No Time to Die (5/5 Stars)

 

James Bond was never intended to be the adult in the room. The early films are exercises in juvenile wish fulfillment, specifically those of white boys. Imagine being a very important person (agent of a world superpower government) possessed with extraordinary skills and intelligence in exceedingly dangerous (see exciting) situations that will never have to actually deal with any of the repercussions. The cleanup is another department. As a bonus to all of this, as a very important person dealing with the less civilized parts of the world, you are offered exotic women by the local power brokers, and if other situations, the women just naturally flock to you because you are more handsome, wealthier, the plot calls for it, etc. I like the old James Bond movies, in particular I recommend “You Only Live Twice” but I will admit they are a guilty pleasure, you know like pornography.

I bring this up in this review for “No Time to Die” because it is quite extraordinary how grown up the franchise has become. With massive popularity comes responsibility (via criticism) and the James Bond of 2021 is more an elder statesman than a juvenile delinquent. What is even more amazing is that the quality of the movies have not diminished. “No Time to Die” is just as entertaining as “You Only Live Twice.” Indeed, “No Time to Die” retains many of the old James Bond tropes: exotic locales, gorgeous women, a disfigured villain in an island fortress, but the mood and tone are of an entirely different genre. “No Time to Die” is like a great cover version song of an old classic. You know the song, but you had no idea it could work so well in such a completely different way.

This is Daniel Craig’s fifth outing as James Bond. The story picks up right where “Spectre” of several years ago left with the hopeful retirement of James Bond with Lea Seydoux, that gorgeous French woman. This one is directed by Cary Fukunaga (True Detective Season 1, Sin Nombre) who also shares a writing credit with the duo of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. (Purvis and Wade, IMDB relates, have written the last seven James Bond movies dating back to 1999’s “The World is Not Enough.” They are getting very good at it.) The retirement does not last very long though as Lea Seydoux’s past comes back to haunt her with James as the collateral damage. This movie is two and a half hours long, its locales span continents from Italy, to Cuba, to Sweden, to Japan, the main villain’s plot, and even his identity, comes quite late, yet it never moved slow and I never felt restless. I was in good super competent hands.

In particular, this movie is a course in actions sequences that work. Unlike the digital acrobatics of Marvel blockbusters, the stunts in “No Time to Die” have a down-to-earth visceral feel to them. It looks like that car really crashed and rolled, that the telephone pole fell down on a live set, that the stunt man really did drive that motorcycle up the side of that Italian building (wow!). At one point, in an extended one shot sequence, Daniel Craig shoots and fist-fights his way up a crowded stairwell. Whatever they are doing, it is just so much better than “Shang-Chi”.

A good James Bond movie is a series of fun set pieces, strong men, and beautiful women. The opening car/motorcycle chase with Lea Seydoux through the Italian village is great. So is the spy mission in Havana, Cuba with Ana de Armas as sidekick. Finally the infiltration of a villain’s island fortress with Lashana Lynch. In between there is humor deftly brought to the fore by wisecracking Ben Whishaw as Q and Naomie Harris as Moneypenney and the classic James Bond score providing the punctuation. In the villain department, Christoph Waltz reprises his Spectre mastermind Blofeld now locked away in a maximum security prison while outside a new threat in the form of Rami Malek.

It is the villain subplot that is finally where this movie comes up short. The danger is real enough. The British government was secretly developing a type of airborne weapon that attacks certain genomic sequences. In this way, the government could conceivably release the virus in a room and it would only kill one person, the intended target. Of course, this weapon is stolen and repurposed so that it may attack whole groups of people with similar genomic sequences, maybe an entire race of people. Evil enough, but the movie does not actually go so far as to suggest what group of people the bad guy is interested in killing. The bad guy’s island fortress is located between Russia and Japan and a simulation of the weapon seems to mainly central Europe. Noone in the movie is from Central Europe. Perhaps the franchise felt that to actually pinpoint a target was not necessary given that the members of the audience could all agree that the idea is nefarious supervillain territory regardless of what group is being targeted. Still, the lack of this detail, harms the viewer’s ability to understand the motivation of the villain, which in turn harms the drama. A minor quibble. Otherwise Rami Malek with his creepy delivery and bug eyes are classic Bond villain.

