Rated R because we're dealing with classic James Gunn now.  If you have only seen Guardians of the Galaxy and its sequel, you don't realize the sheer gore and inappropriateness of the whole experience.  He's not as over-the-top as he was with films like Slither or Super (or other S titled films), but he's not exactly holding back either.  This is an unapologetically R-rated film, but with a message that's kind of endearing.  Regardless, R.

DIRECTOR:  James Gunn

Now this is what made HBO Max worth it.  I mean, I never thought I wanted to experience a James Gunn film outside of Guardians of the Galaxy, but there's a good chance that giving Gunn a big budget and freedom to do what he wants might be a good thing.  He's hitting this sweet spot between what his artistic sensibilities are and what a studio wants to see from him.  Sure, a lot of this might be the change in the studio attitude.  And while The Suicide Squad might not even be my favorite James Gunn movie, my goodness I had a good time.

Suicide Squad is a tough concepts.  While we want to see villain movies, the notion behind Task Force X is packing as many villains into one area and try to make them likable to a certain extent.  Now, I'm sure that most of the commentary that's coming about this movie is the comparison to the David Ayer film of similar name.  Like Guardians, it's not like the Suicide Squad was one of those popular properties that a mass audience could get behind.  So the movie has to do a lot of legwork to set up this conceit and then take a bunch of intentionally despicable characters and get us to care for them.  That probably was David Ayer's approach and God love him for trying to make that work.  But James Gunn took a much smarter approach.  Instead of going the way of the first Suicide Squad, Gunn took his inspiration from films like The Dirty Dozen.  With a title like Suicide Squad, there should be a body count and a metacommentary stressing how unimportant life actually is.  (Not something I espouse in reality, but it makes for great popcorn cinema.)  What actually happens is that we start caring about the survivors because we need to hold onto them.  It seems paradoxical.  Through the carnage of villains (some of whom are played by actors I wanted to see throughout the film), I grew to care about the ones who didn't die.

But I think that the reason that The Suicide Squad might be a major jump forward for Gunn because it does embrace his over-the-top slaughterfest that he absolutely adores, but this movie seems to have a bit of heart.  Now, there are people who will argue that James Gunn's film always had a heart to them.  I don't really see that.  I never thought that a movie that had Bloodsport as the dynamic protagonist would exist.  But apparently, when you cast Idris Elba in that role, it really works.  I love the idea of the world-weary anti-hero who oddly has this minutia of humanity to him.  But the film is about watching that little seed grow.  We know that he's not an absolute monster because he cares in his own disturbing way about his daughter, but in the way that stresses that he was going to go through this whole arc throughout the film.  Maybe I'm harkening back to my obsession with father figures.  But I adore how, once again, the role of surrogate father is thrust upon an unlikely candidate.  With this case, the father figure is, to paraphrase Wreck-It Ralph, not a bad guy, but an actual Bad Guy. 

It is Bloodsport's relationship with Ratcatcher II that makes the story worth more than the collection of jokes and gore.  Don't get me wrong.  The reason that I'm obsessed with Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 is because of how darned funny the movie is.  But the reason that I can say that it is objectively a good movie is because of the depth that exceeds the genre storytelling.  (Oh geez, that's another problematic father story!  Maybe I need to have a joint therapy session with James Gunn.)  I know that I should be rooting for Bloodsport to be a good father to his actual kid, but it seems like the fact that Bloodsport actual goes beyond dealing with his own internal conflicts to be paternal to his team, but he literally allows himself to experience his ultimate nightmare of being overwhelmed by a hoard of rats.  If you ever wanted a physically verifiable sign that a character had indeed changed, it has to be Idris Elba cowering in fetal position while being engulfed by a sea of gross fur.  

I think that DC doesn't quite know what to do with Harley Quinn.  You have Academy Award nominated and / or winning Margot Robbie who straight up advocates for the character.  She does a pretty good job with potentially the most cartoonish DCeU character available.  She is iconic and part of the cultural zeitgeist.  But I still have a hard time really caring about her character.  Listen, Gunn and Robbie do some amazing stuff with the character.  But I quickly realized that Harley Quinn ultimately doesn't need to be in this movie.  It's almost like Warner Brothers have contractually obligated her to be in villain films because she sells a ton of merchandise, but her stories almost seem to be parallel to the main plot.  And she enhances the film.  But isn't The Suicide Squad supposed to be like Birds of Prey and simply be another Harley Quinn movie?  I'm way more interested in Bloodsport, Peacemaker, Ratcatcher, Polka Dot Man, and King Shark than I am in Harley Quinn.  And I WANT to love Harley Quinn.  Her animated series is one of the best thing on HBO Max and I want Margot Robbie to keep playing the character.  I just want the movie to actually nail something for her to do that is great for the character, not just another team up movie where she says naughty things.

