BONDATHON: A VIEW TO A KILL

James Bond 14 represented the end of an era. It was the final film of Roger Moore’s tenure. This departure came way too late. His overly mugging performances enabled the creative team to indulge the franchises weakest aspects and lose sight of nearly everything that made the character interesting.  Another problem with Moore’s inclusion at the end of his run is director John Glen. This is his third Bond and his darker, more direct style coupled with more mundane plot lines are at complete odds with the spirit of the Moore-era. The stupid, soul crushing spirit.

The prologue is a good example of this. It’s a rather grim one that finds Bond in Siberia recovering a microchip from a deceased 003 (it’s behind a locket with a family photo) only to be spotted by Soviet agents. During the ensuing ski-chase the soundtrack is invaded by The Beach Boy’s singing “California Girls.” Why does this happen? Because it’s a Roger Moore Bond film, that’s why!

From there we transition into the opening credits. Which are yet again by Maurice Binder. By this point Binder’s title sequences had become even more repetitive and predictable than the films themselves. But here he mixes it up by painting black light patterns and words on the girls. It’s often a garish effect but it is striking. The accompanying theme song by Duran Duran is a bit muddled. I was not surprised to learn that it was the last song the band wrote before they broke up. It feels like two songs stuck together. Lyrically it can’t decide if it wants to meet you “with a view to a kill,” or to simply “dance into the fire.” Fortunately John Barry’s epic symphonic orchestration of the melody fairs much better (attached below)

Back in the plot, that microchip turns out to be very important to national defense and it's manufacturer Max Zorin may be double dealing with the Russians. Time for Bond to investigate! It should be mentioned that Zorin is played by Christopher Walken. That’s right, Oscar winner Christopher “More Cowbell” Walken was a bond villain! After a long stretch of completely forgettable baddies, Walken is the perfect antidote. He’s not quite as gonzo as we know him now, but is clearly having a blast, particularly as he does Judo with his hench-woman May Day (Grace Jones) or when unveils his evil plan aboard his personal blimp. It’s not the writing that makes Zorin memorable, it’s 100% Walken.

In the last review I complained that stylistically, Bond films felt trapped in the past particularly after the action movie really started to come into it's own in the early 80's. This film starts to rectify the issue. Cinematography by the returning Alan Hume feels a bit more dimensional then in his last few efforts and there are some subtle dolly moves that help make the film feel more modern as well.

More important in this regard, are the action scenes. The quality of these scenes very wildly, but they are more dynamically filmed than previous efforts. There’s a great mini-chase where May Day parachutes off the Eiffel Tower and Bond frantically follows her in a car that is first turned into a convertible by a parking gate and then into a mini by a passing truck. It’s as good as these gimmick scenes get. Unfortunately there are some very lame chases near the end in San Francisco, including one where Bond climbs onto the ladder of a speeding firetruck for no real reason. It also doesn’t help that by this point Moore was closer to 60 than 30, meaning it was getting harder and harder to believe that it was Bond saving the world and not a highly trained stunt-team.

Apart from a few of those action scenes and Walken as Zorin, there isn't a whole lot to recommend here. The film's have become little more than products, and very silly ones at that. The franchise wasn't in great shape when Moore came on, but at least there where possibilities. Instead the films became lowest common denominator, tone deaf affairs alternating between great stunts, gruesome kills, and terrible jokes.  Hopefully the two Timothy Dalton films will be better. A View To A Kill is a forgettable swansong. Best described as "The one with Christopher Walken."

Grade: C+ 

Here's an excerpt of John Barry's score for the film. This orchestration of the Duran Duran song is truly gorgeous...until the 80's guitars kick in at the 3 minute mark.


Enjoy these other Bondathon entries:

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball / Never Say Never Again

You Only Live Twice
On Her Majesty's Secret Service 
Diamonds Are Forever
Live and Let Die
The Man With The Golden Gun 
The Spy Who Loved Me 
Moonraker
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy  
A View To A Kill
The Living Daylights
Licence To Kill
Goldeneye
Tomorrow Never Dies
The World is Not Enough
Die Another Day
Casino Royale
Quantum of Solace
Skyfall

BONDATHON: OCTOPUSSY

For a moment it didn’t look like Roger Moore would return. He reportedly didn’t like the violence of For Your Eyes Only and was negotiating his contracts film by film at this point. So Bond mastermind “Cubby” Broccoli was all set to recast the part with American actor James Brolin. This plan would have marked a huge change in the Bond series, but when it was announced that Sean Connery would be starring in a rival James Bond film Never Say Never Again, it was decided that it would be a bad time to introduce a new Bond to the official franchise and Moore was convinced to sign up again for Octopussy.

In East Berlin, there is a fancy dinner party at the residence of the British ambassador. The party will be interrupted by a clown crashing through the Ambassador’s glass doors. He falls dead, a fabergé egg clutched in his hand. This is a mystery too ridiculous for other detectives/super-spies. This looks like a job for Bond, James Bond. It turns out that the clown was Bond’s coworker 009, and while the egg is a fake, it’s drastically important to someone and it’s Bond’s job to find out who’s responsible, and why they’d make such a big deal over a fake egg.

