Eternal Legacy

April 15th, 2011

At some point I’ll get through all of these pho­tos from China. This is a statue in Tianan­men Square, ded­i­cated to the People’s Army, if mem­ory serves. While there’s a num­ber of folks who will insist that there’s no point tak­ing pho­tographs in the harsh mid-day sun this was taken in when there’s per­fectly good light com­ing, maybe, in the golden hours, that’s pretty rub­bish advice if you’re not going to get an oppor­tu­nity to go back wher­ever you are in a hurry. It’ll be a while until I’m back in China, and if I have to go under my own dol­lar, per­haps I never will. This was taken with the sun directly behind the statue in an attempt to do some­thing inter­est­ing with the hand dealt to me, with lim­ited suc­cess as you can judge from the above.

Read­ers of a cer­tain age and pre­dis­po­si­tion may remem­ber the infancy of videogam­ing in the home, with unsus­pect­ing “seri­ous com­put­ers” such as the ZX Spec­trum and Com­modore VIC-20 being abused into dis­play­ing some prim­i­tive ances­tors of the mod­ern gam­ing mul­ti­me­dia extrav­a­gan­zas we take for granted on our Xboxes and Playsta­tions. While Atari might have been a lit­tle more strict about intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights, given that they owned a good chunk of the good arcade games at the time, other for­mats were the rip-off equiv­a­lent of the Wild West.

Cue a mas­sive num­ber of barely, if at all, dis­guised ver­sions of Pac-man and Space Invaders and the like, often of wildly vary­ing qual­ity. A sim­pler, more inno­cent time, where peo­ple shared and shared alike, or at least when game com­pa­nies didn’t have legal teams larger than their devel­op­ment teams.

I’m appar­ently not the only one nos­tal­gic about this era, or reck­less enough to base a company’s release sched­ule entirely around quite bla­tant idea theft. Gameloft have been mak­ing games for mobile phones for as long as they’ve been capa­ble of run­ning the rudi­men­tary Java-based games that seemed fab­u­lous at the time, and as bar­barous as Speccy games in ret­ro­spect. The release of the iPhone, how­ever, seems to have turned them into full time rip-off merchants.

You’d have to be incred­i­bly char­i­ta­ble or com­pletely dis­hon­est not to feel that there’s a mas­sive degree of sim­i­lar­ity between N.O.V.A and HALO, or the Mod­ern Com­bat and COD: Mod­ern War­fare games, or Star­front and Star­craft, or as we’re inter­ested in here, between Eter­nal Legacy and Final Fan­tasy. In par­tic­u­lar, Eter­nal Legacy draws on the graph­i­cal styles of Final Fan­tasy VIII and the plot of Final Fan­tasy VII, so I sup­pose if you’re being aston­ish­ingly gen­er­ous that counts as innovation.

I’d get a lit­tle more shirty about Gameloft’s out­right clon­ery were it not for the gen­er­ally high qual­ity of all of these cover ver­sions. While N.O.V.A and Mod­ern Com­bat are shad­ows of their inspi­ra­tions on the mas­sively more pow­er­ful con­soles, they’re still very com­pe­tent, fluid games and arguably as close as anyone’s come to mak­ing great FPS’s on the Apple iThingys. Eter­nal Legacy in some respects one ups the oth­ers men­tioned, by being a bet­ter game than the Final Fan­tasies it apes.

Of course, this is com­ing from some­one with a very low tol­er­ance for Final Fan­tasy games, so fac­tor that in your cal­cu­la­tions of what­ever that’s worth. Astrian, a spiky haired fel­low car­ry­ing a ridicu­lously over­sized sword in no was resem­bling FF8’s Squall and his buddy, in no way rem­i­nis­cent of Zell, are rebels attempt­ing to steal an oppres­sive government’s shiny crys­tal trin­kets, Varsh Stones, the source of power in this world, which is the first hint that you’re play­ing a game heav­ily indebted plot­wise to FF7. In fact, I’m going to stop point­ing out char­ac­ter sim­i­lar­i­ties to FF8 and plot sim­i­lar­i­ties to FF8, as oth­er­wise we’ll be here all day. Please just assume that any char­ac­ter you play is a barely dis­guised ver­sion of some­one from FF8 and most of the plot’s a homage, shall we say, to FF7.

Mechan­i­cally, the game also shares ele­ments with the FF series, although by exten­sion it shares ele­ments with pretty much every RPG with turn based com­bat. There’s the usual com­bi­na­tions of phys­i­cal attacks, ele­ment based attack magic, stat alter­ing buff/debuffs and assorted heal­ing items and spells, which dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters will use to dif­fer­ing lev­els of effect depend­ing on their abil­i­ties. There’s also a rough ana­logue of Limit Breaks, and a stat/effect boost­ing sys­tem thank­fully far less tedious than FF8’s Junc­tion­ing, as Varsh Frag­ments found through­out the game can be attached to the weapons and armour you use, grant­ing either access to spells that could not nor­mally be utilised by the char­ac­ter, extra defence or attack, and so forth.

So far, so famil­iar, and the over­world sec­tions aren’t going to blow your mind with their orig­i­nal­ity either. It’s the usual RPG deal of wan­der­ing around a town talk­ing to peo­ple, either get­ting a quest or receiv­ing infor­ma­tion that involves head­ing some­where else and fight­ing your way their through a vari­ety of whacky ene­mies and beast that seem to have no par­tic­u­lar sto­ry­line rea­son to be get­ting up in your grill. At least, thank­fully, there’s no ran­dom encoun­ters, as the ene­mies are clearly seen wan­der­ing around and thus can occa­sion­ally be avoided com­pletely, and you can per­haps sneak up on them. Why this isn’t the way all RPGs deal with this is beyond me. I can almost accept it as a lim­i­ta­tion on ear­lier machines, but there’s no excuse for it in the mod­ern age.

So, there’s a brownie point for it, but there’s a num­ber of less suc­cess­ful deci­sions made in the game. The com­bat and cus­tomi­sa­tion sys­tems are far sim­pler than in the games it apes, which to my mind is entirely appro­pri­ate and laud­able for a game designed to be played on the move. As the iDe­vice for­mat is more con­duc­tive to play­ing for short bursts as a time filler rather than full-on gam­ing ses­sions, short­en­ing the nor­mally inter­minable 40 hour RPG grind to a more com­pact 8 or 9 hours fits quite well.

Fits well for me, at least. Given that JRPGs these days seem to make their hay based entirely on how ludi­crously com­plex and padded they are, what’s fine for me may not be so good for the intended core audi­ence. The plot’s suf­fered a lit­tle under the baton of time com­pres­sion, tak­ing a few sharp right turns that could leave you flat­footed if you were hop­ing to actu­ally care about the sto­ry­line or char­ac­ters. It also presents a novel twist on the ‘early doors unwinnable bat­tle with even­tual boss’ trope, as you face off against the game’s main antag­o­nist, kill him with ease, and are imme­di­ately taken to a cutscene show­ing you on prone, defeated and at said antagonist’s mercy. Some­how. Buh?

There’s a few mechan­i­cal annoy­ances that should really have been fixed remain­ing in the ver­sion avail­able as I write. When you equip a new weapon, the Varsh frag­ments do not auto­mat­i­cally trans­fer over to the new weapon from the old, which means another fid­dly trip to the menu sys­tem. That I can deal with, but the menu sys­tem in com­bat is a com­plete pain in the ass when try­ing to nav­i­gate the lengthy item menu. Or at least, it’s lengthy by the end of the game which is about the only time you’ll ever need to use heal­ing items.

You see, the main prob­lem I have with Eter­nal Legacy is that it presents no chal­lenge what­so­ever to any­one with the slight­est expe­ri­ence of these sorts of games. I had won­dered if there was some sort of bug in the game, as my char­ac­ters were very quickly lev­el­ling up to silly degrees. Turns out that’s a func­tion of the shorter game length, but between the stats boost gained and the free heal­ing gained from lev­el­ling up there’s prac­ti­cally no dan­ger of dying, at least until the game pulls one of it’s some­what fre­quent dick moves, split­ting the party and leav­ing you with­out any­one that has a heal­ing spell. At which point we’re often rely­ing on heal­ing items, and the cum­ber­some menu for select­ing them that can take so long to get at that you might be in dan­ger of dying more through menu inef­fi­ciency than through lack of tac­ti­cal nous.