I want to have a paragraph on Peacemaker.  I have nothing of wisdom to say about this character, but I don't.  I just want to applaud the casting of John Cena in an absolutely perfect casting job.  James Gunn casting wrestlers as the funny guys is just on-the-nose perfect.  I know that Dave Bautista was supposed to play Peacemaker and I'm sure that he would have been perfect.  But John Cena is a welcome addition as an antihero like Peacemaker.  He makes the film.

So The Suicide Squad is pretty great.  Maybe I don't have the most insight into this movie and I know that there's stuff to analyze.  But I do applaud James Gunn for finding a way 1) to bounce back from all that Disney drama 2) to make a movie that is both commercially fun while being absolutely to his taste and 3) to salvage a franchise while giving hope to a meh DCeU.  Nicely done.

PG-13, but almost because it is historical.  I'm not saying that The Courier is an offensive movie in any way.  But I'm also saying that it gets a free pass from the MPA for being a movie for history nuts.  It has nudity and torture.  I'm sure if it was a contemporary film with a slightly different tone, it would have gotten an R-Rating, but I don't mind the PG-13 rating either.  I suppose you can throw in alcoholism and adultery into the questionable content area too, but it's mostly about nudity and torture.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Dominic Cooke

How has everyone seen this movie already?  I hadn't seen a trailer for this movie.  I just knew that people were seeing the new Benedict Cumberbatch movie, The Courier.  I mean, why did I watch it?  I don't regret it.  It's just a matter of me watching something because people had said that they had seen it.  I don't even remember if they gave me their opinion of the movie.  I just remember everyone telling me that they had just seen this film.  I didn't even know that many movies were showing during the pandemic, but apparently this one did.  Am I watching movies just to say that I've watched them at this point?  Am I a vapid shell of a human being? Man, I hope I discover some kind of personal truth while writing about a movie that will probably get forgotten to history pretty quickly.

The thing is, I love the Cold War from an academic perspective.  I have a history minor and there's so much out there.  But I find the Cold War to be absolutely fascinating.  I want to go off on a tirade about how we're basically in a Cold War right now, but that is not the point of this blog.  But even as a Cold War nut, can I question how tired I am about the same movies getting made over and over again?  This sentence alone makes me a monster.  Here I am, sitting behind my computer in absolute comfort, and I can't even appreciate the fact that Greville Wynne totally deserves a biopic about his life.  It's just that...I feel like I've seen this movie a dozen times.  Heck, it's just Argo for the Cold War.  And I don't even mind that.  But it also blows my mind that studios keep making these kinds of movies.  And the they always have the same result  They either become complete Oscar bait or completely forgotten to history.  These aren't bad movies.  There's not one thing in The Courier that doesn't really work (despite my wife's insistence that the movie was getting longer as we were watching it).  It's a fine movie that really just pulls from the subgenre for years.

You may have read a cynical edge to what I've just written.  Trust me, I hate me too.  It's just that a lot of this film feels like it was resting on the shoulders of films that we've seen before.  At least it isn't the John LeCarre style films.  I know that people love those kinds of movies.  The Courier is the Cold War that I'm interested in.  *and it is in this moment that I realize what the core value of this film is.  Let's explore it together!*  Why I find the Cold War so fascinating is because it was complex, yet affected everyone.  Civilization became a mask.  We pretended that there was something normal to go back to.  With World War II, there was this active shift from routine to the war effort.  While there were reminders that there was a normal to be found, ultimately people were majorly affected and acted like it.  Because no one was firing guns yet, people put on this show of normalcy.  But it was a show.  Greville Wynne could be the mascot for what the Cold War was all about.  He was so boring and normal.  He was a representative of Capitalism, a businessman who didn't let politics affect his career.  But there came a point where the acknowledgment of being apolitical is, indeed, a political statement is what hits the character.

There's a cool shift in Greville.  (I'm going to call him by his first name because his name is actually "Greville", which is what I imagine a British name was if I didn't speak any English and I had to make one up.) Greville takes this dangerous gig to give himself a sense of importance.  He's such a little man who is kind of pathetic.  His wife, Sheila, doesn't realize that his lack of ambition is what makes him attractive and he resorts to affairs. In an attempt to settle himself as something larger, he accepts this low-stakes gig to get a sense of grandeur.  (It's probably what I would do if the core values aligned with my own enough.)   But Greville, while being placed in Moscow, sees the world from beyond his blinders.  The world is a far more fragile place than what our small view allows it to see.  (I'm connecting it to today.) It's when he sees real people and how his choices affect others that he becomes genuinely heroic.  He never views himself as heroic.  He's always just Greville Wynne, businessman.  (I'm not sure what exactly he sells besides general industrialization.)  But it is in his embrace and acceptance that things aren't normal that he kind of steps up to the plate.  He realizes that the mask is actually that of businessman.

