Movie Review: The Public (2018)

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As the third floor librarian of the Cincinnati Public Library working in the Social Sciences Department, the fields of psychology, sociology, political science, history, economic, public health, and more are Stuart Goodson's domain.

However, as we see shortly into The Public from writer-director-producer Emilio Estevez (who also plays Goodson), the librarian's experience with these subjects goes far beyond the printed page as everyday his workplace transforms into a veritable homeless shelter, which gives citizens freezing on the streets of Cincinnati a warm place to go for the day.

Bringing awareness to an epidemic that plays out in public libraries across the country, the film, which was inspired by an article that Salt Lake City Public Library Deputy Director Chip Ward wrote for "The Los Angeles Times" in 2007, became a twelve years in the making indie passion project for Estevez.

Without the support of the local government, which instead turns a blind eye to the crisis, Goodson spends his shifts playing the role of friend, social worker, referee, and first-responder to a group of homeless patrons he knows almost as well as the books on the library's shelves, letting instinct and kindness be his guide.

But when a deadly cold front hits Cincinnati and fills every shelter in the area, Goodson finds himself caught in the middle of a righteous act of civil disobedience as a group of roughly one hundred men refuses to leave the warmth of the library at the end of the day.

Taking a few moments to weigh the pros and cons of the action, which arrives in the middle of a frivolous lawsuit against the Cincinnati Public Library, Goodson decides to risk everything and join the men's cause in the hopes that the mayor will sanction the library an emergency shelter for the night.

Having proclaimed that books saved his life, even though he understands they're facing an uphill legal battle, Estevez's aptly named Stuart Goodson knows that as a good son adhering to the rights of the nation's founding fathers in his role as a librarian, sometimes you have to stop stewing in the arts and stand up for what's right.

Filled with symbolism, speechifying, and signposting, The Public wears its heart in each one of cinematographer Just Miguel Azpiroz's frames. And while Estevez raises a number of valid and urgent points from start to finish, I couldn't help but wish that the film would have woven its main thesis into a much more organic narrative tapestry than it ultimately does.

Rather than draw us into The Public with character-driven storytelling, we're repeatedly told how to feel as (even with the best of intentions) Estevez introduces and then abandons important subtopics from the opioid crisis to media manipulation throughout the film's roughly two hour running time.

A work with a lot on its mind and all of it worthy of deeper discussion, the decision to turn Ward's article into a fictional feature is ambitious indeed since — as someone not only passionate about libraries but who also grew up in and around them — I believe there's enough here to warrant an HBO documentary miniseries.

Buoyed by a terrific turn by Estevez (in his strongest role in years), the film boasts a who's who cast of terrific and largely criminally underutilized character actors including Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, Christian Slater, Michael Kenneth Williams, Taylor Schilling, Gabrielle Union, and Alec Baldwin that's sure to delight fans.

Though continuing Estevez's great tradition of making socially conscious features like The War at Home and complex Altmanesque ensemble pictures like the masterful Bobby, The Public falls short of those films by too often spelling out key plot points and character reveals as if holding up a sign at a protest rally.

But thanks to Estevez's wise decision to add levity and laughter to the issue to try to appeal to a wider audience, it's one cause we'd be proud to stand up for along with Goodson and The Public since in the end, humanism should be in all of our domains.

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DVD Review: Cadillac Records (2008)

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Although pop culture would tell you otherwise, rock 'n roll did not begin with Elvis Presley at Memphis, Tennessee’s Sun Records. Instead, rock had its origins in the blues and later rhythm and blues. And while arguably the first bona fide rock 'n roll star was none other than Chuck Berry—Berry’s story along with the other pioneers of rhythm and blues that led to rock 'n roll as we now know it today has basically been left in the dust.

While interviews with artists like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and other musicians along with musical scholars will cite there early blues influences and a few years ago an entire PBS documentary was dedicated to the subject-- writer-director Darnell Martin said to change all that in a minor way with her stunning, underrated ensemble piece Cadillac Records.

Although admittedly, some of the facts have been blended together and some of the personalities have been left by the wayside to squeeze in what Martin explains was “the absolute truth” of the stories she wanted to tell “about how the blues became popular music, how it affected civil rights,” by whittling down her 150 page first draft to a feature-length movie running just 109 minutes, she achieves a wonderful success that works on two levels.

