Meet the New Blog

I feel like it's time to retire the second omnibus. I've got new blogging software. It allows me to put together no only a new blog on the .mac space I'm paying for, but to easily update and link to my new podcast. Head over there for the details, and update your links.

A Real Stand-Up Babe

Bitterspice got me the second season of "The Rockford Files" on DVD. I'm a lucky man.

I'll Do Him Ten Better

Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly said of Casino Royale "Is Casino Royale the greatest Bond film ever? Let's put it this way: It will never be quite as quintessential as, say, Dr. No, the first and (to me) still the finest moment of Bond's Connery/Cold War/Playboy heyday. Yet if Casino Royale isn't a greater Bond film than that, it's a greater movie, period."

Bollocks, Mr. Glieberman.

I can not only name one Bond film better than Casino Royale, I can name ten:

1. The Spy Who Loved Me
2. Goldfinger
3. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
4. Goldeneye
5. For Your Eyes Only
6. From Russia With Love
7. Dr. No
8. The World Is Not Enough
9. Licence To Kill
10. Thunderball

What makes these 007 films better than Casino Royale? They're shorter. Their plots are tighter. Their villains are more threatening. Their romances are stronger, and M doesn't have to call Bond two minutes before the closing credits to tie up loose ends in the story.

This takes nothing away from Daniel Craig's performance. He was very good. But let's not make his debut out to be more than it is: a promising start attached to a substandard story. I'm glad Craig did well, but I've seen many better films, not just on screens this year, but in my own 007 DVD collection. If it weren't in stores everywhere, I'd offer to let Mr. Glieberman borrow it.

We Live Here

I'll pass this on without comment:

Congressman Criticizes Election of Muslim
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

Mr. Goode declined Wednesday to comment on his letter, which quickly stirred a furor among some Congressional Democrats and Muslim Americans, who accused him of bigotry and intolerance.

They noted that the Constitution specifically bars any religious screening of members of Congress and that the actual swearing in of those lawmakers occurs without any religious texts. The use of the Bible or Koran occurs only in private ceremonial events that take place after lawmakers have officially sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

Since the November election, Mr. Ellison said, he has received hostile phone calls and e-mail messages along with some death threats. But in an interview on Wednesday, he emphasized that members of Congress and ordinary citizens had been overwhelmingly supportive and said he was focusing on setting up his Congressional office, getting phone lines hooked up and staff members hired, not on negative comments.

“I’m not a religious scholar, I’m a politician, and I do what politicians do, which is hopefully pass legislation to help the nation,” said Mr. Ellison, who said he planned to focus on secular issues like increasing the federal minimum wage and getting health insurance for the uninsured.

“I’m looking forward to making friends with Representative Goode, or at least getting to know him,” Mr. Ellison said, speaking by telephone from Minneapolis. “I want to let him know that there’s nothing to fear. The fact that there are many different faiths, many different colors and many different cultures in America is a great strength.”

Me Me Me Me

Time magazine, whose usefulness is declining by the second, named YOU (actually me, you pointless proles) the person of the year. And just to press the point, they put some reflective material on the cover so that you can check yourself out as you examine the cover. (Great. Yet another reason to feel inadequate in the face of Russell Crowe's cover on Vanity Fair. Couldn't those pricks from Time-Warner send along a makeup person and a lighting guy? And where's my green corn tamale and chardonnay? Don't try to slip Pinot Grigio in there instead, you fuckers, because I can fucking tell!)

It did, however, make me think of a stage rap from one of the members of Peter, Paul and Mary: (Peter, I think, and I'm paraphrasing)

In the 1920s, there was a magazine called Time, which covers a lot of ground. Imagine, all of time in one magazine. Wow! Then, in the 1930s, they came out with Life. Now life is a large part of time, but it's not all of it, just life. Then in the 1950s they came out with People, who are a smaller fraction of all of life, and an even smaller fraction of time. By the 1970s, the new magazine was Us. We won't talk about them; we'll only talk about us. Then the 1980s brought us Self. I think that by the 1990s there's only one place for magazines to go: ME. It'll be twenty pages of Reynold's Wrap.

I suppose in selecting its person of the year, Time earns credit for irony.

In the meantime, while all y'all are busy jerking yourselves off with the story that you control the world, people will keep dying in Iraq, companies will keep shipping your pension funds to Switzerland and the Caymans, and the richest 1% of the world will add another percent or two to their share of the world's wealth while you pay an increasing share of their taxes. Don't think of that, just look at the magazine--shiny pretty magazine.

Life's Soundtrack

Here's Bitterspice's list. Here's mine:

1. Opening Credits: Coast of Malabar—The Chieftans
2. Waking Up: Swagger—Flogging Molly
3. First Day At School: You and Oblivion—Robyn Hitchcock
4. Fight Song: Closing Time—Leonard Cohen
5. Breaking Up: Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard—Paul Simon
6. Happiness: All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be A Star)--R.E.M.
7. Life’s Okay: Mary Jane—Alanis Morisette
8. Mental Breakdown: Bittersweet Me—R.E.M.
9. Driving: I Won’t Back Down—Tom Petty
10. Flashback: Drunken Lullabies—Flogging Molly
11. Getting Back Together: Sky is a Poisonous Garden—Concrete Blonde
12. Wedding: 4:50 AM (Go Fishing)—Roger Waters
13. Birth of a Child: Piano Sonata in A, D. 959: 3. Scherzo—Franz Schubert
14. Final Battle: Don’t Get Around Much Anymore—Louis Armstrong
15. Death Scene: Better Version of Me—Fiona Apple
16. Funeral Scene: Tom’s Diner—Suzanne Vega and D.N.A.
17. End Credits: Mountain Song—Jane’s Addiction

I can't picture the sort of battle I'd wage during Louis Armstrong's "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", but that's shuffle for you.

