redfiona99

There are many spoilers, all the way through this.

The case for the prosecution:

I wanted to like "Tomorrow Never Dies" a lot more than I did. It features a solid Bond, two excellent Bond girls (Teri Hatcher as the beautiful and damned Paris Carver, and the ever-awesome Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin), a truly glorious villain in Elliot "I can't believe it's not Murdoch" Carver, and a half decent theme tune (I have no idea why Sheryl Crow has disowned it; I like it.)

So many good parts. The whole, unfortunately, does not come together.

And I don't know why, which is very frustrating. If there was something obvious, it would be easier to explain.

The scene itself:



(Sound quality variable)

Why the scene is so good:

You want the definition of 'one scene wonder'? This is it. What is the first thing everyone remembers about "Tomorrow Never Dies" - "I am a professor of forensic medicine. Believe me, Mr. Bond, I could shoot you from Stuttgart und still create ze proper effect." And I love that 'ze' is in the official quote. Because Vincent Schiavelli is having all of the fun playing this deeply twisted but incredibly competent individual. He's a throwback to the old Bond villains, with a 90s twist, because the whole conversation with Stamper is very much post-Tarantino.

The set-up for the scene is great because Carver has already filmed his wife's obituary and he's making Bond listen to it. (Have I mentioned that Carver is a great villain, and very prescient of where news media went?) This distracts Bond enough that Kaufman can sneak up on him. Kaufman is good enough at his job that he could kill Bond so there's also peril. So Bond is stuck and he has to use his smarts to get out of this, because violence will not fix it, and he does. That's why I've chosen this scene ahead of the car chase that immediately follows. The car chase is too gimmicky and reliant on tech for my taste. The reason I've chosen this over the motorbike chase with Michelle Yeoh later on despite the motorbike chase being an excellent setpiece of destruction (note, Spectre director, this is how you film a helicopter scene) is the bit at the end of the Kaufman scene where he's begging for mercy, a mercy he'd never show anyone and Bond just goes no. It's a fantastically book-Bond bit.

Tomorrow Never Dies a film of bits that do not gel. The bits are excellent. The whole is not.

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In the spirit of treat yourself, I also link Götz Otto's IMDB gallery. Because he used to be vaguely attractive if you liked that sort of thing, now he's stunning and there are several good photographers out there.

Spectre
This is very much the short version of my problems with Spectre, the long version is here -https://redfiona99.dreamwidth.org/1018518.html

The case for the prosecution: Films have ended up on this list for a variety of reasons but I think this is the only one that's on the list for philosophical reasons. I just can't agree with its themes, or most of them at least.

There are a lot, and they all seem to contradict each other in really odd ways.

1 - the surveillance society is a bad thing

OK, this one I am OK with, the problem is how they approach it. They're (M, Tanner, Bond, Q, Moneypenny) rude, unnecessarily rude, to C, long before it's obvious that he's being used by Blofeld. Just because he's played by Andrew Scott doesn't mean that he's a bad guy, and I'd prefer it if the good guys had evidence before they attack.

2 - James Bond shouldn't have to do this job.

Which yeah, fine, with but it seems to be only Bond they object to doing that job, which is odd. There are at least another 6 double-0 agents, that they don't mention, and M and Tanner as well. Either no one ought to do it, or there's no reason to mark Bond out especially.

Then there's the whole bit about how it shouldn't be machines that make the sort of decisions spies take, but if it's not machines, it has to be people and the same film has just been arguing that people shouldn't be making those decisions so who the *blank* do you want to make these decisions? It's probably the best example of the confusion of the writing but it's by no means the only one.

3 - Love redeems

Which I have issues with anyway, even before the really poor way the film deals with it. Redemption requires at least an attempt to fix the trouble you have caused, there is none of that just a badly-written illogical romance. (Dudes, your lead actor is Daniel Craig, it should be straightforward to convey the leading lady wants him. You have failed in some spectacular way when you don't manage that.)

4 - The children of bad people are the only people who can understand bad people.

Urgh! Just urgh!

So we're supposed to believe that Dr Madeleine Swann will automatically be suited to Bond, a bad man, just because her father is a bad man.

I repeat my urgh!

Not related to the above, I am done with villains with personal reasons. Blofeld doesn't care who Bond is, he just wants money and power. And that is how we like him. Even Christoph Waltz being wonderfully wicked and charming does not save this version of Blofeld.

I also have artistic objections. I hate the theme tune, although several buskers have proved the problem with the theme tune is Sam Smith's voice, not the tune itself. I hate the stupid filter that's put over footage filmed in any country warmer than Britain, not least because it ruins the effort that went into the Mexican helicopter stunts. It is a stupid effect and it annoys me.

Also, that's not what thalium poisoning looks like.

The scene itself:



Why the scene is so good:

It's one of few scenes where everything actually works*. There's this brittle hysterical edge to Craig's Bond in Spectre, for good reason, and this is where it all breaks. There are few actors who do despair quite as well as Daniel Craig and here he nails yet another flavour of it.

