Michael Mand

Blogalongabond – A View To A Kill: Visual & Vinyl Villains

In 1985, Roger Moore celebrated his final appearance as James Bond in the film A View To A Kill. He also celebrated his 58^th birthday. Unfortunately, these two events are difficult to separate when watching Moore’s swansong; when Sean Connery (who also played Bond into his fifties) derides you as “too old”, it’s time to think about turning in your licence to kill.

Moore disliked AVTAK, later describing himself as “horrified” by the film’s violence while self-deprecatingly admitting, “I was only about four hundred years too old for the part”. This observation cannot really be denied: at times Moore resembles a condom stuffed with walnuts, while maintaining the air of a boxer who has taken on one fight too many – Ricky Hatton in a tuxedo, perhaps?

Despite this complaint – and the fact that AVTAK holds the lowest rating on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes of any official Bond movie – I maintain a level of affection for the film, largely based on three factors: my age, my memories of the theme tune, and the mighty Grace Jones.

AVTAK was the first Bond film I ever saw at the cinema and, despite the fact that the character on screen bore little resemblance to the 007 I had recently read about in Ian Fleming’s original novels (and my mother’s insistence that “Connery is the real Bond”), I was ready to accept the aged figure creaking his way up the Eiffel Tower as the genuine article. (Anyway, since Fleming’s Bond is a physical wreck of a man, perhaps Moore’s portrayal is more accurate than Daniel Craig’s Bourne-inspired superman thug-hunk)?

Prior to AVTAK, Bond theme songs had been largely recorded by long-established crooners, such as Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones and, despite their success, bore little relevance to the pop music of the day. This all changed, however, when Duran Duran’s Bond-loving drummer John Taylor ran into producer Cubby Broccoli and insisted that it was time to let “someone decent” have a crack. I will leave it to you, Dear Reader, to judge whether Le Bon’s yacht-dwelling fops do actually fall into the “decent” category, but it cannot be denied that, at the time, they were hot property on both sides of the Atlantic.

(At this point, I shall admit to having purchased said single, but will not dwell on this further, other than to point out that it remains the most successful Bond theme ever in chart terms, having reached number one in the US, so I was clearly riding some kind of zeitgeist. Also, I was nine.)

So, to GRACE! One of the weaknesses of the later Moore films lies with the routinely unthreatening villains – the anti-feminist pushover Octopussy and business-bore Aris Kristatos to name but two – but AVTAK provides us with a double-dose of charismatic anti-heroism, in the shape of Jones’ May Day and the abominable Max Zorin (a surprisingly fresh-faced Christopher Walken). Zorin is the super-intelligent yet psychopathic result of Nazi medical experiments, out to dominate the world’s microchip market by triggering a massive Earthquake on the San Andreas Fault which will flood and destroy Silicon Valley. His relationship with May Day is complex, falling somewhere between co-conspirator, lover and martial arts teacher/pupil.

Walken, of course, is a man able to look intimidating while tap dancing and, having seen Jones performing in person last summer, I can confirm that even at 63 years of age she still cuts the kind of figure that you might imagine eats British secret agents for breakfast. May Day is a woman of few words, leaving Jones to convey menace via a serious of turn-to-stone glowers. If not technically accomplished, it’s still a captivating performance, not least as a rare example of female empowerment in the Bond series; Jones’s sheer physical presence pre-empts Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp, Goldeneye’s thigh-crushing femme fatale.

Re-watching AVTAK today, it seems overlong and unnecessarily convoluted, though there are highlights: 007 snowboards down a mountain to the sound of the Beach Boys, a sequence credited with kick-starting the sport’s popularity; a tense horse racing scene gives new meaning to the phrase “raising the bar”; we meet a female henchwoman named Jenny Flex, which may or may not be a pun on the word ‘genuflex’, a name aiming much higher than the standard Pussy Galores. Generally, however, the film’s saving grace lies with its charismatic pair of villains.

One final thought: AVTAK was the end of an era in two ways. Not only did it mark the end of Moore’s tenure as James Bond, but the original line-up of Duran Duran would not record together for another quarter of a century. Small blessings indeed…

Blogalongabond is the ingenious brainchild of blogger The Incredible Suit.

The British Guide To Showing Off

“Being natural is merely a pose, and the most irritating one I know” – Oscar Wilde

The notion of camp has been an integral, if much misunderstood, part of British cultural life for more than a century, from the humour of the music halls, through the innuendo of Round the Horne and the Carry On series, to the dressing-up-box excess of ‘70s glam rock and the ‘80s New Romantic scene. Jes Benstock’s 2011 documentary The British Guide to Showing Off, released on DVD this week, profiles a man who perhaps more than any other figure exemplifies this country’s love of camp. Encompassing all of the contradictions that this suggests Benstock weaves together its disparate elements in regal style.

Artist, sculptor and performer Andrew Logan first staged the Alternative Miss World competition in 1972 and the film follows his preparations for the twelfth event, staged in 2009, while looking back on the competition’s history and the eccentric menagerie of people who have been involved along the way.

