I finally saw: Quantum of Solace

Considering that I don't think of myself as a huge James Bond fan, I shouldn't be so surprised that I've never made time for Quantum of Solace.

However, you can't argue with facts: Solace had been the only James Bond movie I hadn't seen since 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me. (And it's funny -- even though I consider Roger Moore to be my James Bond, I've only seen four of the seven films he appeared in.)

I would have probably let Quantum of Solace sit on the scrap heap for a while longer except that a) Spectre comes out today in Australia, and b) we're planning to discuss Spectre -- and presumably, Daniel Craig's entire stint as James Bond -- on the next episode of the ReelGood podcast. (Well, the next episode after the one we record tonight, which will be about The Lobster.) Only b actually plays a role in my decision, as mere storyline continuity did not require I see Quantum before watching Skyfall three years ago.

In fact, storyline continuity may have been what turned me off from prioritizing Quantum of Solace in the first place. (That and hearing that it wasn't much good.) I wasn't a big fan of Casino Royale, particularly the ending, in which Bond is all weepy over this woman Vesper who just betrayed him. Given the way Bond has traditionally disposed of women -- most shockingly later on in Skyfall, where he is a disinterested party to the disposal of a woman, if not actually the cause of her disposal -- it struck me as unusual that he would get so bent out of shape over the death of one who actively betrayed him. (It was for a similar reason that the maudlin display of emotion over the death of the traitor Boromir initially did not sit well with me at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.)

Anyway, upon learning that Quantum of Solace was a continuation of the events of Casino Royale, and that it was not very good, it seemed like an easy one to skip.

It was interesting trying to watch it last night without having Casino Royale clear in my memory, because the movie does intimately rely on a knowledge of events and characters from that movie, without giving any kind of flashback to those events or containing any overt exposition in the dialogue. So in one respect, Solace worked even less well for me than it probably would have had I seen it when it came out.

In another respect, however, it probably worked better for me since I hadn't placed the weight of all my expectations on its shoulders. After Casino Royale, I really had no expectations -- no positive ones, anyway. So if I look at Quantum of Solace just as a series of kinetic action set pieces -- and the criticism is that this is all it is -- it sort of works for me on that level. While Marc Forster's handling of the action scenes is one of the things people didn't like about this movie, I found that a couple of them really got my adrenaline going, particularly that one in that half-finished building where Bond and his assailant are fighting each other while riding up and down on pulleys. The camera is moving in an alive and alert way, even if the end result is fairly banal in terms of the narrative.

And I guess the big problem is that I really couldn't follow the narrative, and not only because I didn't remember the function of certain characters or what they had done in Casino Royale. But maybe no one could really follow it because it jumps forwards in fits and starts, with a truly absurd number of locations, with fight scenes breaking out seemingly at random, and with Bond ending them in unusually cruel and usually fatal abruptness. Because right, this guy is mad after Vesper drowned.

What seems clear -- and what they kind of figured out with Skyfall -- is that even if Bond has a kind of overall brooding character arc that may be informed by the various things that have happened to him, each new installment needs to stand on its own, without strong connective tissue to the other movies -- especially when it doesn't care to remind us what happened in those other movies. And that not only that, but that Bond should stay jovial even when he's getting down in the muck and knocking heads.

It's a tricky balance, though. In Skyfall, he got so jovial that he cracked a joke after the villain callously blew away the girl he'd slept with the night before.

What I think of Spectre remains to be seen, but I think I'm ready to turn the page on Daniel Craig as Bond. Fortunately, he is too. Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were disappointments, and even though Skyfall was not, my lingering impression of it is its misogynistic treatment of a truly unfortunate Bond girl.

Maybe Spectre will send him out in style ... or just leave me rolling my eyes over another at least partially missed opportunity.

Some pretty crap pairings

I like me a good puzzle.

Not necessarily those brain teasers that threaten to drive a person crazy. I'll try those from time to time, but I'm usually driven crazy before I solve them.

