Plasma Pool

In November and December of 2008, Darren Franich and Eric Freeman engaged in a ridiculously long email exchange about virtually everything related to Quantum of Solace and the James Bond franchise as a whole. That conversation is now reproduced here.

This back-and-forth is part of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” series. To view all “Point-Hyperpoint” entries, visit this page. To read all “Point-Hyperpoint” posts on James Bond, please click here.

ERIC

November 24 | 3:14 PM

I’ll respond to your latest message soon, but I just saw this comment on the AV Club news update about the Serge Gainsbourg movie and thought I should send it to you immediately:

Mathieu Amalric has to be cast as Roman Polanski in the biopic covering the period between the Tate murders and flight from statutory rape charges posthaste.

So true.

***

DARREN

November 24 | 3:33 PM

He’s totally Roman Polanski’s bastard child. Maybe Michael Bay could step in for a brief cameo as John Frankenheimer.

***

Pause for side discussion about Deadwood, John From Cincinnati, True Blood, David Foster Wallace’s essay about David Lynch, the badness of new fantasy genre TV and its relationship to the cinema of Edward D. Wood Jr., American Beauty’s unexpected awfulness and the decade-long hackery of everyone involved in its making, and Wes Bentley’s specific hackery vis-á-vis Ghost Rider.

***

ERIC
November 25 | 10:21 PM

We’re obviously not going to agree on Goldeneye, so I have nothing more to add on that topic. (Although I really can’t believe that you listed the existence of an early-‘90s hacker character as a negative. There is nothing better than outdated computer-related anything in a Hollywood movie. Have you seen The Net recently?) At the very least, you’ve convinced me to watch Die Another Day again, presumably under circumstances that don’t involve randomly finding it on cable, even if that’s probably the best way to watch it.

You are definitely the first person ever to accuse me of liking realism for its own sake, so allow me to clarify why I like Greene’s awful fighting. Yes, it’s realistic that a utilities executive would axe himself in the foot, but the real reason I like it is that it makes Greene out to be so much less than the typical Bond supervillain. Again, there’s no sense that this fight is the end-all be-all of Bond/villain fights.

I can understand what you don’t like about that, though, because it’s the same reason why I didn’t like Le Chiffre in Casino Royale the first time I saw it. It wasn’t clear to me why he was a threat, and there’s way too much time spent on the poker scenes, which I like conceptually but not necessarily in practice. (For one thing, Giancarlo Giannini is forced to play a really awkward role as commentator to Eva Green and the audience.) Throughout those scenes, Le Chiffre just seems really weak, which sucked when I was working from the assumption that the villain would function much like the villain in every other Bond movie.

But now we have the conspiracy, and suddenly Le Chiffre’s weakness makes sense. What I like about Quantum of Solace is that it establishes continuity across the Craig Bond films in a way that had only been done stylistically in the previous films. As you say, it now has the makings of a saga, which is really fucking cool to me. Though I am also a total sucker for conspiracy movies — I imagine I’d probably even like Vantage Point if I gave it a shot. [Note from the date of publication: I did not like Vantage Point when I gave it a shot.]

I agree that the treatment of the banality of evil in Quantum of Solace isn’t particularly nuanced, but it’s also a representation that you don’t see much in gigantic blockbusters, so I’m just happy that it exists in the movie at all.

*

INTERLUDE

I just turned on Revenge of the Sith and happened upon the Birth of Luke and Leia. This is one of the worst scenes in the history of film, not least because they had the potential for a cool bit of cross-cutting with Birth of Vader, only to fuck it up by having Portman give birth to twins without opening her legs. And then she actually dies because she loses the will to live. That is seriously the cause of death. Oh, and then Vader literally melts walls with his mind. Fucking hell.

*

My usual way of describing Megan Fox is “dirty hot,” which is really just another way of saying that she doesn’t have a predetermined look. So I definitely agree with you there. I’ve been hooked on Eva Green since I saw The Dreamers, so you’ll get no argument from me that she’s the perfect actress for the Craig Bonds. She is simply incapable of being uninteresting, and I think it also helps that she’s indeterminately European.

