The Greatest Trick Misogyny Pulled Was Convincing The World It Didn't Exist

A confession: At roughly midnight on Sunday night, as the social media sphere found itself aflame with the torch it put to Seth MacFarlane's Oscar performance, I simply poured another Maker's Mark and carried on with my life.

I didn't think it was misogynistic until you told me it was. I didn't think it was offensive until you told me it was. It was a comedian doing comedy. As far as I was concerned, the conversation needn't proceed farther than, "Did he make me laugh or not?".

Should I feel bad that such thoughts never occurred to me? Short answer yes with an if, long answer no...with a but.

Even as I write this, I know what my thesis for this post is. I know what I'm trying to say. If it seems as if I'm rambling and having trouble finding my point, though, it's because I am. I'm confused and torn, but believe me, I'm trying to understand where the other side is coming from.

Eh. That'll do for the point right there: Often, if not always, it's best to shut the fuck up and listen.

Do I think MacFarlane is a misogynist? No. I'd even teeter into the territory of "absolutely not." In his hands were concepts that might have birthed satirical fruit, but he never took it beyond the initial phase of shock humor (watch the masterful stand-up of Louis CK to learn how a straight white male can use the words "faggot," "cunt," and "nigger" and get away with it). But none of it struck me as overtly sexist. Comedy is a sacred ring where anything goes. I sing among the Greek chorus that in comedy, if you find it offensive, you suck it up and move on.

My views on comedy haven't changed. Anything can still be funny if you find the right target and use the right spin. Many women found MacFarlane's antics misogynistic, and I didn't get it.

Now cue the world's most obvious lightning bolt. Not only did I not get it, I absolutely can't get it.

Contrary to high school taunts, I am a male. I'll never feel sexism the same way a woman will because I've never experienced it. I'll never notice sexism in society the same way because it doesn't stand out to me. I've never had to walk on certain sides of the street or worry about the message my clothes might send or lie about dating someone to leeches trying to pick me up.

These are things I don't understand, but that sure as shit doesn't give me the right to dismiss them.

I'm neither trying to defend nor attack MacFarlane. God knows his bruises from Internet cyber punches stand on their own. I'm also not trying to explain why I'm not a sexist or walk McClane-style across broken glass to explain the views of other men. Such battles miss the point.

It's not men vs. women, misogyny vs. acceptance, us vs. them, black/white, wrong/right. It's me taking the pathetic little step I can to hold eye contact and listen. To not be a brick wall and say, "Oh, you just can't take a joke." To be a willing partner in an ongoing, evolving understanding

My job as a man isn't to be the savior of women. My job doesn't even revolve around being a man. My job is the same one we all share. If someone says they're hurting, then shut the fuck up and ask why.

Maybe Seth MacFarlane really is a misogynist. I truly don't think so, and I truly think his jokes were simple attempts at humor that missed the mark. Maybe it's indicative of how systematic misogyny is that he didn't notice and I didn't notice.

These are all questions best left to people wiser in the non-pop culture world than I. At least I can recognize the questions' validity. No doubt that on the epiphany scale, this piece ranks one step above, "Water chases the thirsties away." My apologies. But sometimes it's just easier living in the box.

Now weren't we supposed to be talking about movies?

Movie Catch-Up: THE HOBBIT Is Boredom Captured In Real Time

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY
(dir. Peter Jackson, 2012)

 
What’s the sound of one hand counting money?
 

That’s not a riddle. The answer’s easy.

As blatant a cash-grab as it comes, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” offers a nearly three hour glimpse into the mind of whatever Peter Jackson was dreaming before he decided to shoot. Nothing feels vital. Nothing feels built to last. It’s all a blank canvas for Jackson to regurgitate his ideas without a filter and charge us 10 bucks three times over for the privilege.

