is one of the best actors ever to play a Bond villain, although his onscreen motives in this film are a little ridiculous, hackneyed, and unclear. Maybe Live and Let Die's biggest weakness is its leading man: this film constitutes Roger Moore’s debut in the role of Bond, and Moore is still finding his way into the role. Thus the film is not as laden with slapstick humor as its immediate sequels, The Man with the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me, though it does successfully go for the laughs during the “flying lesson” sequence and when it introduces Louisiana Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James). Yet the pacing of the first half of Live and Let Die is surprisingly slow, picking up and staying lively only from the double-decker bus chase onward, after the one-hour mark. Nevertheless, this is a Bond film I return to with some regularity, and all in all, I am forced to call the imperfect Live and Let Die a worthwhile and largely entertaining Bond adventure.**

British comedian Rowan Atkinson joins Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again.

Never Say Never Again (1983)

While a bit lengthy and certainly no match for the film (Thunderball) of which it is a remake, Never Say Never Again is nevertheless pleasurable because Sean Connery is so damned good in the leading role. After twelve years of Moore’s parodic take on the Bond character, it is a treat to have the tough, believable Connery back as 007, and the film has many excellent sequences, most notably the clinic fight early in the film and the motorcycle chase midway through. Barbara Carrera particularly shines as villianess Fatima Blush, and I am a big Rowan Atkinson fan so enjoy his appearance here as bumbling government liason Nigel Small-Fawcett. All in all, a fun if imperfect farewell from the best Bond actor there ever was.

The Man with the Golden Gun's "duel between titans" -- Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) squares off against James Bond (Roger Moore).

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Yes, The Man with the Golden Gun is a decidedly “cheesy” James Bond movie. The sequence where Bond fights an entire school of martial arts practitioners is flatly ridiculous, as are the stupefyingly silly antics of Bond’s “helper,” Agent Mary Goodnight (Britt Ecklund). However, I return to this film again and again for one central reason: Christopher fuckin’ Lee. There is a reason Lee played Count Dracula so successfully in the 1950s Hammer horror films, and the answer is that he is a fine actor with an awesome, deep voice, a scary onscreen presence, and thus he totally rocks as super-assassin Francisco Scaramanga in this film. Lee’s performance and the script’s framing of the conflict between Scaramanga and Bond as a duel between titans, two world-class professional killers with few peers to challenge them, brings a gravitas and excitement to the climactic duel between them that has never really been matched in other Bond films. As Lee himself put it, Scaramanga is “the dark side of Bond.” Further, The Man with the Golden Gun showcases superb location use, for Scaramanga’s island hideout — shot on location in Phuket Province, Thailand – is one of the most beautiful and memorable of all Bond villain hideouts, second only to Blofeld’s volcano lair in You Only Live Twice. Lastly, along with The Spy Who Loved Me, The Man with the Golden Gun qualifies as the rare Bond film where the writing and tone mesh well with Roger Moore’s gently parodic take on James Bond, thus producing a harmonious if somewhat campy whole. I find myself returning to this one again and again, not least to hear the film’s funky 70’s theme song. Check it out!

Drax and Jaws are friends in Moonraker.

Moonraker (1979)

Explicitly produced to capitalize upon the popularity of Star Wars (1977), this Roger Moore Bond film goes way over the top: it ends with a laser battle aboard Drax’s orbital space station. The producers knew they were risking making even Roger Moore look silly in this, yet it more or less pays off: Drax is one of the franchise’s most sinister villains, and who doesn’t love Jaws (Richard Kiel), the famous Bond assassin appearing here in his second and final appearance in the franchise? Further, the excesses of Moonraker led the Bond producers to tone down the gadgets and bombast for the next, much darker Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only. My biggest complaint about Moonraker is its pacing — it feels a bit slow and bombastic to me. But Drax and Jaws keep me coming back, at least once in a while.

The always delightful Robbie Coltrane as Valantin Zukovsky in the underrated Bond picture The World is Not Enough.