The Alternative Miss World is a pageant of the outsider, featuring an array of contestants (including several members of Logan’s family) dolled up in a series of extravagantly outrageous outfits, from drag queens to theatrical performers and grotesques. As in the non-alternative version, the lovelies must model a range of costumes – day wear, evening wear and swim wear – though in Logan’s version, shallow beauty is replaced by creativity, self-expression and a celebration of the different. The result is a very British creation, yet clearly reminiscent of Studio 54, Warhol and the spectrum of New York oddities that moved in his creative orbit and appeared in his work.

The cast of characters who have been involved in the contest over the years, many of whom appear in the film, is a virtual who’s who of British pop and even high culture; David Hockney (who judged the first contest), David Bowie (who failed to gain entry to the second), Zandra Rhodes (who designs all of co-host Logan’s outfits), Derek Jarman, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Brian Eno, Ruby Wax, Nick Rhodes and Julian Clary have all been part of it, either as judges, guests, co-hosts or even contestants. The spirit of creative otherness and freedom that Logan has engendered brings to mind Jean Cocteau’s declaration that “I am a lie that always speaks the truth”; beneath the makeup and costume lies a fundamental truth about British culture, to the extent that the contest has reflected and influenced the look and attitude of almost every major pop musical movement of the past thirty five years, from glam to punk to the Blitz Kids, taking in Rocky Horror along the way.

The film mirrors Logan’s sense of playfulness, including Python-esque animation, collages of photographic images and some wonderful footage of the contest down the years, as well as revealing interviews with former contestants and some intriguing talking heads. Despite some problems including budgetary concerns (incredibly, Logan’s team manage to entice major companies including Swatch to sponsor the event) and a desperate hunt for venues, Logan comes across as perennially cheerful, open and likeable. Far from being a specifically ‘gay’ event, the Alternative Miss World challenges perceptions of sexuality and encourages us all to embrace the myriad layers of our personalities. As Logan himself says, “this whole thing is about realism”.

In an age in which ‘alternative’ has come to mean the creative cul-de-sac of Coldplay, while the depressing factory line of X-Factor defines performance, Andrew Logan and his pageant are a key reminder of our culture’s camp heritage, individualism and tradition of reacting against the norm. The British Guide to Showing Off is nothing less than a journey through the alternative history of Britain.

The British Guide To Showing Off is available on DVD now, released by Verve Pictures.

Blogalongabond – Octopussy: An All Time Low?

Political correctness and James Bond have always been mutually exclusive. Ian Fleming’s literary 007 was an unreconstructed chauvinist, a reflection of the author’s own tastes and prejudices and an “anonymous, blunt instrument”, as Fleming himself called his creation. Russian journalist Yuri Zhukov described the world of this Bond as “nightmarish…where laws are written at the point of a gun, where coercion and rape are considered valour”, but the cinematic Bond has routinely been lent redeeming charm by the humour and suavity of the actors cast to play him.

In 1983, we were treated to not one, but two Bond films, as Sean Connery’s return in Never Say Never Again faced up to Roger Moore’s sixth outing as Connery’s successor in the official series, Octopussy. The promotional posters for Octopussy featured the tagline “nobody does him better”, a tacit acknowledgement of the competition between the two, but in truth Connery was the winner as the Broccoli camp produced one of their duffest and most troubling efforts in Octopussy.

The origins of the film lie in a posthumously published short story by Fleming, the plot of which is largely ignored in the film, used solely to provide a back story to the titular character. While the two preceding films (Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only) offered absurd science fiction and an attempt to add depth to the Bond character respectively, Octopussy is a muddled and convoluted affair, which leaves an unpleasant taste of right-wing misogyny and casual racism in the mouth.

As ever, we begin with a stand-alone pre-title sequence, in this case involving Bond’s escape from Cuban communists using a light aircraft disguised as a horse’s arse. Soon, however, we encounter a more sinister set of reds, as Soviet General Orlov (played by Stephen Berkoff, a man who never knowingly under acts) seeks to take advantage of European unilateral nuclear disarmament in order to expand his country’s borders. The message here is clear: back off peaceniks, nukes are necessary.

Confusingly, we then encounter yet more villains and Orlov is offered little subsequent screen time. Instead, Bond heads to India to investigate a fake Fabergé egg, coming up against exiled Afghan prince Kamal Khan (Louis Jordan), who works for a mysterious female cult leader (think Blofeld, with a preference for sea life). The India of Octopussy is a parade of clichés; dirty, taxi-strewn streets are filled with elephants, snake charmers, sword swallowers, beds of nails, hot coals and rope tricks. The natives dine on curry and sheep’s heads, while Bond’s Indian contact Vijay (played by real-life tennis professional Vijay Amritraj, a fact which is referenced more than once) resembles a satirical character from BBC sketch show Goodness Gracious Me.

Even more worrying than this rather tiresome stereotyping is the film’s attitude to its female characters. Of course, Bond’s womanising is a major element  of his character, and one which FYEO attempted to address through reference to his dead wife, but for a film made in the post-feminist era, Octopussy (from its suggestive title onwards) seems strangely misogynistic.

