R.I.P. Roger Moore: The 2017 James Bond Archives - Final Edition Trading Cards Are A Fitting Goodbye.

The Good: Archive box exclusives, Generally good collectibility, Some truly spectacular autograph card signers, Metal cards are neat, Cool relic cards
The Bad: Orientation issues,
The Basics: The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards make a decent trading card set out of an unfortunately bad James Bond film!


Like many people, yesterday I awoke to the sad news that Sir Roger Moore had died. Roger Moore frequently was underrated and undervalued by James Bond fans, which is ironic because Moore had the most "canon" James Bond films under his belt (Never Say Never Again has licensing issues due to its distribution and its authenticity within the James Bond canon is frequently challenged and counting that film only makes a tie for Moore and Sean Connery having equal quantities of James Bond films). Sir Roger Moore was the James Bond whose films I grew up on and because it was the work I had seen him in the most (other Bond actors having effectively branched out from James Bond or came to Bond later in their careers), I most closely associated Roger Moore with James Bond. His death left me saddened and it seemed fitting that the day after he died, completely coincidentally Rittenhouse Archives released its 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards. As the name suggests, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are Rittenhouse Archives's last James Bond trading card set for the foreseeable future (unless they do some form of In Memoriam exclusive set for Roger Moore) and so James Bond fans are saying a lot of "goodbyes" over the last twenty-four hours.

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are actually an incredibly fitting way for fans of the James Bond franchise to say goodbye to Sir Roger Moore, as the trading card set is very heavy in Roger Moore material - the set features four autographed trading cards by Roger Moore and bonus sets from three of Moore's James Bond films - Octopussy, For Your Eyes Only, and A View To A Kill.

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards allow James Bond fans to complete their Rittenhouse Archives James Bond trading card collection with a lot of flair and some truly impressive cards.

Basics/Set Composition

Fully assembled, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set has 387 cards and is essentially four (or five) sets in one. As well, there is an oversized binder produced by Rittenhouse Archives that holds the entire set, with all of its associated chase cards, which has not always been the case for some of the bigger James Bond trading card sets! The set consists of 83 common cards and 304 bonus cards. The chase cards are mostly available in the packs of cards, though eight of them were incentive or promotional cards and could not be found in any of the packs. The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards were released in boxes of twenty-four packs of five cards each.

Common Cards

The common card set for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards consists of eighty-three modern-looking trading cards. The entire common set recaps the plot of Die Another Day (reviewed here!). Sadly, the common set for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are inconsistently oriented. While the backs of every card are portrait-oriented, the fronts of the cards vary between portrait and landscape orientation. That makes the cards something of a pain in the butt to place in the binder as there is no organic way to make the set look good from an orientation point-of-view.

That said, the photograph and writing for the Die Another Day common set in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards is universally wonderful. The 2017 James Bond Archives cards have the traditional UV-resistant coating which is flawlessly applied. The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature a great range of vibrant pictures that have not been overly-promoted (and are different from the shots from the Inkworks Die Another Day set from when the film was theatrically released). Interestingly, Rittenhouse Archives included the image from the promotional card within the common set, which is not a usual thing for their trading card sets. The cards have a fresh look to them that makes it a visually-interesting trading card set. The backs are well-written and the cards detail the plot of Die Another Day quite thoroughly. The writing for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards common set is very entertaining and follows the plot of the film with a lot of detail.

Chase Cards

The 296 chase cards that can be found in packs and boxes of 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition essentially create three additional "common" sets and one bonus parallel set, in addition to more traditional James Bond chase cards. As is the habit in many of the newer trading card releases, there are no bonus card sets that can be completed with even a single case of trading cards; most require at least two cases with ideal collation to assemble the chase sets. The higher-end sets require three to six cases to complete.

The 2017 James Bond Archives trading card set features three extensive bonus sets that require multiple cases to complete. There are retro sets that retell the stories of For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View To A Kill with 36, 32, and 30 cards each. The retro sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards illustrate an overall problem with the way Rittenhouse Archives approached their throwback sets (as a holistic collecting issue). Prior retro Throwback sets had up to 102 cards and the detailing on the plot of each movie was as detailed as for the common sets, the films for which Rittenhouse Archives was able to yield less material made for smaller sets. The three retro throwback sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are well-written, though they have somewhat more condensed plotting than the common sets (the Octopussy set, for example, devotes a single card to the teaser mission whereas the Die Another Day common set has eight cards for the mission that came before the opening credits in that film!). Rittenhouse Archives did the best they could with the material they were able to cull from the three films in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards, but James Bond trading card collectors are likely to feel like they are getting less for their money on the throwback sets in the Final Edition cards. If Rittenhouse Archives had produced all of the throwback sets at the same time and more evenly distributed them through the last six Archives releases, the throwback sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards would not have been so anemic by the numbers.

That said, the photograph and the writing for the throwback sets maintains the high standards of quality that the other retro sets have embodied. The throwback sets, like many of the prior Throwback retro sets are inconsistently oriented and are more problematic to try to put into binder pages in any sensible way. All three of the Throwback sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are made of a more retro cardboard stock to make the cards from the older films seem like they were from the period in which the films were released. The For Your Eyes Only and A View To A Kill sets features black and white photography on some of the card backs, but this is nowhere near as problematic as the Throwback sets for the color films that have black and white images on the fronts.

Two per box there are gold parallel cards for the Die Another Day set. The gold parallel set was limited to only 250 of each of the cards. The gold parallel cards are a particularly boring parallel card; they are distinguished from the common versions of their cards by limited gold foil lettering for the title on the front of each card and an individual foil-stamped number on the back, at the bottom of the card. While they are substantively similar to prior James Bond parallel cards, the parallel cards lack any real flash quality to them.

As part of finishing the James Bond trading card line, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature 24 SPECTRE and Skyfall Expansion cards. Found one per box, the twenty-four Expansion cards continue the common card sets from prior releases as bonus cards. The 9 SPECTRE cards for The Complete James Bond come together to form the movie poster for SPECTRE on the back, just like every nine-cards in the common set did. The other fifteen Expansion cards extend the Heroes & Villains, Bond Girls Are Forever, Bond Villains and James Bond Archives sets from prior releases with content from SPECTRE and Skyfall, perfectly continuing those sets and concluding them in a fashion consistent to the original releases.

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards concluded the 007 Double-Sided (Mirror Cards) card set that was begun early in 2016. The eight cards found in this subset in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards work together with cards found in the two prior sets to create a 24-card bonus card set. These beautiful trading cards feature the incarnation of James Bond on one side and the primary villain on the obverse for each of the James Bond films. The eight cards in the 007 Double-Sided set found in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are every three Bond films starting with the third M3,M6, M9, etc. While this might create a weird ultimate collation the cards themselves are stunning and cleanly printed on a vibrant-looking mirror board that is very fresh looking.