Firstly, she's made it one hell of a great film about the blues (which in reality is surely about the history of the American people) by calling attention to artists that have been long forgotten and secondly, like a cool walking musical encyclopedia, Martin earns in n honorary title as professor in making us want to not only seek out the recordings by these amazing artists but also learn more about them as human beings.

Purporting to tell the history, inception, and impact of Chicago's own Chess Records initially created by first-generation Polish immigrants Leonard and Phil Chess (although Phil is mostly absent from the film aside from a few scenes in which we infer he’s the “other white guy” next to Adrien Brody), Martin simultaneously weaves in the story of the artists who would join the label including Leonard Chess’s first great star, Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright).

In yet another phenomenal, chameleon-like performance by the great Jeffrey Wright -- the type of which we’re beginning to take for granted on—he tackles Muddy first as a sharecropper in Mississippi whose life was forever changed by a happy accident when his voice was recorded by two men from Fisk University who had initially set out see record the fault music of the late Robert Johnson. After they learned that Johnson had passed away, they were directed to Muddy’s porch and following an impromptu recording that gave the future “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy” the first opportunity to hear the way he sounded on vinyl, he memorably noted he felt as though, “I’m meeting myself for the first time.”

It was with those determined and confident words that Muddy packed his guitar and headed north without looking over his shoulder to Chicago where he formed two important relationships. The first was with Geneva (Gabrielle Union) who would become his longtime love and the second was none other than Leonard Chess, with whom Muddy began making records, taking part in payola schemes, getting him as well as the rest of the Chess lineup of artists unprecedented air-play and treating them to shiny new Cadillacs sometimes without informing them that it was being taken out of their royalties.

Admittedly in the 1950s, both the friendship and relationship -- especially when money was involved -- between both white and black individuals was charged with complexity over whether or not the musician was being exploited and the idea that a white man may have been needed to be the front for the organization in order to lead to the era of Motown but Martin never makes any concrete judgments about her characters.

This is especially evident as other artists join the roster and Martin manages to interlace some double-standards and new thoughts coming from all involved—mostly in the form of Muddy’s greatest harmonica player and the seventeen year old hot-headed prodigy Little Walter (Columbus Short) and the fiery and proud Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker) who has extremely firm ideas about what we sense he felt was an evolved version of “slave” and “master.” Rounding out Martin’s ensemble piece, we’re also introduced to the terrific writer and current owner of Chess Records who has turned it into a museum, Mr. Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), and two of the most legendary acts—Chuck Berry (Mos Def) and Etta James (Beyonce Knowles).

Although it was Muddy that paved the way, eventually it was Berry’s blend of country and rockabilly helped destroy racial barriers playing sold out gigs to white and black listeners alike along with appearing on television. Yet, unfortunately while his song “Sweet Little Sixteen” was blatantly stolen by The Beach Boys for the background of “Surfin’ USA,” and his career was cut short when he was imprisoned for driving a white female minor across state lines (making his dalliances with young women not that much different than Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley), soon a savior managed to enter the recording studio at precisely the right moment in the form of the exquisite yet contradictorily volcanic Ms. Etta James (Knowles).

Despite her deceptively sweet appearance, James was a woman who as Leonard described “lived the blues” instead of just singing about them. With a horrific addiction to heroin and countless family problems including a failure to get her rumored father Minnesota Fats to acknowledge his paternity, James as played by Knowles is walking heartbreak. Anyone who thought that the singer’s vast improvement as an actress in Dreamgirls was a fluke will be immediately taken aback by her dynamic portrayal in this film.

In the part written exclusively for the musician by Ms. Martin and amazingly shooting all of her scenes in just six days, Knowles is able to effortlessly capture James’ tough-talking demeanor, her more vulnerable side opposite Oscar winner Adrien Brody (in a few scenes that really send sparks flying), and most importantly bring the house down in recording session performances that will send shivers down your spine as she sings not just “At Last,” but also “Once in a Lifetime,” and “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

While indeed there is some accurate criticisms about liberty being taken with the facts, Martin surpasses expectations by avoiding the trappings of strict biopic and moving into a far more daunting challenge of bringing to life several figures at the same time. To tell you just the Leonard Chess story, or just the Muddy Waters story, or just the Chuck Berry story, or just the Etta James story wouldn't have captured the real story namely that of the blues which is what provided the soundtrack of the American experience.