At the end of this movie, you may come to the realization that this really will be Daniel Craig’s last dance and that the franchise will have to turn to a different actor in any new installment. So who should it be? Well, I think whoever it is, they should redo the entire feel of the franchise, taking it perhaps down a few notches from the stripped down, brutish, and semi-seriousness of Daniel Craig. How about Dev Patel and, please, more irresponsible sex. Being responsible is great for a few movies, as a change of pace, but overall, James Bond should be having more fun.

Moonlight (4/5 Stars)

 “Moonlight” is the type of movie that provokes an IMDB search after watching it. I was vaguely familiar with some of the actors. Mahershala Ali I know from ‘House of Cards’ and Andre Holland I know from ‘The Knick.’ Naomie Harris is the latest Moneypenny in the James Bond Franchise. But I hadn’t heard of Barry Jenkins who wrote and directed this movie. Turns out the last time he made a movie was six years ago. And that’s too bad, because from watching this movie it is plain that he is a storyteller who excels at not only writing words and coaching actors but also for visual framing and sound design. In other words, he is a complete writer/director. Such a person should be making a new movie every one or two years, not six. We are missing out by not keeping him continuously employed.

“Moonlight” is one of the small intimate pictures that is done to perfection. The story is split into three chapters all named after the various incarnations of the main character. The first story is called ‘Little’ and takes place when the boy is a child. The second is called ‘Chiron’ and takes place in high school. The third is called ‘Black’ and takes place in adulthood. The elements of the story are not particularly new: A bad childhood and awkward adolescence with bullies. Two other elements, themselves not particularly new, become novel when put together: 1) an African American boy with an absentee father and a drug-addicted mother and 2) the boy happens to be a homosexual in a community that has way too many other problems to be progressive in that respect. But the movies strength comes not from the fact it checks off these boxes in the world of identity politics (it could have and a lesser and lazier movie would have been all about it), it is a great movie because this is a story about the identity of this one particular person, and the movie in no way excludes portions of the audience from empathizing with this one particular person’s search for identity. He ultimately defines himself from the inside-out, as opposed to say from the outside-in in contrast with some exterior societal force.

A movie that focuses so much on the interior development of a character will focus as much on the good times as well as the bad, and though this character has dark forces around him, the movie’s memorable scenes are moments of kindness. “Little” escapes into a crack-house to escape bullies and is found by a drug dealer (Mahershala Ali). This man turns into a kind of mentor through time and at one point teaches ‘Little’ how to swim. (To give a sense of how completely the Director uses the artform, this tiny sounding scene is one of the best parts in a great movie complete with poetic exchanges and a striking orchestral score). “Chiron” dealing with a deteriorating home life finds solace in the home of Theresa, the surviving spouse of the drug dealer. And in all three timelines Little/Chiron/Black starts, continues, and reignites a friendship with Kevin (Old Kevin is played by Andre Holland).

I feel like I’m doing a disservice to the movie by trying to describe it. All I’m going to say more is that this movie will likely be high on my made up Oscar category Best Use of a Song. It’s ‘Hello Stranger’ by Barbara Lewis. It occupies a moment that makes the picture worth a thousand words. And my main criticism of the movie is that it wasn’t long enough.

Spectre (3/5 Stars)

It would be unfair to comment only on the drawbacks of Spectre without at first highlighting the things it brings to the table that other films simply cannot accomplish. That would be the epic globetrotting landscapes of the James Bond franchise. This movie directed by the returning Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) with a new cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Her, Let the Right One In) is especially impressive in this regard. It was shot on film in the classic style and plays great on a big screen (I saw it at the Ziegfeld). The exotic locales include Mexico City during the Dia de los Muertos festival, Rome bathed in a nighttime orange-green glow of conspiracy, London in a chilly bureaucratic blue, a supervillain headquarters in the middle of the desert, and at least one beautifully soft lit train interior great for white tuxedos and fistfights. It really looks good but enough about that.

Spectre seems to be the culmination of the last three Daniel Craig Bond films. At various times in the movie the images of past characters find themselves on screen. Included are Eva Green from Casino Royale and Judi Dench from Skyfall. Conspicuously absent are any characters from Quantum of Solace; a movie that I really liked for reasons everybody else hated i.e. a realistic supervillain scheme. All of the shadowy bad guys in the previous movies are connected to a secret organization called Spectre that has an octopus as a mascot. It’s really big and does a lot of things. And here is where the last series of movies finally experiences a thematic disconnect between the reactionary pedigree of the franchise and the radical version of the Daniel Craig James Bond.