Also found only two per case are two of the twelve Metal cards for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards. Featuring the movie posters for each of the last twelve James Bond films, the Metal cards are individually numbered on the back and they concluded a very cool set that was begun in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards. Rittenhouse Archives has recently gotten into metal card production and the metal cards in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards reinforces the argument that Rittenhouse Archives knows exactly what it is doing with that technology!

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature fifteen Relic cards, split between fairly traditional costume cards (albeit in an uncommon portrait orientation) and relic cards of James Bond props. Rather cooly, the Relic card set features a dual relic card with prop materials from two different props from Quantum Of Solace. The costume cards are limited to 200 each and they are pretty typical costume pieces - James Bond suits, a top from a Bond girl and a supporting character or two's costume pieces. Unlike something like a Star Trek costume that has a variety of fabrics or colors, the James Bond costume cards with costume materials from Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace and Skyfall have fabric swatches that are very consistent and unimaginative. Fortunately, the rarer relic cards are much more variable and intriguing for card collectors and James Bond fans.

As with most media-based trading card sets, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature autographed trading cards. This set of trading cards features a whopping fifty-six autograph cards, which includes awesome autographed materials like autographed costume cards and a gold signature card. The bulk of the autograph cards in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set are split between the familiar format of the 40th Anniversary set – which had very small pictures of the character’s head and were oriented in a landscape format – a single Women Of Bond autograph card and the vastly more popular full-bleed style which was portrait oriented with giant images of the characters and a minimal signing space at the bottom. The seven 40th Anniversary style autographs are highlighted by autographs by three different Roger Moore autographs and one extremely limited Daniel Craig autograph. I was pretty psyched that Ben Whishaw signed another card for this set.

In the full-bleed autographs, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards Rittenhouse Archives included one of the most incredible autograph line ups of all Rittenhouse Archives James Bond card set releases. In addition to a full-bleed Roger Moore autograph, there is yet another George Lazenby signature card. Rittenhouse Archives included first-time signer Tula alongside highly-coveted celebrities like Judi Dench, Halle Berry, Dave Bautista, Michelle Yeoh, Berenice Marlohe, Lea Sedoux, and Jeffrey Wright. Rather impressively, Rittenhouse Archives had held an incredible autograph card from fan-favorite villain Jaws portrayed by Richard Kiel before he died, which they released in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards. Most of the autograph cards in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are from recognizable actors and characters from the James Bond films. This is one of nicest-looking autograph card sets for James Bond trading cards that Rittenhouse Archives has ever produced.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set has eight cards not found in any of the boxes or packs. There are three promotional cards – the usual general release, an exclusive one that Rittenhouse Archives is distributing at conventions, and the binder-exclusive promotional card.

The casetopper for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set is a pretty cool Die Another Day movie poster metal card. The Die Another Day variant movie poster cards are not individually numbered, but it is a metal card and it features artwork from the most recognizable movie poster for the film.

Then there are the incentive cards and they are split between the average and the incredible. For every six-cases ordered, collectors of the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards received a Gold Signature Maud Adams as Octopussy autograph card. This card, predictably, looks amazing, though the value of it is not likely to be on part with prior 6-case incentive cards. The nine-case incentive card is an absolutely wonderful Christopher Lee full-bleed autograph card, posthumously released. This Scaramanga autograph card might well be the rarest Christopher Lee autograph card from Rittenhouse Archives and they look incredible!

The final two cards in the 2017 James Bond Archives set were exclusive to the Archive Box. Filling in one of the gaps in the Women Of Bond autograph card set is a Yvonne Shima autograph that was released as an exclusive. As well, Rittenhouse Archives released a true grail card in the form of a Sean Connery cut signature card, which could only be found in the Archive Box. The cut signature cards - the ones I've seen - look absolutely amazing with vibrant, clear signatures from Connery and they represent the only Sean Connery James Bond autograph card from Rittenhouse Archives.

Overall

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards might not be flawless, but they are a fitting tribute to Roger Moore and the final James Bond films that Rittenhouse Archives had yet to make card sets for. Collectors will want to hunt down everything they can from this set as it closes the book on James Bond - at least for the time - with a very high level of quality.

This set culls images from the James bond films Die Another Day, Octopussy (reviewed here!), For Your Eyes Only (reviewed here!) and A View To A Kill (reviewed here!)!

These cards are available in my online store! Please check them out here: 2017 James Bond Archives - Final Edition Trading Card Current Inventory!

For other James Bond trading card reviews, please check out my reviews of:
2009 James Bond Archives
2015 James Bond Archives
2016 James Bond Classics
2016 James Bond Archives - SPECTRE Edition

8/10

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Mental Illness Trumps Social Commentary In Bulworth!

The Good: Political message, Performances
The Bad: Character problems, Writing/themes
The Basics: Bulworth has some good ideas, which are undermined by the execution of its high-minded principles.


Every now and then, I finally get around to the massive list of films I have that people have recommended to me and I get to watch one. Tonight, the film that I've finally cleared from my list is Bullworth. For years, I have been politically active and between commentary and activism, friends have recommended various films to me. While I've long loved The West Wing (reviewed here!), one of the films that it took me a long time to get to was Bulworth. While I respect the people who recommended Bulworth to me, the film has enough flaws to be impossible for me to recommend.

The concept of Bulworth is not an inherently bad one, but its execution allows virtually the entire film to be written off as the ravings of a mentally ill man. One of the main warning signs of schizophrenia is a lingual problem called "clanging." Throughout Bulworth, the protagonist frequently raps in a way that is much more clanging than rational rebellion, which means Bulworth is more about a man suffering a full psychological collapse as opposed to a man who has a mid-life crisis and starts standing up for his long-abandoned principles.

As the 1996 elections loom, California Senator Jay Billington Bulworth finds himself despondent. Once a fiery liberal Senator, Bulworth has sold out all his principles. So, he takes out a massive insurance policy on himself and hires a hitman to kill him while he is campaigning in California. Bulworth's behavior becomes alarming to the party when he starts to call out the financiers of his campaign, straightforwardly telling his audiences that he is bought and paid for by various industries and rapping to them about how change won't come while there is money so intimately integrated in American politics.

While fleeing his financiers, Bulworth connects with Nina, a young woman under the thumb of a local drug lord, thanks to her brother's debts. Nina titillates Bulworth and takes him to a rave. Amid the affection and the drugs, Bulworth begins to feel like the man he once was and decides he no longer wants to die. As Bulworth and Nina flee to the ghetto, Bulworth comes to realize that the danger might be closer than he thought!

Bulworth is a heavy R for language and for as much as Warren Beatty tosses out the f-word, the film is more horrifying for the way the word "nigger" is thrown around. While the word is used as a form of characterization, the message of the film is frequently lost by the casual use of obscenities. In other words, the epitaphs are thrown around not as a function of political outrage, but rather to characterize Bulworth's mental decline and the culture of many of the black characters living in the ghetto.

The performances in Bulworth are almost universally wonderful. Halle Berry's performance as Nina is unlike any other role she had. It's weird watching Cloud Atlas (reviewed here!) and then go over to Bulworth where Berry looks so young running around with her thong sticking out, but Berry plays the spunky and desperate Nina surprisingly well. Similarly, Don Cheadle's L.D. is far from his articulate and socially active roles as he plays the part with unsettling menace.

