Skyfall Is A Beautiful Mess

As an action movie experience, Skyfall works. It is exciting to watch. It is engaging. It draws you into its world and movements. It is the most visually beautiful Bond movie I have seen, and by far the best-directed of the Craig films.The theme song by Adele is beautiful and sums up the spirit of the film - but which film? Because Skyfall tries to be three different movies; and so it is totally lacking in cohesion and internal logic in both a narrative and thematic sense.

Also, there's a massive helping of misogyny to the point that I felt uncomfortable because my female friend didn't feel uncomfortable. Has she been living with this kind of stuff so long that it no longer registers? Anyway, spoilers (misogyny isn't really a spoiler).

As I said, this is a movie in three parts. There is the traditional Bond movie which holds our attention at the start and appears in brief flashes later: far-flung locations, Bond being charming and deadly, a villain with a plan that threatens the world. There is also a rather more grim movie in there about the challenges that MI-6 faces in a new world as its enemies not only proliferate but splinter, endlessly, into so many different faces that they might as well not have identities. And there is the beating heart of the movie which asserts itself most in the last quarter: the origins of both Bond and his enemy, and the dread machine of human intelligence into which they were both fed. Or into which they fed themselves - the movie is intentionally ambiguous about that point (and I can't really tell if that's a good thing).

The problem is that these three movies, these three plots, have very little to do with each other. The villain's identity as ex-MI6 rather undercuts the idea of MI6 suffering fundamentally new threats. And the intimacy which the villain shares with both Bond and M means the missing list of undercover operatives which ought to drive the plot never gets the space it needs to feel properly threatening. And as for the villain's big evil plot...it turns out to be to shoot M. Marvelous. The same M who was traveling about London in a Jaguar for much of the movie, and Jaguars are not known for their bullet-resistant properties. I understand that it is the mentality of the villain which drives this complicated plan, but the villain himself is a problem.

He's a former agent with a bone to pick with MI-6 and particularly M, who gives a brief justification of her abandonment of him. This issue is never questioned or expanded upon by any of the characters. Skyfall is content to let us know that there might be a moral issue here, but it has no interest in actually dealing with it. The brutal use of people, fed into the machine of human intelligence and gunfights that is the recent Bond movies - that goes unexamined, even though the entire motivation of the villain is to get M to examine herself. Because Rodriguez nee Silva never gets a chance to be right, he is never proved wrong and so his hatred of M lingers with the viewer longer than I think it was intended to. That Javier Bardem makes the character work at all is a testament to his talent and presence on screen.

Let's now talk about the misogyny. First of all, the easy example. Bond meets a henchwoman in Macau. Her name is Severine (though in fact the movie develops her so little I had to look up her name on Wikipedia), and she is magnetic. The self-control covering gnawing fear, the self-possession of her body language, the strange and fragile hope which she places in Bond to free her from slavery. Then she is killed by the villain to mess with Bond. Perhaps the point is that Bond failed her, that agents cannot rescue everyone who needs rescue - but this is never pointed out in any way by the movie, and in fact her quiet, senseless death is overshadowed by the arrival of Bond's backup. What should be a stirring moment was for me a waste. Why couldn't they have arrived ten seconds earlier and saved her? Why is her death so meaningless? Why is she in this movie if she has no purpose? Is she just here to look pretty and vulnerable, sleep with Bond, and then die?

Do not, please, tell me that this is part of the Bond movie milieu. Skyfall is not based on a Fleming novel, and even if it were there is no reason that an adaptation has to carry across misogyny and the linking of female sexuality and death. Nor ought it to contain its other strange message about gender: that women cannot be trusted in fieldwork or authoritative positions. Early in the movie Bond tells Eve that field work is not for everyone, and near the end she accepts his advice and accepts an administrative posting, becoming Moneypenny. This might fly if it was a decision she made herself, but because of Bond's blunt assessment earlier it has nasty undertones of women can't do this manly manly job. Screw you, Skyfall.

Now, I'm a Christian. I get my spiritual truth from the Bible. Let's flick to Judges chapter four, down to verse eighteen. Jael invites this guy in to her tent, gives him a drink to put him at ease, and when he's asleep hammers a tent peg through his skull. Now, this might not have been a moral thing to do. But it was certainly stone cold and I think's it pretty clear evidence - which is borne out in the world around us - that woman are just as capable of violence, and duties which involve violence, as men.

Also M is treated oddly. She tells Eve to take that shot, even though Bond is in the way. Later she gives a perfectly reasonable justification for her decision and Bond says she lost her nerve. Yes - because the heads of intelligence agencies are commonly very nervous people. The whole thing has nasty undertones of oh women are so emotional. And at the end of the movie, after M's death, she is replaced by a man. This would be no problem if it wasn't for all the weird gender roles stuff the movie had spent so much time implying. As it is, it reeks of the idea that women can't control their emotions and so can't be trusted with Important Decisions.

