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POETICAL EXCURSION #6

“Uphill”, by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894).

Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

They will not keep you waiting at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

:: This poem, seemingly a series of questions by a traveler and the answers by one who has traveled, is a lovely and moving meditation on death and its relation to life. Each answer given by the secondary speaker builds on the sense of inevitability that the young traveler must reach this particular destination — in fact, he cannot avoid it: You cannot miss that inn. More interesting, though, than this sense of the inevitability of death is the sense that death is not to be feared; we are instead to find comfort and solace in death. Rossetti employs imagery throughout the poem implying that death is a welcome refuge after a long, hard journey. It is the world that is to be feared and turned from, in the end. Death will provide a roof and an inn, and there will be comradery in the welcome we find by Those who have gone before. Life, Rossetti tells us, is a long journey, lasting From morn to night, and death is not an end to be feared but a rest to be earned and welcomed. The juxtaposition of fatalism and optimism fascinates.

Another interesting question about this work is: Who is the second speaker, the person giving the answers? At first glance, we suspect someone old and weary at life, precisely the kind of person who would welcome death. But there are another possibilities: that the Answerer is actually himself one of the dead, who is telling someone soon to die not to be fearful. Or perhaps it is even God, seeking to reassure a fearful worshipper.

(NOTE: I’ve added permalinks at left to the other Poetical Excursions, and I am planning to do these more than once per month. The composer Robert Schumann once wrote that young musicians should “read industriously from the poets”; this is something that I am trying to do. Reading poetry shows us what wonders are possible in language.)

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James Bond Redux, part III.

…continuing my capsule reviews of the James Bond films, in order of release. (Parts One and Two.)

:: Live and Let Die. This is the only James Bond film that I really, genuinely dislike. There are some good things in it — Jane Seymour is stunning and she does fairly well at portraying her character’s inner conflict (ludicrous as that conflict may be), and Yaphet Kotto is a decent villain. Roger Moore does fairly well in his initial outing as Bond, despite the worst script ever written for a Bond film. I did write a more detailed review of this film a few months ago and see no need to rehash it. (The Gadgets: Adding to the list of ways in which this film falters, Q does not appear at all. Instead, M briefs Bond on how to use a wristwatch that is a buzz-saw and an incredibly powerful magnet. I actually like this gadget, and to the film’s credit Bond puts it to good use later on. There is also a weird gun that shoots bullets that are filled with compressed air or something like that.)

:: The Man With the Golden Gun. Better than Live and Let Die, it has some good parts as well as some parts that are truly awful. Roger Moore brings a certain intensity to his portrayal — witness the scene where he interrogates Miss Anders as to Scaramanga’s whereabouts), so the typical accusation of Moore as playing Bond for laughs doesn’t hold up. I also wrote about this one in more detail a while back. (The Gadgets: The best gadget in the film is actually Scaramanga’s golden gun, which he puts together out of a pen and a cigarette lighter. Come to think of it, that’s probably the film’s only gadget. Q appears to provide analysis rather than equip Bond with nifty items.)