Warren Beatty slouches through the role of Bulworth and he plays the part with a decent balance of slurring and hinting at the prior potential of the character. Bulworth might have once been an upstanding, principled man but he is a buffoon now and Beatty plays that astonishingly well.

Unfortunately, the quality of the performances is nowhere near enough to carry the film. At its best, Bulworth hints at establishing a high-minded debate about the critical problems with finance in American politics. At its worst, Bulworth is a high man running around clanging. The latter overwhelms the former and makes it impossible to recommend Bulworth.

For other political films, please check out my reviews of:
The American President
Game Change
All The President's Men

4/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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What A Difference A Year Makes: The 2015 James Bond Archives Trading Cards Are Less Spectacular Than Their Predecessor!

The Good: Not prohibitive to collect (yet), A couple of good autograph cards
The Bad: Misprints, Orientation issues, Vast pool of uninteresting autograph signers, Lack of impressive bonus cards
The Basics: The 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading cards are an awkward idea that makes for a poor sequel that feels rushed and churned out.


As a trading card collector and reviewer, I try to judge each set I encounter on its own. Every now and then, I find one that makes it too hard to do that. The 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading cards are one such set. While the 2015 James Bond Archives trading cards are only the second James Bond set I have reviewed, after the 2009 James Bond Archives set (reviewed here!), my lukewarm reaction to the 2015 James Bond Archives trading cards cooled even more when I compared them to the 2014 James Bond Archives trading cards. The 2014 James Bond Archives trading cards were chock full of autograph cards and relic cards and, other problems aside, the 2015 James Bond Archives trading card set looks anemic by comparison, having no relic cards, fewer chase cards, and less and lesser autograph trading cards.

As one might expect, the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading cards were produced in 2015 by Rittenhouse Archives, one of the biggest producers of non-sport trading cards in the industry, as their annual James Bond trading card release. For the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives cards, Rittenhouse went with a retro look and feel for a couple of the chase sets, following in the tradition and concept of the 2014 James Bond Archives trading cards.

Unfortunately, between misprints, autograph cards that were not returned in time and rejected cards, the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading cards had a rushed feel that made for a less remarkable or impressive trading card set than they could have been.

Basics/Set Composition

Fully assembled, the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading card set has 622 cards and is essentially four (or six) sets in one. As well, there is an oversized binder produced by Rittenhouse Archives that still does not quite hold the entire set. The set consists of 90 common cards and 532 bonus cards. The chase cards are mostly available in the packs of cards, though seven of them were incentive or promotional cards and could not be found in any of the packs. The 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading cards were released in boxes of twenty-four packs of five cards each.

Common Cards

The common card set for the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading cards consisted of ninety modern-looking trading cards. The entire common set recaps the plot of Quantum Of Solace (reviewed here!). One of the immediately problematic aspects of the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading card common card set is that the cards are inconsistently oriented. Some of the common cards are oriented with a portrait orientation, though most are oriented with the pictures in landscape format. That makes the set problematic to ty to arrange in any sensible way in a binder.

While the 2015 James Bond Archives cards have the traditional UV-resistant coating which is flawlessly applied, there is a rushed quality to the common set. There are some problematic misprints, most notably the repeated lines on both cards 43 and 44. While it is nice that Quantum Of Solace finally gets a full trading card set devoted to it, it is unfortunate that Rittenhouse Archives did not take the time to make sure it was done all right. Between the misprints and the lack of consistent orientation for the cards, the common set is executed problematically.

Chase Cards

The 525 chase cards that can be found in packs and boxes of 2015 James Bond 007 Archives essentially create three additional "common" sets and two bonus parallel sets, in addition to more traditional James Bond chase cards.

The 2015 James Bond Archives trading card set features three bonus sets that require multiple cases to complete. There are retro sets that retell the stories of You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and Goldeneye with 78, 93, and 102 cards each. These sets, like the Quantum Of Solace set are inconsistently oriented and are more problematic to try to put into binder pages in any sensible way. The You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me throwback sets are made of a more retro cardboard stock to make the cards from the older films seem like they were from the period in which the films were released.

One per box there are gold parallel cards for the Quantum Of Solace and Goldeneye sets. Each of those sets were limited to only 125 of each of the cards - though I have yet to figure out how that works with one set being 90 cards, the other being 102 cards and only one of each of those cards being found per box (somewhere, it seems, there should be a stockpile of Goldeneye parallel cards). The gold parallel cards are a particularly boring parallel card; they are distinguished from the common versions of their cards by gold foil "007" on the front of each card and an individual foil-stamped number on the back, in the middle of the card. In addition to being especially annoying to find and collate from the packs to the sets (the card numbers are in the lower left corner, the foil stamped number on the back is in the middle right, which is covered up when one organically shuffles the cards to organize them from the packs!), the parallel cards lack any real flash quality to them.

Continuing the tradition of fleshing out prior common sets that featured the rest of the Bond films as chase cards in new sets, the 2015 James Bond Archives set features SkyFall expansion cards, one per box. The SkyFall expansion cards add cards to the James Bond Heroes & Villains set (6 cards) and Dangerous Liaisons (8 cards). While I'm seldom impressed by common cards as chase cards, the 2015 James Bond Archives SkyFall expansion cards are just a mess. Apparently, there were supposed to be 9 Dangerous Liaisons cards and one was rejected by the studio. Rather than resubmit to make the full nine-card set, Rittenhouse Archives cut the card and the result was three of the eight cards ended up with troubling misprints. DL19 features the last shot of SkyFall on the front, with text on the back about the beginning of the film. Similarly, the card that has the image of M dying does not have text that accompanies it and the film's train combat sequence that is supposed to open the set is on one of the latter cards in the SkyFall Dangerous Liaisons set. While Rittenhouse Archives is already looking into fixing the three error cards (and possibly releasing the ninth card with an image that gets approved), one has to wonder why the card company did not delay the set to get it right (especially when one considers that the set was not a sell-out from the manufacturer).

Then there are the autographs. This set of trading cards features forty-five autograph cards, which is another step down from the prior few James Bond sets. Autograph cards in the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading card set are split between the familiar format of the 40th Anniversary set – which had very small pictures of the character’s head and were oriented in a landscape format – and the vastly more popular full-bleed style which was portrait oriented with giant images of the characters and a minimal signing space at the bottom. The nineteen 40th Anniversary style autographs are split between big names - Roger Moore, Dolph Lundgren, and Sheena Easton - and actors with minimal influence or interest to collectors. Sure, Stanley Morgan and Shane Rimmer are new signers, but is the concierge from Dr. No actually a character collectors care about? Mathieu Amalric and Lundgren are wonderful first-time signers, but given that they appear in this set on the less-popular format than some of the other signers, it is hard to consider them big selling points for the set! They flesh out an autograph set that inexplicably has a Caroline Bliss (she was A70 in the Complete James Bond set with virtually the same image) and yet another Jesper Christensen autograph card.

