Star Wars: The Liberal Cribbing From The Books Awakens

So. I loved the new Star Wars movie even though it had a few problems. And it had a few problems. One of the problems that I didn't have but a friend did was that it kept cribbing from the Star Wars movies.

And, yeah, it did. But it was like GoldenEye; cribbing from Ye Olde Bygone Better Days to lure people back for three awful sequels and then a recast and reboot that similarly schizophrenically tried to be "the same but different" and wound up stuck up its own bunghole with a truly shit villain and no plot save for a mishmash of homages to previous entries and...

...oh.

But, no, I'm willing to give The Force Awakens a pass for its liberal cribbing of the earlier films. It was reassuring. What was annoying was how it threw out the old book canon... and then kept cribbing from it.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Spoiler-Free Version

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the GoldenEye of Star Wars films. It hits a lot of familiar beats, but it does this in the name of dragging the franchise out of the shadow of recent failures and reigniting it for easy public consumption. There are a lot of spoilery nitpicky problems with it, starting with the fact that I can't decide whether Adam Driver was horribly miscast or the best casting decision in the film, but that's for the VERY SPOILER HEAVY post.

Oh, and speaking of Bond/Star Wars comparisons, Daniel Craig has a hilarious cameo in it.

All right, on to as much substance as I can give you without giving any major plot points away. I love the fact that, right after the title crawl, the camera pans down to a Star Destroyer. None of this ships-that-aren't-Star-Destroyers nonsense that we had to suffer through in the prequels.

The Force Awakes: Spoilers Everywhere Version

The Dalton Dilemma
There's a phenomenon in movies that I call the "Dalton Dilemma." A review of The Living Daylights, starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond, complains that Dalton's impatience with the script seeps through his performance, causing him to stomp about in permascowl mode because the whole proceeding is completely beneath him. I thought that this more accurately summed up James Bond the character rather than Timothy Dalton the actor.

What does this have to do with The Force Awakens? Well...

SPOILERS

I have now played one hour of Fallout 4

Granted, most of this time was spent on a really choppy framerate at low graphics quality because I, being a moron, did not have my computer set up properly. And by "did not have my computer set up properly," I mean "I plugged the monitor into the motherboard instead of the video card."

So, anyway

My character can finally aim!

The Daniel Craig Films Are Just Darker Regurgitations of Pierce Brosnan Ones

So this is a post that is kind of due the political (warning) blog, Ace of Spades, which did a post on The Man From UNCLE - the recent box office flop starring the Great Lost James Bond Henry Cavill. By the way, it's a great movie and you should see it, but that's not why we're here. In discussing the film, Ace said the following:

Napoleon Solo, on the other hand, is essentially inhuman in his absolute detachment from the world. If you read the reviews for the early Bond novels and films, critics were scandalized at how amoral and nihilistic and sadistic James Bond was. That's largely what made the movies popular, of course: It just felt more adult and "real" that a professional killer would be emotionally cold and unburdened by the weight of conscience. 

Over the years, they've lost that aspect of Bond, though they try sometimes to reclaim it. Sure, Bond says "The bitch is dead" at the end of Casino Royale, but we also had this embarrassing exchange in Goldeneye: 

GIRL: So there you are in your armor again.
BOND: It's what keeps me alive.
GIRL: It's what keeps you alone. 

In fact, they returned to this armor metaphor in Casino Royale, having Bond tell Vesper that all his armor was now gone, and that he was absolutely naked to her and ready to fall in love. 

Well, that didn't last long. 

But anyway, while James Bond is often said to be amoral, the movies actually do spend a lot of time trying to "humanize" him. I suppose they have to. Hell, it's been 22 movies; you can't spend all that time with a total sociopath.

Hrm.  Not entirely sure that even the Connery Dr. No Bond, thumping that extra bullet into an already-dying Professor Dent, was ever quite as much an heroic sociopath as Napoleon Solo was presented in UNCLE, but anyway. That got me thinking about my usual James Bond formulation, how Connery, Moore, and Brosnan all play Boring Invincible Superagent 007 and Lazenby, Dalton, and Craig play Actual Human Being James Bond, and actually what a total crock that theory is.

