Tag: Daniel Craig

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Film Features Film/TV

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

During the height of the streaming boom, when Netflix, Disney, and HBO were swimming in speculative stock market money, studios looking to feed the online content machine made a lot of big deals with filmmakers. The one that raised the most eyebrows was Rian Johnson’s $469 million deal with Netflix for two sequels to the writer/director’s sleeper hit Knives Out. $234 million a pop is in line with what Johnson had to work with when he made Star Wars: The Last Jedi. But Knives Out was a classic cozy mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. There were no special effects-heavy space battles or big expensive stunt sequences. One of the reasons these kinds of stories became so popular in the early days of sound pictures is that they’re cheap to produce. How was Johnson and longtime producing partner Ram Bergman supposed to spend all that money? 

The answer presented by Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is to give everyone Johnson’s ever wanted to work with a cameo. Serena Williams’ cameo even makes a joke of the money burn rate. As “the world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has an emergency conference with Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe) in the gym of tech billionaire Miles Bron’s (Edward Norton) island estate, a video screen in the background promises a private session with Serena. As they speak, what seems at first to be a still image of the tennis star moves slightly. Then Williams, bored with the details of a mystery she isn’t privy to, speaks up. “So you don’t want to work out?” 

No, snaps Blanc. We’re busy. 

“Whatever. I’m still on the clock,” she sighs, then returns to her crossword puzzle book. 

Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Leslie Odom, Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Janelle Monáe, and Daniel Craig have a dinner party.

Serena Williams is not the only A-lister in a funny cameo. When we first see Blanc, he’s stuck inside his New York apartment during the height of the pandemic quarantine, playing Among Us on Zoom with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Natasha Lyonne, Angela Lansbury, and Stephen Sondheim — and losing. But his pandemic blues are relieved when he’s one of five people invited to a murder mystery party weekend at Bron’s palatial estate on a Greek island, known as the Glass Onion. 

The group, who Miles calls his “beautiful disruptors,” includes Claire (Kathryn Hahn), the Governor of Connecticut who is running for a Senate seat; Lionel (Leslie Odom, Jr.), lead research scientist for Miles’ rocket company; Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), supermodel and fashion designer; and Duke (Dave Bautista), a gun-toting, men’s rights YouTube influencer. Andi, Miles’ former partner in his technology company, is also invited, but the group seems very surprised when she actually shows up. Blanc quickly susses out that these alleged old friends don’t actually like each other very much. When the murder mystery dinner party game is interrupted by a real murder, Blanc (and Johnson) are in their element. I won’t spoil what comes next, except to say that the “onion” in the title refers to layers upon layers of flashbacks that Johnson uses to reveal the mystery and its ultimate solution. 

Janelle Monáe

An all-star cast solving a murder conjures visions of bad ’70s haircuts phoning in performances. But Jonson knows how to assemble a cast with chemistry, and treats Glass Onion like a Robert Altman dinner party movie, where everyone’s having fun and giving it their all. Monáe is captivating as a woman whose secrets have secrets. Hudson disarms with a ditzy blonde routine before revealing the icy calculations beneath her facade. Odom and Hahn, used to being scene stealers themselves, are excellent, but feel a little underutilized. 

Like Knives Out, Glass Onion fronts as a frothy potboiler just out for a good time. But in its heart, it’s a scathing satire of our oligarchic ruling class. Exposing Miles, his “genius” Elon Musk figure, as a garden variety sociopathic manipulator feels particularly timely on Johnson’s part. Netflix execs might feel some buyers remorse when they see Monáe gleefully smashing the astonishingly expensive set, but we the audience get our money’s worth.

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Film Features Film/TV

No Time to Die

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No TIme To Die.