:: The Spy Who Loved Me. This one is generally held in higher regard than I would prefer; I find it a mixed bag. The plot is a rehash of You Only Live Twice, with American and Soviet submarines getting highjacked as opposed to space capsules. There are some good action sequences, especially a high-speed chase on the mountain roads of Corsica. Barbara Bach plays Major Amasova well, and the “Bond teamed with his Russian counterpart” angle is fun, although the bit where Bond turns out to have killed her lover (also a Russian agent, who had been trying to kill Bond in the film’s teaser sequence) does not so much lend tension as seem contrived. And if Anya is such a good agent, why does the film just turn her into yet another trapped damsel at the end, when the villain escapes with her only to do no more than tie her to an ugly plastic chair? And speaking of the villain, Stromberg is curiously unmenacing. Maybe he just doesn’t have enough screentime to develop a persona of evil; he’s simply not sharply drawn at all. He is obsessed with the sea, and in one shot we can see that he has webbing between his fingers, but nothing much comes of this aspect of his character. (He also displays the same bizarre habit that Goldfinger had of killing people in highly expensive ways when there were much simpler ways to do the job. He drops a secretary who betrayed him into a shark pool — very easy — but then he allows two scientists who worked for him to fly off in a helicopter, which he then blows up by remote control. Why destroy a perfectly good helicopter? Why [presumably] kill a pilot? Why not just dump the scientists into the shark pool as well?) This is also the film that gave us the dentally-enhanced henchman Jaws, who is mostly played for laughs. The fight aboard Stromberg’s supertanker goes on far too long. The film’s teaser sequence features an ineptly-photographed ski chase, and the music — some disco garbage by Marvin Hamlisch — is distracting and ugly. The Spy Who Loved Me has some good parts, but I generally find it a disappointment. (The Gadgets: A bunch of them. Bond has a wristwatch that scrolls of a tickertape message from M; he uses his cigarette case to screen some microfilm; he has a Jet-ski — this was when Jet-skis were fairly new items — and he has the Lotus automobile that is armed in the best Bond fashion and can convert to a submarine.)

:: Moonraker. This is easily the most absurd of all the Bond films, with a villain — Hugo Drax — who has decided to go to a space station with a hand-picked group of “colonists”, wait out his poisoning of the earth, and then return to the surface to repopulate and rule. This plot is completely over the top, and in the end a laughable space battle takes place. And we have Jaws again for the ride, this time falling in love with a short, pigtailed blond girl he finds amid the destruction that he wreaks in a cable-car station. In another fight scene, Bond and an Oriental martial artist seemingly destroy half of the artistic heritage of Venice, Italy (what is it with objets d’art always being demolished in Bond films, anyway?). There is a ludicrous chase through the canals of Venice, for no other reason than to have a chase through the canals of Venice. This entire film is over-the-top self-parody; it’s films like Moonraker that gave rise to Austin Powers. And yet, I actually like the bloody thing, probably for the same reason that I like chicken wings and beer. The film has a sense of fun that is actually infectious; every actor involved seems to be enjoying what is going on. I especially like Lois Chiles as Holly Goodnight; here Bond is again teamed with a female secret agent — this one from the CIA — and she is never turned into a damsel-in-distress; she is a genuine equal for Bond (or as much as was possible in 1979). The script is utterly loaded with double-entendres, some of which really are funny. The teaser sequence, involving Bond being tossed out of an airplane sans parachute, is eye-popping. John Barry is thankfully back to do with the music. Moonraker is a guilty pleasure. I shouldn’t like it, but I do. Ah well…. (The Gadgets: this film actually has my favorite of all of James Bond’s gadgets, a dart-gun that he wears around his wrist. All Bond does is flick his wrist and out flies either an armor-piercing dart or a poison-tipped one. He also has a wristwatch that contains explosives; in the afore-mentioned Venician chase scene he drives a motorized gondola, which then converts to a hovercraft. He has another nifty safecracker, this one using X-rays to reveal the tumblers of the lock. There is also an amusing scene where Bond figures out that Holly Goodnight is a CIA agent by testing all of her gadgets and making fun of them, although one of them comes in useful later when he’s engaged in a fight with a big snake.)

…to be continued…

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James Bond Redux, part II.

…continuing my capsule reviews of all the James Bond films, in order of their release…

(Part one: Dr. No through Thunderball)

:: You Only Live Twice. In this film, feminist critics of the James Bond series will find some of their most potent ammunition — this is a film where Tanaka, the head of Japanese Intelligence, tells Bond: “In Japan, men always come first. Women come second.” (To which Bond replies, “I may retire here.”) There is a lot of woman-as-object in this film, and Bond’s thoughts never seem to be far from the bedroom. Whenever he has a free moment, he is looking for, well, some “action”. That’s one of my biggest complaints with this film. The other is the villain: we get our first sight of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, but he is unfortunately played in spectacularly unmenacing fashion by Donald Pleasance. No Bond villain should sound whiny, as Pleasance does when he orders one of his lackeys to “Kill Bond! Now!”, and certainly Blofeld — Bond’s archenemy — should never sound thus. The film also suffers from bad special effects (probably unavoidable in a 1967 film, but there it is) and in the general unbelievability of the plot. The film’s strengths are in its gorgeous photography of the Japanese locales, John Barry’s sparkling score, and the film’s zippy pace (a welcome change after the lugubrious Thunderball). (The Gadgets: Bond has a safe-cracking device, an area where Q-Branch seems to be constantly devoting its efforts, as Bond uses nifty safe-crackers a lot. He also has cigarettes that fire explosive darts, and most notably a collapsible one-man helicopter that is armed to the teeth.)

:: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. For years — pretty much ever since its release in 1969 — OHMSS has been something of an “unloved child” amongst the James Bond films, for a number of reasons. It is the longest of the films; it has the series’s only downbeat ending (actually, it’s a tragic ending); and it’s the first film to not feature Sean Connery as Bond. Connery had left the role after You Only Live Twice, and the producers hired a complete unknown with no acting experience, George Lazenby, which would have been a risky move in any event but given the nature of the film’s story was potential for unmitigated disaster. Were those fears realized? In a word, NO. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is not a disaster. Quite the opposite: this is the best James Bond film yet made. Yes, I said “best”.

Where so many Bond films a faux-epics, mistaking huge sets and massive battles for grandeur, OHMSS gets it right by telling an epic story. The sense of sweep in this film has never stopped amazing me; it amazes me to this day. The film opens with Bond becoming intrigued by an encounter with a beautiful heiress who is also suicidal; his concern for her leads him to an unexpected opportunity to find Ernst Stavro Blofeld, for whom he has been searching for two years. Every development in the story leads on to the next development perfectly; this film exhibits storytelling logic that is often wanting in Bond films (and, in the worst films, completely absent). Because nothing in the story is wasted, the film’s lengthy running time (142 minutes) seems much shorter than it really is. Richard Maibaum’s screenplay contains the best writing in the series, and it would be another six films — not until For Your Eyes Only — before the scripts would approach this level of quality again.

There are many to this day who don’t care for George Lazenby’s performance as Bond. I am not one of them. Lazenby has, to my mind, only a handful of wooden line readings; for the most part his performance is solid and in certain scenes it is almost perfect. He handles an early scene with Diana Rigg very well, conveying that he is more intrigued with this particular woman than with most “mere” beautiful girls, and there is another scene later on — when Bond realizes that he has fallen in love, and that this is more important to him than his job as an agent for Her Majesty — that Lazenby absolutely nails. In every scene that demands the most from Lazenby, he delivers. He is also a very athletic actor, which shows in his action sequences. He also displays good comic timing with his early line, “This never happened to the other fellow.”

The other performances are wonderful. Diana Rigg is still my favorite Bond heroine; she is beautiful, intelligent, and three-dimensional. Telly Savalas is Blofeld this time, a welcome change over Donald Pleasance. (He also has the film’s best line, suring a ski chase: “All right, we’ll head him off at the precipice.”) There isn’t a single weak link in the supporting cast.

The music for OHMSS is the best in the series, with John Barry’s wonderful main theme (the only time in the series that an instrumental was used for the main credits) and the love theme based on Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time In the World”. The photography is outstanding; if you can watch this film and afterwards not want to immediately book a trip to the Swiss Alps, then you weren’t looking at the screen at all. The action sequences are first-rate, most notably a ski chase that is still the best in the series. A common refrain about OHMSS is, “If only they’d made it with Connery….” Well, they didn’t. They made it with George Lazenby, and they have never since made one better. (The Gadget: The focus in OHMSS is on human abilities; gadgets are not much in evidence. Q describes, in the film’s opening scene, research into radioactive lint, which slipped into an opponent’s pockets would make him easier to track. There is another nifty safecracker machine that is also a photocopier, and Bond has a miniature camera. That’s about it.)

