Bringing the sexy back.

James Bond 007 is back, with a savage demeanor, a rocket-shooting car, a KGB plot, an illegal arms deal, a beautiful blonde, an even more beautiful secretary, and a double double-cross. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS takes its title from Ian Fleming’s 14^th book and final collection of Bond short stories published in 1966, Octopussy and The Living Daylights. A new opening gunbarrel sequence; the rifling is now tinted gunmetal blue, and a new Bond dynamically fires on us—

new bond: dalton, timothy dalton

39-year-old Briton Timothy Dalton was approached to be Bond way back ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE in 1969, but felt he was too young at the time (around 23) – and he only came onboard for this movie because Pierce Brosnan was fucked over by the producers of his TV series REMINGTON STEELE who, overjoyed that Pierce was chosen to play Bond, decided to squeeze more STEELE episodes out of him to cash in on his higher profile.

But Bond producer Cubby Broccoli said Fuck You to the STEELE producers and hired Dalton instead.

After Dalton turned down the 1969 offer, he busied himself with TV movies and TV series, and in a way, it’s fortunate that he never hit big with any of them, or this second opportunity may not have arisen.

Dalton signed for three Bond films, but after this film’s sequel, LICENSE TO KILL, legal issues between Cubby Broccoli’s EON Productions and United Artists held up production of the third film for nearly 5 years; by the time the court battles ended, Dalton had lost the taste for Bond, and let his contract expire, never to renew it.

“Wait, Mr. Dalton – I’m not the gunbarrel sequence—I’m your spotlight operat—agh!”

Timothy Dalton was truly the precursor to Daniel Craig. The hawk eyes, the dashing figure, the lean towards cruel action rather than suave quipping (although he does get his fair share of quite humorous quipping in), and he brings a welcome upgrade in energy to Moore’s doddering, e.g. that scene where Dalton guns down a man from an opera balcony and then turns like a striking cobra to shoot at the spotlight suddenly aimed at him, looking like he’s doing the gunbarrel opening sequence for real. Also, Dalton did most of his stunts, really putting his back and blood into Bond.

Cold open. Head of MI6, M (Robert Brown) sends three double-oh agents on a mock parachute mission, all clad in black Archer turtlenecks. After two double-ohs are killed by a guy who looks like young Anthony Hopkins, Bond finds himself smack in a real mission, on the roof of a truck barreling down a cliff-edge road, being shot at through the roof. And we suddenly realize how integral soundtrack is to the Bond series (or, I presume, any branded franchise), because when Connery was infiltrating the castle in the opening for NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, there were no Bond themes allowed in that production, so it felt surreal, “non-Bond”; but here, with Dalton battling Hannibal Lecter with the Bond Theme backing him – well, how could he lose?! Though we’ve never met this Bond before, we immediately identify with him, due to soundtrack alone. We feel more of a kinship with Dalton in his 1^st film than Connery in his 7^th!

Truck goes off cliff with dead Hannibal and live Bond in it – he deploys a parachute, which starts to burn; nonchalantly, Bond lands on a yacht in the bay, pleasantly surprising the bikini babe onboard, who was just on the phone, craving man-meat. What are the odds?! Bond snatches her giant cellphone to call HQ, introduces himself to her offhandedly as “Bond, James Bond,” and tells HQ he’ll be there in an hour [woman holds out a champagne glass]… “Make that two hours.” Ha! I love this Bond!

And with that terse quip, Dalton’s ownership of the character is complete. Throughout this movie, he proves time and again why many hardcore Fleming fans consider him The Best Bond.

The limp disco of A-ha’s The Living Daylights opens the film. It’s of apiece with Duran Duran’s View To A Kill; the 80’s day-glo dance era spawning thin synth-based plop like this. After their gargantua 1985 hit Take On Me, this would probably be the only other time the Western world would hear this Norwegian one-hit wonder. There is an outro song as well, “If There Was A Man,” performed by The Pretenders.

The plot (written by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson) is intriguing and well-constructed: After a plot by a Russian defector is proven to be a scam to entice the British to assassinate the Russian KGB leader, the KGB teams with Bond to uncover arms and drug deals by the defector and an ex-patriot American general.

Bond aids a Russian defector (Jeroen Krabbe as Koskov) to get a secret list to MI6, that targets British agents for assassination, including Bond. Koskov says the list is sanctioned by KGB Russian leader Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies), but Bond has his doubts about the list, especially when Koskov is snatched back by the KGB hours afterward.

Without warning, the new Miss Moneypenny comes onscreen, and without warning, I come on screen. Glowing, luscious, bespectacled blondette, the absolutely delectable 26-year-old Caroline Bliss (in name and nature), spars coquettishly with the handsome new Bond, rekindling that sensual thrill that sparks so naturally between two young, hot people, rather than us being forced to watch Moore and Maxwell spar like our grandparents. Lois Maxwell, though a classical beauty when young, overstayed her post as Miss Moneypenny, through three Bonds, from DR. NO (1962, when she was 35, still looking like an aunty) to A VIEW TO A KILL (at 58, looking like an uncle).

