Out with the smug. In with the smugger.

The codes of a destructive satellite named GOLDENEYE have been stolen by Russian traitors working with a British traitor, Agent 006, who plans to use Goldeneye’s electromagnetic pulses to cause a global financial meltdown. James Bond must defeat the stronger agent, thwart the runaway satellite, and bang the Russian hotness.

new bond: brosnan, pierce brosnan

The first Bond that came to my young attention was Moore, Roger Moore. And I lavished the appropriate young-boy idolatry on this Real Man surrounded by gangsters, gadgets and girls. Upon learning of Connery, Sean Connery, it seemed only appropriate to then lavish the proprietary respect on He Who Came First – and let’s face it, he was quite the Man’s Man himself (meaning he was even more of a misogynist than Moore). Lazenby, George Lazenby, I never knew thee. And Dalton, Timothy Dalton, I was ambivalent at best about the choice, being young, dumb and fulla that white stuff.

I used to go around saying what a fine Bond that young REMINGTON STEELE fella would make; whatsisname? – Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan. Well, little did I know that wheels of fate were in motion: Brosnan was married to Cassandra Harris in 1981 when she did FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, and was introduced to producer Albert Broccoli… and thus he was, in fact, chosen to replace Roger Moore in 1987’s THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS – and lost the gig to Timothy Dalton due to NBC grasping like the tentacles on the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. octopus and extending Brosnan’s contract on REMINGTON STEELE due to the heat he would generate from being Bond. So Broccoli said Fuck NBC and hired Dalton instead…

Sadly, Cassandra would die of cancer in 1991 and would not see her husband become Bond.

But here we are at last, me being proven right on what a damn fine double-oh Brosnan cuts, in his first go-around as 007 at 42 years of age, in a film once again named so appropriately in the Bond vein, GOLDENEYE (maybe because we’ve been conditioned to accept the “gold” appellation, with GOLDFINGER (1964) and THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)).

GOLDENEYE is the first Bond film not lifted from an Ian Fleming Bond novel.  But there is a connection to Fleming: Goldeneye is the name of his estate in Oracabessa Bay in Jamaica. It was where he started the first draft to the very first Bond novel in 1952, Casino Royale.

Smugtastic!

GOLDENEYE grips us immediately with James Bond 007 (Brosnan) bungee-jumping off a massive dam in total silence to infiltrate a Russian base. With fellow MI6 Agent 006 (Sean Bean), they both spy around a bit before 006 gets killed by Colonel Ourumov (Gottfried John) and 007 escapes in another throat-gripping stunt – leaping a motorbike off a cliff runway to chase a taxiing single-engine plane off the cliff, with no pilot. The stunt is so audacious, it cannot be matched by anything that comes after it. The opening titles slink in with Tina Turner singing Goldeneye.

NINE YEARS LATER…

Bond is careening down a mountain road in an Aston Martin with a young woman, who nervously begs him to slow down, “James, I enjoy a spirited ride as much as the next girl, but…”  A luscious woman in a red sportscar overtakes them, openly flirting with Bond. Bond’s young woman asks, “Who’s that?” James: “The next girl.” (Ha! I love it! Shutup! So do you! It’s 1995.)

After meeting that sportster at a baccarat table (the delectable Famke Janssen at the height of her sex as Xenia Onatopp – all the better to innuendo her), the plot kicks into gear, with Onatopp and Colonel Ourumov stealing a techno helicopter, wiping out a Russian satellite base, and tying Bond’s knickers into knots.

We are introduced to a new actor playing Moneypenny the MI6 secretary (Samantha Bond, who would play the character through Brosnan’s four Bond films); not as luscious as Caroline Bliss heating up Dalton, and not an auntie like Lois Maxwell pining for Connery’s and Moore’s underpants, Bond (Samantha) is an attractive redhead who smugly informs Bond (James) that she was just on a date with another gentleman, and that Bond’s flirtations could get him charged with sexual harassment! (Just wait’ll she gets a load of #MeToo!)

There’s a new M – Judi Dench as MI6 director, taking the reins from Robert Brown (who took over from Bernard Lee and only did four Bond films prior to Dench). The first female M, she’s openly contemptuous of Bond, “You’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur,” as Bond is direct about his distaste for her as nothing more than “an accountant.” M matches Bond in smug, with a dash of anger – smug-anger? smanger? It sets up a contentious dynamic that would play right into the Daniel Craig era.