His Bond here know he's being ridiculous, because it's a mouse, but he's had to be paranoid, because Blofeld, and his electronic surveillance, is everywhere. It's a wonderful tightrope walk of a scene, because he's still dangerous but he's at the end of his tether, and that's dangerous in a different way. Why can't the rest of the film be that good?!

*remarkably, most of these feature Dave Batista, this is one of the two that don't.

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Timothy Dalton. I brook no argument on the subject.

(Okay, not entirely true, I give some leeway for Sean Connery as an answer.)

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Fencing

I went to the MOFT (or the Merseyside Open, but I prefer to call it the MOFT) at the weekend. My fencing was not great, I finished one outside the top 16 again, but I enjoyed myself and I did some things reasonably well. My distance is still off, but more of that later.

The two things I love most about the MOFT are that it always runs on time, and they pay the referees so there are always enough referees and they are good referees. It's one of the few competitions I can go to where I know my success and failure will be entirely due to my fencing, not due to external conditions like the state of the hall or the ability of the referee.

Actually, this ought to be where I put in my usual plug for the MOFT. If you can only go to 1 competition in the year, go to the MOFT. It has a good mix of fencers, because some of the Scots come down and the Midlands and Londoners come up, and, because it's on their selection list, some Irish fencers come across. Add to that that the local uni have a large chunk of international students, it means you get a nice mix of fencers, including some you're not likely to fence anywhere else.

It also has 2 rounds of pools and no cut so you're guaranteed an elimination match.

They also have jelly babies, and have expanded to include chocolate eclairs.

All this for the princely sum of £15.

Anyway, back to the fencing. My first pool had a good Scot, a sneaky left-hander (even by the sneaky standards of those wrong handed types ;) ) and two sabreurs giving it a go. One of them, E, had got 3rd place in the sabre the day before and then fallen out of a taxi, and the other had been conned into doing the foil by her captain. Her captain is a mean, horrible person, because she's only a beginner sabbie, and we all beat her. Anyway, I beat E and the other sabreur and lost my other two matches 4-5. Not bad.

My second pool had E and the good Scot again, with a different left-hander, this one being violent rather than sneaky, and V, a Louth beginner. I beat E, and V, and lose my other matches 2-5. Not as good, but hey-ho, and I beat a Louthie (see many, many previous fencing posts for the back-story there).

At the end of the two pools, I'm ranked 15th. I get E, again, in my knockout. Sneaky, US-trained, has been fencing since 1991, sabreur with decent footwork that she is, she finally beats me, and soundly. E gives me some advice on my distance, which I plan on putting into us, which is sadly the same advice that one of the coaches at Birmingham has been giving me. In my defence, I've gone from being a whole foot's length to close to being half a foot's length too close. Hopefully I will be able to ameliorate it further in time for the Nottingham in 2 weeks time, where E is also fencing. The Notts also has 2 rounds of pools and a guaranteed DE, and is also on my list of favourite competitions.

Other, non-me related stuff:

The Israeli national stripes are lovely, it's a Star of David with one point lengthened so it looks like a sword.

A Canadian epeeist was desperately doing a one-man job to explode the myth that all Canadians are nice. Every single point against him was being argued. AT EPEE! Actually, the male epeeists in general were misbehaving in a manner unbecoming even sabreurs. It's epee, guys, if there's a light, there's a point. The problem with epee is that it attracts rules lawyers, so rather than the foil and sabre arguments of 'ref, could you phrase that please' with it's deliberate undercurrent of 'if you think about it, you'll see you're wrong', it's all 'as you can tell by rule 34 subsection 1, he didn't salute the judges and therefore should lose'.*

More seriously, they did all seem to be complaining about phantom lights and bad refereeing so either they really got the short end of the stick or male epeeists are whiners. I know what I am going with, especially as the female epeeists reported no such problems.

On the fun side, I accidentally clouted the referee for my first pool with my sword, but thankfully he forgave me. Fencing left-handers is a dangerous business. The ref for the second batch of pools was a French young Jude Law look-a-like, apparently, not only are the French better fencers, their refs are eye candy.

But yes, lots of fun was had by all.

*That's not rule 34 section 1, by the way, r34 s1 is the one about progression counting as priority in foil. I have had many arguments about the application of that damn rule.

Novelisation of the film of the same name.

( Review )

( Suggestions )

No unsuggestions

Proof that Benicio Del Toro always was good looking even when he wasn't Hollywood's golden boy.

Young and a Bond Villan

The amount of cheering from me when he won the Oscar was probably bordering on noise pollution, but it's always nice when someone you dug before they got big and famous win stuff.

And if you're looking, more bad guys (spoilers if you've never seen The Living Daylights)


( More stuff, spoilers so I've cut it )

On a Bond cast related note, how good does Sean Bean playing MacBeth sound?