Skyfall: The maturing of James Bond

M: Are you taking me hostage? 

James Bond: You could call it that. 

 
On Monday night, I saw Skyfall with my wife and a dozen-odd people scattered around the 300-seat auditorium. People were playing musical chairs, switching their designated seats with the empty ones for a better view. We stayed put in ‘E’ row from the rear: the view was clear. There were no latecomers after the credits had rolled or after the interval was over. The theatre was nearly empty and the twenty-third James Bond flick would've looked the same no matter where you sat.

Except for Bond, Daniel Craig’s third outing as the famous British spy. He is different in Skyfall, more vulnerable, more appealing, and more convincing than he is in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Much of it has to do with his boss M, the head of MI6, the British intelligence service, who casts a long shadow on Bond and everything he does in the film, and vice versa.

Bond’s mission is closely entwined with the safety of his commanding officer, played by Judi Dench in what is, unarguably, her best Bond film ever. Forget her previous six roles as M. Get a load of her in Skyfall.

007’s mission—to retrieve a computer hard drive encoded with classified details of undercover NATO agents in terrorist organisations—leads him to his nemesis, Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a former MI6 agent turned rogue.

A rogue not of his own making, he says, rather forced to become one by M who let the Chinese have him for a few years. Silva, who sports golden hair and laughs in an insane way, comes back to avenge his incarceration and torture. He takes out a few MI6 agents, destroys a part of MI6 headquarters in London, and then comes after M, nearly killing her at an intelligence committee meeting.

Silva is M’s past and he is haunting her present. Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army and Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, is forcing her, with political persuasion, to retire gracefully, because her computer system and her position in MI6 have been compromised. But the formidable M stays to fight Silva with her most trusted agent by her side.

Skyfall is as much about M as it is about James Bond. Director Sam Mendes gives M a wide berth in the film, as wide as the sweeping and breathtaking landscape of Scotland and its cloud-capped hills—the scene of the final battle between Bond and Silva that plays out in Bond’s family estate, Skyfall.

The destruction of Skyfall is reminiscent of the destruction of Wayne Manor in Batman Begins and you wonder how much of it influenced Mendes, especially since both Bond and Wayne were orphaned at a very young age. However, unlike Bruce Wayne who vows to rebuild his family home brick by brick, 007 looks back at his burning estate and mutters that he never much cared for it. He turns around and follows Silva who is following M into the dark night.

M never says so in any of her films but there are enough hints to suggest that James Bond is her favourite agent. Her concern for Bond’s well-being has been all too obvious in the previous six films. In Skyfall, M takes her strictly businesslike relationship with Bond to a new and personal level—that of a “mother” and her favourite “son” who swears to protect her with his own life. You know he’s doing a job he’s trained for, and die if necessary, yet you can’t help thinking there’s more to the two than an intel head and her most trusted agent.

If I were to describe Skyfall in one word, I’d say, as the British would say, bloody brilliant and if I were to rate the film on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a respectable 8. The film scores well on most aspects we have come to associate with a Bond film, right from the time the credits roll to a smorgasbord of kaleidoscopic colours set to a great theme song, Skyfall, by English singer Adele. Noted American composer and conductor Thomas Newman sustains the musical narrative of the film with some fine background score. Unlike in his previous two films, Craig’s Bond also delivers some notable one liners in this, a throwback to the days of Roger Moore.

An 8 out of 10 does not mean Skyfall has no shortcomings. There are plenty of those too. I’ll mention some.

One, the jaw-dropping fight scene between James Bond and mercenary killer Patrice on the roof of a speeding train somewhere in the Turkish highlands should mark out 007 as a superhero, which, in a way, he is, more so in the last few movies in the series.

Two, the blonde-haired Javier Bardem as Silva is far from convincing. In spite of the ominous nature of his mission, a terrorist plot against MI6 and its chief, Bardem fails to move you in the way that his Anton Chigurh does in No Country for Old Men. He talks too much and laughs too much though I have a hunch his villainous persona will pay off, especially among his fans.

