Shaken, not stirred
To Glasgow's Cineworld, spruced up for the Scottish premiere of Quantum of Solace.
The event was for charity - raising £12,000 for Maggie's Centres - and there was no shortage of well-dressed people happy to sip a Martini, pose with an Aston Martin and do their bit for a good cause.
Shame the film was a bit of a disappointment - the credits rolled to a deadly silence followed by the shuffle of shoes as everyone filed out of the auditorium.
What went wrong? It had all the ingredients that made Casino Royale such a breath of fresh air: big set piece car chases, rooftop running, nerve jangling fight scenes, but none of it really made a lot of sense.
The baddies are disappointing - particularly the mundanely named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric) whose act of evil is to force South American dictators to buy their utilities from him at vastly inflated prices.
What next? A row over supermarket developments? Whatever happened to the good old days of baddies who wanted nothing less than world domination?
Daniel Craig's grim-faced Bond is wearing a bit thin now. His first funny line - delivered in Spanish almost an hour in - wins a huge laugh from the audience who're just desperate for anything to lighten the atmosphere.
There are some truly impressive scenes - the opera scene in Austria in which Bond addresses the undercover baddies from the top of the stage, then sets about them offstage to the sound and visuals of the onstage Tosca.
Judi Dench is wonderful as M, gliding in and out of the film, never truly able to cut off her rebellious agent. And the MI5 software, virtual information which appears at the tap of a finger is both fascinating and unbelievable - much more likely that Bond would be put on hold while someone looked up the baddie's credentials on Wikipedia.
The Bond girls drag it down too. Jolly hockey sticks Gemma Arterton bounces around like a sugar-fuelled schoolgirl. Olga Kurylenko is beautiful but wooden, with a back story which neither convinces nor moves the audiences.
Still, it's a not unpleasant hour and three quarters - the shortest Bond film to date. And the Maggie's team have more Martinis to lift the spirits and an auction to boost their coffers.
One of the most popular lots is a last minute addition by Maggie's Media Manager, Anna Marriott. For weeks she's been trying to convince Daniel Craig to come to Glasgow to support the event.
Unfortunately he's out of the country but he sends her a lovely handwritten note explaining why he can't come and offering his best wishes for the Scottish premiere. She's had the note and the envelope framed, along with two tickets for the event and it soon sparks a bidding war in the Cineworld Bar.
"It's on his own personal notepaper," says the auctioneer. "A very personal gift."
One of Anna's colleagues points out that the envelope can also claim to have been licked by Daniel Craig which pushes the price even higher. It eventually sells for £470.
There's one final item to be auctioned. Scots artist Douglas Gordon has donated one of his Portrait of Me and You series - a picture of Morrissey - to the cause.
He's a regular in a pub where one of Maggie's fundraising assistants met him. She decided to chance her arm and ask if he had anything he could give to the charity auction and couldn't believe her luck when she landed a painting valued at £44,000.
Maggie's are now in touch with the major auction houses to arrange to sell it - and hope it will provide a massive boost to their Bond night funds.
Not London’s South Bank, but the south bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow - every bit as lively in cultural terms as its namesake. I’m Pauline McLean, 91Èȱ¬ Scotland’s arts correspondent, and I’ll be blogging here about arts events and issues happening across the country.
Comment number 1.
At 1st Nov 2008, GW wrote:It's a shame some people just don't get the point. The Bond franchise was fading as Roger Moore's stint was coming to an end - Pierce Brosnan just about killed it off altgother...not his fault (although he is my least favourite Bond) but the movies were dependant on the gadgets and the girls - Bond had nothing about it him but cheesy lines.
In the Flemming short. Quantum of Solace, Bond learns that no matter how bitter the relationship between two people becomes, as long as the tiniest spark of what brought them together and what they once felt for each other still burns, they will still have something to hold on to, but without that, the relationship is dead. He also realises that he's never had that quantum of solace, he's never had that kind of relationship.
What the last two films have done have taken Bond back to what he was always supposed to be - a ruthless, hard-ass governemnt agent, but also human and flawed.
As Daniel Craig's first film ended with Bond having being betrayed by, and then robbed of, the first true love he had felt that could have taken him away from the only way life he had known, the second sees him out to take revenge on those who had done that to him.
It's odd to mourn the absence of megalomaniac baddie set on world domination, then complain that the gadgets are unbelievable. In this day and age, there's nothing more realistic than a global corporation out to make the world suffer in the name of making money - that's something we can all relate to.
And as for the gadgets, touch-screen technology is already here for crying out loud. And what we saw here was far more believable than the outrageous technology that the pre-Craig Bonds had become reliant on.
No, Bond is now as it should always have been - about the man and his character, scarred on all levels by his past, motivated by duty and his own desire.
(ps, I'll never understand how such a thing as a critic can exist...imagine being paid to express an opinion that only those responsible for creating the thing being criticised care about (although in this case probably not)...most people will just go a head and enjoy it anyway, regardless of what the "professional" tells us we should think).
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Comment number 2.
At 1st Nov 2008, splendidParko wrote:The lazy,unimaginative title for this article says it all really...
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Comment number 3.
At 1st Nov 2008, J_O_E_L_-_C wrote:#1: "(ps, I'll never understand how such a thing as a critic can exist...imagine being paid to express an opinion that only those responsible for creating the thing being criticised care about (although in this case probably not)...most people will just go a head and enjoy it anyway, regardless of what the "professional" tells us we should think)."
Presumably in a vain attempt to counter the reams of slickly-presented and omnipresent PR campaigning that attempt to part as great a number of fools from their cash as is possible with a given budget.
Its a pity that 91Èȱ¬ news itself seems to be increasingly caught up in these campaigns, presumably under the umbrella of "public interest". It was the same situation for the latest Indiana Jones movie, The (risible) Simpsons Movie, The Dark Knight, Spiderman 3 (etc, etc.).
Arguably the role of the critic is to indirectly provide feedback on the artwork, in order that the creators can maybe produce something better in future.
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Comment number 4.
At 1st Nov 2008, badgercourage wrote:I saw the new Bond film yesterday and while it is different from other Bonds, Craig's reading is much closer to the spirit Fleming's books.
The audience at my showing were also subdued after it finished.
It's quite a dark film, pessimistic and thoughtful, not played at all for laughs and the misogeny of the genre is less evident than in the past.
For all those reasons it won't do as good business as other recent Bond outings.
But if you put away the baggage of Roger Moore and Sean Connery it's a brave attempt at a more honest view of Bond, and will probably in time be seen as one of the best of the sequence.
Agree with #2 about the lazy journalism...
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Comment number 5.
At 1st Nov 2008, shoewummin wrote:Hmmm... I went to see the film last night and, well, wow, it was brilliant. I admit it wasn't the usual bond but is that a bad thing? Me and my son thought it was a great film. Daniel Craig was his usual brooding Bond and Judi Dench was superb.
The down side? The action scenes were WAY to fast for me to keep up and were hard on the eyes (maybe I'm just getting old?!).
That aside, the only other down side was the theme song - rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.
Don't knock the film - it's great!
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