In the full-bleed autographs, there are some impressive and hard-to-find autographs, including one James Bond (George Lazenby), Christopher Lee (Scaramanga), Halle Berry, Teri Hatcher and Maud Adams (not as Octopussy). Lee has the grail card from the full-bleed set, as he died just over a week before this trading card set was released. The full-bleed autograph cards are unnumbered, which might be in keeping with prior releases, which is really annoying for collectors trying to complete the set. Also irksome is how many of the signers are duplicates from prior releases . . . when there are several big names that could have been a part of the set. Barbara Bach (from The Spy Who Love Me) still has not been the subject of a full-bleed autograph card and this seems like the set that it would have been perfect for. While Jeffrey Wright was originally slated to sign for this set, his card was delayed. The three SkyFall full-bleed autographs are not the most significant potential signers - Ben Whitshaw, Ralph Fiennes, and Javier Bardem have not yet signed (neither did Adele or director Sam Mendes) - and between the signers who have signed for prior releases and somewhat unremarkable minor-character signers, along with the fact that there are fewer autograph cards than in the prior Bond sets, the 2015 James Bond Archives cards have an unremarkable feel to them.

That leads us to a commentary on the collectibility of the autographs. In general, the autograph cards have decent and fairly even distribution. The thing is, and I don't know why collectors haven't figured this out yet and dealers haven't highlighted it, there are five autograph cards that are ridiculously hard to find in the 2015 James Bond Archives set. Five of the autograph cards are classified as Extremely Limited, meaning that the signers signed less than 200 of each card. While some of these have inherent value - Roger Moore, Christopher Lee's final card release - the other three are more hit or miss - George Lazenby is hardly the most popular Bond and Nadja Regin and Yvonne Shima are both obscure characters and have signed for prior trading card releases. What people have not seemed to do yet (save dealers who opened a ton of cases of these cards!) is run the numbers. Assuming that those five cards were actually signed at 200 of each card and taking into account that all five of the autographs were found in the archive boxes (let's very conservatively assume there were 30 Archive boxes), that means that any one of those Extremely Limited autographs is found at a rate of 170 out of 8500 (the number of boxes of 2015 James Bond Archives cards). My experience of opening 18 cases netted only one Extremely Limited autograph in every other case. That means that the five Extremely Limited autographs should have some inherent value to the trading card collectors . . . but they are still consistently selling for less than $100 each, which is insanely low compared to their rarity. The full-bleed autograph cards of Regin and Shima are unlikely to reach a value on par with their rarity because the characters/performers are comparatively obscure.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

The 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading card set has seven cards not found in any of the boxes or packs. There are three promotional cards – the usual general release, an exclusive one to conventions that Rittenhouse Archives attended, and the binder-exclusive promotional card.

The casetopper for the 2015 James Bond 007 Archives trading card set is a fairly bland SPECTRE preview card, which continues the downward trend of casetopper cards (they used to be cool autograph, sketch or autographed costume cards!). The SPECTRE cards are not individually numbered, foil or even sealed into their toploaders!

Then there are the incentive cards and these follow the trend of recent Rittenhouse Archives releases! For purchasing six cases, dealers received a gold series autograph of Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight from The Man With The Golden Gun. Ekland's autograph card is another example of a step down from the prior release (the 2014 Archives set had a Roger Moore gold series autograph for the six-case incentive), though the card looks good. For buying nine cases, dealers were given a Daniel Craig autographed costume card. They were limited and hand-numbered to 250 and are a tough sell after the Craig/Judi Dench dual autograph that was the comparable incentive card last year!

The final card in the 2015 James Bond Archives set is the Archive Box exclusive George Lazenby gold series autograph card. Found only in the archive boxes, which were randomly inserted into cases in addition to being an eighteen-case incentive for dealers, the Lazenby autograph is similarly undervalued as the rest of the set.

Overall

The 2015 James Bond Archives set is a set designed to keep interest in James Bond collecting through the release of SPECTRE this winter and foreshadow inevitable future releases that make full common sets for SkyFall and SPECTRE. Unfortunately, the annual release of a James Bond set was treated with less respect, enthusiasm and access than prior James Bond releases. The result is a placeholder set that feels like a placeholder . . . and an unfortunately sloppy one at that.

This set culls images from the James bond films Quantum Of Solace, You Only Live Twice (reviewed here!), The Spy Who Loved Me (reviewed here!) and Goldeneye (reviewed here!)!

These cards are available in my online store! Please check them out here: 2015 James Bond Archives Trading Card Current Inventory!

For other trading card reviews, please check out my reviews of:
Star Trek Aliens
Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 1 trading cards
Cryptozoic DC Comics Super-Villains

4/10

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Marvel Finally Gets Its Perfect Film With X-Men: Days Of Future Past!

The Good: Acting, Character work, Plot, Special effects
The Bad: Minutiae
The Basics: Mixing all of the best elements of the franchise, X-Men: Days Of Future Past resets the mutant section of the Marvel Universe with unparalleled success.


For all of the complaints that some might have with films based on DC Comics properties, the writers and directors of films from that comic book company have managed to succeed where Marvel Enterprises has failed. Twice. Those adapting DC Comics properties have managed to make two perfect films, which is a rarity and an exceptionally hard thing to do for action-adventure/science fiction/comic book genre films. And yet, for all the issues with making a movie that tends to rely upon trying to balance a story fans will love with creating a self-contained film that holds up independent of allusions to other films or books, to date, DC Comics properties had yielded the best results with The Dark Knight (reviewed here!) and Watchmen (reviewed here!). With the release of X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Marvel Enterprises finally scores a film that is damn near flawless, is thoroughly entertaining, and provides a compelling dose of character development and larger thematic elements to make a statement worth experiencing again and again.

To be fair to Marvel, the X-Men films have been some of the most consistently wonderful films based upon comic books; from Bryan Singer’s first dalliance in the universe fourteen years ago, the characters became a platform for discussing broader themes of alienation, prejudice, and fear. Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of X-Men: Days Of Future Past is how the film is constructed as a time-travel movie that is remarkably devoid of temporal problems and makes some of the most successful and rewarding allusions to prior films in the franchise. Is X-Men: Days Of Future Past dependent upon all of the X-Men films that preceded it? Yes and no. Yes, if one wants to get the richest possible experience out of viewing the film; no, in that the film ultimately acts much like Star Trek (reviewed here!) did to reboot that franchise. For the Star Trek franchise, there is a Universe 1.0 and a Universe 2.0. In a similar way, X-Men: Days Of Future Past ultimately introduces the X-Men Universe 2.0 to viewers. It is worth noting that X-Men: Days Of Future Past is loosely based upon the graphic novel Days Of Future Past, which I have not read; this review is purely one of the film.