What Kind of Seducer I am

Bitterspice turned me on to this:

Okay. I'll take libertine, but lazy am I? Lazy, you pustulent crackwhores?!? I just finished my second book, which makes two more books than the current President of the United States has ever seen. The correct answer is "psychopathic"! Okay. Okay. Calming down. Will. Not. Kill. Tonight. Put. Away. Chainsaw.

Calm. Calm. Serene. Serene.

I learned that from James Coburn, who used it to settle Animal down on The Muppet Show.

I'm Back, Briefly Anyway

I know I haven't blogged in roughly 7.3 million years. Let me make up for it. Trolling around with nothing better to do, I found David Cross's bit on serial liar James Frey. It's damn funny. Check it out.

The War In Bill-O's Head

The holiday season foists its share of unpleasant rituals upon us--the annual declaration of the hot new toy, the obligatory footage of consumer driven idiots forcing their way into Macy's, any TV special with the ending "on ice", and the knowledge that the cousins from Kansas that you hate will once again fail to take a plane that has the decency to crash. Still, there's one miserable ritual that top 'em all, one fatuous, tenth rate holiday habit that, like the evil ring of power, binds all the others into an unbeatable monstrosity of idiocy. That's Bill O'Reilly's annual War on Christmas.

People deal with this unloved and unwelcome intrusion in all sorts of ways. Mocking it can be fun, especially if you're the owner of large amounts of whiskey. (A proposed drinking game: every time Bill O'Reilly accuses the secular left of a plot, you take a drink. During the silly season, you may not make it through his whole show alive.) Others try ignoring it, but I'll try something I rarely attempt here: sincerity.

Until O'Reilly started raising a stink about which holiday greeting Target stores gave their customers, I really didn't think about the distinction between "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays", or the less popular "Season's Greetings". I assumed that those using "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hanukkah" were expressing good wishes intended to correspond to the specific, named holiday; whereas "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" were used to refer to the period containing the holidays Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. Each greeting had its uses, and no matter which greeting a shopkeeper or passer-by settled on when addressing me, I assumed it was just an expression of friendliness and general goodwill. I'd respond in kind, and go on my way.

What bugs me most about what O'Reilly has done in ginning up this stupid controversy is that he's taken what should be a congenial gesture and turned it into a club to beat his enemies with. O'Reilly's made it hard to hear "Merry Christmas" without thinking of him, and because of that, he's vexed the words. Now I'm not allowed to simply smile and say "Merry Christmas" back. Instead I have to wonder what the person's motive is in saying "Merry Christmas". Is the gesture still friendly, or is it some sort of test? If I respond with "Happy Holidays" instead, or simply smile and wave or say "Thank you", does that mean I don't back Christmas with enough zeal? What should happen to me then? Should I be made to stand in front of a church and subject myself to Stalinist self-criticism? Should I be set in stocks at a mall where people can throw ornaments and fruit cake at me? I never saw Christmas as a chance to force my fellow man to declare a side. In this I must admit Bill O'Reilly's imagination is larger than mine.

Only a man as thoroughly lacking in the Christmas spirit as O'Reilly is would take a holiday meant to celebrate universal brotherhood and pervert it into an occasion for smearing and bullying. You're a punk, Bill. You really are.

Merry Christmas.

I've Seen The Future, and It's Really Hackneyed

I stopped writing in the SF genre about eight years ago. It was an easy divorce, fueled by mutual indifference. I wasn't writing material that excited most SF editors (except for Dean Wesley Smith, editor of the sadly dead Pulphouse), and they weren't publishing material that interested me. So I moved on to literary fiction, and left them to figure out new ways in which people could download themselves into computers and threaten our civil liberties. Sometimes, though, like Lot's wife, I have to look back to see what I left behind. I didn't turn into a pillar of salt upon reading Orson Scott Card's new manuscript, Emprie, but I must say that I envy Mrs. Lot her good fortune.

The blurb for Empire promises a "chilling look at a near-future scenario of a new American Civil War." What Card provides is a tale of two soldiers, Cole and Rube (as their friends, Card says, like to call them) who, in the midst of the devastating war of words between right and left and the terrorist threat of Al Qaida, know that America needs to stop listening to professors and trust good solid military men who always act for the country's best interest and never surrender to anything, not even personal bias. In an introspective moment, Rube wonders whether he's as closed minded as the representatives of the "insane Left", his fellow Ivy League graduate students:

Am I like them, just a bigot learning only what fits my worldview? That's what he kept asking himself. But finally he reached the conclusion: No, he was not. He faced every piece of information as it came. He questioned his own assumptions whenever the information seemed to violate it. Above all, he changed his mind -- and often. Sometimes only by increments; sometimes completely. Heroes he had once admired -- Douglas MacArthur, for instance -- he now regarded with something akin to horror: How could a commander be so vain, with so little justification for it? Others that he had disdained -- that great clerk, Eisenhower, or that woeful incompetent, Burnside -- he had learned to appreciate for their considerable virtues.