At the risk of creeping everyone out, I have to say that I think Olga Kurylenko is one of the most attractive Bond girls ever, but I also agree that she starts out very close to Christmas Jones territory. The Brosnan Bond movies completely botched the treatment of women; it’s like they were trying to straddle (pun very much intended) the line between typical Bond Girl hotness and Strong Independent ‘90s Female. As such, they’d usually give them legitimate titles and roles (spies, nuclear scientists, excellent fighters, etc.), only to give them nothing particularly interesting to do, with the end result always being that they’d dispatch a minor henchman/woman and then have sex with Bond as the credits rolled. The greatness of Eva Green/Vesper Lynd is that they finally realized that a strong female Bond Girl doesn’t have to be a female version of Bond. Oh, and it also helps when you let her fuck Bond before the end of the movie so as to not suggest that it’s the ultimate prize in any fine lady’s life, especially when none of them were ever mentioned again in the following movies.

Kurylenko is tricky, because she’s really not given much to do from the time Bond takes her off Medrano’s boat to the time she kills Medrano. I agree that she’s very good in the quieter scenes with Bond, but in all action scenes she’s either knocked out on a boat or messing around in the background while Bond does the real work. In a lot of ways, that makes her like the Brosnan Bond Girls, except she plays an important thematic role and is much better in the filler scenes. Then, after she kills Medrano and they escape the whatever-that-building-is, we get one of the best scenes in Bond history. As you say, has anyone ever turned down Bond before? And doesn’t that say more about her character than every scene that came before it? Another amazing thing about that scene is that it’s mostly dependent on the viewer’s familiarity with the series — it’s at once an important character moment and something much bigger than either character.

***

DARREN

November 26 | 10:19 AM

Interesting! I think I’m catching onto your wavelength here—that what makes Le Chiffre and Greene both interesting characters is how completely unimportant they are in the grand scheme of things. This places the Craig movies in the tradition of movies that wouldn’t even necessarily have a tradition if the last decade of action cinema had never happened: Action Movies In Which The World Is Not At Stake.

It’s not totally the fault of The Matrix (the trend began with Independence Day, maybe), but since the late ‘90s, action movies, perhaps just by virtue of having exorbitant budgets, have been in a constant Babel-style race to create a new Top. Every superhero movie inevitably focuses on a threat that will at least destroy a city (Batman Begins, all the Spider-Men) but could destroy the world (Hellboy 2, Blade, X-Men, Superman Returns) and might also destroy the universe (Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four 2). This may be yet another reason why The Dark Knight was so awesome: although the stakes were high and encapsulated a whole city, it was done in such a realistic, London-subway-bombers fashion (which is also one reason why Unbreakable is probably the number-two superhero movie ever made.)

So I guess I can see how Greene is a step in the right direction. Looking at it this way, I suppose that Le Chiffre could be seen as kind of an intermediary character — he’s got the facial deformity of a Blofeld, though it’s actually closer to the style of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy strips. However, I think that our different reactions to the characters may have less to do with the villains themselves and more to do with what the films allow them to do.

Le Chiffre in Casino Royale has less concretely substantive things to do. He basically plays poker, does some shady business in the hotel, and then tortures Bond. However, the boring poker scenes you’re talking about are the center of his appeal. Those scenes, with Le Chiffre across the table from Bond, crystallize their enmity in such a casual and unforced way (like Connery’s golf match with Goldfinger). The director himself actually complained about those poker scenes, saying that the great challenge of Casino Royale was figuring out how to keep the movie going around the poker, but oddly, the fact that the movie has to calm down for the poker is really what gives Casino all the heft, the drama, the center, the sheer thereness that is lacking in Quantum. The poker scenes let Craig just sit there and be Bond, and although Le Chiffre is maybe half a character, Mads Mikkelsen has a face straight out of an Alain Resnais film, so their wordless interaction onscreen is fucking vibrant (it also helps that Mikkelsen’s voice resembles Christian Bale’s Batman basso profundo, whereas Greene sounds like every whiny foreign millionaire scion you meet at an Ivy League school.)

Conversely, Bond’s interactions with Greene always feel forced. There’s the docks scene (all the cutaways to Bond watching the proceedings, reduced to a spectator in his own movie), and the scene at Greene’s party, and … well, that’s it! Sure, that last scene between them is great and darkly funny, but their final interaction has no weight to it, because it’s practically their first interaction. It’s not just that Greene isn’t a Bond Villain, it’s that he scarcely seems to be a villainous force in the movie at all. He’s a placeholder vessel into which Bond pours all his vengeful feelings, which wouldn’t be a problem, except that the movie uses him the same way, too.

