Reviews of Quantum of Solace, Bolt and Andy Richter Controls the Universe

Quantum of Solace
MGM
$29.99
2-Disc Edition: $34.98
Blu-ray: $39.99

Plot: Bond, James Bond (Daniel Craig) pursues a top-secret organization from the the opera houses of Europe to the deserts of Latin America on a revenge mission to find the person that killed the love of his life, Vesper Lynd.

Opinion: There’s one sequence in the latest Bond adventure that ranks amongst the very best moments in the franchise’s four-decade history, a high-tech stakeout at an Austrian opera house.  The reason this sequence clicks is that it’s really the only part of the movie where director Marc Forster is able to successfully integrate his own style and interests with the rigid James Bond formula.  Best known for small-scale dramas like Finding Neverland and Monster’s Ball, Forster has never made an action movie before and it shows in Quantum’s near-incomprehensible chase sequences, gun battles and fistfights.  One of the great joys of Casino Royale was the way director Martin Campbell and his crew designed each of the film’s big set-pieces with an eye towards practical stunts that required a bare minimum of CGI-assists.  I don’t doubt that Forster tried his best to master the language of action filmmaking, but he’s been thrown headfirst into a franchise that demands a skill set he just doesn’t possess yet.  Forster’s talents lie in an entirely different arena and it’s worth noting that, dramatically, Quantum of Solace is quite good.  The director is genuinely interested in Bond as an individual and he gives Craig the opportunity to play a range of emotions his predecessors could only dream about. Ultimately, all of Quantum’s strengths and weaknesses stem from a common source-Forster wanted to make one movie, while the producers wanted another movie that was different…but not too different from every other Bond adventure.

Bonus Features: After the excellent 3-disc Casino Royale DVD, to say nothing of the extras-laden box sets that MGM put out a few years back, this two-disc special edition isn’t so…well, special.  The first disc only offers a music video and two teasers, while Disc 2 contains a half-hour making of documentary and then five shorter featurettes that recycle a lot of the same material seen in the main doc.  The only other significant extra is a collection of short “crew profiles” that were released on the web during the film’s production.  Here’s hoping there’s a special “special edition” coming down the pike before the next Bond flick hits screens.

Verdict: Rent It

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Bolt
Disney
$29.99
2-Disc Edition: $32.99
Blu-ray: $39.99

Plot: In this animated spin on The Truman Show, a dog named Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) is unwittingly made the star of an ongoing TV-series where he saves his human master (Miley Cyrus) week in and week out with the aid of his extraordinary powers.  But when he escapes the set and finds himself in the real world, he discovers that he’s not the wonder dog he believed himself to be.

Opinion: Hollywood satires are always a dicey proposition and the idea of making one for a family audience seems like a pointless endeavor at best.  Face it, is the average kid really going to get—or care about—jokes about overprotective agents, obnoxious studio execs and spoiled movie stars?  The folks behind Bolt don’t seem to think so as they’ve stacked this animated feature with tons of industry gags, most of which are sure to sail right over kids’ heads.  Worse still, most of these jokes aren’t really all that funny anyway, which means parents won’t be laughing either.  The non-Hollywood portions are equally banal, featuring the usual mixture of slapstick-infused chase sequences and clumsy moralizing featuring none of the wit and sophistication on display in superior films like Finding Nemo, Wall-E and the upcoming Monsters vs. Aliens.  In Hollywood parlance, Bolt is The Player meets The Incredible Journey and yes, that’s just as unpleasant a combination as it sounds.

Bonus Features: The usual smorgasbord of kid-friendly extra goodies, including a new animated short, a Miley Cyrus music video and deleted scenes.  Older viewers might be interested in the behind-the-mic documentaries, but otherwise this DVD plays best for the under-10 set.

Verdict: Skip It

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Andy Richter Controls the Universe
Paramount
$39.98

Plot: Andy Richter plays…Andy Richter, an aspiring writer whose only escape from his mind-numbing day job is his overactive imagination.