The World is Not Enough (1999)

Some people would disagree with me here, and rate The World is Not Enough below the other Brosnan Bonds, including Tomorrow Never Dies and the ridiculous Die Another Day. But there is something in the plot and tone of this well-directed Bond picture that really works for me. There is a depth of characterization and an intensity in the acting, particularly from Sophie Marceau (as oil heiress Elektra), Robert Carlyle, and even Brosnan himself. In fact, I think this film documents Brosnan’s best portrayal of Bond. Furthermore, the twisted relationship between Elektra and Renard, not to mention its impact on M (Judi Dench), is handled with a sophistication and pathos rare to see in James Bond films. Michael Apted’s direction and an ambitious script come together in a really coherent package, and while Denise Richards’ (Christmas Jones) acting may not be the greatest the Bond franchise has ever seen, it is not enough to seriously detract from this well-crafted and, dare I say, most thoughtful and emotionally rich of all the (pre-Daniel Craig) Bond films.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Stellar action sequences, particularly the Saigon building escape and motorcycle / helicopter chase that take place an hour and sixteen minutes into Tomorrow Never Dies, cannot save this second Brosnan outing from overall mediocrity. Despite an interesting premise, the villian Carver (Jonathan Pryce) is a bit too overplayed to be effectively scary, and Michelle Yeoh, who shines during the fight sequences, is pretty flat elsewhere and she and Brosnan lack chemistry. Two standout supporting performances include Teri Hatcher as the voluptuously alluring Paris Carver and the weird-looking Vincent Schiavelli as Dr. Kaufman, but neither of these two characters live long enough to provide much ongoing help. However, this is a very well-paced film overall, and the aforementioned motorcycle/helicopter chase is one of the most breathtaking and well-executed action sequences in the entire Bond oeuvre -- well worth a look!

Christopher Walken as Max Zorin in A View to a Kill.

A View to a Kill (1985)

This film is preposterous in large part due to Roger Moore’s tiredness in and with the role of James Bond. Moore wanted to quit the Bond cinematic franchise after For Your Eyes Only but the producers enticed him back two more times. And although the ever-chipper Moore gives it a good parting effort, you can kind of tell that he is finished with the role. However, it is A View to a Kill’s supporting cast that makes this film a stupidly delightful watch. Christopher Walken as Max Zorin, Grace Jones as May Day, and Patrick MacNee (of British “Avengers” fame) as Tibbett really bring their segments of this picture to life. I further admit that I really like the fire-engine / car chase through the streets of San Francisco that happens three-quarters of the way through the movie, and of course the Duran Duran title song fucking RAWKS! Hmm, is this movie so bad it’s good? I definitely enjoy this picture more than I feel I should given that I’m placing it so low on my list. I certainly watch it at least as often as I watch Moonraker.

THE REALLY BORING JAMES BOND FILMS***

Robert Davi and Benicio del Toro: two of the most entertaining elements of Licence to Kill. 

Licence to Kill (1989) 

I used to think this second and final Timothy Dalton Bond film was even worse than its predecessor, The Living Daylights, but upon reviewing it recently [in 2008] for this Guide, I have been forced to admit that it’s not as bad as I remembered it. In fact, it is far faster paced than The Living Daylights, and is chock full of lean-and-mean fights and well-orchestrated action sequences. There is also some good supporting cast here, like the very attractive Carey Lowell as CIA agent Pam Bouvier, Robert Davi as the diabolical if stereotypical villain Sanchez, and a very young Benicio del Toro as Sanchez’s twisted henchman Dario. The opening and closing theme songs, “Licence to Kill” and “If You Ask Me To,” are excellent as well. Yet I still have trouble sitting through the fucking ridiculous truck stunts near the end of the film (an 18-wheeler doing fucking side wheelies? Come on!), and ultimately it is Dalton’s somewhat strange fit in the role of Bond that keeps this film from rising above the level of dull and dumbshit. But Licence to Kill may be semi-decent dumbshit — occasionally enjoyable as a guilty dumbshit pleasure.

Die Another Day (2002)

This film exemplifies the furthest the Bond franchise has ever gone into the realm of high-tech gadgetry and science fiction-esque premises, barring Moonraker. But while Moonraker embraced its own over-the top silliness (recall that the notorious assassin Jaws finds true love — in space no less! — in Moonraker), Die Another Day seems to try way too hard to take itself seriously. So, despite breathtaking action sequences, such as the clinic raid, the fencing duel (wow!), and the climactic cargo plane fight, and despite semi-decent chemistry between Brosnan as Bond and Halle Berry as American agent Jinx, this film always feels too bombastic and over-determined to me, one I enjoy sometimes and cannot bear other times. I know some Bond fans defend this film and I admit that the first time I saw it in the theater I thoroughly enjoyed it and was more or less blown away. But on increasingly disappointing repeat viewings I digested the fact that there’s an invisible car in this movie, and hence its well-deserved placement in the “dumbshit” category.

This scene from The Living Daylights, set in Vienna, pays homage to iconic imagery from Carol Reed's film noir classic The Third Man (1949).

