A few years ago, I posted a list of my top ten favorite romantic comedies.  You can read it here.  Today, I'm doing something a little different -- a list of my ten favorite romantic dramas!  I've excluded movies that belong to other specific genres like westerns, musicals, or film noir, simply because... those aren't in the drama section of my movie collection, okay? 

As always, if I've reviewed a film on this list, I've linked the title to my review.

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) Three veterans (Dana Andrews, Frederic March, Harold Russell) find returning to civilian life much harder than they'd expected.  Bonus: this movie contains THREE love stories!  You get love between a husband and wife getting reacquainted, between childhood sweethearts, and between new acquaintances.

2. Jane Eyre (1983) Strong-spirited governess Jane Eyre (Zelah Clarke) falls in love with her wealthy, secretive employer (Timothy Dalton), but they cannot marry until they both deserve each other.

3. Chocolat (2000) A mysterious woman (Juliette Binoche) opens a chocolate shop in a sedate French village and teaches its inhabitants to reexamine their attitudes and customs.   Also, she falls in love with a gypsy (Johnny Depp).

4. North and South (2004)  A woman (Daniela Denby-Ashe) from the pastoral south of England moves to the industrial north and spends months ignoring the fact that a wealthy manufacturer (Richard Armitage) is in love with her. 

5. And Now Tomorrow (1944) A wealthy young woman (Loretta Young) loses her hearing in an illness. Though her family and fiance (Barry Sullivan) try to convince her she needs to accept her condition, a young doctor (Alan Ladd) with an experimental treatment holds out hope that she could regain her hearing.

6. Pride and Prejudice (2005) Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) can't fall in love with each other until they both come to understand themselves first.  Bonus: multiple love stories here too!

7. Jane Eyre (2011)  Strong-spirited governess Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) falls in love with her wealthy, secretive employer (Michael Fassbender), but they cannot marry until they both deserve each other.

8. Moran of the Lady Letty (1922)  A wealthy young man (Rudolph Valentino) gets shanghaied onto a smuggling ship, whereupon he falls in love with the only survivor (Dorothy Dalton) of an abandoned vessel the smugglers rob.

9. Sense and Sensibility (1995)  A young woman (Emma Thompson) and her sister (Kate Winslet) both discover that their own particular personality strengths are also weaknesses when it comes to finding a smooth path to true love.  Bonus: this movie also contains three love stories.  Because why not.

10. Return to Me (2000)  A man (David Duchovny) falls in love with the woman (Minnie Driver) who was the heart donor recipient of his wife's heart after she died.

I just realized that Judi Dench is in three of these:  Chocolat, Pride and Prejudice, and the 2011 Jane Eyre.  How nifty is that?

This post is a contribution toward Cordy's Lovely Blog Party, which is in full swing and continues all month!  You can read her kick-off post here. 

I missed out on seeing this in the theater, but I've seen it twice on DVD now.  The first time, I liked it okay.  The second time, I found it fascinating.  As generally happens to me, the first time I watch a movie, I'm just there to understand what's going on.  The second time through, I start to dig into things like the subtext and meanings and really notice nuances in the performances.

Although I already knew the basic plot of Murder on the Orient Express because I've read the Agatha Christie novel a couple times, I still spent my first viewing just following the story.  It's been years since I read the book, so I'm not sure how closely it followed that, but I did NOT remember several things, like (spoiler alert) how it involved a kidnapping much like the Lindbergh case (end spoilers) -- I'm going to have to re-read the book to see just how faulty my memory of it is.  One thing I did remember was the ending.  Which I feel they were faithful to here.

Let's all admit, though, that really we're watching this more for the all-star cast and the pretty costumes than the plot, shall we?  Because there have been other movie versions of this same story, most notably the 1974 film that also boasted an all-star cast.  And this is probably Christie's most-famous book, so people generally have a basic idea of what it's about.  In case you don't, here's my fairly non-spoiler-y rundown of the plot:

Famous detective Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) has just finished solving a case in Jerusalem when he's urgently called to consult on another one.  He acquires a spot on the already-filled Orient Express train.  And once the train is underway, there's a murder.  And an avalanche that stops the train.  Because he's a famous detective, he gets asked to solve the murder, and of course one of the other quirky passengers must be the murderer because they're in the middle of nowhere.  It's a fun variation on the old "country house murder" scenario.