Opinion: One of the many offbeat comedies that the Fox Network let whither and die (that list also includes Wonderfalls, Greg the Bunny and The Tick) before it could find a devoted audience, Andy Richter Controls the Universe still holds up pretty well seven years after it went off the air.  It helps that, for the most part, the show’s writers avoided topical, pop-culture humor, instead going for a zany mix of wild fantasy sequences and funny-five-minutes-after-you-think-about-them one-liners (a routine later perfected on the late, great Arrested Development).  The show’s closest relative is probably NBC’s Scrubs, which was similarly in danger of early cancellation, but stuck around for eight more seasons.  While it’s possible, that Andy Richter would have worn out its welcome the same way Scrubs has, it’s still a shame that the series was tossed off the airwaves when it was still in its comic prime.

Bonus Features: Richter and the show’s co-creator contribute a pair of funny and insightful commentary tracks that make you wish they chatted over every episode.  Also included are two retrospective documentaries featuring new cast and crew interviews.

Verdict: Buy It

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Also on DVD

Instead of Bolt, I’d like to recommend that parents immediately run out and purchase Lilo & Stitch: 2-Disc Big Wave Edition (Disney, $29.99) for their kids.  This 2002 cartoon remains one of modern Disney’s very best cartoons, a wildly funny and surprisingly emotional tale of a little girl and her blue alien buddy with destructive tendencies.  This new edition includes tons of new extras and interactive games.  Another excellent animated DVD release—though decidedly not kid-friendly—is The Venture Bros., Season 3 (Cartoon Network, $29.98), which presents the junior year of the beloved Adult Swim series.

To ramp up viewer interest in Fast & Furious, the fourth entry in The Fast and the Furious franchise, Universal is releasing new two-disc editions of the first three pictures The Fast and the Furious Trilogy (Universal, $19.98 each, Blu-ray Box Set: $99.98) which include some new featurettes and BD-Live capabilities in addition to previously-available extras.  Also making its debut in Blu-ray is the James Bond oddity Never Say Never Again (MGM, $34.99), Sean Connery’s last outing as 007 made in 1983 when the actor was 53 years old.  Not considered part of the official Bond canon, the movie is a remake of the 1965 film Thunderball, which was Connery’s third outing as the super-spy.  Elsewhere, Paramount continues their Centennial Collection line of DVDs with two more from-the-vault classics, Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (Paramount, $24.99) and The Odd Couple (Paramount, $24.99), one of the most influential comedies ever made.  (Don’t believe me?  Just watch an episode of Friends.)  Finally, Fox releases a special edition of the 1953 Biblical epic The Robe (20th Century Fox, $19.98), which starred Richard Burton, Jean Simmons and Victor Mature and is famous for its lavish production design as well as being an epic bore.

James Bond is back for 22nd mission.  But does Quantum of Solace pack a license to thrill or a license to bore?

Quantum of Solace
Directed by Marc Forster
Starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench
**1/2

There’s one sequence in the new James Bond adventure Quantum of Solace that ranks amongst the very best moments in the franchise’s four-decade history.  In it, our favorite “00″ secret agent (played, once again, by Daniel Craig in his sophomore outing in Bond’s impeccably-tailored suits) has followed his latest target Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric)-an environmentalist, business tycoon and, of course, member of a top-secret organization bent on world domination-to a lavish opera house in Austria to attend a performance of the Verdi classic Tosca.  Slipping unnoticed into the crowd, Bond spots Greene picking up a specially marked gift bag and uses his stealth (as well as his fists) to secure one of these bags for himself.  Inside, he finds an earpiece, which he pops into his ear as he makes his way into the catwalks that hover above the audience.

Adjusting the frequency, he finds himself listening in on a meeting between Greene and his partners-in-global-conspiracy as they discuss their latest plot-overthrowing the government of Bolivia and handing the country over to a puppet dictator they can exploit for their purposes.  But this meeting isn’t being conducted in some opera box or secret room; instead, all of the conspirators are sitting comfortably in the audience, watching the opera while planning the conquest of a sovereign nation.  It’s a terrific, suspenseful scene that confirms what Bond has been told about this organization early on in the film from one of its members: “We have people everywhere.”

The reason this sequence clicks is that it’s really the only part of the movie where Quantum‘s director Marc Forster is able to successfully integrate his own style and interests with the rigid James Bond formula.  And make no mistake, the 007 movies are all about formula.  The producers have been able to churn out 22 of these things because audiences come back again and again expecting to see certain things: great action, hot girls, cool gadgets and witty quips.