It’s not game-cripplingly unus­able, and to be fair I strug­gle to see how else the menus can be organ­ised. How­ever, even this prob­lem stems from the core prob­lem — a lack of chal­lenge. The menu becomes unwieldy because the game is mas­sively gen­er­ous with dis­patched ene­mies drop­ping heal­ing potions. Apart from this mean­ing you’ve no excuse no to go into each bat­tle in top shape, it also leaves you with a ridicu­lous num­ber of items in your inven­tory, mak­ing find­ing par­tic­u­lar things more dif­fi­cult. By the time the game ended, I had some­thing like four hun­dred spare heal­ing thingys. I could sell most of them to a trader, but in the absence of a “sell all” but­ton that meant tap­ping ‘sell’ some­thing like four hun­dred times, and, well, screw that noise. It’s not as if I needed the money for any­thing, as the few items that the mer­chants sell were eas­ily afford­able from the money dropped dur­ing the nor­mal course of the game.

Dis­ap­point­ingly, for a rel­a­tively short RPG there’s still a bit of arbi­trary game­play padding as you return to pre­vi­ous loca­tions for pretty poorly laid out rea­sons. Thank­fully, it’s pretty rare, and there’s no need to spend hours in one loca­tions grind­ing out either level gains or draw spells, mechan­ics from FF8 that still give me night­mares to this day.

Okay, per­haps it’s a lit­tle slap­dash in places, and I’m not sure if it’s going to com­pletely sat­isfy the JRPG / Final Fan­tasy lov­ing crowd that it’s aimed at. But it’s a rea­son­able mobile fac­sim­ile of famil­iar con­cepts, and it cer­tainly kept me com­ing back to it for those eight to nine-ish hours with only rel­a­tively minor com­plaints. Look at it this way — if you had told the younger ver­sion of myself play­ing that there Pac­man rip-off on the Speccy all those years ago that they could play some­thing of this qual­ity and scope on a mobile phone, he’d have been blown away, at least once you had fur­ther explained the con­cept of a mobile phone to him. I am very old, remember.

And all this for a price less, in absolute terms, less than the bud­get game releases of the day, even before you take infla­tion into account? Lunacy. How­ever, we’re not judg­ing Eter­nal Legacy in com­par­i­son with Chuckie Egg, we’re judg­ing it amongst its App Store com­padres. There are a few more pol­ished RPGs that I’ve seen, but most are either opt­ing for a SNES-y, car­toony, Zelda-y look, or have more in com­mon with the West­ern, Oblivion-style RPGs. Noth­ing wrong with either approach, but it’s left a gap in the mar­ket for some­thing a lit­tle more mod­ern and JRPG-influenced to exist, and Eter­nal Legacy is a very cred­i­ble game to fill that gap.

It’s cur­rently £2.99 in the App Store, a triv­ial amount of cash for such a game on any con­sole, but thanks to the unusual met­rics of the sys­tem it’s in a more expen­sive tier than most games. It’s cer­tainly worth that much, but per­haps you may want to wait (as I did) for one of Gameloft’s fre­quent sales to knock that down a lit­tle before tak­ing the plunge. At fifty nine pence, it’s damn near as good value for money for a game as I’ve ever had. There’s also a free demo ver­sion, should the prospect of part­ing with less than the price of a mediocre cup of cof­fee con­cern you greatly.



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The Man With The Golden Gun

April 13th, 2011

One day, I hope to have processed the shots from China and India from the start of the year. This is from the Red Fort, if mem­ory serves.

We should start at the start of The Man With The Golden Gun, or at the very least close to the start of it, with a few words about the theme tune that the poor, unsus­pect­ing Lulu was lured into singing. If there’s a worse theme tune, or one with more asi­nine lyrics, I have yet to expe­ri­ence it. It sounds some­thing like an alien might imag­ine a Bond theme would sound like, were you only able to com­mu­ni­cate the con­cept of music through a series of rudi­men­tary clicks and whis­tles, but the lyrics are more akin to a plot recap for the hard of think­ing. It’s only very mar­gin­ally bet­ter writ­ten than “There’s a man with a gun, and it’s golden, and he kills peo­ple, lala la lala”. Now, Bond themes might not tra­di­tion­ally be the deep­est, soul-rending explo­rations of the human con­di­tion, but they often have a lit­tle more mys­tery and soul than just describ­ing, in broad terms, that this is a film about a man who shoots people.

Or indeed two peo­ple who shoot peo­ple. Roger Moore’s Bond may be offi­cially licensed by Her Majesties’ Gov­ern­ment to go about bust­ing caps in evil’s col­lec­tive ass, but this film is con­cerned with the world’s most pres­ti­gious and expen­sive assas­sin, “San” Fran­cisco Scara­manga (Christo­pher Lee). In ret­ro­spect the only sur­prise about peren­nial vil­lain Lee appear­ing in the Bond series is that it took so long. It is brought to the atten­tion of HMSS that a con­tract is out on Bond, a not-so-subtle warn­ing being sent in the form of a golden bul­let with 007 engraved on it. Pulling Bond off his cur­rent mis­sion, track­ing down a miss­ing solar power expert and his rev­o­lu­tion­ary effi­ciency enhanc­ing McGuf­fin, M gives Bond tacit per­mis­sion to go off and get shot of Scara­manga before Scara­manga shoots him.

It’s funny how intel­li­gence gath­er­ing works. Although, as M says, nobody knows where Scara­manga is, or what he looks like, but some­how we do know he has a third, super­flu­ous nip­ple. Although one could argue that all the nip­ples on a man are super­flu­ous. The point being that there’s no solid leads on how to get hold of Scara­manga, which must make hir­ing him dif­fi­cult, let alone killing him. How­ever, Bond has a solid lead on the maker of the hand crafted cus­tom ammo that Scara­manga uses, and from there on it’s just a mat­ter of shak­ing the right trees until Scaramanga’s island base drops out. Not lit­er­ally, obvi­ously. In accor­dance with Chekhov’s gun, Scara­manga is tied up with a firm of Thai engi­neers who are, I sup­pose, evil, although in no par­tic­u­larly well described fash­ion, other than try­ing to get their mitts on that there solar power gizmo.

I had remem­bered The Man With The Golden Gun quite fondly, which rather goes to show how tricky this whole mem­ory thing can be. This really isn’t a good film, although as I believe some peo­ple do with On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice, if you cherry pick the more suc­cess­ful and inter­est­ing ele­ments from the movie and fill in the remain­der with some­thing a shade less ridicu­lous you can imag­ine a very good film. Sadly, in the bor­ing old con­ven­tional real­ity my doc­tors tell me I’m sup­posed to be deal­ing with, this film kinda sucks.

Gen­er­ally, a Bond film is only as good as the bad guy Bond’s fac­ing. You could argue that The Man With The Golden Gun has as good a chance as any to be one of the best Bonds. The idea of Scara­manga, mys­te­ri­ous hit­man, and Bond’s nom­i­nal equal sounds like a far surer recipe for suc­cess than, say, a jive-talkin’ voodoo-backed island Pres­i­dent. Taken in iso­la­tion, Scara­manga has all the hall­marks of a great Bond char­ac­ter and Lee deliv­ers his role con­vinc­ingly, with the self-assurance of some­one who knows he’s at the top of his game.

The prob­lem is, we’ve only really got his word for it. Scara­manga says he’s the best. Every­one agrees that he’s the best. We are con­tin­u­ally told that Scara­manga is a very cred­i­ble threat. How­ever, we’re never at any point shown why he’s the best hit­man around. We’ve only got one straight shot from across a deserted road, some ridicu­lous tom­fool­ery in Scaramanga’s pri­vate house of mir­rors and an expen­sive taste in muni­tions to back it up, none of which really passes muster. Show, don’t tell, is as old a canard as you could care to bust out, but it’s no less appro­pri­ate in this instance.

Moore looks com­fort­able in his sec­ond out­ing as Bond. It seems I don’t loathe Moore’s inter­pre­ta­tion of Bond as much as my addled mem­ory would have had me believe at the start of this endeav­our, I just find him remark­ably bland. Still, at least this sto­ry­line plays more to the smooth, sophis­ti­cated side of this new Bond, which works rea­son­ably well. While I don’t find Moore as con­vinc­ing as Con­nery in action sequences, We should all be thank­ful he’s not flail­ing around like Lazenby’s drunken mar­i­onette impersonation.