Opening in a bleak future in Moscow where a small band of surviving mutants are hunted by Sentinels (robotic/organic killing machines that absorb the abilities of the mutants they fight to learn how to better kill mutants), the world has become a dark and desperate place. Most of humanity is dead (as the Sentinels zealously killed the humans who carried the genes that could give rise to future mutants) and mutants like Storm, Blink, Colossus, Bishop, Warpath, Sunspot, Kitty Pryde, Wolverine, Magneto and Professor X represent some of the last of mutantkind. After what appears to be a losing battle in which only Kitty Pryde and Bishop escape, the surviving mutants rendezvous in China a short time earlier. Kitty reveals to Logan just how they accomplished their “escape;” during the battle, she sends Bishop’s consciousness back in time a week or two in order to let their small band know where the Sentinels will hit them and when and they manage to evade the Sentinels by using Blink’s portals to simply not be there. Xavier and Magneto, hearing this and seeing its success, realize that this same technique has the potential to prevent the rise of the sentinels in the first place. To that end, they want to send a consciousness of a mutant back to their earlier body to stop Mystique from getting captured by Bolivar Trask, the inventor of the Sentinels, so he can never develop the adaptive technology that leads to the new wave of Sentinels. Unfortunately, Kitty is fairly certain that Xavier’s mind would never survive the trip back in time because of the mental torsion that comes with her technique. Logan, however, with his incredible healing power, could survive the trip, so he volunteers to be sent back to 1972 to try to save the world. The two catches: his body must be kept alive in the future long enough for him to succeed in his mission and he has to reunite the younger Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr.

Arriving back in the early 1970s where he is shocked to discover that the technique worked, Logan sets about to finding Xavier. While Logan heads to Xavier’s estate turned school for gifted youngsters, Mystique breaks a team of American mutants being used by the U.S. military out of Vietnam, where they were being sent home to be experimented upon by Trask. Trask, for his part, tries to sell the U.S. government on his nascent Sentinel program, but finds the Congressional leadership unwilling to spend money to create a weapon to use against American citizens. Logan finds that Xavier is disillusioned and is living at the school with only Hank McCoy. Having lost everything, Xavier is little more than a drug addict, as he has started to use one of McCoy’s treatments which allows him to walk, but at the cost of his telepathic abilities. Logan details his plan to try to save the future and even comes up with the means to get Erik out of his maximum security prison far underground at the Pentagon. After managing to convince Logan and Xavier, the trio picks up a mutant (Quicksilver) and they spring Magneto. Magneto quickly becomes game to find Mystique and in France, at the peace conference that would end the Vietnam War, Logan’s team encounters both Trask and Mystique. The stakes are raised in the past as the attempt to stop Mystique goes sideways and Trask gets a sample of what he needs, which breaks apart the alliance between Eric and Charles, while in the future, the team protecting Logan’s body is besieged by Sentinels!

There were several points in X-Men: Days Of Future Past where I found myself wondering if Bryan Singer and the writing team could pull off the concepts they were trying to present. For a time-travel film, the movie has remarkably few issues with temporal mechanics. In fact, it even has a built-in safety that is never addressed within the movie; if the first attempt to send Logan back fails, Kitty could send Logan’s consciousness to a few weeks earlier and try again! But three things stood out as potential sore spots that the writing team and Bryan Singer manage to adeptly pull off. First, from the moment the meeting in France falls apart, the characters are stuck in a clusterfuck of mistakes. Team members turn on one another, Trask gets a blood sample, and Logan’s consciousness slips back out of his body. The amazing thing is, even as all of the plans in the past go horribly awry, the film manages not to feel like a huge mistake. Instead, the characters keep pressing forward and innovating to adapt to their new circumstances and the brilliance of that is that it makes what could be a comedy of errors into a film intensely motivated by the characters. On the character front, X-Men: Days Of Future Past takes a turn that is reminiscent of the cave scene in The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here!) when it stops all of the action dead and moves for a philosophical conversation between the two Xaviers. The right turn in tone manages to work because the character’s journey is finally rectified in a sufficient way; Xavier can only rise to the heroic heights he needs to with help from himself and the infusion of personal strength plays out in an innovative way. Finally, the moment Magneto starts using his massive power to lift a stadium into the air, my stomach sank with the feeling that the entire sequence was going to be a pointless digression only to serve the needs of fans of extreme special effects. But there again, Bryan Singer pulls the sequence off (and I’m proud to say I figured out the purpose of the sequence moments before it was revealed!).

One of the problems with films based upon the X-Men has always been that there are so many characters to service and fans are bound to feel that some characters they might care about are getting the short end of the story. Cinematically, the X-Men films have largely (smartly) focused on Logan (Wolverine), Charles, and Erik (Magneto) above all the others. X-Men: Days Of Future Past is much the same, save that Magneto’s part is minimized in favor of adding more Mystique. For sure, Magneto is present, but much of his part in the film is to battle for Raven’s soul. Mystique has an actual character arc, fighting like an underground resistance fighter to an outright terrorist/assassin to a hero for her cause for which she is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. The character balance in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is sufficient to make for strong arcs for the main characters, though there are some elements that are hard not to miss. Most notable of those is the character of Rogue, whose footage was excised from the film months ago in order to get into the action earlier. Sadly, we shall have to wait months for the DVD/Blu-Ray release to confirm the theory that the body that a young scavenger finds in a pile in New York at the film’s outset is, in fact, Rogue’s (Rogue dying in the film’s early moments would justify the implicit relationship that Kitty Pryde now has with Iceman). Nicholas Hoult as the young Beast is given a truncated arc that makes him mostly into Xavier’s sidekick (without the chance for him to have any reflective, emotive, moments with Mystique). Most of the thrill in X-Men: Days Of Future Past on the character front comes in the form of cameos of X-Men past and present (even Emma Frost is given a nod if one watches the special effects closely as one of the final Sentinels seems to have her abilities!).

That said, the character journey of Charles Xavier roots all of the fantastic elements of X-Men: Days Of Future Past in a profoundly human journey. Xavier is essentially experiencing the holocaust that Erik Lehnsherr always warned him about and that Magneto fought to prevent. That Xavier’s only chance to help save the future and prevent that holocaust means that Wolverine must appeal to him at a time when he was the least hopeful makes for a compelling story in which a disillusioned man must learn to feel hope again. Amid all of the wicked cool special effects sequences and character turns, the story of Charles Xavier’s hope being rekindled grounds the film incredibly well.

By contrast, Wolverine’s journey in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is largely only appreciated by fans of the franchise. Wolverine is essentially a plot tool in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, but the climax of his journey is one that completely justifies the faith viewers have in the franchise. In that regard, X-Men: Days Of Future Past truly rewards fans of the franchise with payoffs to little moments seeded in earlier films. Magneto’s final line in X-Men: The Last Stand might have been paid off by the mid-credits scene in The Wolverine, but it entirely justifies his place in the future scenes of X-Men: Days Of Future Past as a full ally of Xavier’s. One of the few niggling continuity issues (in franchise, as opposed to in-film) is how Wolverine got his adamantium claws back (he lost them in The Wolverine and the mid-credits scene in that film pointedly illustrated that he did not get them back).