The James Bond supervillains have historically been colorful silly things. They generally have some outlandish goal like wanting to take over the world (or blowing it up). They have exhorbitantly expensive secret lairs. They have exotic henchmen with quirky ways of killing people. None of these things are all that believable. The Daniel Craig series of movies took the silliness out of the franchise. They took away almost all of the gadgets. They took away the scene stealing physical deformities of the villains. They involved evil schemes that were more or less real (in fact the scheme in Quantum of Solace actually happened which is the main reason I thought the movie had some serious chutzpah.) Heck even the blatant promiscuity is gone. I believe Daniel Craig refuses sex at least once in each of his movies. In this one, the refusal takes place within the first ten minutes during an impressively long tracking. It feels like a nice inside joke. The effect of all this seriousness combined with the retention of superior action sequences and decent character development has produced, I would argue, the best Bond movies in the franchise. Spectre has the look of the last three art house Bond movies but the plot of one of the old sillies. The whole thing feels like a setup to the production of more of the forgettable kind of Bond movies. It seems counterintuitive to me that the last three great James Bond movies would culminate into a standard James Bond movie. But that is me. James Bond movies do have a structure and the franchise has been around for a very long because that structure works for the most part.

If you have many Bond movies there are plenty of tropes here that you will recognize. The running joke of Bond’s propensity to destroy all of the equipment built by the continually annoyed Q (Ben Whishaw) is on full display here. Bond flirts with Moneypenney (Naomi Campbell). Bond rebels against M (Ralph Fiennes now). Bond gets captured by the bad guy, tied to a gurney, and uses a trick watch to escape. There is even a scene involving the love interest (Lea Seydoux) tied to a chair with a ticking time bomb and Bond has to decide whether to save her and probably die or just save himself. You have seen all of this before, but rarely in the Daniel Craig series, (or shot so beautifully by a great director and cinematographer team), which always took itself more seriously than the previous installments.

Nowhere does the disconnect present itself so glaringly then when the evil scheme presents itself. Spoiler alert I guess although I don’t think you will care so much by this reveal. The scheme is a world dragnet of surveillance, the sort Edward Snowden told us about and is in vogue currently as a supervillain plot. James Bond’s part of the British Secret Service MI:6 is portrayed as the responsible old fashioned way of doing spy stuff. Of course it isn’t. I mean the first scene of this movie has James Bond going AWOL in Mexico City having a fistfight in a helicoptor over a parade of several thousand innocent bystanders. It is a seriously dangerous irresponsible stunt by a agent going rogue agaist all orders. I know this is a James Bond movie but I wouldn’t judge the scene on its safety to the public if the movie itself did not intend to grandstand against the surveillance issues of our times and take the position that those are worse. There are too many dramatic conversations where characters inveigh vaguely against the danger of a police state in between set pieces of extraordinary violence that only with movie magic would not kill scores of innocent bystanders.

But let’s be positive about some of those set pieces because they are very good. My favorite parts of the movie have to do with the henchmen, played by a former pro wrestler named Dave Bautista who first came on the movie scene in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy. He is a big brute of a man. After an awkward introduction he becomes the antagonist for a great car chase through Rome. It’s thrilling and very prettily shot and I was impressed that they got access to the Vatican. James Bond gets away but Dave Bautista catches up on a train as James Bond, in a white tuxedo, and Lea Seydoux, in an elegant dress, are sitting down to drinks. He bursts in from another car and havoc ensues. The fight is interesting in that it becomes clear that James cannot win it. Bautista is too big and too strong. It is a very cool thing to watch. I was wondering if they could end it in a way that wasn’t bullshit. They did.

I wish Cristoph Waltz was more entertaining as a Bond villain to me. On paper he would seem to be perfect. But I can’t say it was a particularly memorable performance or character. Oh and the bad guy from BBC's Sherlock Holmes is in this movie as well. He had far more potential on paper too. 

Skyfall (4/5 Stars)

Arthouse Bond

M recites Tennyson; Q critiques an oil painting, Adele sings the theme song, and the villain displays homoeroticism and serious mommy issues. This is not your father’s James Bond and considering how this movie ends will probably not be your father’s Bond for several more movies.