Over the past few years, we've been inundated with biopics and while some of them have been exceptional such as James Mangold’s Walk the Line-- the decision to move away from that tried and true paradigm and instead embrace the idea of presenting us with an authentic sense of time and place is what sets Cadillac Records apart.

In the incredibly worthwhile roughly twenty-seven minute making-of-featurette “Playing Chess,” the filmmaker accurately describes the approach in the work of the cast as “everybody’s playing a different instrument.” Effectively managing to make the most of their limited budget by ensuring the production and costumer designers always knew what was going to be seen by the camera at any given moment to avoid unnecessary expenses, the largely female production team discuss the methods they used in augmenting the story from using both color and texture to truly “sell the period.”

Employing a large amount of blues, greens, purples and browns near the opening—Martin reveals in the design featurette “Once Upon a Blues,” that she was extremely careful about avoiding the color red until the moment Chuck Berry and rock ‘n roll are officially introduced. In addition to providing deleted scenes, the filmmaker also takes part in a feature-length commentary track that would be of extreme interest to music buffs as Martin’s knowledge of the characters, Chess records, music, and the time period is extraordinarily detailed, which is evident from the start as she helps clear the air on factual items that didn’t make it into the movie.

Unfortunately overlooked in a crowded December filled with a large amount of Oscar bait pictures making their way daily into theatres across the states, luckily Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s underrated gem is now available in both DVD and Blu-ray high definition where the sound on even the DVD alone manage to heighten the sound of James’ “At Last” or Waters’ “Mannish Boy” to concert level quality despite your sound system setup.

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Soundtrack From iTunes
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Blu-ray Review: Quantum of Solace (2008)

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3/24/09

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Read the Original Theatrical Review

I. An Introduction

Bond couldn't have arrived on Blu-ray at a better time in history. Not only is the format war between HD-DVDs and Blu-rays officially over but the parent studios of James Bond-- Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and United Artists-- find their discs distributed in tandem with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures. The Blu-rays produced by Fox and Sony boast unprecedented and consistently exceptional quality that makes even average films far superior in your living room than at the multiplex.

Gone are the problems of artifacting or muddy browns and gray that appear in the Blu-rays offered by some other competitors-- Sony and Fox manage to exceed our expectations. Fox in particular, hot off the triumph that was the restoration of The French Connection to a Blu-ray disc that even its director William Friedkin called the best version of the film ever made available has also managed to elevate downright shoddy fare like Max Payne or The Boondock Saints to ridiculously sophisticated levels.

In the case of this Bond-- the effect is immediate as we discover that not only the picture offers mind-blowing depth that makes you feel like you're speeding along inside the boat with Bond and Olga in Quantum but the strains of Tosca in Forster's opera sequence come through as though we were front row center at the performance.

The previously distracting and overly video game styled CGI and hyper cut feel of Quantum of Solace still cause to its let-down in comparison to the predescessor Casino Royale (a.k.a. the purest and best James Bond film made thus far) but when transferred digitally to Blu-ray, it's a bit smoother, absorbing it as though it were one of Sony's video game systems. However, before I go more in-depth on the subject of the Blu-ray, here's a reprint of my original review of Quantum of Solace seen on the largest screen in Arizona back in November.

II. The Theatrical Review

Publication Date: 11/14/08

As that rare breed of feminist who can still recite every single entry of the James Bond franchise from memory and manage to overlook its eye-roll inducing moments of the Playboy lifestyle as the quintessential late 20th century hero managed to charm the dress off of every woman in sight and knock every man out cold, I must say I was looking extremely forward to catching Quantum of Solace.

Yet this morning looking over the majority of blurbs at Rotten Tomatoes, I realized the reactions were similar to the great political divide in America-- much to the left and much to the right with very few people falling in between. We had the gleefully upbeat freewheeling praise on one side and the witty puns of shame on the other like "The Spy Who Bored Me," and "License to Confuse," as the detractors seemed to make like Catskills comedians all answering the "It was so bad-- how bad was it?" style of jokes. Yet I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, still fondly recalling some of my favorite Bond movie moments that remain as vivid as when I first watched the movies along with my older brother.

My first Bond film onscreen was seeing Pierce Brosnan's debut as the smug and seductive variety (essentially shaking together pieces of both Connery and Moore into a human version of that famous martini), in the excellent Goldeneye. Yet, following the fun diversion of Michelle Yeoh as an ass-kicking martial arts Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, the franchise seemed to have run its course with the atrocious The World is Not Enough (save for the gorgeous theme song by Garbage that is Shirley Bassey Goldfinger good) and Die Another Day.

