Ntuple Indemnity

Watching Casino Royale was like witnessing the restoration of a rejuvenated monarchy. It restored the name of James Bond to a credible position of leadership in espionage cinema when the genre needed a capstone to its brief renaissance, with Munich arriving the year before and The Bourne Ultimatum and Lust, Caution hot on its heels—and while all four are destined to be spy classics, Casino Royale had the further distinction of being an old-fashioned popular action flick when blockbusters as a whole were sorely lacking in grit. It wasn’t merely a great Bond film: it was an admirable piece of cinema by out-of-franchise standards.

I spent most of Quantum of Solace missing Casino Royale.

I missed the absolute clarity of the wide-angle view we had of the action, stitched with a pulsating tandem of escalation and diminuendo that pervaded the showpiece sequences with a shot-to-shot rhythm rivalling the finest fruits of Steven Spielberg’s longtime collaboration with editor Michael Kahn. I missed how Bond was constantly and seriously endangered on all sides. I missed the dutiful preservation of Ian Fleming’s greatest balancing trick: the ability to draft characters that look like comic-book figures on paper and still make them belong in a milieu of hard-boiled, no-nonsense realism.

Nowhere in Quantum of Solace will you find anything to match the tension at the poker table, the tics of Le Chiffre, or the topping of Daniel Craig’s devil-smile when the airplane sabotage sequence finished with its controlled-explosive kerplop.

This isn’t to say that Quantum is a bad time at the cinema. It’s good fun, it’s technically accomplished, and it retains the brains, topicality, and calculated coarseness of its predecessor. There is even a shocking homage to Goldfinger‘s most iconic image that literally drips with the post-9/11 ethos, capturing the essence of the new James Bond in a single frame. And I know it’s a cosmetic trifle, but the locational title cards are superb.

But they borrowed the right Fleming title, for this film is a quantum indeed: discontinuous, and in need of a unified theory.

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The funniest thing I’ve read all week: “Indian People Accidentally Enjoy Roadside Romeo.” For those of you who don’t know, Roadside Romeo is a Disney-distributed CG production by Yash Raj Films that I have heard described as a Bollywood Lady and the Tramp; you can watch the trailer here, if you dare. It’s also a runaway hit. Amid Amidi proposes that all animation be removed from the nation of India, and I think he’s only half joking:

We’ll try the plan for two years. Don’t worry, good ideas like this take time. When the fine people of India feel they’re good and ready to respect the animation art form, I will personally send over a print of One Froggy Evening. If you enjoy that more than you did Roadside Romeo, we’ll send you Dumbo the following month. If you still enjoy Roadside Romeo, we’ll take more drastic measures like defrosting Walt and sending him over to help you see the light. Either way you’ll finally be able to see that your enthusiasm for Roadside Romeo was one huge terrible fucking mistake. Don’t feel too bad, even animation-savvy countries make mistakes sometimes.

It’s a satirical piece (“Additionally, any DVDs containing animation can be dumped in useless neighboring countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh”), and all the more effective because the plan would garner my full support. Honestly, sometimes I think we need drastic measures like this right here in North America—my fellow Canadians, that includes you—and I can’t think of a better remedial syllabus.

Let’s set Roadside Romeo aside for a moment, since I haven’t seen it. When India pulls off its equivalent of Spirited Away, which earned its way to becoming the biggest domestic success in the history of Japanese cinema by also being one of the best animated features in recent memory, then we’ll talk. Of far greater concern is the link in the last sentence I quoted. The Cleveland Show? This is like milking a diseased cow. Is Seth MacFarlane out of his giggity mind?

I make it no secret that I consider Family Guy a televised disgrace, a cancer upon the storied art form of Walt Disney, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, Nick Park, Brad Bird, and everyone else who belongs on my abbreviated list. And that’s to speak only of its offence to animation, never mind comedy (or, for that matter, Americana). I’m not sure when it became fashionable to equate “adult” animation with crude construction and crass immaturity; I grew up believing that adults were people who grew up. Maybe this is the same audience that never grew out of the adolescent sensibility of feeling too cool for cartoons.

The Family Guy franchise bothers me considerably more than the usual decadent pop-culture rot because of how it has managed to swindle so many otherwise intelligent people, possibly including Seth MacFarlane himself, into believing that it is in any way clever. It’s dumb-as-bricks entertainment that purports to be smarter than the average bear. It’s like a Dan Brown novel (which makes the ineptitude of Family Guy‘s onetime jab at The Da Vinci Code all the more ironic), though it casts a loftier net. At least trashy bestsellers fill the coffers of publishers who can then make risky gambles on unknown authors. (There was a rumour going around that Doubleday’s recent layoffs happened because they expected the next Brown novel to show up on this year’s ledger, though it was denied.) Family Guy begets more Family Guy, be it in the isomorphic stupid-to-make-you-feel-smart sitcom family of American Dad or the selfsame nucleus in The Cleveland Show. It has no excuse, and I will celebrate when it dies.

One often forgets that Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons attempted spades of pop-culture “references” (as distinguished from parody). Shorts like Hollywood Steps Out have declined into trivial irrelevance for all but the most serious collectors, and I say that as someone who recognizes classic film stars like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson; still, at least the drawings back then were actual caricatures. And one would have to admit that 8-Ball Bunny gets a little stale by the third time Humphrey Bogart’s character from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre shows up to pester Bugs.