Everyone kind of sees that business in Russia is a mask, but no one really directly addresses it.  By Greville going to Moscow, he's pretending that all of these atrocities aren't happening for the sake of money.  Perhaps he can justify it by saying it is the government and not the people, but he's interacting with government officials almost exclusively.  It's only once he's captured do people question why he was in Russia.  It actually makes more sense for him to be a spy in Russia than it is for him to pretend like sales is a thing in the face of nuclear annihilation.  All of this leads me to the moment that I absolutely adore, and that's the relationship with Oleg / Alex.  (I like how they had to nickname him "Alex" because there were too many Olegs in the movie.)  There's this friendship that stems out of mutual admiration.  They both view each other as heroes, despite the fact that at least Greville doesn't view himself as a hero.  But there's this moment in the prison where Greville reveals that they stopped the Cuban Missile Crisis through their efforts and both men realize the sheer scope of their small meetings.  Everything that may have seemed minor gets this grandiose meaning to it.

So as much as this movie has been made before, it's pretty good.  I can't help but get on my soapbox a little bit and comment that I can see why this movie is necessary today.  The world is more political than it has been in my lifetime.  Maybe I'm just almost 40 and I've chosen a side, but politics are fundamental to the way things are done today.  To pretend that you want to leave politics out of things is a way of saying that you don't care about the outcome of other people.  Greville Wynne honestly started this whole story by wearing a tie clip to help his govenrnment in a dangerous time and it led to him ending the Cuban Missile Crisis. I can't help but think that I'm constantly seeing anti-mask and anti-vax memes and that I'm not supposed to say anything about it.  It's choosing to help the other that matters in these moments, not the self.  Okay, it was a weak soap box, but it got my point across.

PG-13 for scary scary jump scares involving creatures who break the silence with loud screaming and heads that expose fleshy red parts.  There's also some horrible trauma that happens to our main characters, who happen to be kids in a lot of the situations.  If you want to see a kid get his foot caught in a bear trap, that happens.  Oh, and it shows it too, so just prepare for some grossness.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  John Krasinski

Remember how A Quiet Place became the horror movie for all audiences?  I was sitting there with my extended family --outdoors in attempt to stave off the very apocalypse we were watching --thinking that my mother-in-law is excited to watch the sequel to A Quiet Place.  And there was screaming!  Oh my, how there was screaming.  My father-in-law regularly got up to stand outside because he knew that something was going to jump out at the characters.  Of course, this made the movie all the more fun.  It's why most horror movies don't really stick with me.  It's the knowledge that an audience is going to share in the experience with me versus being the only one who wants to watch a scary movie. 

Now I'll be honest because that's why I write all this nonsense.  I don't know if A Quiet Place really needed a sequel.  For a sequel, this is a pretty great movie.  It gets us back into this world of silence and it is one of those rare sequels that captures the vibe of the first movie while offering new scares.  But in terms of telling a new story, there's not much here.  I mean, I know what story was meant to be told.  In terms of adding to the greater mythos and thematic elements of A Quiet Place, the second film is (supposed to be) about mourning and finding humanity in a world that finds kindness to be a weakness.  But as I'm sarcastically stressing right now, the themes of this movie are pretty superficial and weak compared to the depth that the first movie really seemed to cover.  

The first film was about forgiveness, both of self and of others.  Because we never really saw the monsters until the final act, the movie had to really settle with the family dynamic all throughout the film.  Yeah, there was always a threat that they couldn't make any noise, but it was about how setting enhance the main storyline.  A similar thing is present in zombie movies, especially stuff like Dawn of the Dead by Romero. By forcing people out of their comfort zone, they are forced to address the elephants in the room and that's what the first film really did.  The introduction of Cillian Murphy's Emmett had the potential to tell a story about the road not taken.  Emmett, after all, is a dark mirror for John Krasinski's Lee.  They both had similar lives before this all went down and they were friends in that life.  It's only when the apocalypse is thrust upon them that they take different steps.  Now, there is a reason why Emmett grew cold and became a survivor at all costs.  Lee had Evelyn while Emmett lost his wife.  Perhaps this is too a cautionary tale for Evelyn for what she could become given that Lee is no longer there.  There's some stuff there to really explore, but it all falls victim to the notion that there is a fun sci-hi action horror to be indulged in.

And that stuff really is great.  Like, Krasinski is kind of the man.  I mean, I may have thought that the first movie was a flash in the pan, but his scares in this one are top notch.  The bus coming at them was on the next level in terms of how that scene was shot and how effective the scare was.  Yeah, the monsters are creepy, but like with The Lost World: Jurassic Park, there tends to be a little bit of creature fatigue when it comes to seeing the monsters.  So the fact that Krasinski decides to make the environment a scarier thing than anything else is smart.  Maybe that's what the entire movie is kind of toying with.  There's that trend of sensory deprivation horror that we saw with this and Bird Box that feels like nature is the monster out there.  It always feels like a revenge plot for being so cavalier with how we've treated the planet.  So the monsters are almost the avatar for something much larger.  That's why the scariest things are the environment.  The bear trap with Marcus is treating him how humans treated animals.  That part is terrifying.  The box with the baby (by the way, the baby is too well behaved) is the walls closing in.  Marcus and the baby within the hatch is the reliance on man-made space and how that ultimately will be their doom.  These are all moments where the monsters are perhaps the spark that gets the scene moving, but it is the environment that becomes the real villain.  