Branagh directed and produced the film as well as starring in it.  I happen to be very fond of him as a director because he knows how to tell a good story in a straightforward, non-frilly manner that pleases me.  While this story is necessarily more complicated than, say, Cinderella (2015) or Thor (2011), it's got a lot in common with the many Shakespearean films he's directed.  Certainly this star-studded cast is nothing compared to his Hamlet (1996), a story much more complex than this.  It's his ability to tell a convoluted story in a straight-forward way that makes me like his directing so much, and certainly that added to my enjoyment of Orient Express.  While the story has many tangled twists and turns, I was never confused.  None of the surprises felt jarring or unwarranted.  Everything made magnificent sense in the end, which of course is a tribute to Agatha Christie's original story, and to Michael Green's screenplay, but also to Branagh's clarity as a director, I think.


And Branagh's acting is no less adept.  At first, you want to dismiss his Poirot as a persnickety, obsessive caricature.  But as the film progresses, we see the wistful man behind the absurd mustache.  He holds sacred the memory of a girl he once loved, or perhaps I should say, the girl he still loves, but has lost.  He has little patience for greedy or grasping people, but much sympathy for those who are troubled or hurting.  He dispenses with pleasantries when they are no use, but is punctiliously polite otherwise.  And, over the course of the story, he grows and changes more than we usually see in the lead detective in a possible series.  He begins the story confident there is right and wrong and nothing else, but he ends it admitting that there are, indeed, gray areas in the world where it is difficult to make a perfectly right choice.  (Spoiler alert again)  Like Sherlock Holmes in certain canon cases, he chooses not to pass judgement or turn over culprits for punishment, since he is not a member of the police and feels doing so would be more harmful than just.  (End spoiler.)  By the end of the film, I felt strongly sympathetic toward this Poirot, and I'm very happy to see that there's a sequel planned!


The other stand-out performance here, I felt, was Michelle Pfeiffer as Caroline Hubbard.  I've seen her in a handful of other things, but the only one where I cared much for her at all was LadyHawke (1985), which she was quite compelling in.  She was actually a bit of a revelation here, as I'd never quite understood why everyone was gaga over her, aside from the fact that she's pretty.  But her acting here was superb -- alternately repellent and compelling, and with a fragile hardness underneath everything that, particularly on the second viewing, I found revelatory.


Everyone else was enjoyable.  Johnny Depp was obviously having a great deal of fun being intimidating and gauche.  Judi Dench could have used more screen time (but I love her, so I always want more), but she was a nice blend of frosty and pensive.  It was fun seeing Willem Dafoe again, as I've liked him so much ever since I first saw Clear and Present Danger (1994) as a teen.  He was also having a great deal of fun in his role as a pompous, bigoted Austrian professor.  And it was delightful to see Daisy Ridley in a period piece.  I hope she joins Lily James and Keira Knightley in doing lots and lots of them, because she suited it well.


It's always nice seeing frequent Branagh collaborator Derek Jacobi, though he had a small part with little to do.  Josh Gad was much more subdued than I'm used to seeing him, which was a pleasant change.  Penelope Cruz felt a little one-note, but I've honestly never really been a fan of hers.  The only other cast member I found particularly interesting was Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who was utterly charming in his short bits of screen time.  But everyone was well-suited to their roles, and I enjoyed the entire ensemble.

Is this movie family friendly?  Not entirely, as it does deal with a murder, obviously.  The murder itself is eventually shown in flashback in a not-terribly-gross-or-detailed way.  There's a prostitute in an early scene, though while her profession is mentioned, there's just some innuendo in the scene, nothing shown.  There are guns and cigarettes and alcohol.  There's a tragic backstory (Spoiler Alert!!) that involves a kidnapped and murdered child (End Spoiler Alert).  And there's quite a bit of bad language, though mostly the old-fashioned sort.  Older teens would be fine, but not tweens or younger.

I have so many wonderful memories surrounding this movie.  It's the first James Bond movie I ever saw all the way through, aside from a couple parts my parents would skip for us.  This is probably why Pierce Brosnan remains my favorite Bond.  Judge all you like -- I'm sticking with him, and it's all because of GoldenEye.  It's my favorite Bond film too, even though I do recognize and acknowledge that there are better ones.  Don't care; I love this one.