Unfortunately for Bliss (and the male world populace), she was also an indirect victim of Broccoli’s legal Bond battle; by the time pre-production was ready to start on the next film, she had aged five years – and that’s way too long for a woman in the movies to be a sex object. Just ask Lois Maxwell.

Q (Desmond Llewelyn) seems content as a pig in shit designing man-eating couches and ghetto blasters (that really blast ghettoes); his role is expanded past weapons quartermaster, basically doing any task that keeps him onscreen as an agent, the producers realizing his comedic utility at last. The main gadgets are a key-fob explosive that reacts to whistling, and a tricked-out Aston Martin, with so many weapons, I lost count. (A tech who tricked out the Lotus Esprit in SPY WHO LOVED ME once remarked that with the mechanics required to include this many devices in a car, you wouldn’t have space for the engine.)

While helping Koskov escape a sniper, Bond (using a techno sniper rifle bigger than anything Connery or Moore ever used) defies orders to kill the sniper, because a) he can tell she is no professional, so wings her gun instead (“Whoever she was, I must have scared the living daylights out of her!”), and b) she’s the cellist he just noticed playing in the opera house, and c) she’s hot. Bond makes contact with her, and discovers she is Koskov’s girlfriend, Kara (Maryam d’Abo)! Then why was she sniping at Koskov?!

Plots within plots, as Kara relates how Koskov himself set her up to snipe at him, with dummy bullets. Then why did Koskov employ Bond and MI6 to kill his sniper?…

Bond poses as a friend of Koskov’s, empowered to take her to him. A strange dynamic develops, as Bond and Kara roll through a montage usually played to denote a couple growing closer to banging (on the run, visiting a fair, bodies touching innocently, meaningless laughter) – but she believes she’s on the way to her boyfriend, so why is SHE getting so chummy, like a schoolgirl in love?

Bond even gets a little p-whipped by Kara, maintaining they should NOT go back for her cello – CUT TO: the wahp-wahp-wahp moment of waiting outside her apartment while she retrieves her cello. (Maryam does a good job miming the instrument, with a noticeable vibrato. As a violinist once told me, “Try and get a string player NOT to use vibrato.” It’s such an inbuilt mechanism that it’s easy to spot actors who are miming, because they usually can’t or don’t do it, but Maryam pulls it off. There is even a pure Bond-ian use of the cello case in a chase scene, used to escape henchmen by sitting in it and sliding down the snowy hill.)

Bond’s gentlemanly interaction with Kara differentiates Dalton as the guy who did, in fact, read the Fleming source material diligently – and applied it – making his Bond more human than caricature, so whereas Connery and Moore would have already banged Kara, this Bond is sincerely trying to get a lead on Koskov by Friend-Zoning himself, and later cautiously falling for Kara like any Cary Grant or Hugh Grant. If the screenwriters are playing it this way, it can only mean Koskov is gonna end up dead or treacherous, so that these two can bonk in good conscience.

Sure enough, we discover Koskov poolside, kissing and groping many chicks at once – the lame filmic device that informs us he’s a Villain. No decent man would kiss and grope this many chicks – at once… forgetting that the hero of this series is as big a cad as this villain. Also, Koskov arranged for MI6 to kill his “sniper” because he wanted Kara out of the way! So now it’s only a matter of time before Kara applies her tremolo guilt-free to Bond’s skin flute.

Set around Tangier and Eastern bloc countries, the plot unveils Koskov in cahoots with ex-pat American general Whitaker (Joe Don Baker, as repulsive as fried butter), who supports dictators, tyrants and Confederates, neck-deep in arms deals, drug deals and fried butter. Whitaker’s number one hitman is a Nordic chiseled blond named Necros (Andreas Wisniewski), whose oomph-Bond-gimmick is exploding milk bottles, who totally looks like that blond terrorist in DIE HARD… Waitaminute–he IS! Next year, he would be killed by John McClane, who would write on his sweater, “Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.”

Bond discovers that Pushkin knows nothing of the double-oh assassination plot – it’s a set up by Whitaker to get Pushkin killed by MI6. Thus the two Cold War enemies – Britain and the KGB – team up to smoke out the Even Badder Villains, the fried butter general, the womanizing perve and the Die Hard milkman.

Virginia Hey appears as Pushkin’s girlfriend – one of the most striking Australian beauties (she was the Warrior Woman in ROAD WARRIOR), unfortunately with no lines – but who needs lines with side-boob like that?!