So, it’s not that there aren’t some good ele­ments in The Man With The Golden Gun. Sadly, they are weighed down by some dread­ful deci­sions to arbi­trar­ily play for laughs, which under­mines any dra­matic ten­sion it could be build­ing. This should be a tense cat and mouse game with a leg­endary assas­sin, not a bor­der­line sex­ist dou­ble act with Britt Ekland’s bum­bling, incom­pe­tent secret agent whose only plot func­tion appears to be enabling a damsel in dis­tress act for the last half hour, and indeed giv­ing an excuse for the last half hour to exist at all. Had she dis­played even a bor­der­line level of com­pe­tency, Bond would back in the hotel with tea and crum­pets just after first meet­ing Scaramanga.

There’s just too much stu­pid on dis­play to take the film seri­ously. Scara­manga ought to be an impos­ing fig­ure by sheer dint of his rep­u­ta­tion, but it’s dif­fi­cult to take him all that seri­ously when he’s cart­ing around a com­edy dwarf manser­vant called Nick Nack (Hervé Vil­lechaize). There’s a few chases that ought to be excit­ing, but thanks to the entirely unwel­come, inex­plic­a­bly coin­ci­den­tal return of Clifton James as walk­ing Deep South U.S.A. stereo­type Sher­iff J.W. Pep­per, they instead become teeth-grindingly irritating.

Still, if The Man With The Golden Gun has taught me any­thing, it’s that the most time effec­tive way to become CEO of a large multi-national com­pany is to shoot the pre­vi­ous chair­man. I assumed there would be more paper­work to fill in, per­haps some Board approval or reg­u­la­tory over­sight. No, here at least, pro­mo­tion is by dead man’s boots.

I’ve seen it men­tioned some­where that Scara­manga is the best Bond vil­lain stuck in the worst Bond movie. That’s wrong on both counts, but I can see where they’re com­ing from. I still can’t bring myself to out­right dis­like The Man With The Golden Gun, but there’s cer­tainly a num­ber of things to hate in there. Idi­otic side­kicks, idi­otic return­ing char­ac­ters and the sin­gle most idi­otic sound effect in Bond car stunt his­tory as they exe­cute the oth­er­wise impres­sive corkscrew river jump.

There’s cer­tainly far worse movies that The Man With The Golden Gun, and there’s cer­tainly far worse Bond movies than The Man With The Golden Gun. In the cold light of day, it’s just such a frus­trat­ing film to watch. There’s very nearly some­thing great hid­ing under­neath the lay­ers of obfus­ti­cated idiocy. Ulti­mately, it’s not a entry in the fran­chise I can rec­om­mend as any­thing other than home­work for those who like con­struct­ing a bet­ter film in their heads than is actu­ally played on screen.

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Live and Let Die

April 2nd, 2011

The above is the guts of a bar­gain base­ment Android tablet that would make a barely ade­quate ebook reader, were it pos­si­ble to get any elec­tric­ity into it’s woe­fully under­de­vel­oped bat­tery. You get what you pay for, I guess. If noth­ing else, smack­ing it with a ham­mer was fun.

Live and Let Die proved quite the sur­prise for me. By which I don’t mean that it’s a far bet­ter film than I recall, or that, actu­ally, the newly installed Roger Moore was a bet­ter Bond than Sean Con­nery. The sur­prise for me is that it doesn’t start with that ludi­crous sequence of Moore pick­ing up a wheelchair-bound ‘Blofeld’ in a heli­copter and drop­ping him down a chim­ney like some evil, dead Santa.

That hap­pens about eight years later in For Your Eyes Only. My addled mem­ory had put that scene as Moore’s first actions as Bond for the obvi­ous rea­son that it makes a hell of a lot more sense, pro­vid­ing at once a con­ti­nu­ity with the prior films in the series as well as break, and a new begin­ning with a new actor and, inevitably, a new actor’s take on Bond.

Choos­ing Moore as Bond seems, ret­ro­spec­tively, almost inex­plic­a­ble. I can’t have been the only one to think that by the time Dia­monds Are For­ever rolled round, Con­nery was look­ing a lit­tle too long in the tooth for this spy caper. Cast­ing some­one older than Con­nery to replace him must have, fit­tingly enough, raised a few eyebrows.

I’m not the biggest fan of Moore’s inter­pre­ta­tion of Bond. While the char­ac­ter as a whole has devi­ated con­sid­er­ably from the colder, more cal­cu­lat­ing per­sona of Fleming’s nov­els, regard­less of how daffy the script­ing of the films became Con­nery often man­aged to present the idea that his charm and swag­ger was a front for not really car­ing about any­one other than him­self. This is a sen­si­ble self-preservation mech­a­nism given the turnover of Bond girls in his life.

Start­ing here, that side com­pletely van­ishes. I don’t want to give the impres­sion that it’s been par­tic­u­larly preva­lent over the end of the Con­nery era either, but los­ing all hint of it makes the char­ac­ter mea­sur­ably less inter­est­ing. By mak­ing Bond eas­ier to like, and by play­ing up comedic ele­ments in the scripts to degrees that are often laugh­able in entirely the wrong way, it becomes far less compelling.

That said, per­haps there’s the least of the play­ing for laughs in Live and Let Die, which is odd, because it’s prob­a­bly the most ridicu­lous of the sce­nar­ios that Moore finds him­self in. Not so much in the sense of the over­ar­ch­ing plot, con­cern­ing a Caribbean tin­pot dic­ta­tor cum crime boss Dr. Kanaga (Yaphet Kotto) attempt­ing to flood the United States with cheap heroin, dri­ving his com­peti­tors out of busi­ness, increas­ing the num­ber of junkies then cream­ing money from the monop­oly he’s created.

This is quaintly small scale, in com­par­i­son to SMERSH’s hi-jinks. Why, this doesn’t even require a rocket launch pad! It’s sur­pris­ing Bond even both­ers to get out of bed for it. No, the plot is believ­able enough. It’s the ancil­lary non­sense that sur­rounds the cen­tral story that’s bizarre, almost to the point of out­right racism.

Appear­ing at the height of the Blax­plo­ti­a­tion era, this makes no bones about hitch­ing on to that band­wagon. Almost from the out­set, Bond’s being chased by what’s described as a pimp­mo­bile, and from there on in there seems to be approx­i­mately one black per­son around who isn’t in some way con­nected to Kanaga and by exten­sion, evil. Which is, I imag­ine, to be expected in the inves­ti­ga­tion of a crime syn­di­cate run entirely by black folks, and shouldn’t feel any more racist than a plot cen­tred on the Mafia being full of Ital­ians or Italian-Americans. Except some­how it does.

In iso­la­tion, I doubt I’d have a prob­lem with the por­trayal of Big Mis­ter Doc­tor Kanaga’s restau­rant fronted heroin dis­tri­b­u­tion scheme, if it wasn’t for the assorted non­sense that Kananga ties him­self up with. Despite seem­ing sane and ratio­nal, he places an inor­di­nate amount of trust and faith in the guid­ance of his per­sonal for­tune teller, Soli­taire (Jane Sey­mour). He’s involved with a bunch of loincloth-attired lunatics who are tying peo­ple to stakes and wav­ing rub­ber snakes at them, although come to think of it they were per­haps sup­posed to be real snakes. One of his hench­men, if the end­ing of the film is to be believed, is actu­ally an immor­tal voodoo spirit, or at the very least a chap who is sur­pris­ingly resilient to snake venom.

Frankly, Live and Let Die seems to be about one step away from shout­ing “ooga-booga” at you and start­ing tirades with, “I’m not racist, but…”. Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be an under­cur­rent sug­gest­ing that we should all fear black peo­ple that I found off-putting, if not out­right offen­sive. Per­haps it’s just a child of its time, although that’s some­thing of a lame excuse even if it is.

I shall per­haps hold major judge­ment on Moore’s Bond for a few more films. It only seems fair to give the man a lit­tle time to get his feet under the metaphor­i­cal desk, but I’m cer­tainly not alone in find­ing his ini­tial out­ing lack­lus­tre. He dis­plays such a casual, off-hand atti­tude to every­thing up to the prospect of being eaten by an alli­ga­tor that it removes almost any of the impact the events shown should have.

Mechan­i­cally, it’s com­pe­tently made film, and I sup­pose the march of time has made the effects work far more effec­tive. There’s no real com­par­i­son between, say, the car chases of Goldfin­ger and the car and boat chases of Live and Let Die. It’s no longer a film than the other Bond movies, but there does seem to be a lit­tle more dead­weight to be car­ried here that per­haps ought to have been excised.