That is, however, until Bond went blonde and both the women and men had much more fun with Casino Royale, an epic old-fashioned style spy film with a worthwhile romance and the best Bond girl yet with Dreamers star Eva Green's sultry and stunning yet smart and sophisticated Vesper Lynd. Of course, it didn't hurt that Daniel Craig stepped into the lead role, really wearing more than just the suit with his incredible looks but also taking the emotional depth of work he'd completed in art-house dramas and injecting it into Ian Fleming's hero.

Starting at zero as Bond earns his '00 status in the opening sequence of Royale, it seemed as though we'd been given the chance to begin again, reinventing the character so that he resonated with contemporary society. And then a funny thing happened on the way to the sequel with the smash success of the Matt Damon's Bourne Identity action trilogy featuring rapid-fire editing and shaky camera work.

More specifically, movies became video games and while the action in Bond was always on a different level-- from the opening of Monster's Ball, The Kite Runner, Stranger than Fiction and Finding Neverland director Marc Forster's first turn at the wheel with the opening car chase in Quantum of Solace, we realize that we're presented with the cinematic equivalent of chaos.

While Bourne's style took some getting used to but ultimately served the film well, especially considering it had the brains to balance the buoyant editing and camerawork and a shaky camera helped get us right into the action in this year's Cloverfield and Eagle Eye, when it comes to Quantum, it's hard to keep up and frankly, we realize we could care less.

As our eyes strain to figure out which character just landed another blow or dove off a high structure and our ears feel as overpowered as though we're right near the speaker at a Metallica concert, Solace is a barely comprehensible, illogical, irritating, and downright ludicrous mess that's not only one of the biggest disappointments of the year for a Hollywood blockbuster but doubly tragic when it followed what is quite possibly the best Bond film ever made.

With an homage to Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, Diamonds are Forever, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and countless other Bond movies thrown into its succinct 106 minute running time (despite it feeling endless), on the surface it seems to follow the events from the previous film. With his lover Vesper dead, Bond decides that the best way to get closure is to get even, wreaking bloody havoc on anyone that crosses his path, while trying to uncover just who was behind her blackmail and responsible for her demise.

Managing to axe every lead like a wicked madman in some spectacular stunt work that comprises fights which go from one location to the next in typical Bond chase fashion-- instead of relishing in the excitement as we did in so many other beginnings-- the shoddy camera work, pointlessly pretentious inter-cuts to other high culture events, and distracting editing ruins every single action sequence. This is especially apparent in an airplane crash that looks so computer generated, for a moment, I felt like the reel had accidentally switched to James Bond: Quantum of Solace-- The Video Game.

Following the first forty minutes which finds us barely engaged with a Bond so icy and one-dimensional, Craig could've just been played by a stand in or one of those gorgeous eye-candy posters of the man adorning the walls of local Sony stores, and a plot that somehow finds us trying to take on the evil "fake-environmentalist" (yep, not exactly in the same realm as Odd-Job, Jaws or even that freaky diamond dude in Die Another Day), we start getting some semblance of an actual story. Yet, it's one of those that's so off-the-wall and barely plausible that it's almost as meaningless as the film's title itself which is destined to leave your brain as soon as the final credits roll.

Instead, it's obvious Forster just wanted to set aside art-house pretensions (aside from one excellent scene in an opera house that is pompous yet wonderfully staged) and leave the heavy lifting to the fight-choreographer, a cinematographer and editor who may need to switch to decaf and lay off the Red Bull, and stuntmen who no doubt are in traction at a hospital somewhere, if all of their limbs are still intact that is.

Headache-inducing and nowhere near as classy or superbly entertaining as Bond at his best whether it's in Goldfinger, Goldeneye, Casino Royale or some of the wildly unbelievable yet engrossing string of films starring Roger Moore like For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved Me, Quantum of Solace may boast a better Bond than Timothy Dalton but film-wise, I'd rather sit down and watch Dalton's The Living Daylights again for some much needed solace after Solace.

Or maybe I'll just grab Casino Royale and wistfully pine for what could've been had the filmmakers either quit while they were ahead or stayed away from video poker and slot machines and just continued to play Baccarat... since obviously Royale's Texas Hold 'Em led them astray. And while it's always good to try something new, it's called gambling for a reason and maybe it's time for the franchise to take a good long look at itself and question whether or not they need to make a meeting, go through twelve steps, and try something different instead of playing things so fast and loose, we don't even recognize the man in the tux any longer.

