Diamonds Are Forever

February 10, 2009 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

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No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to DIET!

If you weren’t there, you can’t imagine how exciting it was to arrive at the theater when this movie opened in 1971. To my wide adolescent eyes, the poster alone (featuring a gazillion diamonds in space, stuff blowing up, and Sean Connery flanked by Lana Wood and Jill St. John in bikinis) promised an evening of pure guilty pleasure.

Sad to say that 40-some years later it’s a guilty pleasure of a different kind… indifferently directed, filled with unattractive performances, and with a dud script that’s especially painful after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The Nixon-era Vegas locations are so surreally ugly that you half expect Hunter S. Thompson and his Samoan attorney to come ripping through in their great red shark.

And to paraphrase Hemingway, any movie that leaves you idly speculating that it would have been better with George Lazenby is a bad movie.

From Dr. No through Thunderball, Sean Connery had the grace and alertness of a panther on the prowl. In Diamonds are Forever, he’s just a jaded middle-aged movie star walking through a role he no longer takes seriously. Paunchy, jowly and sporting a greasy toupee, he looks more helplessly irritated as the movie drags on. Toward the end, when two girls send him crashing into tables and chairs, you realize that if he was any fatter and his pink tie any shorter, he’d be Oliver Hardy.

On the plus side… Jill St. John is a nice surly Bond girl — just the woman to help you start to get over Diana Rigg. Always a terrible actress, here she basically gives up, and unlike Connery, lazy indifference suits her. (If Bob Hope had only played Blofeld and growled leeringly at her, the movie would be perfect.) Although the chases inaugurate the “Smokey and the Bandit” vibe of the 70s, they do feature a cool red Mustang and a clumsy Moon Buggy. I still have the Corgi Toys of both. Finally, there’s the fantastic title song. If you listen to the words, it expresses not just the Bond character’s jaded contempt, but that of the whole cast and crew.

So, if I haven’t made it clear, I love this sleazy movie. Is it worthy to stand with a series that includes OHMSS, Goldfinger, and Casino Royale? Irrelevant, Mr. Bond!

Tough Decisions

January 16, 2009 By in The Martini Shot Leave a comment

So Bush and Cheney are making their farewell tour, and the phrase the White House Communications Office has come up with for them is that the President has had to make “tough decisions.”

The idea is that, while you might not actually like him, or anything he’s done, the President’s record low popularity is… well, it shows what a pussy you are, because you don’t have his kind of guts—not caring about popularity because he’s so “tough.” This little meme is being dutifully parroted by cabinet members, local GOP officials, the right-wing noise machine, Fox “News” and other apologists for this train wreck of an administration.

Here’s the thing. I’ve made some “tough decisions” in my life.

Some were tough because I really didn’t know what the right thing to do was, and I had some intense arguments, with myself and others. Maybe I even made some of these decisions without actually being 100% sure I was right.

Others were tough because, although I knew they were good decisions, they forced me outside my personal comfort zone. I had to change my way of thinking, or my behavior. I had to confront someone and put our relationship at risk. I had to embrace some personal growth, which is always painful in the short term.

And some were tough because I plainly and simply did not want to make them. I had to suck it up and do things I didn’t want to. I chose the lesser of two evils.

Well, I have followed the Bush administration pretty closely for these past eight years, and I have never seen the slightest evidence of the President or Vice President making those sorts of decisions. Intense internal debate? Personal growth and change? Doing things you’d rather not?

No, their decisions have consistently been to do exactly what they want to, the way they want to, and to treat anyone with a contrary viewpoint as a mortal enemy to be mocked, vilified, steamrollered, or destroyed.

Using 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq? Cherry-picking intelligence to bolster a spurious case for war? Going into Iraq with inadequate preparation? Imprisoning people without charge or trial, torturing them, and then using every legalistic trick in the book to escape war-crimes prosecution? Spying on virtually anyone without a warrant? Lowering taxes in order to de-fund the federal government? Deregulating the financial industry? Waging war on every type of environmental and consumer protection? Honeycombing government agencies with incompetents chosen solely on the basis of their right-wing Christianist beliefs? Sitting still while New Orleans drowned, because after all, it was just a bunch of shiftless poor people?

These seem to have been very easy decisions for these guys to make. In fact, they simply did everything Republicans have promised or threatened to do for the past 50 years.

“Tough decisions”? Only in one sense: if you don’t like any of their decisions… well, that’s just tough.

My Life in Bond Movies

November 15, 2008 By in Explorations, Movies Tags: Leave a comment

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In honor of Quantum of Solace, here’s a short history of my life, measured out in Bond movies.

Goldfinger. Wow, a toy car that has guns and an ejector seat! I am a little kid and nothing could possibly be cooler. Not even robots.

Thunderball. It’s all about the Aston Martin. Even the producers know it, because it makes an appearance in scene one, bizarrely shooting water out of its exhaust pipes. I am seven now and this is cool, cool, cool. But the movie is long, long, and half underwater. I fall asleep.

