A preview of Saturday's Caustic Commentary

How do you recycle a story that is itself the hero's journey RECYCLED IN SPACE?

Well for a start you don't give him a journey, by which I mean a "character arc." They tried that once and it got the audience all Lazenbothered. So instead it's more of the same but bigger and flashier and more expensive. It's the Star Wars prequels/toy adverts thirty years early. There's no Jar Jar Binks in this one, thank Christ, although there is a double-taking pigeon, which some philistines seem to think is just as bad.

'tisn't, really. a) it's far more in keeping with the "tone" of the film; a double-taking pigeon belongs in a film where a man has stolen a space shuttle back from the US government in order to complement his own fleet so that he can go up to his space station - invisible, somehow - and rain gaseous death down on us Earthlings and the hero drives a motorized gondola in the course of stopping him and Does Violence with a man with metal teeth and forgets he's wearing a wrist-gun during these fights (...gasp, pause for breath) in a way that cartoon rabbit does NOT belong in a film about taxes and politics and the start of a journey that transforms an eight-year-old kid into Cyborg Space Hitler. If anything's out of place in Moonraker, it's the bit with the dogs. More on that later. And, b) it takes up about 2 seconds, if that, of screentime and is thus considerably easier for amateur angry nerds to edit out than Jar Jar Binks is in The Phantom Menace.  The effect is totally rubbish, I'll give you that, and given what happened next I'm not convinced John Glen should have gotten to helm five (a record) Bond films on the basis of having rendered that, but those are other rants.  This is Moonraker, as the credits have gotten done telling us. Ian Fleming's Moonraker, appar', but Captain America 2 retained more elements of the novel than this did. No wonder this is the last "Ian Fleming's (Title)" until Casino Royale's adaptation/expansion rolls around.

Oh, while we're on the titles: "Moonraker" as sung by Shirley Bassey is gorgeous and beautiful and poetic and in no way deserving of being attached to this rot.

Is it rot because it ripped off Star Wars/previous Bonds? Nah. Ian Fleming wasn't a paragon of originality - stole a quote from Jack London for Bond's epitaph, the cad - and the Bonds are all by and large products of their times.  I "quite" like For Your Eyes Only, and I tend not to think that the film's "goodness" - not greatness - is ruined by having the Iron Lady mistake a parrot for Britain's top sexist pig of a "secret" agent. It was 1979. Everybody was cashing in on Star Wars, George Lucas most of all.

But it is a very silly film.

QoS - the "Commentary"

Having had a couple of false starts with other "commentaries," I quickly came to the conclusion that I can't do ones for films that I "love" as they turn into gush-fests (e.g., I ran out of ways to praise Timothy Dalton's acting/interpretation before he shot Kara in the gun) or "hate" as they turn into the opposite (e.g., I ran out of ways to enjoy life before Madonna "sang" Die Another Day and decided not to), but rather can do them for films I "enjoy." With that in mind, I developed a list of films I "enjoy," meaning films I intend to do Caustic Commentaries of, and these are them:

Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only (maybe), Octopussy, A View to a Kill, GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies (maaaaybe), The World is Not Enough, and... James Bourne?

Surprised (a bit) to discover I "enjoy" Quantum of Solace. "Like" is definitely too hard a word. Like On Her Maj, it grew on me. (You can read that sentence either as "I like On Her Maj; it grew on me," or as "Like On Her Maj, Quantum grew on me." I intended the latter, but intent dies when I publish it and interpretation is up to you.) Unlike On Her Maj - in direct contradistinction to On Her Maj, in fact - the leading man is about the only watchable thing in this one.

