This year saw the 12th Annual Hallowe’en Scary Movie & Chili evening at the house of Tismey. The films were Suspiria and Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon, and the theme for Pumpkin carving was ‘cute and adorable’.

I carved Scott Pilgrim, Ramona Flowers and Knives Chau, and was pretty pleased with how they turned out, but more than anything I was just impressed with how much time and effort people invested in carving the pumpkins. Congratulations to Mandy and Rob for winning the Cute and Knifework prizes respectively, and thanks to everyone who came!

If anyone wants to have a go at carving these pumpkins, the templates are available for download here. My previous attempts at comic book pumpkins (The Goon, Rorschach, Arseface from Preacher and Kevin and Marv from Sin City) are still available here.

When Casino Royale came out it was likened to Batman Begins, for obvious reasons; both shot-in-the-arm reboots for tired, diluted franchises. Batman Begins successfully stripped the Caped Crusader of his trappings and, as the title spells out for us, gave us Batman’s origin. This is important, because it’s not Bruce Wayne’s origin story. We see the murder of his family in flashback, but the story is very much more about how Batman came into being than it is about Bruce Wayne. Similarly, Casino Royale is not James Bond‘s origin story, but that of 007, the myth that precedes the man. We don’t see Bond being recruited to MI6 or his training; the pre-credits sequence shows him making the 2 kills required to grant him double-0 status and then we’re into the opening sequence. Just as we see Wayne acquiring the suit and the Batmobile, we see Bond upgrade from a Ford to an Aston Martin before he finally steps out in his trademark tuxedo halfway through the film. Even at this point he’s still not comfortable, still feeling his way round his new role. Only when he’s tracked down the mysterious Mr White at the end of the movie is he “Bond. James Bond” and the familiar theme kicks in for (I believe) the first time.

The two films’ sequels move on from this point in markedly different ways. In ‘The Dark Knight’, Christopher Nolan sets out to consolidate the ‘real world’ Gotham he established in the first film and in doing so moves the franchise even further away from Joel Schumacher’s neon nightmare. In contrast, ‘Quantum Of Solace’ is a move back towards Classic Bond.

It’s not just the no-gadgets, post-Bourne grittiness that makes ‘Casino Royale’ different from the movies that preceded it. Bond has a vulnerability here, a humanity that has yet to be beaten out of him, and this allows for a more character-driven plot than we’re used to seeing in these films. 007 isn’t a character with more than the occasional flash of human frailty or feeling and, consequently, the opportunity for stories like those presented by the James/Vesper relationship diminishes as the 007 persona takes hold.

Crikey, that’s a long preamble. What was I saying?

So, ‘Quantum Of Solace’ isn’t as good as ‘Casino Royale’, not by a long chalk. Daniel Craig is excellent again, Judy Dench give M a depth (s)he’s never had before and the action sequences are breathless and painful in roughly equal measure, but the plot is little more than a series of excuses to get from one exotic location to another for the next action set-piece. And that is EXACTLY what a Bond movie plot should be.

‘Quantum Of Solace’ is unashamedly a Bond movie. It features sequences in Italy, Haiti, Austria, Bolivia and Russia, including one at an opera, one at a horse race and one at a cocktail party. It has car chases, rooftop foot chases and a plane chase. It has two attractive women; Bond sleeps with one and she is later killed, the other is a useful ally in his mission. A beneficent facade hides the bad guy’s evil plot, which in turn hides his actual evil plot. And the whole thing climaxes in a hotel in the middle of the desert which has been SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO EXPLODE IN FLAMING FIREBALLS. The story never really mattered in Bond movies, but this wasn’t the reason the films were in such dire need of an overhaul, so much as the cheesy one-liners, the stupid gadgetry deus ex machina and John Cleese – notably none of these have made a reappearance. They’ve been replaced with a more cynical view of international relations and the intelligence community, where the CIA are happy to deal with terrorists and our Government aren’t necessarily on the side of the Good Guys. Also, in Quantum we have a SPECTRE for the 21st Century, Blofeld’s cat-stroking replaced by international big-business conspiracy that will hopefully provide a storytelling engine off which directors can hang ‘splosions and car chases for a few years to come.

All in all, I was quite pleased with how they turned out.

I really don’t understand the people who are criticising this film for its lack of plot or characterisation. Sure, when one of the Autobots gets torn limb-from-limb by Megatron in the final showdown of the film I wasn’t really sure which one it was, but you know what? It looked AMAZING. I’m not bothered about developing an emotional connection with these huge chunks of metal, or indeed with their human sidekicks. I want to see them hit each other, blow things up, squash things and turn into cars or planes and back again and they do all of these things in abundance.

