Movie Review

Like many I was skeptical about the casting of Daniel Craig (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Layer Cake) as James Bond. He’s blond, first of all. Secondly, he seems a little too rough around the edges for the Bond we’ve come to know and love. The latter objection gets blown to bits in this second adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel.

Beginning with Bond’s entry into the double-0 ranks, Casino Royale suffers not because of Craig’s performance but more from an uneven script that both explodes with gritty action and drags with sequences that could have been significantly shortened. Truth be told, no matter how high the stakes, no matter how well dressed the players or how well they handle the chips, watching other people play poker is just not visually engaging.

Hinging on the money laundering activities of Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), Bond follows a trail that leads him from Africa to the Bahamas to the Casino Royale in Montenegro. It seems Msr. Le Chiffre has been playing the stock market with the money he is supposed to have been washing for his “freedom fighter” clients, money that he had hoped to make a profit from after blowing up a prototype aircraft at the Miami International Airport (a plot thwarted by Bond with the reckless abandon that is typical of this film’s action sequences). Now that Le Chiffre’s clients have come to collect, he finds it necessary to earn back their money via an invitation only high-stakes poker game.

Financed in this game by Great Britian’s Treasury Department, to the tune of 10 Million (we’re not sure if that’s Pounds Sterling, Euros, Swiss Francs, or U.S. Dollars (not that it matters)) and shepherded by Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), possibly the blandest “Bond girl” to ever hit the screen, Bond is thwarted in his pursuit of Le Chiffre by the first in a series of double-crosses. And it is from these double crosses that Bond learns the lesson that will turn him into the ruthless double-0 agent he will need to be.

That lesson: never trust anyone.

Overlong by at least thirty minutes, Casino Royale is a capable re-entry into the Bond franchise. Marked with a sly humor that is less self-conscious than anything we’ve seen since Sir Sean carried the 007 moniker, this characterization is grittier and more connected to what we’ve come to expect from an action-adventure/spy film. Craig’s Bond makes mistakes, some whoppers actually, and when he gets into a scrap he ends up showing the effects. You get the sense that he has to work for his victories. In some ways this fallibility, this humanity, makes this Bond more appealing than any of the ones who have come before him. Casino Royale is, in fact, a post-modern James Bond film that wouldn’t have been possible without all of the versions that preceded it.

Given that the price of movies has gone up to $10 for the matinee, given that no matter how hard the entertainment machine tries to convince me it’s visually interesting poker is not a spectator sport, and given that it could have been better with very little effort on the part of the filmmakers, I still found myself walking away disappointed. As such I have to give this film a 2.5 out of 5.

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Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind) uses a big, broad brush to paint this satire of virtually all things entertainment. Employing his usual motley cast of regulars, including Catherine O’Hara and Harry Shearer as aging has-beens, Guest creates a film within a film (something I’m really not fond of) that should be taking on Hollywood’s obsession with self-congratulatory awards ceremonies.

Shooting Home for Purim, Marilyn Hack (O’Hara) is that actress whom everyone thinks was in that movie, you know, the one with that other, more famous actress. Her role as Esther, the dying matriarch of a Jewish family in the South during World War II, is meant to be nothing more than another job, a little film, until someone reports a rumor found on that “interweb thing,” as the internet is called by the film’s clueless publicist Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins), that Hack’s performance is good enough to warrant an Oscar nomination.

Taft is the catalyst the parlays a two line blurb from someone on some web site into an appearance on a local Los Angeles morning show for Hack and Victor Allan Miller (Shearer) which through utter stupidity gets spun into a potential Oscar nod for Miller as the family’s patriarch which gets taken to another level when Variety picks up that rumor and turns it into gossip about a nod for Callie Webb (Parker Posey) who is playing the black-sheep, lesbian daughter. What ensues is an uproarious indictment of celebutainment and people’s ability to buy into the rumor that they want to be true, particularly if it is a rumor that tells them they are valuable.

