Monday, November 20, 2023

Scars Of Dracula

Scars of Dracula (1970)

Dir. Roy Ward Baker

Written by Anthony Hinds, using the name "John Elder"

Starring Chirstopher Lee, Christopher Matthew, Dennis Waterman, Jenny Hanley



For the last six years, I have been doling out the Hammer Studios DRACULA films at the rate of one-per-October, trying to recreate the experience of being a Hammer fan over the course of 1958 to 1974 as the once-genre-defining series gradually slipped into obsolete mediocrity. But even watching these six films in a sped-up six years rather than the 12 years that would have passed for OG Hammer fans between THE HORROR OF DRACULA and SCARS OF DRACULA, the decline has been less precipitous than I assumed it would be; while none of the increasingly unnecessary sequels (and increasingly frequent; after only producing two sequels between 1958 and 1966, SCARS would be the second DRACULA sequel to premier in 1970 alone*) are anywhere near the level of the superior original, even six movies in the quality has been reasonably consistent. Of the six films leading to this point, last go-round's TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA is probably the weakest, and not only is it still a decently enjoyable time, but its immediate sequel --which we concern ourselves with here-- is actually an unambiguous improvement. Honest to God, even as the studio was floundering into the 70's (the same year they'd try an abortive re-boot of their flagship FRANKENSTEIN series without Peter Cushing) and only six years from their final theatrical horror film, their sixth DRACULA sequel is not obviously any worse than the generally well-liked second sequel DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS.


Of course, the reason that one might feel tempted to compare those two movies is that they're basically identical. Once again, you have Dracula (Christopher Lee, THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN) getting resurrected** and lurking around his (now much more modestly appointed) castle until a handful of clueless pretty young people  show up and try to hang out there, while Dracula tries to vampirize the women. That's pretty much the exact plot of PRINCE OF DARKNESS, with a smattering of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE in that there's also some business revolving around a local pub where Michael Ripper is the proprietor (but a surly innkeeper compared to his cheerful one in RISEN FROM THE GRAVE), and a sympathetic and sexually-frustrated barmaid who is vastly more interesting than the wooden female lead lends some assistance and comes to a bad end. It's a sturdy enough formula to get the job done, but there's no getting around the fact that we've seen all of this before (and audiences in 1970 had seen it just six months earlier, as TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA had premiered in May). And it doesn't help that it's not only the same thing, but a noticeably cheaper version of the same thing, with smaller and chintzier sets and no significant escalation in the sleaze or violence to give it more juice.



That having been said, there are a few details that give it at least a little distinction. For one thing, I like that it begins with a scenario that is part and parcel of the FRANKENSTEIN series but has not yet turned up in DRACULA: the townsfolk, fed up with having their most voluptuous women constantly exsanguinated, gather an angry mob (led by Michael Ripper as an unusually action-prone tavern owner) and storm up to the castle to torch it. This ends up working out poorly for them, but hey, it was worth a try; unfortunately the trauma associated with the fallout from this incident makes them very disinclined to be helpful to anyone else who might want to try to take down the Count. In a long series abundant with surly, suspicious townsfolk, I think this is the first time we actually get enough of their perspective that we sort of understand where they're coming from. 


And like DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, this has one of the more tolerable Generically Handsome White Guy Protagonists of the whole Hammer canon; obscure actor Christopher Matthews (IMDB reports his most known role is "radar technician" in a handful of Dr. Who episodes) is actually a lot of fun as good-hearted lothario Paul (oddly, he has the same name as Barry Andrews' similarly tolerable protagonist from RISEN FROM THE GRAVE) who turns the first half-hour into a cheeky sex romp which takes a PSYCHO-esque twist when he discovers he is, in fact, in a vampire movie. Unfortunately this turns out to be a big problem, because SCARS OF DRACULA is one of those perplexingly numerous Hammer movies (see: THE GORGON) which switches protagonists and restarts halfway through, this time abruptly pivoting to Paul's much, much lamer brother Simon (Dennis Waterman, apparently famous for tough-guy roles in The Sweeney and Minder, but a total dishtowel here) and Simon's personality-free fiancĂ© (Jenny Hanley, one of Blofeld's sex cult haram in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE), who basically exactly reenact the film's first 40 minutes but with less charisma. 



Still, it wouldn't be the first Hammer film to succeed in spite of an iffy structure and some bland young people as protagonists. Things are much better off in the villain department, with Lee given probably the most screen time and the most active part he's had in the whole series. His take on the character (playing Drac as a predatory force of nature just barely masked by a veneer of regal civility) is much better-suited to this story structure than it has been to the last few sequels, and he seems engaged enough that you would never guess what a huge baby he was about returning again and again to the series that made him a star. He has a few moments of titillating brutality which, while still kind of tame by Italian standards in 1970, would nonetheless be further than Hammer could have pushed the boundaries back when this thing kicked off in 1958 (although for my money, PRINCE OF DARKNESS is more shocking).  Oh, and they finally do the thing where Dracula scampers up the castle walls (one of the more memorable images of the novel, and ignored by the franchise thus far), and  --even more welcome-- The Count gets what is unquestionably his most awesome death in this series (which, admittedly, is more notable for how lame his deaths have been up til now).  


So it's probably Lee's most impactful outing since the original, and he's  given a solid assist by the Renfield-like*** "Klove" (Patrick Troughton, the second Dr. Who, and memorably impaled by a lighting rod in THE OMEN), who really leans into the character's pathetic misery in a way that gives the film what little bit of drama it possesses. Plus there's 1000% more bat action than any of the previous sequels, which is admirable but perhaps a bit reckless considering the, um, quality of the bat puppet they procured. And they think of a lot of good excuses to zoom in on Hanley's cleavage, so, you know, obviously these guys know their business.


So really it's not that there's a lot wrong with SCARS OF DRACULA, so much as there's just nothing that justifies returning to this exact same material for a sixth time. On one hand, it feels like a genuine surprise that they were able to maintain the basic quality this long -- I had assumed, based on the next movie, that this series was already a cheap joke by this point. It's not; if this were the third or even fourth sequel, we might even find ourselves in a position to be more kindly disposed to a scrappy little retread with a handful of decent genre beats. But yeah, it's hard to ignore that the sixth sequel --and the second in a single year!-- really needed more of a hook to justify its existence.**** Unfortunately, Hammer seemed to agree with me, and the next sequel has the kind of hook that makes one long for the classical, tried-and-true simplicity of SCARS OF DRACULA. 