But the movie also has one really dumb moment.  I mean, this moment had us all groaning.  The movie has little productive for Marcus to do.  This is Evelyn's and Regan's  stories, but Marcus is kind of just messing things up.  There's the bear trap, sure.  It's to get Marcus out of the way while providing an awesome bit of tension. Good on that.  I'm impressed that he didn't scream for that long and then he wouldn't shut up.  But there's a part where Marcus just puts everyone, including is baby brother (sister?) in danger because he wanted to be...helpful, I guess?  Marcus is placed in charge of the baby.  They are hanging out in the soundproof tube with the door open.  The baby is fine.  Marcus is injured.  Mom gave specific instructions.  Then he just decides to put the baby in the box, waste a tiny amount of oxygen that he didn't check ahead of time, and then go look out a window?  I don't know what his logic was.  Who did he think that he was helping?  Was he aware that he didn't really have a plot in the movie so he just invented one?  It's a really weird moment.

This all kind of leads Regan as a protagonist.  I love Regan as the protagonist.  Evelyn kind of told her warrior woman story in the first movie, giving birth in a bathtub with a nail in her foot.  That is, by far, going to be the most memorable moment in the franchise, however long it goes on for.  But her story is now one of support.  Regan, however, is about ownership of her new role as savior.  I really like the idea of it, getting the hearing aid to a radio station. But I don't know if there was enough for her to do.  She gains a new father in the form of Emmett and that's fine, I guess.  But it feels like there weren't enough complications.  She kept getting that hearing aid back.  I'm always bummed when a plan works.  Yeah, there were hurdles.  No denying these hurdles were scary and effective.  But really, the hearing aid to the microphone was kind of blah for me as an ending.  I wanted something else.  I also kind of wanted something more permanent.  It just seems like we're going to get a third movie and it's going to be a little bit more of the same given time.  I want the movie to take a risk, not push the whole thing to status quo.  It may feel like this is a step forward, but the family is in the same position that they were at the end of the last movie.  They were always able to take out monsters.  Now slightly more people can do the same.  

So while the movie is a good time, I think there was something more that could be done.  Ultimately, the first movie sold me on the idea of this concept and this is more of the same, both in good and bad ways.  I would probably watch a third and a fourth movie, but I don't get the same sense of satisfaction that I did watching the first film.  

Not rated, but it actually breaks one of those cardinal rules of what you are allowed to do in film.  It straight up kills a kid.  Oh, and it doesn't just kill a random kid, like in Fritz Lang's M.  It kills the kid that's one of the main characters in the story.  But there's also the understanding that lots of people are killed and London is plunged into fear.  There's also a stabbing death that's so blunt (no pun intended) that it comes across as shocking.  Regardless, not rated.

DIRECTOR: Alfred Hitchcock

I thought that I was the idiot, but I'm not the only one who made this mistake.  I could have sworn that I saw Sabotage before.  You know, the one with Peter Lorre?  Yeah, the internet made the same mistake that I did when I was looking for images from this movie.  That's kind of a win-win for me, because I've seen a lot of Hitchcock, so a new Hitchcock for me --especially one that I already owned --is pretty rad for me.  I watched a solid print of an okay Hitchcock movie.  I can think of worse things.  Not only that, but now I'm considering reading a novel that I thought I would never get around to, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, thanks to the fact that I'm now curious how close the movie is to the book.  Look at my charmed life!

I'm going to be irresponsibly critiquing one of the greatest auteurs that ever lived.  It's because I have a computer and I can't actually fight Alfred Hitchcock.  I adore Hitchcock.  I absolutely adore his films and they have brought me such joy and a love of cinema that you have to keep in mind when I talk a little trash about movies like Sabotage.  I don't really fall in love with Hitchcock until his time at Warner Brothers.  His British films often lack a little something.  Part of it, I mentally blame on the British persona woven through his time in England.  This is pre-the British documentary philosophy of cinema.  No, this is wartime cinema in England.  While the Brits were making movie, the studio system at United Artists in the States was changing the face of film.  But this is a time where a younger Alfred Hitchcock was experimenting with what could be done with film.  

This is amazing stuff.  It's just that...it's not all that cohesive.  I don't want to compare THX-1138 with the early work of Alfred Hitchcock, mainly because George Lucas isn't the most amazing director ever, but there's an eerie similarity with what Lucas was doing in that film with what Sabotage ends up being.  Both THX-1138 and Sabotage are impressive films for the individual beats as opposed to the film as a whole.  I remember thinking that THX got a little bit of harassment unnecessarily when I was watching it, because the movie looked super duper impressive while I was watching it.  It was only when the film was over that I realized that I was kind of bored stupid and didn't really care about any of the characters.  Sabotage isn't quite that reaction from me.  

