This is not a review of Quantum of Solace, the 22nd James Bond picture. There was a screening Wednesday night, but I had to put my Walther PPK aside…and babysit. My license to kill has been revoked, my piece replaced with a 4 oz. bottle.

In any event, it gives me a chance to do what Popdosers often do: stroll down memory lane. Week-to-week, most of this column is in the here and now, but today I go back…way back, from Bond 1 to Bond 21. We start at the age of eight, circa 1973, when Nixon was still in the White House and my dad took me to see a double feature of Diamonds are Forever and Live and Let Die. I have vivid memories of the former, Sean Connery’s second-to-last turn in his signature role: From the get-go, it was more perverse than what I was used to be taken to, with gay villains, lesbian villainesses, and a bad guy in drag, not that any of this registered with any clarity (though its swishy portrait of homosexuality is on a third-grade level today). But I immediately grasped its structure, with the pre-opening credits action, the fusion of opening song and sinuous animated titles, the introduction of series regulars, and a rise-and-fall pattern to the expository, bedroom, and action scenes. Everything snapped perfectly into place, like one of Q’s gadgets.

There was a playful formality to it, credited, I came to recognize, to co-producer Albert R. Broccoli, who from Dr. No to Licence to Kill lavished as much attention on his baby as David O. Selznick did on Gone with the Wind. (His partner Harry Saltzman, who I think kept some of his lesser impulses in check, left the series after The Man with the Golden Gun, as the series made a decisive shift.) The journeyman directors, never A-list auteurs in their own right, who were hired to keep the works running smoothly did some of their best work on the series. Then again, how could they not, with the likes of composer John Barry, production designer Ken Adam, and titles creator Maurice Binder in their corner? (more…)

Chances are you’ve already missed Halloween. No, not the carving of the pumpkins or the trick-or-treating, which I’ll feel less foolish doing when I bring my daughter. (I’m a sucker for wax teeth and bags of candy corn, and just give them up without complaint when this middle-aged goblin shows up at your door tonight.) I mean John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, the movie that redefined the celebration. So far as I can tell, its one and only broadcast, on no less an occasion than its 30th anniversary, is, or was, on commercial-ridden, censor-happy AMC, at 9:30am, a time when most serial killers are still in bed. I note that the inferior sequels are getting some airtime, while the real deal goes unnoticed. It’s not like Rob Zombie’s trailer-trash remake has stabbed it in the back by pushing it off the schedule—that’s not on, either. Imagine Christmas if TV programmers decided to give It’s a Wonderful Life a year off, or retire A Christmas Story. As someone who loves horror movies, I protest.

But my revolution will not be televised, so like the mom caught short on Oct. 31 who has to cut holes in her white sheet so Junior can dress up as a ghost, I improvise. I suspect it’s late in the game to be renting the DVD, and if it’s not on your shelf, you’ll have to move on. Going to a movie may not do the trick: Quarantine has burned itself out, a fifth Saw is about as enticing as a third High School Musical if you’re just not into the franchise, and The Haunting of Molly Hartley smells like the kind of blah teen terror destined to haunt video stores in an underwhelming “Unrated” edition by early next year. I can recommend Let the Right One In and Splinter, which are now playing—alas, their independent distributors have them in limited release only, and unless you live near where they are playing they may have missed their peak moment, to face the fate of vampires caught at dawn when their runs expand.

That would be a pity. Let me say that Let the Right One In, from Sweden, shouldn’t be mistaken for Halloween-dependent, so when it turns up in your neighborhood, pounce. I’d love it if it opened on the Fourth of July, and it would be a good choice for Valentine’s Day, as it is a love story, a most unsettling one. Based on a 2004 novel, it takes the creepiest idea from Interview with the Vampire—the notion of an undead child, a doll-like immortal with fearsome predatory urges—and runs with it. As George A. Romero’s set his classic Martin, another superior twist on bloodsucking, in a fading Pittsburgh, Let the Right One In (a title adapted from a Morrissey song) takes place in a snowbound, fraying-at-the-edges housing complex outside Stockholm, a perfectly anonymous place for the undead to tap fresh blood. Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a smart but unformed twelve-year-old with a quiet thirst for revenge against his tormentors, is the ideal recruit for Eli (Lena Leandersson), the ghoul next door. (more…)