John Terry plays a new Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA pal, who is after the same villains. (I’ve totally lost count of Felixes – why couldn’t they ever get an actor to reprise the role?!) And Walter Gotell squeezes in a cameo as Russian General Gogol during the final minutes…

Virginia Hey’s nakedness causes man-battle.

Bond publicly shoots Pushkin as a ploy to smoke out Whitaker’s plot. When Bond is captured by Whitaker, there is actually a compelling reason not to kill him: Whitaker, always the opportunist, wants to score points with the Russian authorities by turning Bond over to them for murdering their leader.

The jail scene is more intense than it needs to be, as the sadist Russian jailer-bear buries himself in the role, looking like he’s really going to beat Timothy Dalton to death and rape Maryam d’Abo. Escaping the jail, Bond and Kara also free another entertaining prisoner – the great Art Malik as Mujahideen freedom fighter, Shah, who is a big man in his village, elbows deep in opium deals with Whitaker.

Shah helps Bond bring down Whitaker, after Bond explains that his opium deals end up funding more weapons for the Soviets. This was back in the day when the Mujahideen were still considered America’s pals (America supplying them with arms to beat back the Soviets; in 1998’s RAMBO III, the Muja rode by Johnny Rambo’s side).

On the opium transport plane, Bond sets a bomb timer for 10 minutes, which takes the whole third act to explode. And later, when Bond finds he and Kara’s only escape is to liftoff in the plane, he doesn’t RUSH back to the bomb like a man who set a 10-minute timer at least 20 minutes ago – he saunters back – only to be accosted by Die Hard out of nowhere after we thought he was dead. (See? It runs in his family!) Why Bond doesn’t scream at him, “I am trying to defuse a bomb, you idiot!” is beyond me.

Plane runs out of fuel, glides into a mountain, as Bond and Kara dive into a Jeep and roll out the back cargo bay. (Should the plane really make such a big Pretty Orange Explosion when it crashes? I mean, the thing IS empty!)

Separating himself from previous Bonds, Dalton’s final prurient encounter is with Kara in a private room, no chance of being discovered by MI6 or Q; a more “romantic” ending, not a stray bang. It’s the second-best debut film of any Bond (ceding first place to Daniel Craig’s perfectly formed arse in CASINO ROYALE).

The same team responsible for the shoddy A VIEW TO A KILL made this exciting film. Maybe it was action man Dalton that inspired Glen, Maibaum and Wilson to bat their A-game – or maybe it was something else… Albert R. Broccoli’s daughter, Barbara, was brought onboard as executive producer (taking this role in every successive Bond production to this day). I believe with this passing of the torch from Cubby to Barbara, her input enabled us to cleanly delineate the “cartoonish” Bond films from the tonally realistic ones, and this movie, THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS, is that dividing line. Yes, there will always be fan service callbacks to the old Connery and Moore flummery (Brosnan para-sailing a wave, harking back to Moore snowboarding a cowabunga chase scene; or Craig in a plane chopped smaller and smaller, like Moore in a car chopped smaller and smaller; or Halle Berry tied to a table with lasers threatening her, like Connery tied to a table with a laser inching toward his nuts) but the overall tenor of the New Generation Bonds (Dalton, Brosnan, Craig) has been one of hyper-world fiction rather than schoolboy tall tales.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS grossed more than Moore’s last two Bond films – $191 mil worldwide (the 4^th most successful Bond film at time of release), which also means it grossed more than many of Connery’s Bond films! Not bad for a guy who said he didn’t want to take over from Sean Connery way back in ‘69 because “Sean was far too good.”

Seeing those grosses must have scared the living daylights out of Roger and Sean.

END

Loopy Lupine.

THE WOLFMAN starts as a remake of the classic 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. film THE WOLF MAN, and ends somewhere between BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.

That ain’t so bad, but not what it was aiming for.

Director Joe Johnston (JURASSIC PARK III, HIDALGO) pays homage to the horror pioneers by including all the old conventions in his remake: the classic poem “Even a man who is pure of heart…” (which is not arcane Euro legend, but penned by writer of the original WOLF MAN, Curt Siodmak), old villager’s tales of lycanthropes, the moon appearing preternaturally large and full – at least ten nights in a row, the full-body jump through bay windows, arms and limbs dismembered, and the fiery finale in a lavish mansion.

Benicio Del Toro is Lawrence Talbot, who returns to swampy 1891 England and his ancestral castle to investigate the mysterious death of his brother. He is greeted ambivalently as a prodigal son by his father Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins, phoning in some kind of distracted cross between Hannibal Lecter and his butler in REMAINS OF THE DAY).

Lawrence is distracted himself by his brother’s widow Gwen (Emily Blunt), and he is tailed by a detective (Hugo Weaving) creating the template for reporter Jack McGee in THE INCREDIBLE HULK television series – always showing up after the fact.