I hate saying obvious things, but Hitchcock is the Master of Suspense.  It's in Sabotage that we have him almost distilling the concept of suspense into a brutal cocktail.  I'm talking about the death of the kid, guys.  I know that this doesn't sell me as the most amazing teacher ever, but my students have a running gag saying that I love any book where the kid dies.  That joke has evolved into "Mr. H loves kid death", which is probably something I should probably put a cap on so I don't get fired.  But I am genuinely floored by how impressive Stevie's death is planned out.  In his interview book with Francois Truffaut, Hitch talks about how it is the ticking that is effective and the explosion that is the anti-climax.  (Be aware, I'm butchering that paraphrasing.)  It's all in the anticipation that gets us in a movie.  I feel like Hitchcock made this movie just for this sequence because it is so crafted and so tense that the rest of the film feels like an afterthought.

Part of that is probably due to the taboo of the subject matter.  In my head, there were two options to Stevie's package delivery turning out.  1) Stevie somehow is separated from his package and escapes danger.  2) Stevie is injured, but not killed, causing Mrs. Verloc to question her husband's criminal actions.  In my wildest dreams did I think that Hitchcock would blow the kid up after all of that setup.  Especially, I never thought that he would die immediately after getting his teeth brushed and his hair pomaded.  It just read as such a silly human moment that to counter that moment with a bus explosion seems impossible.  And I suppose that we're meant to think that because Hitchcock completely foreshadows the bus explosion happening.  There are a handful of times when Hitch points out that film reels are not allowed on public transportation because it's just so flammable and then that scene happens?  It's all genius.

Dear Diary, I have a question about xenophobia.  It's very easy from the 21st Century to look back at 1936 and say "Ew."  Once again, an older movie plays on the concept of the evil foreigner poisoning the Western way of life, steeped in democracy and whatnot.  In this case, we have Mr. Verloc.  Now, Hitch made Verloc suck.  Understandably so, he's the villain. But he's also not the big villain of the piece.  I mean, he's the primary antagonist because he's present throughout the film, but Verloc isn't a patriot.  He's a guy who wants to make his struggling business thrive once again.  Basically he's looking for a quick buck.  But given all that I just said, is it horrible that he had to be a foreigner.  (He gets mad when his cabbage is brown.  I'm not sure if this is a '30s thing or a foreigner thing.) There's really no reason that he had to be from another country.  There might actually be something more haunting about a Brit betraying his country because of capitalism, but that's me sitting here comfortably tic-tacking away from my future machine.  It just seems gross?  I don't know.  It's '36.  England has a natural weariness from the outside world at this time.  Maybe a bad guy with an accent makes it easier to watch something merely from an entertainment perspective.  

To close this whole puppy up, I want to specifically talk about what makes this movie less than amazing.  I know, I didn't talk about Ted and how he's trying to steal a foreigner's wife.  I think that's all I can say about that and the fact that Hitchcock feels the need to wedge a romance into this suspense tale when it really shouldn't have it.  No, I'm talking about the weakest third act I've seen in a Hitchcock movie.  The movie really hits its climax when Mrs. Verloc stabs her husband.  That moment is great.  But the movie really tries to go out of its way to close up all of its plot points. I would like to also mention that it doesn't even accomplish this, even in a ham-handed way.  We still don't get the guy from the aquarium or even a concrete reason for all of this eponymous Sabotage.  Instead, we get the bird guy.  That guy blows himself up.  The leading lady is let off the hook and there's a romance to be had in the wake of her dead brother and husband.  It just seems so...trying too hard.  There's no emotional vulnerability, which is something that Hitchcock has always been criticized for.  So the end...really sucks.  

But for a movie that falls apart in the third act, it is a pretty good watch.  Hitchcock is his own worst enemy by peaking with the bomb sequence.  Once the movie tries resolving itself, it shows that it is really underbaked.  But we do get these moments of pure genius and hints that Hitch will become the greatest director of all time in this film.  It's got great parts, but it is not a great product.

PG because there was no PG-13 at the time.  Like many of the James Bond movies, a lot of the objectionable behavior comes from James Bond's commitment to vice and violence.  There's more women killed in horrible ways in this one.  There's more near nudity, but plenty of sexuality and drinking.  There's also the Connery era xenophobia about Asian people, in this case Korean people (to a almost forced plot justification).  I'm going to talk about fridging women as well, so keep that in mind.  Oh...and Bond confesses that he hates the Beatles, so keep that in mind. PG.  