No, more than anything I mean I like fitting things together so they just plain work. And one "recent" (almost five years ago) example of that was the seating arrangements for our wedding.

That was my responsibility, and I attacked it with gusto. I loved the challenge of taking a group of disparate guests (nearly 100) and dividing them up so that each table included the perfect blend of similar personalities, and at least one really gregarious person who could help get everyone talking. The key was working out the whole table, not just eight of the ten seats. The final results of my mixing and matching left me with a much greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction than such a task probably should have.

The Mission Tiki Drive-In needs someone like me.

With many fewer variables to consider, they've done an absolute shit job figuring out which movies should fit with which this week.

As I may have told you before, I get a weekly email from Mission Tiki telling me which movies are paired for double features on which screens. They've probably made some bad pairings before, but this week's pairings are particularly egregious.

The only prominent new movie opening today is Killing Them Softly, which joins a slate of seven returning movies: Skyfall, Wreck-It Ralph, Flight, Twilight: BDP2, Taken 2, Rise of the Guardians and Red Dawn.

Now, if you want a little challenge of your own, take a minute to pair off these eight movies in the ways you think would be smartest.

When you do so, keep in mind that this drive-in theater does not let you switch screens between the two features. I should know, as discussed here.

Therefore, also keep in mind that both movies should be appropriate for the same audiences to watch. I'm sure there are some people who come to watch only a single movie and then leave, but you're paying for two movies, so they should arrange it so you can see both of them. (Actually, you're paying only $7 for adults and $1 for kids from 5-9, with those under 5 free, so the price is justified for only watching a single movie. Still, that's no fun, and it's not how the movies are advertised.)

Have you made your selections?

I'll show you mine in a minute, but let me first show you theirs. The first movie listed below plays twice, both before and after the second movie, to accommodate the late-arriving crowd.

Killing Them Softly with Skyfall
Wreck-It Ralph with Twilight
Rise of the Guardians with Flight
Red Dawn with Taken 2

If the problem with this arrangement doesn't immediately jump out at you, let me give you a little assist.

Three of these pairings are basically fine. Not ideal, but fine.

The fourth is an outrage.

I'm talking about Rise of the Guardians and Flight.

(And very minor spoilers about Flight are about to follow.)

Guardians is rated PG. But since it's an animated movie, you wouldn't be surprised if some parents assumed it was rated G. Meaning it would be suitable for their youngest possible tots. And believe me, there are always plenty of young tots at this drive-in.

Flight? R. R for Restricted.

R for full frontal nudity and cocaine use in the first five minutes.

That's right, all you lovers of the female flesh -- in the first five minutes of Flight, you see Nadine Velazquez, erstwhile cast member on My Name is Earl and The League, boobs and bush front. (You see her butt, too, but that's comparatively quaint.)

Actually, forget what I said about five minutes. You see this in the first one minute of the movie.

Not long after that, major movie star Denzel Washington leans over a glass table and snorts a couple lines of cocaine.

So even if parents were savvy about the rating and prospective content of Flight, and even if they were hurrying to pack up their kids and leave before the next movie started, there's a decent chance those kids would be exposed to pubic hair and drugs before their parents even had a chance to do anything about it.

And any parents know that you can't pack up your kids to leave somewhere in only a minute or two. Especially if you've got coolers out and a half-dozen kids running around like maniacs, you're looking at ten or 15 minutes.

What's more, it's one thing to know that an R-rated movie is coming on, and what it may contain. It's another thing to be assaulted by the movie's kid-unfriendly elements while the opening credits are still rolling.

And then of course there are all those parents who don't know what Flight's about, and will be just sitting there, blissfully watching the second movie, until all the sudden, a 40-foot vagina is staring them in the face.

Someone needs to put a stop to this before the first show tonight, methinks. At least it's raining in Los Angeles, so perhaps Mother Nature will step in where stupid human beings either can't or won't.

The thing is, this should be easy enough to fix.