And there’s Q, the same old weapons expert we’ve grown to love – Desmond Llewelyn (a fixture since the 2nd Bond film, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and would be till his death after 1999’s THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH). His role is pure comic relief, and we realize this whole bit about showing Bond new gadgets has become almost a satire within each Bond film.

Alan Cumming is Russian computer whiz Boris (although it doesn’t take much to hack these 1995 computers, basically some typing skills and figuring out sexual innuendo passwords).

And the Bond Girl in this 17^th EON Production Bond film – Izabella Scorupco as Natalya. She’s a computer programmer – because she’s a girl. Think I’m joking? Computers were coming into their own as plot drivers in movies, but note the attitude toward sitting and typing in 1995 – a task usually reserved for secretaries, a job usually reserved for women since time immemorial – all the Russian computer techs are women and doughy guys, and effete Alan Cumming is the head computer nerd. Real Men were still doing the punching and shooting. There is a moment where this disparity of effort comes across: Natalya must hack Goldeneye, and Bond gives her a look that says, “Wait – you’re actually going to sit there and TYPE while I do the real work of punching and shooting?!” It lasts for just a second – but it’s there, giving away the inborn misogyny of the filmmakers (writers Jeffery Caine and Bruce Feirstein and director Martin Campbell). There’s also another message in Bond’s look: that of a man unversed in computers (again – because they’re girly things).

Compare that 1995 attitude to Timothy Olyphant’s sexy computer mastermind in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007), or even Man’s Man Daniel Craig as 007 hacking M’s computer in CASINO ROYALE (2006).

To be fair, the women are given their due in fighting skills – Onatopp, it seems, takes an equal amount of sensual pleasure in violent killing as raunchy fucking, and her signature move is wrapping her thighs around a man and crushing the breath from him. And when Bond gives Natalya a gun, asking if she knows how to use it, she quickly demonstrates how proficient she is. So, Ladies – we got your back (as long as it’s pearbottom).

Joe Don Baker’s first Bond appearance was in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS as an American ex-communicated general who supported the Confederates; here he plays agent Wade, a more regular Ugly American, loud and obnoxious, Bond’s disrespectful sidekick (“Hey, Jimbo!”), who turns up wherever he’s needed so that Bond isn’t stranded. And Robbie Coltrane is Russian mafia, more for comedy than plot.

GOLDENEYE loses steam when 006 turns up back from the dead, as a British traitor, and tries to kill Bond and Natalya. This first murder attempt, where they are left in a helicopter with missiles headed for them, yet with the EJECT button within reach… was beyond laughable for a supposedly canny traitorous double-oh agent to have set up. Was the movie pulling our legs? So by the 5^th attempt on Bond’s and Natalya’s lives, we’ve checked out, figuring that 006 must harbor some love-that-cannot-be-spoken for 007 for all his half-hearted efforts in terminating him.

But it’s not all his fault – at one point, 006 sees Bond on a monitor and clearly says to his men, “Kill him.” Easy enough directive, right? Wrong. So the stormtrooper-trained baddies all machine-gun Bond’s general direction, hitting nothing but air, then when Bond steps out with his hands up, they point their guns at him as if that’s a threat. Idiots, you were just shooting at him enough to turn him into confetti, and now that he’s standing right in front of you, you STOP? They take Bond back to 006 – who proceeds to question Bond on why he won’t die. The first thing he should’ve shouted at his idiot soldiers: “Why did you morons bring him back here?! I SPECIFICALLY TOLD YOU TO KILL HIM!”

Movie devolves to TV’s THE A-TEAM when Bond chases Ourumov through Russian streets in a tank. Yes, I said TANK. It’s the coolest scene in the movie, with Bond driving a Russian T-55 tank blithely through buildings and landmarks (the amount of collateral damage! and probable death! But – good guy, so it’s okay) – yet every police car that impacts the tank and is turned over, crushed, or pushed off bridges, we see the occupants exit the cars in quick cutaways, for the PG-13 rubdown.

What about all those trained soldiers that run directly INTO the line of fire? Well, they fall down with no blood or brains spattering everywhere, as would be the case with the high caliber weapons they are being killed with.

Inexplicable interlude in the Caribbean, where Bond and Natalya seem to be spending a casual honeymoon. Skip–

James Bond fiercely guards his woman from progressive liberalism.

