Saturday, November 29, 2008

#5 Bad Idea: Quantum of Nonsense

This afternoon I watched Quantum of Solace, and it's a disturbing experience to spend 100 minutes with an iconic pop culture experience and realize that, out of all the twenty-plus Bond films of varying quality over the last few decades, not one has ever reached so far and grasped so little as this one. What does it mean to feel that the most supremely escapist movie franchise on Earth has produced an installment that feels not just haphazard, slack, campy or stupid, but downright irrelevant?

Could it be that there was no artificially intelligent formalwear?

There's no shortage of films involving magic outfits that transform their wearers into enhanced or superpowered version of themselves, but the Bond films, with their rotating cast of actors and manic insistence on style, elevate the fitted tuxedo and the Windsor knot to a kind of personhood all on its own. So why not launch a Bond franchise with the titular spy wearing a wisecracking, sarcastic tux? Kitt-like and dry, Bond's tux could always be relied on for just the right witty rejoinder. Sample phrases include "Whoah, down boy!" "Would it kill you to put on some deodorant now and then?" and "Take me Cary Grant's drycleaner, stat!"

Ah man. Laughs a-fucking-plenty. It couldn't be any worse than a movie full of Daniel Craig refusing to smile.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it sucked.

Anonymous said...

I had feared that Quantum of Solace would be bad when the first commercials for the film came out. They featured bond driving in traffic. That was it. Bond in Traffic. Sure he was driving aggressively, but it was still really just Bond in traffic. At that very moment I thought, this new bond film is going to suck.

Then the title appeared a Quantum of Solace... how un-Bondy of a title can one get. Fried Green Tomatoes was probably the alternate title, the in-production title. Who made this new Bond? ...and why do they hate the Bond Genre of films so very very much?