Movie review: “Skyfall”

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Partner and I saw the latest James Bond movie, “Skyfall,” yesterday. I wasn’t expecting much, frankly. The Financial Times review a week or two ago described Daniel Craig as “looking more than ever like a garden gnome who, having overdone it a little in the 1990s, spent the following decade in the gym by way of compensation.”

I’m pleased to tell you that it’s actually a pretty good movie.

Every actor who’s been lucky enough to play James Bond has done something different with the role. Sean Connery, the original, set the pace: serious but wryly funny, very physical, very sexy, heartlessly deadly when necessary. Roger Moore was Bond-the-playboy, and very much Austin Powers’s granddaddy. The others – Lazenby, Brosnan, Dalton – came and went without much impact.

Daniel Craig, in this (his third) Bond movie, gives us Bond-as-Batman: haunted by the death of his parents, noble, humorless, murderous.

Also, he has dreamy blue eyes, and a body like a Greek god.

I’m sorry: what were we talking about?

I can’t tell you much about the movie without spoiling it for you. I will say that Judi Dench is back as M, cold and bitchy as ever, and strangely compelling. We have Naomie Harris as Bond’s, um, assistant, and Ben Whishaw as a cocky young Q. We have Ralph Fiennes as a Ministry bureaucrat who turns out to be something more.

Also, we have Javier Bardem as the villain.

You know how you think of some James Bond movies in shorthand? “Diamonds Are Forever” is “the one in Las Vegas.” “Goldfinger” is “the one where they try to get Fort Knox.” Well, this one will be “the one where Javier Bardem played that blond madman.” (Seriously, what is it about Javier Bardem’s hair? He’s a very handsome man, but just give him a strange haircut and/or a dye job, and he’s the Antichrist.)

Javier doesn’t appear in the movie until about halfway through, and he’s very nasty and very memorable. He rolls his eyes and giggles unbearably. He’s sexually ambiguous in a very stickily insane way. You spend the last half of the movie wishing that James Bond would just show up and kill him as brutally as possible.

And do you get your wish?

I won’t tell you.

The first James Bond picture, “Dr. No,” came out fifty years ago, in 1962. We know the James Bond clichés by heart by now, and many of them are here: the Aston-Martin, the shaken martini. Craig even says the obligatory line: “Bond. James Bond.” It makes you feel at home; it makes you realize that, whatever else happens, James is gonna come through, guns blazing, in the final reel. But this movie also acknowledges that time is passing: Bond is getting old, and M is getting old.

But maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as Bond can kill everybody he needs to kill.

I can’t neglect mentioning the remarkable cinematography, nor Sam Mendes’s direction. Whole scenes are amazing: a dreamlike night scene in Shanghai, full of windows and reflected light; a nightmare struggle in Macao with Komodo dragons looking on.

I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought I would, as you can probably tell. It was too long, and too noisy, and too violent, naturally. But it was funny and compelling too, and very well-acted.

Go see it, kids.

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London 2012: the opening ceremonies

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I think the Olympics are great. I especially like the opening ceremony.

 

 

Actually, the opening ceremony is pretty much the only thing I like. I find the athletic events dull. (Over the past few days I have watched bits of volleyball, and cycling, and swimming, and I cannot stifle my yawns.)

 

 

But the opening ceremonies – yowzah! They are an opportunity for the host country to tell a story about itself. We all remember the powerfully choreographed opening of the Beijing Olympics, with 2008 drummers in sync with one another, and later the adorable children from all over China, in ethnic costumes. (I vaguely recall that one of the children was lip-synching a song, but let us not speak of that.) I also recall the Vancouver Olympics, with a sort of rippling pool of light in which we saw Native American images, and a huge bear, and fiddlers, and – well, all kinds of things.

 

 

The London ceremony was huge, and sloppy, and very endearing. We knew in advance that it was going to be the “English countryside,” and snippy commentators were predicting sheep and cottages. Well, we did in fact get sheep and cottages. We also got the countryside (literally) rolled away. We got the World-Tree ripped from the top of Glastonbury Tor. We got Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” growing out of the floor. We got suffragettes, and the Jarrow Marchers, and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 

 

Danny Boyle, the director of “Slumdog Millionaire,” did a wonderful thing: he tried his very best to include everything. And I think he may well have succeeded. (I think he put up a posterboard: “What is the UK?” And he, and everyone, put up notes, for days and days. And he included everything that everyone suggested.)

 

 

We got music, and weather reports, and Sir Edward Elgar’s “Nimrod,” and “Jerusalem.” We got J. K. Rowling. We got Tim Berners-Lee. We got the Stones, and Cruella de Ville. We got Paul McCartney! We got the Sex Pistols. We got the Queen (the actual Queen!) and her corgis, with Daniel Craig as James Bond. We got allusions to Austin Powers and J. R. R. Tolkien. We got Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

 

 

We got an elaborate salute to the UK’s National Health Service, right in front of Mitt and Ann Romney, and I would have loved to ask them how they enjoyed it.

 

 

The Beijing ceremony in 2008 was about unity and power. The London ceremony was about diversity. The choreography – dear God! – was elaborate in the extreme, but it seemed almost random: groups of marchers drifting together, marching through one another’s ranks, and separating again.

 

 

One of the Financial Times commentators last weekend said, nicely: “The parts that didn’t work highlighted the parts that did.” Exactly right. The rock-and-roll section was a little long, and maybe Rowan Atkinson / Mister Bean was a little over-the-top, but it all worked. (A lot of people on Tumblr seem to think that the Olympic cauldron, which only came together in the last moments of the ceremony, was the Eye of Sauron. I don’t think so. But – who knows?)

 

 

Sadly, I had to watch this ceremony on American television, on NBC. Matt Lauer (whom I thought was smarter than this) treated it as the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, and  giggled and talked through the whole thing. Bob Costas (to whom I am used by now, after many Olympics) thinks he has to do color commentary through the whole thing. My Tumblr idol, wellthatsjustgreat, wrote some wonderfully scathing commentary on Messrs. Lauer and Costas, which I encourage you to read. In effect, they almost ruined the thing, especially the Parade of Nations. (Well, NBC helped; they decided that we didn’t need to see whole chunks of the ceremony, and dumped in a fatuous interview with Michael Phelps. Also, I am told by a correspondent in the UK that the BBC coverage was even worse.)

 

 

I have the ceremony on the DVR. I have already watched bits over again. I still haven’t gotten all of the British-culture references. I probably never will.

 

 

It was wonderful, nonetheless.

 

(And now I have to go back and watch the Vancouver ceremony from 2010, because I still don’t have all of that one figured out either.)

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