It’s overlong, it’s slow-paced, and for whatever reason Raimi completely fails to actually tell the story of the black suit which has taken Spidey over. His descent to the dark side REALLY IS demonstrated through a bunch of bad dance sequences, that’s not just bitter internet fanboys making stuff up. Peter SAYS that the black costume makes him powerful, but we never see any evidence of it. Doctor Connors TELLS us that the suit might be difficult to take off and that it amplifies aggression, but again, we never see it. The 90s TV cartoon series did a better job of the black suit saga than this. At worst, the black suit appears to turn this Peter into a prize cockpocket who fancies his chances with the laydeez.

In the context of all this, the fact that Gwen Stacey’s character is a complete throwaway inserted simply to make MJ jealous, that the second Goblin is basically an extreme snowboarder with a lightsabre and that Alfred Exposition the butler shows up in the third act to help Raimi out of a storytelling hole seem like petty gripes. If anything, the worst thing about the whole sorry mess is that the rushed and inept inclusion of Venom merely serves to overwhelm the one really good thing about this film – Thomas Hayden-Church’s performance as Flint Marko and the effects that make him the Sandman. Sure, retconning him as Uncle Ben’s killer is yet another unnecessary addition to a film already overcrowded with story, but he’s pretty much flawless.

Given how good Spiderman 2 was, I’m stunned at how much of a misfire this film is, especially considering that it’s from the same team. At least the only other superhero film that can compete on the amount of crying – X-Men: The Last Stand – had an excuse.

Basically, there’s a sort-of twist (more of a pre-twist, but who cares?). Christian Bale’s character is involved in a shootout against a police unit who are ostensibly on his side. He massacres them with his oh-so-clever gun-fu. Later, when he is arrested by his ambitious partner, the gun used shows up as being his partner’s, not his own. Bale’s character switched them, and his partner flashes back to the point where this happened. Unfortunately this point, an execution scene, happens AFTER the shootout.

There’s a whole load of gumpf on the web about this plot hole. I’m all for nerds discussing ambiguities of a film, book, comic, whatever on the internet – it keeps them off the street, after all. There are hours and hours and pages and pages of unexplained, utterly ambiguous plot holes which are fodder for stupid, geeky conversation which means nothing. Marvel used to give out ‘no-prizes’ to their readers for spotting and explaining them. Inconsistency is part of what holds the fabric of geekdom together.

This isn’t inconsistent though, it’s sloppy. No matter how many excuses the Equilibrium fanboys (yep, even second-rate Matrix imitations have a rabid interweb following, it seems) come up with, be it director’s commentaries, quotations from shooting scripts or some Q&A at a Comic-con, the storytelling of the film explicitly places the gun-switch in the execution scene via flashback. So there’s no excuse for this massive plot-hole.

I’m sorry. I don’t know why this is so important. Before I read all the horrible excuses for bad filmmaking churned out by idiots on the internet refusing to admit that their favourite, derivative, early-noughties popcorn-sci-fi flick has a nasty case of internal illogic, I didn’t really care beyond the fact I’d noticed the plot-hole and thought it was a bit crap. After a bit of Googling, I’m beyond despairing. So, what started as a note about an insignificant inconsistency in an insignificant post-apocalyptic sci-fi-thriller has taken on a life of its own. So here it is.

NERDS OF THE INTERNET – IF YOU’RE GOING TO WASTE YOUR TIME DEBATING SOMETHING COMPLETELY POINTLESS THEN FOR CHRIST’S SAKE MAKE IT ABOUT SOMETHING VAGUELY INTERESTING. WHAT’S THE MATTER? ARE YOU FUCKTARDS TOO STUPID TO JOIN IN THE PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHICAL BULLSHIT ON MATRIX FORUMS OR WHAT?

Give me strength…

1. The corrupt politician chap is played by Dominic West, who plays Detective McNulty in The Wire. After hammering through the entirety of Season 1 of this fantastic show over the last few weeks, I was consistently surprised every time he opened his mouth and his accent was English. Apparently he’s from Sheffield.
2. There was a horribly cringeworthy moment where the otherwise excellent soundtrack gave over to big crunchy guitars which made me want to vomit. Really awful, really incongrous choice of music.
3. Deformed hunchbacks in silly hats are funny. It doesn’t matter how much peril your main characters are in, you’re always going to stop and laugh at a deformed hunchback in a Wizbit hat – it’s just human nature.