Granted, Quantum‘s predecessor, Casino Royale, did away with some of the traditional elements, but director Martin Campbell otherwise provided a nearly flawless execution of the Bond formula, just as he did a decade ago with Goldeneye, the movie that got the series back on his feet after the ’80s dog days of late-period Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton.  Forster, on the other hand, seems largely uninterested in sticking to the producers’ carefully designed playbook.  He goes through the motions like a professional, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that he has another kind of movie in mind than the one he was hired to make.

Best known for small-scale dramas like Finding Neverland and Monster’s Ball, Forster has never made an action movie before and it shows in Quantum‘s near-incomprehensible chase sequences, gun battles and fistfights.  One of the great joys of Casino Royale was the way Campbell and his crew designed each of the film’s big set-pieces with an eye towards practical stunts that required a bare minimum of CGI-assists.  Think back to that awesome parkour chase through a construction site, the airport scene and that final shoot-out in Venice; all of the action was choreographed and edited with tight precision.  Now look at the opening car chase in Quantum, which is shot and cut like an over-caffeinated outtake from The Bourne Ultimatum.  Or check out an aerial dogfight between Bond and the bad guys that’s filled with so much CGI, it could have been made by Pixar.

I don’t doubt that Forster tried his best to master the language of action filmmaking, but he’s been thrown headfirst into a franchise that demands a skill set he just doesn’t possess yet.  There’s a reason why many of the best Bond pictures have been made by directors with extensive backgrounds in second-unit and stunt work rather than dramatic features.  They come in with the innate knowledge of how to satisfy the prime directive of any 007 adventure, namely dreaming up creative, memorable (and sometimes improbable) action sequences that leave audiences breathless.

Forster’s talents lie in an entirely different arena and it’s worth noting that, dramatically, Quantum of Solace is quite good.  The director is genuinely interested in Bond as an individual and he gives Craig the opportunity to play a range of emotions his predecessors could only dream about.  Picking up almost immediately after Casino Royale ended, Quantum shows as a bitter, furious, vengeful Bond who is more than happy to use his professional resources as means to settle personal scores against the men that killed his one true love, Vesper Lynd, who perished in Royale‘s final moments.

But 007 isn’t the only one who desires bloody revenge; Forster introduces a Bond Girl who finally has more on her mind than bedding England’s best-looking secret agent.  Her name is Camille (played by Ukrainian stunner Olga Kurylenko) and she’s the daughter of a high-ranking Bolivian official and his Russian wife (hence the accent) who were murdered many years ago by the general that Greene plans to put in power.  Save for a brief kiss in the film’s closing moments, Bond and Camille display little carnal interest in each other, which gives their relationship a completely different dynamic than what we’re used to seeing in a 007 movie.  (Because the Bond formula dictates that the spy has to do the nasty at least once in every movie, he does get it on with a fellow MI6 agent tasked with dispatching him back to headquarters.  But this character is a complete waste of screen time-her only function in the movie is to spread her legs for Bond and then meet an untimely end.)

Ultimately, all of Quantum‘s strengths and weaknesses stem from a common source-Forster wanted to make one movie, while the producers wanted another movie that was different…but not too different from every other Bond adventure.  Given that impasse, the only way the film could have been a rousing success is if they had given Forster free reign to do whatever he wanted with Bond or just brought back Martin Campbell for a second go-around.  Because what we’ve ended up with is a movie divided against itself; as a James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace disappoints, but as a drama about an angry, angst-ridden spy, it’s pretty solid.  The one thing that unites these two very different films is Daniel Craig, who has officially become-and I’m being absolutely serious here-the best Bond ever.  He’s not as effortlessly suave as Connery, nor as affable as Moore, nor as charming as Brosnan, but he accomplishes something even more difficult: he makes this superhuman…well, human.

Verdict: Rent It

The 22nd James Bond adventure, Quantum of Solace, is just around the corner. (Can’t wait. Can’t wait. Can’t wait.) And hitmakers Jack White and Alicia Keys collaborated to compose the film’s theme music, a crunchy track called “Another Way to Die.” Check out the music video here.

White’s hard-riffing touch dominates the track, with Keys following cautiously behind. She seems to be trying hard to match White’s vocal style, especially during the chorus, but her occasional piano twinkles are pleasant bursts of light amid the sour and gritty song. The two follow in the footsteps of Duran Duran, Tina Turner, Madonna, Gladys Knight, Chris Cornell and Sheena Easton.
What’s your favorite James Bond theme?