More could have been made of the competitiveness between 006 and 007. I imagined 006 was the veteran, having earned his license to kill earlier than Bond. The script plays them as old friends, with Bond BETWAYED. 006 sneers that he “was always better,” which means he has the inferiority complex. A climax above the dish of a radio antenna proves him wrong. However this outcome might have been more poignant had 007 always thought he was the inferior one and comes to realize, without fanfare, that in besting 006 he was, in fact, “always better” – the better agent, the better man, the better smug.

Timothy Dalton went back to the Ian Fleming 007 novels to inspire his take on Bond, but Pierce just looked to Roger Moore – and turned up the smug. Moore was 58 years old when his last Bond was released (A VIEW TO A KILL, 1985), and just didn’t have the smug-stamina (smugina? staminug?) to compete against a new generation of bad guys and badder girls. The franchise needed the younger Pierce to inject its smug into those bad people.

Except for the opening stunts, which are organic to the story, each outlandish action sequence is predicated on stupid things being done or neglected or coincidentally falling into place in the preceding action sequence, which means negating one small coincidence, or just having one of the 50,000 stray bullets hit its mark would put an end to this whole beargarden. The biggest recurring mistake is that no one will get smart and shoot Bond in the head point-blank, over the course of about 63 opportunities to do so. Seriously, you almost start rooting for the bad guys, the number of times this super secret agent finds himself in these embarrassing situations. If he was half the spy his legend makes him out to be, he wouldn’t wind up captured or in the crosshairs in the first place, and the story wouldn’t need the pathological procrastination and breathtaking bad aim.

The grandest, stupidest plot convenience of all must surely be Boris’s subconscious habit of clicking a pen three times while twirling it in his fingers, while he does his feminine computer hacking. Well, it’s a good thing Q just happened to give Bond an explosive pen that is armed when you click it three times. So, yeh… CONVENIENT. I mean, what are the odds?

About the same as someone shooting Bond in the head point-blank.

END

When it’s bad being Bad.

Geez, I hope no one confuses the sex appeal and street-kewl of these Hollywood-ized detectives with the misinformed rednecks that are real cops. Too late…

BULLITT (1968), DIRTY HARRY (1971, four sequels), THE SUPER COPS (1974), BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984, two sequels), LETHAL WEAPON (1987, three sequels), COPS (1989 TV series, 27 seasons and still going strong in 2014) – the list of movies and TV shows that celebrate the phallic thrust of the bottom rung of law enforcement is literally endless. Is it any wonder that synergy continues into the 90s, with bigger explosions, bigger budgets and bigger phallic thrusts?

BAD BOYS Martin Lawrence and Will Smith are two comedians trying to make drug busts in Miami (which is basically a description of cops in Miami). On the tail of a 100 million dollar shipment for Euro badness Tchéky Karyo, they must also rescue mega-hotness Téa Leoni as a murder witness, must keep Lieutenant Joe Pantoliano out of their pantaloons, dodge Internal Affairs sexpot Marg Helgenberger, and placate Martin’s nagging wife, Theresa Randle. Their “theme song” is Inner Circle’s Bad Boys…

Michael Bay directs in his film debut, and we see all those swooping camera moves and slomo hero shots that would become a staple of his style. Maybe he was a natural extension of his predecessors, maybe a creature of his era? Maybe a copycat of some obscure European director, or a pioneer? I don’t know; I just know that this bombastic Pretty-Orange-Explosion, low-angle, guns-and-cars-and-cheese motif would inform the bulk of Hollywood blockbusters in the decades to come. We must admit, for all the chickendipshittery of it all – it looks great, with the production team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson helming the slick affair, with a lotta laughs from the easy chemistry between Lawrence and Smith, and edge-of-your-seat thrills from Bay’s swooping cams. There’s no way we’ll ever confuse this glossy afterburner with the grit of DIRTY HARRY or the breeze of LETHAL WEAPON.

The title of the movie itself is a massive case of reappropriation (the act of taking an insult and claiming it as a badge of honor, like headbanger, jarhead, nigger, etc.). Bad Boys was a 1987 reggae song that referred to criminals as “bad boys.” However, after it was misused/overused as the COPS TV show theme song, its perception was twisted and seemed to apply to the cops as “badasses.” In fact, this movie uses the song blatantly as the epithet for Lawrence and Smith’s badass quipping buddy cops; they actually sing a snatch of the song as they roll in their souped-up Porsche 911 Turbo II 3.6. That’s what Hollywood calls realism.