Over the course of 25 films, James Bond movies evolved into their purest form — or maybe the word is “devolved.” Eon Productions, founded 59 years ago to make Dr. No, came to believe that the appeal of the series was based on the flashy cars, expensive watches, and other signifiers of wealth and class surrounding the posh secret agent. Bond became a brand, and the films little more than extended commercials for luxury goods, punctuated by extraordinarily expensive stunt sequences. Ian Fleming’s marquee character ceased to be a hard-boiled hero and became a moving mannequin for expensive suits. The tendency deepened as the Cold War waned, and the international spy game lost its capitalist vs. communist stakes. Bond was a violent solution looking for a problem. Remember 10 films ago, in The Living Daylights, when he went to Afghanistan and fought with the Mujahideen, aka the Taliban? Good times … 

And then there’s the misogyny. Commander Bond is a love ’em and leave ’em sailor at heart, but his manly charms, integral to early appearances like From Russia With Love, curdled into something ugly. The exception in the canon is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where George Lazenby, in his only outing as Bond, was paired with the great Diana Rigg as Tracy, an underworld princess depicted as his equal. They marry, and when she is killed at the end of the film by a bullet meant for Bond, he cries. The film was a flop, and Lazenby lost the job. In the next film, 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, Bond can barely hide his contempt for women. 

Daniel Craig has played James Bond for 15 years, first appearing as the superspy in 2006’s Casino Royale.

But even as their relevance waned, the movies became more lavish and more expensive, until, in the 21st century, Eon Productions is eating up a significant chunk of British film financing. No Time to Die, the latest installment, is one of the most expensive films ever produced, costing an estimated $250 million to make, and at least another $100 million to market. Daniel Craig, Bond since 2006’s Casino Royale, is retiring, and he and True Detective director Cary Joji Fukunaga seem to have decided to try something different: What if we used all that money to make a good movie? 

From the trademark cold opening, it’s clear that this is a different kind of Bond flick. Instead of immediately throwing us into the middle of an action sequence, it’s a gauzy flashback from someone who isn’t even Bond. Madeleine Swann (Leá Seydoux), who eloped with Bond at the end of Spectre, remembers the day an assassin came to kill her father, a capo in Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Waltz)’s criminal syndicate. The revelation of Madeleine’s parentage — which comes in the middle of a spectacular motorcycle chase through the Italian countryside — ruins the couple’s honeymoon. 

Five years later, Bond is retired, spending his time drinking on the beach of his home in Jamaica. When an advanced biological weapon is stolen from a secret lab in London, the new 007, Nomi (Lashana Lynch) a Black woman who loves to rock some ’80s Grace Jones sunglasses, is dispatched by M (Ralph Fiennes) to retrieve it on the down-low. When the CIA gets wind of the situation, Bond’s old buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) knows who to call. When it comes to chasing madmen with WMDs, nobody does it better. He arrives at Bond’s doorstep to recruit him with a Trumpite politico named Ash (Billy Magnussen) in tow. Bond immediately pegs Ash as a bad guy (“He smiles too much.”) but agrees to help out anyway. 

James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Paloma (Ana de Armas). Credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Naturally, Blofeld, who is still running SPECTRE from inside his Hannibal Lecter cage, is responsible for the heist. But that’s just the first twist in No Time to Die’s plot. The screenplay, credited to four writers, manages to fit in both character-building scenes and a finale designed around a raid on a secret supervillain lair. Fukunaga plays with expectations by setting up a rookie CIA agent, played by Ana de Armas, as a ditzy female stereotype before revealing her to be a competent operative. Instead of seducing her, Bond toasts her murderous prowess with expensive whiskey. It’s all surprisingly coherent and self-aware for a Bond movie.

Fukunaga gives the supporting cast great moments, like Wright imbuing Felix and Bond with genuine friendship, and Fiennes as the conflicted, alcoholic spymaster. Craig, who has shown his chops in Logan Lucky and Knives Out, delivers the best performance of his career. Sure, the old hero coming out of retirement for one last job is a cliché, but when the execution is this good, it doesn’t matter. You can take a guy out of MI6, but you can’t take the spy out of the guy. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Knives Out

Be advised: Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a great movie, and I will fight you.

Notice I didn’t just say “The Last Jedi is a good installment in the Star Wars franchise,” like I would say about a Marvel movie that adequately hits the marks of costumed heroism while setting up the next episode in the infinite saga of corporate synergy. I said it was a great movie, period. Not only does it look amazing — it’s the best-lit Star Wars movie since George Lucas got his USC film professor Irvin Kirshner to helm The Empire Strikes Back — but writer/director Rian Johnson explored and expanded all of the characters he was given to work with by Lawrence Kasdan and J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens, leaving the story neater and better than he found it. With the much-maligned Canto Bight “space casino” sequence, he did what the middle passage of a trilogy is supposed to do — complicate the morality of the story.