I’m think­ing mainly of a seem­ingly inter­minable sequence of Soli­taire and Bond tool­ing around on San Monique before find­ing Kananga’s heroin poppy crop, and the clos­ing chase sequence’s con­tin­ual interup­tions to intro­duce us to hick Lou­siana Sher­rif J.W. Pep­per (Clifton James), who I’m guess­ing was sup­posed to pro­vide comic relief rather than the mas­sive, mas­sive irri­ta­tion that he actu­ally induces.

While Paul McCartney’s post Bea­t­les work (and to be hon­est, a lot of his during-Beatles work) aren’t exactly my cup of tea, for rea­sons I would strug­gle to ade­quately explain (unfor­tu­nate, given the nature of this increas­ingly unweildily paren­the­sised para­graph) the Live and Let Die theme is one of my favourites. I think it’s because it sounds like three seper­ate songs crudely glued together with some sort of rudi­men­tary musi­cal adhesive.

I realise now, as I draw this mono­logue to a thank­ful close, that I’m almost giv­ing the wrong impres­sion of this film. There’s not really any sin­gle ele­ment, music aside, that I could say that I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed. It cer­tainly wouldn’t be the Bond film that I rec­om­mend to any­one look­ing to get into the series, and I have issues with most of the sub­ject mat­ter. Yet still, there’s enough pol­ish and struc­ture to the movie that I, if not exactly enjoyed it, didn’t mind pass­ing the time with it too much,

“Inof­fen­sive” might not exactly be glow­ing praise for the movie, but given some of the hor­rors we’ll be sub­jected to over the com­ing weeks as we delve into Moore’s stint as Bond, I’ll take what I can get.

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Diamonds Are Forever

March 31st, 2011

There’s some­thing about this lantern that gives me night­mares. Although, that’s prob­a­bly more of a reflec­tion on my psy­che than the lantern.

I believe I made my opin­ions regard­ing On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice rea­son­ably clear in my last scrivven­ings, but it should be noted that at the time of its release it wasn’t exactly regarded as the colos­sal dis­as­ter that I think that it is. Sure, it didn’t make quite as much money as the pre­vi­ous Con­nery out­ing, but there didn’t seem to be a press­ing eco­nomic need for Dia­monds Are For­ever to run away scream­ing back to the com­fort­ing for­mu­las that OHMSS devi­ated from.

That said, nat­u­rally I am pos­i­tively over­joyed that they did. George Lazenby appar­ently feared becom­ing type­cast and departed the fran­chise, to the dis­ap­point­ment of nobody, and the Broc­co­lis backed up a lorry load of hun­dred dol­lar bills into Sean Connery’s garage to con­vince him to return for one last stint. Well, last apart from another con­tro­ver­sial side note that I’ll sup­pose get to in due course.

It seems Bond’s still upset about his short-lived mar­riage, track­ing down and killing Blofeld before the cred­its even roll. Well, that was easy, although you think he might have passed com­ment that he’s yet again mor­phed between films, now look­ing much less Telly Savalas-y and a lot more like Hen­der­son from You Only Live Twice. Charles Gray’s intro­duc­tion to the role at least has the cour­tesy to men­tion plas­tic surgery as a get-out clause, and I trust I’m not intro­duc­ing any major spoil­ers or sur­prises in say­ing that this is not the last we’ll see of him in this film.

With the series’ recur­ring bogey­man appar­ently dealt with, Bond is told to return to far more mun­dane mat­ters. He’s sent on the trail of a dia­mond smug­gling oper­a­tion that’s wor­ry­ing the gov­ern­ment, in the main because the gems are not appear­ing on the mar­ket. Someone’s hoard­ing them, and nefar­ios­ity is assumed. Despite Bond think­ing all this is a lit­tle beneath him, a rou­tine jaunt to Ams­ter­dam turns into a mis­sion to Las Vegas, with the seem­ing involve­ment of reclu­sive mil­lion­aire Howard Hughes. Sorry, Willard Whyte, played by coun­try singer Jimmy Dean.

Of course, as I’ve already help­fully ruined in advance, it’s actu­ally Blofeld who’s behind every­thing, kid­nap­ping Whyte and using his busi­ness empire as a front for his evil schem­ing. This time round he’s brought his very own mad pro­fes­sor, cre­at­ing a stu­pen­dously pow­er­ful orbital dia­mond focused laser satel­lite do-hickey. He’s using it to destroy the nuclear capac­i­ties of the major pow­ers, apart, nat­u­rally from the one who gives him the most money.

Blofeld, and by exten­sion SMERSH, have pro­vided a con­tin­ual source of puz­zle­ment to me through­out their endeav­ours. It’s always been about col­lect­ing money from gov­ern­ments, which is under­stand­able to a degree. After all, money is use­ful, so more money would log­i­cally be more use­ful. How­ever, the means by which they choose to extort money, well, don’t seem cost effec­tive. I’m not say­ing that I’m not impressed by their scope or vision, but I’m unsure as to what cost-benefit analy­sis allows for launch­ing a dia­mond encrusted satel­lite into space in order to extort a few mil­lion dollars.

Per­haps SMERSH would have been bet­ter hir­ing an accoun­tant rather than a sci­en­tist. I’m all for spec­u­lat­ing to accu­mu­late, but the return on invest­ment for this project hardly seems worth it. If you’ve got the means to do some­thing like this, per­haps you’ve already got enough money and could instead retire some­where nice, and maybe take up gar­den­ing. Or at the very least, go balls-out power-mad and shoot for world dom­i­na­tion. Just ask­ing for cash seems petty and vul­gar, somehow.

Dia­monds Are For­ever cer­tainly can­not be described with a straight face as being the best Bond film in the fran­chise. I think I could make a decent case, how­ever, for it being the most fun Bond film in the fran­chise. It’s the only film in the series (at least that I recall — the Moore Era tends to mulch together in my mind) that has some level of aware­ness of what the insti­tu­tion has become, and how after Goldfin­ger it’s only ever just been on the sen­si­ble side of a self-parody.

What hap­pens in Vegas stays in Vegas, I’m reli­ably informed. This seems to have been the ratio­nale for the script to go bananas. It’s not as if the plot, inves­ti­ga­tions or char­ac­ters of Dia­monds Are For­ever are any less believ­able than in, say, Thun­der­ball. While Con­nery doesn’t exactly wink at the cam­era in this film, the whole film feels like it is some­how wink­ing con­tin­u­ally. What other rea­son would there be for the inclu­sion of a scene to show us an ele­phant win­ning on the slot machines?

As a film, Dia­mond Are For­ever could so eas­ily have fallen flat on its face. I’m sure there are peo­ple who think that it has, and I’m not alto­gether dis­mis­sive of their opin­ions. Cer­tainly, if you wanted a stone cold spy clas­sic, this is too silly for you, although arguably every­thing since Goldfin­ger was also. If you’ve been tricked by Shirley Bassey’s belt­ing out of another iconic Bond theme song into think­ing that this fits com­fort­ably into the Bond film for­mula (and why wouldn’t you?), Dia­monds Are For­ever is unlikely to meet your expec­ta­tions, at least from the moment after Bond gets to Vegas.

While the ini­tial inves­ti­ga­tions into the ‘mere’ dia­mond smug­gling is, I’d argue, as good as any seri­ous piece of Bond sleuthing in the series, he’s hardly landed State­side before he’s barg­ing past peo­ple in space­suits inex­plic­a­bly mov­ing in slow motion to hijack a moon buggy, escap­ing from a shower of goons on trikes.

There will be peo­ple who do not think that escap­ing from a shower of goons on trikes in a hijacked moon buggy is not a purely awe­some work of sur­re­al­ist genius for the World’s Best Secret Agent to be doing. I under­stand their point, and reject it fully. If you think that a moon buggy is any less ridicu­lous a mode of trans­port than an Aston Mar­tin with ejec­tor seats, rocket launch­ers and buz­z­saws then you’re delud­ing yourself.

Well, okay, it is pretty ridicu­lous. But it’s a lot of fun.