:: Diamonds Are Forever. For reasons passing understanding, George Lazenby quit the Bond role after his one film, and Sean Connery was convinced to return. After doing this film, Connery left for good, and Roger Moore took over the role. Moore has often been blamed for the shift into self-parody that the Bond films undertook in the 1970s, but in reality that shift began with Diamonds Are Forever. (This also ilustrates a theory of mine, that actors are often blamed for things that are really faults of writing. I’ll have more to say about that in later reviews.) Diamonds Are Forever is a decent film on its own; the story — involving a particularly nasty smuggling ring, where each link in the chain is murdered as the diamonds are moved along — is interesting. Jill St. John is an interesting Bond heroine, playing a criminal who ends up being Bond’s reluctant ally. Sadly, the film turns her into a bumbling bimbo in the third act — and the film as a whole pretty much collapses in its climactic scenes. The final battle against Blofeld and his minions is unexciting, and we are cheated of a “final confrontation” between Bond and his archenemy. That, really, is the biggest failing of Diamonds Are Forever: it makes no reference at all to the events of OHMSS, choosing to tell a stand-alone story rather than the gripping revenge story that one might have expected. Blofeld, remember, murdered Bond’s wife — and yet this is not mentioned at all. There should be personal hatred, but the Bond-Blofeld dynamic here is firmly along the lines of “the cop versus the bad guy he’s never been able to put away”. Imagine if, in Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader never fight each other, and when they meet face-to-face no mention at all is made of Vader’s revelation in The Empire Strikes Back. That’s the feeling here. There are also a number of ludicrous moments, such as a chase scene involving Bond and seemingly the entire Las Vegas police department that goes on far too long and a scene that depicts Blofeld dressed in drag. Diamonds Are Forever is enjoyable until the climax, but it is also a missed opportunity of staggering proportions. (The Gadgets: Bond fools a fingerprinting machine by wearing false fingerprints; he has a gun which fires pitons and ropes for climbing purposes — very useful for getting into a Las Vegas hotel’s forbidden penthouse; and there is some gizmo that changes people’s voices. Q also demonstrates a gadget that causes slot machines to come up Jackpot. The gadgets are fairly pedestrian.)

To be continued….

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After a round of heavy revision work the last few days, I am roughly two-thirds of the way through my novel-in-progress. I’m getting a bit worried about the climax, but I may have solved a particularly thorny problem — or at least conceived its solution — over the weekend. Also, two short stories whose rejections arrived last week are now going out again to different markets. I keep thinking that one of these things has got to sell, one of these days….

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Some of my favorite e-journals are by writers who chronicle their writing and their thoughts thereof. Here is another good one.

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I’ve just bounced off Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. The novel’s interesting premise wasn’t gripping me, and about 150 pages in I was having difficulty figuring out who was who. (Part of the trouble is that, for various “real life” reasons, my reading of this book was interrupted several times. I’m something of a “daily rhythm” reader, and if that rhythm is upset I have a hard time regaining the momentum.) I’ll attempt the book again at a later date. I loved its predecessor, A Fire Upon the Deep. (Deepness is actually a prequel-of-sorts to Fire, although the connections are really tenuous.)

I’ve switched genres entirely, and am now reading Barbara Paul’s mystery novel Kill Fee.

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Salon recently ran this interesting article on those Left Behind books. I’m something of a sucker for things like millennialism and Biblical prophecy and end-time thinking and all that, but I haven’t summoned up the urge to read this series. It just doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, really. (I also find the seriousness with which these books are taken — the idea that this is how it’s really going to be — rather creepy.)

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I’ve loved the James Bond films since I saw my first one: Moonraker, when I was in second grade. Someone has said that everybody’s favorite Bond is the one they first saw. While this isn’t true in my case — more on that later — I certainly don’t agree with the a priori notion held by most people that there is Sean Connery and then there is everyone else. I’ve loved all of the Bonds, and I don’t find Connery’s Bond films to be any better, as a whole, than those that came after. What follows is Part One of my capsulized opinions on all of the Bond films thus far, in order of release. (The purpose of this exercise is, of course, to occupy my time while I print out several lengthy files.)