And now we've come to the part of our program where you and I compare notes on our own pairings for these eight movies. This is what I came up with:

Flight of the Guardians with Wreck-It Ralph
Red Dawn with Twilight
Killing Them Softly with Flight
Skyfall with Taken 2

The first pairing is so obvious, it should have hit them over the head with something heavy. You have two animated movies with very little scandalous content. Put them together on the same bill.

The second seems pretty obvious as well. These are the two movies featuring primarily casts of late teenagers/early twentysomethings. I'm sure there's a fair amount of angst in both. Not to mention that both of the damn movies have the word "dawn" in their titles. (A little on-the-nose? I don't care, I like it.)

The remaining four movies could probably be divided up in almost any fashion. In fact, I was tempted to pair Skyfall and Flight, just because of their similar titles.

But when you look a little closer, a more logical configuration does present itself. There are two PG-13 movies here, and two R movies. Just match up the two R movies, you idiots.

Last week they weren't smoking this much crack. Killing Them Softly replaced Hotel Transylvania, which finally finished an improbably long run that would have started in late September. Transylvania had been matched up with Guardians. Ralph was with Twilight -- not perfect, but at least the younger audiences probably aren't going to be scarred for life by anything that happens in Twilight. Flight was with Taken 2 (that's fine) and Red Dawn was with Skyfall (that's also fine). There are some Rs mixed in with some PG-13s, but I don't really think that line of demarcation means what it used to mean.

Who knows why they got soft in the head this week.

Now, I don't want to rule out the possibility that there's some kind of profit algorithm they use to determine what goes with what. Maybe strong performers only go with strong performers, or maybe just the opposite -- maybe strong performers need to prop up weak performers. (Though I don't know how you can accurately determine which movie is responsible for a double feature performing well.) Or maybe there's a newness variable, or maybe there's some kind of variable to determine which movie needs to be shown first. After all, if you match the two animated movies, you are pushing the start time of Wreck-It Ralph back to 9:30. Maybe they've witnessed the exodus of cars from the lot after the first movie ends, and they know that most of the tykes clear out after the first movie anyway.

But even just the risk of incurring the anger of dozens of parents, for whom Nadine's "special area" was never part of their evening plans, seems like a good reason to throw that algorithm out the window. At least for one week.

At this point I should admit that protecting kids at the drive-in from things they shouldn't see is an imperfect science to begin with. All you have to do is rotate your head to watch any one of the other three movies. You can see all four screens from almost any vantage point (though the other three would be farther away and therefore harder to make out clearly). The drive-in logistics department just assumes you're going to want to keep your eyes trained on the screen of the movie whose sound is also playing on your FM dial. But if you're talking about a young kid, that's not a safe assumption. If you're a young kid whose attention easily wanders, his/her eyes might easily and unwittingly wander to Nadine Velazquez' crotch. 

At least in that case it would be a random occurrence, not part of our regularly scheduled program.

Of course, they could solve some of these problems by just allowing people to switch theaters between movies. I've never quite understood why they're so strict about that. Except that it probably does have something to do with judging which movies are performing and which are starting to stink like old fish.

Besides, power-hungry assholes get off on being power-hungry assholes, and no, I'm not talking about those guys who drove up to us in their golf cart to prevent us from switching screens to see Hall Pass after we'd finished Battle: Los Angeles in March of last year.

And no, I'm not still bitter.

Though they could go a long way toward mending fences with me if they hired me as a "pairings consultant." I would do it for a very modest fee: $25 a week.

If they're looking for referrals, I offer for their consideration the hundred happy guests at my wedding. 

James Bond on the brain

Literally.

But the weird thing was that I sent it from my brain to someone else's last night.

I was walking up the stairs from the parking garage to the main level of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where I was planning to meet a couple friends for an 8:30 showing of Skyfall at the Arclight Theater. I started to anticipate not liking the movie as much as I think I should, and viewing that as more evidence that I'm not a huge Bond fan. Apparently, I want to like Bond more than I actually do, so this seemed to me a failure of some kind.