Which is fine, because Daniel Craig is eminently watchable as James Bond, especially in this one. In fact I might go as far as to say he is the most watchable James Bond. Connery, Moore and Brosnan, well, you're there for things like "charm" and "charisma" and "screen presence" more than you're there for a "performance," no? (I know I'm offending basically everyone I know by lumping Connery and Moore/Brosnan in with Brosnan/Moore. They're all playing Boring Invincible Comic-book Superagent 007, only Connery's too bored and Moore's too old and Brosnan's screen presence is deficient compared to the other two. Get over it.) Lazenby? Nope; he works (surprisingly) well in OHMSS, but OHMSS was hardly representative of the series as a whole. While Timothy Dalton is basically exactly what James Bond "should" be - intense, ice-cold, grim, manipulative bastard played by a top-notch actor who can somehow throw "human" into that mix too - it's not quite as fun to watch as Daniel Craig, is it? That's cool; it doesn't have to be entirely Fleming-authentic if it's more fun. (Fleming once wrote a short story where somebody told Bond a story over drinks. Totally unfilmable, but the point was that drama and tragedy doesn't always need to involve master villains or goofy gadgets. It was called Quantum of Solace.) BlondBond - especially here - projects a devil-may-care attitude over an obviously tortured soul, and he gets away with it in a way that BatBale totally didn't. Reminds me a tad/a lot of Christopher Eccleston, a criminally underrated Doctor Who.

So without further adieu, my "commentary" on Quantum of Solace, the second in a series of juvenile humor, petty abuse, and inadvertent exposure of the creator's own crippling flaws. I speak of my "commentaries," not the Craig films.

Quantum of Solace commentary is done. Holding off on posting it because I think it's a bit tacky to (lovingly) eviscerate a film about dealing with grief and loss on Memorial Day.

The writer and director of Skyfall have made a TV show with Timothy Dalton in it. Why wasn't I told? And also, is it Christmas already?

A preview of my next Caustic Commentary

These are my thoughts as I watch footage of a bazillion pounds of steel getting scrambled get scrambled. This Daniel Craig fellow certainly can act, and he is quite rightly billed as the star of this spectacle. Never once convinced that BrosBond wasn't totally in control during his action scenes, even that time he was skidding along upside-down inside his Aston - there, I mentioned Die Another Day, let us never speak of it again - Brosnan's scaredface is not much to write about, but then again you hadn't cast an actor, had you, you'd cast a presence. Craig is a whole different beast. "Not in control" is what he is for most of this film's underwhelming (a mercy; more of it and I'd get sick) runtime.

Bond drives down a long tunnel. Inasmuch as this is a film wherein Bond treats his license to kill as an outlet for his grief now that his cuddlebunny's gone and drowned, I'm trying - and failing - not to read much into this blatant tunnel imagery.

Having no wish to watch/hear/comment on the titles or the execrable "song", I shall describe this film at length, primarily as a means of getting the obligatory out of the way now so I can enjoy Daniel Craig Doing Acting during the parts of the film where I can see it properly:

Gritty, nervy "back to Fleming" actor (actor, note, as opposed to charismatic screen presence), in his second outing as James Bond, off on a highly personal mission despite whatever he calls it. Theoretically not sanctioned by MI6, prompting the best confrontation between this Bond and this M, even though they send at least one employee out "after" him and welcome him back with open arms afterwards.  Felix Leiter played by an actor reprising the role from an earlier film.  Fire plays a rather large role in the climax, set in the middle of a desert in South America, wherein the villain attacks a bloodied Bond with a sharp-edged weapon and completely fails to hit him despite Bond being unarmed. Bond Girl set up as a foreign secret agent (with her own slightly/greatly confused subplot wherein it briefly looks as though she's working for the villains), who is more useful driving transport and causing introspection on Bond's part than doing fights, but makes up for it by shooting one of the baddies. Main villain at one point threatens revolution against a country's dictator-for-life during a monetary dispute. Secondary Bond Girl at one point wears naught but a sheet. One of the good guys causes a collision involving a yacht. The random use of a "harmless" actor as a villain. The lead actor, doing Proper James Bond Acting, is cited as a great asset to the film, mostly by the film's (few) defenders, but they're absolutely right. The villain at one points makes a sartorial decision best described as "questionable." Scars visible on a Bond Girl's back, due to trauma she suffered at the hands of one of the villains, the one whose body is consumed by fire at the end. One villain's name is a mispelling of an actual word; another is an actual word. Gunbarrel technically present and accounted for, but done a tad "wrong." Etc.

Licence to Kill.

As for Quantum of Solace, the same, but written by about ninety billion different people on the fly, shot by a man suffering seizures all the way through, and edited by a team of (poorly) trained monkeys on speed.