Which applies to damn near the whole film. The uber-camp ‘top assas­sins’, Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint, are extra­or­di­nar­ily ridicu­lous, steal­ing Bond’s gim­mick of one-liner kiss-off lines and ham­mer­ing it into the ground with ruth­less aban­don. They near-immediately go from mildly creepy to wildly silly, and hardly present a cred­i­ble, dra­matic threat.

Which, again, applies to the film as a whole. Until Austin Pow­ers arrived decades later, this was as close to a decent Bond par­ody as existed. Inci­den­tally, the 1966 ver­sion of Casino Royale cer­tainly does not count as a decent Bond par­ody. Even Blofeld is more play­ful, steal­ing most of the film’s best lines, and Jimmy Dean’s like­able Willard Whyte is an over the top pres­ence that comes close to over­shad­ow­ing Connery.

Whether this is Connery’s weak­est per­for­mance as Bond or merely the one in which he is given the least to do is up for debate, but I’d per­haps go with the lat­ter. Despite start­ing to look a shade too old for this sort of thing, Con­nery pro­vides some mem­o­rable moments, from the close quar­ters ele­va­tor fight sequence to his casual pose rid­ing on top of an exter­nal hotel ele­va­tor, even to accus­ing a rat of smelling like a tart’s hand­ker­chief. There’s plenty of moments to like, but I sus­pect because they are part of a film that only barely ‘feels’ like it fits into the Bond fran­chise they’re easy to ignore and focus on the more left-field and, to some, ris­i­ble, ele­ments of the film.

Admit­tedly, were I in the mar­ket for watch­ing a clas­sic Bond film, this is going to be above only Thun­der­ball in the Con­nery era. This is just a lit­tle too out-there for it’s own good, but damned if I don’t find it mas­sively enjoy­able. It’s cer­tainly far more inter­est­ing a watch than the badly-aged Thun­der­ball, and I’d choose it over, I believe, all of Moore’s stint as Bond, which I see in the cor­ner of my eye, ready to pounce. Pre­pare your­self accordingly.

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On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

March 20th, 2011

Is this a meal ready to be eaten, or one already fin­ished? Who can say?

I can. It’s fin­ished. Sorry to spoil the intrigue.

There’s a very sim­ple test to see if some­one has gone off the deep end to a men­tal state from which there is no return. Ask them what their favourite Bond film is, and it the reply comes back, “Why, On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice, of course!” they are no longer per­ceiv­ing the same real­ity that the rest of us are, and should be taken away to a safe place with­out sharp edges for their own protection.

Plot­wise, this time around Bond has spent the past three years try­ing and fail­ing to track down Blofeld. In accor­dance with Thun­der­ball’s prece­dent, he picks up the trail by going off-duty. When tak­ing a brief break, he stum­bles across the strong-willed Tracy Di Vicenzo, in which Bond may have met his match. Falling in love with her brings into play her father, mob boss Draco who hap­pens to have a lead on Blofeld’s lawyer. From there it’s a short inves­ti­ga­tion to Blofeld’s new base of oper­a­tion in the Alps where he’s putting the fin­ish­ing touches on another evil plan for our old buddy Bond to stop.

Well, I say our old buddy Bond, but of course the most rad­i­cal and obvi­ous dif­fer­ence between this and all that have gone before it is that Sean Con­nery has left the Bond build­ing, and George Lazenby has picked up the tuxedo and Walther PPK.

Now, there really is an awful lot wrong with OHMSS. Quite a stag­ger­ing amount, hon­estly. I almost don’t know where to start, but I sup­pose the biggest fail­ing, and the most crit­i­cal is the insane cast­ing of Lazenby. I sup­pose I can see the idea behind cast­ing an unknown for the role, some­one that car­ried no bag­gage or audi­ence pre-conceptions into the fran­chise. Seems rea­son­able, but is this really the best that space year 1969 could offer us?

From the first scenes, this guy man­ages to be the exact oppo­site of Connery’s por­trayal. Per­haps that’s inten­tional, but if so it’s bone­headed. Con­nery prowled through his tenure, always seem­ing a moment away from jump­ing on his tar­get, be that vil­lain or woman. This guy flounces. Connery’s phys­i­cal­ity meant it was nor­mally quite believ­able that he could punch people’s faces in. This guy… not so much, flail­ing around with wild hay­mak­ers that dou­ble as wind­mill imper­son­ations. Con­nery devel­oped a laid back charm com­bined with the odd believ­able moments of anger at stress points. This guy’s actu­ally in dan­ger of mak­ing Roger Moore look like a great actor by comparison.

This guy sucks. Really badly. George Lazenby sim­ply isn’t Bond, in any believ­able way. Every other actor has brought some­thing inter­est­ing to the role, which might not have been suc­cess­ful but at least some­thing was attempted. This guy’s only brought his absence of talent.

There doesn’t seem to be much point writ­ing any­thing else. A Bond film with a stiff, unlik­able, uncon­vinc­ing lead actor has already had the legs cut from under it, but in the inter­ests of hit­ting my word quota let’s crash on.

The other risk, of sorts, the movie takes is to stick closely to Fleming’s orig­i­nal novel, after the rad­i­cal depar­tures of the pre­vi­ous few films. This isn’t auto­mat­i­cally a bad thing. Many would wel­come it. How­ever they are stick­ing so closely to the novel that it’s caused baf­fling plot holes that make every­one seem like they have some kind of brain damage.

This is sup­posed to hap­pen, in what would pass for chrono­log­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity for the fran­chise, before the events of You Only Live Twice. How­ever, given that we are never told this dur­ing the film, we can only assume that every­one has suf­fered short term mem­ory loss. Blofeld and Bond meet and have pleas­ant chats with­out recog­nis­ing each other, despite last year’s vol­cano based spot of bother in YOLT.

Oh, and while we’re men­tion­ing it, Blofeld’s being played by a dif­fer­ent actor too, with Terry Savalas’s shiny head replac­ing Don­ald Pleaseance’s shiny head. And of course, he’s play­ing the char­ac­ter in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent way, because con­ti­nu­ity is for chumps. This ver­sion is more than happy to strap on a set of skis to give chase to an escap­ing Bond, despite estab­lish­ing him quite effec­tively over, well, all the prior films in the series as a man behind the cur­tains, pulling strings in the shad­ows rather than a front line warrior.

His plot turns out to revolve around a threat to ster­illse the world’s food sup­ply, unless his demands are met. Why? Doesn’t Blofeld need food, or has he become a more lit­eral SPECTRE? What hap­pens if his bluff is called? Kill the world? Bril­liant! Great plan, you bald twat.

It takes us well over half the film to get even a sniff of Blofeld. While an inves­ti­ga­tion heavy front end didn’t do too badly by Dr. No, here it’s a curi­ous mix of inves­ti­ga­tion and fawn­ing over Diana Rigg’s Tracy, a rela­tion­ship with all the fire­works, drama and inter­est of a damp Thurs­day after­noon in Stafford. The next half”s not much bet­ter either, reduc­ing to an hour of dread­fully back pro­jected ski­ing shots that did not once come close to being interesting.

The defence of OHMSS most often comes in the form of an appeal to dra­matic sen­si­bil­i­ties. I could con­ceiv­ably see that the less fan­tas­tic plot along with the only sem­blance of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment since the first film, and if you’ll excuse the spoiler, (if you can have spoil­ers for a film over forty years old) sud­den death of the first woman Bond has been goodly enough to treat as some­one with more util­ity than a sweat­sock should add up to some­thing that’s sub­stan­tially deeper and more affect­ing than you’ve become used to in the series.

The prob­lem with this sce­nario is that it only occurs in an alter­nate dimen­sion where every sin­gle ele­ment of the film is much, much bet­ter than the one that you can wit­ness using your human eyes and ears. Sure, if the films had been shot in the order they’re sup­posed to be in, it’d have fewer baf­fling, inex­plic­a­ble char­ac­ter inter­ac­tions. If Lazenby had as much more charisma, as much as, say, a small pep­per pot, there might have been some inter­est in his life and emo­tions. If there was any­thing remotely inter­est­ing going on, I’m sure we’d be inter­ested in it.

But this is a fan­tasy ver­sion of the film, cast by uni­corns and shot on rain­bows. The one that you can buy on DVD is a wretched, mis-shapen lump of a film, shuf­fling around drag­ging its haunches across the floor, whin­ing pathet­i­cally, beg­ging for a bul­let to be put into its dam­aged brain. I’d hap­pily oblige it.