And three, you wonder why James Bond whisks M away to his dilapidated hideout in Scotland with few weapons and improvised booby traps as his only defence against Silva and his men who are, intentionally, put on their tail. You’re thinking, “Bond, you could have taken M anywhere in the world!”

Skyfall may not be the best Bond film ever but it is the best of Daniel Craig’s three Bond films. A terrific entertainer.

VINTAGE PICTURES

The age of Dickens

Dickens by Leslie Ward

In the Literature & Books section of The Booklovers Magazine No.1 Vol.1, January-June 1903, published by The Library Publishing Company, Walnut Street, Philadelphia, USA, Andrew Lang presents a fascinating study on Charles Dickens. Lang (1844–1912), who was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, contributor to the field of anthropology, and best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales (courtesy: Wikipedia), dissects Dickens and his writing with a fine-tooth comb. The article has a few interesting illustrations of the celebrated English writer from Portsmouth. 

Among many things, Lang says...

After the original sketch by "Spy"

"The century in which Dickens lived and wrote has gone where the roses go. He died before young readers now alive were born. His world is not their world ; many conditions of life have altered ; opinions have changed; some manners and customs which he knew are scarcely recognizable. "The great divide" between the age of Dickens and ours is the railway cutting, as Thackeray said. Dickens' first and best novels deal with the old stagecoaches and the life of the road, though he lived to suffer in a great railway accident. Criminals, in Dickens' time, were publicly hanged for the edification or amusement of the crowd. When he visited America for the first time, slavery was a flourishing institution in the Southern States. Any American by reading Martin Chuzzlewit will perceive that, even allowing for wild, exaggerated caricature, the world has changed out of knowledge since the youth of Dickens."

"I have a tenderness. One who is still so happy as to have all of Dickens unread before him had probably better begin with David Copperfield. If he does not enjoy this delightful book, it is likely that he had better abandon his researches into Dickens. The story, as every one knows, is partly autobiographical."

An etching by Theodore Joyeuse

"After Copperfield, Pickwick ought to be read. Dickens never again wrote such a book—nobody has ever written such a book; but some readers may prefer Copperfield, which contains more story and plenty of ' the love interest." After reading these a man may go on with confidence."

Original Pickwick cover with Dickens autograph

BOOK BUYS

Death Lives in the Mansion by Douglas Locke

The dead join forces against the living—Helen Peters stands alone in a world falling apart... 

I have no idea who Douglas Locke is though I'm assuming he is an American writer who has, in fact, written two other novels, The Drawstring and The House of Two Wives. I picked up this 256-page 1967-novel from a secondhand bookstore. It appears to be a thriller set in an old, seemingly haunted, mansion and revolving around Helen Peters and her patient Lyman Harpur who is being murdered before her eyes. Can she save him from his killer whose identity she can only guess? I haven't read the paperback yet though the blurb on the back cover suggests a gripping suspense drama in the big house that echoes with weird voices during the night.

Here's what it says...

"Someone—or something—wanted Lyman Harpur to die...die in agony! Helen Peters watched her patient in his trance and knew that his soul was suffering the torments of the damned...and the medical doctors could do nothing to save him! Their science belonged to the lost world. Yet Helen knew that Lyman Harpur was being murdered vefore her very eyes...and the would-be killer was his wife! But which wife? Was it beautiful Phoebe, current mistress of the mansion in the French quarter of New Orleans—beautiful and vindictive Phoebe? Or was it Celeste, the first Mrs. Harpur—Celeste, who was dead!"

What do you think? Have you heard of this author or read this book?

BOOK REVIEW 

Journey Toward Death (1983) by Amos Aricha

My contribution to Patti Abbott’s Friday’s Forgotten Books over at her blog Pattinase is a suspense novel about the making of the Israeli mafia in America written by a noted Israeli writer.

Mossad’s Nimrod. Tough, brilliant, he is the arrowhead of this treacherous mission, a man marked for death... 