But as I reached the top of the steps I thought "But that's not really true -- I like that second Brosnan movie more than almost anyone I know." The title Tomorrow Never Dies did not immediately leap to mind, but that's the movie I was thinking of.

Apparently, so was someone else. As I continued on toward the main thoroughfare, I caught a lingering snippet of a conversation from the group of people I had just passed. The last words I heard one of the guys speak were "the one with Michelle Yeoh in it."

Which means that he, too, was thinking of/talking about Tomorrow Never Dies at that very same moment. And also not producing the title on the spot as he and his friends did a Skyfall post-mortem before separating to their cars. 

Now, I'm sure you are thinking "Vance, you just heard them talking about Bond, which is what got you thinking about Bond and predicting your reaction to Skyfall." But it's not true. I started to think about Bond before I even reached this group of people, and even if I had unconsciously heard them talking about it, it's still striking that I started to think about Tomorrow Never Dies before the guy ever mentioned it. And even if I had unconsciously heard them talking about Tomorrow Never Dies -- though not by title, because, as discussed, the guy referred to the movie only by mentioning one of its Bond girls -- that's not how I "got to" Tomorrow Never Dies in my own head. I started thinking about it by reassuring myself that I do really love some Bond films, and producing TND as an example. And it's not like we were both thinking of the most recent Bond film before this, which I haven't seen anyway. The film we were both thinking of is 15 years old.

Anyway, this funny little coincidence -- probably not a case of either of us sending messages with our brains -- gave me something to think about for the rest of the walk to the theater.

During one of the down moments of the first act, I got to thinking something else about James Bond and his own personal history. I'm sure this has been written about by untold Bond enthusiasts, but I haven't read their work, so it was occurring to me independently as I watched Skyfall. The question struck me as appropriate for the 50th anniversary of the character's appearance in movies.

The question was:

Is this James Bond supposed to be the same James Bond from Dr. No?

Setting aside the obvious problem that a secret service agent could not be in peak physical condition for field operations for a 50-year period of his life, is Daniel Craig, as James Bond, supposed to be the same James Bond who fought on the platform of a huge satellite dish (Goldeneye), the same James Bond who disarmed a bomb on a military base wearing a clown outfit (Octopussy), the same James Bond who cheated his apparent death the first time after being shot in a fold away bed in Japan (You Only Live Twice)?

There seems to be a good reason that the character doesn't spend much time mentally cataloguing his past adventures, all the ways he's evaded death and all the women he's loved. It's because clearly this is not meant to be the same man for 23 movies. But it's not overtly supposed to be a different man. I mean, clearly there is not more than one superspy named James Bond working for MI6.

I guess it's probably useful to think of it this way: Each actor who plays Bond has had the experience of all the things that have happened to him in his own films. The James Bond of A View to a Kill (1985) has the memories of the James Bond of Live and Let Die (1973), because both are Roger Moore. But if you ask him to remember what happened to him in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), he can't, because that was Sean Connery.

This isn't to say that each actor's first time as Bond represented the character as an agent new to MI6. Bond is a veteran agent even in Dr. No. Just that each actor's first Bond film represents the first cinema-worthy adventure Bond undertook as an agent. You'd assume his previous adventures were more by-the-book, even the harrowing ones. In that sense, the Bond series was mastering the concept of the "reboot" even before we had computers.

I'm sure Travis will have something to say about all this.

As for Skyfall, I was quite entertained. It's an unusual entry in the series in many respects, not least of which was the cinematography by Roger Deakins -- I kept noticing the wonderful composition and framing of shots, for which Sam Mendes also deserves credit. I commented to one of my friends afterward that after the first scene -- which may just be the best 15 minutes in any Bond movie I've ever seen -- the movie was notable for its lack of the kind of Rube Goldberg staging of action scenes that we have come to associate with the series. (You know, the kind that Aardman Animation has since perfected.) The finale of the film is a particular departure in that respect. Skyfall is a lot more raw and straightforward, which is not a bad thing.