So, when I was a kid, my dad would get the old James Bond movies out of the library if he was taking a sick day.  He didn't get sick often, but everyone gets a cold or the flu once in a while, him included.  And he loved the old Sean Connery and Roger Moore 007 movies.  Once he was feeling better, and no longer contagious, a lot of times he'd show my brother and I the stupendous opening sequence to whichever 007 movie he'd gotten this time.  I must confess I don't even know which movies some of them go with, but I have great memories of Bond ski-surfing, jumping off cliffs, etc.

Now, my dad never liked Timothy Dalton as 007.  But when the new guy named Pierce Brosnan took over the role, Dad rented GoldenEye when it came to the video store.  If you remember life with video stores, then you know this was about six months after the movie was in theaters.  We had it rough back in the '90s, kids.  It was another three months or so before we could buy our own copy on VHS.

Happily, my dad really liked this movie and this 007.  And before he took the tape back to the video store, he showed my brother and I the opening sequence.  I still love it so much.  James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) bungee jumps off a dam.





He and 006 (Sean Bean) infiltrate a Russian chemical weapons facility and set a bunch of bombs.  They engage in witty repartee and buddy jokes.

I fell in love with Pierce Brosnan right here:


And I fell in love with Sean Bean right here:


That first viewing, I almost liked 006 better than 007.  I mean, his name was Alec (James and Alec are basically my two favorite guy names -- I loved them being the names of these two cool buddies!).  He had a lot of sarcasm, and I reeeeeeally liked his voice.  But if you're at all aware of who Sean Bean is, and what generally happens to him in movies, you know what comes next.


Yeah, they shot him in the head, and he's very, very dead, and it matters very little whether stone or lump of lead -- it is very, very certain that he's very, very dead.  (I may have loved that line from Gilbert and Sullivan's musical The Yoeman of the Guard a little too much.  I use it whenever I can.)  And so 007 blows the whole place up and escapes.


Oh, the feeeeeeeels!  I've cried so much over 006 dying.  More than once.  This was the first thing I ever saw Sean Bean in, and it was before he had died in quite so many movies, so I totally wasn't expecting it, I was expecting that this would be a snarky buddy-comedy James Bond movie, and then nope, death to 006.

In fact, my dad let us watch just that opening sequence many times over the course of several months before he ever showed us the whole movie.  So I got really attached to 006 and 007, and that whole opener remains my favorite part of the film.


But the movie does continue after that part, and eventually my dad had watched it often enough to know where to skip things and mute bad words.  So I finally got to watch the whole movie.  After my beloved opening sequence, nine years pass for Bond, and then off we merrily go to London, where we meet the new M (Judi Dench), who is... (drumroll please)... a woman.  Edgy stuff.  A woman ordering James Bond around!  Sounds really lame now, but this was kind of a big deal twenty years ago.  Like, I was sixteen at the time, and I found the new M very scary.  I didn't like her.  She yelled at James Bond too much.  Nowadays, I absolutely love her, and Judi Dench is one of my favorite actresses, but at the time... she scared me.  Kind of a lot.


Anyway, James Bond gets sent out on a new mission.  All about hackers in Russia and a missing electromagnetic pulse device and a nuclear space weapon, the usual exciting, high-tech, implausible, delightful stuff James Bond movies are made of.

Plus, we meet up with a Russian computer programmer named Natalya (Izabella Scorupco).  She's smart, she's sassy, and she's the Bond Girl of the day.  I like her much more than most Bond Girls because she doesn't just fall into Bond's arms immediately, and she's got a lot of guts.  She generally doesn't need rescuing, and is one of the first strong female characters I genuinely admired.


We also meet up with freaky-deaky hit-woman Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), so named because we have to have some kind of weird double-entendre-laden name in here somewhere, it's kind of a rule.  She kills people a lot.  In strange ways.  Hers are the scenes we had to skip when I was a kid.


