When I heard Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster say in the promo trailer that he tried to make the Bond film he always wanted to see, I thought “Uh-oh.” But my “Uh-oh” turned to “Oh, shit,” once I got to the screening and saw Paul Haggis listed in the credits as one of the writers, my distaste for Finding Neverland Forster trumped only by my loathing of faux-deep Haggis. And yet none of this mattered in the least because I was going to see Quantum of Solace for one reason and one reason only: to watch Daniel Craig get naked. (Heck, I’d have happily sat through Crash a dozen times if Haggis had tossed in a naked Daniel Craig every once in awhile!)
You see, ever since Craig’s debut in the remake of Casino Royale, the dusty old, 007 series was offered a prime opportunity to expand its audience for the first time in decades. Not only would hardcore Fleming franchise fans and massive car explosion enthusiasts be lining up for tickets; there was now a third audience of those like me, indifferent to the Bond legacy and shaky cam chases alike, but hot and bothered by Mr. Craig. And Forster and Haggis, not surprisingly considering their very un-sexy track record, blew it.
Arnaud Desplechin makes movies that play like epic novels built out into live-sized pop-up books. Virtually Cubist in their multi-faceted narrative complexity, they cast such a spell that they’re almost interactive. When you watch a Desplechin film, you can smell perfume and feel bass shaking a room, and you feel the burden of each character’s long-simmering loves and resentments as if they were your own. Beyond surround sound, it’s surround space, surround time, surround life.
A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel), Desplechin’s latest, is a darkly comic dysfunctional family fairy tale, more Meet Me In Saint Louis than The Royal Tenenbaums, with a healthy dose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thrown in. With its whimsies and excesses playing out under the oddly liberating spectre of expected death, the whole thing is infused with a fin de siecle sensibility. While ailing matriarch is Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) infuriatingly matter-of-fact regarding what may be her own last holiday (she explains the seriousness of her condition to her husband in their warmly-lit budoir, backed by the strains of cafe jazz), her grown-up kids reflexively take the reminder of the ticking clock as an opportunity for boozy, reckless revelry, as an excuse to fight and to stop fighting repressed desires. Weird, warm, gleefully funny and unavoidably heartrending, this grand tale of a family reunited by mortality is, in it’s most impressive trick, not a bit morose. To borrow a line from Desplechin himself, speaking after a screening at the New York Film Festival, the Vuillards “don’t have time for melancholy”; to borrow a line from his script, “suffering is a painted backdrop” for the business of getting through the day.
The news that Mathieu Amalric, star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, has been cast as the next Bond villain may not be such a great sign for Bond 22. Nothing against Amalric––in fact, just the opposite: the best actors have a tendency to show up in the worst Bond films. Here’s five bits of evidence to support that thesis; tell us what we’ve missed/why we’re wrong in the comments.
1) Max Von Sydow, Never Say Never Again
A lot of 007 purists barely acknowledge this “unofficial” Bond film, which was made outside the auspices of the Ian Fleming-sanctioned production company behind the rest of the franchise. But we have to include Von Sydow on this list, as the actor, who coincidentally plays the father of Amalric’s character in Diving Bell, was the source of an initial rumor that Almaric would be taking on the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played by Sydow himself in Never.
Never came out the same year as Octopussy, but made less money; it’s essentially a rehash of the far-superior Thunderball. Sean Connery came back to play Bond after a 12 year hiatus, whilst Von Sydow takes over the recurring character of Blofeld, head of the villainous SPECTRE, previously played by Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas and others. Wikipedia has a chart comparing the various Blofelds across the seven films in which they appear, which pegs the Pleasance and Savalas incarnations as a clear inspiration for Dr. Evil. Von Sydow’s characterization of Blofeld broke from that mold, and reactions were/are mixed. At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Leo Goldsmith mocked Von Sydow’s “Dracula accent and silly haircut,” but The Bond Film Informant praises Von Sydow for making Blofeld “cool, calm and bearded.”
So, like father like fictional son? Somehow I can see Amalric rocking the “cool, calm and bearded” thing a little more easily than the “creepily impetuous Siamese cat-careeser” thing, but we shall see.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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