III. The Solace of Blu-ray

As previously mentioned in the introduction-- the film plays much, much better on Blu-ray. While all of the problems listed in the review remain with the movie itself-- the viewing experience is vastly superior, making the recent advent of 3D at the cineplex seem all the more intriguing and timely given 2008's poor ticket sales.

Simply put-- when we're given this wonderful of a motion picture experience at home without the annoyance of talkative patrons, popcorn filled floors, or high ticket prices-- the best bang for our buck turns out to be Blu-ray instead of the Box Office.

Testing out the disc in every different picture setting, I found it never failed to impress in its clarity and managed to make the most even out of basic television speakers simply via the HDMI cable. The sharp richness in the colors-- especially during the opera sequence which damn near sparkles like crystal as the tuxedo clad Bond walks down a solid white hallway and later tries to pick out one man in a sea of similarly dressed attendees doesn't falter in the slightest with unrivaled focus and clarity from the far left side of the screen to the right.

Overall, the Special Features run the typical gamut you would expect (with the interesting absence of filmmaker commentary or deleted scenes) and consist of the uninspired music video for Jack White and Alicia Keys' loud "Another Way to Die," that aside from its addictive chorus sounds a bit dissonant (as if matching the editing chaos of Solace) along with numerous featurettes.

With a few ranging from very brief typical "electronic press kit" stuff to more polished and professional lengthy behind-the-scenes endeavors complete with narration-- one of the standouts was Bond on Location which takes us into the process of Forster's determination to scout for and discover imaginative locations that one wouldn't normally expect in a Bond world.

Noting that Daniel Craig's turn in Casino Royale suddenly had given the world a Bond with whom we could relate (as opposed to the dry wit of Brosnan, perfect coif of Dalton, Moore's take-it-in-stride and Connery's penchant for misogyny), the Swiss-German director Forster speaks about the challenges and extremely high expectations in making what would be a direct sequel to the previous film in trying to keep up the momentum of the previous film's phenomenal storytelling and audience interest.

Realizing the inherent need to make it better, throughout the featurettes, the answer to that challenge to Forster and his endless crew of stuntmen, trainers, assistant directors, helicopter pilots, etc. went with the old adage of "size matters," by doubling the amount of action in the work, remaining on the road in endless location changes for several months, and sometimes having the Bond machine operating in a few different countries at the same time while a principle crew worked in Panama and a different unit simultaneously going with their version of Forster's Bond playbook (if you will), working on elaborate plane stunts in Mexico.

Treating the locations as though they were characters, Forster's attention to detail included ensuring that the extras were just right as we see extras arriving after hours of traveling down river, then on bus, to appear in the background of a shot.

Likewise, juggling the decisions that for every camera position in the air sequence, three helicopters must fly in and three must fly back out-- you marvel that Forster had the ability to keep everything straight but throughout the film, we get the sense that the otherwise enormously talented filmaker felt the unimaginable weight of the entire franchise on his back. And instead of continuing the style and rhythm established previously in Royale, the rush and pressure to just get it done and get Bond in theatres, must have translated to the editing and hyper-real style that never fully manages to engage.

Yet, even though some sequences threaten to cause eye strain and a trip to the optometrist-- particularly in a fight ripped right out of Bourne-- on Blu-ray, you can get lost in the majesty of it all, relish in the locations and beauty and take advantage of the slower speed on your remote so that they don't whip by in a nanosecond.

Check Out the Newest Bond Song
By Alicia Keys and Jack White

The World of James Bond:
An Amazon Product Slideshow
(Click the Item to Explore)

James Bond: Quantum of Solace (2008)

Bring Bond Home
3/24/09

Read the In-Depth Blu-ray Review

Click Here to Explore the Trailer & More

View Classic Bond Music Videos

Read the Album Review: The Best of Bond

Animated Spoof: The 30 Second Bunnies

As that rare breed of feminist who can still recite every single entry of the James Bond franchise from memory and manage to overlook its eye-roll inducing moments of the Playboy lifestyle as the quintessential late 20th century hero managed to charm the dress off of every woman in sight and knock every man out cold, I must say I was looking extremely forward to catching Quantum of Solace. Yet this morning looking over the majority of blurbs at Rotten Tomatoes, I realized the reactions were similar to the great political divide in America-- much to the left and much to the right with very few people falling in between. We had the gleefully upbeat freewheeling praise on one side and the witty puns of shame on the other like "The Spy Who Bored Me," and "License to Confuse," as the detractors seemed to make like Catskills comedians all answering the "It was so bad-- how bad was it?" style of jokes. Yet I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, still fondly recalling some of my favorite Bond movie moments that remain as vivid as when I first watched the movies along with my older brother.