Bond’s usual flirting with Moneypenny is quickly undermined by his new interest in her young assistant, with Moneypenny treated like yesterday’s news. Khan’s strangely anachronistic barge is rowed by a bevy of bikini-clad, semi-slave girls. When he finally comes face-to-face with Octopussy herself, Bond ignores the standard “no means no” rule, virtually forcing himself on her (despite her protestations, she is predictably unable to resist his overpowering ‘charms’), while her island paradise is entirely populated by scantily-clad swimwear models.

Perhaps the only moment of female empowerment in the film sees said models turn ninja, aiding Bond in giving Khan’s minions an almighty kicking, a sequence that still requires little clothing and bears more resemblance to an Eric Prydz video than, say, Kill Bill. However, the novelty of a female villain is lost in Octopussy’s turning to 007’s aid, which leaves her as just another, rather underwhelming Bond girl.

On a separate note, Octopussy contains some of the weirdest dressing-up in the Bond series. Much of this is due to the bizarre inclusion of a circus as a key part of the world domination/egg-smuggling plot; indeed, 009 meets a sticky end early on having been knifed in the back while dressed as a clown (though he does get to boot a villain in the jewels with his enormous shoes). Bond himself slaps on the pancake while attempting to locate a nuclear bomb, lending a sense of levity to an otherwise fairly serious scenario. We also see 007 in a monkey outfit and fleeing would-be assassins in a safari suit, a scene during which he delivers a farcical Tarzan impression, complete with Johnny Weissmuller yodel.

The theme tune of Octopussy is Rita Coolidge’s ‘All Time High’, a song which flopped in the UK charts. Similarly, the film’s confused plot, lack of engaging action and outdated, often distasteful attitudes make Octopussy itself one of the Bond series’ all time lows.

Blogalongabond is the ingenious brainchild of blogger The Incredible Suit.

Blood on the Ice: Goon, violence & hockey cinema

As a young man in a small town in the north of England, entertainment was hard to come by in the late 80s and early 90s. My particular town did boast a two screen cinema (now an Australian theme pub) but in our pre-pub/club days, there really was only one social option: the local ice-rink. This pigeon-infested structure was of interest to local youth largely on the basis of the skate discos held there each weekend (think ‘50s hops, but colder). However, of far more interest to me were the rink’s resident stars: the most successful British ice hockey team of the day, the legendary Durham Wasps.

As today, the North East was a hotbed of football, with my town split – sometimes violently – between two local teams. A uniting sight, however, were the numerous, colourful Michelin Man-sized jackets worn around town by fans of the hockey team. I was a regular, shivering in the stands as a coalition of local boys and Canadian imports took to the ice in my name. This was a fast game, thrillingly dangerous, as blades sent sleet into the air, sticks clattered into midriffs, and pucks and bodies alike clattered plexiglass partitions.

Goals were met with cheers and chants by a surprisingly female-heavy crowd (particularly when compared to the aforementioned football), but it was a far more sinister element of the game which really worked the fans into frenzy: the fighting. On a ridiculously regular basis, members of both teams would remove various gloves and helmets and begin a punch up of the type that would be familiar yet frowned upon in the taxi queue not 200 yards away.

This violence wouldn’t be tolerated in any other team sport yet even to a sensitive youth like myself, its prevalence was intrinsic to the essence of the sport. I recall a local news report on one game concluding, “Eventually, a game of hockey broke out”. It was with all this in mind that I sat down to watch Canadian hockey comedy, Goon.

STIFLER ON ICE

Written by Seth Rogen collaborator Evan Goldberg in conjunction with one of the film’s stars Jay Baruchel, Goon approaches the inherent violence of the sport in a manner not seen since 1977’s Slap Shot and with as much brutal relish as the most bloodthirsty boxing movie. That the film is in the hands of Michael Dowse of Take Me Home Tonight and It’s All Gone Pete Tong ‘renown’ did not fill me with confidence; nor did the fact that the lead is played by Stifler himself, Seann William Scott. However, Goon is a movie which surprises not only in its violence, but in its successful comedy and central performances.

A “goon”, as any fule kno, is a hired thug, and the word is commonly used in Canadian hockey to describe a player whose role is to protect his team mates, rather than to contribute to the general play. In Goon, Ross Rhea (Liev Schreiber) is the ultimate example of such a player; an ageing hard man who prides himself on his ability to physically overpower any opponent, and whose assault on Halifax Highlanders’ flair player Xavier LaFlamme (Marc-Andre Grondin) has left the French-Canadian terrified, out-of-form and spiralling into a world of drugs, loose women and prima donna behaviour.

Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) becomes a local hero in Goon

Into this uber-masculine world enters our hero Doug Glatt (Scott), son of an intellectual Jewish family, whose parents and brother are doctors with inflated expectations of their boy. Doug is an amiable idiot; slow, yet self-aware enough to understand that he cannot match his parents’ academic demands. Taken to a minor league hockey game by his best friend Pat (Baruchel), Doug earns notoriety and praise when violently defending Pat in a scuffle with an opposition player. This street fighting performance attracts the attention of the team coach and the offer of a contract. Soon Doug is on the other side of the glass, as his inability to skate or play hockey fails to dissuade the Highlanders from picking him as the ideal on-ice bodyguard for the out-of-sorts LaFlamme.

Scott brings a surprising amount of heart to the character of Doug, whose gentle naivety and innate loyalty includes a touching belief in his teammates and willingness to suffer in their name. When he meets hockey fan Eva (Alison Pill), it transpires that this decency and acceptance of physical and emotional pain also applies to romance. Even in the face of LaFlamme’s abuse, Eva’s unavailability and his parents’ disapproval, Doug’s decency away from the ice is in stark contrast to his brutality on it.

Make no mistake; this is a film which glories in violence. Just as in my days watching hockey in the local rink, the fans see the confrontation between their boys and the opposition as gladiatorial. With Eva (who admits her attraction to such primal physicality) and Pat cheering him on, Doug becomes the crowd’s hero, as he drops a series of rivals, happily waving his way towards the sin bin. The fight scenes are shot in close-up, every punch reverberating with the sound of slapped meat and claret colouring the ice below. That we are able to look beyond this blood-letting to enjoy the film’s occasional belly laughs and relate to Doug’s vulnerability is either a testament to Scott’s performance, or a damning indictment of our society’s numbness. You decide.

Of course, Doug’s path is inevitably leading to a climactic stand-off with Schreiber’s Rhea, though even their initial encounter betrays the mutual respect of gladiators; the suggestion being that these ‘goons’ are a vital part of the sport, willingly sacrificing themselves in the name of glory and the team ethic. It is an odd strength of the film that such mindless violence can seem to contain an element of heroism.

HOCKEY ON SCREEN

While the origins of Goon lie in a book called Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into a Minor Hockey League which detailed the career of boxer turned ice warrior Doug Smith, another clear influence is the 2004 Canadian documentary Les Chiefs. Les Chiefs follows the fortunes of five players with the Laval Chiefs, a semi-professional hockey team in Canada, including Mike Bajumy, whose brother produced the film. Bajumy, like Doug Glatt, came from an educated family (his parents were also doctors), but similarly rejected academia for the thrill of the minor leagues, much to the disapproval of his mother. Directed by Jason Gileno, the documentary details the squalid living conditions of the players and the violence of the game itself, while also revealing the blood lust of the Chiefs’ rabid fans.

The clearest link in Les Chiefs with the characters of Goon is found in the substantial shape of Tim Leveque and Dominic “The Giant” Forcier. Leveque joins the Chiefs mid-season to initial suspicion from his new team mates, but wins their respect by thrice defeating 6’7” Forcier in fights and eventually helping the team to the championship. This rivalry and Leveque’s ability to win respect through violence has much in common with Doug Blatt’s rise to prominence with the Halifax Highlanders and his eventual face off with Ross Rhea.

Of course, it would be foolish to consider Goon without placing it in the light of perhaps the best hockey film of all (Mighty Ducks fans, save your ire for the comments section), George Roy Hill’s aforementioned Slap Shot. Another comic-violent exploration of a struggling minor league team, it benefits from the presence of Paul Newman in the lead role and its refreshingly foul-mouthed collection of characters.

Slap Shot's terrifying Hanson brothers

The fictional Charlestown Chiefs, led by veteran player/coach Reggie Dunlop (Newman) are perennial losers who find their very existence under threat thanks to the closure of the local factory, the town’s major employer.  In an attempt to carry the morale-sapped team through to the end of the season, Dunlop resorts to manipulation, lies (suggesting that a mystery buyer may be about to transfer the Chiefs to sunny Florida) and an extreme change of tactics following the arrival of the Hanson brothers, a trio as dense as their jam jar glasses.

The Hansons are real ‘enforcers’, launching into violence at the slightest provocation, starting fights before the game has even begun and, at one point, even climbing into the stands to attack opposition fans. Suddenly, the team begin to win, the crowds return and Dunlop realises that this new ultra-violence may be the key to success. On the whole, his players revel in this new tactic, one even changing his name to the physically inappropriate ‘Killer’, but opposition fans are outraged (“GOONS GO HOME”, reads one banner) and Dunlop finds a moral opponent in his talented, college educated top scorer Ned Braden who insists, “I’m not gonna goon it up for you”.

Off the ice, many of the themes of Goon are present in Slap Shot, as the hockey players are presented not as elite sportsmen, but rather as hard-drinking, womanising wash-ups, caught in a spiral of small-town living, loneliness and divorce. Just as Goon’s Pat seems to belch obscenities with every breath, Dunlop is similarly profane (Newman admitted that the character spilled over into his own life and vocabulary) while the women who are drawn to hockey and to those who play it are portrayed as lonely alcoholics, dabbling in lesbianism and enjoying a love/hate relationship with the routine violence. This is far from the perecived glamorous world of professional sport.

