007 Grows Up

Ladies, are your hearts racing? Gentlemen, do you feel inadequate? Then he has done his job.

Quick flashes of improbable stunts in British-manufactured sports cars while an overly bombastic and brassy theme plays? Yes, children, it’s that time of year again – they’ve released the teaser trailer for the new James Bond movie, and it follows the formula perfectly. 85% explosions and fight sequences, 10% sex, and 5% vague and ominous voiceover hinting at the inevitable fact that James Bond will once again fuck y’all’s shit up. Oh, it’s all there. Is there a plot? Who the hell cares! It’s a big budget, well photographed movie, and, why look! It’s Daniel Craig, all muscular and Aryan and eager to be forgiven for his part in The Golden Compass. Are you getting pumped up? Because I’m sort of pumped up.

You may think I’m being-

Oh, actually, let’s put this on pause for a second just so I can go on record and say Yes, that was a diss on The Golden Compass, and No, I don’t want to argue about it with you in the comments section. Yes, I know, I alluded in an earlier, terribly unfunny update that I was eager to see the movie based on the fact that it was perceived as atheist propaganda, but if that’s the best we atheists can do then I’m going to cash in my chips and find a religion that knows a thing or two about filmmaking. All I’m saying is that if a movie featuring a race of armored warrior bears can still find a way to be boring despite the gallons of inherent liquid Awesome at hand, there must be something seriously wrong with it. No, for your information, I didn’t read the book, but I doubt that reading the book is going to change my opinion of a movie that could have been two hours of awesome armored bear fights but was instead not two hours of awesome armored bear fights. Good day, sir.

Anyway,

You may think I’m being sarcastic in my analysis of the new James Bond trailer, but to be honest, I am truthfully quite pumped up. Ordinarily, action movie trailers of this sort don’t have much effect on me, because I’ve seen enough crappy movies with awesome trailers to fill a Hollywood Video and at this point I know to look past the glitz and explosions for the characteristics that really matter, like story and boobs. However, the James Bond franchise and I have sort of an agreement: They release a trailer, I think it’s awesome, I see the movie, and I may or may not be satisfied. But that’s cool, that’s cool, because at the very least there will be explosions and boobs.

As a kid I was a raving James Bond fanatic. The first movie that I ever remember calling my Favorite Movie Ever was Goldfinger - I’d seen that movie hundreds of times before I reached an age at which I could understand why a name like Pussy Galore always made my Dad snicker under his breath. My fanaticism continued throughout elementary school as I devoured as many of the films as my parents deemed appropriate for my young eyes (to this day I have not seen Octopussy). There was one week in fourth grade when I rented The Living Daylights on Monday, and then proceeded to watch it after school, every day, until the five day rental period was up. I have no idea why I decided to watch the same movie five times in as many days, but I do know that by Wednesday the act of coming home and chilling out with Timothy Dalton for two hours was more a matter of habit than choice. Picasso had his Blue Period, I had my The Living Daylights Period – both were major turning points in the cultural landscape of the 20th century.

Every few years, much to my childish delight, they’d release a new James Bond movie, and I’d eagerly badger my parents to take me to see it with all the ferocity of a crackhead who has just found out that his dealer is having an all-you-can-smoke crack buffet. Two Bond movies came out during the height of my craze - Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough. Now, while Tomorrow Never Dies didn’t gain quite the same fanbase as its superb predecessor, Goldeneye, I still considered it to be a thoroughly entertaining movie, and between 4th and 5th grade I watched it with the same zeal with which I’d approached The Living Daylights. It had explosions and gunfights and all the things I liked; I felt at the time that it could’ve done without all the sappy romance stuff, and looking back I think I really didn’t understand the plot too thoroughly either, but that was okay – it had the explosions and gunfights, and as we all know, a spoonful of violence makes the medicine go down.

However, after I saw The World Is Not Enough, something strange happened that I had never experienced before: I realized that I’d just watched a really sucky James Bond movie. Imagine, Christians, if archaeologists unearthed a new gospel belonging to The New Testament, and it was verified as 100% legitimate, and you, having devoted your life to Christ, were understandably eager to find out what else old J.C. had to say. But then imagine, having read it, that it was really boring and had terrible dialogue and was hokey to the point of being melodramatic. How would you feel at that point? Well, that was pretty much how I felt. It was almost as though my childhood ended on the sorrowful day that I watched a movie featuring a female lead named Christmas Jones,* a role that was apparently far too deep for Denise Richards to play convincingly. After The World Is Not Enough, I wisely decided to start growing out of James Bond, lest he break my heart again.

*Really? Christmas Jones? Come on. I know you’re out there, whoever wrote this festering turd of a movie, and I want you to know that I really, really hate you for that. It’s a time honored tradition of the James Bond franchise that the women have ridiculous names; however, they’re supposed to be weirdly suggestive, not weirdly stupid. But look at you – you mashed the name of a major holiday together with a bland, common last name, and then you took another hit of whatever drug turns people into horrible, horrible writers. How hard could it have been to think up a name that wasn’t just ludicrous but also suggestive? How about Lady Jameswill-Havesexwith? I came up with that right off the top of my head. Come on, people. She could be, like, British aristocracy, or something. They always have weird last names.

And then a few years later, came Die Another Day, and, enticed by the trailer, I cautiously let James Bond back into my life once again. I was treated to a film that begins with James Bond surfing into a North Korean military base completely undetected and just goes straight downhill from there until he’s parasailing across ice floes while being chased by a giant diamond-powered laser beam. I was 13 years old at the time and I considered that movie an insult to my intelligence; perhaps the target audience was people with ADD, or masochists. As I left the theater, I turned over my shoulder and sullenly bade a final farewell to James Bond. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Theme song by Madonna, you should be put on trial for war crimes.”

James Bond and I didn’t speak to one another for a good four years after that. It was early in my senior year of high school when I saw the trailer for Casino Royale and fell right back into the franchise’s metaphorical arms as placidly as the literally hundreds of women James Bond has taken to bed. The filmmakers had finally struck the perfect balance – a movie with all kinds of explosions and gunfights that also gives us credit for our intelligence and provides with James Bond more depth than just a walking penis with a gun.

This sort of thing has been happening a lot recently – a respectable, time-honored series goes on for too many installments and becomes embarrassingly silly and overblown, and finally somebody with considerable talent comes in and reboots the franchise in such a way that you don’t have to remove your brain and put it in a Mason jar just to sit through the entire film anymore. The other franchise to do this that comes to mind is Batman, which Christopher Nolan turned around by rebooting the series, adding realism, and subtracting nipples from the Batsuit. And yes, in case you were looking for my opinion, I have seen The Dark Knight, and it is decidedly groovy-pants.

Realism seems to be the key to success these days. Nobody wants to watch movies about James Bond coolly surfing into a warzone or a caricatured, fanfiful, nipple-y Batman – they want gritty, raw stuff that’s packed full of character development, movies where James Bond shows vulnerability and Batman has to deal with stuff like identity, ethos, and the greatest film villain in recent memory. And of course I use the term “realism” lightly, because in Casino Royale James Bond runs through a wall completely unharmed and in Batman Begins the Gotham City Police are somehow completely fooled when Batman turns off the headlights on the Batmobile, but these are acceptable discrepancies in the name of Awesomeness.

So I hope you’ll join in my excitement for Quantum of Solace - yes, the title may be kind of silly, but it certainly doesn’t suggest a woman with eight vaginas.

Truman Capps shamelessly stole the phrase “groovy-pants” from Zero Punctuation, hence why it was funnier than everything else in this update.