I can think of movies I hated more. But few in recent memory made me this angry. Like I had been handled by a filmmaker who didn’t give a damn if we were entertained, didn’t give a damn if we were bored, and didn’t give a damn whether his movie was working. With his (deserved) Oscar gleaming on the mangle, he set forth to build an extended preview for two other movies.

Most of the problem seems to be lack of constraints. When he made the “Lord of the Rings” series he was a director with a mission to make fantasy a viable mainstream genre, up against a system assured of his failure. Every step he took, fans held their breath waiting for their dreams to be rendered moot. Making those movies was one long string of “No.”

And now the lyrics to the song are nothing but “Yes.” Three hours covering 100 pages of novel? Yes! An extended 20 minute sequence where Bilbo wonders why people are arriving for dinner? Yes! Random giant living mountains that fight when thunder spews or something, leaving our heroes stranded on the side until the scene ends and the story resumes? Why not!

Creativity doesn’t live in unfettered access. It lives in a box. You’re put in the box, shown the boundaries, and use your brains to fight your way out. With Jackson now appearing to be a man without rules, his thoughts just ooze across the landscape.

What a series of aimless, borderline lazy thoughts they are too! His “LOTR” films had a drive. A propulsion. You knew what the characters’ goals were, what they needed to get there, and thus their actions carried genuine weight. No such weight exists here. Instead it feels oddly like some hang-out TV show like “Dukes Of Hazzard.”

You want one scene leading logically to the next? No such luck. Just a mishmash of dwarves getting’ into random jams and Gandalf getting’ ‘em out. How are them Middle Earth boys gonna get out of this one, you wonder!? Oh right. They have a fucking wizard with a magic stick. Enjoy your movie, suckers.

That lack of structure leads to lack of tone – “The Hobbit” never quite pins down what kind of movie it wants to be. J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel was essentially a kid’s book. Fantastical creatures go on a quest of relatively little consequence, fight a few battles, and that’s that. Light breezy stuff requiring a light breezy movie.

And that’s what Jackson provides…among many other movies. While he is indeed adapting “The Hobbit,” he’s also making what is now consciously a “LOTR” prequel. As such, he makes the clumsy effort to meld the whimsy of “The Hobbit” with the direness of “LOTR.” Entire scenes vault back and forth, like a plane guided by dueling air traffic controllers with a grudge over a woman.

If the movie struggles over tone and plot, there is certainly no struggle between personalities. Remember Aragorn in “LOTR”? What about Frodo? Gimli? Can you describe them in ways besides their individual actions or looks? Now try doing the same thing to the new characters in this movie (apart from established ones like Gandalf).

Abandon all hope, ye who want distinct characters here. All you’re greeted with are hollow vessels to spout exposition. 

I admit it. I’m not a Tolkien fan. As one not among the faithful, I have no right to demand what a “Hobbit” adaptation should be. For all I know, this is the movie Tolkien fans dreamed of. Like I said, I’m not one of them.

I am, however, a movie fan. And as such, this one blows. Bad movies I can get over. What bothers me is the insinuation that this is all I deserve. “The Hobbit,” in its entire interminable glory, shows such lazy disinterest in its audience. 

Like a victim whose loved one has been kidnapped and dismembered, we can only dread the remaining pieces down the road.

A Mediocre HANSEL AND GRETEL Projects Film For A While, Then Stops

HANSEL AND GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS
(dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2012)

 

Here is one missed opportunity that wouldn't have amounted to much anyway. A wannabe cheeky concoction of fairy tale lore and bloody 3D gore, "Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters" doesn't so much run from beginning to end as it does stumble aimlessly until director Tommy Wirkola puts it out of its misery.

Some movies exist to enlighten. Others exist to entertain. "Hansel And Gretel" seems to exist largely to distract you from the fact that other movies exist. Honestly, I care so little about it, I'm not bothering to write the ampersand that officially takes the place of "and" in the title. Eh, it's difficult to find on the numbers row, and "30 Rock" starts in an hour.