There's lots of inns and outs in this one. Eventually Bond meets a smuggler named Octopussy (Maud Adams) and her all female army. There are all sorts of red herrings and a rogue Soviet general who wants to invade Europe, it's actually a lot more plot than we usually get in a Bond film, certainly more than For Your Eyes Only. The script by novelist George MacDonald Fraser feels like a proper International thriller with twists and title cards telling you where you are and everything. It's not John Le Carre, but it's nice to see them try.

Action scenes aren't bad. There are some nice gimmicks such as a mini-airplane, and the terrifyingly hilarious buzz-saw yo-yo. The standout set pieces include a car chase through the streets of Udaipur, India and a train sequence, both feel almost like direct responses to scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark but without the smooth freneticism of Spielberg. According to lore, Spielberg lobbied for years to direct a Bond film only to be turned down every time for in-house people. Spielberg moved on to beat the franchise at its own pulpy game with Raiders, it moved the genre forward, while the Bond films still look and feel like they could have been made in 1969. The competing Bond film from that year, Never Say Never Again (reviewed more thoroughly here),  isn't the best Bond film, but at least it feels modern. Never also had Sean Connery who brought with him the energy and iconography of the best of Bond.

While we're on the subject of iconography, someone really needs to sit the Bond producers down and have a long talk with them about dress-up. Since Spy Who Loved Me, the Bonds have included a moment where 007 dresses up as other cinematic icons. Scenes like this these can be terrible, can make for some decent chuckles, but they also devalue the character. If an icon has to dress up as another icon, then he’s not really an icon. Every time we see Bond in a Clint Eastwood poncho or, as in this film, swinging from vines doing a Tarzan yell, it’s just saying that Bond isn’t a powerful enough icon to carry a film like this.

James Bond is supposed to be the ultimate fantasy symbol. He has the clothes we will never afford, takes the cars we will never drive to the places we will never go to meet the girls we will never have a shot with. Yet in the Roger Moore era, all those elements have been diluted to the point that late in Octopussy, we have James Bond literally dressing up as a clown.

Ladies!!!

Not only is he dressed as a clown, he's dressed as a clown while disarming an atomic warhead. This is, sadly, not the low point of the series (That is still Man With The Golden Gun), but it does signify that the producers care more about their little throw away jokes than character or tone. Bond doesn't need to be super serious, whimsy is fine. But I need to believe, on some level, that this character exists in a plausible world, otherwise the fantasy breaks down and the iconography breaks down.

Grade: C+

Enjoy these other Bondathon entries:

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball / Never Say Never Again

You Only Live Twice
On Her Majesty's Secret Service 
Diamonds Are Forever
Live and Let Die
The Man With The Golden Gun 
The Spy Who Loved Me 
Moonraker
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy  
A View To A Kill
The Living Daylights
Licence To Kill
Goldeneye
Tomorrow Never Dies
The World is Not Enough
Die Another Day
Casino Royale
Quantum of Solace
Skyfall

 

THE MASTER

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, The Master, is a fantastic piece of film making. It's an immaculately shot, scored and acted, intimate epic of post-WWII America and if it's not one of the best film's of the year, it's certainly one of the most thoughtful.

The film is essentially about two bootleggers. Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie. The man isn’t like you and me. He’s a mentally unstable veteran who wanders the Earth making booze out of paint thinner, photo developer and other handy stuff. It’s unclear whether or not his illness is something he was born with, shell shock or a result of ingesting paint thinner and photo chemicals, but he insists: “It’s not poison if you drink it right.”

This comment tickles the films other bootlegger, a man by the name of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Dodd doesn’t make booze; he makes religion. He peddles a spiritual system known as The Cause. The goal of The Cause is to return the mind to a perfect state, or rather, to purge animalistic thought. At first it looks like psychotherapy, but then like torture. Inductees are put through “processing,” where the subject is repeatedly asked the same invasive questions without end until the processor is satisfied. They are forced to repeat tasks over and over and to not ask questions. Members can leave at anytime but are told those who leave are enemies of The Cause.

After a few rounds of processing, Dodd takes Freddie with him in his travels around the country as his special project. But Freddie is a hard project, extremely impulsive and given to sudden acts of violence. He’s loyal though, sometimes to a fault, others to a point. In one scene he kicks down a door to beat an enemy of The Cause, in another he’s openly calling Dodd a liar.

Dodd's family (its matriarch played by a wonderfully icy Amy Adams) feels that Freddie is beyond any help and they’re probably right, but Dodd keeps him on anyway. Does Dodd think he can help this man, or does he just want to make him into his pet? “Everyone serves a master,” Dodd informs us late in the film. If the pet analogy was intentional, then Anderson has chosen his title more cunningly than I had thought.