The Living Daylights (1987)

This one really earns the “boring” label. The worse of Timothy Dalton’s two contributions to the Bond series, this film is too serious in tone, too long in running time, and too desperately slow in pacing at points to be much fun as Bond films go. It’s not that the producers and Dalton himself don’t give this thing a good try, and some of the supporting cast in The Living Daylights — particularly Joe Don Baker as Whitaker and Maryam d’Abo as Kara — are really enjoyable. In the end, while I like Dalton and find him charismatic and I want him to succeed in the role, he nevertheless doesn’t quite feel like Bond to me. Maybe after six years of Reagan and Thatcher, etc., the Bond premise was just wearing a bit thin by the late 80s. Maybe the public so badly wanted Pierce Brosnan in the role that Timothy Dalton could never have fulfilled anyone’s expectations at that time. In any case, the whole Dalton-as-Bond business is an unfortunate mismatch; Dalton is simply not quite at home as Bond, despite his talent. And when Bond doesn’t work, the Bond film doesn’t work, especially when it's this damned slow and somber. So fuck The Living Daylights. (But on the Dalton-is-talented note, make sure to see him in the awesome 1980 Flash Gordon movie.)

Octopussy (1983)

The single worst James Bond film, Octopussy is slow-paced, convoluted, and full of boring characters. The film is so lackluster that even the usually high-spirited Roger Moore cannot breathe life into it. A shit-pile.


THE SEVEN BEST JAMES BOND THEME SONGS
1. “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me.
2. “You Only Live Twice” from You Only Live Twice.
3. “Diamonds Are Forever” from Diamonds Are Forever.
4. “Goldeneye” from Goldeneye.
5. “Live and Let Die” from Live and Let Die.
6. “Goldfinger” from Goldfinger.
7. “Licence to Kill” from Licence to Kill.

Ursula Andress as Honeychile Ryder in Dr. No (1962).

THE SEVEN BEST BOND WOMEN
1. Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) from Dr. No: Honey Ryder is the first and best. Tough and statuesque, Andress made not just Bond history but film and cultural history when she walked out of the surf just over an an hour into Dr. No.
2. Carole Bouquet as the tough, revenge-driven Melina Havelock in For Your Eyes Only.
3. Domino (Claudine Auger) from Thunderball: Haunted and very empathetic, Domino feels subtly believable to me, and she doesn’t suddenly change her character 180 degrees by falling head-over-heels for Bond like Pussy Galore and other Bond leading women have by the last reel.
4. Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) from Goldfinger: One of the few Bond women who really seemed close to being Bond’s equal, despite her capitulation to Bond’s charms (and selling out of Goldfinger) by the film’s climactic showdown.
5. Tracy Bond (Diana Rigg) from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: an intense actress and the only leading woman Bond ever marries. . .
6. Agent XXX (Barbara Bach) from The Spy Who Loved Me: Bach is able to play this role with just the right amount of knowing humor so as to perfectly compliment Moore’s performance and the film.
7. Jinx (Halle Berry) from Die Another Day: though trapped in a shitbox of a film, Berry shines as American agent Jinx, almost (but not quite) rescuing this film from its overdetermined self-importance and excessive techno-gadgetry.

French actor Michael Lonsdale as Drax in Moonraker (1979).

THE SEVEN BEST BOND VILLAINS
1. Drax: The creepiest of them all, so aristocratic!
2. Donald Pleasence as Blofeld: The first and coolest Blofeld.
3. Goldfinger: The most iconic Bond villain, especially in the laser-beam scene.
4. Scaramanga: He’s Christopher fuckin’ Lee. Sinister and perverted!
5. Kananga: Rendered interesting because of Yaphet Kotto’s presence and performance.
6. Largo: His eye patch and love of sharks make him unforgettable.
7. Zorin: Come on, it's Walken.

Roger Moore as James Bond in For Your Eyes Only (1981).

JAMES BOND ACTORS RATED BEST TO WORST
1. Connery
2. Moore
3. Brosnan
4. Lazenby
5. Dalton

There's no doubt that Roger Moore’s ironic/parodic take saved the franchise from imploding — an earnest Bond never worked after the 1960s, as Dalton’s tenure emphatically proves. Regarding George Lazenby, I feel that had he had more time to grow into the role (and acquire more acting skills), Lazenby might have ranked higher on this list, but history was not kind to the Australian model-turned Bond: he was dismissed after one film, the rather excellent On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.