So, I don’t rate this film very highly. And I haven’t even men­tioned break­ing the fourth wall! Let’s just say that those cin­e­matic brick­lay­ers spent a very long time build­ing up that wall, and it serves us in good stead to leave it up, because when you start knock­ing walls down, the roof tends to cave in.

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You Only Live Twice

March 8th, 2011

At Qutub Minar

Inspect­ing the remains of the out­build­ings at New Delhi’s Qutb Minar. I’ll get round to sort­ing out the rest of these pho­tos some­time, I’m sure.

So, You Only Live Twice. Or, so they say. But what do they know? Who are you going to trust, me or Nancy Sinatra?

Hav­ing saved the world from nuclear based extor­tion in Thun­der­ball, there must have been some head-scratching going into how the sequel could raise the stakes. It appears that they went for a rather lit­eral approach, rais­ing the open­ing action lit­er­ally into orbit as the forces of SPECTRE plot to start a new World War, rais­ing Cold War ten­sions by space-napping both astro and cos­mo­nauts, leav­ing the Yanks and the Sovs blam­ing each other. A very Hot War looms. Oh noes!

The only peo­ple not fooled by this, appar­ently, are the jolly old stiff upper lipped British, who are con­vinced the craft are land­ing near Japan. Not believ­ing the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment to be behind the scheme, it’s left to James Bond to poke around, see what’s going on and put a stop to it. As men­tioned, the track leads, through a Japan­ese man­u­fac­tur­ing con­cern, to those naughty chaps at SPECTRE, the plot this time being headed by the pre­vi­ously incog­nito Num­ber One, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Don­ald Pleasence).

This pretty much rounds out the Bond trope check­list. Of course, Blofeld’s been knock­ing around for the past few films, par­tially glimpsed in his oft-parodied pussy-stroking, but this is the first time he’s front and cen­tre. Spe­cial men­tion must be made of Pleasence’s per­for­mance, as despite it being the most imi­tated vil­lain­ous per­for­mance from any­thing out­side of the Star Wars fran­chise it remains creep­ily effec­tive and chilling.

If you want to look at how much the Bond fran­chise has changed in a rel­a­tively short space of time, you don’t need to look much fur­ther than the use of Monty Norman’s Bond theme. In From Rus­sia With Love, unless my mem­ory has failed me entirely, it’s heard as Jimmy checks into his hotel room and turns the place over for sur­veil­lance devices. In You Only Live Twice, he’s buzzing around in a flat-pack heli­copter over a secret vol­cano lair, destroy­ing enemy chop­pers with flamethrow­ers, somehow.

This has very firmly crossed over to balls-out action ter­ri­tory, with only the very vaguest hint of actual spy­craft to be seen. Well, I say actual spy­craft. Actual spy­craft going by the movie def­i­n­i­tions of it, I mean. I expect actual spy­ing these days involves a lot of sit­ting at com­puter ter­mi­nals and spreadsheets.

Regard­less, You Only Live Twice does action as well as any­thing of the era, and bet­ter than most films now. The pac­ing is exem­plary, the screen­play from Roald Dahl (now, there’s a tale from the unex­pected) rarely lin­ger­ing and always hav­ing the dis­tinct feel­ing of for­ward motion. There’s a new direc­tor to the fran­chise, with Guy Hamil­ton mak­ing way for Alfie direc­tor Lewis Gilbert. There’s cer­tainly a very dif­fer­ent feel and energy to the piece in com­par­i­son with its direct pre­cur­sor, although a good chunk of that may well come from this being the first of the series to essen­tially lift only the title from Fleming’s novel, and invent­ing the rest. First, but by no means the last.

If there’s a bone to pick with You Only Live Twice it’s going to be mainly loca­tion based. Yes, everything’s com­pletely over the top, from the action to SPECTRE’s plan, but the movie does at times appear to be jump­ing up and down say­ing “I AM BASED IN JAPAN! LOOK AT ALL THIS JAPANESE STUFF THAT I AM SHOWING TO YOU! HAVE I MENTIONED I AM IN JAPAN!”. Under­stand­able, and suit­ably exotic and intrigu­ing to West­ern audi­ences, how­ever by the time Tiger Tanaka has revealed his secret ninja train­ing ground it can feel a lit­tle strange and over-egged.

There’s fur­ther odd­ness, and admit­tedly it’s per­haps not quite as strange as Doc. No’s make-up job, but You Only Live Twice does seem to imply that it’s easy to take a Cau­casian and turn them into a per­fectly dis­guised Japan­ese fella by apply­ing a Tommy Sheridan-esque level of fake tan and dodgy hair­cut. I’m not alto­gether sure if this is racist, or merely very stu­pid. At least we’ve restrained our­selves from hav­ing Bond run around talk­ing about mak­ing a deli­cious runch of flied rice at tooth hurty.

These are nig­gling points. You Only Live Twice stands up to time’s chal­lenges far more robustly than Thun­der­ball does, and makes for a far more thrilling watch. It rep­re­sents the final­i­sa­tion of the Bond movie for­mula that it will rely on for decades to come, with a few notable excep­tions. In par­tic­u­lar, the next in the series, but we’ll deal with that when we come to it.

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Rebay

March 4th, 2011

I am, I have come to realise, some­thing of a hoarder of things. Not inten­tion­ally, really. Every­thing I pur­chase is bought with a firm use and goal in mind, and is kept for exactly that rea­son. I really do still want to play through the Leg­end of Zelda, which required buy­ing the cart and the N64 to play it on. The fact that I don’t have time to play the games I have for the con­soles actu­ally cur­rently attached to the telly, let alone the ones in boxes in the cor­ner of the room, is besides the point.

At any rate, I’ve decided there’s a hel­luva lot of stuff lying around that’s going to be of more use to some­one other than me, and a lot of it was photo gear. This is a win/loss record of those trans­ac­tions, mainly for my own edi­fi­ca­tion, but per­haps might be of use to some­one study­ing Olym­pus cam­era gear depreciation,

Olym­pus E-1: The first of Olym­pus’ for­ays into the dig­i­tal arena, this pro-level, weather-sealed mon­ster was a lot of fun to use, and despite the lim­ited res­o­lu­tion took pho­tos as good as, and some would say bet­ter than, the cur­rent gear. It was a love­able, ergonomic beast, sub­stan­tial with­out being over­whelm­ingly heavy and in gen­eral a lot of fun to have. Still, it shows its age badly, and as a child of the mod­ern era being shorn of the excel­lent Oly image sta­bil­i­sa­tion sys­tem and it’s quirky auto-ISO han­dling often lead to me botch­ing shots I would oth­er­wise have got. Pilot error, of course, but it meant that the cam­era was left on the shelf more often than not and so had to find a new home. Bought: 27/09/2010 for £175.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £110.00. Lost my prover­bial shirt on it. It’s an abnor­mally low price for it to go at. Not sure what hap­pened there, bad tim­ing perhaps.

Olym­pus 25mm Pan­cake: What a lovely lit­tle lens. Lit­tle being the cor­rect word, as attached to the E-510 or E-600 it became a pock­etable DSLR ‘solu­tion’, as long as part of your solu­tion is a coat with big pock­ets. At f2.8 it’s a pretty decent and very cost-effective por­trait lens, but I had a han­ker­ing for faster glass that even­tu­ally left this sur­plus to require­ments. Bought: 18/06/2009 for £147.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £146.00. Can’t argue with that result. Basi­cally a year and a half rental for one hun­dred pence.

Olym­pus 8mm Fish­eye: My first widean­gle expe­ri­ence, much to my buddy Craig’s dis­plea­sure. But, screw that guy, I like fish­eye effects. For a while, the high­est qual­ity lens I had, it got great results but results that couldn’t be used all that often unless you wanted to become known as’that fish­eye guy’. Which led to it often being left at home, which led to it being partly for­got­ten about, espe­cially after mov­ing to the stel­lar 7-14mm lens. So onwards it trav­elled. Bought: 23/08/2009 for £310.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £332.09. Effec­tively, I was paid to pho­to­graph with this lens. I’m a pro! Well, maybe not, but it’s a net gain for me.