And then there's Boris (Alan Cumming), who steals every single scene he's in, even away from Pierce Brosnan.  Even away from Sean Bean.  He is one of the funniest characters I've ever seen, and my family still quotes him to this day.  "I am inVEEEEEEENcible!"  Yeah.  Get the biggest kick out of him.


SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!  Lots of spoilers.  Spoilers and more spoilers and still more spoilers.  Okay, maybe not that many, but I'm going to spoil a big plot twist, so skip to below the picture of James Bond and Natalya if you don't want to be spoiled.


I think GoldenEye holds the distinction of being the only movie in which Sean Bean gets two death scenes.  First he got shot in the head in the beginning, but he didn't actually, he was just staging his own death.  Now he's the bad guy orchestrating everything, and man, when I found that out the first time, I was sooooooo angry.  And so happy.  Happy that I got more Sean Bean to watch!  Angry because he was the bad guy now!  All the mixed-up feelings a teen could feel.  Because I'd gotten so very, very fond of him from watching the opening sequence over and over and over before I saw the whole movie, and now I felt very betrayed.  Much like James Bond feels!

Of course, Sean Bean has to die at the end.  He's the Bond baddie AND he's Sean Bean, so it's required.  Sniffle.


Is this movie family friendly?  Not really.  Xenia Onatopp kills people by squeezing them to death between her thighs, sometimes during sex.  There's some bad language, there's a good bit of violence.  Like I said, my family always censored parts of this -- in fact, we permanently censored our VHS copy by recording over several scenes.  We recorded bits of a documentary about building castles over them, and from then on, my brother and I referred to the process of censoring scenes in any of our family's movies as "castle building."  I miss being able to do that -- you can't "fix" movies on DVD like you could on VHS.  In fact, I own three or four movies on VHS I refuse to replace with DVDs because I want the edited versions, not the originals.  Sigh.


This has been my entry for the 007 Blogathon hosted by MaddyLovesHerClassicFilms.  Be sure to drop by her blog to find links to the other entries.

Like I promised in my post about my ten favorite actors, here is the list of my ten favorite actresses!  This was, in some ways, a much easier list to compile, because I simply don't get as fanatical about actresses the way I do about actors, and so I don't have as many favorites.  However, here are ten ladies who can all make me want to see movies solely because they are in them, and they have played a lot of characters I admire, would like to be friends with, or want to be more like.  Definitely my favorites!


Once again, this is a bit different from my other "ten favorite" posts because I can't provide a synopsis of people the way I can for films. So I've listed the first movie I saw them in, my favorite movie of theirs, and my favorite role they played.  And again, I've linked their names to the post labels for them, so if you click on one of their names, it will take you to all the posts I've written that involve that particular actress.  Finally, I've linked movie titles to my reviews of them where applicable.


1.  Maureen O'Hara.  I think the first movie I saw her in was The Rare Breed (1966), as a preteen.  My favorite movie of hers is Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and my favorite role of hers is probably Maggie McKendrick in The Parent Trap (1961).


2.  Emma Thompson.  I first saw her in Sense and Sensibility (1995) when I was a teen -- in fact, I believe that was my introduction to Jane Austen as well.  My favorite movie of hers is Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and her role as Beatrice in that is also my favorite of hers.


3.  Barbara Stanwyck.  The first thing I saw her in was The Big Valley (1965-69), which remains my favorite thing she's in, and her role as Victoria Barkley on it is also my favorite -- I wrote this post a few years back about why I want to be just like Victoria when I grow up.


4.  Judi Dench.  I first saw her in GoldenEye (1995), and it's funny, but I didn't like her much at first.  I was extremely fond of Pierce Brosnan, and she yelled at him a lot, and that made me mad at her character, M.  But I grew increasingly fond of her over the years, both M and Judi Dench.  My favorite movie of hers is Chocolat (2000), and my favorite character of hers is actually M, especially in Skyfall (2012).


5.  Lauren Bacall.  I think the first thing I saw her in was To Have and Have Not (1944), though it might have been The Big Sleep (1946).  My favorite film of hers is To Have and Have Not, but my favorite role is probably Marilla Hagen in Designing Woman (1957), though it's been a long time since I watched that.


6.  Keira Knightley.  I first saw her in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), but my favorite movie of hers is Pirates of the Caribbean:  Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), and my favorite role of hers is either Gwyn in Princess of Thieves (2001) or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (2005).