New direction? Please. At least Bond's suits fit this time.

YOLT - the "commentary"

I now present a "review" of You Only Live Twice, presented through the lens of petty abuse and a crude synopsis.

BRN-uh! BUN! BRN-uh! BUN! It's black and white again after a bold blue-tinged Thunderbarrel. On the plus side, it's just the Thunderball gunbarrel in black and white; they haven't gone back to Bob Simmons, because heavens forfend anyone get the slightest hint of an inkling that anyone other than SEAN CONNERY will be playing Bond forevermore (spoiler alert: he won't, and everyone involved in the making of this film knew perfectly well he was on his way out. SEAN CONNERY IS JAMES BOND might not be the best ad campaign under those circumstances, just maybe).

Space. The fifth frontier. Previously we've had An Island, the Soviet Border, A Golf Course and Hicksville USA, and Underwater. Yup, after "Space" we've basically exhausted all the locales on Earth. Better make this a good one then, because we'll have to fire Connery in order to free up enough of a budget to go to Mars, and then we'll use that money to actually write a decent script instead, so we'll have to set it in Switzerland. (And once that's done we'll have to invent names for locations. San Monique. Isthmus. Skyfall.)

We're off to a promising start with effects Doctor Who would regenerate for.  One spaceship eats another (still not the most daft thing we've seen in a Bond teaser yet: that would be the heroin-flavored bananas in Goldfinger) while various people squawk on the radio. Five films in and the franchise is still showing us brand new things. It's so creative, in fact, that it's not even in the book! Definitely a sign of the shape of things to come.

By the way that was Shane Rimmer in the background of one of the ground control sets, trying and failing to get in touch with Major Tom. Having lost a space capsule they'll put him in command of a nuclear submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me, and let's see if he does a better job keeping it out of enemy hands (spoiler: no).

The next scene is set in one of Epcot's golf balls and features a bunch of pretentious a-holes arguing about whodunnit.  Naturally The Britishe One is the source of reason - this is nominally a British film series, after all, even if the star is Scottish and the producers American, and most of the cast of this one have unpronounceable names and I don't mean Welsh ones.

James Bond: The World is Not Enough

Hail and farewell to the one true Q, Desmond Llewellyn.  Last time Bond drives a BMW, thank frak, and first time the character they’ve shilled as the “main” Bond Girl turns out to be evil.

First hint that M uses MI6 as her own private army; see also the Craig films.

Men in Black was the best Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film ever made.

Star Trek 2009 was the best Star Wars film in thirty-five years.

Galaxy Quest was the best Star Trek film since Wrath of Khan.

Work starts tomorrow

so you might notice a downturn in activity here. (Not that you haven't noticed a dropoff already after a strong start this month.)

Bond Film reviews will start again soon. No, they won't be in order. The next one will be The World is Not Enough.  

The World is Not Enough referenced On Her Majesty's Secret Service. A lot.

Having just seen the former again and being a huge fan of the latter, here are the ones that I noticed...

Some thoughts on the SHIELD finale

Bear in mind 1) I've only seen the "Uprising" arc (or, to put it another way, the episodes that aired after The Winter Soldier came out), and 2) there will be SPOILERS

The Winter Soldier

This review contains politics. It's a review of Captain Jingoism: Edward Snowden Saves The Day, for f*ck's sake, what did you expect?

Well, let's start with the low-hanging fruit. It doesn't run for half an hour after its main character arc is concluded, so it starts with one up on The First Avenger. 

The film is more than two hours long, but unlike either The First Avenger or The Avengers, it doesn't really feel it. Maybe that's because it's juggling two villains and three heroes, all with ample to do, even if nothing ever quite comes to fruition.

It definitely has a political allegory... and a lot of shakycam... and some character threads to tie up from previous films. Quite a bit like Quantum of Solace, but better. Also, just because of some plot elements, quite a bit like GoldenEye.  And there's an oblique visual reference to The Third Man during the climax.  And, per TvTropes, apparently ran with some elements from the novel version of Moonraker.

Okay, I really appreciate that you don't need to see the first film - or The Avengers - to see this one, because everything you need to know is fed to you.  Once again there's absolutely no mercy when it comes to absorbing key plot elements, but this works as a standalone film in a way that The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World don't. It also has a lot less of the obvious CGI that plagued The First Avenger.

