New Star Trek trailer, Quantum of Solace
Click to viewKirk is the wrong kind of pretty. Shatner could bring the boyish charm, but he had a more adult physicality. New Kirk looks like he belongs on a WB show. The other potential problem I'm seeing with new Kirk is a lack of gravitas. Shatner didn't always manage it, but he certainly reached for it. His most famous tic, the slow talk with weird pauses, was an attempt to give dilithium crystal jabber some weight. Star Trek is far from being Srs Biz, but I don't want Dawson freaking Leary captaining the USS Enterprise, thank you very.
Has anyone heard good things about new Kirk that might assuage my fears of bubblegum, all-American-ness?
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I haven't seen many reviews of Quantum of Solace on the flist. Is no one interested in the new Bond movie? I saw it Friday night with some friends, and an enjoyable experience was had by all. All but the people who sat in front of us. It's a sad day when a group of twenty-something women are more annoying (by roughly a factor of ten), than seven fourteen year old boys. Like, I got dirty looks, even. *g*
This is more of a ramble, than an organized review.
Daniel Craig continues to embody incendiary hotness. The best part about a Daniel Craig is that you find yourself waxing lyrical about the most unexpectedly delicious body parts. His shoulders. His forearms. His un-hot-but-sweet ears. Then there are the usual suspects: his eyes, his ass. Dear lord, his ass in a finely cut pair of trousers. And speaking of physicality (as we just were) Craig manages to imbue Bond with the perfect mixture of thugishness and studied suavity. Because that is Bond: paid killer, government thug, and charming adventurer.
This outing has Bond driven by grief and helplessness. Bond helpless? The villains, shadowy multi-national-criminals, outsmarted MI6 last time, and they will outsmart him again (and again and again). The hydra-headed organization loses a few smarmy European operatives each time, but will continues in the background, pursuing business as usual. As it must, because like the weirdo dictators and mad scientists of the Bond films of yesteryear, they are a Metaphor of Our Times, right? As much as the old baddies reflected Cold War anxieties, the new ones, equally terrorists and corporate slicksters, reflect a range of contemporary bugaboos.
Helpless too, to prevent the death of his girlfriend Vesper, in the last film, and at first, to find her killer. His government, and the Americans are all too willing to get in bad with the bad guys, and on a more personal level, how do you avenge your girlfriend's death, when a whole organization was complicit in it? Bond can defeat Quantum, but can he really defeat Quantum, and what it represents? The answer of course, is no.
Midway through the film, the second of two Bond Girls appears. A Miss Fields, employed by the British Consulate in Bolivia, tasked with making sure that Bond goes back to England, and stops his investigation into Quantum. Fields can't resist Bond's charm and is soon sharing his bed and his adventure. Then she turns up dead, covered in the oil that Bond denies is the aim of Quantum's schemes in Bolivia. Fields is a run of the mill secondary Bond Girl, but she's also a Vesper analog. Much of what grabs Bond's attention, is what attracted him to Vesper. And while they don't have the same kind of bond (arg!), when Fields turns up dead in his bed, it reminds him of Vesper. M's admonition about Bond's deplorable habit of getting pretty women killed, drives the point home. (I really want a fixit fic, btw, where Fields doesn't die, but is spirited off to become an agent).
And finally, Bond is helpless in the face of his bottled up rage. It never explodes out of him in an obvious way, but he can't seem to stop himself from killing people. Even when it's obviously not necessary to kill a suspect, or person of interest, he does it anyway. If he isn't killing, he's setting people up to be killed, or causing grievous bodily harm. To a certain extent that's always been Bond, but in QoS, we have M regularly reminding us that killing all the bad guys makes it damn hard to investigate a shadowy multi-national criminal organization. In fact, she regularly tells Bond to stop killing so many people. She did this in Casino Royale too, btw, but here there's a growing sense of alarm at Bond's mental state. Craig, meanwhile, does a fantastic job of hinting at what's going on underneath, without spelling it out for us. So that when he admits that M was right, he was pretty darned cheesed about that Vesper thing, and it was affecting his work, we believe him.
And M - rawr! Judi Dench continues to rock this part so hard. (I need an essay on the new Gender Swappped Genre Dragon Ladies, like M and Laura Roslin. Women who maintain their femininity, sexuality and maternal possibility, while literally stepping into masculine roles. Without being sexualized, without being infantilized, or shown up by their male underlings). I kind of like the hint of M-as-Bond's-mother that was introduced in this film. It's never more important than M-as-boss, and it doesn't reduce her to hand-wringing mom. And like everything else in the revived franchise, it's complicated. It's another piece of the relationship tapestry that still includes sexual chemistry. It was also great to see M fighting the backroom boys of the British government. New Bond hasn't been without questionable women-issues, but it's got some great roles for female performers.
In addition to M, QoS also has Camille, who's more Bond's comrade in arms, or even his mirror, than his love interest. A lot of reviewers have been disappointed by the lack of chemistry between these two, but I think they have exactly the measure of chemistry necessary: which is to say, not all that much. Camille and Bond recognize each other as attractive creatures who use their good looks and charm to get what they want, but neither falls under the spell of the other. And that's because they're just too much alike. Camille, like Bond, is looking to avenge dead loved ones. She's also an agent, a trained killer who hasn't killed yet (like Bond was just before CR), and possessed by a mess of emotion that she pretends doesn't exist. She's Bond a few years ago: not as hardened, not yet as good at hiding her humanity. There are a series of great moments that make this explicit: Bond saying he doesn't judge her for using sex, Bond advising her on how master her emotions and get the kill, Camille stalking through the hotel, her fight with El Presidente that was so much like Bond's fights throughout the film, and most especially, Camille walking away with a new mission. Their goodbye kiss was devoid of romance, but that's exactly as it should be. How could either of them enter into a new romance at this point, anyway?
Other character things I liked: Mathis! Bond cradling him as he dies and then mugging him. Perfectly in character for both of them. Felix! (Awesome Felix is awesome). Here's hoping that Felix appears again in the next film, whatever it turns out to be. The slimy district CIA chief. The slimier villain, with his insecurities, wounded masculinity and world-destroying, calculating evil. The dude who works for M, who was as compelled by that performance of Tosca as I was. People! Why wasn't I at that performance? Guh!
Weird thing I noticed: nearly every fight in this movie made serious use of broken glass. Did the second unit have a thing for the horrors of the human body meeting propelled plate glass? There was falling glass, people thrown and falling through glass, stabbing with glass, crawling on glass, and Bond dragging his fingers through glass. There weren't many moments of people looking through or at glass, or much dramatic use made of reflections. Something to ponder.
Things I disliked: the movie was too short. Too damn short! I fully expected another act, where Bond hunts down other Quantum schemers, in addition to Vesper's killer.
And one last thing: hello Canadian intelligence agent!
So yeah, I liked it, and will probably post about it again, when I get my thoughts in order.