THE JAMES BOND FILMS LISTED CHRONOLOGICALLY

1. Dr. No (1962), starring Sean Connery, directed by Terence Young

2. From Russia With Love (1963), starring Sean Connery, directed by Terence Young

3. Goldfinger (1964), starring Sean Connery, directed by Guy Hamilton

4. Thunderball (1965), starring Sean Connery, directed by Terence Young

5. You Only Live Twice (1967), starring Sean Connery, directed by Lewis Gilbert

6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), starring George Lazenby, directed by Peter Hunt

7. Diamonds Are Forever (1971), starring Sean Connery, directed by Guy Hamilton

8. Live and Let Die (1973), starring Roger Moore, directed by Guy Hamilton

9. The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), starring Roger Moore, directed by Guy Hamilton

10. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), starring Roger Moore, directed by Lewis Gilbert

11. Moonraker (1979), starring Roger Moore, directed by Lewis Gilbert

12. For Your Eyes Only (1981), starring Roger Moore, directed by John Glen

13. Octopussy (1983), starring Roger Moore, directed by John Glen

14. Never Say Never Again (1983), starring Sean Connery, directed by Irvin Kershner

15. A View to a Kill (1985), starring Roger Moore, directed by John Glen

16. The Living Daylights (1987), starring Timothy Dalton, directed by John Glen

17. Licence to Kill (1989), starring Timothy Dalton, directed by John Glen

18. Goldeneye (1995), starring Pierce Brosnan, directed by Martin Campbell

19. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), starring Pierce Brosnan, directed by Roger Spottiswoode

20. The World is Not Enough (1999), starring Pierce Brosnan, directed by Michael Apted

21. Die Another Day (2002), starring Pierce Brosnan, directed by Lee Tamahori

--
* Here I must add a flagrant racism alert. True, all James Bond films carry imperialist implications, what with their championing of a globe-straddling, white, British superspy who saves the Western world at every turn by besting and killing less-white foes and henchmen (and, in most cases, getting his own allies killed as well). But You Only Live Twice features some of the most overt Orientalism of the whole series, culminating in a shocking sequence in which Bond dons yellowface in order to blend in with a group of (gulp!) ninjas. Of course, the concept is ridiculous to the point of absurdity: no matter how you tape his eyes back or yellow his skin, a 6'2" Scotsman is simply not a ringer for a Japanese man. But silly or no, the Bond yellowface scene brings the franchise's racism (in the form of racist stereotyping and caricature) to the fore in a pointed and off-putting way.
** This is another place where my former self's Roger Moore-dislike clashes with my current appreciation for Moore-as-007. I would still call Live and Let Die an imperfect Bond film, but would move it up toward the bottom of the "Truly Great Bond Films" list despite its flaws (particularly Mr. Big's extremely foggy motives for doing whatever he's doing). Along the same line, today I would push The Man with the Golden Gun up a few slots to the very top of the "Mediocre" list or maybe to the very bottom of the "Great" one. I enjoy Golden Gun at least as much as You Only Live Twice -- probably more so.
*** When I originally wrote this review in 2008, I used the term "Dumbshit" to refer to this third, least favored category of James Bond films. However, I subsequently realized that "Dumbshit" wasn't an ideal moniker, since almost all James Bond movies, even really good ones, feature moments that qualify as over-the-top, ridiculous, and "dumbshit." In many cases, those dumbshit moments are some of the most pleasurable ones. No, the worst crime committed by the films on the third list are that they are dull; thus I have re-dubbed the third category “Boring” rather than the admittedly funnier but slightly less accurate “Dumbshit.”

My Thoughts on James Bond

With the new Daniel Craig "James Bond" film Spectre coming out later this fall, it seemed an appropriate time to share my thoughts about the James Bond film franchise. I have confessed before that Bond movies run deep in my cinephile DNA -- Thunderball (1965), the first Bond film I ever saw, was one of two films I screened at my 12th birthday party in 1983. I have been a devotee of the series from that point until the inception of the Daniel Craig era in 2006.

I don't wish impugn the quality of the recent Bond films and I actually think Daniel Craig is a superb choice for the lead role. But the franchise fundamentally changed in 2006, undergoing a reboot and a drastic shift in tone, so to my mind it is more accurate to refer to Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012), and the forthcoming Spectre as "James Bond" films (in quotation marks) so as to differentiate them from their more lighthearted and aesthetically distinct predecessors. I enjoy some of the new films okay, especially Skyfall, which brought some much-needed levity back to the franchise, but I am most truly devoted to the series' original run from Dr. No through the end of the Pierce Brosnan era.