What is a James Bond movie? I do not count myself as a huge expert in the franchise. I have seen all of the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig movies but only two or three of the Sean Connery ones and none from the 70s and 80s. What I can tell though is that they all have a similar format: Action Sequence: either escape or chase. If in cars be sure to run into fruit carts - Song and Credits – Mission Briefing – Gadgets – Exotic Locale – Exotic Woman - Disfigured villain with crazy plans – Action Sequence: guns if men, melee weapons if women – Sex – Action Sequence: explosions this time? – Pithy one-liners over martinis and poker – Action Finale: use any gadgets not previously used – Sex: if not all gadgets have been used, here is your final chance – Credits and hook for next movie.

Of course, the problem with any formula movie is that they tend to be formulaic. At the same time, if one tried to do something that strayed from the formula, they might capture the wrath of die-hards that flock to these movies to get just what they have come to expect. It’s the franchise paradox: Do something original and make the core audience uncomfortable or do something standard and succumb to a barrage of comments that the first movies were better. It’s a lose-lose situation (not counting the box office.)

It is kind of amazing then that “Skyfall” can be persuasively debated as the best James Bond movie in the fifty years of the franchise. It is actually debatable. Whether this is true or not should be left to someone who has seen all the movies. (Not me!) I do however feel comfortable in saying this: This is the best-looking James Bond movie ever.

In this sense, the franchise has embarked on something truly original. It has gone through the trouble of hiring an Oscar caliber heavyweight duo to be the director and cinematographer of this movie. I am speaking of Oscar Winning director (American Beauty) Sam Mendes and his frequent collaborator and perhaps the world’s best living cinematographer Roger Deakins. I do not know the name of many cinematographers but many a time I have seen a truly good looking movie, looked up the credits and found the name Roger Deakins. Amazingly he has never actually won an Oscar, but there is hardly a year that goes by where he has not been nominated for one. His list of nominated movies include: True Grit, The Reader, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn’t There, O Brother Where Art Thou? Kundun, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption.  I believe after Scorsese finally won for “The Departed,” Roger Deakins has rightfully taken over the title of most snubbed. He should be nominated for this movie it is about time that he finally won.

Outside of a Tarantino movie or something from China, this particular skill is rarely used in action thrillers. But here it is. When James Bond engages in a fistfight with a sniper on the 50^th floor of a building, they are silhouetted against a serene vision of skyscraper blue. When he tussles with some heavies and a couple of komodo dragons in a casino, the scene is ensconced in delicious Chinese red. Back in Scotland the moors are distinctively gray, bearish, and heavy with the past. When there are explosions, the characters are framed just right for the audience to feel the full effect of the raging fires. Take your girlfriend to see this movie and if she doesn’t approve of the sex and violence tell her she does not appreciate great art. How many times after a James Bond movie do you expect to truthfully be able to say that again?

But hey we did not see this movie for the beauty of it, did we? Let’s talk about sex and violence.

The action has thankfully been returned to “understandable” after that sojourn into chaos, which was “Quantum of Solace.” I especially liked how each set piece differed in the type of action from the chase scene in the beginning to the standoff in the end. It’s good stuff and people die well, especially the victim of that giant lizard.

The women are not especially memorable and Daniel Craig continues his trademark Bond style of not being particularly focused on swinging his way through his movies. This is the third movie in a row where a female is introduced, seduced and murdered (by the bad guys) in a span of let’s say five to ten minutes. In fact, I think it is fair to say the Bond Girl in this movie is none other than Judi Dench, as the MI6 boss, M. Her part in this movie is substantial as the bad guy’s plot revolves around specifically exacting revenge on her. Much has been said about the misogynistic nature of James Bond, but like “Casino Royale,” this movie provides an actual excuse for his behavior. Bond is already taken. He is married to England and M, well, that abbreviation may as well be for ‘mother.’ At least that is what the bad guy, a disgruntled ex-MI6 agent out for revenge, played by Javier Bardem, seems to think.

It has been noted before that the novelty of franchise movies is contained in its villains. They are after all are the newness of the installment. I think it is a less of an insult to Javier Bardem’s Julian Asssange tinged cyberterrorist and more of a big compliment to the sure-handed competence of the last three movies to say that Daniel Craig’s orphaned thug of a James Bond still remains the most interesting character in these stories. That’s a big thing. This is not just a great Bond movie; it is a very good movie in general. Not just for diehards, for everyone.