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Film

Review Quantum of Solace

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So let’s get the obvious out of the way:  Daniel Craig is not the James Bond of decades past.  At least not largely.  This is probably ample material for a separate blog entry, but to make a long story short, his is a post-9/11, post-Jack Bauer, post-Jason Bourne Bond.  And as such, much of the excesses have been stripped away, leaving a good deal of room for character development and more intense action.  And as expected, it’s something of a divisive decision; Roger Ebert doesn’t care for it, and he’s far from alone.  Critical consensus for Quantum of Solace has been mixed at best, especially contrasted with the near-universal praise for Casino Royale.

But all the same, Casino Royale was, after Die Another Day, a breath of fresh air.  While Brosnan’s Bond movies were hardly economical spy thrillers, he was able to carve out his own niche as a Bond somewhere between Connery’s swagger and toughness and Roger Moore’s likeable wit.  Gadgets, though pleantiful, were never centre-stage.  At least for his first three movies.  Die Another Day was at least on-par with Roger Moore’s campiest outings, and while I enjoyed it, Bond looked closer to Austin Powers than ever thanks to contemporary spies like Jack Bauer and world events taking a sharp turn to chaos and uncertainty.

Exit Brosnan, enter Daniel Craig.  When Casino Royale gave the series (and the character) a fresh start, Daniel Craig had to both stay true to past incarnations and prove he could keep up with Jason Bourne and the like.  And he had to make the character his own.  And thanks to Martin Campbell’s direction, most agreed he delivered.  Quantum of Solace, Craig’s follow-up, continues in a similar direction, but isn’t quite as well executed.  While it’s by no means a poor addition to the Bond catalog, it does have it’s share of shortcomings.

The storyline is actually not too un-Bondian.  Bond, betrayed by Vesper Lynd, is out for revenge for her death, and as luck would have it, he stumbles upon a conspiracy much larger than his initial scope.  It echoes similar storylines from Connery’s first few outings as Bond, but manages to feel like a revenge tale all the same.

Where it most significantly differs from Casino Royale (and all previous Bond outings) is how economical it is.  This unfortunately works both for and against it.  A number of early action scenes feel too short, and the edits are simply too fast.  This is most prominent in the opening car chase, but the rooftop chase and hotel fight scene both were a little too close to similar scenes in the Bourne series for comfort.  Not necessarily bad things, but still alien to the series, and too quickly paced for my liking.

Similarly economical is the dialogue.  Bond has very little to say, especially since a still-green 007 lacks the confidence and cockiness to drop cheesy one-liners and ridiculous innuendo on a regular basis.  M’s role is expanded, but dialogue is still largely kept to a minimum.

But after the first act, things take a turn for the better.  It’s almost as if Director Marc Forster became more comfortable with the film as he went.  The turning point is Bond doing some legitimate spying at the Opera.  It’s one of the best scenes in the movie, and probably one of the best spy moments that a Bond movie has seen in quite some time.  From there, the movie resembles a Bond movie more.  Action scenes look a little more epic.  Bond’s women are a little less cold.  And Bond’s cold exterior warms up a little.  While Dominic Greene isn’t a cartoonish megalomaniac with a hollowed-out volcano, he still manages to be an effective villian, and the film ends with a very strong fight scene, and a great deal of promise for future installments.

While Marc Forster probably shouldn’t refocus his career to making big-budget action flicks, it’s still a solid entry in the Bond canon.  Make no mistake, this is a far cry from Roger Moore’s campy classics, but it’s taking a similar direction to Connery while making good use of Daniel Craig’s talent as an actor.  Of course, growing pains are to be expected with a series re-boot.  And Quantum of Solace doesn’t match Casino Royale.  But it’s beginning to look more like James Bond than it did at the end of Casino Royale.  Rebuilding a character as legendary as Bond from the ground up was an unenviable task, but I still believe that Daniel Craig will be remembered as the strongest rival to Sean Connery.

Daniel Craig is, sometimes in spite of the thin script and Marc Forster’s action scenes, giving Bond the proper 21st century makeover.  While I hesitate to say that we’ll have the good old Bond back sooner than later, Quantum of Solace is still a step in the right direction after Casino Royale.  How well it works might be easier to determine when the Quantum story arc has closed, but things are looking good, even without Q’s fancy toys.

As a Bond movie: B

Overall: B+

Film

Film Review Tropic Thunder

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Given how incredibly over-exposed celebrities are, especially in contrast to how little work some appear to do, it’s surprising how seldom the darker side of Hollywood is discussed.  No, not alcoholism, cocaine binges, and sex tapes.  Oscar baiting.  Oscar baiting is a difficult topic to bring up because it can result in some politically incorrect opinions.  And frankly, sometimes it’s just easier to lie and accept pandering as talent.

Tropic Thunder, however, takes a well-deserved stab at actors who are perpetually searching for Oscar gold not via talent, but via working Academy politics.  It’s something worthy of not just mockery, but a flat-out indictment.  It’s been done before, to a degree.  Kate Winslet’s cameo on Ricky Gervais’ Extras took on the big gun: holocaust movies.  Holocaust Oscar-bait is generally the easiest target, but Tropic Thunder director and star Ben Stiller wisely avoids the subject, since Holocaust movies are (regardless of intention) generally not offensive to the subject.  The same cannot be said for the Hollywood types that Stiller skewers.