My first Bond film onscreen was seeing Pierce Brosnan's debut as the smug and seductive variety (essentially shaking together pieces of both Connery and Moore into a human version of that famous martini), in the excellent Goldeneye. Yet, following the fun diversion of Michelle Yeoh as an ass-kicking martial arts Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, the franchise seemed to have run its course with the atrocious World is Not Enough (save for the gorgeous theme song by Garbage that is Shirley Bassey Goldfinger good) and Die Another Day.



That is, however, until Bond went blonde and both the women and men had much more fun with Casino Royale, an epic old-fashioned style spy film with a worthwhile romance and the best Bond girl yet with Eva Green's sultry and stunning yet smart and sophisticated Vesper Lynd. Of course, it didn't hurt that Daniel Craig stepped into the lead role, really wearing more than just the suit with his incredible looks but also taking the emotional depth of work he'd completed in art-house dramas and injecting it into Ian Fleming's hero.

Starting at zero as Bond earns his '00 status in the opening sequence of Royale, it seemed as though we'd been given the chance to begin again, reinventing the character so that he resonated with contemporary society. And then a funny thing happened on the way to the sequel with the smash success of the Matt Damon's Bourne Identity action trilogy featuring rapid-fire editing and shaky camera work.

More specifically, movies became video games and while the action in Bond was always on a different level-- from the opening of Stranger than Fiction and Finding Neverland director Marc Forster's first turn at the wheel with the opening car chase in Quantum of Solace, we realize that we're presented with the cinematic equivalent of chaos.



While Bourne's style took some getting used to but ultimately served the film well, especially considering it had the brains to balance the buoyant editing and camerawork and a shaky camera helped get us right into the action in this year's Cloverfield and Eagle Eye, when it comes to Quantum, it's hard to keep up and frankly, we realize we could care less.

As our eyes strain to figure out which character just landed another blow or dove off a high structure and our ears feel as overpowered as though we're right near the speaker at a Metallica concert, Solace is a barely comprehensible, illogical, irritating, and downright ludicrous mess that's not only one of the biggest disappointments of the year for a Hollywood blockbuster but doubly tragic when it followed what is quite possibly the best Bond film ever made.



With an homage to Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, Diamonds are Forever, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and countless other Bond movies thrown into its succinct 106 minute running time (despite it feeling endless), on the surface it seems to follow the events from the previous film. With his lover Vesper dead, Bond decides that the best way to get closure is to get even, wreaking bloody havoc on anyone that crosses his path, while trying to uncover just who was behind her blackmail and responsible for her demise.

Managing to axe every lead like a wicked madman in some spectacular stunt work that comprises fights which go from one location to the next in typical Bond chase fashion-- instead of relishing in the excitement as we did in so many other beginnings-- the shoddy camera work, pointlessly pretentious inter-cuts to other high culture events, and distracting editing ruins every single action sequence. This is especially apparent in an airplane crash that looks so computer generated, for a moment, I felt like the reel had accidentally switched to James Bond: Quantum of Solace-- The Video Game.

Following the first forty minutes which finds us barely engaged with a Bond so icy and one-dimensional, Craig could've just been played by a stand in or one of those gorgeous eye-candy posters of the man adorning the walls of local Sony stores, and a plot that somehow finds us trying to take on the evil "fake-environmentalist" (yep, not exactly in the same realm as Odd-Job, Jaws or even that freaky diamond dude in Die Another Day), we start getting some semblance of an actual story. Yet, it's one of those that's so off-the-wall and barely plausible that it's almost as meaningless as the film's title itself which is destined to leave your brain as soon as the final credits roll.

Instead, it's obvious Forster just wanted to set aside art-house pretensions (aside from one excellent scene in an opera house that is pompous yet wonderfully staged) and leave the heavy lifting to the fight-choreographer, a cinematographer and editor who may need to switch to decaf and lay off the Red Bull, and stuntmen who no doubt are in traction at a hospital somewhere, if all of their limbs are still intact that is.