The spoiler-free bottom line is that I liked enough of it to consider it the third-best MCU film (after Thor and Iron Man).  But that's mainly because the rest of the competition kinda sucks.

It was only after I posted my review of The First Avenger that I realized the most basic problem with the Captain America character: the man is not allowed to have a character arc. The entire point of him is that he's the same guy before and after the super serum, he just has muscles now. So you would think that the logical thing to do is to send him up against a bona fide government conspiracy, force him to choose whether to be lawful or to be good, and watch his character unravel.

(Spoilers from here on out.)

So now that Agents of SHIELD got renewed for a second season, I guess I have to watch it

I don't watch a lot of TV.

No, wait. I don't watch a lot of current TV.

Basically what it is is my stubborn refusal to process a story at a rate of one hour per week. I bought the Battlestar Galactica boxset without having seen a single episode, and it was still one of the best purchases I ever made, meh-tastic ending and all. Buffy, Angel and Firefly were all discovered after they had ended, as were Deep Space Nine, Babylon Five and, of course, classic Doctor Who.  I picked up Game of Thrones between the second and third seasons (after going and reading the books, naturally).

A couple of years ago, when Dollhouse got renewed for a second season I finally started to watch that. I didn't want to bother having another Firefly on my hands, where I got emotionally invested in a story that was then cut cruelly short (...oops). Now Agents of SHIELD is in the same place, and, yay?

In a way I guess it's sort of a sort of vindication. (Sort of a sort? Note to the blogger: you are not Charles Dickens, meaning you're not paid by the word.) I am now free to express interest in a show that was watched by enough people not to get murdered in the crib by the network.  (Or, rather, a show that ties into movies that statistically everyone has seen, and has thus avoided getting murdered in the crib by virtue of being a link to money-printing machines.)

From the Blighted United files

I do not like United Airlines. I haven't liked air travel in general ever since airports became a Fourth Amendment-free zone.  But I especially do not like United Airlines.

I was supposed to spend part of this week in Virginia touring Civil War battlefields (because Civil War battlefields are awesome). The flight was originally supposed to leave at 6:15. Crazy bad weather forced United Airlines to cancel my flight after about three hours of delaying it in thirty-minute increments.  This is, so far, par for the course for America's premier jerkweasel airline.

This is how I learned that Blighted United had cancelled my flight:

I looked at the monitor and saw that my flight status was now:

Delayed until 9:15 (Cancelled).

Shortly thereafter the monitor began displaying information about a flight to St. Paul that would be leaving from that gate later that evening.

There was no PA announcement.  There was no agent at the gate counter to help the legion of angry passengers find alternative arrangements. There was an agent further down the terminal at the gate for flight to Washington; he promptly bolted.

At the front ticket counter there was one supervisor overseeing a bunch of trainees.  Now, granted, this was really late at night, but that's still just f*cking aggravating.

Again: there was no PA announcement, and there was never during the entire three-hour delay an agent at the gate counter.

What the utter hell, United?

Derpy musings

So a show associated with Joss Whedon (but which apparently isn't "a Joss Whedon show") got a massive quality boost after turning one of its main characters evil.

Buffy Season Two?  Dollhouse Season Two?  (Come on, Firefly would have done this with Book, except, y'know.)  Angel...  Well, the closest Angel got to turning one of its main characters - as opposed to a character who showed up in the main credits for a year but was honestly never part of the "family" - evil was when Wesley got kicked out of the group towards the end of Season 3.

Now, I'm not saying this is Joss's most overused trope. Because it's not. "Team breaks up and then comes back together" is Joss's most overused trope. Exhibit A: (Marvel's) The Avengers. But of his shows that did this... they tended to do it right when those shows grew the beard.

Coincidence?

There's a moment in Moon where Sam-5 wakes up in the medbay and Sam-6 is watching him, and Sam-5 looks down to the burn on his hand and everyone in the audience goes OMFG I forgot about that.

There needs to be a word for that sort of thing.

Here's a terrifying thought experiment

Imagine a world where you could only have one window on your computer open at a time.