Necessity is the mother of invention. I just didn’t make it to the multiplex this week, but, fearing reprimand by my masters here at Popdose, figured I had to come up with something. Salvation arrived on Monday, via press release. “Wayne Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska Enjoys Record-Setting Debut on YouTube,” it read. “165,000+ views in a two-day period is the biggest online opening ever for a feature-length studio film.” My razor-sharp journalistic instincts sniffed a story, a thankfully easy-to-get story I could put together between diaper changes (my daughter’s, not my own).

It got better: Beyond the headline, the release said that had the movie opened in theaters, it would have ranked No. 15 for the weekend, ahead of City of Ember, Religulous, and Lakeview Terrace. And, most important, it was free. Hell, yeah: I could sit in front of my MacBook and enjoy the 15th-ranked movie, for free (I wouldn’t pay 50 cents to watch City of Ember), pop out a few comments, and invite you to watch it, too, giving the whole experience a little of that crazy new-media interactivity the kids are always talking about. Stop reading (assuming you started reading, when you realized Saw V would not be on today’s menu) and click on over to YouTube’s Screening Room, “a new channel dedicated to premium film content,” at http://www.youtube.com/ytscreeningroom. Then tune in, and wait for those red heels to start pacing in the big box on the left side of the screen. Those boots are made for walking, and The Princess of Nebraska is gonna walk all over you.

But, whoa, hit pause, or stop. The main event can wait. Let’s look around. I like the clean, red-draped look, very “theatrical” and less busy than the hectic funhouse that is the rest of YouTube. There’s an archive of short films to explore at the bottom, including an expanded (but still short) version of the 2002 Oscar winner in the live-action category, Thoth. Spend 42 minutes on that one if you’d like—it won an Academy Award, after all—then come back. Or multitask, and read and watch at the same time. (more…)

George W. Bush says he is content to let history judge him. But he misunderestimated Oliver Stone, whose W. puts our departing president on the cinematic cutting board just weeks before the next election. I was concerned over the timing: Stone’s throwing red meat to Bill O’Reilly and the “base” is just the kind of diversion flop-sweating right-wingers are hoping for as the McCain campaign lumbers on. True, conservatives will carp over the more broadly satirical sections, and the distortions to the record as they see them. (The very idea of Oliver Stone, a Vietnam veteran resistant to swift boating, dipped in Oscar gold, and beloved by segments of the liberal media, is infuriating to the right.) But with so many noted Republicans, Republican incumbents, and Maverick himself running away from Bush’s meager achievements, it will be no easy task for pundits to prove that Stone is the only one kicking Shrub when he’s down. Besides, the movie picks him up from the gutter, and dusts him off a little bit. It’s a portrait Joe the Plumber might endorse, at least in part, if he had that tax cut he needs to afford movie night again.

W. is fitfully entertaining, but Stone’s slash-and-sympathy tactics make for a schizophrenic experience. He is a coarse filmmaker, largely adverse to nuance, and that bludgeoning quality gives his best pictures their lifeforce vitality. When brain matches brawn, you get a Salvador or a Platoon, and I’m partial to the time capsule called Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Any Given Sunday besides. But he overreaches, as with Natural Born Killers and Alexander, and played it safe with World Trade Center, as if he had lost his nerve. He hedges here, more skillfully. W. is a cheekily timed broadside, more sober-minded than Comedy Central’s “That’s My Bush!” (which despite a dead-on interpreter in Timothy Bottoms came and went pre-9/11, before its subject was better defined) and what for some was the wish fulfillment of 2006’s briefly controversial fake documentary Death of a President. We get a recreation of Bush choking on a potato chip as he watches a football game in the White House, but this is treated semi-solemnly, and leads to a flashback. (more…)

