The shiny new thing that you’ve actually spent your own
money on, but which you saw so very recently in the cinema that nothing’s
likely to come as much of a surprise, or the one you’ve never seen, started
watching the day it came but was far too tired to appreciate, and which is a
rental and so it really ought to go back
as soon as possible so that they can despatch another one and you get something
approaching your “money’s worth” this month…
Somehow though, you then actually manage keep yourself awake
long enough on a Saturday evening to see both, whilst the other rental disc, the one that arrived two weeks earlier
but which you really haven’t been in the mood for, sits there lonely and
unloved in the envelope, and you constantly hear a soft shrill voice shouting
in the manner of a fly-headed scientist caught in a web…
“Watch me! Watch me!”
Which is merely the sound of my own guilt constantly
nibbling away at the back of my subconscious mind.
Watching the two films back-to-back really did give me pause
for thought. Both of these films start off rather slowly, in fact, the first
time that I tried to watch the Bourne film, I gave up after half an hour
because I was feeling so very sleepy. Still, second time around it escalated
into a rattlingly fast-paced yarn which was all rather enjoyable.
This observation of “slowness” might seem an unusual
observation, especially with regards to “Skyfall” which opens with an
escalating chase sequence which has had the critics and the general public
raving, but the high-octane ending of “The Bourne Legacy” really made the pace
of “Skyfall” seem pedestrian at first, once we’d switched the discs over,
although the pace does pick up after the attack on the board of enquiry room…
Mind you, I thought that the first half seemed rather slow
in the cinema too. The Bond films, I’ve always felt, have always seemed rather
too pleased with their stunt sequences and do rather tend to dwell upon them,
whereas other films of that ilk seem to treat those sequences in a rather
cavalier and throwaway fashion which does tend to keep the pace rattling along
more quickly…
I had a similar problem with the l-o-o-o-n-g boat chase
sequence at the start of “The World Is Not Enough” over a decade ago, although
I put that down to finding London to be a rather drab and shabby place on film,
although I suppose that’s perhaps got something to do with over-familiarity,
and London might seem exotic and mysterious if you’re watching a film in
Islamabad.
It’s not that I think “Skyfall” is a “bad” film or, for that
matter, that the Bourne one is a “good” one, but it was interesting to watch
them both “back-to-back” as it were when I wasn’t really expecting to and make
the comparison between two different film franchises which cover broadly the
same ground.
Of course the plots of both of these films make no sense at
all, but, then again, the plots of this kind of movie seldom do anyway when you
actually start to think about them... “Skyfall” in particular suffers from the
“over-convoluted plot” syndrome in that a heck of a lot of pre-planning has to
fall into place for the plot to even be possible whilst another character gains
easy access to the home of the main target very simply quite early on and you
wonder why the villain didn’t just try doing that...
In fact there are a few moments where you find yourself
almost screaming at the screen (well, I was at home this time…) things like “If he can substitute himself for a
chauffeur, why didn’t you…?”
And, of course, the person who ends up being the main victim
in the film only does so because of an act of random chance and this leads to a
rare failure for the lead character which is dressed up in all the trappings of
success, because after all, we need our “heroes” to be “successful”, don’t we…?
Daniel Craig is an oddly shaped chap though, isn’t he…?
You only have to look at the silhouette on the cover of the
DVD to realise that, and that slow walk towards the camera at the start of the
film does rather emphasise it, too. But, I reaise that a lot of people actually
seem to like his peculiar shape (Personally, Clive James’ description of
Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “condom stuff full of walnuts” springs to mind) so I suppose that, once again, I’m getting that
wrong in comparison to everyone else’s opinion.
Back to my own DVD purchase, and I suspect that, on another
day, I might have been posting giddily something tiresome like “It’s arrived…!
It’s arrived!” about my “Skyfall” disc, but, you’ll have happily discovered, I
chose not to do that.
Well, until now, anyway…
After all, I’ve always been inclined towards completing my
Bond film collection as quickly as possible whenever a new one comes out, but
they still only sit on a shelf and gather dust once I’ve done so, so perhaps it’s
time that I grew up and stopped being so easily led…
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