Yes, because as we know, the most reliable judge of whether a person is closed-minded or not is the person himself. Just ask Dick Cheney. Under other circumstances, I'd assume that this passage was meant ironically. But after reading this passage, I came to doubt that its author could claim that irony was in his bag of tricks

"I want our babies to be as smart as you and as tough as me," he [Rube] said.

"I just want them to look like me," said Cessy. "Because having daughters that look like you would be cruel."

Their daughters did look like Cessy, and their sons had Reuben's lean, lithe body, and all in all, their family life was perfect. That's what he came home to every day from school; that was the environment in which he studied. That was his root in reality that kept calling him back from the brink of getting seduced into the fantasyland of academia.

Until Averell Torrent decided he wanted Reuben's soul.

Averell Torrent, by the way, is one of those nasty academics, decked out in this passage with horns and a pointy tail (or maybe a black cape and fangs. I can't decide which). Rube's impatience with academia, his tendency to believe that anyone who enjoys the life of the mind is either a fraud or a nut, mirrors Card's expressed feelings about the professors whose love of literary fiction denies Card's books respectability. Rube imagines he's avoiding the crimes of the extremists and elitists, but he commits their worst sin. He assumes that everyone who disagrees with him, or expresses an opinion he finds beyond the pale, is either sinister or stupid. The saner of us figure that some of our opponents are sinister or stupid, whereas others oppose us for perfectly legitimate reasons, from their point of view. But acknowledging that requires us to recognize nuance, and Orson Scott Card doesn't do nuance.

When Empire isn't occupied with putting black hats on Card's--er, excuse me--Rube's enemies and white hats on his friends, it's treating its readers as if they were fools. Take this passage, where the narrator demonstrates a command of the obvious so stunning it rivals Leslie Neilsen's response to the question: "A Hospital! What is it?"*:

They made their way back through the southwest gate, past the same MPs, past the emergency vehicles and military vehicles and the cordon of soldiers that were now completely surrounding the White House. Cole finally asked, "Even if you're arrested, you know they can't convict you of anything."

"I'm not afraid of being convicted," said Malich.

"What, then?"

"I'm afraid of Jack Ruby."

The guy who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald before he could be tried. The guy who made sure that the tough questions about the Kennedy assassination could never be answered.

Gee, uh, thanks Orson. I'd never heard of Jack Ruby before...um...duh... What's next? "Malich saw a picture of Jack Nicholson. Yes, that Jack Nicholson, star of A Few Good Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Five Easy Pieces."

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Card would stick this line in here. To him, everyone's an idiot. Without him, people wouldn't know how to vote, to read history, or to tie shoes. And failure to heed his warnings and condemn his enemies brings terrible consequences...tsk, tsk...terrible:

"You look pissed off," said Malich.

"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."

"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."

I wasn't so happy to see where it led either. This last quote was from Chapter Five, and the way I figured it, there was a whole lot more book to go after that. And no rube or intellectual, European or American, Muslim or Christian, Freemason or Elk, Mugwump or Whig, Republican or Democrat could claim happiness upon receipt of that news.

*Neilsen's answer: "It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now."

My Poor Bland Voice.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
The West
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Stalin

Evil has always been more comprehensible to me as an absence than as a presence, and Stalin to me has always stood as a prime example of a man who, in many important ways, just wasn't there. Certain wires that should have connected Stalin to feelings of shame, remorse, or pity, were simply never hooked up. His emotional vocabulary was limited to ambition and jealousy; and though he could simulate tender feelings in public, a talent he used to great effect during the funerals of Lenin and Kirov, he was in reality numb to them.

Robert Service's biography of Stalin does an excellent job of tracing the long career of this strange and frightening political figure and placing it within the larger context of Soviet revolutionary politics and Russian political history. Service begins with Stalin's difficult childhood. Like Hitler, a man whose ruthlessness in handling opposition Stalin admired, Stalin had a violent father and a doting, overprotective mother. Though Stalin later cultivated a reputation among his Bolshevik colleagues of being an unsophisticated Georgian hick, Stalin was in reality a voracious reader, and, by his early twenties, a published poet.

The real meat of the book comes later, though, after the October Revolution. When men like Stalin or Hitler or Mao rise to power, all of us wonder how they managed. Why didn't anyone see the disaster coming? Service's portrait of the culture of the early Bolshevik era gives us a great many clues.

Stalin's politics were extreme, and Stalin's methods as General Secretary and Commissar for Nationalities were often violent and cruel, with an emphasis on punishment; but Bolshevik political rhetoric in general tended to be violent and extreme, and other leading Bolsheviks of the era--Lenin, Trotsky, and Dzerzhinsky--were given to cruel action in prosecuting the revolution and the civil war that followed. In another era, or a different environment, Stalin's mask of sanity might have slipped more obviously, but context and fortune favored him.

Stalin was a gifted maniuplator. He knew the value in being underestimated. Stalin allowed his rivals in the Bolshevik party--Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky--to believe that they were smarter and more sophisticated than he. (Even Lenin, whose relationship with Stalin was volatile, for reasons having to do as much with Lenin's temper as Stalin's eccentricities, thought that Stalin was a hayseed who sucked on his pipe too loud.) He knew how to form alliances, how and when to betray them, and how to use the potential of a party split to shore up his position. He displayed an uncanny sense of what his nearest allies and enemies were thinking, while allowing even those closest too him no access to the contents of his head. Of the leading Bolsheviks, only Lenin came to recognize what Stalin was before Stalin took power, and by then, Lenin was too sick to stop him. Of those who figured Stalin out later, none survived.