Guest and co-scripter Eugene Levy, who also makes an appearance in the cast as a slimy, not very convincing agent, spend more time poking a sharp stick in the eye of the industry that has sprung up to cover Hollywood, movie review shows, night time talk shows, entertainment reports, and the like, than they do dissecting that fact that Hollywood’s denizens believe they have a right to this sort of coverage. He’s none to kind to actors, portraying them as vain luddites more concerned with appearance than what’s inside.

Sprawling and with only the vaguest sense of structure, the film feels episodic. Still, if you’re even vaguely tapped into the culture of celebrity and the massive spin that surrounds it (pictures of Katie Holmes’ and Tom Cruise’s wedding anyone?) you will not be at a lost for laughs both broad and sly during the course of this film. For that, for the fact that all roads lead back to This Is Spinal Tap and for the complete irony that this film is probably just as worthy of anything that will receive an Oscar this year I’ll give this film 3.5 popcorns out of 5.

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There is nothing subtle about this film: from the themes to the set dressing to the performances Stranger Than Fiction bludgeons viewers with the message that we should squeeze every ounce of life we can out of every minute.

Taking pages from Sartre, Luigi Pirandello, and Charlie Kaufman, Stranger Than Fiction centers on Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who is quite possibly the most boring, placid human being ever to be brought into existence.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last six weeks you know that we know what Harold doesn’t: he is a character in a new novel by Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Eiffel’s problem, which is Harold’s saving grace, is a raging case of writer’s block. Karen is a writer of tragedies and she can’t figure out how to kill Harold Crick. Eiffel’s publishers hope that saddling her with Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), a “writer’s assistant,” will help her make her deadline, a deadline for a book on which she has ostensibly been working for over a decade.

In a turn that is less Adaptation than You’ve Got Mail, Harold, who is an IRS auditor, is assigned the case file of Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal doing her best Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (right down to the voice)) a baker who as a protest against the government calculated what percent of her taxes would go to fund programs she doesn’t support and purposely withheld that amount from her payment instead sending a letter that begins “Dear imperialist swine.”

Where Harold is bland – beige walls, white sheets, and even a beige telephone that looks like it was lifted right out of a hotel room from late-1980s Italy – Ana is bohemian complete with a sleeve tattoo that starts at her shoulder and ends at her elbow, driftwood lamps, and a guitar that she took as payment from someone or another for a batch of muffins. Ensue unlikely romance between typewriter crossed lovers.

Added to this mix is Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman doing a star turn at “quirky”) in the role of God for both Harold and Karen. After his unsuccessful visit to a psychiatrist it is to this professor of literary theory Harold turns and thus begins his personal odyssey into actually living. Harold’s subsequent discovery that Eiffel is writing his life and his meeting with Eiffel are where this film breaks down as it comes after Eiffel has figured out how to perfectly, poetically kill off her main character. Eiffel’s crisis of conscience (how many real people has she killed, she wonders) begs the reality question (is Harold real or a character? Is Eiffel a god? Such existential thoughts presented in such broad strokes are a bit much even for the thinking viewer to contemplate in the midst of a subplot that is entirely standard Hollywood romantic comedy fare.)

What is most shocking, though, is not just Prof. Hilbert’s advice that Harold accept his death for the greater good of literature but that Harold takes such advice with barely a ripple in his psyche (perhaps this was meant to be a comment on the placid nature of humanity in the 21st century, or perhaps it’s just too-clever for its own good writing passing for art; I’m not really sure) and that Eiffel, in turn, consults Hilbert to determine what she should do now that she has met Harold in the flesh.

The character and nature of the film’s subplot should tell you everything you need to know about how this film ends, and that is the real problem. For a film that attempts to take on the true meaning of life, death, and work the ending and plot twists are too easy, too pat, and too Hollywood for comfort. The film ends up being merely cute when it could have been a serious meditation on life in that way that true human comedy is serious yet simultaneously ridiculous.

Cute it is, though, and basically entertaining. And it is because of these things and because when confronted by Penny, who has sufferred through rainstorms, tantrums, and cartons’ worth of cigarette smoke in her job, about just how she discovered the way in which she would kill Harold Crick Eiffel replies “like anything worth writing it came without warning, method, or reason” I’ll give Stranger Than Fiction three popcorns out of five.

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