Increasingly, Dunlop is corrupted by the violence he finds himself revelling in; one key scene sees him taunt an opposition goaltender until he provokes an attack. Grinning on the ice he, like Glatt, happily takes a beating on behalf of the team. This corruption perhaps reaches its apogee when Dunlop places a bounty on the head of an opposition player. He has lost touch with the game that has been his life and hockey, in both his eyes and those of most of the Chiefs’ players and fans, has become more about gore than goals.

Ultimately, all three films reveal very similar truths about the underside of minor league hockey and of the corruption of violence, though different conclusions are drawn. While Doug’s defining clash with Rhea provides the redemptive climax of Goon, Slap Shot relies on Reg’s realisation that winning by any means possible is a betrayal of his ideals. Violence is a part of hockey, but it is a sideshow, and should not be allowed to eclipse what is in itself a fast, skilful and exciting sport. Goon is a lot of fun, but not for the squeamish and certainly not for the sporting idealist.

Goon is released in cinemas on Friday January 6th via Entertainment One.

Blogalongabond – For Your Eyes Only: This Time it’s Personal

“Before setting out for revenge, you first dig two graves” – Chinese proverb.

Thus speaks Roger Moore’s James Bond to the beautiful and bereaved Melina Havelock as she prepares to avenge the murder of her parents by mysterious henchmen. As with the latest instalment in the franchise Quantum of Solace, revenge is a major theme of 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, a film which consciously sets out to reject the extravagance of its predecessor (Moonraker) while providing its hero with something approaching a back story.

We begin, as ever, with a short but key pre-title sequence, in which we find 007 standing beside the grave of his late wife. This may come as something of a surprise to non-Bond aficionados, who might understandably hold an image of Bond as the ultimate bachelor boy (Cliff Richard notwithstanding). However, we were introduced to Teresa “Tracy” Bond in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, who was murdered on the orders of arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld within hours of her nuptials. Just as the demise of Vesper Lynd at the end of 2006’s Casino Royale provided context for Bond’s driven, misogynistic coldness, this early reminder of his dark past offers an explanation for the revenge thriller to come in FYEO.

Our first taste of that which is best served cold comes immediately afterwards, as Bond is entrapped in a remote control helicopter at the mercy of the very same Blofeld (or so we assume – legal complications left the producers unable to use that character’s name and we never see his face; however, his bald head, wheelchair and clear affection for cats give the game away). Sitting atop a tall London building, which we can only assume has outstanding wheelchair access, “Blofeld” produces his usual over-egging of the assassination pudding, allowing 007 to regain control of the situation and dump the villain down a Beckton chimney stack.

John Glen, making his directorial debut, clearly realised that attempting to top the unparalleled absurdity of Moonraker (see PPH passim) would be a fool’s errand, and the plot of FYEO is infinitely more low-key, concentrating on character development and several very impressive stunt sequences, literally bringing the series back down to earth. A British spy ship is sunk, allowing a top secret system which controls the Royal Navy’s entire fleet of Polaris submarines to fall into unscrupulous hands. Bond is sent to investigate, at which point he crosses paths with Melinda (Carole Bouquet) who has already begun her campaign of revenge, taking out a suspect with a crossbow (apparently the weapon of choice for both female assassins and teenage psychopaths).

One signal of the shift in emphasis from previous films is the sheer lack of sex in FYEO. Far from bedding every skirt that moves, Bond is gently affectionate and almost fatherly towards Melina. At one point, faced with a young, naked blonde in his hotel bed, he insists she dresses and leaves the room. The blonde is sexually-terrifying Olympic ice-skating hopeful Bibi Dahl, played with perfect annoyance by real-life skater Lynn-Holly Johnson (not to be confused with the singer from Frankie Goes To Hollywood); her relationship with Bond is fairly absurd, but thankfully brief. The only woman with whom 007 actually becomes ‘intimate’ is fake-Countess Lisl von Schlaf (Casandra Harris), who amusingly transpires to hail from Liverpool. Even in this case, we are spared the gory details, though the Countess soon falls foul of the Bond curse as the victim of a beach buggy hit-and-run (Bond fact: at the time of filming, Harris was married to future 007, Pierce Brosnan).

Also mercifully missing from the film are Moonraker’s raised-eyebrow ‘humour’ and punning asides, along with that film’s globe-trotting location switches and over-reliance on gadgetry. Proof of this comes when Bond’s Lotus explodes, leaving him and Melina to flee armed pursuers in a battered 2CV - a car usually favoured by 1970s schoolteachers - during an enjoyable chase through the Spanish countryside. Indeed, the less over-the-top nature of the stunt set pieces is a strength of FYEO, with a lengthy pursuit through the Alps particularly impressive. The sequence sees Bond pack at least five Winter Olympic events into the space of ten minutes and should perhaps have seen the film re-titled The Spy Who Went Out in the Cold. Throughout the scene, 007 is pursued by lackeys on motorcycles, surely not the ideal mode of transport when going off-piste.