But Stalin was more than simply a manipulator whose time was ripe. Service argues that he did hold a genuine, if frightening, ideology of power. It was based in Leninism, but Stalin altered Lenin's ideology to accomodate an older, Tsarist notion of political power. For examples, Stalin looked to Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, and, most importantly, Ivan the Terrible and Genghis Khan. In these leaders, Stalin saw evidence that it took great sacrifices, and often mass death, to advance Russian civilization. Combined with the Marxist certitude of the inevitablity of a communist golden age, this ideology provided Stalin with the intellectual justification for the violence of the first Five Year Plan and the Great Terror.

The private Stalin, in Service's work, is as strange as the public one. He's a remote figure to those who tried to get close to him. Those who knew him in his younger days considered him a difficult man to socialize with, because he insisted upon constant adulation. His sense of humor, to the extent that he had one at all, centered on the embarrassment and humiliation of his subordinates. He had virtually no relationship with any of his children, and his second wife, Nadya, (in an eerie similarity with Hitler's one true love, Geli Raubal) committed suicide. His most notable personal quality was a complete unwillingness to forgive any perceived insult. This led to grudges that would sometimes last for decades (and which usually ended in the death of the offender).

There are some faults in Service's biography. He does, on occasion, make assertions without showing the facts that might back him up. This was most glaring to me when he stated that there was no convincing evidence of a rift, or any political distance, between Stalin and Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov in 1934. Historians do fight over this, and since Kirov's murder, and Stalin's long suspected complicity in it, marked the starting point of the Great Terror, it seems like too important a relationship to glide over the way Service does. But Service nevertheless captures much about the character of Stalin and his times.

Service reports that among Stalin's papers, found at the end of his life, was a note. It contained what may have been the last words of Stalin's one-time rival, the urbane and sophisticated Bolshevik economist Nikolai Bukharin. They were: "Why is my death so necessary to you?" It's a question that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and indeed, the entire Russian population could have asked. In a time where the Kremlin is once again suspected of political murder, it's a good thing we have Service's book to guide us toward an answer to that question.

He's Back and Better Than...Give me a Minute

This decade has been charm-free so far. One of its few amenities had been the absence of Newt Gingrich from public view. America had remanded him to its attic, where he sat, doing needlepoint with crazy Auntie Perot and shouting "It's extraordinary!" over and over again. Sadly, Gingrich has returned to demonstrate once again that Fitzgerald was wrong about the dearth of second acts in American life. The first act was the tragedy; if Marx was right the second will be farce. But we won't be laughing because we'll all be trapped inside the joke.

Newt has been speaking up a storm in recent days. He won't admit yet that it's a prelude to a Presidential run, but because the speculation attracts cameras to him so that the evil spirits who live in his hair can have their messages heard, he won't deny it either. I provide two samples, one courtesy of Salon's War Room, the other courtesy of my channel flipping on a snow day:

Sample A:

The former House speaker and potential presidential candidate said Monday that the United States may have to revisit the idea of freedom of speech in the context of the war on terrorism. Speaking in New Hampshire, Gingrich said that we may need to apply a "different set of rules" before "we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade."

Sample B:

Extolling the virtues of America as a place where anyone can make it, Newt Gingrich used the example of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He claimed that it was only because of the unique opportunities America provides that a young child, born in Austria, could rise to become both a millionaire and a political leader.

Oh. For. Fuck's. Sake.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the recent turn in American discourse is that neither of these pronouncements, which Gingrich intones in a manner meant to imply that he's passing along insights he received from a whirlwind or the Oracle of Delphi, is instantly mocked back to the stone age. The English lexicon is thick with words to describe Gingrich and men of his ilk--words that too often go unemployed: nitwit, halfwit, dolt, ninny, nincompoop, dingbat, twit, schmuck, chowderhead, meatball, boob. That we don't use these words more often when discussing Newt--e.g. "Famous dingbat and world renowned schlemiel Newt Gingrich said today..."--is a devastating reflection on our political culture.

Still, having dispensed with my dismissal of Gingrich's latest drool, I'll now take him on point by lamebrained point, just for the exercise.

Okay. I'd hate to lose a city as much as Gingrich, I suppose, especially since I live in one. But before we start slapping that Homeland Security duct tape and plastic sheeting over people's mouths, let's look back at previous American cities that have gone under. Let's see now. We lost Roanoke Island because, well, we don't know exactly but most historians figure the Native Americans rubbed the colonists out. We lost Washington D.C. in the War of 1812 because some goobers in congress thought it was a great idea to pick a fight with the British. We lost Atlanta because General Sherman decided to burn it down (good for him). We lost Chicago because of Mrs. O'Leary's cow. We lost San Francisco in an earthquake. We lost a good deal of Florida in one hurricane and all of New Orleans in another. Suspending freedom of speech would have helped us in none of those cases, and it won't stop terrorists from taking out a city if they should ever develop the means to do so. Terrorists grew up in and live in countries that curtail all kinds of freedoms, and they still manage to strap bombs to themselves and blow things up. They're used to oppressive environments. They know how to operate when under surveillance, and because the best of them are completely contemptuous of their own deaths, if they want to wreak havoc, havoc will be wreaked. Giving up our liberties doesn't to a damn thing to terrorists; it just hurts us. Only a complete idiot would fail to recognize that.