On the acting front, X-Men: Days Of Future Past is exactly what one would hope for. The cameos are wonderful and returning cast members do amazing jobs of reclaiming the roles they are known for. Omar Sy and Bingbing Fan are nice additions to the mutant mix as Bishop and Blink, though they are not given much to do – Kitty Pryde works on Bishop and Fan’s presence is nowhere near as impressive as the special effects used to illustrate Blink’s powers. Quicksilver is cool and he is performed with the film’s most comic presence by Evan Peters. And while Bolivar Trask might be presented with something of a monolithic façade, Peter Dinklage makes him entirely watchable. Even Josh Helman brings enough moments of suspicious eye movements and calculated tone to his deliveries to sell the menace of Stryker in his younger form.

The real moments given to the performers are given to James McAvoy (Charles Xavier in 1972) and Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique) to pull off. And they do. McAvoy plays Xavier with a tormented quality that we have not seen from Professor X before and yet, he manages to make the character feel like the same one that was introduced in X-Men: First Class. There are few films that so successfully find a previously likable and empowered protagonist wrestling with such crippling defeat and pulling it off the way McAvoy does as Xavier in X-Men: Days Of Future Past. He does this with a slouch and stare that sell the lost man who is essentially an addict and he plays it well.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Raven and whether she is in full blue make-up or essentially herself, she is given some of the key emotional moments in X-Men: Days Of Future Past and she knocks them out of the park. Lawrence plays Raven as strong and internally motivated with great posture and a sense of dignity that radiates from her. She embodies the “mutant and proud” slogan her character mocked in the prior film. But the key for her range comes in a scene that could simply seem to be an answer to plot questions fans of the franchise had. When Mystique learns the fates of the mutants who accompanied her and Erik after the Cuba incident, Lawrence plays shock and sadness wonderfully and Mystique is shaken to her core without the actress delivering any lines.

Some have said that X-Men: Days Of Future Past is inaccessible to non-fans, but the film is strong enough on context clues to answer all of the questions new viewers might have. Just as the film does not make explicit what Bishop’s mutant power is - it can be inferred enough through what happens to him to allow the viewer to enjoy his brief time in the film – the key elements of Charles’s lost nature, Logan’s pining for Jean Grey and even Erik’s rage are presented in a clear enough way that their characters make sense. Ultimately, X-Men: Days Of Future Past uses its broad canvas to tell a story that burns through its two hour, ten minute runtime at a lightning pace and makes viewers pine for more. Hopefully there will be a Director’s Cut that restores more footage to X-Men: Days Of Future Past; between that potential and the promise of the next sequel on the heels of one of the best franchise-ending scenes in all science fiction film history, fans have much to be excited about for the future of the X-Men franchise. But in the wake of a time travel movie that looks back and intimates about the future, X-Men: Days Of Future Past reminds us to enjoy the now and this is just the film to enjoy now with!
For other movies based upon the Marvel comic books, please check out my reviews of:
Guardians Of The Galaxy
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise Of Electro
The Wolverine
The Avengers
Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance
Captain America: The First Avenger
X-Men: First Class
Thor
Iron Man 2
The Incredible Hulk
Spider-Man 3
Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
Blade: Trinity
Elektra
Daredevil

10/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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So Many Wonderful Actors Create Something Horrible: Movie 43

The Good: Moments of actual humor, Wonderful cast used fairly well.
The Bad: Drawn-out concept, No character development, An equal number of misses as hits
The Basics: Movie 43 is a sketch comedy film that pushes the envelope of good taste with drastically mixed results.


When it comes to comedy films, there are very few that live up to the hype for repeated viewings. When, during a first viewing, viewers find themselves bored or frustrated with the premise of the film, it does not bode well for the film’s longevity in the collective unconsciousness. Slapstick comedies especially suffer from the problem of having limited rewatchability, as do sketch comedy programs. So, last year’s star-studded film Movie 43 had two potential strikes against it before the movie even began. Despite having an incredible cast of classy actors, Movie 43 is little more than an extensive, R-rated episode of MadTV or Saturday Night Live.

Movie 43 trades on its extensive movie-star cast to try to fool viewers into believing they are watching something other than lowest common denominator humor for under an hour and a half. The film, which is loosely held together with a plotline of a failed writer trying to sell his first script to a movie studio executive at gunpoint, is filled with raunchy humor that frequently crosses the line of good taste.

Opening with Charlie Wessler pitching to Griffin Schraeder, Wessler tells stories that he thinks are supposed to be heartwarming and crowd-pleasing. The first is a blind date between a woman who is excited to go out with one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Davis is rich, successful, single . . . and has a scrotum on his neck, which causes Beth quite a bit of discomfort to see during her dinner with him. That is followed by a couple talking with another couple about their homeschooled son. They tell their new neighbors all about how they haze their son and provide him with awkward high school-level first sexual experiences (which is beyond troubling to the neighbors and the audience). Then comes the “romantic comedy” pitch where a woman asks her boyfriend to poop on her and, after getting some advice, filling up on burritos and laxatives, he feels he needs to rush into meeting his girlfriend’s bizarre request.

The pitches continue with a young man working at a grocery store when the young woman who loves and loathes him comes in and the two give each other sexually explicit small talk . . . over the public address system in the store. There is a parody of an Apple product; the iBabe, which is a life-sized MP3 player in the shape of a naked woman. After the initial advertisements, the makers of the iBabe wrestle with the public relations nightmare of young men whose penises are mangled when they fuck the iBabe and encounter the unit’s cooling fan inside the vagina of the unit. Superhero fans are treated to a sketch wherein Robin is out on a speed date with Lois Lane and then Supergirl when Batman comes and cockblocks him. In another sketch a boy has a girl over for a first date when she has her first period and bleeds through her pants. The three males in the house freak out having no idea how to deal with the event and it only serves to embarrass and horrify her. A brutal segment follows in which two men capture and torture a leprechaun for his gold. Then comes a first date in which a man and a woman play an escalating game of truth or dare. They end up horribly disfiguring and humiliating one another before finally consummating their relationship. The penultimate segment is a hilarious mockery of sports movies. In it, a coach motivates his high school basketball team by pointing out that the students are black and they are going up against a white team so they are guaranteed to win. Partway through the closing credits comes the final segment, a sketch involving a couple that is interrupted by their (animated) cat, Beezel. Beezel has a crush on his owner, Anson, and when Amy walks in on Beezel masturbating to pictures of Anson in a swimsuit, a very violent series of encounters follow.

Such is the type of humor in Movie 43. Sadly, there is not really much more to the movie than the sketches themselves. Movie 43 scores as high as it does with me because it actually is amusing in points. Movie 43 is entertaining and it is funny when it is not being entirely disturbing.

Moreover, Movie 43 is a cinematic example of “better ingredients, better pizza” as it were. Getting Liev Schreiber, Terence Howard, Elizabeth Banks, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Kristen Bell and other a- and b-list actors to perform in the sketches makes them seem like something more than cheap shots and gross-out humor. But, that’s mostly what Movie 43 is; it’s just fortunate that the jokes land as often as they do, or else the movie would be far less than it appears.