* And since Lee also appeared as the Count in Jess Franco's non-Hammer DRACULA and as an unnamed but Dracula-like vampire in Jerry Lewis' ONE MORE TIME the same year, 1970 probably marked the high-water mark of any one actor playing Dracula -- or, hell, any specific character-- in terms of pure volume.


** This time a Bat spits blood on his bones before the credits, and that's that; the most "fuck it, whatever, somehow Palpatine returned" resurrection until Renny Harlin had a dog piss fire on Freddy Krueger. Notably, Drac's corpse seems to be back in his castle, which is a significant break in continuity from the preceding TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, where he died in an abandoned church. The series hasn't been huge on continuity up to this point, but I believe this is the first one that doesn't even gesture towards it.


*** Weirdly, none of the Hammer Dracula movies actually have a character named "Renfield." He's completely absent from HORROR OF DRACULA, but similarly shows up as a character named "Klove" (played by a different actor) in PRINCE OF DARKNESS. Was there a copyright issue or something?


**** Actually, this does have a hook that features in one of the series' goriest images. So maybe just a little more ambition would do it.

HAMMER’S DRACULA SERIES:



6: SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)
8: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)


(see also: Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN series)

Monday, May 1, 2023

Attraction and Repulsion: Last Night In Soho and the Ambivalence of "Problematic" Art




LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (2021)

Dir. Edgar Wright

Written by Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg


I like Roman Polanski's REPULSION. At the same time, I very much don't like drugging and raping 13-year-olds. The same Roman Polanski who made REPULSION also drugged and raped a 13-year old. And the same 60's and 70's counterculture which produced so much provocative, challenging art I love also produced a culture of hedonistic, celebrity-centered boundary-pushing that made him think he could get away with it. And there's very little space to "separate art from artist" when it's so obvious that the art in question is the direct result of both the specific person and the the specific culture from which it sprang -- and not always even from the more admirable qualities of that person and culture. So what to do with the fact that these things I love are also inextricably interwoven with things I find repugnant -- and not just repugnant, but things that I think need to be actively, forcefully repudiated, not just for abstract moral reasons but because they remain active and dangerous forces in the modern world? 


LAST NIGHT IN SOHO is Edgar Wright's attempt to grapple with those questions, essentially by making a vague REPULSION riff* that very self-consciously brings to the foreground the less savory aspects of the director and the time period, forcing the confrontation between our fetishization of the nostalgic past and the grim reality of that past that we sometimes conveniently overlook. The movie does this in the most literal possible way: by sending a somewhat brittle Zoomer 1960's fangirl (Thomasin McKenzie, JOJO RABBIT) back in time, where she discovers in no uncertain terms that beneath the alleged glamour and liberating social loosening of the era, there was some rampant misogyny** that somehow she never gleaned from a lifetime of consuming an apparently unadulterated diet of nothing but 60's media. (Not to be an asshole, but, like, the first thing she sees in 1965 is a huge marquee for THUNDERBALL, a not-particularly-obscure film which, uh, has some pretty strong hints that gender equity in 1965 was not exactly up to the standards of today. It kind of makes her seem like an idiot for being surprised, but as we will see, being an idiot is at least a pretty consistent character trait for her). So it's basically MIDNIGHT IN PARIS if it was in any way self-aware. 


This is all reasonably successful, as far as it goes, but it's also a little disappointing it doesn't go further. For a movie taking aim at such a fraught topic, its insights are ultimately pretty shallow and prosaic. At the end of an extremely unrushed 116 minutes (including an entire opening act that is almost wholly useless deadwood), the only thing the movie has been able to articulate with any clarity is "boy, there sure was a lot of misogyny in the 60's, huh? But those clothes and pop songs sure do rock!" an observation which is not only a little underwhelming as a central thesis, but one which has already been fully explored by the 50-minute mark (which sounds like it's late in the movie but, in fact, marks the first glimmering of any actual conflict -- I told you it takes a long time to get going!) and will not be expanded upon a single iota during the film's remaining 66 minutes. 


This disappointingly banal answer to the movie's rather more complicated questions is not just reflective of a lack of intellectual rigor, though it is that too, but is also the inevitable result of Wright's stylistic choices, which have the effect of limiting any possibility that the film might expose something genuinely revealing. The problem is that in trying to explore our perception of the past, the movie never creates a real, tangible place. It's all as blunt and exaggerated as possible, presenting the 60's alternately as a giddy fairy-tale fantasy or a cartoonish nightmare, and consequently never really interrogating its central dilemma with any nuance. In theory, the movie probably thinks it's trying to balance our cozy nostalgia with harsh reality, but since both "good" and "bad" versions of the past are ultra-stylized caricatures, it never really feels like a search for truth, more like a battle between two opposing and equally phony reductive fantasies. 



In reality, the 60's wasn't just one thing; it was a complex, sprawling era that looked very different depending on where you were, who you were, and what you wanted, and the movie can't really explore it meaningfully when it presents the past in such starkly black-and-white terms. And because both visions of the 60's are so patently disconnected from any kind of real lived reality, the movie really struggles to link the dark side of the the 60's to the continued issues of the real-world present (in fact, I'm not even sure it's trying to, which is a serious issue for a movie that so strongly wants to posit itself as a moral arbiter). Bizarrely, the script places its only blatant modern-day misogyny at the very start of the movie (there's a very effective early sequence where our protagonist gets stuck in a cab with a sexually threatening driver), and then, content that it has established the present day as thoroughly unpleasant, sends its heroine back in time to her idealized 1960's, only to gradually disillusion her of the idea that they were such a great time for women. But wait, did she (or anyone) really think the 1960's were the halcyon days of sexual equality? This ordering of events has the strange effect of sequestering the problem in the distant past, and centering the movie's conflict on re-framing our images of history rather than seeing misogyny as a long-running continuity that stretches through the past into the present. Indeed, it almost makes the issue of misogyny itself independently unimportant, a mere stand-in for the ways in which we unwisely idealize the past, rather than an important topic in its own right (which would be fine if the movie had a lighter touch, but I seriously doubt that's what it thinks its doing, given how hard it pushes its themes of female persecution).  