What I mean is that Greene isn’t the real villain that the movie is interested; Vesper’s boyfriend, who Bond sees at the end of the movie, is. There’s such a righteous charge to that scene, like nothing else in the movie, because it’s not just paying lip service to Casino Royale and to Bond’s emotions – it’s genuinely following through on them. Frankly, I think this scene would have played better at the beginning: Bond, having dispatched some tiny guy in Quantum, needs to take his vengeance all the way to the top. Alternately, it might have been more interesting to make Greene Vesper’s lover.

Whatever. The point is that there are no really personal stakes between Bond and Greene. There’s one tiny glimmer of the rivalry they could have had. Greene makes the joke about how every woman Bond touches seems to die. It’s a dark, real moment, but the movie never really follows through on that.

Look, I’m not saying that Bond needs to have some kind of “This Time, It’s Personal” storyline with the villain, but part of what made Casino Royale so much better than the Bournes was how it managed to take the humorless grit of those movies and spice them up with old-fashioned zip. Bourne is an interesting character because he basically interacts with no one, but some of the scenes in Casino Royale feel more like an old-school Grant/Hepburn farce than an action film (almost all the scenes with M are like this—Howard Hawks banter that’s funny but also kind of dark). Except for a very few scenes in Quantum (pretty much everything with Giancarlo Giannini), we never get to see Craig just inhabit Bond.

*

INTERLUDE

I was reading online the other day that Tom Stoppard apparently did some script-doctoring work on Revenge of the Sith, which now has me itching to watch it again so I can play “Which Lines Were Written By The Author Of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”

I actually enjoy Revenge of the Sith quite a bit, but only because it’s literally about the destruction of the prequel trilogy. Everything that was so wrong about Episodes 1 and 2 — the stupid random Jedis who were never cool, the Trade Federation Asian Stereotypes, the Imperial Senate that seemed to come straight out of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Sam Jackson, and finally Hayden Christiansen — gets exploded, electrocuted, shot in the back, decapitated, and, in one very special case that I have to believe was fan service, triple-amputated and lava-burnt. The fact that George Lucas stopped just short of killing Jar Jar Binks is unfortunate, but the film represents one of the most long-awaited intentional artistic self-immolations. The sheer schaudenfreude on display is amazing, if unintended. When Anakin kills all the Jedi Babies, I practically wanted to stand up in the theater and scream, “Three cheers for the Dark Lords of the Sith!”

*

Your description of the Brosnan Bond girls is awesomely spot-on. The one exception to the rule (besides Xenia Onatopp—swoon!) was Sophie Marceau in The World Is Not Enough, easily one of the weirdest characters ever. Basically, she was Onatopp without the subtlety. Instead of just killing men with her hips, she slept with them, controlled them using her sexuality, and inevitably betrayed them, like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct without the nudity. When’s the last time you had a patricidal sociopath suffering from Stockholm syndrome, megalomania, and nymphomania? Feminism should have sued.

I also really like Kurylenko. I think it’s really a matter of them finding the exact right performer for the performance. As far as emoting goes, she’s roughly on par with Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me (another Vengeful Female Bond), but whereas Bach’s character was supposedly holding a whole mess of emotions in her head (she hates Bond because he killed her lover! but she has to work with him to save the world! but she’s secretly attracted to him!), Kurylenko is playing a character who’s been seeking revenge for so long that she’s essentially numb to it.

There’s another difference, too. Whereas Barbara Bach was an Anglophiliac American stretching to play a monotone Russian, Kurylenko is a genuine ex-Soviet, born and raised in the Ukraine (the Ukraine : Russia :: Quantum of Solace : Casino Royale; smaller, less powerful, but just as gritty).

This is going to sound like (and is) a rampant generalization, but Kurylenko possesses a quality which I’ve only ever seen in Russians, and I see it in almost all of them—they’re simultaneously smarter, colder, more tormented, more deluded, and more confident than any other culture since maybe the Visigoths. This may be because they’ve never really had a quiet moment in their history, or because they’re trapped right between Europe and Asia, or because more than half their year is spent in fierce cold, or because their country literally reaches up to the top of the world, where one finds only the biting cold of the ninth circle of hell.