Despite maintaining the same general lineup of recurring characters and even retaining Judi Dench (a holdover from the Brosnan films) as M, Casino Royale (2006) represents a complete reboot of the James Bond film franchise. Casino Royale tells (for the first time) part of Bond's origin story, adopting a different, more serious tone than any previous 007 film and even breaking with certain formal traditions that defined the series since the 1960s (more on the specifics of that in a minute).

Television scholar Jeremy Butler defines a series as

a narrative form that presents [. . .] episodes with a defined set of recurring characters. Each [. . .] episode is basically self-contained. [The] narrative of a series does not consistently continue from one [installment] to the next.

Conversely, a serial

expects us to make specific and substantial narrative connections between one episode and the next. In the series, the link between each [installment] is rather vague. In the serial, the connection is fundamental to its narrative pleasures.*

For forty years, from 1962 (Dr. No) until 2002 (Die Another Day), the James Bond movie franchise operated as a series. There were characters (Bond, M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter, Blofeld, Jaws, Quarrel, Valentin Zukovsky) and selected catch phrases and jokes ("Shaken, not stirred") that recurred, but each film stood alone with practically no acknowledgement of any events from other installments.**

In 2008 that all changed, when Quantum of Solace picked up right where Casino Royale left off, acknowledging Bond's love (!) relationship with Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) from the first movie of the rebooted franchise. At that point, the Bond movies became serialized, telling an ongoing story of Bond's adventures assumed to be in chronological order and with events from one film impacting what took place in the next. (See, for example, what happens to M and MI6 at the end of Skyfall.)

In addition to the adoption of the serial format and a generally grittier tone, the Daniel Craig reboots also did away with the traditional sequence of content that had opened all Bond films since From Russia with Love in 1963. (These conventions had not yet been solidified in Dr. No, the first Bond film, which has no pre-credits sequence.)

The famous James Bond "gun barrel" intro, designed by Maurice Binder.

In the original films from From Russia with Love onward, the sequence goes:

1. Circular "gun barrel" motif looking at a nonspecific location. Bond walks in from the right side of frame as the gun barrel "eye" follows him and the James Bond main theme plays. He suddenly turns and shoots the viewer. As blood drips down the screen, filling it, the circular gun barrel "eye" plunges toward the bottom of the frame, then cuts (From Russia with Love, Goldfinger) or irises (all subsequent films) into . . .
2. An opening vignette that sometimes does, sometimes doesn't bear any direct relationship to the main story of the film.***
3. Opening credits sequence, usually designed by Maurice Binder and set to a unique title song.†

Casino Royale's reworking of the "gun barrel" motif. 

With Casino Royale the sequence instead becomes:

1. Opening vignette -- in black and white no less! And including a flashback to an earlier fight!
2. The opening vignette ends in the bathroom location of the flashback. From within that specific location, Bond turns to face the camera and shoots the viewer with the "gun barrel" effect superimposed over the edges of the frame. [No James Bond theme is played.] Dripping blood fills the frame, becoming the red background for the . . .
3. Opening credits sequence accompanied by a unique title song.

It's a clever reworking and reordering of some of the old iconography, but that's exactly my point: it's a reworking. These changes to the order of and transitions between the traditional components clearly signal that Casino Royale is breaking with its past, modifying the opening sequence enough that the difference is noticeable, especially to a longtime fan of the franchise. I do not judge this, I merely note it and offer it as evidence supporting my claim that the pre-Casino Royale Bond films are quite different from the Daniel Craig ones. This distinction matters to me and is the reason why, in my overview of the James Bond films that will constitute a two-part sequel to this post, I will discuss and evaluate only the pre-Craig Bonds.

Stay tuned for the next installment!

"Yes, Ian, that's right, THIS is the spot at which Sean gets to slap around the ineffectual darky henchman. . . "

UPDATE 6/11/2016: See also Owen Gleiberman's recent rumination on where the Bond franchise might head after the departure of Daniel Craig.

--
* Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (Third Edition) (Routledge, 2006) pp. 34 and 40.
** I can think of exactly two exceptions to this: (1) In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as Bond goes through his desk early in the film we see mementos from a few of his previous missions, and (2) In the opening moments of the For Your Eyes Only pre-credits vignette, Bond places flowers on Tracy Bond's grave, which is a reference to his short-lived marriage to her at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

*** Bond movies with opening vignettes that relate in some way to what comes after include On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, The Living Daylights, Licence to Kill, and all four Brosnan films.  

† Binder designed every Bond title sequence from Dr. No to Licence to Kill (1989) EXCEPT From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, which were designed by Robert Brownjohn.