7.  Myrna Loy.  I'm pretty sure The Thin Man (1934) was the first thing I ever saw her in, and Nora Charles in that and the subsequent Thin Man films is definitely my favorite role of hers.  But my favorite movie of hers is The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which I watched for the first time solely because she was in it.
10.  Nicole Kidman.  I first saw her on the little-known Disney channel western series Five Mile Creek (1985), and I absolutely loved her tomboyish character Annie -- she wore pants and didn't like dressing up, and she could beat up boys!  Major role model for me as a girl.  My favorite movie of hers is Australia (2008), and her character in it, Lady Sarah Ashley (aka Mrs. Boss) is also my favorite role of hers.

Who are your favorite actresses?  Do we have any in common?

So, I've decided I love too many "action/adventure" movies to lump them all together, and I'm going to do lists of my favorite superhero, sci-fi, fantasy, and war movies separately.  Which means these are all pure action movies about people without super powers or magical abilities that are battling other real people, not robots or supervillains or evil wizards.  Yes, such movies exist!



1.  The Fugitive (1993)

Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) is wrongly convicted of his wife's murder, escapes, and goes hunting for the real killer while U.S. Marshal Sammy Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) hunts for him.  My second-favorite movie of all time.

2.  The Bourne Identity (2002)

Amnesiac Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) races across Europe, evading unknown pursuers, seeking answers about his past, and falling in love with a quirky stranger (Franka Potente).  The movie that changed my mind about Matt Damon.  And based on one of my favorite books.

3.  A Knight's Tale (2001)

Poor William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) pretends to be a knight so he can win jousting tournaments and feed himself and his friends (Paul Bettany, Alan Tudyk, and Mark Addy).  Rollicking good fun, with a crazy soundtrack and some awesome jousting scenes.

4.  Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Paranoid cab driver Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) convinces the woman he loves (Julia Roberts) to help him uncover a conspiracy.  I think this is the first thing I ever saw Patrick Stewart in other than Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  It manages to be twisty and tender, creepy and sweet, all at the same time.

5.  The Three Musketeers (1993)

Young d'Artagnan (Chris O'Donnell) just wants to be a Musketeer, but he ends up embroiled in unmasking a plot against the king.  His three Musketeer friends (Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Oliver Platt) are hilarious and awesome too.  I actually like this better than Alexandre Dumas' book!

6.  GoldenEye (1995)

James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) battles his ex-partner (Sean Bean) to save Britain from an electronic meltdown.  The first thing I ever saw Brosnan, Bean, and Judi Dench in -- and I became a total fan of all three.

7.  Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World (2003)

Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) leads his best friend Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) and his ship's crew on a quest to capture a dastardly French ship.  I'd read all of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Aubrey and Maturin before the movie came out, and I spent a lot of my time in the theater whispering to my brother about how perfectly everything matched the books.

8.  R.E.D. (2010)

Retired black-ops agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), his new girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), and a bunch of his old pals (Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren) and enemies (Brian Cox) team up to figure out who's trying to kill them, and why.  Hilarious from beginning to end.  You guys wanna get pancakes?

9.  The Hunt for Red October (1990)

CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) tries to convince his superiors that a Russian submarine captain (Sean Connery) wants to defect.  Still the best Jack Ryan movie, and since I love Harrison Ford but only like Alec Baldwin, that's saying something.

10.  Romancing the Stone (1984)

Romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) goes to South America to rescue her kidnapped sister and ends up having a grand adventure with the help of a stranger (Michael Douglas).  Rollicking good fun, and all the parts that have to do with being a writer crack me up to no end.

When I got in the car to go see "Skyfall" this morning, Adele's theme song for it was playing on the car radio.  An auspicious sign, eh?  I'd really never heard it all the way through, and I quite liked it.  I haven't really jumped on the Adele bandwagon, but if anything would tempt me to, it would be this song.  (Watch the official video here.)  It harkens back to the great Bond movie themes, the ones you can belt to the rafters like "Nobody Does it Better," yet also reminds me a lot of the songs for GoldenEye and Casino Royale.   Quite the heady mix, and it got me very much ready for a sweet, adrenaline-laced ride.  I hoped I wouldn't be disappointed like I was last time around.