Tropic Thunder opens with fake ads and trailers: always a good sign.  Brandon T. Jackson’s Alpa Chino (yeah, I know..) hocks an energy drink called “booty sweat”.  Then  Stiller’s Tugg Speedman appears in a trailer for the one-liner driven actioner Scorcher VI, which is classy enough to use roman numerals, but stupid enough to be a fifth sequel.  The Fatties- Fart Two features Jack Black’s Jeff Portnoy as a host of characters in fatsuits and bad makeup farting perpetually.  And finally, One-time Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr’s 5-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus stars as a gay monk alongside Tobey Maguire in the art-house Satan’s Alley.

Cut to an epic battle in Vietnam.  Which cuts to director Damien Cockburn having an epic hissy-fit on the set of Tropic Thunder, based on the autobiography of Nick Nolte’s “Four Leaf” Tayback.  At the suggestion of Four Leaf, Damien Cockburn decides to send the cast into the jungle and shoot the film guerilla-style with hidden cameras.  Hilarity, danger, and self-discovery ensues.

Tropic Thunder works less often that it should.  Mainly because it’s trying to be two different movies.  It’s a legitimate action flick, despite parodying them, but it’s also a goofy comedy.  And while I’ve made no secret of my love for the recent trend of homage/parody movies, the goofier elements of it fall flat.  But first the good:  Ben Stiller’s not normally known for his directing, but it’s a really impressive feat, given the scale of some of the scenes.  A lot’s been made of Robert Downey Jr’s blackface performance, and it’s very impressive.  But it’s largely the lesser-known actors who made the biggest impression on me.  Jay Baruchel, who starred in Judd Apatow’s Undeclared and Knocked Up, very nearly steals a number of scenes as the only actor in the bunch who actually takes his job seriously.  And similarly, Brandon Jackson is able to match Downey in their scenes together.  Jack Black and Ben Stiller are in familiar territory, and there aren’t any real surprises from either of them in this one, but they’re not phoning it in either.

The problems come when the story deviates from the actors and crew in the jungle.  Stiller cast Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaghey in the two largest support roles, and it’s jarring to switch from Downey et al so immersed in their roles to Cruise and McConaghey effectively just having fun on set.  Celebrity cameos made sense in Zoolander, but they just didn’t work in Tropic Thunder.  What impressed me in the movie wasn’t how many celebrity friends Ben Stiller could persuade into making an appearance, but how many great performances were found in such a ridiculous situation.

But still, it’s effectively the Robert Downey Jr. show.  It takes an incredible actor to achieve subtlety while playing an actor who changed his skin colour for a movie.  It’s kind of a shame that Stiller took an easy comedy route by having Tom Cruise yell profanities in a fat suit when there’s so many great aspects that could have been more dominant.  But it’s a well-deserved attack on actors and producers who play politics for fame and fortune when it works, it in those instances, it works really well.

B-

Film

Review Pineapple Express

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Much has been made of how Judd Apatow has changed the face of R-rated comedy from teen comedies with bodily fluid jokes and Blink-182 soundtracks.  Apatow – primarily as a producer, but perhaps more effectively as a director – has been able to make movies that are able to waffle between high-comedy, low-comedy, and legitimate drama.  It’s something he started on TV with the downright flawless Freaks and Geeks and the slightly less flawless, but equally entertaining Undeclared, the casts of which appear in many of his movies now.

However, when I saw Pineapple Express, it did fit it nicely with Judd Apatow’s body of work (albeit the first one with a car chase and large explosions).  But it reminded me more of another contemporary filmmaking team I adore:  Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg.  Pineapple Express could hang with Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz just as easily as Superbad or The 40-Year-Old Virgin.  Aside from it being a faithful and respectful homage to buddy-action flicks like Lethal Weapon, it’s also got the fish-out-of-water thing down.  Pineapple Express does for lazy stoners caught in a drug war what Shaun of the Dead did for slackers caught in a zombie (yeah yeah, don’t use the Z-word…) outbreak.  It walks the fine line of demonstrating how ridiculous the genre really is without mocking it, and by being a solid entry in the genre overall.

And then you have the issue of how Apatow and Wright share an approach to male friendship.  In the end, both Pineapple Express and Shaun of the Dead are about male friendship.  Seth Rogen and James Franco had their work cut out for them in making their mostly ridiculous characters appear to have a real connection that would eventually manifest itself in risking eachothers lives for the sake of the other.  As strange as it sounds, Pineapple Express and Shaun of the Dead are both just as much examinations of friendship as they are parodies.

It is, ultimately, in the hands of Seth Rogen and James Franco to make the movie work.  The script is genuinely funny, but the overall product wasn’t as tight or polished as Edgar Wright’s homage-buddy flicks.  It’s overall package is consistent, however.  But again, the cast is what really makes it work.  Thank God James Franco is in a strong comic role again.  As much as I enjoyed the Spider-man films (even the third one, though not without a number of qualifiers), Franco just seemed out of place in such a dark role.  To me, he’ll always be Nick Andopolis.  This is probably as close as I’ll get to seeing that sort of performance from Franco again, barring some sort of 10th anniversary Freaks and Geeks reunion movie in 2010.

I also feel compelled to mention the ever-impressive Ed Begley, jr as Seth Rogen’s girlfriend’s father.  He’s basically on the edge of completely flipping out the entire time, but never actually goes full-tilt crazy and it’s definitely a scene-stealing performance.

All in all, it’s a really entertaining movie.  And I’m saying this as someone who saw it with no chemicals in his system besides caffeine.

B+