Gabberfraky. I realized that I never actually did a review of Moon. I wrote about it very, very briefly back in 2011.

So that's on the menu for summer break.

A sure sign that, at 25, my childhood is finally over.

I own a Nintendo 64, a GameCube, and what until recently was a Wii and is now a very expensive brick.

I have no intention of buying a Wii U.

...okay, granted, I have a gaming PC. Never mind, folks, the party's still on.

Totally not a review of The Third Man

Obligatory:

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Also obligatory:

On to more substantive materials.

I quite liked it.

At some point I will feel compelled enough to do a post that's nothing but comparisons between stuff in this film and stuff that The Living Daylights lifted from this film - by the way, if you like Daniel Craig but have never heard of Timothy Dalton, go watch The Living Daylights Right. Now.

I will say, however, that this film has a problem. It's the same problem as That Other Film What's Got Orson Welles In It That I Done Seen Oooh Okay Not Casino Royale 1967 Let Us Never Speak Of That One Again, and that's that the ending falls heavily into, um, It Was His Sled territory. And it's a bigger problem here than it was in Citizen Kane.

But more on that in a moment. There are a couple of things I want to praise this movie for.

1) the cinematography. Dear sweet lord, the cinematography is utterly stunning. Well-deserved Oscar on that one. In particular the wonderful chiaroscuro from The Reveal basically through the end of the film. A bit less so the sewer chase, which does drag a bit and - awkwardly, since it was actually filmed in real sewers - keeps looking like they're trying to pass off the same set as different locations. (Update: Ah, Orson Welles apparently refused to go down there, so any time you can see his face, it is a set.)  Still, Dutch Angles For Life.

2) Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. (It's not Kane and Leland, it's Harry and Holly.) Especially Orson Welles - who apparently wrote the cuckoo clock speech himself - but also Joseph Cotten. Oh, and that's Bernard Lee, the original M, as Sgt. Paine. Let me back up a second here. Orson Welles has about 10 minutes of screen time and is utterly enthralling in every second of it. Even when he's foofing around in the sewer at the end.

3) The Ferris wheel scene should be required watching at film school from here to kingdom come. Welles mesmerizingly, effortlessly, switches back and forth between Your Best Friend and Complete And Total Monster.

Hokai. SPLOILERS. (C'mon, it's The Third Man. You know this one already.)

Can't stand io9's new comment feature.

Actually, can't stand io9's pretense at being apolitical, but wah wah troubling right-wing goose-stepping creeping about advancing behavior.

The comments, as redesigned probably six months ago, just don't work well. Used to be clear where the breaks were between topics.

Now... on this article the comments go from talking about The Spy Who Loved Me (starring Roger Moore) straight to a comment that says "I wish Moore would stop bitching." The Moore in the second comment being Alan, not Roger.

Change it baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 51) Sansa IV: Be Careful What You Wish For

Previously on A Game of Thrones, one Stark girl managed to escape (with a lot of luck/help/reluctance). How'd the other one do?

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 50) Arya IV: Still Less Ridiculous than Yoda With A Lightsaber

Previously on A Game of Thrones Littleprick was a little prick.

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 49) Eddard XIV: Well, I Didn’t Vote For You

G'day.

If you are reading this brubbery you have less sense than Eddard Stark in a Small Council meeting. We all know what happens - it's a very short chapter -  and my comments tend to be less snarky and more meligrubrious. The Oxford English Dictionary has not yet come up with a definition for "meligrubrious," so let me coin one: Pointless, hate-fueled frippery, or: what Democrats think of every Republican talking point.

Previously on I HATE SAM HE SLOWS DOWN THE PLOT AND ADDS NOTHING OF VALUE, AND THIS IS DOUBLY TRUE ON THAT "ADAPTATION" PORNO HBO IS DOING, Ned Stark continued to bungle his way through a succession crisis.

A Blog of Thrones (Chapter 48) Jon VI: “Obey Orders” is Curiously Absent From That Oath

Previously on A Game of Thrones, King Robert developed a sudden and entirely unforeseeable case of boar-tusk-through-the-jamberbellies.  Previously in a Jon Snow chapter, we learned that King Leonidas Jon Snow is not.