And I wasn't.

:-D

Skyfall is not as sleek and insouciant as Casino Royale.  However, it is also not as clunky and glitchy as Quantum of Solace.  It is cheekier than both of the previous Daniel Craig outings, but also more heartfelt.  Stop reading right here if you don't want spoilage, because I am going to spoil a whole lot of stuff, and if you haven't seen this yet and really want to, you are gonna be mad at yourself if you read the rest of this post.  Trust me, just close the browser tab and come back once you've visited the theater.

Okay, you've been duly warned.

Linger here and gaze at your own peril.  You could drown in those eyes.

Let's begin with the opening sequence, shall we?  This one is jam-packed, with a car chase, a motorcycle chase, and a good, old-fashioned fist-fight on top of a train.  Which goes on to involve an excavator -- I kept thinking how I can't wait for Dano to be old enough to watch movies like this, because he would love the whole excavator part (if it wasn't for all the shooting going on during it, I'd show him that part just cuz it'd probably make him laugh in glee).  But this opening sequence deviates in one very important way from all other 007 movies (at least, the ones I've seen), making it very clear that this movie is going some different places.  James Bond does not win.

In fact, he doesn't even come close to winning, though through no fault of his own.  He gets shot by his own teammate, thus raising the question of just who we -- and he -- can trust.

But, obviously, he can't have actually died only ten minutes or so into the movie.  When he returns, he's haggard, he's haunted, and above all, he's not entirely sure he's up to this job anymore.  In other words, he's quite delicious.

Look who needs a hug!

M tries her best to bolster his (and her) confidence, a new Q arms him (and delivers my favorite line of the movie:  "Were you expecting an exploding pen?  Because we don't really go in for those anymore."  I laughed and laughed), and dear James gets sent off to Shanghai after the guy who killed off another agent at the beginning of the movie and stole, well, basically the equivalent of the NOC list from Mission:  Impossible (1996), but hey, new MacGuffins are hard to find these days.

I knew, from reading reviews of this movie, and interviews with various people involved, that they were bringing back some of the quips and bon mots that had mostly been missing from the last two movies.  I was expecting to laugh, and I did, quite a few times.  I was not expecting, however, that I would cry.  I don't think I have ever cried during a James Bond movie.  But I cried at the end of Skyfall.  Because M dies, cradled by Bond in a sort of reverse Pieta that was hauntingly filmed and achingly well acted.

Which brings me to the subject of Sam Mendes, who directed this.  I've seen two of his previous movies, American Beauty (1999) and Road to Perdition (2002).  I didn't care much for the former, but the latter is one of my favorite neo-noir movies, and it made me hope a great deal that Skyfall was not going to have the crummy camera-work and wonky pacing of Quantum of Solace.  Again, I did not hope in vain.

Remind me again why you drove me to the middle of nowhere, Bond.

I have to think that the dead guy in the bathroom at the beginning of this is a nod to the way Daniel Craig's character died in Road to Perdition, and it made me grin.  Also, the last part of the movie, where James Bond and M go on the run, just them and a car, reminded me a great deal of the father and son on the lam in Road, only with the "son" driving and protecting and planning.  Even the ending, with them confronting their pursuers in a house miles from anywhere, had echoes of Road.

Okay, anyway, Skyfall has lots of great nods and winks to the classic 007 movies, from the Aston Martin with the ejector seat and machine guns, to a bunch of Komodo Dragons circling around under a walkway, very like those sharks from Thunderball (1965).  It also as the creepiest 007 movie bad guy since... um... since Christopher Lee in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).  (And that's saying a lot, since we all know Christopher Lee = Ultra Creepy.  When he wants to be.)  Javier Bardem's Silva is creeeeeeeepy, and I don't mean just cuz he hits on Bond in the creepiest way he can manage, or because he can take out his top teeth.  He exudes creeeeeeepiness and is scary in the that-guy's-brain-is-a-bag-full-of-cats way you can't figure what he'll do next.

Only a crazy person would wear that shirt, amiright?

Actually, speaking of Loki, they put Silva in a glass prison cell that had me instantly thinking of the cage on the helicarrier where Nick Fury stashed Loki.  And also of Magneto's plastic prison in X-Men and X-2.  Hmm.