In summary: a beautiful movie as long you don't listen to anything anyone says.

The Hunger Games Freaked Me Out

After its summer hibernation, the common or garden coffee-snouted blogging bear emerges into the light, snuffling the air like an X's Got Talent judge scenting a comeback tour.

It's not the softening of the

I hadn't seen a movie for some time, so the degree of audience involvement in the wrong way totally

I feel that the film-makers made some choices which rendered the intended message

MY RAGE REJECTS YOUR HUMAN CONCEPT OF COHERENT BLOGGING

What is the sound of a moral flying over the head of a cinema full of teenagers?

All the girls going "awww" when the two main characters kiss because they need to have an engaging romantic arc in order for their audience to send them medicine so they don't die of infection. Or, perhaps, half of the cinema applauding when one of the 'bad people' - a teenaged girl - is killed by a teenaged boy to avenge the murder of another girl.

The audience certainly engaged with the story. But they engaged with it as separate from them, created for their entertainment, to satisfy their expectations. They never considered that the rich and corrupt Capitol audience in the movie might be them. It was quite disconcerting, watching the audience respond only to the predictable (and predicted) beats of a movie about how an audience's expectations can create predetermined and constricting roles for those required to entertain them.

I could also feel the other message, about the banal destruction of violence, straining to emerge from the movie - held back by the rating. The shaky hand-camera work during the fight scenes - particularly the multiple-death opening of the contest - disguises the pain and fear that should permeate the cinema. Death occurs at a careful distance from the viewer. I think it is more than a little ridiculous to make a movie about teenagers killing each other and then do your best to avoid showing teenagers killing each other. It also makes no sense within the movie's world; it is obvious that the contest area is covered in fixed cameras, so the footage should not be shaky or blurred.

I haven't read the books. Considered only as a movie, Hunger Games is not even a swing and a miss. It fouls the ball off. Wait, that's a baseball analogy that no one outside the US and Japan will get. Let me think. It's the cinematic equivalent of rolling the last ball along the ground so the other team can't possibly hit the improbable six they need to win: it avoids defeat, but also avoids success. This movie ate the poisonous berries.

Review: 'The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara' by Terry Brooks

On re-reading this trilogy, which consists of Ilse Witch, Antrax and Morgawr, I was struck by the way in which it used all the classic tools of fantasy to brutally demolish the importance of those tools for both characters and authors. Ancient magic, destiny, heroic quests, monsters, scheming villains and grand battles all appear in the trilogy - but lead nowhere. At every point the narrative hinges on the personality, history and choices of the characters, and the victories won by the heroes are in the choices they make.

As a Standard Fantasy Trilogy (tm), Jerle Shannara is decent fun. At times it's a little predictable and Brooks enjoys chapter cliffhangers and 'haha the omniscient narrator will not tell you this thing so that it will be a surprise later' a bit too much, but the characters are interesting and work well together. Brooks spreads around the trauma and death but always in a way that develops the characters and their individual arcs. This trilogy isn't revolutionary. But it is a solid piece of writing and you could do much worse for your fantasy reading.

Review: Churchill's ' The Second World War' Vol. I 'The Gathering Storm'

This volume has no key point or argument, but concerns itself with explaining the military and political landscape which will be the site of War as soon as the reader opens volume two. It ranges over European politics and diplomacy from the Treaty of Versailles to the beginning of the Second World War without attempting brisk overviews or detailed dissections of those issues upon which it touches.

Churchill never writes as if impartial or detached from his subject matter, always maintaining a personal voice and perspective. His understanding of those years is not the result of systematic inquiry or debate but the result of personal experience; his observations flow from his experience quite naturally, though at times diverted or enlarged by later events and understanding. The quotation of his contemporary speeches and thematic snippets of poetry give a powerful impression of the author's mood and draw the reader deeper into his confidence and perspective.

The focus is placed not upon general trends or forces but the events and actions of individuals which demonstrate or resist those trends. It is a work about people, many of whom Churchill knew personally, and how their actions produced other actions in a series of steps towards conflict which Churchill presents as chaotic but always explicable. Churchill's railings against British policy of the time, mentioned quite calmly in the work, seep through in his general approach: if my understanding now and then is so congruent, it cries, how could it ever have been unclear to the governments of the time? Though Churchill understands the motivations of the actors in this phase he remains perplexed by their reasoning. He does not rant or apportion blame but leaves the unanswerable questions to dog the reader as they turn the last page.

The volume is unmistakably the first part of one larger work, but might be read on its own to give background to twentieth century European politics, or as a case study in the interplay between domestic and international polities, or as an account of the collapse of the League of Nations from a British point of view. Written by a man who lived and led in those years, it does not shy away from equal measures of conclusive statements and suspensions of judgement. Challenging, grand and warmly personal, the first volume of Churchill's The Second World War is an impressive work of history.