Body of Lies didn’t have to do much to impress me. It’s the first movie I’ve seen since becoming a dad, and the switch from explosive poops to plain old explosions was a comfort. But I must have gotten rusty over the last two months. It is my duty to tell you the plot of this movie, and I confess I can only start at about the 90-minute mark, when after a great deal of strenuous editing the movie caught its breath and became a post-9/11 version of The Sting. As far as I could make out, Leonardo DiCaprio’s conflicted CIA operative flim-flammed a Mideast businessman, a minor cog in Al-Qaeda’s wheel, into a big fish, to draw out the bigger fish that his untrustworthy boss, Russell Crowe, was interested in. Part of this ruse involved DiCaprio pretending to be an average Mideast citizen, but Leo dressed as an average Mideast citizen looks like Leo dressed as an average Mideast citizen, and neither the terrorist bigwigs he’s after nor I were born yesterday.

I’m not really knocking Leo, or Body of Lies, which cuts a few corners in the logic department to get the job done but is more efficiently locked and loaded than Ridley Scott’s last picture, the draggy and morally distasteful American Gangster. That one smacked you upside the head with its posturing, and embalmed period recreation; this one takes place in our fubar world, with DiCaprio, last seen slogging through Sierra Leone circa 1999 in Blood Diamond, dispatched to the fresher hells of Iraq and Jordan to atone once more for the West’s hypocritical sins. Like Jake Gyllenhaal’s pained CIA analyst in last fall’s war-on-terror flop Rendition, DiCaprio’s Roger Ferris is about the only standup guy in the movie—which is rather difficult to reconcile with what we know of the agency’s egregious involvement in our present regional difficulties. The notion of a “good” CIA agent is hard to swallow, even in a potboiler like this one. (more…)

Warning: this week’s column is going to get ugly, and fast. We start with Choke, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, which is also a love letter to its star, Sam Rockwell — one written in shit and cum (I told you). First-time writer and director Clark Gregg, an actor (recently in Iron Man and weekly on The New Adventures of Old Christine) is not the first to swoon for Rockwell, the character actor extraordinaire who makes uneven pictures worth the effort: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Assassination of Jesse James (I doubt the rest of the title ever fit on a marquee) all benefit from his special madness. The general audience doesn’t get it: Outside of earlier, scene-stealing assignments in more successful Hollywood pictures like Galaxy Quest and The Green Mile, Rockwell is pretty much a flop indicator, a good actor whose presence virtually guarantees a kind word from critics, a look-see from his more dedicated fans, and a voyage to the bottom of the weekly grosses list, where he and Nicole Kidman often wave at each other.

Escape is possible — Robert Downey, Jr. may have come up for air for good — but Choke is unlikely to be it for Rockwell. And it’s partly his fault. The film is all Rockwell, all the time, and it gets tedious, like an iPod with only a few tunes to shuffle. I haven’t read the book, but the movie goes to black comedy extremes…not too extreme enough, though. A movie like Choke has to hit like a punch in the gut to make an impression, and this one pulls its punches. The shit and cum are implied. I never got the feeling that the R-rating was tested, or threatened, as it might have been in more transgressive hands. (more…)

Management has given me a cruel task: preview fall cinema.

Now, this was not so difficult back in April, when I pontificated on the summer schedule. In fact, I rather enjoyed it. But that was back when my wife and I were merely expecting a child; now that our bundle of joy, seven pounds of gurgling, wide-eyed beauty named Larissa, has arrived (on August 25, a perfect time, as there isn’t much of note playing in that dead-zone period), daddy has a new role to play. While I’ve seen a fraction of what’s coming up at advanced screenings, I haven’t been to a movie theater since Pineapple Express a month ago. And seeing as how I’m on baby time, DVD and DVR viewing has been widely scattered.

I haven’t really missed it yet, but these have been cultural-doldrums weeks for me. Later-in-life (not Tony Randall late, but post-40) fatherhood is terrific, even if my part consists mostly of changing diapers and keeping mom calm through this and that unanticipated development. There have been very few, really, in the first three weeks — our daughter is a delight — but when you’re used to a certain order, “the monkey in the wrench,” as Bruce Willis put it in Die Hard, can throw you, particularly at 4:30 in the morning. So my moviegoing routine, unchanged for years, is out the window, and is unlikely to resume in quite the same way as this swinging cineaste redefines himself as a stay-at-home dad. (Or SAHD. Or SAD. Terrible acronyms both.)