And if its vision of the past more generally is more baroque fantasy than honest reckoning, its portrayal of actual misogynists is even worse. There are only two type of men in the movie: venal, despicable monsters or endlessly sympathetic saints (ok, there's only one of the latter), which is a thoroughly unhelpful way of looking at things. If it were that simple, it would be no problem, would it? One would think that a movie with Polanski so thoroughly on its mind would be more aware that misogyny is much more complex than the one-dimensional mustache-twirlers depicted here. After all, REPULSION, ROSEMARY'S BABY, and CHINATOWN, just to name a few Polanksi movies, are all acutely aware of women facing various kinds of misogynist violence and dismissal, and indeed are all rather more sensitive and closely-observed in their implied critique of the patriarchy than LAST NIGHT IN SOHO ever is. These movies suggest Polanksi enjoyed a more-than-superficial perceptiveness of women's exploitation at the hands of men... and yet, in the end, he was more than willing to perpetuate that exploitation himself, and to this day seems stubbornly insistent on rationalizing his actions rather than introspecting about them. That's the kind of misogyny that's truly insidious; LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, in its search of signifiers more than genuine provocation, has eyes only for the easy, obvious villains, who would have been roundly condemned by most of society even in the 1960s. What good does that do?


So as a reckoning with our relationship with history, and as a reckoning with real-world misogyny, the movie is well-meaning but depressingly superficial considering how effortful it is. But its more interesting angle is a more complicated one. By being both a tribute to and a tacit criticism of Polanski in particular and exploitation horror in general, the film isn't just reminding us of the dangers of blind nostalgia, it's openly asking the question what does it mean that we are drawn to art built around some extremely dubious morality, often made by some extremely dubiously moral artists?


Between this film, INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD, and HOTEL FEAR, I seem to have stumbled onto an unexpected run of quasi-horror films which are very self-consciously dedicated to the subject of women's' suffering at the hands of men who view them as objects upon which to act out their own desires and insecurities. Given the horror genre's --let's say uneven-- track record on misogyny, there's a level of auto-critique inherent in threading this theme into a genre movie at all, and consequently, when you're watching them there's the implicit understanding that these films are intentionally trying to right a wrong, to address the genre itself by reframing the conventional narratives in a way that challenges our assumptions. That they attempt to do this through essentially the same tools as a more traditional horror movie is at least theoretically provocative, particularly given that all three were directed by men (and with only one female writer between them, in this case co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns [1917, THE GOOD NURSE]). 



This in turn requires a certain level of meta self-awareness on the part of the film and the audience; we need to understand that the point here is to undermine our expectations about the way the genre will treat its female protagonists, and to do that we need an implicit understanding of the way female suffering has traditionally been used in the genre. After all, depicting female suffering is hardly novel in itself; even the most horrifically misogynist genre works traffic in images of violence against women that are at least nominally sympathetic (since that sympathy is necessary to drive narrative tension). The difference between standard horror and these more introspective efforts is supposed to be in empathy, in the humanity the film grants to its suffering women, and the degree to which it is able to contextualize their fictional suffering in a way that implicates, or at least interrogates, the complicity of the viewer, making for a premise that is necessarily involved in a conversation about the genre more broadly, and the characteristic assumptions it makes about how we will interpret screen violence against women. 


That kind of self-awareness is not necessarily a shortcoming; there is, at least, something kind of perversely interesting in HOTEL FEAR's profound awareness of how threatened the protagonist feels to have men constantly lusting after her, while at the same time the camera constantly lusts after her too -- and of course this tension can only come from a director who feels both concerned about the implicit ethics of exploitation cinema and drawn to its earthy thrills. Although obviously it would be valuable to have more female voices expressing their gendered experiences with male violence articulated vis-a-vis the conventions of genre expectations, men just as obviously need to be part of this conversation too, especially considering their oversized role in both perpetuating real-life violence and creating and supporting violent art which frequently dehumanizes women (if not outright fetishizing violence against them). The question becomes, then: what does it say about us that we gravitate to art which often presents suffering --and primarily female suffering-- as entertainment? 


As a quick look at my viewing history should make clear, I don't believe violence in art is equivalent to real-life violence, and I don't believe depiction is inherently endorsement. And in fact, believe isn't even the right word; I think there is overwhelming evidence that, at the very least, antisocial media does not directly produce antisocial viewers (if it did, I would surely be a serial killer by now). But I don't think it's responsible to simply brush off antisocial film as harmless fantasy, either. Screen violence and real-world violence are not directly linked, but they are intertwined in slippery, nebulous ways that deserve hard scrutiny, at the very minimum simply because violent art makes it very clear how vulnerable our brains are to uncritically interpreting stories through the framework a careful storyteller lays out. That, at least, should have profound real-world implications, because it's not only movies that seek to carefully frame stories to subtly delineate who does and does not deserve our empathy. If a movie can get you to laugh at a woman who gets horribly butchered, a news story can too. 


Still, I think that asking how stories affect people's behavior is not the most productive direction from which to approach this topic. Rather than asking "what does art do to people," the question should be "what do people take from art?" A subtle distinction, maybe, but a vital one. Fantasy, and even (and maybe especially) antisocial fantasy, is not inherently dangerous; indeed, I think it is foundational to the experience of being human. But we start to run into more trouble when we let particularly compelling stories begin to dictate the terms of reality for us, and begin to forget that stories --all stories, fictional or not-- are always fantasies, and we're most vulnerable to uncritically embracing the fantasies that are sold to us in the most insidiously seductive style, with the most flattering framing. This has more to do with the inherent psychological landscape within the viewer than within the art itself; the movie is an inert object, but the interpretation we apply to it is an obscure and abstract process of internal storytelling, whereby we synthesize all our understanding of the world into a prism that refracts the sounds and images into something with meaning. Consequently, the content itself isn't something which acts upon the psyche so much as something to be acted upon by the brain's endlessly complex pattern-seeking machinery. A healthy brain has the tools to establish context, letting us interpret potentially horrific content through the conventions of fantasy, and not as something which needs to be literally reflective of reality, idealized or otherwise. An unhealthy brain, of course, may struggle to do this, with potentially disastrous real-world consequences. But then, discerning how constructively your brain is processing things is not always an easy task.