The Wolfcuke

When he visits a gypsy camp one night, Lawrence is bitten by a werewolf. And we all know what happens then: your body grows long wolfy fingers, your back muscles expand and your shirt rips off, your paws grow massive and your shoes explode – but your pants stay on. Really tight – like the Incredible Hulk.

Rather than take after the CGI wolves in the stillborn TWILIGHT series, or even the rampaging wolves in the UNDERWORLD series, I was glad to see THE WOLFMAN’s wolf-man design emulated the classic Lon Chaney look – a wolf-headed man with barrel-chested human torso, just slightly less hairy than a Middle Eastern teenager. The white ripped shirt and black vest with Elizabethan trousers stretched tight complete the classically Euro lycanthrope ensemble.

There is nothing intrinsically “wrong” with this lush production – the effects are superb and naturally much better than the 1941 version or any of its sequels (I still remember as a kid being dissatisfied with Chaney’s onscreen transformation – the slow dissolves from one makeup point to another – even though it was supposedly “Hollywood magic”); the gore teeters on the cusp of gratuitous and ludicrous, the night forests are eternally backlit by kliegs, and the story is changed minimally to accommodate a wolf-on-wolf deathmatch finale. Danny Elfman’s soundtrack alternates between LORD OF THE RINGS and BATMAN BEGINS. The most uncomfortable aspect is that maybe this production takes itself too seriously. And ends up funny.

The interaction between Hopkins and Del Toro seems forced – they are meant to be estranged father and son, yet they seem like they’ve never ever met before their dress rehearsal. Art Malik as the butler is a strange piece of casting pie. And there is hardly any chemistry between Lawrence Talbot and Gwen, as they share but one kiss, so her distraught chase after the hunters to save him as The Wolf seems a little forced. But Anthony Hopkins as a pudgy, blondish wolf is priceless.

I fear the faults in this movie may be ours – the moviegoing audience. Are we too cool to take in an old-fashioned tale of simple legendary horror without trying to read everything as a homage to arcane movie references or a nod to modern ones; without trying to see irony or cynicism behind everything? Even this production felt it needed to add a “twist” to the original tale to hold our interest. Have we outgrown the old monsters?

And just how many nights of a full moon can the Earth stand anyway?

END

“I know it’s not a CHAH-PAH but it vill haff to do!”

Brawny Bond.

Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s back – in yet another extremely silly, extremely enjoyable comedy-actioner, TRUE LIES, as superspy Harry Tasker, who leads the double life of a Bond-ish field agent and a suburban family man, his wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), and daughter (Eliza Dushku) oblivious to his “real” job, thinking he is a boring computer consultant.

James Cameron writes and directs (remaking the 1991 Claude Ziti French movie, LA TOTALE!), so it’s going to be bombastic, larger-than-life and speak in a funny accent.

Funniest thing about TRUE LIES is – Tom Arnold. And we’re not laughing AT him this time – we’re actually digging his head-on, dead-on comedic delivery, as Arnold’s superspy wingman, Gibson.

Serious thespian, Jamie Lee Curtis, showing off her craft.

Tia Carrera sloppily fills the femme fatale role as a glamorous front for Arab terrorists (hey! They’re Arabs – they MUST be terrorists!), led by the robust Arab stylings of Art Malik (who is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and attended school in London, yet is forever typecast in Third World roles for his Pakistani birth roots.) And big manly Charlton Heston is the spy agency boss.

Bill Paxton may be trying to outdo his Hudson pussy from ALIENS in a creamily sleazy comedic turn that almost outshines Tom Arnold’s, as Simon the car salesman who pretends to be a spy to get women, with the best delivery of the word “DICKLESS!” ever committed to film. Happenstance leads him to Harry’s wife as a panty prospect for Simon. (The last time Paxton and Schwarzenegger were onscreen together was in THE TERMINATOR 1984, with a naked Arnold beating up a punked Paxton for his clothes.)

“You vontu mess vid me? I give you de Clint Eastwood stayeh.”

Harry’s wife discovers his spy life in the most inauspicious manner: bored with her home life, she gravitates to Simon, who claims to be an action man spy. When real spies Harry and Gibson find out, she is mock-kidnapped by them in disguise and sent on a fake spy job to scare her out of her action jones. On this job – where she performs a sensual striptease for her own husband, without realizing it is him – both she and Harry are captured by real terrorists. Let the Bond-ing begin…

Lots of big orange explosions later, after some spectacular stunts (a motorbike leaping across skyscrapers, Jamie Lee Curtis hanging from a helicopter, Schwarzenegger in a Harrier jet) and absolutely ridiculous sequences (Schwarzenegger bodysliding downhill on snow, shooting jet-skiers behind him, a horse chasing a motorbike through a hotel, the terrorist clinging to the tail of the Harrier, Schwarzenegger doing the tango!), we leave this movie thankful it has stopped bombarding our Blockbuster Nerve.

And go back to our double lives of lying to our spouses.

END