Chuck Todd interviews me about alternate histories
Showing posts with label Sean Connery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sean Connery. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

No Time to Die: Quibbles about that Death



My wife and I finally saw the new (to us) final Daniel Craig as James Bond movie -- on Amazon Prime. We very much enjoyed it.  In fact, although it has its flaws, I'd say No Time to Die is certainly among best James Bond movies ever made.

[Spoilers follow, of course.]

Let's begin with that shocker of an ending: Bond dies.  I didn't like to see that as it was happening --not at all -- but it is a highly original way of ending a Bond movie, and deserves credit for that.  It does explode or reveal as a myth the fact that Bond never dies.  Those around him die, and he must suffer that.  But not Bond himself.

The words on the screen at the end of the movie assure us that we'll see Bond again, and this will no doubt occur the way it's been presented in every transition to a newly acted Bond since it first happened back in Sean Connery's reign, actually twice, once for one time with George Lazenby, and then for a new series of Bond movies with Roger Moore.  In those and every subsequent case, the new Bonds were introduced with no mention of the fact that they looked different from their predecessor.  The same logic says the new post-Craig Bond can be introduced with no reference to his predecessor being killed.  What this, I suppose, means is that Bond's death at the end of No Time to Die is no big deal -- even though it meant the world in the context of that movie.

I did have two quibbles about the two characters must crucial to that death.  Rami Malek was superb as the arch-villain Safin who engineered Bond's death -- no one can match Malek's way of delivering powerful lines in a soft voice and a nearly expressionless face.  But given the profundity of Bond's death, I would have rather seen it done by a life-long adversary, like Blofeld, who's not able to step up to that role because he's earlier been killed by Bond in another nefarius Safin move on the lethal chessboard.  Similarly, although Madeleine (well-played by Léa Seydoux) with a most worthy love of Bond's life. we unfortunately don't meet her until the beginning of this very movie.  I would have rather seen someone we already got to know in previous movies.  Of course, since Vesper was already killed, it would have been difficult to pull someone out of the earlier Craig as Bond movies, but, nonetheless, that would have added a special gravitas in No Time to Die.  Bond's daughter was a really nice part of this movie, and had a gravitas of its own, but a mother with a history of Bond loving her before this story began would have added more.

Otherwise, I thought every other aspect of the movie was outstanding.  I especially loved the reprise of Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World" at the end of No Time to Die.  The reprise, of course, was from Her Majesty's Secret Service, where it was also played at the end of the movie.  In other words, the death of Bond's true love, and then all these years later, the death of Bond, get the same musical aftermath.  Unless you're made of stone, that song is bound to bring a tear to your eyes.

Thinking about what the next Bond movie will bring, we have  the question of how many of the agents and administration in No Time to Die with survive.  I see no reason why all of them can't, deprived of course of any grief at the loss of the Bond played by Craig.  I've seen and really enjoyed every Bond movie ever made, pretty much in the year in which they were released, and I'm looking forward to more.




See also The New James Bond -- Without the Golden Pun ... It's Not HBO -- It's a Quantum of Solace

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Outlander 3.8: Pirates!

Well, with Black Sails sailed off the air earlier thus year, Outlander couldn't have come up a pirate thread at a better time - that is, if you like pirate stories (I do) and if that ship at the end of episode 3.8 whose men captured young Ian are pirates. 

I think they are.  But who can be sure (since I haven't read the novels, I'm only sure of what I've seen on screen).  I'm indeed sure that tonight's episode was excellent, in the new series that's come back to us with Claire's return to Scotland and the past.  Her reunion with Jamie, and all its difficulties, have been handled with intelligence and style.

As always, I have questions (and maybe these were answered already in the novels).  But -

1. Why didn't Jamie go up to the stones, rather than swim to the island, when he was out of prison, any time during the 20 years?  Is it possible that stones won't work for Jamie?  But, if so, how would he know that?  Or, did he try to travel to the future via the stones, but got nowhere?

2. Less cosmic: how was young Ian supposed to get the coins and jewels back to Jamie and Claire without a boat?  It's already been established that the swim is rough, even treacherous, so what was the plan?  (And my wife wonders why young Ian couldn't take a boat in the first place?)

But I'm loving Outlander, anyway, and the prospect of Jamie and Claire going to the same part of the world as James Bond, played by Sean Connery, another Scot, would fictionally do in our own century - come to think of it, around the same time Claire was in Boston - is appealing indeed.  How do you say shiver me timbers in Scottish?