With the family fortune at stake and the patriarch’s corpse still warm, can the Thrombeys get a clue?

But that move is only an echo of the most challenging part of The Last Jedi, the characterization of Luke Skywalker. Instead of the gung-ho farm boy ready to take on the galaxy single-handed, he is a depressed hermit who no longer believes his youthful heroics made the world a better place. For a lot of disillusioned Gen Xers who grew up idolizing Luke, this was just a little too real. Johnson shepherded the best performance of Mark Hamill’s career as he rediscovers the heroic heart that still beats within him.

In a just world, Johnson should still be at the helm of Star Wars for the final installment of the trilogy of trilogies, which will hit theaters later this month. Instead, he and his producing partner Ram Bergman reunited most of the Last Jedi crew and knocked out Knives Out in about a year.

If you want to see what the real pros think about Johnson’s abilities, look no further than the incredible cast he assembled, starting with James Bond himself.

Daniel Craig plays private detective Benoit Blanc, who, in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie-derived whodunits sports an absolutely outrageous accent. Instead of Hercule Poirot’s bombastic Belgian, Blanc has an exaggerated Southern drawl, which prompts Hugh Ransom Drysdale (Captain America himself, Chris Evans) to call him “CSI: KFC.” Evans plays the black-sheep grandchild of Harlan Thrombey (Captain von Trapp himself, Christopher Plummer) the wildly successful writer of mystery novels whose untimely suicide on the evening of his 85th birthday party Blanc is hired to investigate.

Captain no more — Chris Evans is the black sheep of the family in Rian Johnson’s new whodunit, Knives Out.

But who hired Blanc? That’s a question that no one, not even the detective himself, knows the answer to. Was it eldest daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), the self-made real-estate mogul? Or was it Walt (Michael Shannon), business head of Harlan’s publishing empire? Or maybe it was closeted fascist son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson) or lifestyle guru daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette). The one person we know for sure it is not, is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s immigrant nurse who finds herself caught in the middle as the children of the fabulously wealthy family jockey for a share of the inheritance.

Johnson’s script for Knives Out is the kind of thing Hollywood craftspeople like Leigh Brackett and Dalton Trumbo used to churn out on the regular: a tight, fun genre piece suffused with contemporary politics. Johnson delights in pulling the rug out from under you, then leaving you to wonder how long the floor is going to last.

Blanc, the eccentric detective, is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, only he has a pair of Watsons in local cops Lieutenant Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan). As necessary in byzantine mysteries, the dialogue is heavy in exposition. But it goes down easy because all the actors are having so much fun. Craig chews the scenery like it’s a plug of tobacco, while Curtis projects raw, feminine power and Shannon plays against type as a subservient failson. Only de Armas is truly playing for sympathy, as the sole poor person in the cast, who, coincidentally, vomits every time she tries to tell a lie.

What makes Knives Out a meaty murder mystery is its subversive portrait of the American ruling class. They’re all feeding on the corpse of a fortune made by someone smarter and kinder than they are, and their thin veneer of niceness is stripped away the instant an iota of their privilege is threatened. That’s why it’s immensely satisfying when Johnson delivers their collective comeuppance.

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Film Features Film/TV

Logan Lucky

Who is the greatest living American director? That’s the kind of question I usually avoid because it’s unanswerable and ultimately meaningless. Ranking is for sports. What’s important is not who is better than whom. It’s “does the movie work?” Does it make you feel like it intended to make you feel, and if so, is that a good feeling? If a film not only works in the moment, but transcends it and becomes something people want to watch again and again for years to come, that’s the kind of win a director wants to chalk up.

Nevertheless, as I was leaving Logan Lucky, the question of who is the greatest living American director was on my mind. There’s Steven Spielberg, who has an unparalleled breadth and depth of work over the last 43 years. Then there’s David Lynch, who is currently unspooling an 18 hour epic about the struggle for the soul of America with Twin Peaks: The Return.