The major weakness of FYEO is the villains themselves who are fairly underwhelming. Bond’s main nemesis is Greek businessman Aris Kristatos, played by Julian Glover (earlier pipped by Moore for the role of Bond himself). Though a fine actor, Glover doesn’t bring the necessary maniacal oddness that we have come to expect of a super-villain, while the fact that his character is looking to make a quick buck from the cold war arms race, rather than achieve galactic domination, is another example of the film’s reigned-in ambition. This makes the arrival of the reliably larger than life Topol, as Kristatos’s pistachio-obsessed former colleague Milos Columbo, extremely welcome.

FYEO reaches its climax with another stunt sequence; having tracked Kristatos down to a mountain-top monastery, Bond and his companions proceed to scale an enormous cliff face in order to reach him. One is tempted to suggest that, with national security at stake, MI6 could have sent a fleet of SAS helicopters in to reclaim their hardware, rather than four Greeks in a basket, but that would be churlish. Perhaps we should just put it down to cuts in defence spending (though evidence suggests that this could be solved by simply sending 007 to a casino with what remains in the Treasury’s coffers)?

Despite the relatively straight tone of the film, perhaps the most bizarre scene in the entire series comes at the conclusion of FYEO, as our hero is patched through to the Prime Minister. Rather than portray a fictional character, impressionist Janet Brown is employed to impersonate Margaret Thatcher in a comic vignette involving husband Dennis, some biscuits and a talking parrot, which seems more suited to Not the Nine O’Clock News than a spy drama. Limited space prevents me from making any comments about Maggie proving the most convincing villain in the film.

Overall, this is mid-table Bond, never touching the heights of the Connery years, but avoiding the self-parody of Moonraker. The action is returned to sea and slopes and is all the better for it while Moore, despite advancing age, gives one of his better performances. The impressive stunt sequences aside, perhaps the most interesting things about For Your Eyes Only are the themes of revenge and the attempt to present Bond as a more rounded character, something which would anticipate the wounded, human secret agent that Daniel Craig has brought to our screens in recent episodes.

Blogalongabond is the ingenious brainchild of blogger The Incredible Suit.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Blogalongabond – Moonraker: When Powers met Skywalker

Mocking a Bond film for its absurdity is like taking Picasso to task for being abstract; that’s the essence of their art. Albert R Broccoli’s spy series has provided plenty of guffaw-provoking moments down the years, however, 1979’s Moonraker remains the epitome of Bond silliness, throwing in a dash of cynicism and plenty of comic cheese to boot.

Moonraker’s predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, had promised us that Bond would return in For Your Eyes Only. By the time filming commenced, however, the world was in the grip of sci-fi fever in the wake of 1977′s Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the Bond camp spotted a lucrative bandwagon. In Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel, Moonraker’s villain was a Nazi with a nuclear missile trained on London, but the film dispenses with all but his name (Hugo Drax), instead cramming in space shuttles, laser guns and Wookies (not really).

The cynicism of this alteration is apparent in the somewhat incoherent plot’s occasional similarities to the aforementioned sci-fi blockbusters; at one point we witness Bond turn his spaceship’s laser gun to manual in order to hit his target (presumably using “The Force”), while a laboratory’s entry keypad actually plays the chimes from Close Encounters’ alien craft.

We open with the usual pre-title sequence in which, apropos of nothing, Bond is turned upon by a gun-toting stewardess and thrown from his private plane without a parachute, an issue which causes our hero only mild inconvenience. We also discover that a space shuttle, loaned to Britain by the US, has been stolen. Quite why Britain would wish to borrow a space shuttle is unclear; perhaps the recently elected Thatcher government had plans for galactic conquest?

Drax himself is rendered instantly villainous by way of his ostentatious wealth, beard and German accent, which make his plan to commit genocide to pave the way for a master race seem somewhat like national stereotyping (the master race themselves look worryingly like the cast of the musical Hair). He instantly launches several extravagant attempts to kill 007, as ever passing up a number of perfectly decent opportunities to simply shoot him in the head. Instead, a series of loyal henchmen are quickly mopped up by Bond, turning one’s thoughts towards the brilliant Austin Powers skit about the effect on such henchmen’s families (not the only moment in the film that summons the ghost of Powers).

Among the henchmen is Jaws (another Spielberg reference?) who turns up to work for Drax, presumably recruited from the ‘intimidating heavy’ equivalent of Office Angels. Richard Kiel’s character had previously appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me, proving so inexplicably popular with children (perhaps this film’s true target demographic) that he was recalled for Moonraker and even rewarded with a girlfriend and Road to Damascus-style conversion. His sudden switch from the dark side is particularly hard to swallow and adds to the impression that this is more kiddie flick than spy thriller.