Anyway, by the end of the movie, we have a new Q, a new M, and a new Moneypenny.  But the same Bond.  Whew, cuz I like the way Daniel Craig fills Bond's tuxedo (literally and figuratively), and I'm not in any hurry to see him replaced.

Oh, and also, is Albert Finney ever anything less than delightful?  I can't believe how many UK acting heavyweights are in this movie!  Finney, Dame Judi Dench, and Ralph Feinnes... I kept expecting to see Ian McKellen pop up somewhere.  Guess I have to wait for next month for my Gandalf fix, though.

One last note -- kudos to the filmmakers for staying classy and not letting this devolve into soft porn.  All (all!) the love scenes faded to black at appropriate moments.

In sum, is this my new favorite 007 movie?  No.  I still love GoldenEye and Casino Royale best.  But I look forward to seeing this again.  (From Redbox or something, Cowboy -- stop panicking!)

Note to 007 filmmakers: stop trying to make James Bond into Jason Bourne!!!!! If I wanted to watch a Jason Bourne movie, I would have stayed home and watched one. I go to a Bond movie expecting a sleek, stylish ride in an Aston Martin, not a turbulent jouncing in somebody's old Jeep. I realize the Bourne movies are fantastically successful, but that doesn't give you a reason to copy them -- Casino Royale was fantastically successful too, on its own terms.

WARNING: LOTS OF SPOILAGE BELOW!!!

So yeah, I went to see Quantum of Solace yesterday. And it had its fun points, for sure. The Wondrous White Pants made another appearance, to great effect. There was a motorcycle. Daniel Craig is 100% enjoyable as Bond. I like Dame Judi Dench so much as M, I want to adopt her as my snarky great-aunt.

But most of the action sequences were a big disappointment. I know the herky-jerky, in-your-lap camera style is supposed to make us feel like we're in the thick of the fight or car chase, but these were shot so close and cut so quickly that I couldn't tell what was going on a lot of the time, and that's not cool. Even in the second two Bourne movies, which this seemed to be copying, I can still tell what's going on. In Quantum's opening car chase, I could barely tell who was chasing who. And during the fight on the scaffolding, I literally could not tell which guy was Bond and which was the baddie. And that's not just uncool, that's bad directing and editing. Never confuse your audience like that, people! You will only annoy them.

Also, the plot was kinda scattered. I love the tight focus of Casino -- it feels like riding a racehorse through a tunnel. Quantum feels like running a three-legged race on a golf course. It's way shorter than Casino, but feels longer.

And hey! Beating the snot out of people using an everyday object is Jason Bourne's turf! I think the number one thing that bugged me about this movie was the fight where Bond kills the guy with a cuticle scissors. The whole thing, from the guy bursting through the window through the death-by-manicure, just reeked of copying Bourne. Grr.

And I kept wanting the bad guy to be played by Sam Rockwell instead of this Mathieu Amalric guy -- Rockwell could've pulled off the skeezy thing with more fun and zeal.

That said, it's a fun romp, and it served the very important purpose of defunking me out of a seriously cranky mood. And it had the Wondrous White Pants. But it gets two Warheads for dragging in the middle.

I have a new second-favorite Shakespeare play! Obviously, Hamlet is always my favorite, but I periodically decide I really like another of his plays. For a while it was The Merchant of Venice. Then Much Ado About Nothing, then King Lear. Now it's Henry V. I haven't read it yet, but on a whim I picked up the Kenneth Branagh version at the library last night. I mostly got it cuz Christian Bale and Dame Judi Dench are in it. Whenever I'm not watching a Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare movie, I always have this "who does he think he is?" attitude toward him. And then when I'm watching one of his movies, I realize who he is--a guy who really likes bringing Shakespeare to the big screen. Which can be way fun--I love his versions of Much Ado and Love's Labour's Lost. His Hamlet is okay, but some of the cameos annoy me.

Anyway, last night I watched Henry V and I adored it! Any play that begins with "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention"--yeah, that's just gotta rock! And people talk all the time about the St. Crispin's Day speech...there's a reason they do that.

I'd ramble on some more, but Cowboy wants to go grocery shopping...