Never Say Never Again (1983)

Never Say Never Again (1983), dir. Irvin Kershner

**

There must have been a lot of hubbub made in 1983 over the dual release of Octopussy and Never Say Never Again.  At that time Roger Moore was still playing James Bond for Eon Productions, the company responsible for carrying the franchise.  And yet, Sean Connery, who after proclaiming he would never play James Bond on two occasions (once in 1967 after filming You Only Live Twice, and again in 1971 after Diamonds Are Forever) decided to make his return to the character that same year—hence the title, Never Say Never Again.

      Never Say Never Again is a remake of Thunderball, from 1965, which also stars Sean Connery.  I’m not sure why exactly they decided to revisit Thunderball; it was always my least favorite of the Connery Bond films.  Perhaps they wanted another crack at it.  In any event, I don’t think they improved upon it much with this film.  I’ve seen all of the Eon produced Bond films numerous times, but really never felt compelled to take a serious look at this one.  I have faint memories of seeing it on video as a young child.  There’s a particular scene in which a man removes a contact lens, exposing a false eye to breach a security system operated by a retina scan.  Shortly after he is killed by having a snake flung into his car, resulting in a ghastly accident.  Certain scenes like that had a way of sticking with me as a child and it was something surreal to revisit it after about a quarter of century.

     Taking a quick glance at the names of the people involved in the production of this picture, things sure looked promising.  It was directed by Irvin Kershner, who also directed The Empire Strikes Back, and the screenplay was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., who wrote many of the episodes of the 1960s Batman live-action TV series.  Kershner was a great action movie director, with an excellent sense of pacing, and Semple Jr. had a marvelous comic flair.  There certainly are some great one-liners in Never Say Never Again—I chuckled several times.

     Where the film fails is in its reluctance to take itself seriously.  It’s a bit too light hearted in tone, and Bond is far too cavalier for us to feel any real tension behind the criminal plot at hand.  In the plot, SPECTRE, the international crime syndicate, has managed to steal two nuclear warheads in order to extort billions of dollars from NATO nations.  Pretty heavy stuff, and yet Bond continues to carouse and womanize throughout the picture, all the while being trailed by Michael Legrand’s cheesy jazz pop soundtrack.  Connery, as much as I hate to admit, simply looks too old to play the part anymore in this picture.  He was pushing the envelop twelve years earlier in Diamonds Are Forever, and here one cannot help from cringe a little when looking at him lock lips with his younger female co-stars.

     Any shortcomings aside, the casting for this film was excellent.  Klaus Maria Brandauer in particular is a very effective villain.  He’s everything a Bond villain should be: refined, coldly sophisticated, and brimming with confidence—so much in fact that he flatly refuses to take Bond seriously as a threat.  He offers him free range of his yacht, which is the command center for his operation.  And he never opts to kill him outright when he has an opportunity.  Instead for instance, he prefers to leave Bond chained in a jail cell with a pack of vultures.  It's classic Bond villainy, in the sense that the arrogance and assuredness of Bond villains is legendary.  That somehow the act of simply killing Bond in a crude fashion when the opportunity presents itself is beneath them. 

    Also effective is Barbara Carrera, as the femme fatale, Fatima Blush.  She’s lethal, gorgeous, and like Brandauer, overly confident.  Her own sense of self assuredness drives her to attempt to extort a written confession from Bond stating that she is the greatest lover he has ever had, eliciting some of the best one-liners in the film.  There are some other great talents showcased, including Max von Sydow as Blofeld, Kim Basinger as Domino, Bernie Casey as Felix Leiter, and a very young Rowan Atkinson.

      Never Say Never Again is not a serious Bond film.  It is however a pleasant way to spend two hours on a lazy Saturday afternoon.  And if you happen upon it on television, I would recommend putting the remote down.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

Cloud Atlas (2012), dir. Tom Twyker, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski

**

 Cloud Atlas is one cluttered mess of a film.  It’s comprised of six fully conceived stories, spanning several hundred years, that are constantly vacillating back and forth between one another, presumably to deliver one grand, overriding message.  After nearly three hours of screen time, that message still remains unclear, and the relationship between the stories, though presented in a fashion to suggest is a significant one, is riddled with superficiality.