Stupid but fun, I can accept. Abject horribleness I can even get on board with. "Hansel And Gretel" instead plops in that dreaded trench of mediocrity. Nothing redeems it. Nothing stands out. The plot is telegraphed miles ahead of schedule, so as it hits key points, beat by beat, you can feel the grinding of its gears.

Such a shame, because as an exercise in genre mash-up, the movie coulda been harmless fun. Jeremy Renner continues his apparent Leap Year pledge to say yes to anything by showing up as Hansel to Gemma Arterton's Gretel, who encountered a witch as kids and were cursed to be the only characters in their movie without German accents. Despite this crippling setback, they grow up with a drive to slay witches and luckily they find a bunch to kill, otherwise we'd just be stuck watching our graves fly 88 minutes closer to us, all in 3D!

What's frustrating is I know exactly what they're going for. Not a classic, mind you. The results would always be hollow. What they're going for, and what the movie distressingly lacks, is "fun." This was supposed to be fun. Gore flying at the screen, characters cracking wise amidst serious settings, snarky anachronisms - all the ingredients are here.

The problem is that no one involved seems to want to be there. There's no devilish glee in the actors or the director or the script. No sense of getting away with something. A casual viewer might suspect we're watching the result of a cheesy sitcom pilot, where a film crew gets into a car accident, and because they have no insurance, the judge forces them to make an R-rated splatter flick.

Wirkola shoots in a flat, static style - his camera not so much involved in the action as documenting it. Everything sorta occurs in front of the lens that just happens to be there. And his script with Dante Harper offers no zing, no wit. Instead of the impudent romp they evidently wanted, lines just lie on the page, like a dead slug. Also telling to Wirkola's lack of commitment to character: important-seeming traits are raised and discarded at will, as subplots are similarly cast aside when he becomes bored with them.

All appropriate, though, for a movie that amounts to nothing.

Neither tightly propulsive nor gloriously over the top, "Hansel And Gretel" now joins the pantheon of movies that technically qualify as movies. May it wear its paper crown well.

10 Great Movies At 90 Minutes Or Less

Brevity is the soul of wit. And apparently 2012 films offer the least witty crops of work this side of "Mein Kampf." Some of these titles earn their extra reels - the six parallel stories of "Cloud Atlas" demand time to breath. Others feel like glorified DVD collections of deleted scenes (sorry, Peter Jackson and "The Hobbit: Midgets Cross A Bridge"). 

Still, between those, and "Lincoln" (150 minutes), "Skyfall" (143 minutes), "Les Misérables" (158 minutes), "Zero Dark Thirty" (160 minutes) and "Django Unchained" (movie still running), filmmakers seemed to argue that if less is more, think about how much more more would be. Presented are 10 movies, in alphabetical order, that find greatness while still maxing out at one REM cycle. Take note, Hollywood. All of your ideas for a movie aren't worthy simply because they exist.

BEFORE SUNSET (80 minutes)

This movie flows. It glides. And it all seems effortless. Presented entirely in real time, director Richard Linklater and his cast of two deliver remarkably fluid dialogue that begins with pleasantries and gradually, believably breaks down to the characters' realizations that little in their lives went according to plan. Between this movie and "Before Sunrise," Linklater displays a keen eye for those brief, random moments that forever change your life.

BICYCLE THIEVES (89 minutes)

 

Italian neorealism takes cinema that was crushed into rubble and builds it anew with what's left. A man has a wife and son who would look sad even with a smile. His job requires one thing - a bicycle. His bicycle is stolen. He tries and fails to recover it. This film, probably the neorealism's crowning achievement, breaks your heart over and over again so many times, thank god it's not an epic. Its deep, unimpeachable sadness cuts to your core.

