Ass-Headed Bottom: Of the 22-24 Bond movies, something like 25-27 have been awful. Well, there is a pleasure, I suppose, in the Connery movies--From Russia with Love at least had enough vroom for a decent boat-chase and enough gumption for a hideous female evildoer. Goldfinger at least involved a boomerang razor-hat, showed off a gold-coated-dead-naked woman, and scored a bingo on the first-ever use of a laser in movies (Hollywood technology should be aimed directly at the leading-man's balls). But most of the rest of them were garbage. And then along came Casino Royale and Daniel Craig, the 10-second car-chase and the hilarious ball-torture, the comical French villain and the frank admission that poker will never be entertaining to watch. I actually wanted to be James Bond for days afterwards. Sadly, all that is finished now. Quantum of Solace--a title as dumb as Octopussy, yet devoid even of a single pussy (actually, not true, there's a gratuitous crotch-shot toward the end of the movie, so I guess Monopussy)--is an incoherent mess. The opening song, an unlistenable collaboration between Jack White and Alicia Keyes, has no business existing. Since the villain is the guy from Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I kept expecting him to have a seizure--the eyes rolling to the back of his head would have made him that much more terrifying--but he's just a ruthless capitalist posing as an eco-trader. Thrilling. And where the previous movie deconstructed Bond tropes with wit and self-awareness, this one reconstructs them in all their original clumsiness: we have the overlong car-chase, the improbable boat-chase, the irrelevant plane-chase. As for Bond himself, he reminds me of Jason Bourne. Note how small his gun is. Rarely do quanta offer less solace.
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