As for Schwarzenegger, well, jeez. Only in America does an Austrian have a chance to get rich and rise to power? Really? You know, I remember a certain Austrian. He came out of Linz as I recall. He started out as a poor postcard painter, joined the German army, won a medal, wrote a bestselling book that made millions for him, and rose to the highest office in the land. His name was...wait. Don't tell me. Funny moustache, quasi-military uniform... I think he shouted a lot.

I'm not an expert on the number of wealthy people in Austria or the chances for upward mobility there or in neighboring countries of the EU, but I imagine that at birth an Austrian's prospects are pretty good. We don't have waves of Austrian immigrants sneaking into the U.S. in cargo containers or parachuting out of planes in order to work crappy jobs to send money home. Some do come out to Hollywood to pursue movie roles, but that's hardly evidence that Austria is a barren, bleak, economic and cultural wasteland.

That some people take Newt Gingrich seriously as a politician or as a thinker is evidence of how far, and how fast, our civilization has fallen. I hope that someday, when reason is restored to this land and the proper names are restored to their rightful owners, that Newt Gingrich will return to the office that best suits his capabilities: village idiot.

Deal Him In

It's possible to call Casino Royale a success because it does one thing very well: it introduces Daniel Craig as 007. While press notices and publicity people led me to believe that Craig would be grim to the point of moribund, Craig showed much greater range than that. He could be charming, flirty, punny, arrogant, sweaty, vulnerable, angry, and determined--sometimes all at once. He did a lot to remind me of Connery, but there were welcome doses of Moore and Brosnan in as well. Craig has established himself in the role, and I look forward to seeing him take his next turn.

The movie itself is more problematic, suffering some of the same difficulties that plagued The Living Daylights. It's overlong (144 minutes, longer than any Bond film I remember), and its plot is byzantine to the point of being nearly incomprehensible. When "M" has to put in an appearance after 137 minutes in order to provide additonal narrative summary, you know the plot's too complicated. The movie also suffers from the worst case of lack-of-villains syndrome in any Bond I've seen. The most prominent of the villians, LeChiffre, weeps blood tears (thus following the formula of the major villiains' having some sort of physical defect), but he never produces much in the way of menace. He seems more desperate and pathetic than dangerous, and I never believed he'd present 007 with a challenge. The way that he and Bond interact, at a high stakes poker game, sparks little banter. Compared to the baccarat games in Goldeneye and Thunderball, the golf game in Goldfinger, or the backgammon game in Octopussy, Casino Royale's poker sequence is staid, taciturn, and dull. Bond and LeChiffre spend most of their time glaring at each other icily while turning over improbably high poker hands. (What is it about poker movies that they can never let someone win the climactic poker battle with a pair of aces, a straight, two-pair, or three-of-a-kind? They always have to have the villain with four-of-a-kind, beaten out by the hero's royal flush.) While LeChiffre fails to generate much terror, Bond's other adversaries are nameless, faceless, and interchangeable. For terrorists, they're not especially terrifying.

Eva Green's turn as Vesper Lynde, though, was a good one, and her chemistry with Craig helps keep the pace from flagging. It's a pity Bond had to fall in love with her--the kiss of death--because I would have liked to see her again. Oh, well. I'll have to take what I get here, and what I get is the real reason for watching this movie.

The action set pieces are almost all wonderful--especially an early foot chase through a construction site in Madagascar (which involves stunts I've never seen, and I thought I knew all the tricks.) I only quibble with the opening sequence, which struck me as the most hackneyed and predictable part of the film. I won't say much about it, except that the sequence could have appeared in just about any generic spy movie. They'd have been better off starting with the Madagascar chase, but I guess the filmmakers wanted to establish a tone. They didn't need to, but I guess they wanted to.

Still, quibbles and beefs aside, I thought Casino Royale was an enjoyable 007 romp. I'd rank it in the middle of the debut pack. It's better than The Living Daylights, about even with Live and Let Die, and a rung below Dr. No, Goldeneye, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I hope that next time Craig gets a stronger script, so that he has a story to match the quality of his work.

(Oh, by the way, I blogged a few days ago about the "Does it look like I give a damn" line in this film. As it turns out, Craig's Bond is just as particular about his martini as any other Bond. He delivered this line just after he'd blown a large sum of money at the gaming tables, and was feeling understandably frustrated.)

For England, James

Goldeneye came at a unique moment in the history of the Bond franchise. Six years had gone by since Timothy Dalton's last film, Licence to Kill, and the intervening time had been taken up with rights disputes and studio troubles. Timothy Dalton's contract expired. He decided against extending it, and once again the part was open. In the wider world, geopolitics had changed. The Soviet Union was no more, and the question on everyone's lips was, "What would James Bond do in the new world order?" (Never mind that the Soviet Union had only been the antagonist in a few of the James Bond pictures.) And also, after five of John Glen's grittier films, there was more of an appetite for fast cars, luxurious settings, and gadgets.

Enter Pierce Brosnan.

Brosnan's 007 differed from Dalton's in that Brosnan's Bond was more obviously a sensualist. When Xenia Onatopp (quite the sensualist herself, in a psychopathic sort of way) says "Enjoy it while it lasts." Bond replies, "The very words I live by." Brosnan's Bond doesn't expect to have a long life, so he aims to have a fun one. He in is his job mostly for the thrill of it, and though he's got good instincts and can think on his feet, planning isn't always his strong suit (though he is, like all Bonds, a gifted detective). It's no wonder that when Brosnan started in the role, both Qs took to saying "Grow up, 007."