Headache-inducing and nowhere near as classy or superbly entertaining as Bond at his best whether it's in Goldfinger, Goldeneye, Casino Royale or some of the wildly unbelievable yet engrossing string of films starring Roger Moore like For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved Me, Quantum of Solace may boast a better Bond than Timothy Dalton but film-wise, I'd rather sit down and watch Dalton's The Living Daylights again for some much needed solace after Solace.



Or maybe I'll just grab Casino Royale and wistfully pine for what could've been had the filmmakers either quit while they were ahead or stayed away from video poker and slot machines and just continued to play Baccarat... since obviously Royale's Texas Hold 'Em led them astray. And while it's always good to try something new, it's called gambling for a reason and maybe it's time for the franchise to take a good long look at itself and question whether or not they need to make a meeting, go through twelve steps, and try something different instead of playing things so fast and loose, we don't even recognize the man in the tux any longer.

Check Out the Newest Bond Song
By Alicia Keys & Jack White

The World of James Bond:
An Amazon Product Slideshow
(Click the Item to Explore)

W. (2008)

View the Trailer and Photo Gallery

"We were not out to demean or hurt the man. That is not the right motivation for me to direct. Too much time is involved. Who needs a negative mindset? We let the man speak it in his own words. We set out to show his reasoning for the Iraq War as a function of who he is, his personal history. The hope is when you can walk out of the movie, you say, 'I understand that guy. I may not agree or like the result, but I understand.' And that's drama. I can't say I liked Oedipus when I walked out of 'Oedipus,' I can't say I liked Agamemnon, I can't say I like many of the Greek heroes. Some of them are outright assholes. But you watch them, you follow their story. That's drama. It may be easier or more palatable to have a character with whom you sympathize-- studio executives love that word. But it's tricky: if we sympathize with everyone, we create a manufactured values system. It's much more interesting and real if you try to empathize and understand, if not always approve."

-- Director Oliver Stone on W. in the Lionsgate Press Release

There's a recurring metaphor running throughout director Oliver Stone's controversial biopic W. Opening the film and ultimately closing it, the avid-baseball fan and team owner George W. Bush (as portrayed by Josh Brolin) is way out in the outfield with his eyes on a pop-up ball heading straight towards him in center field, just out of reach. Stone has never been one to relish the joys of traditional narrative structure and instead symbolism, ingeniously ironic musical cues, and clever editing have always made their impact for better or for worse during his legendary career but this time, his eye is on the ball (if you'll excuse the cliche) in depicting what has spiraled into the decision and event that will become synonymous with W's name. Of course, specifically that is the Iraq war which has developed into such an incredibly complicated mess that no one, not even the man who made the decision to go in following 9/11 knows quite how to catch and stop it. There's no calling a time-out-- although this upcoming election will find us trading players with the possibility of a whole new starting lineup if (as I'm truly hoping) Obama is elected, what has happened has happened and Stone knows better than to try and tack on some sort of conclusion that would ultimately mean as little as W's "Mission Accomplished" speech.

W. is the type of film that Stone argued it would be from the beginning-- a fair and balanced, overwhelmingly even-handed and at times slightly too polite portrait of the President from a young man to the leader of the free world. It's one that I doubt he would've made in exactly the same manner in the early 1990's, although he managed to make one of the finest and most underrated films of his career with his masterful biopic about Richard Nixon, yet this time, running just under two hours, W. is also one of his most succinct fact-based works.

Independently financed long before a studio was on board to distribute, Stone and his longtime collaborator and Wall Street scripter Stanley Weiser decided around Christmas of 2007 that "if we didn't do the Bush movie at that moment, it wouldn't have been made, not for a long time." Striving for the "long-shot chance of getting W. out before the election," Stone wanted to fight against his belief noted in the release that "attention spans in this era, particularly as to history, seem to have the shelf life of a fruit fly."

While it's sure to divide critics and audiences, no matter which political party you're affiliated with or what you think of the man himself, Stone and Weiser managed to do the impossible of reading every single book available on the man himself as well as the Presidency and made the decision early on not to cover his entire life or every event during the eight years he served (and continues to serve) as Commander-in-Chief, specifically "focusing on that crucial era between October 2001 and March 2003, when he finally went to war with Iraq." Intriguingly Stone continued that, "not much was known about the Presidency during the 2000-2004 period because the Presidency was veiled and propagandized. But after 2004 there seems to have been increasing scholarship into the inner workings of the Bush Administration."

