Die Another Day (2002)

 "What are you? CIA?

"NSA..."

I was spoilt for choice for quotes. This may not be the best Bond film ever, but it's one of the very best for double entendres.

Yes, I know, it's reputation isn't great. And yes, it's flawed. I sisliked it back in 2002. And yet, on today's second viewing... is it really that bad?

Yes, we have the invisible car and really quite out there sci-fi elements. But I wasn't as bothered about that this time for some reason. And yes, the plot doesn't quite make sense. And it's a bit harsh for Bond to be in the doghouse for supposedly cracking under torture!!!

But I was entertained. Even the universally panned theme song... well, the production is truly horrible, and it's a waste of Madonna to use her in a song like this, but if you look past the horrible autotune and production issues, the song itself is fundamentally good.

Yet we have a good villain, however preposterous his backstory. Halle Berry is... well, adequate as a Bond girl, and gets a nice little scene involving a laser beam that's a nice little homage to Goldfinger. There are some nice locations in Cuba, although by the time we get to Iceland there's far too much CGI. That becomes a problem during the car chase action sequences, too.

And it's all very, very early 2000s, all waterboarding torture and conflict diamonds and smoking at work.

But fundamentally, this film is far from terrible. Perhaps the bad reception was because of everyone now having seen Austin Powers, meaning the format needed to become more serious to survive, and this film is gloriously silly?

The World Is Not Enough (1999)

 "There's no point in living of you can't feel alive."

This is the finest Brosnan Bond film so far. I was unimpressed with GoldenEye; Tomorrow Never Dies was better; this is a superb film that channels the best of Bond.

It's all very late '90s, of course. Q is about to retire, and his replacement, the fittingly amusing R, played by a sprighly John Cleese, a mrere sixty years old, describes the latest Bond supercar as having "six cupholders". Amongst the globetrotting to Bilbao, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Istanbul is a superb set piece boat chase through London, including the Millennium Dome. And, of course, Miss Moneyponey says of a cigar that "I know exactly where to put that."

There's only one decade where that line makes sense.Still, let us note tht Bill Clinton was an abusive wanker, and Kenneth Starr was the same by proxy. May they both suffer lifelong impotence.

There's an innocence to this world pf post Cold War, End of History hubris, where there are no significant hostile countries and where threats of tyranny or nuclear armageddon, that feels charmingly dated. Yet the whole dynamic of Bomd and Elektra offers a surprisingly thoughtful take on sex and to wthe extent it can involve deceiving and using people.  

All this, and we have some splendid set pieces, a supern Bond villain in Robert Carlyle, a nice bit of misdirection where we think Elektra is the Bond girl but she turns out to be the big baddie, and one of the best theme tunes ever. This is, quetly, one of the very best Bonds.

Hammer House of Horror: The Carpathian Eagle

 “Are you going to be strict with me?”

This is an odd episode, not least because it's based on a purported Polish legend of a wronged countess who led men to her bed and had their hearts plucked out with an eagle. It feels more like a police procedural than a horror story... until the very kinky final scene.

Indeed, it's only at the end, with the detective being killed and the killer surviving to copy yet another female serial killer, that it becomes clear what a clever script this is. At first the police spculate the killer may be homosexual, and there's a sympathetic and very out LGBT character, certainly not typical in 1980. Yet the cleverness here is in reversing the gender roles of the sexualised violence- these creepy men perving on much younger and poorer women turn out, here at least, to be the victims.

Sian Phillips has a memorable role, if a surprisingly small one, and there's a small part for a very young Pierce Brosnan. But the star here is the script, a triumph and the finest so far.

Mars Attacks! (1996)

"For dark is the suede that mows like a harvest..."

I saw this once in the ‘90s- at a festival, I think, perhaps Phoenix ‘96. But I was very drunk, and let us not discuss any herbal substances which may or may not have been imbibed. Let us also, in the same token, disregard the bottle of Aragonian wine (yes, the bottle states it’s from “Aragon”, a name from the annals of history) that I have just imbibed at the time of composing this paragraph. Let’s just say that, yes, I can see this film is no classic, but it’s fun.

Tim Burton is always brilliant at making his films feel likes stylised worlds of their own, but he generally has his own gothic style. This film, like its superb predecessor  Ed Wood, gives us a style very different from Burton’s norm- in this case that of the ‘50s flying saucer movie. Hence the many CGI saucers look exactly as we might expect from countless movies. Hence the ever-present sound of the theremin. And the Martians, in old fashioned stop motion, look awesome.

Oh, and the film is bloody hilarious. No, it’s not the funniest film ever, but it’s a fun little spoof and extraordinarily well cast- Jack Nicholson is superb, as ever, as the cynical President. Pierce Brosnan is hilarious as a character taking the piss out of all those pipe smoking, exposition-spouting professors. Also excellent are Sarah Jessica Parker and the wonderful Pam Grier, with a small role for a Michael J. Fox presumably too far into his Parkinson’s disease for a larger role.

