Ten Notable Movies I Watched This Year #1: Quantum of Solace

One of my advisors asked me to do some tutoring for the slightly-less computer science-savvy Bioinformatics majors every Tuesday morning for a couple of hours; today happens to be the last week of my tenure, and expectedly no one is showing up. Granted I've only been here for five minutes, but I'm sure that my usual attendees will be studying for their finals (since it's finals week) and decide to totally ditch this help session that was tailored specifically for their academic needs. Damn ingrates!

So here I am sitting in the Instructional/Videoconferencing Lab section of BCCL thinking I should go ahead and update the blog... and what better way to do it that to make a list of movies that I liked/disliked this year!

I decided to call it simply "Ten Notable Movies" instead of dubbing them something like "The Ten Best Movies" in an effort to prevent too much backlash - I'm sure whoever reads this will disagree with some of my choices (and react obtrusively), but hopefully such consequences will be reduced a little bit despite the inherently controversial properties of such lists. Still, just calling them "Ten Notable Movies That I Watched This Year" gives me the flexibility to mention both good and bad movies that I've seen this year and give reasons why, while also letting me forgo the need to put them in some order (I mean who really cares whether Wall-E is better than Kung Fu Panda if they're both good?).

Originally I was going to list all ten movies here but then I decided to split it to ten different posts; I found myself typing a lot more for Quantum of Solace than I initially thought I would. Besides, this is good blog fodder to write about that'll give me content for a good two to three weeks!

So without further ado, I present to you: Ten Notable Movies That I Watched This Year - Quantum of Solace Edition!
(Note that there are massive spoilers)

Quantum of Solace
I already mentioned this a mere one post ago, but I think everyone's had enough time to watch it by now so I can go into more detail about what I thought of it.

Let me preface this by saying overall I liked this movie. But before I get to that, let's get the bad stuff out of the way...

They switched directors for QoS so the tone and pace of the movie changed noticeably from its predecessor Casino Royale, with the focus being more on Bond's quest for revenge instead of the "background story" to Bond. Since this is a sequel little time was spent on developing Bond's character, and I guess that's my main gripe about this movie. Bond sort of just goes from place to place, searching for the next clue to find answers, which served as sort of a filler between action scenes. There's less substance to Bond. Yeah, he's sad because his girl died, and yeah, he is out for vengeance, but... well... let's just say storytelling took a hit.

There are a few other things that I didn't like. The movie puts Bond in different areas around the world, but the transitions are very sloppy: when Bond first enters a new place, the scene is filled with text on the landscape that tells you where he is. That's it. It's nice that Bond goes to different locales a lot, but I got the feeling that he just "shows up" in a new place. There's no sense of time passing between scenes, so I thought that was kind of weird.

The Bond villain Dominick Greene is also pretty weak. I've only watched this movie once and it was very difficult to follow the story (again, a knock on its storytelling): one minute, Bond interrogates Mr. White (the dude he shot at the end of Casino Royale), the next he's following this Dominic wimp. I think it's because Dominic is a "lead" for Bond's ultimate purpose (to find out the organization behind the events in Royale), but transferring that message to me was done fairly poorly. I never felt like he was a major threat; the first scene in which he is introduced, I just figured the Bond girl will just kill him a few seconds later (because he tried to get her killed). Needless to say, I was confused when he kept showing up later, and even more put off when I started to notice he was becoming this flick's main antagonist. Maybe he just didn't have the same screen presence that someone like Le Schiffre did, whose portrayal in Royale made it easy to see that he was THE bad guy, whereas Dominic seems like some doofus who wants money (at best, A bad guy). I did, however, like the fight scene between Dominic and Bond later in the movie where they showcased how much of a scrub Dominic really is.

Also, the Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko, is too much like Bond and is kind of just... there. They had a similar agenda and just happened to run into each other. They do discuss her motives, but I just couldn't sympathize with her character. Again, it's probably the sloppy storytelling.

Finally, there were these two morons sitting in my row that wouldn't shut the fuck up during the movie. I mean, come on. Why the hell would you answer your cell phone in the middle of the theater, hang up, then talk to the dude sitting right next to you for the entire duration of the film!? Seriously, shit like that can wait, have some respect!

Ahem. Anyway, other than that, I thought the movie was enjoyable. The scenes were well shot. I didn't have trouble following the action (unlike some people), which were well done. And that's all this movie really is - big action scenes made to satiate fans until the third Bond comes out in this planned trilogy.

Hopefully in the next one they'll give Bond more character development awesomeness.

Verdict: One thumb up, the other sloppily halfway down to indicate that the movie's... good? Bad? I'm not sure, but I enjoyed holding it in that position.