And then there’s Steven Soderbergh. Along with Spike Lee, he was there at the creation of the modern indie movement, winning Sundance in 1989 with the sleeper hit sex, lies, and videotape. He made George Clooney a movie star with Out of Sight and defined the 21st century’s first crop of superstars with Ocean’s Eleven. Yet he can adapt Soviet sci-fi with Solaris, get his hands dirty in the DIY underground with Bubble, and take a deep dive into political biography with the two-part, four hour Che. Soderbergh is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, the one young directors look to to learn how it’s done. He works fast and lean and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bullshit.

It’s that commitment to craft that led him to quit Hollywood filmmaking in disgust in 2013. On his way out, he torched the current corporate regime with his State of the Cinema speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival. What was his idea of retirement? Single-handedly writing, shooting, and editing The Knick, a Cinemax TV series.

Everybody knew Soderbergh couldn’t stay out of the game, and he managed to come back on his own terms. At a time when the mainline studios are running up $200 million tabs to pay for a sinking Pirates of the Caribbean ship, Soderbergh’s new film comes into theaters already paid for using an innovative financing and sales scheme that cut out layers of corporate bloat. Logan Lucky isn’t going to win the weekend, but it doesn’t have to. And that means Soderbergh gets to work without an MBA looking over his shoulder. The results of this financial experiment speak for themselves: Logan Lucky is the best movie I’ve seen in 2017.

Channing Tatum (left) and Adam Driver star in Steven Soderbergh’s directorial return, Logan Lucky.

There I go ranking again.

Rebecca Blunt’s script is so tight you can bounce a quarter off of it. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver are Jimmy and Clyde Logan, two West Virginia brothers who’ve been down so long they don’t know what up looks like. Along with their sister Mellie (Riley Keough), they hatch a needlessly elaborate plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway, just across the North Carolina border.

Every part of the sprawling cast is spot on. Katie Holmes swills chardonnay as Jimmy’s ex-wife who left him for a rich car dealer, greased to perfection by Seth McFarlane. Daniel Craig has way too much fun as a mad bomber named Joe Bang, who has to break out of, then back into prison, where Dwight Yoakam is the nicotine stained warden. Just when you think things are winding down, out pops Hilary Swank as an impossibly flinty FBI agent hot on the trail of the robbers-turned-folk-heroes.

It probably goes without saying that the photography and editing are beyond reproach, but I’m going to say it anyway. Logan Lucky is a ruthlessly designed and executed entertainment machine, but its obvious virtues may obscure its depth. Appalachia’s lack of affordable health care, the toxic at-will employment environment, the ravages of the for-profit prison industrial complex, and the impossible burdens of patriarchy on women young and old all serve to create plot points along the way to wacky larceny. With an instant classic comedy as subversive as it is hilarious, Soderbergh has served up a stunning rebuke to corporate Hollywood and cemented his status as one of the all-time greats.

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Film Features Film/TV

Spectre

These days, everyone wants to be James Bond.

Spectre is the 24th film in the Bond franchise, which was a franchise before compulsory franchise status was a thing. Maybe all franchises evolve into Bond. This year alone, we’ve had Furious 7, which transformed that franchise from car chases to spy jinx; Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, which shared Spectre‘s theme of a threatened shutdown by nefarious elements in the government; and Avengers: Age Of Ultron, whose bad-guy super-organization HYDRA’s logo bears a suspicious resemblance to SPECTRE’s octopus.

So how does the real thing stack up to the legion of imitators? Pretty well. Spectre comes out of the gate strong with an extended, Birdman-style continuous tracking shot through the streets of Mexico City during a Day of the Dead parade that ends with Bond accidentally blowing up a building. That’s just the first of the visual confections director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema have cooked up. As Bond tracks down the former M’s killer, we are treated to a wide-screen travelogue through the Austrian Alps, Rome, Tangiers, and the Sahara desert.

Daniel Craig in Spectre

The stunning photography is easily the best part of the film. Daniel Craig, now in his fourth Bond movie in nine years, is in good form. He’s weathered one of the series’ low points with Quantum of Solace, and with director Mendes, has now created two great Bond films in a row. To say this is a more “serious” take on the character depends on how seriously you can take male power fantasies and consumption porn, but at least he’s fun to watch. He even breaks a sweat once as he careens around in an insane aerobatic helicopter sequence. His nemesis this time around is Christoph Waltz who, let’s face it, was born to play a Bond villain. He gets one of the most awesome character introductions of the year sitting in silhouette at the head of the SPECTRE table.