Because even in the Lazenby and Dalton films, Bond's humanity was presented as a weakness: in OHMSS, Bond is captured because he spends more time chasing tail than he does trying to figure out what Blofeld's up to. And then he falls in love For Realz and takes his eye off the ball and that causes him no end of emotional grief - or would have, if Lazenby and/or his agent hadn't been so short-sighted. The entire final act of The Living Daylights only happens because Bond gets too close to the girl he's supposed to be, ahem, pumping for information. And of course Licence to Kill is a case study in just how bad revenge and obsession can be, as Bond bolloxes up the plans of not one but two allied foreign intelligence services.

But since then, we've had eight films in a row where we've tortured Bond's psyche for the audience's entertainment, starting with making his friend and comrade the villain in GoldenEye and ending with making his friend and adopted brother the villain in Spectre. Bond's Feelz have suddenly become sources of Drama, not Weaknesses That Must Be Suppressed.

Anyway, back to the title of this post:

GoldenEye and Skyfall: the villain, a blond ex-MI6 agent, was betrayed by Britain in the past and wants revenge, which he shall achieve via The Power Of Hacking. Bond's relevance in the modern world is questioned at length, the answer ultimately being "yes, because $."

Tomorrow Never Dies and Quantum of Solace: Bond in mourning. Bond Out For Revenge. The most "pure" action film of the lot. Bond Girl murdered and left on a hotel bed. Villain is physically weak but politically well-connected. The only one of the era that withstands repeated viewings, sadly overlooked in favor of its flashier siblings.

The World is Not Enough and Casino Royale: references to OHMSS. Bond develops Genuine Feelings for the girl with the most screen time, but she turns out to be evil and ends up dying.

Die Another Day and Spectre: Retro nostalgia tour. Over-the-top villainy. Bond brutally tortured, shrugs it off, demonstrates heretofore unmentioned ability to stop and restart his heart/ignore severe brain damage. Gets in a car chase where his Aston's special features malfunction.

Spectre

A hot mess.

Spoilers below.

Le James Bond

I have finished re-watching every James Bond film (the EON ones, I mean, so not Casino Royale 1967 or Never Say Never Again), and the verdict is...

So what the hell is going on with Daniel Craig?

There's this story running around about him saying some really, really stupid things. I guess he was strung out from what was an exhausting shoot, but f*ck's sake man you're an actor, you're the face of the brand - The Brand, the hugely-grossing, fifty-years-and-counting franchise that has basically become to action movies what Doctor Who is to science-fiction television, namely That Thing That Defined It In The Sixties And Then Refused To Die. (Oh, there are so many parallels between Bond and Who - they started within a year of each other, both franchises did Things They'd Never Done Before in 1969, their longest-runner started in the early-to-mid-70s and did seven films/seasons, 1987-9 saw a darker and edgier take on the character and the "death" of the franchise, followed by a wrongheaded dead-ended revival in the mid-90s and then a proper quasi-reboot circa 2005 with that short-haired amusingly-eared actor from Our Friends in the North.)

Anyway... Daniel Craig had some extremely unflattering things to say about the role that made him a household name. And these comments frankly veer straight into the realm of utterly unprofessional. I'm shocked, actually.

Of course this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened.

Mad Max: Furiosa Road

If you wanted a film that was basically a ninety-minute version of the tanker chase in Licence to Kill with a proper budget, then look no further.

More random politics

Some people like Ben Carson. I can't get over his deer-in-the-headlights debate performance. The cold, calculating Clinton or the delusional raving Sanders will tear him apart.

At this point my first choice is Ted Cruz because

• He's conservative (putting him ahead of Bush, Trump, Kasich, and Christie)
• He's not a bloviating psychopath (putting him ahead of Trump)
• He gives a rats' about the Constitution (which is basically my way of saying he's not running on Being A Social Conservative, a la Huckabee, although he certainly does care about the Constitution more than any other candidate save - arguably - Paul)
• He didn't embarrass himself in the debate (putting him ahead of Walker, Carson, and Paul)
• And finally I trust him slightly more than Rubio on immigration.

A debate between Trump and Bernie would basically be word salad, a never ending stream of verbal vomit as two delusional twits spew out jibber-jabber envincing a total disconnect from reality. They would be the highest-watched debates in history, but purely for the entertainment value; Finnegan's Wake would be more coherent.

Kingsman: The Secret Service: The one-sentence review

With the possible exceptions of The Spy Who Loved Me, the non-racist minute or so of Live and Let Die, and, God help us, Moonraker, the James Bond franchise has never been as balls-to-the-wall deliciously entertaining as Kingsman.