DIRECTOR:  Guy Hamilton

It feels like the 007 movies have been the largest goal on my blog.  I've had the 50th Anniversary box set forever.  I started watching it before this blog was even conceived.  When I finally knocked out Spectre, in preparation for No Way to Die, I realize that I hadn't written about any of the Connery Bonds with the exception of Diamonds are Forever.  Well, that's going to no longer be a thing because I'm closing up on the Connery Bond films pretty quick.  I think I only have Thunderball and You Only Live Twice left and then I'm done with writing about the Bond movies (until No Time to Die).  You know, I get a thrill adding a giant list to the Collections Page, right? (NOTE: I'm horrified to realize that I rewatched Spectre​, but never actually wrote about it?!?)

In my From Russia with Love entry, I talked about how Goldfinger never really caught my attention, despite the fact that it is the Bond movie that is possibly the most reference.  I don't know why. In high school, we tried remaking this movie for my buddy's Brit Lit class.  It came out terribly because we started filming it when it was already considered late.  But our version has better memories than the actual film.  I always thought that it was a little boring for a Bond movie.  While other people have memories of James Bond strapped to a table with a laser beam threatening to fry his genitals, I always had the memory of James Bond sitting on a horse farm sipping mint juleps for a sizable portion of the movie.   I mean, both those things happen, but I think that I'm more right than the laser folks.  See, the lion's share of this movie is James Bond in captivity.  I don't think I realized it, but I think of Goldfinger in summary as "James Bond all-of-the-sudden is bad at escaping."  

James Bond comes off as a little incompetent in this movie and completely reckless.  One of the throughlines of the Bond films is the fact that M expects perfection out of the Double-Os.  Bond is always dressed down for being irresponsible and a bit too cavalier for things that are clearly out of his control.  He rarely takes it personally because he understands the concept that it is M's role to criticize failure.  But Bond rarely deserves that reputation...except in Goldfinger.  Let's cut the pre-credit sequence out.  There's no actual tie between the pre-credit sequence and the rest of the movie except for the justification that Bond can be at a resort for the beginning of the film for a reason.  Bond starts his mission to observe Goldfinger by shaming him for fun.  His role is to observe Goldfinger and see what he is up to, but instantly reveals himself by forcing Goldfinger to lose his card game badly.  He then seduces Goldfinger's lovely accomplice, Jill Masterson of the soon-to-be-tragic Mastersons.  Jill is the only person who could have dropped the ball when it came to Goldfinger losing his card game, so this seduction proves to be irresponsible.  It makes her a target and Bond kind of should have realized that.  While Goldfinger is the one that kills Jill Masterson, Bond's less than stealthy approach puts her in Goldfinger's sights.

This is where the concept of fridging comes in.  M warns Bond that he has to handle this professionally in light of the death of Jill Masterson.  He's meant to make contact with Auric Goldfinger with the allure of a Nazi gold bar.  Okay.  But Bond once again decides to shame Goldfinger.   As much as Goldfinger cheats during golf, not dissimilar to gin, so does Bond.  By claiming that Goldfinger accidentally shot a Schlesenger 7 instead of a Schlesenger 1, Goldfinger had to realize that wasn't true and it's just another case of humiliating the bad guy without regard for how that will have consequences.  For a secret agent, Bond really goes out of his way to raise Goldfinger's ire towards him.  It's really weird, because later he has to talk Goldfinger out of killing him just by saying "Operation: Grand Slam".  It's actually against Goldfinger's character to offer Bond a reprieve, but the movie needs the hero of the franchise alive so whatever.

And then comes Tilly Masterson.  How bad do you feel for this family?  Tilly is a woman out for revenge on Auric Goldfinger.  Bond mistakes her for being someone trying to kill him, because frankly he deserves it for putting a target on Jill.  Tilly is untrained, but Bond isn't.  When they are caught out in a shootout behind the Aston Martin DB5 --I believe the Aston Martin is actually the star of the film --Bond tells Tilly to abandon the cover of the bulletproof windshield of the DB5 and run for the woods.  It is then that Oddjob shows up and kills her via millinery purchase.  Now, one could argue that Bond was thinking that Tilly could escape regular goons with assault rifles, not Oddjob with a hat.  Oddjob didn't show up right until that moment.  But we are all aware that assault rifles are probably...more deadly than a sharp hat, right?  A hat has one shot.  I would even argue that Oddjob, despite showing off some pretty sweet tricks with that hat, isn't amazing at using it, as proven by the Fort Knox scene.  He doesn't throw it from a distance to take out Bond, who is cuffed to an atomic device.  He also misses Bond during that fight.  

Because he tells Tilly to run for the woods, he's also partially responsible for her death.  If she had stayed behind the bulletproof screen, they probably would have taken her captive like they took Bond captive.  And then Bond fails to escape again once  he is taken captive.  Q puts in this once-in-a-lifetime perfect ejector seat.  He uses this ejector seat.  And then he still doesn't escape because he confuses a mirror for a car.  Why is that mirror there?  Why run into a brick wall?  Why doesn't the machine gun take out the mirror?  It's a lot going on there!  