Bond’s female companionship is provided by Monica Bellucci as the Italian bombshell Lucia and Léa Seydoux as the reluctant daughter of a SPECTRE agent. The sparks really fly between Bellucci and Craig, while Seydoux is essentially a cute nonentity.

It’s probably no surprise to anyone who has seen a few Bond movies to say that the plot of Spectre is paper-thin. Mendes attempts to tie together the previous three Craig movies, but the threads are strained at best. Bond sometimes goes from place to place for no discernible reason beyond a need to get to the next set piece, but the individual sequences are strong enough that you may not notice or care. Like Skyfall, Mendes goes on too long and tries too hard to get some pathos out of Bond’s empty life. But the producers have put $300 million into this Bond-stravaganza, so they need to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. You probably will, too.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Muscle-bound Bond

In the new James Bond movie, Skyfall, Daniel Craig takes off his shirt and examines his wounds. There appear to be two of them — small holes on his skin from bullets fired at the beginning of the movie. He touches his wounds and winces. So do I. Bond is in pain from his wounds. I am in pain from all the hours he has spent in the gym.

Sean Connery

This Bond ripples with muscles. Craig is 44, but neither gravity nor age has done its evil work on him. Nothing about him looks natural, relaxed — a man in the prime of his life and enjoying it.

Instead, I see a man chasing youth on a treadmill, performing sets and reps, a clean and press, a weighted knee raise, an incline pushup, and, finally, something called an incline pec fly (don’t ask). I take these terms from the Daniel Craig workout, which you can do, too, if your agent and publicist so insist. Otherwise, I recommend a book.

Skyfall is a lot of fun — don’t get me wrong — but it still says something about our culture that, in the autumn of my years, I do not like. To appreciate what I mean, contrast this new Bond to Roger O. Thornhill, the charmingly hapless advertising man played by Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Like Bond, Thornhill pulls off some amazing physical feats — his mad frantic escape from the crop duster, the traverse of Mount Rushmore — and like Bond he wears an expensive suit. Unlike Bond, though, when he takes it off we do not see some marbleized man, an ersatz creation of some trainer, but a fit man, effortlessly athletic and just as effortlessly sophisticated. Of course, he knows his martinis, but he also knows how to send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning. He is a man of the world. He is, in short, a man of a certain age — 55 at the time, to be more or less exact.

In North by Northwest and other movies, Grant — for all his good looks — represented the triumph of the sexual meritocracy: a sex appeal won by experience and savoir-faire, not delts and pecs and other such things that any kid can have. He was not alone in this. Gary Cooper, in High Noon, wins Grace Kelly by strength of character, not muscles. He was about 50, and Kelly was a mere 23.

Maybe the best example of the unmuscled hero is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Bogart was 15 years older than Ingrid Bergman, and it did not matter at all. He had the experience, the confidence, the internal strength that can only come with age. As he did with Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon — “I don’t care who loves who, I won’t play the sap for you” — he gives up the love of his life because age and wisdom have given him character. These older men seduce; they are not seduced. They make love. They do not score.

The new Bond is a zeitgeisty sort of character. “There has been a striking change in attitudes toward male body image in the past 30 years,” Harrison Pope, a Harvard psychiatry professor, recently told The New York Times. He said the portrayal of men in what amounts to the Bond image is now “dramatically more prevalent in society than it was a generation ago.” That same Times story reported that 40 percent of middle and high school boys work out with the purpose of “increasing muscle mass.” Many of them also use protein supplements.

This is all very sad news. Every rippling muscle is a book not read, a movie not seen, or a conversation not held. That’s why Sean Connery was my kind of Bond. He was 53 when he made his last Bond film, Never Say Never Again. Women loved him because he was sophisticated and he could handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin. Western civilization was saved not on account of his pecs but on account of his cleverness and experience.

I know the movie market skews young and kids want action, and I take it as a good thing that Daniel Craig’s Bond is older, world weary, and, in sports lingo, has slowed a step. But he still triumphs physically, not cleverly. He does not woo women; they just come on to him. Still, I have great hope for him. In this movie, Bond’s drink is Macallan Scotch. It’s mine, too. The name is Cohen. Richard Cohen.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.