       I happened to read David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name, from which this film is adapted, long before I knew there was to be a film produced of it.  When I heard the Wachowskis would be making a film version, I was piqued with curiosity as to how they would pull it off.  The six stories involved, as I mentioned are fully conceived, and each one would be capable of standing on its own.  The problem this creates for the film version is a matter of giving each story its proper due.  For the both the book and the film, the task of linking them in a coherent and significant way is an extremely difficult one.  The book, in comparison to the film, was extremely subtle in doing so; the film, overt and in your face, yet both fail. 

       If you read the novel it quickly becomes apparent that it was spawned from fancies rooted in both structural and stylistic gimmickry.  From a structural standpoint, it is unique.  The book is binary, with the stories linked chronologically past to future in the first half, and in retrograde for the second half.  Stylistically, each story employs a different literary style and narrative: the first story, The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, is set in the mid-nineteenth century, and as the title suggests is a journal or diary written by an American notary, chronicling his ocean voyage from the Chatham Islands in the Pacific to San Francisco.  He becomes acquainted with an English doctor, Henry Goose, who falsely diagnoses an ailment resulting from contact with a parasitic worm, in order to allow him to covertly poison Adam to gain possession of his cargo.  The second story, Letters from Zedelghem is set in Belgium in the 1930s, and is written in the form of letters.  Robert Frobisher, an aspiring composer, whose bisexuality was not made apparent to me in the book (but flaunted in the film), writes to his friend/lover in England from the home of a once-great composer whom he is acting as amanuensis to.  He ends up sleeping with the composer’s wife, and falling in love with his daughter, while at the same time arriving in dispute with the composer himself over ownership of a composition.  It all results in Frobisher’s suicide.  The connection to the previous story is that Robert Frobisher finds an incomplete published copy of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing in the composer’s home and reads it.  The third story, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is written in the style of a crime novel, à la Elmore Leonard, and is set in San Francisco in the 1970s.  It involves the story of magazine writer who exposes a conspiracy at a local nuclear energy facility.  The man who helps her is the friend/lover of Robert Frobisher, the protagonist of the previous story.  She also gains possession of the letters written to him by Frobisher, thus furthering the connection.  The fourth story, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is a comedy set in the present time, and follows a vanity publisher who flees from thugs sent after him by his gangster client.   He is maliciously committed into a nursing home by his begrudged brother.  The bulk of the story involves his escape from the nursing home.  The connection to the Luisa Rey Mystery is that the publisher has in his possession a manuscript of the same name.  The fifth story, The Orison of Somni-451 is written in the form of an interview.  It’s set roughly a hundred years in the future; in a dystopian city we gradually learn to have once been Seoul, South Korea.  The story is reminiscent of a Phillip K. Dick novel.  It relates the tale of a fabricant (a clone), Somni-451 who attempts to escape her fixed position in society.  The connection to the Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is that that story has been made into a film, which Somni-451 has viewed.  The last story, Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After, which due to the author’s personalized use of heavily amalgamated dialects, is rendered almost incomprehensible.  I couldn’t make heads or tails of most of it when I read the book, and any attempts to do so resulted in intense migraines.  But I was able to gather that it took place in the even more distant future, in a post-apocalyptic world that nearly resembles that of primitive man’s.  In this fragile society they worship a goddess known as Somni, thus completing the connective chain. 

        What I have just described are the structural components and plots that comprise the book.  The plots in the movie are more or less the same—some have been slightly altered for various reasons, but the book’s mirrored binary structure has entirely been abandoned.  Instead there are constant sporadic vacillations between the six stories in the film that give the viewer the sensation that they are channel surfing.  What results is the feeling that one has attempted to watch six separate movies simultaneously.  It’s a unique experience for sure.
     The film, as I have mentioned, tries even harder than the book does to establish a profound relationship between the stories that to my mind doesn’t really exist.  Each of the protagonists possesses a unique birthmark to suggest that each one is a reincarnated version of a single spirit.  Well, the characters are so different from one another in temperament that it’s difficult to accept this explanation.  And the character of Somni-451 we are told is a fabricant (artificially created), so that trumps that plot device.  A particular gimmick the film enjoyed exploiting was the fact the principal actors play various roles in each of the six stories.  Yet, no one actor plays the reincarnated protagonist more than once.  Given the prominent exploitation of such a device, it boggles the mind that they didn't attempt to use it in a manner to where it would have been most effective--that of solidifying the relationship between protagonists.  Granted it would have posed a difficult feat to have one actor traverse both sexes and a variety of races.  Something is certainly needed, because I do believe that if it were possible to establish more cohesion between the six protagonists it probably would have made for a much better film.  Given that the book was conceived as a literary showpiece, the characters and their surrounding conditions are so distant that it makes it difficult to establish that connection.  
       Fortunately, the stories themselves are interesting enough to keep the viewer engaged, but the constant jumping back and forth makes it difficult to focus on any one story.  Personally, I only found three of the stories interesting in the book, and only two in movie.  The futuristic ones (Somni and Sloosha) I found tiresome.  This is too bad, because most of the focus is placed on these two stories.  Whoever did the set design for Somni—451 was obviously inspired by Blade Runner, but it just served to remind me that there are far better science fiction films out there.  Luisa Rey is mundane as a crime thriller, and Adam Ewing, while I much enjoyed that story in the book (mostly due to the narrative) bored me in the film.  The story of Robert Frobisher is a fascinating one, and I wish they had spent more time with it.  And the story of Timothy Cavendish is quite witty—I enjoyed it.

