Miscellaneous, etc.

Hey, I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, but I don’t have time to apologize for that. I think something terribly, terribly wrong is going on.

I know this might sound a little Star Trek to you all, but I suspect that something is deeply wrong with the space-time continuum. And no, not the continuum where I don’t write anything on my website for three months, and then came back with a lame-assed review for a James Bond movie that was actually pretty good, considering it was a James Bond movie. I mean the kind of continuum where the basic, fundamental laws of nature have been challenged by some kind of godless tampering. The kind of continuum where everything changes, like when normally lights are on but instead they’re dark all over the place, and everyone has really dark eye liner and pretends they don’t know you, and your favorite sweater is green all of a sudden where it used to be blue, and where Halle Berry is considered the best thing about a movie.

Are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said? People are writing reviews about Die Another Day, and they’re writing about how luminous and exciting Halle Berry is in her supporting role as a Bond Girl, and how she’s the best part of the movie, and how she breathes new life into the franchise. Halle Berry, breathing new life into a franchise. Halle Berry, carrying a stupid action movie. Doesn’t that seem alien and unthinkable to you, like someone walking up to you on the street, dropping to their knees, and biting you on the groin? Doesn’t that make you question the very sanity of the universe?

Honestly, how long ago was it that Halle Berry was the worst part of X-Men? Where was her charm, flair and breathtaking personality back when she was dropping her horrible clay brick of a line about lightning striking toads? How come her spotless image couldn’t protect her from the entertainment press’ smart-assing about her baring her breasts for a million-bojillion dollars in Swordfish, only a scant year ago? What happened between now and then that convinced everyone so suddenly and unarguably that Halle Berry was the next great actress of our age?

Above: Maureen Kennedy smiles quietly to herself as she takes time out of a busy luncheon to fantasize sexually about Halle Berry.

Oh, fine, you’re telling me that she won an Oscar — but isn’t that like saying Hitler must have been sane because he got elected? No matter where I go, I keep hearing people talk about how beautiful and talented Halle Berry is, and it’s honestly starting to scare the shit out of me.

Co-Worker: So, did you have a good weekend?

Me: Yeah, not too bad. I caught the latest Bond movie, so at least my Friday night was worth a laugh.

Co-Worker: Oh really? I heard that it was pretty good, especially Halle Berry. Man, she’s a gorgeous piece of ass.

Me: I… uh, okay.

Co-Worker: I’m not kidding. That one scene in the commercial when she’s coming up out of the water in her bikini? Christ, that gets me every time– I think I pitched a tent right there, you know what I mean?

Me: I’d prefer not to, if it’s all the same to you.

Co-Worker: Oh, you’re not going to be all politically correct about this, are you? It’s just a movie.

Me: Well, no — it’s just that I’ve never heard a forty-five year-old woman talk about Halle Berry quite that way before.

Not that Die Another Day is so spectacular that a trained giraffe couldn’t have shone in the role of the Bond Girl. In fact, it’s probably the best Bond movie that’s been made since Goldeneye, depending on what you’re looking for from James Bond movies. Those of you who simply can’t let go of Sean Connery will probably agree with me, while those of you who still prefer Roger Moore would probably prefer to watch old men in the shower, since that’s basically all James Bond did from 1973 through 1985. There’s the same odd, entertainingly unbalanced tone to Die Another Day that there has been for all of Pierce Brosnan’s Bond movies, in that there remains a concerted interest in depicting Bond as both a cold-hearted maniac and a smooth operator all at the same time. Brosnan capably carries the tension between the two extremes, though I’m not sure if that’s due to his skill as an actor, or if in fact he’s just that wooden by nature.

Whatever the case, Die Another Day plunges forward happily, finding in Brosnan the right type of Bond to take the script from License to Kill and recycle the majority of it. As in that Timothy Dalton shitpatty, Brosnan’s Bond once again finds himself in a highly personal disgrace, this time after blowing a mission and ending up in a Korean prison for more than a year. After highly secret intelligence begins leaking out all over the place, American and British intelligence both decide that a heavily-tortured Bond is the likely source, and arrange a prisoner exchange to stop the bleeding. Naturally, the very individual that Bond was sent to kill is the one that’s released in the trade, and to flick extra mud in Bond’s eye, he’s immediately suspended upon his return to MI-6.