Self-awareness, then, is the key here; an honest accounting of what we're drawn to about antisocial art, and a vigilance about the ways it may be very subtly strengthening our unquestioned assumptions in way which make us less empathetic and less humble about life's infinite nuance. In that sense, I think antisocial art actually becomes incredibly valuable: the fact that we're drawn to it is a good reminder that we are, in fact, vulnerable to exactly the kind of nastiness it depicts. Nevermind REPULSION or PIECES or whatever, the very powerful personal attraction I feel from the odious charismatic chauvinism of THUNDERBALL's Sean Connery is a pretty powerful reminder that I have it within me to at least tolerate, if not outright enact, some ugly macho bullshit. And I don't even know that it's such a terrible thing that I do. I don't know that I'd want to root it out even if I could -- that little bit of nascent macho asshole helps me understand the world a little better, helps me glean some insight into men who more overtly embrace that ethos, who I may not like or respect, but with whom I have to share a planet and a culture. I don't think being a good person means stamping out every last vestige of temptation in one's soul, it just means acknowledging that those things are there, and they're part of you... but mostly not a useful part, and certainly not a part that should be handed the reigns in any unchecked way. But to guard against that, you need to clarify what ugly impulses inside you need to be guarded against in the first place, and that means an honest accounting of why we're drawn to create and consume art that reflects the darker aspects of human nature in the first place.


That, in my view, is Polanski's chief fault, and the one that LAST NIGHT IN SOHO misses, much to its detriment. He understood --and better than Wright does, I think, or anyway was better at depicting it in his movies-- just how oppressive and dehumanizing the patriarchy could be to women. He just refused to see it in himself, refused to see that even in his movies, despite --and in parallel to-- their obvious (and I believe genuine) empathy, there's also a subtle sort of sadistic pleasure they take in tormenting their female characters. In ROSEMARY'S BABY (spoilers for that movie) the Devil drugs and rapes the protagonist in one of the most horrifying violations in all cinema. Nine years later, Polanski himself did the same thing, yet he never saw himself as a Devil. Maybe if he'd been able to introspect just a little deeper about what that scene stirred in him, why he made it the way he did, why he was drawn to it at all... well, we'll never know. At any rate, I don't think Polanski was possessed of a uniquely deviant psyche (the fact that Wright and I enjoy his movies so much suggests we have more than a little in common with him), and after all, he spent much of his life as a victim himself (of the holocaust, and later the Mason family, just to name two egregious examples). But when it really mattered, he couldn't, or wouldn't, recognize that he had become the victimizer.


Still, although it didn't seem to help Polanski, I think there is value, and perhaps great value, in making and enjoying antisocial art. Far from seeding innocents with evil ideas, I think it helps people --most people, anyway, myself included-- connect with their darker sides, acknowledge them, maybe even indulge them a little, and consequently become more self-aware than they would be if they had to encounter these darker urges for the first time in the real world, in the heat of the moment. Of course that's not always the case for everyone, and we would be negligent to dismiss the people --a minority, I think, but who knows?-- who lack the tools or interest for self-reflection, and instead simply absorb the fantasy, use it to structure and validate their own antisocial internal narratives. This is not a problem lightly ignored, but at the same time I think our response has to start with the people in question, not with the art they misuse. People who lack the sophistication to introspect and distinguish fiction from reality are going to be a problem no matter what, even if we were somehow able to so studiously censor their media experience that they received only the most utterly anodyne, pro-social narratives. Fostering introspection and media savvy is simply a good idea all around, for everyone -- after all, it's not like deranged psychos are the only ones vulnerable to letting a manipulative fantasy subtly strengthen their biases and assumptions about the world. And indeed, I think films like the ones I'm talking about here, that encourage (or even require) a kind of meta-intercourse with our perceptions about genre and the assumptions it rests on, may be helpful, perhaps even necessary, to shape new generations to be more mindful of the ways in which they interact with media.   


...But probably not LAST NIGHT IN SOHO specifically, though, because I'm sorry to say that I think the commentary here just isn't really any good. I appreciate that Wright and co-writer Wilson-Cairns are trying to grapple with these issues, but unfortunately the movie simply never manages to satisfying address (let alone answer) its own questions, either about the dangers of nostalgia or its ambivalence about enjoying morally suspect art by morally suspect artists. To wit: though this is all ostensibly some sort of mystery-horror thing, the moral arc of the movie (or lack thereof) is best summed up by a dress. The protagonist, a fashion student, creates this dress after being inspired by the aesthetics of the 60's, but then freaks out and tears it up after learning that the 60's were actually not so great in some ways. But then at the end... she just happily goes back to it. Why? It's not like she experiences some great character growth which helps her find a healthy perspective on the past. She just flailingly vacillates between complete rejection and blithe acceptance, never meaningfully taking stock of what is so attractive to her about this resurrected signifier of the past in the first place, and consequently unable to grapple with the reasons for either her rejection or reconciliation with the style. Once again, the movie seems utterly unable to actually engage with the the worthwhile issues it raises.


And that's a big, big problem, because it's even worse at doing the other stuff it's ostensibly trying to do, namely be a compelling mystery and horror movie. It's barely a horror movie at all; its sole horror image, of a group of faceless ghostly men, is not utterly without merit, but any potency it ever possessed is quickly dashed through merciless repetition (I'm not joking when I say there's only one horror image in the movie) and by being presented with confounding literalism, despite how stylized most of the rest of the movie is. And as a mystery, it's even more of a dire failure, hanging its entire whodunnit premise on shamelessly withholding key information and in several egregious cases outright lying to the viewer, and beyond that utterly crippled by a protagonist who's as frustratingly incompetent an investigator as I have ever seen in a movie. 


How incompetent? Her entire campaign to "solve" a murder she saw in a vision consists of what looks like an hour or two of fruitless library research, after which she runs away and never again makes the slightest attempt to turn up any clues (the only other proactive step of any kind that she takes is to go to the police and angrily demand they go solve the murder for her, oh, except she doesn't know the names of anyone involved or when it happened or have any relevant details because she saw it in a dream, and the movie acts like the cops are being some real macho assholes for not taking her seriously). If this were any other movie, I would have no choice to but interpret a female character this inept and hysterical as a shamelessly regressive stereotype of helpless feminine fragility. Obviously that's not what is intended here, but the mystery plotting is so lazy and haphazard that it's just kind of where we end up anyway. At one point, she accuses someone of being the murderer, for all intents and purposes, entirely on the strength of his being the one apparently pointless male character who is suspiciously played by a famous actor. There's literally no other reason to suspect him of anything, she has no evidence and doesn't even know his name or anything else about him except that he lived in Soho during the 60's. This should be roundly embarrassing, but the movie is so self-congratulatory about its feminist bona fides that it tries to play the fallout of this incident as a big shocking twist rather than evidence that its protagonist is a spasmodic twit. Yet another modern movie content to simply tell us it believes in strong women without actually making the effort to create one. 