But cops, policemen, baconators – whatever you want to call them – are NOT your quipping pals who would judiciously discern you are not a “bad boy” and let you walk if they accidentally bumped into you on the street or near a crime scene. And whenever you call the cops for any reason, make sure all your alcohol is hidden, all your drugs are flushed, all your porn is stashed, all the bruises on your girlfriend’s arm from Krav Maga are covered, all your traffic tickets are paid, all your clothes are expensive, all your headlights and blinkers work, all your house is painted… or they will find some reason to arrest you and/or beat the shit out of you and/or taser you. And if you’re black, then they’ll really fuck you up.

So although many cop movies are classics and highly enjoyable, cops are NOT the discerning, judicious humanitarians they are usually portrayed as. They are trained to be merely apprehenders of suspected perpetrators. They are trained not to judge, not to deliberate, not to execute. Just bring the perp in, so the SYSTEM can do all that. But it’s media like this that makes the cops think – incorrectly – that they are allowed to have discernment and an opinion and a knee on someone’s neck.

In the world of BAD BOYS, we are rooting like zealots for the cops – family man Marcus Bennett (Lawrence) and sex machine Mike Lowrey (Smith) – to track down the drugs and save the dame. And do unimaginably stupid things along the way that only Hollywood can get away with, i.e. married Marcus masquerades as the womanizer Mike Lowery so that witness Julie (Leoni) will trust him with her life. It’s not enough he’s got a badge and gun, now he’s gotta have a slap-happy tool as well. Or how about taking a page from TANGO AND CASH: Marcus is a millionaire who owns that Porsche, but still does The Job so that the other guys on the force won’t think he’s coasting through life. Hey, I got an idea: why not leave the frickin’ force and coast through life?

Watch for Michael Imperioli (soon to be Christopher from THE SOPRANOS), Anna Thomson (the cut whore from UNFORGIVEN), Kevin Corrigan (as a geek scientist, before joining the Seth Rogen clan).

And you don’t really need to watch for Téa Leoni – you can’t miss her – as the screen is seared by her absolute flawless porcelain perfection and neck-crushing thighs, which the producers were canny enough to keep exposed up to the point of vagina. I thank you, Simpson/Bruckheimer! And my bad boy thanks you.

END

Anthropocentric Spin.

I want to hurt this movie. Like it hurt me.

THE CORE opens with a Peter Gallagher clone sans Eyebrows dropping dead at a board meeting – so begins a series of events that establish the Earth’s core has inexplicably stopped spinning, causing electromagnetic anomalies. So scientists must drill down and re-start the spin with The Universal Solvent – nukes.

Earth-hugger Poffy

But the spin begins long before they take the plunge…

Any rationalizing fools who entreat those of us with a modicum of intelligence to “sit back, relax and enjoy this entertainment” do not realize that we who rail against movies of this ilk, do so not because of bogus science per se, but because of the inconsistent bogus science. We may not boast Geophysics degrees, nor do we aspire to atom-splitting scientific accuracy – we just want consistency!

Example 1: If your movie maintains that pigeons use the Earth’s electromagnetic field for “long-distance navigation,” why show pigeons disoriented whilst tooling around the few hundred feet of Trafalgar Square.

Example 2: If your movie cites Real Science to explain the impossibility of generating enough energy to start the planet’s core re-spinning, why not establish that it takes that same impossible amount of energy to stop the core in the first place? More on this later.

This movie has less “science” in it than STAR WARS – and STAR WARS has NO science in it.

At a militia symposium, geophysicist Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart, playing your average “biscuit-thrower” college professor: disheveled hair, attire and lifestyle; upon arriving home, throws biscuit to dog which has no name – Hollywood stereotype created by Mel Gibson in LETHAL WEAPON), cites Physics 101, yet none of the generals seem to have even a sixth-grade education, as they stare dismayed at his demo of burning a peach with a spraycan, to illustrate – get this! – how the Sun would burn Earth were it to lose its electromagnetic covering. The stupidity meter could go no lower at that point.

Movies of this ilk are constructed around one or two thrilling sequences upon which the burden of the storyline is draped uncomfortably – such a scene was the introduction to Major Rebecca Childs (grotesquely gorgeous Hilary Swank) as her crew emergency-land Shuttle Endeavour in the LA Aqueduct. The movie’s pitch was all about sonic-booming over Dodger Stadium and navigating through overpass bridges like technofied T-Birds from GREASE. Magnificently-staged, the thrill meter hit climax – consequently, it was all downhill from there.