So Bond doesn't escape the laser, so much as he bluffs his way out of it.  He escapes his cell once only to be recaptured by Pussy Galore (I can't even with that).  He tries to get a message out via homing beacon, but that is crushed in a car.  (Also, why didn't Oddjob take the gold out of the trunk before it was cubed?  Why bother cube a car if you are just going to bring the evidence back to your estate?  I will talk about this in a sec.)  Bond is a passive spectator for the majority of this movie.  If anything, Pussy Galore is the real hero of this story because she is the one put at the most risk in the film.  She is the one who swaps out the nerve gas and organizes one of the most insane decoy plans in the history of the franchise.  Bond just sits in a cell for the majority of the film or has fabulous Kentucky horseracing drinks while he figures out the plan that Goldfinger explains to him.  (Also, isn't Goldfinger aware that Bond knows nothing when he reiterates the plan to him during the mint julep scene?)

There are two moments that get under my craw even more than these scenes.  The first is the gangster scene and the second is Pussy Galore.  Goldfinger brings all of America's gangsters to a meeting in his super swivel room.  In that room, he's inviting them all to help him take out Fort Knox for the price of ten million dollars a person.  One of the gangsters, an aptly named Mr. Solo, decides to back out of the deal and leave with his one million dollars.  He's the guy who gets cubed in the car in the most bizarre way possible.  When Goldfinger escorts him out, he slaughters the trapped gangsters using VX nerve gas.  Why all of this theater?  He explains the nuts and bolts of Operation: Grand Slam to these gangsters, only to murder them all?  This is when Bond figures out the details of the project.  We also know that MI6 knows nothing of Operation Grand Slam because Bond only discovers it when he's hiding under the model of Fort Knox.  Why doesn't Goldfinger just murder him post mint julep?  Why drive Mr. Solo somewhere to murder him and then extract the gold?  There's so much in this moment that my head hurts.

Now, the elephant in the room, Pussy Galore.  Pussy Galore in Ian Fleming's novel is homosexual.  The movie kind of dances around that idea.  It's there, but it's never formally stated.  Now, cinema history probably places Pussy Galore as the apex Bond girl.  She becomes a template for a specific subcategory of Bond girl, one that will be tossed around throughout the franchise for a while: the bad guy who may / or may not have a heart of gold.  (Note: the next film, Thunderball, will immediately subvert this archetype.)  But it kind of is gross that Galore's sexuality is so fragile that all it takes is a charismatic secret agent for her to change sides.  The biggest thing is that Galore is possibly the most strong willed woman up to this point in the franchise.  She's clear about her intentions and affiliations.  She clearly has gone through a lot of steps of Operation: Grand Slam to realize that she's going to be labeled a traitor to America for her involvement in the destruction of Fort Knox.  She's in the villain's inner circle.  To have her 180 because of a literal roll in the hay with Bond, who forces himself on her, is super duper gross.  I know, it's 1964.  It's a different era.  But it also says a lot about the character.  If you squint, I suppose you could see Galore's motivation as being unaware that VX nerve gas is fatal and that she doesn't want to be responsible for genocide.  But remember, she also is helping install a nuclear device on the base, so keep that in mind.

I mean, I don't hate this movie.  I just really don't understand why it is quintessential Bond.  Is the fact that it is set in America?  Maybe it is because it is the first time we have the big army battle at the end of a Bond movie?  Perhaps it's just a pretty movie to look at.  But Goldfinger...is not a great film.  I mean, I love me some James Bond, but Goldfinger​ might be one of the dumber films in the franchise.  I know.  This is all blasphemy.  But it's my blasphemy, okay?

PG-13 for general cheekiness.  It's rebelliousness for old people.  If this was any other movie, this would be the most tame PG-13 ever.  But because it is old people talking about sex, it suddenly seems somehow taboo to a target audience.  It's really pretty low key.  The worst part of it is the attempt to have Dame Maggie Smith's character change from a racist to not being a racist.  It's hamfisted and it does not age well.  There's some really mild almost nudity that the MPAA lists as nudity, but it's all fine.  Again, the worst thing is the racism.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  John Madden

I can't be the only person who thinks that the guy who directed this movie was also the football guy?  That's what keeps me going in the blogging profession / hobby that is completely unnecessary.  It's thinking that this movie was directed after the guy who has a series of video games named after him.  Regardless, this is one of those movies that I wasn't the target audience for.  I remember boomers losing their minds over this one and it became this sensation when it was out.  Then I completely forgot about it until a sequel came out and then I forgot about it again.  But it is one of the last movies in my Fox Searchlight box set, so I suppose I had better watch it.  After all, the blog is titled, "Literally Anything Movies".  