        There are few films like Cloud Atlas, as there are also few books.  Gimmickry, as I said in other reviews can only take you so far.  While many gimmicky films fail to provide the other necessary components to make it effective, Cloud Atlas has too many added components, and many of them unfounded.  What resulted is a highly unfocused picture, with too many cluttered elements.  I felt as though I were watching TV with a person with attention deficit disorder wielding the remote, all the while longing to snatch it away from them.               

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), dir. Peter R. Hunt

****1/2

When asked what my favorite James Bond film is I vacillate between Goldfinger and the little-known On Her Majesty’s Secret Service from 1969.  It’s a shame that it is so little known, because it’s a gem in a series that is very much ‘hit and miss’.  With 2012’s Skyfall still fresh in my mind, I suddenly felt compelled to revisit this film.  Daniel Craig’s James Bond is often lauded for its departure from the tired formula exhausted by the other films in the series.  I admit, they have been a departure, but it’s been one that has resulted in the series taking on an uncanny resemblance to the Bourne films, which begs the question: is it still a Bond film that they’ve made?

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service I’m sure felt like a departure when it was first released in 1969.  First of all, it was the first franchised Bond film in which James Bond was not played by Sean Connery.  For this film, George Lazenby, an unknown Australian was chosen to fill those massive shoes.  From an appearance standpoint, Lazenby certainly looked the part—he is quite dashing, and his dimpled smile exhibits a lot of confidence requisite of James Bond. He also approached the role with a lot of enthusiasm.  One great departure that occurs in this film is that Bond appears in disguise for a large chunk of the picture, even utilizing an even more posh accent than we’re used to.  Lazenby, you can tell, despite his voice being dubbed, really enjoyed these scenes, as did I.  One thing I was reminded of while re-watching this film is just how fun James Bond films can be.  Ever since the 1980s Bond of Timothy Dalton, the movies have become increasingly more heavy-handed.  The Daniel Craig outings as Bond have a seriousness to them that makes it an almost unnerving experience to watch.  I had a lot of fun watching On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—Lazenby gives a very light performance, playing the most philandering Bond of the series while rattling off some of the best one-liners any of the films has to offer.  There’s one in particular I’m surprised got by the censors in 1969!  See if you can find it.

While lacking in gadgetry, this Bond film boasts a series of spectacular chase scenes, including cars, skis, and even bobsleds.  It has a slew of beautiful women—Diana Rigg in particular, who despite playing Bond’s foil early on in the film, becomes his most significant affair of the entire series.  For those unaware, this is the Bond film in which James Bond gets married, and as preposterous as that sounds, the way it is approached in this film makes it appear not only legitimate, but also natural and romantic.

          The villain in this film is the quintessential Bond villain—Ernst Stavro Blofeld, head of the elite international crime syndicate SPECTRE.  Blofeld has been played by a host of different actors, and this time is played with much panache by Hollywood veteran actor, Telly Savalas.  In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Blofeld is no longer restricted to the confines of his plush swivel chair, mechanically stroking his unnamed and ubiquitous white cat—no, he can now be seen taking an active part in the most dangerous of chase scenes, even leading his gang of murderous henchman.  For his personal encounters with Bond, he is given eloquently preconceived dialogue, the kind of which one can only dream about delivering in retrospect, after hours of mulling over those perfect phrases that one wishes could have been uttered, while at the same time smoking cigarettes with the most unique grip I’ve seen.