Roger Moore in Moonraker - "eyebrow-arching irony at its zenith"

One of the major criticisms of the film is its supposedly ‘comic’ approach, with Moore’s eyebrow-arching irony at its zenith. Certainly there is fun to be had, particularly as Bond is stalked by yet more potential assassins while cruising the canals of Venice; one scene involves a knife-throwing killer rising from a floating coffin, before Bond quickly returns him from whence he came. However, this is followed by a scene in which 007 outruns a speedboat in a motorised gondola, before taking it onto dry land for a drive through the Piazza San Marco. It’s more Benny Hill than Bond, and even features a ridiculous double-taking pigeon. Similarly, the use of music from other films to soundtrack key set pieces, such as The Magnificent Seven during a bizarre scene when Bond dresses as a cowboy, simply adds to the feeling that this is self-parody of the silliest kind.

There is some respite from the barrage of cheese, with occasional throwaway lines ranging from the Wildean (“Mr Bond. You return with all the inevitability of an unloved season”) to the Kenneth Williams-ean (“I believe he’s attempting re-entry, Sir”), but Moore’s oak-stiff delivery frequently seems more suited to the world of pantomime than international espionage.

As ever, there are babes in abundance, as our hero continues to ignore widely accepted sexual health advice. However, they are unmemorable in the extreme, with the exception of Corinne Dufour, who provides the film’s only genuinely dark moment when Drax has her pursued and eaten by a pack of dogs. Meanwhile, the name of scientist/CIA agent Holly Goodhead would provide Mike Myers with several films worth of mucky puns.

In this post-Bourne world, and in the light of Daniel Craig’s emotionally damaged, action-thug Bond, Moonraker seems camp and unbelievable. Equally ludicrous moments pop up throughout the Bond series, but this film’s attempt to stitch so many together, while self-consciously playing the ‘comedy’ card, leave it feeling retrospectively Powers-lite and very much of its moment. That it remained the highest grossing Bond film until 1995’s Goldeneye only goes to show how well Myers knew his audience when he launched his cash-cow parody on the world.

Blogalongabond is the ingenious brainchild of blogger The Incredible Suit.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

PPH @ LFF: The First Born and the Last of the Silent Era

I was lucky enough this week to attend the London Film Festival’s Archive Gala, which presented us with the latest in line of the BFI’s fine restorations of neglected British films, Miles Mander’s directorial debut The First Born.

The reappearance of this fascinating 1928 silent drama is timely, as the LFF audience has been treated to Michel Hazanavicius’s brilliant new homage to the dying days of silent film, The Artist. While Hazanavicius focuses on Hollywood, The First Born is a very British film which consciously reflects its era’s societal changes, while unconsciously finding itself in the midst of a vast sea change in the history of cinema itself.

Mander stars as the caddish Sir Hugo Boycott opposite a pre-blonde Madeleine Carroll, who plays his wife Maddie. With Maddie unable to produce an heir, and the couple quarrelling, Boycott leaves the country to travel to Africa. Retreating into London society, Maddie discovers a rather perilous solution to her problem, along with the attention of an admirer, and the film goes on to explore what were surely considered to be somewhat scandalous issues at the time with sensitivity and sophistication.

At the time that filming on the The First Born began, it would have been at the cutting edge of silent cinema. By the time of the film’s release, however, Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, shot the previous year, had opened at London’s Piccadilly Theatre and the age of the talkie had begun.  Just as The Artist covers a brief period when an established art form was about to be hit by the tidal wave of modernity, Mander’s film marks the end of an era in British cinema, while reminding us just how valuable much silent era British film was and is.

The issue of our attitudes to these films is reflected in the BFI’s excellent current campaign to “Rescue the Hitchcock 9”; the silent works of perhaps Britain’s greatest director, which have been much neglected and require substantial restoration. However, as Pamela Hutchison has observed in The Guardian (while previewing The First Born), the recent discovery of film reels by British director Graham Cutts in New Zealand was barely reported, and what coverage there was tended to concentrate on the footage’s Hitchcockian connections, rather than the reputation of Cutts himself. As Hutchison says, “by overstating [Hitchcock’s] influence we risk casting his peers into oblivion”. This new version of The First Born is certainly a step towards redressing that balance.

The shadow of Alfred the Great does fall across this film all the same. Mander appeared in films including Hitchcock’s The Pleasure Garden and Murder!, and his filmmaking style is clearly influenced by the director, while Carroll made perhaps her most famous appearance in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. The most important link to Hitchcock comes with Mander’s choice of co-writer, Alma Reville. Reville was married to Hitchcock, but she was also a long-established screenwriter in her own right and her work on The First Born showcases the thematic influence she would later bring to her husband’s films. Furthermore, one particularly memorable scene features a voyeuristically Hitchcockian handheld camera shot, as Sir Hugo searches for his wife through the marital bedroom; a cinematographic device which seems well ahead of its time.

The BFI’s restoration of The First Born, aided by the loan of a 16mm print of the film from George Eastham House in the United States, features expertly restored lost scenes and repaired damage, and returns the beautiful amber, pink and lavender tints which would have decorated 1920s showings. This makes for a compelling and good looking film, but one of the real stars of this new screening was not part of the original. A brand new score by composer Stephen Horne was performed for the first time as part of the Gala screening and provided a rich, unusual compliment to the film’s many moments of romance and suspense.