Stanley Tucci‘s suavely turtle-necked Dr. Conrad Zimsky is simply to insult Dr. Carl Sagan. Ironic that we meet Zimsky exiting his “Einstein Seminars,” even whilst this movie leaves Einstein’s most rigorous theorem (E=mc2) in a deep hole.

Tchéky Karyo, as Frenchman Serge, is the only likable character. Of the admittedly talented cast, his performance alone is so poignant that we’re truly saddened to see him die. (His end was pre-ordained; he was, after all, French.) In the grandest of hackneyed traditions, only the Attractive American White Couple survive whilst every one of the dubiously-titled “terranauts” onboard the drilling craft goes down.

Gorgeously grotesque D.J. Qualls is computer-hacker, Rat, called in by the gubmint to communicate with the drilling craft from the surface; an “unlikely hero” character who is really one of those rootless, amoral beings who make our online lives unbearable with viruses and identity theft and their wholly unnecessary existence – rather than being put on a pedestal, these people should be dumped down a deep crevasse.

There’s the Square-Jawed American Pilot (least-known of the principals, Bruce Greenwood – ergo, first to die); Delroy Lindo as Token Black Dude, Dr. “Braz”; Richard Jenkins (from SIX FEET UNDER – is that some kind of bad joke worse than the puns I’ve been making?) and Alfre Woodard as the preposterously miscast Flight Director. The actors did their best, but the blathering catastrophe of the script kept them low. In a movie this bad, one suspects that either Karyo or Tucci filled a role that F. Murray Abraham was too busy to fill because he was too busy digging himself into a hole on some other bad movie.

Braz constructs their drilling craft with a substance called Unobtainium (stop that laughing in back!), which, he tells us, converts heat and pressure to energy, so the deeper it gets, the stronger it gets….er, I think the misinformed “scientist” meant to say that energy in the form of heat and pressure is converted to mass by the Unobtainium. (Remember that “E=mc2” thingy?) Was the “science consultant” on this movie an actual scientist or a guy that read too many comicbooks? – and, more importantly, may I book some time to put him six feet under?

The script was made of Unobtainium. The deeper it got, the more energy it expended in keeping us from frying in outrage.

Note that “implausible” = fiction; “impossible” = fantasy. A drilling craft outfitted with a laser that disintegrates solid rock to nothingness: implausible. Humans sustaining diamond-crushing pressure in the Earth’s mantle – no matter what they’re wearing, let alone wafer-thin spacesuits: impossible. Throughout the film, Impossibility outweighing Implausibility makes THE CORE Science Fantasy, not Science “Fiction,” so cease associating it with a once-legitimate term.

When physics knowledge was at a groundling stage, scientifically-inept tales like JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH were acceptable, but these days, even the common rabble are well-versed in general physics, so it is inexcusable that knowledge be so denigrated, ignored and subjugated to the inadequacies of feeble-minded technicians with big budgets, who promulgate ANTI-knowledge with their idiotic product…

Deep in the plot, where everyone takes turns saying something scientifically illiterate, Zimsky reveals that a man-made device, “Destiny,” is responsible for the stalled core. I’ll say this once: nothing man-made can output the amount of energy needed to stall a planet’s core. What part of “nothing man-made” don’t the film-makers understand? If these arrogant, anthropocentric, bacterial mites were to explode every nuclear weapon the government denies possessing, it would still not affect the planet’s spin, orbit or sturdiness; it would not even wipe out “all life,” but the great percentage of larger organisms that depend on photosynthesis in their food chain (mainly plants and mammals).

Conceited humans refuse to acknowledge One True Fact: the PLANET will be fine – whether or not the core spins at all; whether or not humans exist at all. You’re only “saving” it for your own selfish ends…

As the Attractive American White Couple are rescued, Rat cries, “The earth is healing itself!” – Well, uh, it was never really “sick,” rodent – obviously jubilant that he can now stop working for The Man and go back to creating viruses and stealing identities online, like the worthless piece of excrement he always was.

But before he hacks into the World Wide Web for spiritually bereft reasons, he does it one last time “nobly” – to promulgate the biographies of the “heroes” who died whilst defying physics laws through uninformed dialog. Whilst we vainly try to clear our e-mail logjams, that’s all we need – more spam.

Can I start to hurt you now, to let the real healing begin?

END