And for a very performatively feminist movie, a movie which, indeed, sets itself very explicitly to the task of condemning the history of misogyny in genre movies, it's a huge problem that the female lead is such an incompetent, helpless baby. She knows, for example, that she gets psychic visions from time to time. These can obviously be quite disruptive and upsetting, but at the same time she knows this happens, she's lived with it apparently all her life and knows they're just visions and can't hurt her, and yet she just simply cannot restrain herself from screaming and freaking out as though this were really happening, at one point almost accidentally murdering an innocent bystander in her panic (!) and at another almost getting her one Black friend arrested, and at no point seeming to realize it's possible, and lo!, even desirable, to just grit your teeth and maintain some composure so that you don't look like an utter psychopath. Haley Joel Osment in THE SIXTH SENSE --a literal child-- does such a vastly better job keeping his cool, while seeing objectively more upsetting things, that you can't help but feel like LAST NIGHT IN SOHO actually has very little real respect for its female characters after all. It does not speak well of this writing, to put it lightly, that I can think of a dozen tougher and more complex female roles from actual 60's movies --and not even super-progressive 60's movies-- right off the top of my head. If you need to make your heroine this wimpy in order to make the patriarchy seem mean, maybe misogyny just isn't really much of a problem. 


And if empathy is the missing ingredient in so much of horror cinema, what does it mean to have not one, but two female protagonists here who are basically empty nothing characters defined only by their naivetĂ© and their helpless suffering at the hands of men? Without interiority or autonomy, their suffering is really distinguished from standard genre-movie female victimhood only by the movie's hesitance to make any of it entertaining, which isn't really an improvement in my opinion. And ultimately even if they were compelling female characters lucidly decrying the patriarchy, it would all be undone by the excruciating final act, which makes utter hash out of even the bland, boilerplate anti-misogyny themes the movie has been loudly declaiming up to that point (the twist about the killer's identity should, in itself, be disqualifying for any movie that wants to claim it's feminist, and the movie's completely off-the-rails final moment is so psychotically misjudged that I can only interpret it as a tacit approval of serial murder). If one were to be charitable to the point of active ignorance, I suppose you might be able to make a case that the climactic twist is attempting to complicate the movie's otherwise fairly boilerplate themes, but considering how badly it already fumbles the boilerplate, you can imagine how deftly it handles "complicating" it. It's almost audacious in how stunningly misjudged it is, but unfortunately also too dull and hectoring to quite manage to to feel exciting in its fearless willingness to jump completely off the rails. 


So does that mean LAST NIGHT IN SOHO is completely worthless? Surprisingly, no! It's just worthless at being a meta-commentary about genre and nostalgia or being an entertaining or effective mystery or horror movie. Fortunately, although it expends a whole lot of very trying runtime on those things, they're not really what it's about. No, what LAST NIGHT IN SOHO really is, for whatever reason, is a ravishing throwback musical-fantasy, minus the actual "musical numbers" per se. Wright may like REPULSION well enough, but self-evidently what really gets him excited is gaudy, gimmicky music videos, and he indulges this fetish every single moment he gets the chance to, in the process turning out some genuinely ravishing sequences. The film's big signature setpiece, tellingly, has nothing to do with murder mysteries or faceless specters; it is a giddy one-take dance sequence where, using mirrors and slick choreography, McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy seamlessly double each other in-camera in a breathless whirlwind of joyful movie magic. This has not much at all to do with anything thematically; indeed, the whole complicated doubling thing is purely literal, simply reminding us that the two characters are experiencing this simultaneously. But it's also what the film is really about, as opposed to what the tedious script is about. If turning the 1960's into a gorgeous, rhapsodic fairy-tale fantasy is resolutely at odds with the movie's stated intent of an honest accounting of the past, the film is so slick and enrapturing about it that I'd happily give up every scintilla of tedious pedantic theme to keep it. If only the movie felt the same way.


I could never wholly condemn a movie with even one scene as blissfully transporting as that one, and LAST NIGHT IN SOHO has several, which is more than enough for me to ultimately feel glad it exists. And I genuinely appreciate the questions it raises, even if it does an objectively bad job actually grappling with them. But still, it can't help but feel like a real missed opportunity -- a film with style and technique and curiosity to spare, in desperate search of a script that allows those things to flourish. Which is, I think it needs to be said, a pretty apt description of every movie Wright had made that wasn't co-written with Simon Pegg, the one man alive who seems able to channel Wright's obvious strengths as a filmmaker into films that are as structurally sturdy as they are energetic and visually imaginative. I wish LAST NIGHT IN SOHO worked on all the levels its ambition is aiming for, but in the absence of anything else really like it, I'll take what I can get. Ironically, then, this film that wants so badly to try to address the legacy of REPULSION elicits a similar reaction in me (though for very different reasons): I like it... with some key reservations.




* Wright also claimed it was his attempt at a giallo, about which many of the same things could be said. But other than his use of vivid, monochromatic color and maybe some vague gestures towards excessive style, there's less of that in here than I was expecting -- so little that I don't know that I would have noticed it if I hadn't been told to look for it. 


** But nothing else; weirdly, despite having a Black character, the movie has not a single hint that there was any other kind of injustice in 1965 London (or today). Not that every movie needs to or can address every issue, but it does seem odd since the movie is so explicitly posited as a direct cultural criticism.  

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Grave Encounters

 


Grave Encounters (2011)

Dir. and written by "The Vicious Brothers"

Starring Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Juan Riedinger, Mackenzie Gray

 


The evidence is encouraging that the high-water mark of the found-footage wave is now safely behind us, or has at least receded enough to allow us to take stock of the damage it did when it was fully upon us. Though it never entirely went away after the huge success of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (not the first found footage film,* but unambiguously the genesis of the modern movement, even if it took a few years after its release to really catch fire), my sense is that the conceit make the leap from "gimmick" to "subgenre" somewhere around 2007/2008, which together logged 20 entries I can easily identify, including the first films of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, REC, and CLOVERFIELD series (by contrast, wikipedia lists only 26 prior found-footage film total, many of them vanishingly obscure). And it wasn't done growing; I count 19 films in 2013 and a peak 22 in 2014, after which things gradually slowed down without ever completely stopping (wikipedia lists 6 found footage films from 2021, and five so far this year).

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, our subject today, hails from the thick of it, a time when there was still some excitement about the idea that the format might be used to do new things, although I personally was already a little sick of the whole thing. I never bothered with it at the time, but even though the conceit has lost a little of its vigor in the last few years, it's been a part of every Chainsawnukah since I watched the original V/H/S in theaters during the first one, and one tinkers with tradition at a high spiritual cost. So what the hell, once more into the breach, dear friends.