You Only Live Twice. Takeme takeme takeme! No? Why the hell not? I fume with impotent rage in the backseat of our Chevy Impala as we drive past the theater. Aw Daddy, doncha love your little Eddie?

Dr. No/From Russia With Love. Reissued with Goldfinger. Mom and Dad dump me at the Saturday matinee… undoubtedly to get rid of me for six hours. Excellent plan. It’s a win-win.

OHMSS. Doesn’t have Connery, so who cares? It’s the end of the 60s. We have all the time in the world.

Diamonds are Forever. Connery is back; this is big. Now I’m 13, and my father takes the whole family. But it’s Easter Sunday and I am sitting next to my grandmother, who is also a minister. Awkward. You know something? Dad can be kind of passive aggressive.

Live and Let Die/The Man with the Golden Gun. Watergate, the weary end of Vietnam, cutesy ragtime music on the radio, and Roger Moore as James Bond. Nobody who lived through the 70s will ever be nostalgic about it.

The Spy Who Loved Me. Wow, a submarine Lotus. I’m a jaded teen now, but this is hot. Ditto Barbara Bach in her black dress. Plus I am old enough to drive myself and my friends to the movies. Things are looking up.

Moonraker. I see this on my first big travels alone, in a grimy grindhouse on a drizzly, icy summer day in San Francisco. The audience is 90% homeless and drunk and happy to be indoors, even watching this gawdawful movie.

For Your Eyes Only. Bonding with Sean MacFalls, who I meet working a loading dock and who is as big a fan as I am. Around this time I see Thunderball on TV while stoned and notice how badly made it is.

Octopussy. Roger Moore is assuming the leathery appearance of an old satchel. Sean MacFalls calls the movie an All Time Low. Little do we know that next up will be…

A View to A Kill. I am married now. Rebecca yells rude things at the screen about Roger Moore’s lack of sex appeal. That’s my girl.

The Living Daylights. Tim Dalton is a breath of fresh air. The new Aston Martin has some cool gadgets… The Pretenders song at the end is terrific. Things are looking up again.

License to Kill. I’m a dad now. Can’t be bothered, except to note that Dalton looks shamefaced about being in this crappy movie. The violence is sickening; the sex is non-existent. Oh, right, it’s the Reagan era.

Goldeneye. Six years have passed. We’ve moved to New Jersey. My coworker does a hilarious impression of Tina Turner growling out the title song. She also imitates Connery’s lascivious Bond. I have a pretty big crush on my coworker. But I skip the movie.

Tomorrow’s World is Not Enough and Dies… whatever those Brosnan movies were called. As a martini drinker, I notice Pierce orders them wrong. I realize I am more sophisticated than the man playing James Bond. And that’s just not right.

Die Another Day. It’s cold and rainy outside the theater. Manhattan is a bleak, sad, empty place after 9/11. Tough room… but then, every single man in the audience groans in unison as Halle Berry wades out of the Cuban surf. And we feel better.

Casino Royale. As played by Daniel Craig, James Bond is battered, vulnerable, and at long last a real man. This is the first Bond movie that Rebecca actually likes. Afterwards she asks me to make her a Vesper. Once you’ve tasted it, that’s all you want to drink.

Studs

November 1, 2008 By in Explorations, Pop Culture Leave a comment

Have you read anything by Studs Terkel? He was the epitome of a Chicago writer — a stogie chomping, whiskey drinking tough guy, with the bullshit detector always on. Looking the hard truth right in the eye without fear and with quiet, steady, understated outrage.

“I never met a picket line or a petition I didn’t like,” he once said. Like the great lyricist E.Y. Harburg, he was a lifelong, unapologetic left-winger, and his politics was driven not by either idealism or grievance, but by intimate knowledge of how real people actually live, and how government policy actually affects them.

And the best, most beautiful thing about Studs was that he went out and talked to those real people, interviewing them with great love and patience until they had given up their “gold,” as he put it… and then he used his own writer’s gifts to edit and shape their words to reveal their eloquence. He once commented that Americans have a natural intelligence and wit, which is true, but it takes a shrewd man to see that, and a great man to put his own gifts in the service of it.

When Studs was 89, about seven years ago, a young journalist went to talk to him — and found him halfway through a cigar at 10 a.m. Studs offered him a glass of scotch because, he said, it was too early for martinis. They talked about the art of turning an interview, with its garbled syntax and false starts, into readable prose. Among other things, Studs said this:

“A guy stopped me once—I did Working, and had all kinds of portraits, and one is the portrait of a waitress, Dolores Dante, she used to work at the Erie Cafe, when it was an expense-account joint. She was great. She talked about the day of a waitress. So one day this guy stops me on the street, and he corners me, on Michigan Boulevard Bridge—you know, people stop me now and then, not celebrity, just me, you know, they know me. He says listen, I want to tell ya—since I read about that woman Dolores in your book Working, I’ll never again talk to a waitress the way I have in the past. I’ll never again. Well that’s pretty good. That means I’ve touched him.”

I love ya, Studs. Rest in peace.