Brosnan also played Bond with a self-awareness that his fellow actors didn't foreground. Sean Connery Bond wore a nearly impenetrable mask. During Roger Moore's tenure, we saw flashes of his grief for the dead Tracy Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only, but he quickly hid those away without inviting further discussion. Dalton exposed a little more, but it was left to Brosnan to respond to the question "How can you be so cold?" with "It's what keeps me alive." It's hard to imagine any other Bond responding that way. The others would have either ignored the question or deflected it.

The film boasts one of the strongest supporting casts assembled for a Bond film. Famke Janssen plays Xenia Onatopp as a kind of dark shadow of James Bond. She also loves fast cars, baccarat, and hot, steamy lovemaking. Of course, she also likes to kill her lovers during the act. Her character, and her confrontations with 007, fulfill a promise that Grace Jones failed to deliver on with her character in A View to A Kill. This is also Dame Judi Dench's first time out as "M", and though her character's personality is very different from that of Bernard Lee's "M", it's no less effective. Sean Bean--who was, like fellow villains Julian Glover and Michael Billington, nearly Bond himself--turns in a great performance as the traitorous 006, Alec Trevelyan. Bean, like Sam Neill, has a gift for appearing feral and cultured at the same time, and it serves him well here. Izabella Scorupco does well as Bond's love interest and willing assistant, while the always excellent Robbie Coltrane and Alan Cumming do their always excellent jobs. How can you lose when you have lines like "Walther PPK. Only three men I know have used this kind of gun. I believe I've killed two of them"?

The cast isn't wasted in a film that has just about everything a human being could ask for in a Bond picture--secret lairs, Tina Turner's performing the theme song, conspicuous consumption, Russian mobsters, missile trains, a scene where Bond chases the bad guys through the St. Petersburg traffic in a Russian tank, a nightime confrontation in a graveyard for Communist-era statuary, and a battle on a giant radio antenna that rises out of a lake. The cinematography is gorgeous, reminding me of both Guy Hamilton's and Lewis Gilbert's Bond adventures. The look of the film is lush, sensuous, as if to match Brosnan's take on the character.

It also should be noted, with all the talk of a Casino Royale relaunch of the franchise, that Goldeneye was also a relaunch. The opening sequence of the film is set nine years before the rest of the action, indicating that we're getting an early look at Bond's career in the service (and also, perhaps uncomfortably for Timothy Dalton, wiping out his tenure). We have a new "M", a new Moneypenny, and a new Bill Tanner (of course, we only saw the old one once, subbing for "M" in For Your Eyes Only). Only Q remains. (How I wish he were still here). Unlike previous transitions, there was no attempt to place Brosnan's character within the timeline of the earlier films. This was necessary. Lazenby, Connery, and Moore were close enough in age to maintain a rough timeline, but starting with Dalton it became a pointless exercise to try.

Doubters of Bond's relevance to the post-cold war world notwithstanding, Goldeneye pulled in $350 million in box office in 1995, making it the most successful Bond film since Moonraker and, before inflation adjustment, very likely the series' biggest moneymaker to that time. (Brosnan's other films matched the figure, and Die Another Day bested it in 2002 by $100 million).

Well, it's been quite a tour, over 40 years of Bond history. I guess if there's an overriding theme here, it is just how hard it is to manage these transitions from one 007 to another. The audience's expectations of the character and the franchise are a harsh mistress. (If it's any comfort to Daniel Craig, Ian Fleming probably would have started seanconneryisnotbond.com had there been an internet in 1961. It was only after Fleming saw Connery playing the role that he changed his mind.) Everyone has a favorite Bond, and in a sense there's no way for a new actor to measure up. Success comes when the actor makes the character his, letting the audience know that the tux isn't rented, it's owned, and tailor made.

Do Critics Ever Look Things Up Before They Speak?

From Mark Rahner's review of Casino Royale:

Remember that the "Bourne" flicks almost finished the hit job that Austin Powers had started on the perfect Cold War spy who made no sense in the 21st century.

Was James Bond really almost finished? The Bourne Identity opened a few months before the last Bond picture, Die Another Day. Did audiences shun Brosnan's finale in favor of a second look at Matt Damon?

Here's the total worldwide box office from Die Another Day: $431,971,116 (from imdb)

That's just the box office as of June, 2003. It doesn't include revenue since then from DVD sales, cable re-runs, or ancillary merchandising (particularly the EA videogames, which have all been hot sellers). Yeah, with only half a billion bucks (or more), how could EON productions possibly go on?

By the way, The Bourne Identity's worldwide take? $190,268,960. That's not bad, but it's less than half of what the Bond film drew.

I don't mean to be pedantic here, but isn't the measure of success for a popular entertainment, well, popularity? Mr. Rahner seems to be saying that because he prefers X to Y, that somehow X has completely supplanted Y in popular culture. Nice try, but no. I may dislike some things that are popular--Jessica Simpson, Tom Clancy, Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer--but it's bootless to deny that other people like them, or to claim that because something I like in the same genre manages to become popular that these agents of Satan have been obliterated. Mr. Rahner probably would have been better off saying "The Bourne Identity was fresher/more modern/more relevant than Die Another Day, and demonstrated that the Bond series was stuck in an, admittedly profitable, rut."

But he said what he said, and he was wrong. So there.