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS is a very stupid name that does not inspire much confidence, but I'm pleased to say it doesn't quite live up to the worthlessness the name implies. The premise is a simple one: a team of TV hucksters making one of those insipid "Ghost Hunters" type shows locks themselves in for a night in a supposedly haunted ex-asylum, only to find that getting out is not as simple as they might have assumed. Oh, and it's haunted.

 


The haunting part is the movie's weakest trait; while it's certainly more eventful than the ridiculously whammy-free PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (four years old by this point!) the events themselves are pretty basic haunted house hokum, occasionally good for a jump scare but mostly a bit threadbare (there's a person standing in the corner! Oh no, they turned around and have a scary face!) or just outright silly (there are... uh, a bunch of arms awkwardly reaching out of the ceiling? A lady disappears in a puff of smoke?). Can’t argue with the sturdy efficacy of a black-eyed, bloody-mouthed goon appearing suddenly on the ceiling and chasing you, but it’s not nearly enough return-on-investment to be worth sitting though eons of agonizing improvised circular arguments between the film’s green-faced non-characters. It’s also not something that takes any real advantage of the found-footage format, though by the year 2022 I’ve more or less given up any reasonable expectation that a found-footage film will use the format in any innovative ways.  

 

Fortunately, it turns out the “getting out is not as simple” part is rather more interesting than the hauntings. See, when you’re in a haunted asylum, the obvious thing to do is just to… leave. And in fact, that’s exactly what our gang tries to do. Only they find that they can’t. Every hallway just leads to more hallways. Every stairwell leads to more stairs. When they finally get to the atrium where they’re sure they entered, the door just leads to more hallways. At one point, we’re told they spent an entire day walking in one direction without getting anywhere. Or at least, one day according to their watches; somehow, the sun never comes up. Days pass. They sleep, they wake, they wander. They’re supposed to be let out the following morning, but morning never comes, and no one ever comes for them. That is kind of scary; the deep wrongness of the never-ending night, of the never-ending hallways, the feeling of being utterly trapped in a cage that has no exit, where basic rules of reality have dissolved until you lack any tools at all to fight back against your captors… that is horror on a very different level. Hell, since I already used the words No Exit, I might as well just say it: it’s existential horror. You can run from a scary ghost. You can’t run from reality itself. If true horror is, to a degree, about making you feel powerless, this is one of the most oppressive scenarios I can imagine, one wherein the rules have been rigged so that no amount of strength or speed or cleverness can save you.

 

It's a dark vibe, so it’s both a shame and maybe just as well the movie mostly tilts towards headier scares after a while; there’s only so much oppression you can take before things get more depressing than a movie this silly can handle. Still, there’s something here, and it gives the standard-issue BOO! moments a little more punch than they’d otherwise have, at least for a while. Still not enough to really make it worth enduring 95 minutes of annoying people shouting the same thing at each other endlessly in night-vision green (which does add to the oppressiveness of it all, but also to the monotony), and especially not to get to such a silly nothing of an ending. But I’ve seen worse, and was expecting less. When you’re expecting nothing and get a little, one tends to be grateful. Still, a film that’s making fun of Ghost Hunter type shows, even one which is at least moderately more eventful, would do well to remember that at least those shows are only, like, an hour long, and that includes commercials.

 

 

* That honor appears to go to Shirley Clarke's THE CONNECTION way back in 1961, with the first found footage horror film apparently CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST in 1980.

 

 


Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Chainsawnukah 2022

 


Hello loyal blog-reader! Since I've received a few messages from fans worried that they're reading the calendar incorrectly, I'm happy to confirm that yes, it IS that most magical of months, Chainsawnukah! Life has been a bit crazy as a of late, and I still haven't had time to do any real long-form reviews, but for now you can follow my ongoing horror marathon in the form of short(er), (vampire)-bite-sized reviews on letterboxd! I'm not as prolific with the longer stuff as I used to be, but I'm sure there will be at least something in the mix this year that inspires me to loquaciousness, so keep checking here and I bet we'll get at least a few examples of my prattling, endlessly digressive masterworks. Because it just wouldn't be Chainsawnukah without it! 

In the meantime, click on Chainsawnta Claus below and follow my continuing adventures in the endless land of terrible, unwatchable horror crap! HAPPY CHAINSAWNUKAH ALL! 



Wednesday, July 6, 2022

No Time To Die

 


No Time To Die (2021)
Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga
Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Phoebe Waller-Bridge (!)
Starring Daniel Craig, LĂ©a Seydoux, Rami Malek
 
Frankly, I'm not at all sorry to see this misbegotten Daniel Craig era of Bond film come to a close. That's no slight against Craig, who has been game enough, and plenty able to cast himself as the suavely misanthropic super-spy with the right blend of macho traditionalism and actorly specificity. But the very idea --pushed hard throughout this pentalogy-- of a grittier, darker tone with a bent towards probing Bond's broken psychology always felt absolutely asinine, the kind of dumbass 90’s defensively self-serious posturing that was already passĂ© by 2006. Why would we want a dour, realistic version of something so inherently unrealistic? Who cares that Bond's life of traveling to fancy places, bedding every beautiful woman he sees, and killing thousands of villainous goons with no consequences scars his soul and leaves him sad and emotionally damaged, when no one has or will ever do any of that?  It’s so ridiculously far removed from anything remotely resembling reality that moralizing about it is a completely meaningless exercise in utter abstraction. What's next, a depressing, realistic origin story for The Joker? That would be stupid, obviously. This is a fun, empty-headed anachronistic antisocial fantasy with absolutely nothing to teach us about the real world. Just let it be its itself.*