Nimrod Eden is a former commando in the Israeli Defence Forces, who fought during the Yom Kippur War, and is now a freelance agent for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, in New York. Nimrod listens to western classical music on his Walkman, while running long distance every morning. He speaks fluent English, seldom carries a gun, and moves around with an attaché case with a tape recorder inside. He seldom records the conversations of sources and suspects without letting them know. Nimrod is soft spoken, often sentimental, and experiences fear like everyone else. He has a habit of patting down his mop of hair and usually has a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

A lieutenant-colonel in the intelligence wing, Nimrod may not seem like the battle-hardened Mossad agent you hear about in spy fiction. But he is every inch the tough and intelligent secret operative you read about in espionage thrillers.

In Journey Toward Death, by Israeli writer and painter Amos Aricha, the secret agent from Manhattan is called upon to investigate the mysterious liaison between an Israeli immigrant David Biton and Arab and North African delegations to the UN, ranging from Egyptians, Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Tunisians, and Moroccans.

Mickey Katz, the security chief for the Israeli delegation to the UN, deems it a high-risk security issue and pulls out all stops to get to the bottom of it. He sends in Nimrod whose investigations take him from New York to Los Angeles where he uncovers a sinister trail of conspiracy at the heart of which lies a brutal war for control of the drug market of the entire west coast.

Nimrod soon finds out that Biton’s secret meetings with the UN delegates are linked with his desperate bid to become the new drug kingpin in California. He was earlier the uncrowned king of the Israeli mafia, the Beit Dagan and Bat Yam gangs, and later mastermind of the drug racket in Europe before the powerful West German dealers and the Chinese mob forced him to immigrate to America where he tries to establish a new drug mafia. 

Israeli author Amos Aricha
Photo: www.artphotoisrael.co.il 

His investigations take Nimrod all over Los Angeles, particularly to the Israeli pockets in downtown Hollywood, in the Valley, on Pico Boulevard, and businesses on Fairfax—all Biton’s territory—and right in the midst of a bloody war between Biton and his men and the established mafia families of the west coast, in particular a man called Mike Billeti who controls it all.

Nimrod Eden must get to the bottom of the conspiracy before Biton or Billeti (you don't know who) finally succeeds in their attempts to eliminate him.

This is the first time I have read about Israeli immigrants and the Israeli mafia in America, one of the main reasons why I enjoyed the novel. The other is the presence of the Sakhara, an old woman who claims to have psychic powers and travels all the way from Beit Dagan, Israel, to Los Angeles with her niece, the beautiful Dalith, to prove that Biton, the youngest of her four sons, is not a murderer.

Journey Toward Death moves at a slow pace with very little action in the initial two hundred pages. Aricha’s prose is simple and engaging. The plot is uncomplicated and the narrative weaves in and out of the lives of various Israelis, friends and foes alike, as Nimrod Eden tries to unravel the truth. I picked up the novel because I’d never heard of Amos Aricha before and also because the blurb on the back cover promised high suspense. It lived up to my expectations. 

Amos Aricha is a well-known painter, author and playwright from Israel. His other novels include Hour of the Clown, The Flying Camel, Spymaster, Phoenix and Fenice, the last two he co-authored with Eli Landau. Phoenix is apparently his most famous book. 

FILM REVIEW

Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) 

or Two Eyes, Twelve Hands

This Tuesday, for Overlooked Films & Television at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom, I’m going to get off the Hollywood bus and hop on to the Bollywood bandwagon and write about an award-winning black-and-white classic Hindi film. Don’t forget to check the other entries over at Todd’s blog. 

The “two eyes” belong to a kind jail warden and the “twelve hands” belong to six dreaded convicts.

The jailer, Adinath (V. Shantaram), takes the dirty (half) dozen under his wing in a valiant effort to make virtuous men out of monsters and rehabilitate them in civil society. The police officer takes the paroled men to an old farmhouse in the countryside and orders them to work on the fields and do odd jobs around the place. Adinath joins them in hard labour and together they produce a rich harvest. 