This essential aura totally helps strengthen her character — I can believe her as a vicious killing machine, but I can also completely believe the scene when she lies shivering in the middle of the fire. I think it’s a testament to how much better the movie becomes with her that, when Bond pulled out his gun, I absolutely thought that he was going to shoot her and put her out of her misery.

Above all, I like how the relationship between Kurylenko and Craig never once feels forced in the movie. Like Female Bonds past, her personal and professional interests align with his, but there’s no lengthy forced interaction where they’re in conflict before their agencies demand that they join forces. As you say, in the Brosnan Bonds, since we all knew how the relationship was going to end, there was no real romantic conflict. Here, though, their relationship is never once coded as romantic—they’re a couple of professionals on a mission, and also a couple of lost souls seeking revenge.

This is why that last scene is so intense. It’s almost as if Bond is backsliding into his pre-Vesper state—Well, now I’ve gotten over that, how about a roll in the Bolivian hay?

(It weirds me out that Megan Fox never looks the same in any photo that’s been taken of her. It weirds me out even more that in every article about her, she basically poses for three incredibly hot mega-naked pictures that make her look like a Greek goddess posing as a prostitute, then gives an interview purposefully designed to deny her goddess status. This actually makes sense, considering that she was in one of the biggest movies ever and yet no one on the face of the earth actually remembers anything about her in Transformers. I mean, even Denise Richards was a genuine presence in Wild Things, which is how she’s managed to remain in the public eye. As near as I can figure, her current notoriety derives purely from the fact that she was simultaneously on the covers of Maxim and GQ [the high class Maxim, unless you think Maxim is the lowbrow GQ], but that was just press for some random movie called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which apparently opened and closed in about a week in October. I have no idea if she even exists.)

I keep trying to think about what I want out of the next Bond movie, not to mention the remaining Craigs. I’ve always thought it would be so awesome for a Bond movie to be set entirely in London. Think about it—the character is so firmly rooted in English tradition, but except for MI6 scenes, we never really see him hanging about. This is especially unfortunate, because London, besides being one of the most picturesque cities ever (with ancient and postmodern architecture), is practically the center of the globalized, multicultural world. Couldn’t there be an awesome film made — maybe even in real-time — about Bond dealing with some kind of domestic-terrorist-crisis-which-is-actually-much-more, racing all around the city? Okay, maybe that’s too 24, but maybe it could be some kind of a Graham Greene thing, beginning in the city and then heading out towards the countryside.

I dunno. What’s on your Bond wishlist?

***

Pause for discussion on how Deadwood’s accidental finale works as a true finale; its aesthetic comparison to The Wire; how The Wire never wastes scenes and Deadwood has no capacity for waste; and where great shows by TV geniuses named David go wrong.

***

ERIC

December 2 | 12:40 PM

You describe the difference between the two types of action movies pretty well, and it’s also interesting that the Bourne/Craig Bonds style usually involves some kind of a return to stunt-heavy action rather than CGI. It’s almost as if the end-of-world action movies construct plots to justify the budget — not the other way around — and movies of the other type go with stunts so that they’re always viewed as more serious than the big-budget studio tentpoles. These distinctions really aren’t necessary, and you’re very right to call out The Dark Knight as the movie that’s best combined the aspects of both types of action movie.

It seems like the Bournes and current Bond movies try to get around the restrictions of their stakes by globe-hopping, but the Bond movies do a much better job of making their locales interesting, whereas in the Bournes most of the cities look relatively the same.

I think you’re right about Greene being not much of a villain, but I still think he’s an interesting type. Plus, as I said before, I have a hard time thinking about Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace as separate movies, because so much of both are tied together for me.

I don’t have anything intelligent to add on Kurylenko, so I’ll just say that I also thought he would shoot her at the end.

Okay, next Bonds. As much as I like the villain structure in these first two movies, they definitely need to change it for the next one. If they pick another middling villain without dealing with the Quantum situation in more depth, we have a problem; I like the current system of villains, but that doesn’t mean I’d be content to see it in every movie with little progression.