DETOUR (68 minutes)

You want real film noir? The seedy, lurid soul of a genre about characters whose souls just sucked, plain and simple? Here it is - everything about noir you want, and nothing else. Shot on the cheap, the movie lacks everything a conventional film class would tell you a movie "needs." But that grimy lack of production values plays up the film's wasted heart, and it has attitude to spare. Most movies on this list are short by choice. This is probably the only one that is short simply because they couldn't afford more film.

DUMBO (64 minutes) 

A bit of a cheat, sure. Early animation's painstaking production process required the movies to be short by design, lest the staff garner intense carpal tunnel. Still, good storytelling is good storytelling. My favorite of Disney's WWII era features, "Dumbo" zips from beginning to end, zipping in a zippy way. There's simply no time to be bored. Plus, my mother still cries at the "Baby Mine" sequence. For whatever that's worth.

THE GENERAL (75 minutes)

About 75% of what I think is funny, I'd wager, comes from Buster Keaton. Funny isn't people trying to be silly. It's people trying to be serious and failing. "The General" finds Keaton at the peak of his powers, a man desperately clinging to his dignity as everything crashes down around him - if Chaplin was the Spielberg of his day, Keaton was the Wes Anderson, offering straight faced characters unaware of the insanity in the background.

KILLER OF SHEEP (83 minutes)

How did this movie go undiscovered for so long? And what a crime that is. A kind of weird fusion of Altman, Kubrick, De Sica, and Cassavetes, Charles Burnett's short little masterpiece is like as science experiment gone horribly right. Shot in 1979, it set on the shelf for almost 30 years, but now it's finally getting its due. With no discernible story, arcs, or meaning, Burnett's vignettes of working class life in Los Angeles' Watts district just teems with life itself.

PATHS OF GLORY (88 minutes)

Kubrick had a heart. He just by and large didn't feel like using it. One of the few exceptions, though, being this 1957 anti-war tale of a French WWI officer who refused to carry out a suicide mission and defended his men against accusations of cowardice in court. Kubrick's classic "2001" and "Dr. Strangelove" both depict machinery acting exactly as designed and bringing on chaos. Similar to a theme explored in this earlier work, except the machinery is war. Such a moving story, told is such economy. 

PICKPOCKET (76 minutes)

Christ, if only every movie told their stories with such laser precision as this one. To bust out an old trope, this movie works like a samurai - enters the room, does its job, and leaves not a moment too soon. Every shot matters. Every cut matters. Director Robert Bresson reportedly shot takes over and over again until all soul drained from his actors' faces, wanting a movie that offers no emotional cues. Here is a movie that isn't short as much as it's exactly as long as it has to be.

RASHOMON (88 minutes)

If "Rashomon" didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it. The movie speaks to such a fundamental aspect of human nature, that the "Rashomon Effect" entered the public lexicon simply because there was no better way to describe it. No great secret to say that people lie. Kurosawa takes it a step farther, though, and suggests these lies really aren't lies when the tellers all believe it. Basically, factual events are subjective and nothing is knowable. Such an idea has no answers, and thus no need for the movie to drag. There it is.

STAND BY ME (88 minutes)  

 

Stephen King crowns this the best adaptation of his work, and although time will tell on "Dreamcatcher," I get where he's coming from. A coming of age story of four boys blissfully unaware of the cold hard punch of life waiting for them around the corner, this movie is so light and gee-whiz charming without being cloying about it, you forget its about people trying to see a dead body. What a little treasure of the movies. Make more stuff like this, Rob Reiner! We miss you.

That's it for 2012! Happy New Year from Filmvielle! May your 2013 be brief and to the point.

Read This DJANGO UNCHAINED Review With An Ironically Perfect Song

DJANGO UNCHAINED (dir. Tarantino, 2012)

 "Django Unchained" is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly untrue.

Here is a movie you wanted, whether you knew you wanted it or not. A work of glorious mayhem, Quentin Tarantino's latest blends spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation, a downright-odd-at-times slapstick, and a stinging indictment of American history, with a delirious amount of blood serving as the glue. Call it "Blazing Saddles" meets "Shaft," The Man With No Name meets Sweet Sweetback, or whatever you want. There's nothing else on the block like it.