It should be noted how hard it is for an actor to play a part as unstable and borderline inhuman as Freddie. It’s a very difficult, physical role and Phoenix pulls it off effortlessly. It's one thing for an actor to disguise himself with mannerisms, it's another to become completely invisible in a part. After wasting years on ill-conceived performance art, Phoenix has doubled down and given an outrageously great performance that will completely reevaluate my expectations of him from here on out.

Much has been made about the film's relation to Scientology, and yes The Cause is outrageously analogous to the mysterious religion in much the same way that Citizen Kane was to William Randolf Hearst. However Hearst came off looking a lot better than Scientology does in this film. Whatever Dodd's intentions, he is a cruel man and Hoffman, at the top of his considerable game, plays him as a man who is more contradiction than anything else. A lesser actor might have played the false Messiah as stiffer or statelier. But instead Hoffman goes the other way and softens him to the point that he’s oddly likable and in doing so, opens a wondrous world of ambiguity. It's clear that he's a tyrant, but is he a fool as well? It's entirely possible that he actually believes what he’s selling; in past lives going back a trillion years, that he can cure cancer and nuclear war with hypnosis. Is Dodd insane or just a snake oil salesmen, building religion out of spare parts the way Freddie concocts his liquor?

Grade: A

The Master comes out in limited release on Friday. In the few theaters equipped to handle it, it will be shown in 70mm. It’s not the type of film one would expect to see in the format, but the clarity of 70mm improves any film. Watching The Master in the format is unlike watching a normal film, it's so sharp that it's more like looking through a window than anything. Color depth also improves astronomically. The film frequently returns to a shot of a boat wake that gives new meaning to the color blue. Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s cinematography is absolutely sparkling and the film will look great in any format, but if you have the chance to see in in 70mm, go—your eyes will thank you for the rest of your life.

BONDATHON: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

When people complain that mainstream films are dull and all the same, For Your Eyes Only is the type of film they’re talking about. As it stands, Eyes is a perfectly ordinary product of the entertainment industrial complex. 

The plot is another one of those Blah Blah things were Bond (Roger Moore) has to find a missing whatchamacallit that's very, very important to England before the Soviets get their hands on it. Along the way Bond travels to the prerequisite exotic locations and meets the required amount of women and gets in about twice as many action scenes than usual.

This over reliance on action isn't surprising. Director John Glen had previously headed up second units on several previous Bonds, as such he was responsible for shooting several of the franchises more breathtaking moments, including that ski jump in The Spy Who Loved Me. With this film he doesn't focus much on plot, or drama, rather he plays to his action strength to mixed results.

Now action is one of the hardest genre’s to do. Part of it has to do with the fact that action scenes aren’t very relateble. We all know what it feels like to be in love, but few of us will ever be in fist fights or car chases. Yet these are exactly the experiences these films try to relate. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to portray action: Chaos and Control. Both kinds of scenes are prevalent here.

In a chaotic action scene, things happen and that’s that. Who, how and why aren’t strictly speaking important in the face of pure spectacle. Take the 8 minute ski-chase. It occurs for no other reason than that there’s usually a chase at that point of the running time. It’s a go-for-broke scene is more interested in being a cross-section of Winter Olympic events than anything else and goes on for so long that one really forgets how it started and why. There is no clarity and everything is vague and undefined. This scene is an extreme, but it’s also fairly typical of many of the action scenes in the films first half. Scenes that are overfrequent, overlong and underwhelming. 

Strangely enough, Eyes seems to get its act together in the second half. Action scenes become more ordered and controlled. A controlled action scene is built on clear goals and clear action. One such scene finds Bond struggling to scale a mountain before a henchman pulls out the rope anchors. The conception is as simple as possible: “Do this before that happens,” and the scene works because of this simplicity.

Also, despite some of the usual silliness, Eyes is a much darker film than many of the previous Moore era Bonds. Violence is more prevalent and more direct. The film's most memorable scene involves Bond kicking a car and its occupant off a cliff. The impact of the scene is ruined by one of those puns that were sly and fun in Dr. No but have long since become a tiresome irritant, but that should not detract from the fact that for one brief, shining moment Roger Moore looks like a badass.

 

Eyes is a huge improvement over Moonraker but it’s still just an okay Bond film. There are some great moments but on the whole it’s merely adequate. Anyone catching the second half of this on TV will probably like it better than if they saw the whole thing, but you can just as easily skip this one.

Grade: B-

Enjoy these other Bondathon entries:

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball / Never Say Never Again

You Only Live Twice
On Her Majesty's Secret Service 
Diamonds Are Forever
Live and Let Die
The Man With The Golden Gun 
The Spy Who Loved Me 

Moonraker
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy
A View To A Kill 
The Living Daylights
Licence to Kill
Goldeneye
Tomorrow Never Dies 
The World Is Not Enough  
Die Another Day 
Casino Royale 
Quantum of Solace