            If you’re looking for a true surprise from this franchise, and haven’t seen this film already, then I highly recommend it!  It’s the second longest Bond film in the series, but it engages you, and the time flies by.  The ending, which I won’t disclose, achieves a sad sort of poignancy you wouldn’t think possible from a Bond movie.  This is only possible from a film that really makes you care for the characters as you do in this movie.  For that reason, Diana Rigg may very well be the ultimate Bond Girl.  She manages to effectively turn both James Bond and the franchise on its head, making it one of the most memorable Bond films, and one of the best. 

     

 

Life of Pi (2012)

Life of Pi (2012), dir. Ang Lee

***

Fans of the 2001 best-selling book by Yann Martel about an Indian adolescent stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger should be very pleased with this picture, as it is just about as faithful a film adaptation could strive to be.  Having read the book myself, I was quite pleased for the most part, but felt unduly underwhelmed when by all accounts I should have felt exhilarated.  As faithful as this film is, given the logistics involved it is forced to approach the story in an entirely different manner from how the book does.  Most of the story centers on only the two characters: the boy and the tiger.  Naturally the tiger cannot communicate with the boy, so any dialogue is impossible.  In the book this is easily compensated for with a rich narrative that draws the reader into the affected mind of the boy as an adult, who is telling the story.  The movie utilizes this format as well, as the film’s prologue is densely narrated by the adult protagonist to an unnamed Canadian writer (same as in the book).  It works quite well, and there is enough dialogue between the other human characters to pad it out.  But once we get out to sea when it’s just the boy and the tiger, the narration, when one thinks it would be most needed, disappears almost entirely.  Here’s where, in my mind, the film runs into trouble.  Because rather than rely upon the narrative to carry the story, it relies upon visuals—heavily computer-generated visuals, which, goddammit, don’t impress me at all.

       I should add that I did not see this movie in 3-D.  After seeing it I read a few other reviews online, and began to wish I had, though I sincerely doubt it would have helped much.  I’ve never been impressed by the 3-D format.  But neither has Roger Ebert (whose review I read), and not only has he been unimpressed by 3-D, he’s been a staunch opposing voice to the medium; however, he was impressed by the film’s 3-D visuals—go figure.  I still refuse to believe that sleekly done 3-D can effectively draw attention away from the sickening artificiality that CGI produces.  God help me, it does nothing for me, and it has ruined countless movie-going experiences of mine for the past fifteen years or so.  I’ve been thinking about writing an essay on the effect of computer-generated special effects on the movie industry, because it’s taken so much of the magic away from seeing special effects films.  Unlike optical effects, which were only lavishly exploited for little over a decade, there is no mystery with CGI.  The overall process is simple enough to understand—what you are seeing are computer-animated visuals, much the same as you would see in a video game.  I don’t like watching ‘video game’ movies with humans superimposed into them.  And as far as this technology has come, guess what—it still looks fake!  The CGI tiger in Life in Pi (humorously named “Richard Parker”) represents some of the finer CGI I’ve seen, but never at one moment did I believe I was looking at a real tiger.  And for that reason, it was impossible for me to share in the fear and apprehension that boy must have felt to have been stranded alone in the middle of the ocean with the beast.

          This story (which is widely known, so I won’t bother summarizing it), in both the book and the film, is told in a fashion to where it should ostensibly be true—“a story to make one believe in God,” we are told.  Aside from the part involving the carnivorous island, the story is quite feasible.  In the book, given the highly emotional narrative account, it is even more convincing.  Regrettably, with the film’s highly artificial visual presentation (as sleek as it may be), we are robbed of some of the doubt we are meant to feel toward the story’s alleged reality.  But perhaps I am being too harsh.  My little tirade on CGI aside, my review is still a favorable one.  The director, Ang Lee has an excellent sense of flow, and the story unfolds very smoothly.  Even without the narrative, the simple visual aspect in regard to what actions we see and how they are shown to us allow us to empathize with the character of the boy enough to feel his fear and sense of uncertainty.  It is a pretty miraculous story, and a fun one besides.  It’s obvious that the people behind this film have a profound admiration for the book, and it’s that affection which is most communicated.