Quantum of Solace (2008)

 "Bond, if you could avoid killing every possible lead, it would be appreciated."

Finally I've caught up in my Bond marathon. I saw this film at the cinema in 2008, but I haven't seen anything since. All things Bond from this point forward are new territory for me. 

As for this one, though... it surprised me. Oh, I'm not saying it's one of the better Bond films because it certainly isn't. It deserves praise for it's non-excessive run time, but it has flaws. The many action set pieces are entertaining but don't come remotely close to equalling those of Casino Royale. Olga Kurylenko impresses as Camille, a character with depth who earns Bond's respect, while Gemma Arterton is also good as Strawberry Fields(!) who, as tradition dictates, falls for Bond, but ends up dying with a touch of the grand guignol. And yet...

The villain, the plot, the scheme- to engineer a coup in Bolivia and profit from control of the nation's water- lacks a certain excitement. Bond is cut loose from MI6 and on the run, albeit with M's role being ambiguous.. but how many times have we seen this? Compared to its predecessor, this film ends up seeming lacklustre by comparison.

And yet...none of that makes it a bad film, just a flawed one. And, on this second viewing,hot on the heels of seeing Casino Royale, I can see what they may have been trying to do. Yes, Daniel Craig's Bond lacks the flippant charm of his predecessors, but the character has depth. The fim sees him working through his feelings about Vesper, finally forgiving her (and himself), as urged by Matheson's dying words, and we end with him finally getting revenge.

And, across both films together, a shadowy organisation is set up- no spoilers, please, but perhaps SPECTRE?

All of this may well be going somewhere. If so, this film may be more quietly impressive than it appears on first glance.

Cosmopolis (2012)

"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted."

I haven't read the original Don DeLillo novel, or indeed anything by him: bad English graduate! But as a script it's superb, fizzling with ideas of Great American Novel standard. And on top of this we get the inspired, stylised directing style of the truly great David Cronenberg. Not all his fans will agree- this is significantly artier date than his better-known work- but it's among his best.

The ideas are superb. Eric Packer is a twenty-eight year old finance billionaire, and he's profoundly alienated from his world. But this alienation isn't existential angst, not even when he murders his own security guard on a whim in a presumed reference to The Outsider. No, this is something much more modern, alienation caused by the deeply abstract, chaotic randomness of our financial system. None of us understand it, but all of us gamble on it in some way and it has the power to wreck our society with crashes and economic storms. And none of it is real, not any more. Not even money is real: most money in the world is just IOU's written by banks, and if it was all called in then the system would collapse. It's absurd, but not in an old-fashioned existentialist sense. It's post-modern capitalism, heady and dangerous, and Eric employs a "head of theory" to pontificate about it. This is a world where financial markets can be thrust into uncertainty by the interpretation of a pause in the speech of the Chinese finance minister.

Eric, over the course of a day, seems to engineer his own self-destruction- casually ending his marriage by blatant infidelity, gambling his fortune on a Quixotic gesture against the yuan and, finally, seeking death. Only there can be find reality.

The visuals of the film complement the themes superbly: most of it is set in cars, and Cronenberg lingers over their erotic visual power in ways that remind me of Crash. The effect is claustrophobic: Eric is limited in where he can go by the chaos (that theme again) of the New York traffic as the president visits, and we see this with the narrow spaces in which he spends the film.

I'm not a fan of Robert Pattinson but he's superb here. And Paul Giamatti is outstanding. But isn't he always?

This is a brilliant film, one packed with far more meaning than I've been able to tease out, and a thing of true beauty. It is also, incidentally, notable for its positive portrayal of Muslims. A superb film.