It’s also very, very ‘90s- Richie dresses just like I used to back then, and the less Grungy fashions are... yes, well. But the film is enormous fun, with its capricious Martians putting people’s heads on dogs’ bodies and zapping US Senators. And can we please have a Martian do you Trump what is done to the President here?

Mamma Mia! (2008)

“Nurse! Donkey testicles, quickly!"

Ok, I suppose after the last few years I can't quite say I don't like musicals. No, I'll never be a huge fan of show tunes, but the genre is much broader than that. But anyone who knows me will know that, open-minded to all sorts of delightfully weird music that I am, I have pretty much zero tolerance for chart pop, which is cynical, depressing, exploitative, unlistenable and vile. So why do I like Abba?

Well, Abba are the poster girls and boys of a more innocent time, when "pop" encompassed a broader range than today's horrible world of girl bands and boy bands, wankers like Cowell and his fellow amoral svengalis, and horribly compressed, autotuned, incredibly narrow "music" that no longer appeals to ordinary people. But Abba? They wrote their on songs, played their own instruments, hurt no one. It was a very different world.

Hence the joyous stage show, and this rather fun film with its inexplicable number of stars. I mean, Meryl Streep? She's incredibly classy, garlanded with Oscars, appears only in the most serious films, is pretty much America's answer to Dame Maggie Smith... yet she deigns to appear in a bit of fun like this. And no, she most certainly cannot sing. But, frankly, who cares? She's giving it a go, as is Pierce Brosnan, whose singing looks good only next to hers.

The plot, bizarrely, with its farcical moments and rigid structure, only needs a bit of crossdressing to look suspiciously like a Shakespeare comedy. But this kind of structure works, and the plot is very cleverly woven around the songs and, while there is conflict and drama, things always remain suitably light and fluffy. A delight.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

"You always were a cunning linguist, James."

I know, it's been a while since GoldenEye. But it took a while before I could face another Bond after that, and it was with all due trepidation that I sat down to watch this. It's a relief to say, then, that Brosnan is better, if still hardly my favourite Bond, and that this is a good if not great Bond film- it says a little in the middle, perhaps, and the whole thing is an extremely formulaic Bond-by-numbers but done well enough, and I think that's what's required at this stage. This is only the second film after a large gap, and there's a need to re-establish all the many tropes.

So we get a notable return to tradition after GoldenEye's sometime iconoclasm, with a notably less spiky relationship between Bond and Judy Dench's M. But we get a decent pre-titles- the Russians are goodies; it must be the '90s- and a mildly disappointing theme tune from Sheryl Crow, and off we go.

This film's Bond villain is the media mogul Eliot Carver, played with splendidly scenery-chewing relish by Jonathan Pryce as he arranges conflict between the UK and China purely to make money. He gets lots of zeitgeisty speeches about the power of the media that date the film enormously; it won't be long until the Internet starts to topple the likes of him off their perches. And I notice that Bond has his first mobile phone, although from the dependably sarky and now octogenarian Q, who has been there since From Russia with Love.

We get a splendid cast as usual, even with the likes of Jason Watkins, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Gerard Butler and Hugh Bonneville with small parts as naval officers. This is hardly one of the greats, but Bond is back on track.

GoldenEye (1995)

"I think you're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War."

I saw and enjoyed this film at the pictures back when I was an 18 year old student at Liverpool University, briefly: I ended up dropping out and getting my degree later. I must admit, though, that disappointed as I am on a second viewing I can't entirely blame this film.

So why did GoldenEye disappoint this time round? Well, to a large degree it's Pierce Brosnan. He really is shockingly rubbish, just phoning in his performance and displaying no charisma whatsoever, something which is not the case with his non-James Bond career.

But it's more than that: it's the script. It feels as though, after a six year gap, they've forgotten how to do James Bond. Only Desmond Llewelyn connects this to any previous film, and really does suddenly look so shockingly old. And the attempts to make ironic references to Bond's inevitable sexism- his combative relationship with the new female M and the new Moneypenny's flirtatious mention of "sexual harassment"- just aren't as clever as the film thinks they are.

Where are the glamorous locations? Yes, it's the '90s, and Russia is fleetingly friendly if also incredibly corrupt, but Siberia is no place to set a Bond film, and brief scenes in St Petersburg and Cuba don't make up for that. Xenia Onatopp is a genuinely brilliant and very Bond character- a female assassin who kills her victims by squeezing them with her legs and a delightfully Freudian nightmare for men- but there's not much else here that's brilliant.

It's hard not to compare this with the Austin Powers films- and unfavourably- given the conscious contrast between the social mores of the '60s and '90s, respectively. And you can tell it's the '90s when bond starts the film with a bungee jump. But this is a slow, ponderous film that takes ages to get going and just lacks oomph. Not their finest hour. In fact, I'm so underwhelmed that I'm going to press pause on watching the Bond films for a bit.

Oh, and we have the bizarre absence of the proper Bond theme tune at the very start. Legal reasons?

The World's End (2013)

"What the fuck does WTF mean?"