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Outside of a few odds and ends, the summer movie season pretty much concludes today. Throw the tarp over the pool, recondition the leaf blower, it’s done. If you’re willing to lay down cash for Death Race or Babylon A.D., you are in the grips of a cinephilia that in all likelihood requires treatment, and Godspeed to you. I sympathize: if I can beat it you can beat it, and maybe Joan Allen can join our support group, too. (Death Race, Joan? For the sake of our relationship I will believe that you mistook director Paul W.S. “Alien vs. Predator” Anderson for Paul Thomas “There Will Be Blood” Anderson and couldn’t wiggle free from your contract.)

The first of your 12 steps will be laying off the C-level action stuff in the run up to Labor Day—instead, take one Elegy and call me in the morning.

Elegy opened last week in New York and Los Angeles and is fanning across the art-house circuit. It’s based on a novella by Philip Roth, which I have not read. Back in time I read every book due for prestige moviemaking, and saw more than a few whose pages came unglued in the translation, like Angela’s Ashes (1999), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), and the last crack at Roth, the Nicholas Meyer-penned The Human Stain (2003). That Meyer, best known for adding to the mythos of Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes, also wrote Elegy raised a red flag. But my fears were allayed. Elegy is one of the best films of the summer, and very possibly of the year.

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If I ever run for office, and someone asks the drug-use question, I can honestly say I didn’t inhale. While pop-music critics are a Dionysian lot, snorting coke off groupies’ breasts, film critics are prim, fussbudget types. There were a lot of people laughing at the stoner humor in Pineapple Express. Me, I rolled my own. My bliss started with the opening credits: The film is a Columbia release, and to get the ’70s vibe under way, the opening credits are in the same exact font the studio used for its comedies in the shag-carpet days. “Man, this is gonna be some good shit,” I thought.

And I was right. There is some good shit in Pineapple Express. But there’s some bad shit too. Plus some bat shit toward the end, though the best shit comes after the bad shit, when three of its characters are just sort of chewing the fat the morning after some heavy shit has gone down.

The film comes to us from producer Judd Apatow, whose modest mom-and-pop comedy outfit became a factory after last summer’s Knocked Up and Superbad, both of which were $100 million hits, now churning out new yuks every quarter. Pineapple Express’s star, Seth Rogen, cowrote the script, which I suspect was merely a list of suggestions as he and James Franco, tending to his long-dormant funny bone, headed to the set and started making shit up. The best scenes in the movie, which pit Rogen’s maturity-challenged process server and Franco’s puppyish pot dealer against a bunch of heavies looking for some really great shit cultivated by the government, have the smell of improvisation to them.

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Maybe I’ve been overthinking things. Worrying too much about the corrosive effects of superheroes on the cinema and all that. I did 1,500 words on The Dark Knight last week, and I’m sticking to every annoyed one of them. I will add that a friend asked why I didn’t go under the surface and explore the “politics” of the film, and I said it was because they were right there in plain view, 9/11-Iraq window-dressing to make the story “relevant.” But that’s enough on last week’s sensation for now.

Why so serious? It may be the humidity, or the lack of a proper summer vacation. So I’m clearing my mind. Getting a few matters off my cursor. I’m taking you to the movies, then dropping you off, with a few bucks for popcorn and some parting wisdom. If you’re multiplex-bound, consider the generally excellent Wall-E, which, along with Hellboy II, could use a little more love. If indie/arthouse is how you roll, take these capsules, and call me in early August, when we’ll meet again.

Baghead. Day for Night meets The Blair Witch Project, as discontented “mumblecore” filmmakers tired of failure get more than they bargained when they hole up at a summer cabin in the offseason to improvise a horror movie based on one of their deepest fears — a stranger with a bag on his (or her) head, ready for the kill. The notion is more than paper or plastic as a “Baghead” emerges from the woods to stalk the four friends, two of whom are in a collapsible relationship, and the other pair on the verge of hooking up. The whole mumblecore movement may be a generational thing — no-budget productions where amateurish performers stare out of dirty window shades for minutes at a time aren’t my bag. (more…)