Stuff My Orders. I Only Kill Professionals

The transition from Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton is the first 007 transition I can remember. Most of the people I knew had been looking forward to Pierce Brosnan in the role (rumors of Sam Neill in the part also made me smile), so when Timothy Dalton was introduced it was a little bit more than a little bit of a shock. As someone who had grown up with Roger Moore in the part, and who hadn't even heard of Sean Connery until 1983's Never Say Never Again, the relaunch of 007 with a more saturnine leading man left me cold back in 1987. Because I didn't enjoy it the first time around, Dalton's debut, The Living Daylights, is a film I have watched from beginning to end at most twice in these last nineteen years, so my memories of its plot, and Mr. Dalton's performance had faded badly before tonight.

This last viewing has made me more sympathetic toward Timothy Dalton's performance than I've been in the past. While he did lack Roger Moore's comic timing, which made his scenes with Jeroen Krabbe, who was pressing to play up the humor in his role, seem strained and forced, I finally think I understand where he was going with his version of 007. Dalton's Bond is a man of conscience and honor in a world with precious little of either. Though he can be deceptive when he needs to be, he hates cynicism, and he wants to believe at all times that he's on the side of the angels. Dalton's Bond is a nuanced creature, perhaps too nuanced for what is essentially a film romance. But Dalton allowed his Bond more humor than I remembered, and though the Bond-as-sensualist aspect was regrettably pushed into the background, it didn't vanish entirely. Indeed, though many critics take Dalton's Bond as a clean break from Moore's, in one aspect at least it wasn't. Roger Moore has said in interviews that his key to Bond was a passage early in Goldfinger where Bond, on his way back from an assassination mission, reveals that he dislikes the violent parts of his job, and that his sensualism is a means of forgetting the ugliness in his profession. Dalton's Bond seems to be equally unhappy with the more brutal aspects of his job. For evidence I submit these two quotes, one from a Moore picture, The Man With the Golden Gun, the other from The Living Daylights:

MOORE'S BOND: There's a useful four-letter word, and you're full of it. When I kill it's on the specific orders of my government, and those I kill are themselves killers.

DALTON'S BOND: Stuff my orders. I only kill professionals. That girl didn't know one end of that rifle from the other. Tell 'M' anything you like. If he fires me, I'll thank him for it.

Dalton also uses the "useful four-letter word" line later in the picture. Despite differences in acting style and temperment, there is a connection between Dalton's portrayal and Moore's. Both need to justify the murders they commit on the basis of an ethical code. It's a code that went unmentioned in Connery's films or Lazenby's (or Brosnan's for that matter), so it seems to have mattered to Dalton and Moore in particular. Just thought I'd mention it. Onward.

Despite my increased sympathy for Dalton's portrayal, The Living Daylights still suffered from the same plot problems I remembered. The central one is that there are too many villains, and their goals are neither clear nor, it seems, particularly threatening. The plot bears some similarities to Octopussy, which also had a fair number of villains and involved secret Russian doings against the west. But Octopussy's advantage was that the major villain's plot, selling off Russian art treasures to buy the means to smuggle an atomic bomb onto a U.S. Air Force base to pave the way for a Russian invasion of Europe, was pretty damned threatening. In The Living Daylights, the plot is to...um...trick M.I.6 into killing the head of the KGB so that a Russian general will be free to sell Afghan opium, which will allow him to buy superweapons from a slightly unhinged Oliver North-y American arms dealer in order to...um...keep the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (yeah, like they were so happy there). Assuming you can follow this plot, and it took me three viewings of the film to get a firm grip on it, it's way too byzantine given its overall importance. By the time you understand it, you're not sure you care.

Another beef: Jeroen Krabbe's Koskov was supposed to be a brilliant manipulator, but I wondered while I watched why anyone in British intelligence believed his story about his supposedly derranged boss. His entire performance seemed like too obvious a put-on to me. (Yeah, intelligence services believing known frauds with lurid but politically convenient stories to tell; that's so unlike them.) It was clear that Bond saw through the act, but why he was the only one stumped me. Maybe if Krabbe had been more subtle, I'd have been more impressed with Bond's powers of perception and less inclined to think that "M" was a dink.

I did love the Aston-Martin they used, and the big blonde guy who went around killing people was meanacing enough, in a Red Grant/Erich Kreigler sort of way. The Afghanistan story was way too long, but the Vienna, Bratislava, and Tangiers sequences were well-paced and fun. Entertainment Weekly put Miryam D'Abo's Kara on their worst Bond girls list, but while I didn't think she was up with the greats, I thought she was fine as a naive civilian who was clearly meant to be out of her depth. It's a shame there weren't more Bond girls to entertain Dalton's 007, but, as Roger Ebert put it, audiences of the 1980s appeared to like action more than they liked sex. (Which makes 1980s nostalgia even more of a mystery to me.) But to the extent that The Living Daylights held together, Dalton earns credit as the glue. Even though James Bond plots are pretty standard issue affairs, Dalton's performance provided at least the illusion that Bond's decisions moved the story. I couldn't always follow the villains, but Dalton was always able to clue me in on why Bond made the moves he made. I'm grateful that he let me see the wheels turn in his head.

But the wheel turned onward, past Timothy Dalton. After a six-year hiatus, a rights dispute, and a lot of legal wrangling, James Bond returned again, this time with Pierce Brosnan as 007 (in a restoration, of sorts). Tomorrow I will be Onatopp of things with a review of 1995's Goldeneye.