Sigma 18-125mm: Here’s a lens that was mas­sively under­used. It’s not that it’s a bad lens, by any stretch, and it seemed to cover a very use­ful range. The inten­tion was that this would be a great ‘walka­round’ lens, for the times when I want to travel light. It more or less ful­filled that, although I often wanted to go a lit­tle wider than this let me. The down­fall was that if I really wanted to travel light, I’d be car­ry­ing around my Canon S90, not a DSLR, and those times I was pre­pared to carry a DSLR, then I’d also be happy enough to lug around a bag of lenses as well. Bought: 16/04/2010 for £88.00. Sold: 14/01/2011 for £72.00. Well, a net loss of £16 for a poorly thought out idea isn’t too bad.

Some other, non-photo stuff:

Sam­sung Q1: Before there was the iPad, there was the lumpen, mis-shapen beasts called the Tablet PC, of which Sam­sung made quite a few. Hob­bled by Microsoft’s need to have Win­dows run­ning on every­thing, regard­less of how well it suited the device, this turned out to be a wretched, glacially slow, unre­spon­sive and fid­dly expe­ri­ence that put me right off tablet com­put­ing in gen­eral. I’d bought it more or less on a whim to see if there was any room or need in my life for a tablet com­puter, with an eye on get­ting the then-upcoming, pos­si­bly just rumoured iPad. In ret­ro­spect, I might as well have bought a horse-drawn car­riage to see if I needed a Fer­rari. Bought: 29/07/2009 for £180.00. Sold: 11/04/2010 for £150.99. A frus­trat­ing, failed exper­i­ment, but not one that left me out of pocket too badly.

Palm Treo Pro: I used to love my Palm based PDA’s, either from Palm or the Sony Clie range. Enabled a lot of mobile work, in the pre-iPhone era. This was pur­chased partly to see what Palm was up to, after a long period of not pay­ing much atten­tion to the com­pany, and partly to find out if Win­dows Mobile was really as loath­some as it was made out to be. Spoiler — it was. In spades. Bought: 19/12/2009 for £77.00. Sold: 11/04/2010 for £46.11. I’d prob­a­bly have paid that much to have some­one take it away from me.

There’s more I could list, but the exact records have been lost in prior email purges.Anyway, I must go and tend to the N64 game auc­tions that are bar­relling towards a close as I type.

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Thunderball

February 28th, 2011

ISO3200 and Noise Ninja for the win.

Another day, another Bond escapade.

This time around SPECTRE has cooked up an auda­cious plan, upping the ante from Doc No’s mere fid­dling with guid­ance sys­tems to out­right steal­ing of a cou­ple of ther­monu­clear bombs. With one of their oper­a­tives under­tak­ing exten­sive plas­tic surgery to infil­trate a NATO train­ing flight, mak­ing off with a Vul­can bomber and swip­ing what would, given the time­frame, prob­a­bly be a “Blue Steel” nuclear bomb. This is a weapon only matched in potency by Derek Zoolander’s Blue Steel “look”.

With the boomy-type things now in the hands of SPECTRE No. 2 Emilo Largo, a demand is issued to, well, NATO, I assume, but this takes a par­tic­u­larly Brit-centric look at the issue, for One Hun­dred Mil­lion Pounds Ster­ling. Which isn’t far off the even­tual world­wide take of the film, accord­ing to IMDB, so in a way the plan pays for itself. Actu­ally, given that the bomber has to be landed on a retractable, sub­mersible land­ing strip, in addi­tion to the expen­sive plas­tic surgery, I sus­pect that most of the black­mail money would go straight back towards pay­ing for the equip­ment used in the endeavour.

With every­one on the hunt for the bombs, but with no clue as to where they are, it’s indeed for­tu­nate that James just hap­pens to have been relax­ing off-duty at the same spa as the SPECTRE agents prepar­ing for their mis­sion. Mas­sively, ridicu­lously, unbe­liev­ably for­tu­nate. At any rate, this leads Bond to the Bahamas on the trail of Largo, as he attempts to sniff out the loca­tion of the stolen Vul­can and its deadly payload.

Sean Con­nery has, as it turns out erro­neously, had Thun­der­ball ascribed as his favourite Bond, but that noth­with­stand­ing I’m sure he has fond mem­o­ries of film­ing it. I’m sure the Bahamas isn’t a bad place to go on loca­tion. By this point he’s clearly mas­sively com­fort­able in his role and for the time, it had some inno­v­a­tive (and SFX Oscar win­ning) action set-pieces.

The prob­lem in Space Year 2011 is that “for the time” state­ment. There can’t have been an awful lot of under­wa­ter film­ing, well, with­out any dis­claimers, really, but cer­tainly not in the arena of main­stream action movies. On a tech­ni­cal and nov­elty level, you can see why the film dou­bles down on it.

How­ever, just as with the cur­rent infat­u­a­tion with 3D film­ing, the gim­mick fre­quently gets in the way of the story rather than sup­port­ing it. Putting your main char­ac­ters in sit­u­a­tions where they can’t talk, due to the breath­ing appa­ra­tus, falls some­where between brave and fool­hardy. Putting entire action sequences under­wa­ter is bone­headed. As any­one who has been in water at some point in their life will attest to, fast and fluid motion isn’t the medium’s forte. Hence the cli­mac­tic action sequences that want des­per­ately to be pitched under­wa­ter bat­tles become, essen­tially, wet­suit clad men hug­ging each other with the occa­sional har­poon dart pen­e­trat­ing them. Ooh-er, missus.

I don’t have much issue with the rest of the film, but so much of this film’s impact is gam­bled on the under­wa­ter action that it under­mines the oth­er­wise solid frame­work of the film.

Con­nery is effort­lessly por­tray­ing Bond by this point, and is a joy to watch in the role. I’m not so fond of Adolfo Celi’s Largo, who appears to have mis­taken ‘char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion’ for ‘wear­ing an eye­patch’. He’s as ham­pered by the under­wa­ter nature of a lot of the film as Bond is, and only in one scene does he ever get a chance to exude men­ace, far towards the end of the film by which point the dam­age has already been done.

While the plot has increased the stakes to nuclear threats against cities rather than gov­ern­ment gold facil­i­ties, there’s it doesn’t trans­late into any extra dra­matic ten­sion. While it’s far from the most dis­ap­point­ing Bond film in the series, it’s cer­tainly the first one we’ve spo­ken about in this ill-advised experiment.

Still, bonus points for fea­tur­ing Bond girl Domino get­ting a tow from a tur­tle, an act which is sub­stan­tially less per­verted than it sounds.

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Goldfinger

February 19th, 2011

A bird
The above bird, which I believe is called a Blue ‘n’ Green Bird, native to Some­whereis­tan, was taken in a sur­pris­ingly gloomy Edin­burgh Zoo enclo­sure. I think it scrubs up quite well for a ISO2000 shot from an Olym­pus E-600, a cam­era which as much as I love is not renowned for its low light chops.

Well, this Bond-a-week project isn’t exactly hav­ing the smoothest of starts. In my defence, I’m still not pre­cisely con­vinced of what time zone I hap­pen to be in. Reme­dial action must be taken on this front, and also on my increas­ingly ludi­crous stack of pho­tographs to sort, process and publish. Let’s get started with Goldfin­ger.

In some part, Goldfin­ger was what prompted this ill-advised adven­ture. As part of a dis­cus­sion with my good buddy Craig, our wan­der­ing atten­tion turned to the sub­ject of the then recently tele­vised movie on one of the higher-numbered ITV deriv­a­tive repeat-mongers. I remem­ber com­ment­ing some­thing along the lines that for me, the moment when Bond trans­formed into some­thing that’s sub­stan­tially less inter­est­ing and more stu­pid is the nanosec­ond after Hon­our Black­man declares that “I’m Pussy Galore”. Bond’s addled acknowl­edge­ment of the unlike­li­ness of the name notwith­stand­ing, I declared it the begin­ning of the end of Bond.

At the time, and bear in mind that I’ve never been the world’s biggest Bond fan, I believed that Goldfin­ger came far later on in the series than it actu­ally does. It is, of course, only the third trip to the cin­ema for 007. Unar­guably, and per­haps this is where my con­fu­sion arose from, it’s the pro­to­type for almost every­thing that fol­lows it, and estab­lishes all of the tropes that turn the fran­chise from a series of spy adven­tures to a series of Bond Films, a sub-genre all of its own.

The car, the gad­gets, the open­ing sequence mini-mission, the overtly high stakes evil plots and most vital of all, the vil­lain parad­ing around front and cen­tre for most of the film. Dr. No was barely seen in the film that took his name. From Rus­sia With Love’s main antag­o­nist, SMERSH killer Don­ald Grant was seen more, but per­haps heard from less. Gert Frobe’s Auric Goldfin­ger is all ingrained on the DNA of almost every scene in Goldfin­ger.