While the focal point is undoubtedly Iraq, W. does disappoint slightly (perhaps due to its hasty production) in not including more on not just the controversial, hot-button topic of the 2000 election as well as Hurricane Katrina, yet possibly this-- along with the curious neglect of the days following 9/11-- may have been because Stone either felt that Bush had already been so much in the media spotlight that we knew it all so well or that it's been covered before such as in Spike Lee's Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke.

Further citing the even-handedness of the screenplay, Jeffrey Wright (who quietly gives one of the film's best performances in an Oscar worthy turn as Colin Powell) cited that W. is much like Stone's World Trade Center "which had a similar type of balance and sophisticated tone," and Brolin who initially turned the project down both due to the subject and Stone's "very controversial reputation," instead discovered the screenplay left him "taken aback, moved... impassioned, really, because I was saddened by it. And above all, I identified with it."

Although it chronicles his young wild days surviving frat initiation at Yale, drinking and driving, bar brawling and rebelling against the family political dynasty until he became a born again Evangelical Christian at the age of 40, sobered up and went into the family business for himself, at its heart, W. takes a cue from the Greek tragedies cited by Stone in presenting the never-ending tug of war and battle for love and respect that occurs between fathers and sons. Whether he's feeling like the black sheep next to his picture-perfect brother Jeb or being told off repeatedly by his father (portrayed by James Cromwell) that he's deeply disappointed him, in depicting W's life story, we find out that what perhaps drove him more than anything was trying to prove his worth to his father.

While daddy-issue tales are nothing new and it's hardly the only individual who held sway over our 43rd president, it's a more relatable and humanistic approach to the man where the time line and the film's three distinct acts are all mixed together as we see the new version of the Bush family in his Presidency of others who may have wielded their power more than they should've in steering the leader in certain directions. Rounding out the cast we witness Richard Dreyfuss' wicked turn as Dick Cheney, Toby Jones' geeky, off-in-the-shadows Karl Rove, Scott Glenn's Donald Rumsfeld, Thandie Newton's Condoleeza Rice, Bruce McGill's George Tenet, Wright's Colin Powell, Stacy Keach's Earle Hudd, Rob Corddry's Ari Fleischer, Ellen Burstyn's Barbara Bush, and nice support by Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush.

While the ads and marketing strategy have seemed to posture the film as a straight comedy and indeed there are some truly hilarious moments pulled right from actual events, more than that, it's a heartbreaking tragedy that goes beyond its initial SNL like characterizations that first kept me at an arm's length early on (especially as audience members laughed throughout Thandie Newton's first entire speech as Condi) and during Brolin's earliest scenes. And admittedly no doubt there will be much debate afterward over whether or not Stone went far enough or created a worthwhile enough portrait to justify its being made before the President has even ended his term in office (and regarding both issues-- I find I'm still torn). Not to mention, tons of discussion will ensue regarding whether it will have any resonant impact in the upcoming election as there were a few walkouts of bored young voting age attendees who may have learned far more about just how and why the war was waged if they'd adjusted their frame of mind from the promised "broad comedy" to the drama that surrounds the events.

Was it rushed? My, my, my yes as I felt like Stone was censoring himself in a few places and the overwhelming importance of the picture still seems to weigh heavily as the press release revealed that Stone's in the process of creating a website that "will include all the anecdotes and are mentioned in the film, their source and the rationale for how, why, and when we used them." Of course, all sources should be cited but this isn't the type of action one would've expected him to have taken years ago and sometimes it seems as though he reeled in his true intentions so much that there were a few loose threads that seemed to hang off the edge of the screen at times but politics aside and just as a film, it's an intimate, high quality and revealing look at a complicated man told in a way none of us were expecting.

While I predict it will do big business during its opening weekend given W's disastrous approval rating and an American population so tired of politics as usual, the true test of Stone's film will be if viewers are able to remain objective when presented not with the straight satire they were hoping but a very humane approach about an overwhelmingly controversial, morally and emotionally trying Presidency and war-- the results of which we're all suffering globally every day. Just like Stone's World Trade Center, it may be a little too soon to view with any real perspective since the wounds haven't yet healed (and they possibly never will) but cinematically I applaud the wonderfully executed effort and above all its fearless cast.