Three Films Make A Post: It'll never let you go

1917 (2019): As a technical feat, and an example of visually extremely beautiful filmmaking this war movie taking place in World War I, shot in two long shots, is an incredible achievement, deserving all the copycats of its tech that’ll surely follow. It’s a film I found myself appreciating on the level of craft a great deal. However, I believe it is exactly this focus – I’m tempted to say fixation - on the technical that makes the film lose emotional impact for me, the humanity it is trying to speak of buried under layers of prettiness and technical chops until it can hardly move. No character in the film has an actual personality, but then, director Sam Mendes’s structural decisions make personalities pretty unimportant, what with no interaction between characters ever having any impact later on in the movie; a swelling score alone is not enough to make me care. Philosophically, we do learn that war is indeed hell, but the why and the how seem to interest Mendes as little as treating his characters as anything beyond ciphers with suffering facial expressions.

Shelter Island (2003): Despite a couple of pleasantly weird details – the film’s protagonist played by Ally Sheedy is a pro golfer turned motivational speaker for example – Geoffrey Schaaf’s thriller about the plot a million late night TV thrillers followed in the decade before, is about as bland as they come. Not clever enough to do anything interesting with the slight variations in its set-up, not sleazy enough to tickle the exploitation bone, and as obvious as “twisty” thrillers come, this one’s about as interesting as watching a middle-aged guy fall asleep watching it. It’s pretty short, though.

The Man with the Magic Box aka Czlowiek z magicznym pudelkiem (2017): But let’s end this on a high note, with this weird (in all the best ways) Polish movie by Bodo Kox concerning a dystopian society that feels like a culturally Polish variation of the kind of society Terry Gilliam would be into making a movie about, psychic time travel, and love across class divides. It’s full of brilliant little ideas realized with the kind of verve that’s usually the result of a fecund imagination coming to life, driven by a weirdness that has its own internal logic, and shows a view of life that’s like an Eastern European shrug that can hardly disguise an honest romanticism.


It’s also really beautiful to look at, Kox turning found locations into organic parts of a strange near future (and the strange land known as the past), while leads Olga Boladz and Piotr Polak breathe human life into characters other films would treat as abstract ideas.

Three Bonds Make A Post: Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008) & Skyfall (2012)

For all my love of Eurospy movies, I have avoided the James Bond movies these films were merrily ripping off for two decades and a half. I only have that much patience for a series of films about a smug jerk without discernible character traits fucking and killing while travelling around the world, particularly when the films clearly have no idea how deeply loathsome their hero is.

The Daniel Craig reboot movies actually seem made with people like me in mind. Suddenly, Bond actually has a character and not just an attitude. Even better, particularly Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are out to criticize Bond's misogynist streak, explain it, and then proceed to actually do something about it. Sure, in the end (or Skyfall), Bond's emotional morals are still dubious, and he's still much too fast solving problems by killing people, but the films add enough actual character development (and even a bit of meta-plot and thematic coherence between the movies) to make clear he's at least improving; and it's always easier to sympathize with a guy who is at least trying than one whose movies comment every murder and betrayal he commits and every death that is his fault with a loud "fuck yeah!".

Plus, the films are really much better than they ought to be at keeping the balance between deconstructing elements of the Bond movie mythology and just enjoying being part of it. And, you know, Judi Dench, or rather, Judi Dench and the films' generally successful efforts to turn the female characters here into something different from Bond fuck dolls. In fact, every film affords at least one of its female characters as much complexity as Bond possesses, which is more than I'd ever have expected from them.

If I were a pessimist, I'd probably see the changes at the end of the third film as the starting point for a regression into less interesting times, but then these last three films should be reason enough to give the series the benefit of the doubt, particularly since the next Bond film will be again directed by Sam Mendes whose Quantum of Solace shows him surprisingly great at imbuing the scenes of spectacle with meaning where Casino Royale's Martin Campbell and Quantum of Solace's Marc Forster tended to a somewhat old-fashioned solidity or the camera shakes, respectively.

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