I am, again, rather mak­ing the assump­tion that you are all famil­iar with the goings on of Goldfin­ger, which may not be the case. At any rate, the Bank of Eng­land big­wigs inform M and our man Bond that they sus­pect that gold mag­nate Goldfin­ger has been ille­gally smug­gling some of the shiny stuff between coun­tries, with some poten­tially unpleas­ant reper­cus­sions for economies still pegged to the gold standard.

It’s left to Jimmy to inves­ti­gate Mr. Finger’s oper­a­tions, wheedling his way into Goldfinger’s deal­ings by dan­gling a bar of Nazi gold in front of him and promis­ing there’s more where that came from. This meets with a mixed recep­tion from Auric and his iconic hat-flinging side­kick, Odd­job, but Bond isn’t a quit­ter, trail­ing Goldfin­ger across Europe, get­ting his ass cap­tured and tied to a table with a point­lessly placed laser both­er­ing him pro­vid­ing yet another boon for lazy com­edy writ­ers, then hauled back to the States for the con­clu­sion of his Mas­ter Plan, as he attempts to irra­di­ate Fort Knox’s gold repository.

If that per­haps sounds famil­iar, even if you haven’t seen the film, per­haps it is because with some cre­ative search and replac­ing, you could apply the above recap to damn near every Bond film that fol­lows it. As tem­plates go, there’s few that have stood repeated re-pressings as well as the nar­ra­tive bones of Goldfin­ger.

It’s dif­fi­cult to know where to place Goldfin­ger in the grand pan­theon of Bond films. It’s surely the most influ­en­tial of all of the series. There aren’t many films that could claim quite to have made quite the same stamp on the lin­eage of its descen­dants as Goldfin­ger. The only thing that Moore era Bonds have in com­mon with Dr. No is the char­ac­ter name. They’d be far more famil­iar with Goldfin­ger.

Is that a bad thing? I sup­pose from the prospect of some­one faced with another twenty odd movies that aren’t going to be a mil­lion miles away from this film over the next twenty odd weeks, it def­i­nitely is. I am, how­ever, hardly a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple, and it’s dif­fi­cult to argue with the box office results of the longest run­ning movie series since the cre­ation of mov­ing pic­tures. Regard­less, this marks the move away from a (still hardly grounded in real­ity) world of intrigue to a series where we’re often just mark­ing time until the next curi­ously prone to explod­ing thing explodes.

It turns out that call­ing this the begin­ning of the end of Bond is wholly inac­cu­rate in any mean­ing­ful sense. It’s the begin­ning of the begin­ning for Bond. It’s the end of the false begin­ning of Bond, the spy nar­ra­tives with a tal­ented but flawed and on occa­sion vul­ner­a­ble pro­tag­o­nist. It’s the start of the Bond that’s a cape and incor­rect under­gar­ment place­ment away from being Super­man. Com­mer­cially, it would be fool­ish to argue with the results. From a hoity-toity crit­i­cal per­spec­tive, it’s the start of stagnation.

I had intended to end with the pre­vi­ous para­graph, pro­vid­ing as it does a nice call­back to the start of this ram­bling write-up. It wouldn’t be accu­rate. While it’s pos­si­ble to posi­tion this as the start of an avalanche of cliches, that would down­play how enjoy­able Goldfin­ger actu­ally is. For the first exe­cu­tion of the Bond For­mula, it’s as fine an out­ing as any of the fol­low­ing. At least until post-Brosnan era Gritty Reboot, its only the less pol­ished spe­cial effects and back-projection that dates it.

Besides, how on earth can you dis­re­spect a film with Bert Kwouk,  a machine gun tot­ing granny and a shower of Mafia bosses that sound exactly like a par­ody of Mafia bosses with lines like “Hey, what’s with the trick pool table!”? It also pro­vides a good chunk of the Austin Pow­ers ref­er­ences, so it’s also achieved an inad­ver­tent comic sheen over time. Per­haps that’s why the pre­vi­ous casual thought inspec­tion left this Bond out­ing a lit­tle tar­nished in my mind, but in the harsh light of cold inqui­si­tion, that’s not a ten­able position.

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Transition

February 5th, 2011

I’ve made peace with Dehli, to some extent, hav­ing spent the day wan­der­ing through the his­toric land­marks, but they’re still down­load­ing off the mem­ory card as I type this so you’ll have to make do with a shot out of the hotel win­dow from a cou­ple of nights ago. Knew I’d brought the tri­pod for a good reason.

I’ve never been entirely sure why Scot­tish author Iain Banks has his sci­ence fic­tion (or spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, if you’re being mas­sively pre­ten­tious about it) pub­lished under the Iain M. Banks moniker. What’s so Sci-Fi about the mid­dle ini­tal ‘M’? This ques­tion has haunted me for many years, ruin­ing nights that oth­er­wise promised a vast ocean of sleep to nav­i­gate, wrecked on the rocky shores of inpon­der­able conun­drums. I am even less sure about how on Earth Tran­si­tion man­aged to sneak under the wire for the ‘nor­mal’ fic­tion def­i­n­i­tion that allows the novel to sport the “Iain Banks” brand.

Y’see, works about peo­ple jump­ing between par­al­lel worlds, occu­py­ing other people’s bod­ies while car­ry­ing out inter­ven­tions, occas­sion­aly fatal, into the lives of oth­ers don’t often fall into cat­e­gories other than Sci-Fi. Quan­tum Leap is rarely found on shelves other than Sci-Fi, if indeed it is found on shelves at all. Oh, boy.

I believe any sort of plot recap would take as long to read as the book itself does, it being a many-layered and splen­did thing, but I have not the writic­u­lar chops of Banks so my recap would be some­what crap­tac­u­lar. Yes, ‘writic­u­lar’ and ‘crap­tac­u­lar’ are per­fectly cro­mu­lent words. Are you doubt­ing my vocabulariousity?

In a nut­shell, this fol­lows the activ­i­ties and lives of a few pro­tag­o­nists, Temud­jin Oh, a prime young agent for the inter­di­men­sional Con­cern of dubi­ous prov­i­dence, Mrs. Mul­ver­hill, his some-time lover and full-time rebel, an obnox­ious young city banker for whom the rhyming slang is entirely appro­pri­ate and a tor­turer, or if you rather an enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion specialist.

Quite the menagerie of char­ac­ters, espe­cially when a num­ber of them can inhabit entirely dif­fer­ent bod­ies at points though­out the nar­ra­tive. Essen­tially, Mrs. Mul­ver­hill has grown sus­pi­cious of the goals and meth­ods of the Con­cern, and aims to tear them down, with Oh’s loy­alty being the key to these plans.

It’s all a lit­tle wheels-within-wheels, and you’re largely left to fill in a lot of the details of the polit­i­cal machi­na­tions your­self rather than suc­cumb­ing to lengthy pas­sages of expo­si­tion. This is no bad thing, with Banks effort­lessly weav­ing the threads of the story through and with the deep char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions that all, even the some­what bit-part, actors in the tale have. 

Were I to haz­ard an answer to the clas­si­fi­ca­tion conun­drum posed ear­lier, it may avoid the nerd­tac­ul­geekuar label of “Sci-Fi” by virtue of not attempt­ing a descrip­tion of the mech­a­nism for all this par­al­lel uni­verse hop­ping zani­ness by virtue of not going into any detail about it. There’s some peo­ple who can do it, with the aid of a spe­cial drug, and a Con­cern that reg­u­lates it. Every­thing else is left to your imag­i­na­tion, which is fre­quently the best idea in gen­eral and cer­tainly in this spe­cific case.

It’s not per­fect, suf­fer­ing from an end­ing that’s not quite directly an out­put of the deus ex machine, but very close to it, and per­haps some­thing of a fail­ure of point towards the end, although I con­cede that per­haps I’m not quite bright enough, or per­haps was not play­ing close enough atten­tion, to see what’s going to be dif­fer­ent in the novel’s world after the finale.

Regard­less, it’s a roundly absorb­ing tale, and engag­ingly writ­ten. I will accept only illit­er­acy as an excuse for fail­ure to read this book, although the con­tra­dic­tions inher­ent in writ­ing that state­ment have made me dizzy so I shall now go off and lie down for a while before catch­ing another jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again.

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