See also Outlander Season 3 Debut: A Tale of Two Times and Places ...Outlander 3.2: Whole Lot of Loving, But ... Outlander 3.3: Free and Sad ... Outlander 3.4: Love Me Tender and Dylan ... Outlander 3.5: The 1960s and the Past ... Outlander 3.6: Reunion ... Outlander 3.7: The Other Wife

And see also Outlander 2.1: Split Hour ... Outlander 2.2: The King and the Forest ... Outlander 2.3: Mother and Dr. Dog ... Outlander 2.5: The Unappreciated Paradox ... Outlander 2.6: The Duel and the Offspring ...Outlander 2.7: Further into the Future ... Outlander 2.8: The Conversation ... Outlander 2.9: Flashbacks of the Future ... Outlander 2.10: One True Prediction and Counting ... Outlander 2.11: London Not Falling ... Outlander 2.12: Stubborn Fate and Scotland On and Off Screen ... Outlander Season 2 Finale: Decades

And see also Outlander 1.1-3: The Hope of Time Travel ... Outlander 1.6:  Outstanding ... Outlander 1.7: Tender Intertemporal Polygamy ...Outlander 1.8: The Other Side ... Outlander 1.9: Spanking Good ... Outlander 1.10: A Glimmer of Paradox ... Outlander 1.11: Vaccination and Time Travel ... Outlander 1.12: Black Jack's Progeny ...Outlander 1.13: Mother's Day ... Outlander 1.14: All That Jazz ... Outlander Season 1 Finale: Let's Change History

 

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Timeless 1.4: Skyfall and Weapon of Choice

An historically rich Timeless 1.4 last night - rife in twists and connections to our popular culture as well as our real history, and the potential of travel to the past to change all of that up - with our three heroes interacting with both Ian Fleming (not only creator of James Bond, but also a real secret agent) and Werner Von Braun (responsible for both the V2 rockets out of Nazi Germany and the launch of the US space program).  Indeed, Von Braun's role in this episode makes it a story not only about time travel but space travel.

But starting with Bond, Wyatt recognizes a feature of the architecture back in a 1944 Nazi stronghold that played a role in Skyfall (the 2012 James Bond movie), with Fleming taking that in.  But that certainly had no influence in our history, since Fleming had nothing to do with that recent Bond movie.  However, at the end of the episode, we learn that Fleming did write a story, "Weapon of Choice," which tells what happened with our characters in this episode of Timeless.  That story is of course unknown in our reality.  And there's a quip about Never Say Never Again - in our reality, the name of the second adaption of Fleming's Thunderball, and the one-film final return of Sean Connery to the Bond role in 1983. Ah, the course of popular culture never did run smooth when time travel is concerned.

Meanwhile, in real reality, concerning both the end of the World War II and the space race in the 1960s, Fleming wants to kill Von Braun, seeing as how the rocket scientist's missiles were wreaking such havoc on London.  Flynn, whose ultimate motives are still not clear, wants to kidnap Von Braun and deliver him to the Soviets, which would mean that they not the U.S. would likely have gotten to the Moon at the end of the 1960s.   Fortunately, our team succeeds in preventing both changes to history, which means that the changes in history wrought by the time travel in this episode are limited only to popular culture, with our real history intact for now.

Timeless continues to be a strong program, with appealing episodes, and the underlying stories of Lucy wanting to get her sister back, and our other characters striving to maintain their personal identities and equilibrium, providing a good, roiling backdrop.


See also Timeless 1.1: Threading the Needle ... Timeless 1.2: Small Change, Big Payoffs ... Timeless 1.3: Judith Campbell


             more time travel in the 20th century




Sunday, November 19, 2006

The New James Bond - Without the Golden Pun

Actually, I thought Daniel Craig was great as James Bond in Casino Royal - I thought the movie was was excellent, too - but I missed two things in the new movie: gadgets and puns.

I'll save the gadgets and Q for another post. Here, I'll just lament the loss of puns. There were so few of them in Casino Royal that you could hear a pun drop. In fact, I heard only one (but I won't tell you what it is, because that would spoil the fun, and give away an important part of the plot).

The puns were always one of my favorite parts of the Bond movies - Sean Connery saying Lotta Lenya got her kicks (she wielded a shoe with a knife), Roger Moore saying he was keeping the old British end up as he made love to the heroine in a boat under the closing credits ... you know, that sort of bling.

Now, it makes good sense that Craig's Bond doesn't say many of those things - he's just starting out, and the whole point of the movie is that he doesn't yet have the polish and sophistication of the later Bond. He's not sure of his drinks or his clothes or even his poker cards. He's more vulnerable to women. He's driving a Ford in the first part of the movie.

So we can forgive him and the movie makers if they left him with barely a verbal barb. Who knows, maybe the world has outgrown that kind of repartee, which was most in vogue when Cole Porter was the top, a good two decades before the first Bond movie, anyway.

But I miss the license to kill which if it didn't make you die of laughter at least left you with a chuckle. Let's hope we haven't had the last laugh on Bond.

Listen to the podcast of this review: The Man Without the Golden Pun

See also Quantum of Solace Felt Like HBO or Showtime - High Praise






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