For other works with Leslie Bibb, please visit my reviews of:
Iron Man 2
Confessions Of A Shopaholic
Iron Man
Talladega Nights: The Legend Of Ricky Bobby

2/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing.

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Living Up To The Hype: Cloud Atlas Is Smart And Complex!

The Good: Wonderful acting, Great make-up and effects, Creative concept, Decent plots
The Bad: Misses some important events/deliberately obscure at points.
The Basics: Told in six distinct time periods, Cloud Atlas follows the reincarnated variations of several characters who interact to change and save the world or humanity through their actions, beliefs, or art.


When I miss a movie in theaters these days, there are remarkably few I pine for and make an immediate effort to see when they are released on DVD; it’s the nature of being a reviewer, there is always something new to see, review, and promote. So, when I missed Cloud Atlas theatrically, it says something about my level of interest that I managed to get it in to watch so soon after its DVD release. The truth is, it was a film I wanted very much to see and given how many preview trailers I saw of it, I was pleasantly surprised how much of the film there still was to be seen (it’s a long movie). In fact, my only gripe with the promotions for the film was that the key voiceovers that explain much of the thematic points and narrative structure were included in the trailers.

Cloud Atlas is based upon a novel that I have not read and thus this is a very pure review of the film alone. With Cloud Atlas, the Wachowskis have now redeemed themselves for Speed Racer (reviewed here!) and they once again prove they have the magic touch for making films that are visually incredible and tell stories about humans overcoming amazing odds and all forms of oppression. The film, however, is long and gory with a climax that sees the demise of so many of the characters that when I, in a moment of wonder at the movie, exclaimed, “How the hell did this movie ever lose money?!” my wife glared at me pretty heavily.

Cloud Atlas is a rare film that is not easy to discuss without giving away major spoilers. However, in defying my usual format, I won’t spoil virtually anything in the film by foregoing the usual plot summary. Cloud Atlas has an interwoven narrative structure that leaps very abruptly between six different time periods. As a result, there is little point trying to discuss any single narrative at length because one of the fundamental points of Cloud Atlas is that many of the main characters are related and interact as different incarnations of themselves in each of the different generations.

Told from the perspective of a man in the distant future, Cloud Atlas flashes back to and meanders through the intertwined stories of a lawyer who is part of a slaving mission and is being poisoned by the ship’s doctor on his way back home, a young composer studying at the feet of an aged composer who is not nearly as talented as he is, an investigative reporter digging into a story on a nuclear reactor in 1973 and all the corporate forces working to stop her from exposing the dangers of the facility, a publisher who is on the run from murderous hooligans when his previously unsuccessful author gains overnight success after killing a book critic, a cloned worked in the future who is given the chance to becomes something much more than she is when her “programming” fails, and a primitive man living on an island after what is essentially the apocalypse who must help a civilized woman reach the nearby ruins of the long-lost civilization, while avoiding cannibals and his own inner demons. Laced between the threads is a musical work that many of the characters create/remember/dream of or otherwise share and the themes of humans in oppressive situations fighting to overcome the political and social conditions that keep themselves and others enslaved.

Cloud Atlas is a film that demands to be watched as it is packed with details (like the idea that the clone in the future story is the deity worshipped in the most distant future timeline!) and the directors bounce between time periods assuming the viewers are keeping up. I liked how each time period had its own dialect and while that frustrated my wife, I found it engaging to sit and mentally translate the concepts both past and future. Cloud Atlas does not slow down to explain itself, but almost all of the keys one needs to understand the film are present on screen. In fact, the only glaring omission for me was that the disaster in the future that led to the technological reversion in the most distant time period was not shown.

What makes Cloud Atlas worth watching is simple; while it plays to the same old themes the Wachowskis (who co-wrote – or adapted – and directed Cloud Atlas with Tom Tykwer) are known for, they make the struggle for freedom and dignity feel fresh again. Visually, the film is a marvel with seamless CG animals, amazing sound effects and make-up that should have won many, many more awards than it did (never have so many great actors worked so hard to be utterly unrecognizable and not trade at all on their celebrity!). Cloud Atlas lives up to the heights one expects from the Wachowskis when it comes to the quality of making big, bold, films.

The real story of why to watch Cloud Atlas is in the way the directors get amazing performances out of the entire cast. While greatness is expected of Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and Hugo Weaving, younger cast members like Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, James D’Arcy and Ben Whishaw hold their own with an apparently effortless ability. The cast is incredible and well-utilized (though poor Hugo Weaving needs to appear in a Wachowski film as something other than a villain!) and they are so engrossing in their performances that even for the recognizable actors, it is very easy to get drawn into their characters and forget anything outside the world of Cloud Atlas.

Ultimately, Cloud Atlas is engaging, clever and utilizes the film medium exceptionally well, making it well worth watching . . . more than once!

For other films with Jim Broadbent, be sure to check out my takes on:
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 2
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince
Inkheart
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull
The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe
Nicholas Nickleby
Gangs Of New York
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Smilla’s Sense Of Snow
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
Brazil

8/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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A Party Of Lasting Value Is Monster’s Ball!

The Good: Acting, Plot, Character
The Bad: Obvious sense of irony, Title
The Basics: Filled with great performances, compelling characters and a great plot, Monster’s Ball takes on prejudice in an interesting, human-driven story.


Last year, Monster’s Ball offered Halle Berry her Best Actress Oscar nomination and win. Instead, Berry ought to have fought for top or at least second billing in this drama. That Heath Ledger is second in the credits over Berry is insulting. And Halle's win for Best Actress was well deserved and not just for the nudity in this flick.

Monster’s Ball is an inadequately titled drama that puts racist Death Row guard Hank Grotowski into a moral dilemma with himself. When he and his son, Sonny, assist in putting to death Lawrence Musgrove, Hank finds himself put into a bunch of coincidental situations with Lawrence's widow, Leticia. Like Lawrence, Leticia is a Negro living in an unlikely present day in the Southern United States. That is to say that after half the film of trying to figure out what time period Monster’s Ball is set in, it is revealed that the setting is modern day Alabama (I had been betting on early '60s based on language and clothes), while the language, locations, and gas prices tend to indicate much earlier. Leticia encounters Hank at the restaurant she works at and later when Hank comes to her rescue when her son, Tyrell is hit by a car. The body count has been rising already as Sonny kills himself in reaction to the execution of Lawrence. Leticia and Hank come together through the passion they both have to want something, anything to go right in their lives.

And it works. As unlikely as it would seem, from the initial drunken sexual encounter, the two form a legitimate, stable relationship. And the film works. Perhaps to the film's credit, the DVD has only three deleted scenes and all of them are only a minute long. Add to that two are obvious cuts that deserved to be left out and you have a fine flick.

The strength of the film is in its characters. Hank has a compelling character arc as does Leticia. They both have incredible stories. Hank's roots are deeply inbred with prejudice and anger while Leticia's soul is one encumbered by an innate desire to love and fix things. The two come together wonderfully, learning and blending with one another.