This has been my feeling from the very start, and Craig's subsequent run of movies has done little to disabuse me of that initial reaction. CASINO ROYALE has a few fun beats and a magnificent villain in Mads Mikkelsen, but it's also a structural mess which, predictably, has no idea what to do with its self-conscious "darker" tone other than scowl more. And when it became clear that QUANTUMN OF SOLACE would do the same thing and would be larded up with a bunch of tedious continuity porn, I almost stormed out of the theater (and I wouldn't have missed much if I had). SKYFALL was something of a welcome course correction, with much more shameless huge-scale silliness, a worthy theme song and Roger Deakins making everything look lush and purty, but it takes a weird turn into mawkish melodrama in its last act and makes the horrible mistake of centering the story around Bond personally. And finally even though SPECTRE is the most recent one, I remembered almost nothing about it except that it has a good opening, a hot Monica Bellucci, and it turns out Blofeld is Bond's brother like in (spoilers for AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER) AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER. Also it has not just the worst Bond theme song ever, but a real serious contender for the title of worst theme songs in any movie in the history of cinema. And the blandest title in the entire Bond canon, which is particularly galling.** I hope it's obvious to everyone here that Bond movies, like gialli, need baroque, decadent titles. NEVER DIE AGAIN TOMORROW, NOTHING NEW UNDER THE GUN, ON GOLDEN POND, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS. Stuff like that. This might seem like unduly sour nitpicking, but Bond films, even more than other rigidly formulaic franchises, are defined by such a particular and iconic set of distinct signifiers that yes, it's a big problem if you bungle your tile and theme song game. And the fact that the Craig era seems to have been defined by a creative team slightly embarrassed about those signifiers and eager to marginalize them or at least furtively recontextualize them strikes me as folly of the highest order.  
So in fact, I would argue with the title of this movie and insist that it is in fact very much time to die. And the fact that the movie begins with Bond and LĂ©a Seydoux (CRIMES OF THE FUTURE) together, as though I have any idea who she is or any memory of her being in the last movie, put me in a sour mood right off the bat. And then from there we immediately dive back into continuity porn with Blofeld and Eva Green and shit. Goddamit, this is why I swore off the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies, and this isn't even going to have that level of stuntwork.



But I warmed to it a bit. The movie bustled along, doing its standard James Bond thing, and doing it pretty well, pretty honestly. Noticeably less anxious, self-conscious fretting about gritty realism, not a lot of drab overthinking but not entirely braindead, either. Still too much annoying continuity clutter and moony melodrama about Bond himself, but at least enough of the desired formula, executed handsomely, that I was willing to provisionally get on board with the film. 
But then something unexpected happened. Like Saul Tenser in CRIMES OF THE FUTURE,*** something alien and unexpected but maybe kind of beautiful started to grow inside it. Something, in fact, that feels almost like a whole different film, a parallel work of art, not wholly disconnected from the standard globetrotting Bond fare but also not particularly dependent on it: an odd, melancholy drama about endings, about regret for the roads not taken, the things left undone, the future that we won't see.

Or maybe it’s not even a drama, since you can’t really call it a story, per se, and Craig is the only character (technically, much of it centers around Bond’s relationship with Seydoux, who the movie frames as his true love. But she’s nearly 20 years younger than him, their chemistry is middling at best, and she’s transparently more plot device than character, important to Bond only because the movie needs it to be so, and even then only by virtue of being the last Bond girl still sitting at the end of a 60-year-long game of musical chairs). So it’s not getting anywhere on the strength of its narrative. But it's more than a tone. It's like, you've got a normal Bond movie, where he wears a tuxedo and orders a Martini and drives a souped up sports car and what have you, but maybe every fourth scene or so just lingers a little longer than you expect, sometimes just holds a second longer on Craig's face than it needs to, lets him register this look he's perfected of aching, resigned regret immediately masked by a reflexive, protective retreat to macho cynicism. It may be just a look, it may not even be anything more than that -- it's not really in the screenplay, except in the sense that the screenplay is confident enough to place Bond in emotionally fraught situations and then mostly just shut up and just let Craig tell us what we need to know entirely through his eyes. 

But it's a powerful look, and not because I've finally come around to the drab idea that this is a penetrating insight into why being a suave, indestructible superspy-lothario is emotionally crippling. Rather, the thing that gives this surprising emotional heft is that it actually has nothing to do with being a superspy. It's about being an emotionally wounded old man, with too much accumulated hurt to be able to entirely trust anyone --to be open and vulnerable the way that love requires-- and experiencing that inevitable moment when you realize you've spent your youth pushing people away instead of letting them love you, and you find yourself alone and empty, with only your regrets and your haunting questions about how it might have all gone differently to occupy your time. And then the old excuses start to ring hollow -- was it really that I am an international superspy and couldn't risk a romantic partner who might betray me to the massive clandestine criminal network run by my estranged stepbrother that wants to kill me? Or was I just afraid of being happy? The specifics emerge naturally from what we understand about the essence of James Bond, but the feelings are richer and more universal. This could be the story of a super-spy, or a gangster, or a high-end chef, and though the specifics of the story would change, that haunted expression would mean the same thing. Combined with Linus Sandgren's (LA LA LAND, FIRST MAN) lush, painterly cinematography,**** and the unrushed editing of Elliot Graham (MILK, X2) and Tom Cross (WHIPLASH, LA LA LAND, HOSTILES), it feels weirdly, unexpectedly evocative, and gives the whole enterprise a curious vibe indeed, a mostly straight-faced silly action romp which is threaded with an implacable but genuine sadness. And the two impulses don't contradict each other, somehow; they balance each other, with the scuzzy fun of Bond fighting it out with a cyborg-eyed motorcycle henchman keeping the middle-aged ennui from sliding into gloomy mawkishness, and the gently insistent emotions giving the action a little insulation from the featureless, plastic churn of some of the more mercenary Bond films.




None of which is to say it's a good movie, exactly. The action is adequate, but mostly lacking in any real showstopper "oh shit!" moments, the design is nice-looking but a little bland, the acting is mostly a moot point outside of Craig himself (Rami Malek is going for something with his bizarre, affectless villain performance, but he's such an uninteresting character the result is pretty dull). The dialogue, scene by scene, is actually rather witty (I’m going to credit a final script-polish by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for that), but the story as a whole is a complete mess, an awkward thing which spends almost half its runtime lurching around trying to tie up unnecessary loose ends from the rest of the series in a way so tossed-off and arbitrary that it makes me angry all over again that this series leaned so hard into its manifestly useless continuity, before finally settling down and pivoting to whatever silly bullshit this movie is about, which it then doesn't seem to quite have time to develop, or even coherently explain (the villainous "Lyutsifer Safin" --yes, that's a real name-- has like three different motives and backstories which are all laboriously spelled out, but they don't seem to meaningfully fit together; as near as I can tell, it's a complete coincidence that he happens to kidnap Bond's girlfriend, --not because she's Bond's true love, but because he happens to already knows her from an unrelated series of events during her childhood and was already obsessed with her?-- on the same day Bond was already planning to fight him because of his evil plan to destroy the world, which was in fact originally SPECTRE's [the organization, not the movie] evil plan but then he stops them because he also hates SPECTRE***** for unrelated personal reasons, but then does the exact same thing they were planning to do? And to understand any of this, the movie relies on you remembering whatever the fuck the deal was with Seydoux's character's father in the previous movies, which seems like a pretty long shot. And it's all made weirder by the fact that everything in the scenario insistently points to "Safin" being an older Japanese man, while Rami Malek is very noticeably not that). Like the Billie-Eilish-sung title track, the plot gets the essential elements right, but can't seem to build like it needs to.