Kinsley 2 for 2

Boy, MK is on fire this week. Check this column about James Baker out:

If we had wanted our country to be run by James Baker, we had our chance. He was interested in running for president in 1996 but discovered that his interest in a James Baker presidency was not widely shared. Although he has held a variety of government posts, from undersecretary of commerce under Gerald Ford to secretary of state under Bush the Elder, and has all the trappings of enormous consequence and wisdom, such as a Presidential Medal of Freedom and his own James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Baker is essentially a political operative. His place in history is Florida 2000, where he secured the presidency for George W. Bush. Reporters were awed by his brilliance and ruthlessness. History may be less admiring of his willingness to make inconsistent arguments and to lie with a straight face.

Being a Washington Wise Man does not require much wisdom. Baker has a "conviction," said a Baker colleague quoted in The Post on Sunday, "that Iraq is the central foreign policy issue confronting the United States." Wow. Now there's an insight. Actually, it is a nice small insight into the Baker mentality that he apparently can imagine a war that is killing large numbers of young Americans every month but that is not our central foreign policy issue. Baker also believes that "the only way to address that issue successfully is to first build a bipartisan consensus." Now, that is a conviction you can sink your teeth into. People like Baker always favor a bipartisan consensus.

They don't really believe in politics, which is to say they don't really believe in democracy.

Work it, Michael! Do that thing!

Funny How the Least Little Thing Amuses Him

After Sean Connery turned down a dump truck full of money to return after Diamonds Are Forever, the search for a new Bond began. After their experience with a younger, less mature actor in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, producers decided on the much more experienced, and much older Roger Moore for 1973s Live and Let Die.

Moore's take on the role was a considerable departure from both Connery's and Lazenby's. Connery, in his early films, and Lazenby in his single outing, were brash, physical types. Moore's Bond, as befitting an older, more seasoned secret agent, tended toward caution, valuing cleverness and resourcefulness over brute strength. Though Moore's Bond fights when he has to, he prefers to cheat, and he never fights fair. The climactic fight between Bond and Tee-Hee, a killer with a mechanical arm, is a case in point. Bond and Tee-Hee battle in this train compartment, and while Bond uses improvisational weapons to good effect early, Tee-Hee's superior strength gradually gets the better of 007. When Tee-Hee has Bond pressed against the window, his mechanical claw edging close to Bond's neck, Bond notices that the wires that control the claw are exposed. He jerks to one side, grabs a pair of nail clippers, and snips the wires. He clamps Tee-Hee's claw to the metal lintel and slips free. Bond administers the coup de grace by opening the window and flipping Tee-Hee out of the train (the mechanical arm stays behind). Where Lazenby often won because he was stronger, Moore usually won because he was smarter.

The themes of Live and Let Die are tricky ones to discuss. Other commentators have wrestled with the racist overtones of both the film and its source material, particularly with respect to Bond's "rescuing" Jane Seymour's Solitaire from losing her virginity to Yaphet Kotto's Kananga. I don't have much to add to that commentary, except to note an irony: Bond's love scenes with Rosie Carver, a black secret agent, were excised when the film was shown in South Africa, owing to apartheid laws concerning depictions of interracial liaisons on stage. These scenes do vex the whole question of the film's view of miscegenation, to the extent that it becomes a white male privilege anyway. I wonder how things would have differed if screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz's suggestion of Diana Ross as Solitaire had gone anywhere with producers.

The throughline of the story is also an unusual one for Bond movies. Instead of battling a villain who has some kind of nasty technological toy, Bond's mission amounts to exposing Dr. Kananga as a heroin smuggler and drug dealer. The drug trade was already a popular subject in movies like The French Connection and Coffy, and it was certainly a temptation for the Bond people to latch onto two popular trends--drug-traffiking films and blaxploitation cinema. If following those trends makes for an interesting change from previous Bond storylines, it also dates the film far more than other Bond films from the period. The clothes, the argot, and the subject matter all scream early 1970s, which was true of neither Diamonds are Forever nor The Man With the Golden Gun (films that, though they have their own problems, seem less wedded to their era).

With all this, I make it sound as though I have nothing but complaints, and there are many things to like about Live and Let Die. The stunt work is very good, the boat chase is a knockout, McCartney's theme song is among the most memorable in the series, the atmosphere (especially in the voodoo camp and the alligator farm) is suspenseful, and the actors all do their jobs well. Special kudos to Moore though. No one thought, after Connery's final departure, that James Bond could survive into the 1970s. Roger Moore's work in Live and Let Die and his six subsequent films not only rescued the Bond franchise from oblivion but also took it to new levels of success against increasingly stiff competition from blockbusters like Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Moore did something very hard to do: he took a well established character and made it truly his own.

At the age of 57, Roger Moore retired from the Bond role, handing it over to 42-year-old Timothy Dalton. His film, 1987's The Living Daylights, next time.

It's Symbolic of Their Struggle Against Reality

I don't usually link to Time.com columns, but today I do, because Kinsley's on the late swing against the war of neocons Adelman and Perle is a good one. A sample:

[Y]ou don't get to assume the success of your intentions then plead a shrugging "Who knew?" when they don't pan out. I also am in favor of toppling dictators, establishing democracy and watching it spread painlessly throughout every region where there is no experience of it. Not only that: I am in favor of turning sand into ice cream and guaranteeing a cone to every child in the Middle East. But you can't turn sand into ice cream. That is not a defect in the execution of the idea. It is a defect in the idea itself. Although Perle and Adelman and others may think they are dissing the Bush Administration when they talk about its incompetence in failing to turn sand into ice cream, they are also displaying the Bush Administration's key vice, which is assuming that things are how you wish them to be and not how they are.

To think, all this time the Iraq War was really just the struggle of Stan to have babies (with a more slaughterous punchline).