True classics like One Froggy Evening will prevail as they always have, as will the best of the parodies—your What’s Opera, Doc?, your Carrotblanca. And there’s no question that there’s a lot of great animation being produced today, be it in North America, India, or anywhere else. The problem is the undiscerning audience that never sees any of it, and is stuck with deplorable examples of what animation can do. Unfortunately, that audience comprises a great many people. Some of them may even be your friends. I fully support their systematic inoculation, and if we have to haul Uncle Walt out of the freezer, so be it.

In commemoration of World Animation Day, the Metro Cinema exhibited two free, back-to-back screenings of National Film Board shorts: a kids’ programme, and another one. I’m not sure what the criterion for inclusion in the children’s screening was, though the films in that package tended to be the ones with a more straightforward attitude to story.

The kids in attendance loved it, at any rate, and broke out in applause at the end. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that among children outside of packed advance screenings and Pixar opening nights. What a treat it must be to see a whole new generation of potential NFB classics at so young an age, when one pays little heed to the finer subtleties of design and technique, but bathes in the overwhelming effect; the age at which a card trick is real magic.

Here in Canada, many people my age who think they only have a casual exposure to animation probably have vague recollections of The Cat Came Back or The Log Driver’s Waltz flickering across their television sets. NFB animation is truly one of the government-funded arts initiatives that is successful even by the Stephen Harper metric, and it isn’t at all a case of nationalistic self-aggrandizement to acknowledge that it has made this country a world player. And considering how many of the best shorts come out of Quebec, I’m glad they’re still here.

As for this weekend’s films: there was a lot to like, and I reserve an especial fondness for the hysterical India-ink anachronisms of Claude Cloutier’s Isabelle au bois dormant (Sleeping Betty) and the punch line that caps off the rhythmic metamorphosis of Malcolm Sutherland’s Forming Game. But there was one film that was the very height of magnificence: Le noeud cravate (The Necktie), Jean-François Lévesque’s mixed-media meditation on the horror of the lifelong dead-end job.

Le noeud cravate was exhibited in both screenings, so I had the pleasure of seeing it twice. I don’t want to give away its most shocking moments, so a careful synopsis will do: a young man receives a striped necktie as a graduation gift, packs his accordion away, and ascends the skyscraper of the aptly named Life Inc. As he rises from floor 25 to 39, the necktie tightens around his neck like a noose, his briefcase overflows with paper, and he develops a hunch. At 40, the only three-dimensional person in an office of 2D worker drones, he wakes up to the realization that he has spent his life sitting in a dimly lit office ironing crumpled paper for no reason whatsoever—so he takes the elevator to the top floor to see what lies ahead.

More than that, I won’t say; you must see it for yourself. I haven’t seen enough of the field to know what the competition is like, but Lévesque’s piece is without a doubt comparable to the quality of past Oscar winners, and I hope it ends up on the shortlist this year.

So I’ve succumbed to curiosity and watched The Da Vinci Code. This may surprise those of you who mention Dan Brown in my presence at parties for the sole purpose of provoking me into entertaining you with an explosion of cleverly phrased invective against what is surely one of the worst novels I have read. All the same, I tried my best to see it with an open mind; good films have sprung out of bad books before, and I respect Ron Howard as a reasonable director of mainstream Hollywood pictures. This is, after all, the same Ron Howard who gave us the excellent Apollo 13 (a study in how to do a straightforward “based on a true story” dramatization well) and the admirable, if conventional A Beautiful Mind.

The Da Vinci Code is inherently an interesting case study in film adaptation, since the “novel” on which it is based is so incompetently written that the most charitable thing a reader can do is think of it as the first draft of a screenplay proposal by a ninth-grade kid who once got molested by a priest. And then there is the further gamble of handing it to the most erratic screenwriter in Hollywood—Akiva Goldsman, who wrote two of Ron Howard’s better films (A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man) but also has his name on the likes of Batman & Robin and I(saac Asimov is rolling in his grave), Robot.

Ron Howard, at least, has a track record that assures us he is literate in the art of cinema, which is not something we can say for Dan Brown’s grasp of written English (grammatical enough to be published, but only that). To film The Da Vinci Code in a manner that reflects the quality of its prose would require a handheld camcorder and a monk costume from the corner shop. That the adaptation is in the hands of professionals at all is enough to assure us that the delivery is an improvement—and it is.

Less expected is how the film manages to expose some of the serious defects in The Da Vinci Code‘s story structure that the book’s breakneck pace sweeps under the rug. Dan Brown’s novel is many execrable things, but one thing it is not is boring. (It’s like Sarah Palin that way—fitting, because Dan Brown’s America is Sarah Palin’s America in so many respects.) Ron Howard’s film is boring, and it is Dan Brown’s fault.

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This week’s selection: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) by Truman Capote.

In brief: Short, simple, and sweet, Capote’s novella is one of those stories that packs every postwar anxiety about the American Dream into one very enigmatic character. There is something mature about fiction that reflects on the idealism of the individual spirit, and asks us to do the same, through immersing us in a deep sense of wistfulness rather than outright disillusionment.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, keep reading below.)

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