Because he is who he is, though, Bond manages to easily escape from his confinement, and immediately embarks on a campaign of revenge against the Korean who got him in this whole mess in the first place. In doing so, he comes across Halle Berry as Jinx, a mysteriously boring American with a penchant for wearing bikinis and employing exaggerated pauses in her dialogue. What with all the intrigue and danger in her lifestyle, I can only imagine that both of these practices are entirely logical, since bikinis are an excellent means of escaping notice, and caesurae are a rock-solid method of communicating subtextual messages.

Director: Okay, Halle, in this scene we’re really trying to build up the sexual tension between you and Pierce.

Halle Berry: Got it. What if, every time he looks at me, I wink at him and roll my shoulder?

Director: Well, no. We’ve already pretty much got the sexy look down for the both of you. I’m thinking more about the wordplay: I want that to really sizzl– Halle, what are you doing?

Halle Berry: (winking and rolling shoulder) I’m building sexual tension.

Director: You look like you’ve pinched something in your spine.

Halle Berry: Oh yeah? And wouldn’t you like to… massage it for me?

Director: There! That was perfect!

Halle Berry: (accelerated winking and shoulder rolling)

Director: No, not that! The innuendo!

Halle Berry: Oh, I got you. You mean like, “If you give me two million more dollars, I’ll flash my… breasts for you”?

Director: Yes! And, no.

Halle Berry: Shit. That totally worked on Travolta.

Above: Halle Berry makes a shout-out to fellow Oscar-winners and action movie veterans Mira Sorvino and Marisa Tomei, in a bid to follow in their illustrious footsteps.

Of course the two of them end up tangling in the sheets, in a love scene that looks remarkably like Jinx is riding on Bond’s knee. They both seem to enjoy it well enough, so I suppose I shouldn’t judge their forbidden paddycakes, and their romance doesn’t really flourish again until somewhere towards the end of the movie. In the interim, an elaborate plot unravels, involving stolen identities, giant satellites, heavily-armed sports cars and North Korean dominance of the Asian Pacific. Give it too much thought and you might start to notice some key elements of logic missing, but critical thinking and James Bond movies are really unfriendly relations at the best of times, so it’s better to simply sit back and enjoy the fluff.

Fortunately for fluff enthusiasts, that which is lightweight does not run in short supply. In fact, the movie seems particularly aware of the continuity of the series, featuring a very long list of inside jokes and hidden references to Bond lore, some more obvious than others. Indeed, one of the central sequences of the movie is a sword duel between the hero and the villian that seems more appropriate to an episode of The Avengers than James Bond; another is a car duel between Brosnan’s Bond and Rick Yune’s Zao, the Evil Korean, made more than a little ironic by the fact that Rick Yune’s last big-screen role was in The Fast and the Furious. In between there are attempts to ground the story in the politics of conflict diamonds from Africa and military coups in North Korea, but mostly Die Another Day is interested in synthesizing the most successful elements of Bonds from ages past: the carpet-chested killer of the Connery era, combined with the witty punster of the Moore timeframe, wrapped in the wasted scripts of the Dalton era, and garnished with the killer satellite storyline of Brosnan’s own debut.

For that reason alone, Die Another Day is worth seeing. Certainly there are no surprises to it, since the producers are still smarting from that one time they fed Felix Leiter to a shark and nobody wanted to see another Bond movie for six years, but instead it does what the most successful Bond movies do — it plays with the formula just enough to produce an interesting adaptation of the same movie that audiences have seen nineteen times before. Plus, as an added bonus, it features Madonna in one of the most remarkable trainwreck cameos I’ve ever seen on-screen. Never, in my whole life, have I ever witnessed a single performance that was capable of grinding down the momentum of a film so completely. I’m pretty certain that there were pornographers in the audience laughing at how horribly jilted Madonna’s delivery was, so unthinkably bad it came across. If only for those five crystalline minutes of cinematic pain is this movie worth your time, so that you can again appreciate what a fabulous actress Halle Berry really is.

It really is… amazing.