So I think they should have Bond defeat Quantum in the next movie, only for a new conspiracy to pop up in the following movie. I know that could run the risk of being completely stupid, but it seems like a potential way to keep what I like about the current structure of villains/threats while still showing some growth by making everything on a bigger scale.

Thoughts?

***

DARREN

December 2 | 10:36 PM

It’s become kind of a too-easy shorthand to point out how the Bourne movies influenced the new Bonds, but let’s give Bond the benefit of the doubt—the first major action sequence in Casino Royale, with Bond chasing the guy through the construction zone, was less about Bourne-style quick cutting and more about Parkour-influenced stunt motion. Put another way, the Bourne action style is mostly created through editing — the quick-cutting panoramic style which Paul Greengrass basically owns (because he makes it look so cool that everyone else tries and fails) — whereas the new Bond action style is, at its best, the work of genuine (or genuine-looking) bodies in motion.

This contributes to a weird bipolarity in the action scenes in Quantum of Solace. All of the action sequences involving transportation devices—car, boat, and airplane—are incredibly lame, but all the action sequences involving brute person-to-person combat are exceedingly intriguing and full of mesmerizing little body movements—Bond pushing Edmund Slate through the window in his apartment, or Bond fighting Greene at the end of the movie. The opening rooftop chase is without a doubt a direct descendant of the Bourne chase, but after a closer look, it’s actually a bit more interesting, shot-to-shot (crucially, though, the chase in Bourne Ultimatum had genuine stakes, whereas the chase in Quantum of Solace is basically: Bond’s chasing some guy we just met who’s evil, and who’s going to die before we learn anything else about him.)

Here are my requirements for the villain in the next movie: They must not be a White European middleman. It seems to me that all great Bond villains manage to balance two distinctive, almost opposing, factors: how much they represent a topical fear, and how their personality plays off of Bond’s. Lean too far in one direction, and you end up with an instantly dated curio—Evil English Bill Gates in Tomorrow Never Dies, Evil Black People in Live and Let Die, Evil Colombian Cocaine Dealers in License to Kill. Conversely, you can have a villain with a cool backstory and an interesting relationship to Bond, but if it’s too fantastical, then you end up with Elektra in World Is Not Enough or most of the Moore villains or Dr. No.

This is why the perfect mix is villains like Blofeld, Goldfinger, or Trevelyan — respectively, they represent Cold War and post-Cold War fears (Trevelyan’s bankrupting scheme, which I’d forgotten about, has actually aged pretty well), but they also provide a great rivalry with Bond because they play off of him so well.

So I actually think your idea of destroying Quantum is interesting, and I would love for the next movie to be about this: in the pre-credits sequence, Bond manages to bring down Quantum. After all, Bond knows who many of the conspirators are—maybe in the first scene, we see a montage of the conspirators being rounded up, some of them legally (i.e. British citizens), some of them more expediently (Bond doing some murder). The whole rest of the movie, we’re following Bond as he tries to round up the remnants of Quantum, but in the process he becomes aware of two separate results of his actions.

First, some smaller countries (like Bolivia) are falling completely into chaos—Quantum was selling them water expensively, but it was selling them water, whereas now there are warlords who let everyone not under their control die of thirst; or, even better, there is simply no one left in charge, and the British Government and NATO and the UN are too busy fighting over who’s going to prosecute Quantum to deal with the human rights issues.

Second, there’s a new player in the game—someone who was actually working with Bond against Quantum, this incredibly well-connected semi-royal wealthy middle-aged woman from the Middle East—who is now moving in on Quantum’s territory. In the first part of the movie, there’s this weird paradox, where Bond and this Lady Big Bad are both racing to get the last few Quantum people—Bond, who wants to arrest them, has to save them from being straight up killed by the Lady Big Bad.

I see Shohreh Aghdashloo playing the Big Bad as a mix of Benazir Bhutto, Dick Cheney, and Dov Charney—wanting to feed the hungry but make an incredible amount of money doing it, wanting to dominate the field of green technology so that the next century belongs to her, helping immigrants enter Western Europe and America illegally but only with a percentage of their lifetime revenue.

***

ERIC

December 6 | 12:35 AM

Agreed. I would watch the shit out of that movie.