Self-dubbed Tarantino's "southern," the movie drops us in 1858 (two years before the Civil War, a helpful title card informs) as bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) absconds with the title slave (Jamie Foxx). In exchange for his help tracking down Schultz's current targets, he promises Django his freedom and the chance to rescue his wife from the satanic plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, positively relishing his role).

Following 2009's "Inglourious Basterds," "Django" finds Tarantino continuing a new, unexpected phase of his career - historical period pieces as wish fulfillment. It doesn't matter that Hitler never died in a torched movie house or a runaway slave could never shoot his way through plantations with such reckless abandon. Tarantino's characters are unaware they're trapped in the confines of history. Instead, merely trapped in their creator's own imagination.

Accuracy is beside the point. What matters is Tarantino's revisions make emotional sense. He creates characters and follows them to their logical end, wrapped up in a way that is also satisfying to 21st century audiences in the theater. 

One could make the argument that his career since "Jackie Brown" (to date his most human work) represents an increasingly indulgent exercise in genre. That characters don't matter. That plot doesn't matter. That an emotional core doesn't matter. That instead, his movies stand as an alter to himself and all the film geek knowledge he can thrust upon the world.

So easy an argument, that I almost believe it as I write it. But it's too easy. His movies aren't patchworks of those that came before. And they aren't dead museum pieces. They're breathing works that are hyper-aware of their own existence as movies and using genres we love, allow those genres' very conventions to be the heroes.

A hard pill to swallow, I know, that a slave like Django could waltz onto a plantation with a gun and fire into the chest of a man who whipped him, offering the perfect capper of, "I like the way you die, boy." Only in the movies is this possible. Unlike "Jackie Brown," where the emotional core comes from the characters themselves, "Django" ultimately satisfies as a testament to movies themselves as the great uniting art form.

It's movies as fantasy, yes. But it also speaks to film iconography as a shared emotional language among fans. And when it hits on a gut emotional level, as Tarantino films don't always do, it's because he's employing the bastard art of cinema (visuals, performers, musical cues, edits) to make it happen.

Plus it doesn't hurt that "Django" ain't no film student thesis. Tarantino reaffirms his status as one of cinema's most merry pranksters, throwing everything he loves into a blender and frappe-ing it into a new singular work. Above all else, the movie is wicked fun, Tarantino slashing American history with unbridled zeal. 

His trademark weaknesses remain, to be sure. The movie is too long by a fair shake - you could cut 30 minutes from roughly any random chunks in the movie and not sacrifice much. Although no individual moments are downright "bad," he does indulge his seeming belief that every idea he has must be committed to screen. Some scenes (such as a dinner table conversation between Django, Schultz, and Calvin) aren't performed as much as they're staged, as Tarantino invites us to hang out in them.

Pacing can be your friend, QT.

Look. You know Tarantino by now. I know him by now. If it's your thing, this will be your thing too. If it's not your thing, it won't be your thing. Just don't call him a pastiche artist. He might take the familiar, but he reintroduces it as something aggressively original. When he makes a new movie, I look forward to it. I want to see it. I want to talk about it.

"Django Unchained" allows for a few new Tarantino tricks (luscious western cinematography, violence that stings instead of just titillating, and some of the most overt comedy of his career). But it's ultimately a logical step in the path his career's taking. What a vital filmmaker, and what a vital film. I'm so glad it's a thing mainstream audiences will see. Whether or not they realize what they're in for.

LINCOLN Is A Riveting Portrayal Of Men Talking In Rooms

LINCOLN (dir. Spielberg, 2012)

 Above all else, Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" puts your No Shave November to shame, assembling the fiercest collection of beards this side of the Mississippi.

