Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Specter, the movie

It's a Bond movie.  I'd rate it medium good against all the other Bond movies.  We don't watch Bond movies to see character development, true love, political points made, conventional tragedy, or Shakespearean eloquence.  We go to Bond movies for the action, the pretty Bond-girl, the evil Bond-villain, Q's lethal gadgets, the car chases, the fighting, and the shooting.  In this vein, Spectre delivers.
   Daniel Craig delivers a satisfying Bond.  He plays a taciturn, driven Bond, with some scores to settle, and some lost loves to mourn.  He has an icy stare.  And a good right hook.  He needs a better tailor, his suits don't fit him very well.  Bond has no sense of humor, never cracks a joke or uses a pun.  This is one serious and scary dud
   Lea Seydoux makes a decent Bond girl.  She is plenty good looking enough, and has some of her own issues.  We see her standing up to 007 and making it work for her and for Bond.
    The movie suffers from some poor technical work.  The soundman doesn't capture all the dialog.  It could be worse, but a fair number of bits of dialog were unintelligible.  It was not a full fledged curse of the soundman, but more like just bad wishes from the soundman.  And the camera man was into under exposure.  A lot of scenes were just annoyingly DARK, the only thing you could see was the actor's face, and sometimes not even that.  I'd find myself saying, "Open up your damn lens" to the screen.  When the camera man did set the exposure properly, he would introduce a misty soft focus effect similar to filling the set with smoke.  Also annoying.  At least we didn't have to put up with 3-D goggles.
   The car chase didn't seem very real, not real the way Steve McQueen's Mustang blasting thru San Francisco did in Bullitt..   The cars sort of floated and pulled off some unbelievably sharp turns into alleys at speed, to the point where I figured I  was watching CGI.
   A lot of plot holes.  For openers, Bond manages to get from London to Rome, with his car (Q's hottest newest Aston Martin) in one quick cut-to-black.  You'd think at least a shot of driving the Aston onto a Channel car ferry would be in order.  Bond manages to collapse an entire 6 story masonry building with a few rifle shots.  There is a lot of travel, but it is never clear where they are going to, coming from or traveling thru.  The Bond-villain goes from fairly handsome, to horribly scarred and I never knew how.  There is some high level skullduggery between the new M, and a snivel service weasel dubbed C which is unclear.  Bond confronts the father of the Bond-girl with a lot of snarling back and forth which was unclear to me, and the resolution of the face-off  is brutal and weird and unexplained.  Ah well, it's a Bond movie and it don't have to make sense.    
   Anyhow, if you like Bond movies,  this one is pretty good.  The critics panned it, but the critics don't like Bond movies, they like Shakespeare, which Bond movies are not. 

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