I'll start off by saying that it is a better movie than I thought it would be.  I thought there would be me powering through this knowing that I would have to write about it, but not so much.  I can actually say that I left mostly enjoying it.  Maybe it is me aging, but I think that this movie has a lot of its ducks in a row.  It's just that there are elements of the movie that I am flummoxed by.  Be aware: I'm going to be working through some of these feelings as I write.  (It's why I do this blog.  I want to talk about movies after I watch them, but that doesn't happen very often.)   In terms of messaging and intended messaging, the movie has something that it wants to say and these are things that need to be said.  We're talking about how the elderly are still people, there are always second chances, racism is toxic, that sort of things.  I think it is more along the lines of the different degrees of effectiveness when it comes to delivering these themes that the movie can be either hit or miss.

It's the least effective elements I want to talk about because I don't necessarily hate these moments, but I don't know if they are the homeruns that the movie wants them to be. I was very confused with some of the choices with Dame Maggie Smith's character and Penelope Wilton's characters (Muriel and Jean, respectively.)  Muriel and Jean are the two characters who come in with these absolutely abhorrent attitudes when it comes to moving to India.  Muriel is over-the-top almost evil when it comes to dealing with India.  A deep-seated racist, there are moments where we're kind of supposed to laugh at her old-timey bigotry.  No denying, Madden wants to show Muriel's change from the beginning of the film to the end.  To do this, she has to be completely abhorrent.  But in terms of the tone of the film, Muriel isn't allowed to be so gross that the movie loses its audience.  It has to be a redemption arc, doesn't it?  Early in the movie, I looked over at my wife and asked, "What if the movie had the guts to have this old lady just die racist and alone?"  Yeah, that didn't happen...

...but it kind of did.  Because Jean Ainslie is a watered-down version of Muriel.  Muriel is straight up racist.  She's the kind of xenophobic that movies have to make racist audience members feel good about themselves that they aren't as bad as Muriel.  But Jean...Jean's comfortable xenophobic.  Jean is someone who has led a life of privilege and comfort for her entire life that she feels personally affronted when she stares genuine discomfort in the face.  I was wondering why Jean was in the movie if Muriel was already covering the racist element of the film.  Well, it's because Jean is there for both contrast and conflict.  Jean isn't really a fully-realized character in the film.  She is there to stop Bill Nighy and Dame Judi Dench from getting together. She's my least favorite rom-com character type. She's the character who has committed to the love interest of the movie to create tension.  But these characters need to be despicable.  They need to be the worst that humanity has to offer so when they get dumped, the audience cheers because everything is what it needs to be.  And like many of these characters, Jean is the type who lets her husband Douglas get a free pass.  There's a moment right at the end of the movie when Jean is faced with the rom-com equivalent of the trolley dilemma: a rikshaw-type driver can either get both husband and wife to the airport with no luggage or just one of them home with luggage.  Jean chooses what she really wants, her luggage, and Douglas is given the gift of the moral high ground in this situation.  He is allowed to be freed from his marriage and embrace India the way he wants to.

I don't know how I feel about Jean.  I think I would like Jean a lot better as a character if Muriel wasn't in the movie.  It's just so much you can take with old white ladies complaining about non-White people.  And the thing is, Muriel is the one we root for in the end.  She's the one who has this life-changing moment that shifts her outlook on life.  But because that same arc is split with Jean, who never makes that moment, Muriel's transformation seems...sudden?  Muriel's big shift comes in the moment when she befriends one of the lowest castes of Indian society.  I don't know if the onus should really be on this girl to make nice with one of the old white ladies to make it happen.  And there's almost something there.  It's the fact that they both have held similar lives.  Muriel, as a beloved servant left to die, feels kinship with this girl.  But it's not a small shift.  There's never a come-to-Jesus moment where we get to see the regret for years of bigotry.  Instead, she's just a good guy from that moment on.  It's fine, I guess.  But part of this also comes with the British rom-com insistence on having a million separate characters all going through separate character arcs a'la Love, Actually.   If it focused on just a character or two, there would be something else.

Like, honestly, Dame Judi Dench's Evelyn's only character history is her husband's death.  Every scene, "Did you know my husband died and I have no money?"  Like, every scene.  And she's great at it.  If you had any other actor in that role, everyone else would be screaming what I'm screaming.  "We get it.  You have a dead husband.  What about you?"  Because nothing about her is actually involved in those moments.  What do we want to root for, her getting over her husband?  Because I don't know if that's the most helpful advice in the world either.

But the movie mostly works.  Perhaps it is a bit superficial and not the best look for India, but it is a charming movie.  I know that there isn't much for me to really consider deep or memorable, but the movie kind of pulls off some really tender moments.  Part of it may be that I'm softening in my old age or I was just in the mood for it.  But between Tom Wilkinson's character arc and some of the sweetness behind the film, I really enjoyed it.  Sometimes a movie just is what it needs to be in that moment.  I will probably never really recommend the film, but it did hit the exact thing I was looking for that evening.  Yeah, I hate excused affairs and casual racism probably needs to disappear.  But the rest of the movie is fun, if not a little goofy.