In another more "meaningful" way, the movie also boils the president down to the most human level yet seen. Gone is the iconography. Gone are the famed tales of doing his math homework in charcoal and writing the Gettysburg Address on a napkin with the blood squeezed from a dragon or whatever. Gone is the history viewed in hindsight.

What we're left with is a strikingly, at times frustratingly, intimate portrayal of a man who has long since belonged to the ages. If its main lesson is the simple one that Lincoln lived his life as a human being - plain spoken, personable, with moments of doubt - maybe that's a lesson worth remembering. History isn't made by faces on the coins we use to scrape gum off our shoes. It's made by actual people who show up.

As I watched "Lincoln," I felt an acute awe that here's a man who actually lived and interacted with other humans. A near-childlike observation, I know. But also a vital one.

Spielberg's boldest gambit, one that ironically proves to be his greatest asset while also holding the movie back from greatness, is his razor focus. Forgoing the usual "greatest hits" biopic style ("Here's the Lincoln/Douglas debates, here's the death of his son, here's the..."), the bulk of "Lincoln" dwells in the last few months of his life as he pushed to pass the 13th Amendment. It's the style favored by Philip Seymour Hoffman's "Capote." Pick one key event from the subject's life and dive headfirst into it, blowing up each detail to life size and hoping it paints a larger, more symbolic picture of the man.

Oddly this also creates a schizophrenic struggle that the movie never quite overcomes. It wants to be a historical epic while remaining a small-scale character study. It wants to be a "how the sausage is made" political drama, but with that usual dash of Spielberg populism. If we get no closer to what made Lincoln tick, maybe that wasn't on Spielberg's agenda. It still leaves an emotional distance between us and a man clearly intended to be a character in his own drama.

Spielberg can't for the life of him shoot a movie that doesn't look at home on the big screen. With cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, he bathes interiors in lush light and shadow and supplies a more cinematic vista than his story seems to even request. Still, "Lincoln" has comfortably rested on Spielberg's to-do list for the better part of a decade and damned if the resulting movie makes evident why.

God, though. To be in the same room as Lincoln. To watch him react. To watch him spout anecdotes and tell jokes. To watch him struggle when men stand in his way. Daniel Day Lewis' greatest gift as an actor is his ability to be perpetually in the present. We never catch him planning his next movie or behaving out of artifice. It's a downright eerie transformation, completely devoid of vanity, and just a towering achievement.

In fact, Spielberg himself displays an admirable lack of vanity, stepping back more than I can remember to let those around him shine. This is a performer's picture, at times becoming a game of Spot That Character Actor (knowing the guy who appeared in both "Breaking Bad" and "The Wire" earns you bonus obsessor points). James Spader in particular delights by popping in and seeming to forget he's in a costume drama.

Everything I can ultimately say about "Lincoln" is that which will drive certain crowds away while sending others a-flocking. Don't expect sweep. Don't expect bombast. Don't even expect goosebumps. Instead, expect a meticulous study in how one particular piece of history is made by the people who showed up to make it. Characters sure do talk for multiple turns of the script's pages - screenwriter Tony Kushner never met a monologue he couldn't expand, and Spielberg never met a monologue he couldn't slowly zoom in on while the John Williams score swells.

Still, as I write this, President Obama recently earned his second term. He stands center in a nation that sees him either as a pillar of nobility and good intentions, or an agent of our demise. No one yet knows how this period of history will play out. And it's vaguely comforting to see on screen one of our greatest presidents when he was alive and knew just as little, but trying his best to figure things out as they came. If "Lincoln" doesn't draw direct parallels between those times and ours, it shouldn't have to. History just repeats itself with different clothes.

It's a dry but absorbing work, seemingly destined to bore unsuspecting middle schoolers to tears when their teacher doesn't have a lesson planned. Whatever. Kids don't deserve Daniel Day Lewis. But this story does deserve a bigger stage.