I mean, the movie's whole damn point is that sometimes retro is better. As a guy approaching 40, that's an idea I'm starting to get behind more and more all the time.

Cramming for Skyfall

I started to write this last week, then never got to post it. So instead of reworking it, I'll just post it as is and tack on a new ending.

Last week: 

The word is out that Skyfall is supposed to be pretty darn great.

Still over a week before it's released, its Metacritic score stands at a ridiculous 83. That's Argo territory.

Which means that a semi-indifferent Bond fan like myself may be on the verge of a good polish-up before seeing it in the theater.

I didn't like Casino Royale all that much. There, I said it. The film is pretty much universally adored, so it's okay if you're looking at me like I have three heads. I had multiple problems with it, but I won't go into them here.

What's germane about not loving Casino Royale is that it means I didn't prioritize seeing Quantum of Solace -- especially after hearing that my minority negative appraisal of Royale was the majority opinion here. I could have used that information to determine that Solace might be right up my alley. Instead, I moved further away from it -- so much so that I still have not seen it.

But the words of breathless praise about Skyfall -- at least from the eight positive reviews currently tabulated on Metacritic, compared to two mixed reviews -- got me thinking that it might be time to give old Quantum of Solace a shot. I suppose I wouldn't strictly need to see it first, but I try to watch movie series in order if it's not that hard to do. And catching up with just a single movie before watching Skyfall would not be that hard to do.

Except, maybe it will be. Turns out other people are cramming for Skyfall as well.

When I added Solace to my Netflix queue a couple days ago and immediately promoted it to the #1 position, I noticed that its expected availability was characterized as "Very Long Wait." Hmmm.

Now, in this post, Don Handsome convinced me that I shouldn't read much into the ETAs issued by Netflix. He told me he frequently gets movies that are in his #1 position even when their expected availability is less than immediate. And I believe I subsequently had the same experience myself.

But it did get me wondering whether this is the actual phenomenon I'm seeing: lots of other movie fans who, like me, did not see Quantum of Solace, and feel like the narrative might confuse them without knowing which person double-crossed whom in James Bond's most recent adventure.

That's kind of a joke, since a James Bond movie is a James Bond movie is a James Bond movie. I didn't worry about the fact that I hadn't seen any of the Sean Connery movies when I sat down to see Moonraker. (It was either that or For Your Eyes Only that was my first Bond movie -- can't say for sure.) You pick up what's going on pretty quickly.

However, what's not a joke is that people who read the critical dismissals of Quantum of Solace may be deciding it's worth reconsidering the movie, now that they know there will be another Bond movie and that it might be really, really good. In case you forget, there was a time when it seemed like the Bond series might not continue. Solace came out only four years ago, but the immediate two years after its release were plenty of time for chaos to reign about the future of Bond. Solace was the last film Columbia (having bought MGM) agreed to distribute, and it was uncertain what would happen with the series after that. Fortunately, a new deal was reached quickly enough for it to barely seem like a longer break than usual between successive Bond films.

This week:

Okay, so now I have some real-world results of my uncertain success about being able to acquire Quantum of Solace from Netflix. In fact, since I started this post, I've been unusually good about watching the discs in my possession. Today, the third movie since I started writing this post is shipping to me, and it's the third straight movie that has not been Quantum of Solace. So in this case, the "Very Long Wait" really means something.

So maybe I'll just not worry about the fact that I haven't seen it. I know there are other ways I could get it, but maybe it's not worth the bother. I'm feeling an excitement for Skyfall that I haven't felt for any Bond film in years, and maybe the attempt to see Solace would only slow me down.

Who knows, maybe it could even challenge Octopussy as my all-time favorite. Stifle the giggles all you want, but that's the one I saw ten times when I was a kid, and it holds a special place in my heart. Could Skyfall top it?

Eh, probably not.