:: Dr. No. As the first ever James Bond film, this one almost has to be admired; if it had been a disaster, the series likely would never have gotten off the ground. A lot of the Bond tropes are here: Bond in a tuxedo, playing baccarat; lovely ladies both in glamorous evening wear and skimpy attire; a villain with a deformity; an ally of Bond’s who dies most horribly; et cetera. That said, I have never really liked Dr. No. The film has always seemed a bit bloodless to me, with uncertain pacing, a lackluster villain, and acting that is, frankly, lousy (excepting Connery and Jack Lord as Felix Leiter). The music also turns me off; by film’s end I am pounding on the side of my skull in a futile attempt to drive “Under the Mango Tree” from my mind. I’m grateful to Dr. No, but I just don’t like watching it. (The Gadget: none. Q does not appear in this film, although Bond is ordered by M and a guy only called “the armorer” to carry his trademark Walther PPK pistol.)

:: From Russia With Love. This is one of my favorites. It’s probably the only legitimate espionage thriller in the entire Bond series, relying almost entirely on intrigue and characterization than thrills and villainy. It’s much better made than Dr. No, and features some of the most memorable characters in the whole series in Bond ally Kerim Bey, villainess Rosa Klebb, and assassin Donovan Grant. Bond’s confrontation with Grant on the Orient Express is a fine, fine scene, and the whole film is taut and exciting. Especially notable is the sense of locale in From Russia With Love. The locations — Istanbul and the gypsy camps in its countryside; the Orient Express — never seem like mere backdrops to Bondian action but actual places with real cultural differences to which Bond must adapt. At one point, Kerim Bey tells Bond, “You’re in the Balkans now. The game with the Russians is played a little bit differently here.” And so it is. John Barry’s score for the film is excellent; the theme song is lovely. One of the best. (The Gadget: a briefcase that contains a collapsible rifle, fifty gold sovereigns hidden in the lining, and a talcum powder can that actually dispense teargas if the briefcase latches are incorrectly positioned prior to opening. The villains also have interesting gadgets: shoes that carry venom-tipped points, and Donovan Grant’s wristwatch garrotte. Desmond Llewellyn appears for the first time as Q.)

:: Goldfinger. This is nearly everybody’s favorite Bond film. It isn’t mine, however. I don’t think it is a bad film by any means; the film is slick and well-made, with an excellent sense of pacing (except in one spot toward the end: the aerial portion of Goldfinger’s raid on Fort Knox goes on for far too long). The villains are wonderful: surely Goldfinger’s line “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” is one of the dialogue highlights of the entire series, and Oddjob is probably the greatest of Bondian henchmen ever. My first problem with the film is with the Bond heroine, Pussy Galore. Simply put, the main heroine in any Bond film should never be the third or fourth most beautiful woman in the picture. Honor Blackman just doesn’t do it for me, unfortunately. Another problem I have is unavoidable, really, given the film’s plot: the locations. Try as I might, I just cannot see rural America as a likely spot for Bondian heroics; and I certainly should never see a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the background of any Bond movie. Part of the allure of a James Bond film is the sense that he really doesn’t operate in the same world as the rest of us, and things like that shatter the illusion. More seriously for the film, though, are problems with the story. If you consider carefully the film’s climactic scenes, you realize that Bond himself does almost nothing to thwart Goldfinger’s plan. The note he tucks in the gangster’s pocket to be found by Felix Leiter never gets to him (Oddjob kills the gangster instead); Bond seduces Pussy Galore and then it is she that tips off the CIA to Goldfinger’s plot — but Bond knows nothing of this at all. The fight with Oddjob, while exciting, has no bearing at all on the outcome; had Bond just sat down and twiddled his thumbs the good guys still would have arrived on time, probably shot Oddjob dead, and defused the bomb. In fact, Bond doesn’t even stop the bomb; he is trying to figure out how to do so when one of Felix Leiter’s friends pushes him aside and defuses it for him! The actions of James Bond are almost irrelevant to the entire last third of the movie. (And why on Earth would Goldfinger bother explaining his scheme to the collection of gangsters, when he is going to kill them anyway? and since he’s already going to kill all of them, why take the other guy aside and kill him in what seems an awfully inconvenient manner?) Goldfinger pretty much loses me as soon as the story moves to the United States. That’s a shame. (Although, even in the early going I have some problems: why, for instance, would there be a mirror installed at the end of an alley in Goldfinger’s factory complex? Did he think at some point, “Hmmm….if ever a secret agent is involved in a high speed chase through my complex, a mirror might come in useful in stopping him….”) (The Gadget: the Aston-Martin DB-V automobile, with bulletproof shield, smokescreen, front-firing machine guns, and an ejector seat. It’s always bothered me that with Bond has one of the niftiest gadgets in all of the films, and even after exhausting its options he still gets captured.)

