Sunday, August 03, 2003
THE 1960s MOVIE(S) (part one): This afternoon, I managed to make it through most of Casino Royale (again) and all of What's New, Pussycat?, two films intensely of their time and place. Casino Royale, which we'll be covering tonight, is famous for being an expensive mess, with five directors each taking a piece of the script and doing what needed to be done without having a bit of coordination between each other, two stars (Peter Sellers and Orson Welles) being so sick of each other that the scenes they had together were only shot one actor at a time, and oh so much more. It's really hard to sort this stuff out (especially since I missed the earliest part of the movie), so here's an Internet Movie Database summary:
Sir James Bond is enjoying his retirement when four international agents press him into service again in hopes of smashing SMERSH and Topple LeChiffre at the baccarat tables. Bond is taken in by Agent Mimi (alias Lady Fiona McTarry) who immediately falls in love with him. Bond's illegitimate daughter, Mata Bond, whose mother was the late Mata Hari, is going to help out. The current agent using the Bond name, Cooper, has his hands full, despite his assistance by beautiful secretary, Moneypenny. 007's nephew Jimmy Bond is supposedly incompetent. Bond, hoping to clear his name from its current low repute, hires Evelyn Tremble to meet LeChiffre at the gambling tables at Casino Royale. The world's richest agent, Vesper Lynd, helps convince Tremble to masquerade as 007.
Sounds straightforward enough when it's boiled down to it's components, but "straighforward" is not an adjective to describe what made it to the screen. Parts of this flick are so disjointed, you wonder how much plot-related footage they had to lop out for the formless scenes that pad out the body. One of my favorite parts is when Mata Bond walks into a "dance academy" in West Berlin straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it's completely superfluous to what should be the main story. It's a self-contained sidetrip that literally changes nothing and only exists to pad the running time.
Peter Sellers plays it startlingly low key as Evelyn Tremble, who in spite of the above summary is only one of the surrogate Bonds (and, interestingly enough, gets the part of the film that was really based on the Ian Fleming novel of the same name), with Woody Allen bringing his own period shtick to the proceedings. Orson Welles seems to be having a high time, and Niven is charming as always. It would've been nice to see all these stars in a more disciplined film, but sometime ya takes what ya gets.
Some people are hopelessly in love with the all-hands-on-deck slapstick melee that ends the film, feeling that it's a great example of the type of "camp" humor that often passed for mainstream satire in the mid 1960s. To me, it's a sign that the writers, or maybe the producers, didn't have a clue how to bring this shindig to a satisfactory end, so instead they made the finale overly-loud and overly-busy in the hope we didn't notice that nothing really got resolved. With all the looney visual non sequiturs tipped in, it feels like it was lifted whole out of a beach party movie.
In other words, if you were raised believing that irony is the height of humor, this might not be your new favorite film. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of funny business within, it's just the heh-to-huh? ratio leans too heavily in the "huh?" direction. It's might be a great movie for parties, but I probably won't be revisiting this one anytime soon. I might spring for the soundtrack album, though, since from it we get Dusty Springfield's gorgeous rendition of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love." And I still might spring for the DVD, since one of the extras is a live TV version of "Casino Royale" from the 1950s, with Peter Lorre as LeChiffre and a jarringly Middle American "Jimmy" Bond going through his paces. Sounds like fun.
A sidebar before I move on: some uninformed, unnamed twit who contributed a user review of Royale to the IMDB said "I would be willing to bet that the Blair Witch Project cost more to make then this low budget, crappy acting, and terrible story-line movie. " Let's put aside for a second the itch to diagram that sentence and beat the contributor over the head with it. You can accuse Casino Royale of a lot of things, but having a LOWER budget than Blair Witch? Your home movies from last Christmas probably had a higher budget than Blair Witch (and yes, I'm counting the cost of the presents here, since they're part of the production). The same reviewer also mentioned that there were "NO special effects," completely ignoring the dazzling freakout montage when Tremble is being manipulated in LeChiffre's clutches, among other psychedelic surface touches. I guess s/he was looking for laser beams and Terminators that melted. It's okay to be contrary, but don't be stupid, anonymous coward.
Sir James Bond is enjoying his retirement when four international agents press him into service again in hopes of smashing SMERSH and Topple LeChiffre at the baccarat tables. Bond is taken in by Agent Mimi (alias Lady Fiona McTarry) who immediately falls in love with him. Bond's illegitimate daughter, Mata Bond, whose mother was the late Mata Hari, is going to help out. The current agent using the Bond name, Cooper, has his hands full, despite his assistance by beautiful secretary, Moneypenny. 007's nephew Jimmy Bond is supposedly incompetent. Bond, hoping to clear his name from its current low repute, hires Evelyn Tremble to meet LeChiffre at the gambling tables at Casino Royale. The world's richest agent, Vesper Lynd, helps convince Tremble to masquerade as 007.
Sounds straightforward enough when it's boiled down to it's components, but "straighforward" is not an adjective to describe what made it to the screen. Parts of this flick are so disjointed, you wonder how much plot-related footage they had to lop out for the formless scenes that pad out the body. One of my favorite parts is when Mata Bond walks into a "dance academy" in West Berlin straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it's completely superfluous to what should be the main story. It's a self-contained sidetrip that literally changes nothing and only exists to pad the running time.
Peter Sellers plays it startlingly low key as Evelyn Tremble, who in spite of the above summary is only one of the surrogate Bonds (and, interestingly enough, gets the part of the film that was really based on the Ian Fleming novel of the same name), with Woody Allen bringing his own period shtick to the proceedings. Orson Welles seems to be having a high time, and Niven is charming as always. It would've been nice to see all these stars in a more disciplined film, but sometime ya takes what ya gets.
Some people are hopelessly in love with the all-hands-on-deck slapstick melee that ends the film, feeling that it's a great example of the type of "camp" humor that often passed for mainstream satire in the mid 1960s. To me, it's a sign that the writers, or maybe the producers, didn't have a clue how to bring this shindig to a satisfactory end, so instead they made the finale overly-loud and overly-busy in the hope we didn't notice that nothing really got resolved. With all the looney visual non sequiturs tipped in, it feels like it was lifted whole out of a beach party movie.
In other words, if you were raised believing that irony is the height of humor, this might not be your new favorite film. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of funny business within, it's just the heh-to-huh? ratio leans too heavily in the "huh?" direction. It's might be a great movie for parties, but I probably won't be revisiting this one anytime soon. I might spring for the soundtrack album, though, since from it we get Dusty Springfield's gorgeous rendition of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love." And I still might spring for the DVD, since one of the extras is a live TV version of "Casino Royale" from the 1950s, with Peter Lorre as LeChiffre and a jarringly Middle American "Jimmy" Bond going through his paces. Sounds like fun.
A sidebar before I move on: some uninformed, unnamed twit who contributed a user review of Royale to the IMDB said "I would be willing to bet that the Blair Witch Project cost more to make then this low budget, crappy acting, and terrible story-line movie. " Let's put aside for a second the itch to diagram that sentence and beat the contributor over the head with it. You can accuse Casino Royale of a lot of things, but having a LOWER budget than Blair Witch? Your home movies from last Christmas probably had a higher budget than Blair Witch (and yes, I'm counting the cost of the presents here, since they're part of the production). The same reviewer also mentioned that there were "NO special effects," completely ignoring the dazzling freakout montage when Tremble is being manipulated in LeChiffre's clutches, among other psychedelic surface touches. I guess s/he was looking for laser beams and Terminators that melted. It's okay to be contrary, but don't be stupid, anonymous coward.
|| Eric 9:36 PM#