Do Ankhen (two eyes) Barah Haath (twelve hands) is the touching story of one man’s belief in, and compassion for, six convicted murderers. The jailer is aware that the odds of reforming the prisoners are high and so are the costs of failure. He is undaunted and determined to succeed because he knows what he is doing is right. 

The men are shabby, unkempt and unruly and look like they are straight out of a medieval horror film. They appear mentally unstable and in one scene even beat up the jailer. The twelve hands don’t have even a modicum of decency as they appear to lust after Champa (Sandhya), a street vendor who sings her way from one village to another, and exhibit traits of anger and greed that is common to their lot. The men even try to escape but return to their ramshackle dwelling because the jailer has finally made his way into their hearts and they in turn have learned to respect him.

Do Aankhen Barah Haath, directed by V. Shantaram, who was one of India’s renowned directors, ends on a tragic note. By then, however, the jailer has succeeded in his mission. 

Actress Sandhya as Champa in the film. 

Shantaram, who, in real life, married his co-star Sandhya, kept the moral of the story simple—man is inherently good and even if he strays, owing to adverse circumstances, it’s never too late to bring him back on the path of righteousness and make a new man out of him.

The story, screenplay and dialogue are by G.D. Madgulkar, a noted Marathi poet, lyricist, writer and actor. Marathi is the official language of the western state of Maharashtra of which Bombay (Mumbai) is the capital city, and home to Bollywood. 

Adinath (Shantaram) gets a shave from one of the convicts.

Typically, the film also has some good songs, with music and lyrics by Vasant Desai and Bharat Vyas, both well known names in the film industry. The most popular song is Aye Maalik Tere Bande Hum, which loosely translates into Oh master, we’re your servants, sung by the Indian nightingale Lata Mangeshkar. The song, rendered by Champa in the film, is actually a paean to the love and respect that she and the six men have for jailer Adinath.

One of the noteworthy elements of Do Aankhen Barah Haath is the cinematography by G. Balkrishna who has shot portions of the black-and-white film against a stark backdrop, a sweeping landscape. If I remember correctly, in one scene, the convicts are making their way through barren land and there is absolutely nothing around them except for the dilapidated house. The filmmakers didn't bother too much with the lighting as many of the scenes are in contrasting shades of black and white. It gives the impression that Shantaram made his film only with a camera, seven actors, and a rundown house in the middle of nowhere. 

The film's pre-release in 1957, apparently, received a “cold response” from Bollywood stalwarts but as Usha Prabhatkumar, Shantaram's daughter-in-law, was quoted by The Times of India as saying, “Do Aankhein Barah Haath touched the nation's chord as it revolved round the universal concepts of love and brotherhood.”

Fifty-five years later, the Indian cinemagoer still feels a deep kinship with V. Shantaram’s classic.

Stamp of a Statesman: Jawaharlal Nehru

The following quotes have been excerpted from Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (1941), which the first Prime Minister of independent India dedicated to his wife Kamala Nehru. His prose in this book as well as in his other two major works, The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History, is mersmerising.

"(Toward Freedom) was written entirely in prison, except for the postscript and certain minor changes, from June 1934 to February 1935. The primary object in writing these pages was to occupy myself with a definite task, so necessary in the long solitudes of jail life, as well as to review past events in India with which I had been connected to enable myself to think clearly about them. I began the task in a mood of self-questioning and, to a large extent, this persisted throughout. I was not writing deliberately for an audience, but, if I thought of an audience, it was one of my own countrymen and countrywomen. For foreign readers I would probably have written differently, or with a different emphasis..."

"Letter writing and receiving in jail were always serious incursions on a peaceful and unruffled existence. They produced an emotional state which was disturbing; for a day or two afterward one's mind wandered, and it was difficult to concentrate on the day's work."

"My main occupation (in jail), however, was reading and writing. I could not have all the books I wanted, as there were restrictions and a censorship, and the censors were not always very competent for the job. Spengler's Decline of the West was held up because the title looked dangerous and seditious. But I must not complain, for I had, on the whole, a goodly variety of books." 