:: Thunderball. This film has an odd pedegree, coming from a story that Ian Fleming co-owned with producer Kevin McClory (which is why McClory, in a later court case, won the rights to make his own Bond film — which turned out to be Never Say Never Again). SPECTRE makes its first grand appearance in Thunderball, with a classic plot: they conspire to steal two nuclear bombs, which they then use to blackmail the United Nations (or NATO, I can’t recall) into some huge payment. It’s a good hook for a Bond film, and the production is first-rate. This is the second Bond film to be set in the Caribbean (after Dr. No), and the sense of location is far more convincing — mainly through the use of some very evocative underwater photography. The villain — Emilio Largo — is not quite in Auric Goldfinger’s league, but he is still menacing; his femme fatale assassin, Fiona, is excellent. Sean Connery’s performance gets more confident with each outing, and the Bond Heroine, Domino, is to this day one of the most stunning women in any Bond film. Thunderball, though, is a mixed bag, primarily because of its wildly inconsistent pacing. The film opens with a lengthy set-up as Bond, who is vacationing at a health spa, happens on some of SPECTRE’s set-up work for their scheme. After about forty minutes, the film finally transitions to Nassau and the pace quickens a bit in keeping with the “race against time” plotline. However, it still meanders quite a bit as Bond investigates Domino and Largo. And then the film’s pacing grinds to a complete stop with the beginning of thirty or forty minutes of slow underwater action sequences. Thunderball seems to have a stop-start-stop rhythm throughout its running time, which makes it a hard film to get involved in. The John Barry score is superb, though. (The Gadgets: Bond has a lot of them this time. He has a geiger counter that doubles as an underwater camera, a homing device that he swallows, and a two-minute rebreather the size of a pen. In the film’s teaser sequence he uses a jet-pack to evade some thugs, before getting into the Aston-Martin which apparently now has the power to shoot water from its tailights with firehose force.)

To be continued….

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Since the remarkable Calvin and Hobbes ended, the only daily comic strip that has been able to make me laugh on a consistent basis is the wicked Dilbert. (Interestingly, my parents don’t like Dilbert at all, which I attribute to the fact that they are teachers — neither has been anywhere near corporate America for more than twenty years. Not that education isn’t riddled with its own share of weirdos, idiots and incompetents; but the two are really different animals.)

Well, Dilbert is still going strong, but now — at long last — there is another strip that makes me laugh almost every time I read it. It is Aaron MacGruder’s Boondocks. The strip from last Sunday may be the funniest thing I have ever seen in a comic strip. This particular installment is subtle, witty, and also a wonderful tribute to a past master of this oft-ignored art form. Check it out.

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A very quick micro-rant about a new pet peeve: I’ve noticed, only in the last month or two, that e-journalists (I don’t like the word “blog” or any of its suffix-derivatives) have a new modus operandi when they have a series of links they wish to share on a given topic. They will write a sentence where each word is a different hyperlink. (An example of this can be found here.) I’m not entirely sure why this bugs me, but I really have trouble seeing the word “to” as a viable word to be linked, by itself, to someplace else. I suppose this is cleaner than employing something like this: (see related links here, here, here and here), where each “here” is a link. I don’t know, but it still strikes me as cumbersome. (Or maybe it’s simply the amount of linking in a single post that bothers me, combined with the effect of it all being jammed together like that in one sentence.)

Ah, well….

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