I like Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright and Nick Frost, I really do. I loved Hot Fuzz and Paul and said so. I loved Shaun of the Dead and must blog that one day. It all amounts to a fine back catalogue. But this film... isn't really all that great. And there's not really all that much to say about it.

I mean, the plot's ok and the acting is as superb as you expect but, well, this is a film about middle age disappointment, with Gary a drunken failure wanting to relive the glories of his youth while his mates all have at least something to show for their lives at the halfway point. And... that's all this film is about. Dull and patronising themes of middle age and growing up. Even the threat- a load of robot invaders who want to enforce conformity, all naturally for our own good- is a bit meh, a kind of intergalactic parent, the man trying to hassle us. It all falls a bit flat for me. Perhaps it's because I'm a couple of years short of forty but don't really identify with any of this. As I approach middle age I've neither gone off the rails, failed to grow up not stopped being the person I've always been, and as such I don't really identify with the film's somewhat cliched message.

Mind you, it has a nice little subtext about the distressing decline of the modern pub. But that's about it.

Remember Me (2010)

"What if I die eating my vindaloo?"

This drama, ironically half-forgotten, might be best known for starring Robert "Twilight" Pattinson in a proper film. And its theme- that we could all get run over by a bus tomorrow so, like, carpe diem and that- may be a bit of a truism with a "shock" ending which seems less and less clever with the benefit of hindsight. But this is actually a pretty good drama, well written and acted, and not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Death is ever present. We begin as Tyler's family gather round his late mother's grave, ten years after her meaningless death and, and we establish Tyler's fraught relationship with his stuffed shirt of a father, Charles, played against type by Pierce Brosnan. The film charts his romantic ups and downs with Ally, his death-obsessed on-again off-again girlfriend, his brother's recent suicide, the bullying of his sister Caroline and the comparison with his less angst-ridden friend, Aidan.

The film is full of signifiers. The opening scenes around the grave are grainy, full of muted colours and Tyler smokes, a sure sign of youthful rebellion, at least in 2001. (He's 21 but, this being the USA, he's only just started drinking, which seems bizarre to us decadent Europeans.) 

His relationship with Ally is complicated by his getting off on the wrong foot with her police officer father, but the central theme is their date in an Indian restaurant (are they a thing in America, where is always thought Mexican food filled the same cultural space?), and her ideas of living for today. This means more than she imagined to Tyler, whose brother committed suicide following the same pressure from Charles to put the family business before music that Tyler is now feeling.

Things come to a crisis after Alyssa dumps Tyler, he clashes with his dad over his neglect of Caroline and, finally, the poor girl is horribly bullied. But Tyler's furious reaction this eventually leads to a rapprochement of sorts with his dad. It's a straightforward sounding plot but the script does a very good job of developing the characters.

I know the ending, with Tyler in the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001, has been criticised on grounds of taste, but I'd say this sort of reaction was somewhat kneejerk; it works in the context of the film, although it doesn't exactly achieve the pathos intended. This isn't a classic of cinematic drama by any means, but it's a good script performed well. It's well worth seeing.

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

"Virtual reality will grow and grow."

Er... no it won't.

it's an odd beast in hindsight, this film. On the on e hand there's more than a smidgen of Flowers for Algernon in it, putting it in the tradition of Twentieth Century science fiction. On the other hand, well, virtual reality is the most 1992 thing ever. Has anything ever dated as much as virtual reality? I'm reminded of Tomorrow's World and a certain episode of Red Dwarf.

Still, it's quite a good film. Adaptations of Stephen King stories usually are.It isn't just the virtual reality that dates the film, though; it'd (just) recent enough to have CGI, but the hero smokes and the phones look charmingly antique from a 2014 perspective. Still, Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan are quite good, and it's nice to see a Hollywood film with a left-of-centre message, in this case opposition to corporate manipulation of science.

The film is seen from the perspective of Dr. Lawrence Angelo, our viewpoint character and also, interestingly, the moral centre of the film, thus putting the audience in that position too. Jobe is a mentally subnormal and much-bullied man, much like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, whose intelligence is artificially boosted. But so is his hubris. It's a solid script, thematically, and it helps that we first see Jobe as such a sympathetic figure and never quite forget those first impressions with his descent into megalomania.

We also have an abusive father and a manipulative and sadistic priest carrying more than a wisp of Opus Dei about him, both of whom get their respective comeuppances: this is not a film likely to gain Papal approval. And it's interesting seeing the portrayal of Jobe's sexuality; like Lenny in the aforementioned novella, he combines a child's mind with an adult's sexual desires, something which seems fated to end badly. His augmented intelligence averts this fate, however, giving him a sexual awakening which really has to be symbolic both of his ceasing, in a sense, to be a child and of the new world that's been opened to him.

Sadly, corporate greed corrupts him, and leads him to insist that the treatments continue far beyond a level that is wise. Eventually he goes all mad and telekinetic and that, and the film builds to an exciting conclusion, the special effects for which would have looked pretty good at the time, I'm sure. It's a good film, small scale and, by the looks of things, not big budget, but with big, big ideas that really work.