Performed by a three piece, including Horne himself on piano and various other instruments, Maddie’s melancholy and despair are reflected by a mournful oboe motif, while the trio manage to work up an edge-of-seat racket during moments of suspense and even segue into World Music-style percussion during the Africa sequence. The score also weaves in elements of well-known melodies, with the use of ‘Rule Britannia’ during a scene in which budding politician Sir Hugo unleashes his rhetoric on a crowd both effective and amusing.

The First Born’s denouement delivers a couple of delicious, unexpected twists regarding the fate of Sir Hugo and Maddie’s initial attempt to win back his love, and despite its vintage, it’s a surprisingly modern film, not least its refusal to cast judgement upon its female protagonist. This restored version offers a ringing endorsement of the BFI’s work, as well as confirmation that the era of British silent cinema deserves more of our attention, both as a record of a time of cultural and technological change and for the relevance and power it can still offer today.

Real Steel

Bay-dar bay·dar/ˈbādär / noun: the ability to deduce from a trailer that a film may consist of nothing more than a mindless cacophony of action and noise.

Upon first viewing the trailer for Real Steel, the latest effort from director Shawn Levy, I was surely not the only one whose Baydar tingled with the fear that this may be yet another film with nothing more to recommend it than the prospect of more large robots beating the Megatron out of one another. So, are we dealing with Rocky VII: This Time It’s Robots, or can Levy and leading man Hugh Jackman bring subtlety to the robo-blockbuster format?

In Real Steel, we find ourselves in the year 2020, a time when the primal violence of traditional boxing has been replaced in the public’s affection by the altogether more visceral thrills of huge, human-controlled machines fighting to the ‘death’ in the ring (think Robot Wars on a WWE scale). Jackman is Charlie Kenton, an ex-boxer who now cruises the highways of Texas and Nevada, fighting his rusting robot for small change and evading creditors at small town fairs.

Following the death of an ex-girlfriend, Kenton finds himself at a court hearing regarding the custody of his estranged son, leading to him strike the kind of deal which both stains his character in ways which seem impossible to overcome and sets up the father and son road trip which defines the film. The younger Kenton, Max, is a fan of the World Robot Boxing League and it is this common bond which offers Charlie’s shot at redemption.

Max is beautifully played by 12-year-old Dakota Goyo, whose previous roles include the young protagonist in Thor. His is a show-stealing, witty and wonderfully nuanced performance which avoids the brat trap that has snared so many child actors before him, and he easily overshadows Jackman’s cynical Charlie. There are echoes of the recent Super 8 in the uneasy, Spielberg-esque relationship which develops between Max, Charlie and Atom, the outdated robot, discovered by Max, which they take together into the seedy underworld of the low boxing circuit.

Whereas most of the fighting automatons resemble humanoid versions of the aforementioned Robot Wars contraptions (names such as ‘Noisy Boy’ being typical), Atom is more like Ted Hughes’ Iron Giant in a fencing mask. His glowing eyes possess a strange humanity that hint ambiguously throughout the film that he may indeed by sentient. Meanwhile, in the background, the supposedly unbeatable World Heavyweight Champion, Zeus, lurks like an end of level baddie.

There are some complaints: Zeus’ owner is a laughable Russian oligarch, whose accent and cold war frostiness recalls Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV (“If he dies, he dies”). There is also a strangely undeveloped relationship between Charlie and his ex-trainer’s daughter, played by Evangeline Lilly, who possesses a faith and trust in Kenton that his behaviour scarcely warrants. Our major villain, Ricky (another ex-prize fighter) also meets a less than satisfactory fate.

Ultimately, Real Steel lives or dies by its fight sequences, which are spectacular. As a film clearly aimed at a young demographic, the substitution of robots for humans allows a level of violence which would put Scorsese’s Raging Bull to shame. Using the legendary pugilist Sugar Ray Leonard as an adviser has ensured that many of the bouts are more realistic in terms of tactics than some traditional boxing movies, with the climactic battle bearing more than a slight resemblance to the celebrated doc Rumble In The Jungle.  The novelty of placing the warring machines within the boundaries of the ring also allows for a visual focus that the roaming brawls of Michael Bay’s dreadful Transformers series lacks.

The mystery over how aware or otherwise Atom is adds something close to pathos to the fight scenes, as Max clearly cringes at the blows his adored discovery is forced to endure. Though lacking the broadly human characteristics of previous lovable robots – WALL-E and Short Circuit‘s Johnny 5 spring to mind – Atom’s simple underdog status is enough to inspire us to root for him as he battles the odds, not to mention a ten-foot colossus.

After a fairly dull first half hour, Real Steel turns into an enjoyable and accessible film, with the outstanding Goyo and the excellent special effects (many of the sequences are improved by the use of animatronics rather than CGI) particularly successful. So, rather than simply Rocky with robots, this is a film which provides action and even a modicum of emotion in surprisingly effective measures, even offering an ending which is not quite as predictable as its story arc suggests.

Contributor Michael Mand can be followed on Twitter @grindermand. Real Steel is released in cinemas on Friday October 14.