"The only books that British officials heartily recommended were religious books or novels. It is wonderful how dear to the heart of the British Government is the subject of religion and how impartially it encourages all brands of it."

"I was well up in children's and boys' literature; the Lewis Carroll books were great favorites, and The Jungle Books and Kim. I was fascinated by Gustave Dore's illustrations to Don Quixote, and Fridtjof Nansen's Farthest North opened out a new realm of adventure to me. I remember reading many of the novels of Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, H.G. Wells's romances, Mark Twain, and the Sherlock Holmes stories. I was thrilled by The Prisoner of Zenda, and Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat was for me the last word in humor. Another book stands out still in my memory; it was Du Maurier's Trilby; also Peter Ibbetson. I also developed a liking for poetry, a liking which has to some extent endured and survived the many other changes to which I have been subject."

"It is a little absurd to discuss this question of freedom of mind in prison in India when, as it happens, the vast majority of the prisoners are not allowed any newspapers or writing materials. It is not a question of censorship but of total denial." 

"In Lucknow Jail I used to sit reading almost without moving for considerable periods, and a squirrel would climb up my leg and sit on my knee and have a look round. And then it would look into my eyes and realize that I was not a tree or whatever it had taken me for. Fear would disable it for a moment, and then it would scamper away."

"Reading was my principal occupation during those winter days and long evenings. Almost always, whenever the superintendent visited us, he found me reading. This devotion to reading seemed to get on his nerves a little, and he remarked on it once, adding that, so far as he was concerned, he had practically finished his general reading at the age of twelve!"

"Sometimes I would weary of too much reading, and then I would take to writing. My historical series of letters to my daughter kept me occupied right through my two-year term, and they helped rne very greatly to keep mentally fit."

"From sunset to sunrise (more or less) we were locked up in our cells, and the long winter evenings were not very easy to pass. I grew tired of reading or writing hour after hour, and would start walking up and down that little cell four or five short steps forward and then back again. I remembered the bears at the zoo tramping up and down their cages. Sometimes when I felt particularly bored I took to my favorite remedy, the shirshasana (a yogic exercise) standing on the head!"

"Travel books were always welcome records of old travelers, Hiuen Tsang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, and others, or moderns like Sven Hedin, with his journeys across the deserts of Central Asia, and Roerich, finding strange adventures in Tibet. Picture books also, especially of mountains and glaciers and deserts, for in prison one hungers for wide spaces and seas and mountains. I had some beautiful picture books of Mont Blanc, the Alps, and the Himalayas, and I turned to them often to gaze at the glaciers when the temperature of my cell or barrack was 115 F or even more. An atlas was an exciting affair. It brought all manner of past memories and dreams of places we had visited and places we had wanted to go to." 

"One extravagance which I have kept up will be hard to give up, and this is the buying of books."

For previous Celebrity Stamps, see under Labels to your right.

BOOK PREVIEW: Fantasy

Memoirs of the Moon Dragon by D.W. Middleton

Ripped out of his home world and transformed by the Source of Life itself, Waldo is plunged headlong into an epic saga of good versus evil.

Australian writer D.W. Middleton spins an "enthralling tale of magical adventure" in his new fantasy novel In Memoirs of the Moon Dragon: The Maligrandé and the Source of Life published by Trafford Publishing of Bloomington, Indiana, USA.

The novel chronicles the adventures of two friends, Waldo and Maidrag (the moon dragon), who, together, "complete the Source of Life, which bestows upon Waldo powerful gifts from the elements of earth, water, fire and air. As Waldo and Miadrag set about their quest to recover the Great Book of Knowledge, they soon discover that once they have it, they will be pursued by their evil counterparts, the Salimandé and the sinister Red Dragon, who has but one desire: to be rid of them once and for all!"

Middleton says: "Memoirs of the Moon Dragon demonstrates how the power of love conquers all manner of disastrous circumstance, and that love being the essential element of the Source of Life, will find a way to restore all things good to the world."

The 138-page novel was published on May 10, 2012, and is available in Perfect Bound Softcover (B/W) format and the price is $14.53.

Source: Trafford Publishing