And yet, for all that, there really is something here. Between Craig, director Cary Joji Fukunaga (SIN NOMBRE), and the ace production team given a limitless budget to fuss around with, a genuine mood is evoked, one which is hard to quantify but impossible to ignore. James Bond will return, of course –even the credits tell us as much—but this is the first and only Bond film which really feels like a goodbye, a bittersweet farewell to maybe not just the Daniel Craig Bond, maybe not even the Daniel Craig era, but maybe to the whole baggage-laden 60-year 25-movie whirlwind itself. There’s something percolating here, not necessarily stated but certainly felt, which is very distinctly aware that Bond as a character has become unsupportably anachronistic. This is not necessarily a new revelation --GOLDENEYE begins with Bond getting dressed down as a "dinosaur," and that was nine movies ago-- but if Bond was a old-fashioned throwback in 1995, today's he's an outright relic of a dead civilization, and utterly alien artifact, functionally incomprehensible and incompatible with the modern world. There’s very little left in the basic concept which doesn’t read as something of an ugly holdover from a specifically mid-20th-century Imperialist fantasy that isn’t very relatable these days – the poisonous misogyny, the flippant violence against endless expendable hordes of foreigners, the inescapable, curdled nationalism of spies violently reshaping the world to fit their own political ends. Even the character's personal idiosyncrasies have aged into obsolescence -- do cool kids fantasize about donning a immaculately starched tuxedo to sip fussily prepared Martinis anymore? 


It's not so ancient as to be outside living memory; us old guys remember a world where it was easy enough to slip into the concept of Bond. The world that produced him was present enough, or at least a recent enough memory, that whether or not we could personally identify with it, we understood it, it read as a comprehensible worldview that you could immerse yourself in for the purposes of this particular brand of silly fiction. But it’s increasingly hard to do that today; indeed, the whole pivot towards moody introspection that the Craig era embodied seems obviously (though blunderingly) calculated towards re-orienting Bond to something vaguely closer to a recognizable modern outlook. But is there anything left of this concept after we’ve stripped away the dated anachronisms and problematic undertones? NO TIME TO DIE provocatively posits that Bond, having resigned from MI6, has been replaced as 007 by a young Black woman little inclined to respect her antediluvian predecessor (Lashana Lynch, CAPTAIN MARVEL). She seems like a cool character in her own right -- one can easily imagine further movies chronicling her adventures. But James Bond is an archetype, and she has her own separate archetype -- if any young British superspy with their own style and outlook can be called "James Bond," the designation means very little. 

And yet, the classic archetype, which has proved surprisingly durable over the course of six very eventful decades --malleable enough in its manifestation to successfully evolve even as the fundamental core remained remarkably rigid-- has finally and obviously ground to a halt, with no clear way forward. If Bond is to be resurrected, he’ll have to be born anew as something completely different, and I, for one, can’t imagine that being particularly practical or even desirable. But that’s OK; the old dies so the new can be born. I’m nearly 40. The world moves on, and I understand it less and less, spend more and more time looking back at the comforting past which may have been horrible, but was at least familiar. I don’t feel any inclination to defend that past, but I also can’t deny that it made me what I am, defined my outlook on life, even if it defined that outlook through revulsion as much as acceptance. And so with the passing of Bond, so too I acknowledge the passing into irrelevance of a part of myself which grew up in a world where he made sense. It wasn’t a world I would want to go back to, but it was home, with all the contradictory comforts that provides, and it feels oddly meaningful, in some way, for NO TIME TO DIE to offer us old folks an opportunity to acknowledge and eulogize the end of that particular, strange, corny, impish, appalling, extravagant, crass, bloated, misguided, every-evolving and never-changing antisocial macho power fantasy.

Goodbye then, James. We hereby bid you farewell with the same lingering mix of melancholy and relief that we leave you with in your last moments on-screen here. With the bittersweetness we might associate with a high school romance or childhood celebrity crush, say. We wouldn’t want to go back there, wouldn't want to live through it all again, but as a nostalgia-tinged memory safely in the distant past, we’ll remember you fondly and allow ourselves a certain sense of grief at our parting. And a part of you will always be with us, even if it’s just as a reminder of the road we’re glad we didn’t take.

You know, I guess it actually was Time To Die, after all.






* In saying that, I make a strong distinction between the film series, which almost immediately degenerated into a sequence of increasingly absurd, gaudy, Saturday-morning-cartoon action extravaganzas, and the relatively more staid (but still not very realistic) series of novels by Ian Fleming, which seemed to provide some vague inspiration but little else for the film series. I have never read any of them, though, so I can't be more specific than that. But I have seen every single James Bond film, most multiple times, so when I say get me more of that, please you can be quite sure I know what it is I'm asking for.

**  I was once grousing about that title and someone said something like 'well, they were probably just excited to get the rights to the name "S.P.E.C.T.R.E" back, and wanted to celebrate.' I mean, who among us could be coldhearted enough to stand in the way of a huge corporation's overwhelming expression of joy at re-acquiring a trademarked brand name? It was around this point that I began to wonder if I was an amnesic alien abandoned on Earth as a social experiment. 

*** Hey, I guess he probably wouldn't do it, but how great would Viggo be as a Bond villain? Oh man. 

**** With its serene palette of moody pastels and curiously propensity for unusually wide shots that feel wistful and beautiful but also make Bond himself a curiously small figure in the frame, this is almost without any doubt the most visually lovely Bond movie, and the first to feel like it has a genuinely distinct visual style, give or take the hideous digital BOURNE-chasing of QUANTUM OF SOLACE or the luxurious Roger Deakins work in SKYFALL.

***** Also, --SPOILERS-- I can't even begin to describe how asinine it is that "Safin" is running the third multinational super-secret criminal syndicate to be grandiosely introduced and then unceremoniously disposed of in this five-movie cycle, each one lavished with oceans of tedious exposition despite being functionally identical. This is the curse of continuity; if you haven't planned ahead, you just leave the next guy the task of laboriously sweeping aside all the previous clutter in order to do their own thing, and it's powerfully tedious stuff by this point.