The easy strength is in the acting. Halle Berry works well doing difficult dialect throughout the film. She wonderfully creates a character quite distinct and different from the actress. And that's what great acting ought to do. Billy Bob Thorton, he makes a character that is far from the creepy, detached figure he has been in every other film I've seen him in. Billy Bob Thorton infuses Hank with both Southern prejudice and Southern hospitality. He creates a character that embodies the worst and best of Southern White culture. He does it well here, too.

And I think it's right to credit the actors here. The writers or director is working with a sense of irony that is incredibly obvious. You have a white prejudiced man ordering chocolate ice cream and black coffee, you have the bullet that slays a son being put in a jar of baby food. Come on! Everything in this film is so obviously constructed that what the actors add to the film redeems much that the visual irony takes away.

Add to that the casting. Halle Berry was wonderful as Leticia. But . . . it was an act of cowardice on the part of the casting department. Halle Berry was great as Leticia, but she is a remarkably safe black woman to be cast in a role that involves prejudice and interethnic romances. What do I mean? It lessens the impact of a white character overcoming his prejudice against black people when the person who redeems him is not terribly dark skinned. Especially in a film like this when so very much of the film sets up obvious color contrasts. Halle Berry was a safe choice designed to eliminate the argument that the film goes too far and bolster Southern box office draws. But Halle Berry does an amazing job and were the film supposed to be about anything other than color blindness, she would be an ideal actress for any role.

It's a sad thing that prejudice still exists. In fact, ideally all roles in film ought to be about character and cast based on the best actors and actresses for the roles. It would be wonderful if the color of an actors skin did not matter. In telling a story like Monster’s Ball where ethnicity is integral, casting does matter.

And outside the title, which is fully explained in the film, but matters little to the subject, this film then has no other flaws.

In fact, the plot, while it requires the suspension of disbelief, is phenomenal. While it ends on a moment that, when I saw the trailer I swore I'd be upset if it ended at, the film works great. The last line comes at an ideal moment. And Monster’s Ball further flies in the face of convention by not tearing the characters apart when the various threads come together. Instead, it works great by not shaking Leticia up any more than she is. And Hank doesn't get right over his need for plastic spoons.

It might not be anything to cheer about, a woman who wants to be dependent falling in love with an emotionally distanced man who until recently was deeply prejudiced and angry, but it's an enjoyable film to watch and it has an important message. Sure, it's obvious in parts, but until we don't need the message any longer, it would be hard to do better than this film.

For other films that explore interethnic relations, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Crash
Gentleman’s Agreement
“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”

8.5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my Movie Index Page!

© 2012, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Franchise Dies A Little Bit More . . . Die Another Day!

The Good: Action sequences, Acting, Technical gadgets
The Bad: Obvious plot and character twists, Lack of reality in character
The Basics: In a James Bond movie that could have changed everything, Bond quickly gets back in action and the hopeful viewer gets bored.


Let me first say that when I was twelve, I went through my "James Bond phase." I watched all of the movies that were out until then, I read all sorts of books about James Bond, I immersed myself in Bond the way most people immerse themselves in Star Trek or marine biology. For about a year, I thought Bond was the coolest cat in the neighborhood and I gobbled up all I could about Bond and then I was done. It just couldn't hold me. Somewhere before my thirteenth birthday, I looked back at all of the Bond stuff and said, "Wow, this is the same thing over and over." So, I was not initially drawn to watch Die Another Day.

Why did I then? Certainly not just to have a review to write. Actually, I had heard excellent things about how the beginning of Die Another Day changed Bond's character. It was leaked pretty early on that Bond was tortured in the beginning and Brosnan claimed he was playing an edgier, wounded Bond. And that, I thought, was different and worth watching.

Die Another Day finds James Bond captured by the North Koreans. They do, in fact, torture Bond for about a year (a sequence we witness throughout the opening credits), until he is released in a prisoner exchange. Bond then quickly gets back into the swing of being a British spy, this time working outside the mainstream with an American agent named Jinx to foil yet another criminal mastermind who has designed yet another superweapon which will kill us all, this time some satellite-based super heat death ray.

Sigh.

I was promised something different. Pierce Brosnan, I want my seven bucks back! The truth of the matter is that, much like Star Trek Voyager, here you have a story that sets up an intriguing change, a fundamental shift in the character, and then it is completely written over. That is to say that, despite the many times Bond has been captured throughout the series, he was never tortured as extensively as he was in the beginning of Die Another Day. This should have made him realize that he could be touched. Yet, the movie progresses much the same as any other Bond movie.

There is no edgier, shaken Bond here. And what a disappointment! The movie itself might have been fine, save that in addition to not having a shaken Bond, the film went out of its way to put Bond in circumstances that make it ridiculous for Bond to not be frazzled, shaken, wounded. For perfect example, one of the classic ways Bond is tortured is through use of heat and cold. That is to say he is taken from super hot saunas where he is dehydrating and thrown into the coldest meat freezers. It's a classic form of torture. Having experienced that, it makes no sense that later in the movie when Bond goes from a nice warm car interior (because what kind of idiot drives around the glaciers without the heat on?), into freezing water, into a tropic jungle without any evidence of discomfort physical or emotional. Talk about a prime time for flashbacks.

The sad thing is, this could truly have shaken up the franchise. Instead, it's the same old story. Bond goes on mission, encounters people, one who will ally with him, one who will betray him, finds villain, is captured, makes a daring escape, thwarts criminal (if you're reading this review and thinking that gives away too much of the plot, I apologize, apparently you haven't seen more than two Bond movies), makes a wisecrack, the movie ends. And if nothing else, Die Another Day goes to prove the idea that you can't simply tell the same story over and over again, even with improving the cast, and put out a high caliber product.

Sure, Pierce Brosnan is Bond. This was the first outing I had seen where he was Bond. He was fine as Bond, there was not a hint of Remington Steele in his performance. He was good, but he played the character as solid and trusting and sex-crazed as any of the others who had played Bond.

And you have a pretty high caliber Bond woman in Halle Berry. She's fine, but at the end of the day, she's played essentially like any other Bond woman; dependent on Bond. It's a bit of a disappointment that the proposed Jinx movie won't happen, because it had potential to expand the role beyond that. It could even be salvaged if Jinx and Bond worked together from this point onward, but that's unlikely.

The supporting cast of Judy Dench (M), John Cleese (Q), Toby Stephens (Gustav), Rosamund Pike (Miranda) and Rick Yune (Zao) are all fine in their roles, but they play them like the "Bond Types" they are. There's nothing extraordinary about any of them, which is unfortunate because Dench and Cleese are both great performers.

In the end, Die Another Day is simply another James Bond movie, with no real surprises for anyone who has been a fan. It's an action adventure movie and it does that well. But sometimes, I expect more out of a franchise. I guess this one did well enough at the box office that the franchise will live up to this episode's name.

For other works featuring Judi Dench, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Pride And Prejudice
The Chronicles Of Riddick
A Room With A View

5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2004 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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