This SKYFALL Review Brought To You By Heineken And Joy

SKYFALL (Sam Mendes, 2012)

Any great movie contains "that" moment. The shot or line of dialogue or look from the actor when you decide you love this movie, when you submit to its power and strap yourself in, all while tactfully ignoring that nagging fear that it will drop the ball.

In "Skyfall," that moment hits in the opening scene and never lets up. Bond (a never more assured Daniel Craig) stumbles onto a mission in Turkey gone horribly wrong, sparking a bravura chase sequence combining cars, motorcycles, trains, forklifts, disbelief, and anything else that happened to be near set that day. To say it challenges credulity is to miss the point (aren't all Bond movies supposed to open with a little swagger?).

What matters is it throws down the gauntlet for a movie that didn't come all this way, through all of MGM's famed financial woes, to be timid. Not only is it a superb James Bond movie and the best thriller of the year, but it's a great movie, period. Here is one bustling, invigorating entertainment representing what pop filmmaking can and should be. A breakneck series of "This is too good to be real, oh wait it is, will it ever stop, IT NEVER STOPS!"

Hyperbole, take a holiday.

Carrying 50 years of creaky franchise history on its shoulders, "Skyfall" and newcomer director Sam Mendes bridge the gap between the old and the new, the elegant and the gritty, the Connery and the Craig (stranding poor Timothy Dalton somewhere in the moat). After that disastrous Turkey mission that supposedly left Bond dead, MI6 headquarters in London finds itself the target of a terrorist bombing. Lured out of hiding but not much giving a damn for the company that abandoned him, Bond sets loose after the man responsible (a terrifyingly flamboyant Javier Bardem), whose motives reveal to be intensely personal.

Mendes and his screenwriting team present themselves as clear scholars of the Bond franchise, paying respects to the familiar tropes when necessary. This ain't no Mad Lib movie, though, filling in the blanks in a preordained structure. "Skyfall" sets to point the compass in a new direction, and it zigs just when you expect it to zag. Bardem holds court in the usual island lair, but he views it as a disposable novelty. The "Bond Girl" is all but an afterthought - disposable candy to cut a few scenes of the trailer around. And instead of an action climax with the fate of the world crashing down, Mendes opts for a lyrical ballet of images (although rest assured, gunfire and explosions abound).

What "Skyfall" ultimately delivers is a 2.5 hour movie with a razor focus. Bond isn't the scenery in some other man's play. Mendes turns the focus squarely on him and how it actually feels to have a license to kill in a career that will probably kill you first. If the movie doesn't ultimately answer what makes James Bond tick, it's because the character still must maintain that man-of-the-moment persona. By the end, enough tantalizing clues are still offered about his past, putting to rest the "James Bond is an ongoing code name" theory.

Structurally it resembles "The Dark Knight" more than anything else, gleefully tearing apart its franchise's past before putting it back together in a way we didn't even know we wanted. Bond and the villain don't engage in a fashion runway walk-off between impossibly suave and megalomaniacal (although they are indeed both that). What we get is far more interesting - two sides of the same broken coin, both hoping the other guy caves first. Clearly arriving on set wanting to create a classic Bond villain and nailing it, Bardem exists in his own world - hurt, disappointment, and pure burning nihilism all fighting on his face. "Skyfall" even makes room for a little latent homosexual tension between the two men with Bardem oozing film queen slime, if that's even a thing.

And Craig, of course, stands as the first Bond for whom a respectful comparison to Sean Connery isn't even necessary. He is the best there is. Hang it on the wall.

God, such serene confidence this movie moves with. Such immaculate, elegant pacing. Such a gripping fusion of thriller, character study, and fanboy cheering. Practically the whole thing rings with the joy of kids playing in the sandbox for the first time, and it affirms the Bond franchise as something that can revive itself as long as it wants as long as filmmakers like Mendes are around to charge the paddles.

I would marry "Skyfall," but I'd also let it have its way with me just as willingly.