film Archives | Handwritten Kin

5 Reasons Quantum of Solace Isn’t Actually Bad

October 6, 2021 By mwmelugin

With Bond 25 right around the corner, I set about the task of re-watching every Daniel Craig Bond movie. I’m eagerly awaiting No Time To Die and thought it appropriate to have this incarnation of Bond’s full arc in context going into Craig’s final installment. Upon rewatch, I confirmed several pre-held feelings about most of these movies. I still really like Casino Royale and Skyfall, and I still wish Spectre hadn’t been made. The movie that surprised me the most, however, was 2008’s Quantum of Solace.

Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko star in 2008’s Quantum of Solace.

The cultural perception of the Bond franchise has seen ebbs and flows since Daniel Craig took over. They hit big on their first bet (pun intended) with Casino Royale, which made $606,099,584 worldwide. Coming off the successful heels of “Casino”, Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace was highly anticipated and opened strong. It made $67,528,882 domestic on its opening weekend, higher even than the opening weekend Casino Royale had. Unfortunately, “Quantum” fell short in its critical reception. As of today, it has a 65% Tomatometer and a mere 58% audience score.

My experience over the last decade has resoundingly cast “Quantum” as the lame bird in the Craig-Bond series. Nearly everyone I’ve asked has said they like the first and third offerings but that Quantum didn’t really work for them. And, in the past, I would typically affirm their apathy toward Quantum. It didn’t stick in my mind upon first watch like the others. There isn’t anything quite as directly memorable in Quantum as there is in the other recent installments. Casino Royale had poker and a brilliant performance from Mads Mikkelsen, Skyfall had a chase sequence on top of a train and perhaps the most electric Bond-villain performance ever in Javier Bardem, and Quantum of Solace simply took a backseat for most people. (Side note: I have nothing to say about “Spectre”. I think it’s awful and it’s hardly worth comparing to the first three Craig-Bond installments.)

This 2021 rewatch made me suddenly and enthusiastically change faith about Quantum of Solace. I tried my best to watch it with open eyes and an open heart. It proved my assumptions wrong as I found myself enjoying it far more than expected. I had anticipated a serious letdown and was met with a pleasant surprise. Here are my top five reasons why Quantum of Solace isn’t actually bad:

5 Reasons Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About Bo Burnham’s INSIDE

June 17, 2021 By mwmelugin

Bo Burnham has created a modern masterpiece with his new special INSIDE. And I don’t know about you but I for one can’t get it out of my head.

Nowadays, we are presented with a perpetual onslaught of entertainment released all day, every day. We doggy paddle our way through a sea of music, tv shows, films, music videos, Instagram photos, tweets, and everything in between. We all bow down to the almighty avalanche of content, the tsunami of entertainment which threatens to drown us if we don’t keep paddling, don’t keep watching, don’t keep consuming. With this massive, almost incomprehensible influx of media being delivered straight to us as though on a nonstop IV drip, it’s next to impossible for a piece of content to rise above the masses, stand out, and shine for longer than the time it takes us to tweet a review and then move on to whatever’s next.

It takes something truly special to make us slow down, even for a moment, and pay attention to a thing for more than the amount of time it takes to consume it. Films and albums are devoured and digested then largely excreted from the brain in order to make room for the next film or album. Even great artistic achievements are often skipped past in a matter of minutes, figuratively speaking. Great works like this year’s Best Picture winner Nomadland are doomed to escape the public consciousness as soon as the next spectacle arrives. As soon as Godzilla vs. Kong hit the big screen, audiences largely moved on from last year’s biggest hits. When the next thing is here, it’s time to move on. Due to this modern phenomenon, it feels somewhat momentous when something comes along and demands my attention long past an initial viewing.

Bo Burnham performs “Content”.

I love when something comes along, completely blows me away, and forces me to sit with it for days or weeks after seeing it. I live for those moments of sheer exuberance, awe, and reflection that emerge when a piece of content utterly astounds you on an artistic level. I’m talking about those moments when you’re left completely speechless, when you can’t believe what you just saw, completely sucker-punched by the artist, when you feel full of emotion and overcome by the power and potential of art. This doesn’t happen all that often, perhaps a couple of times each year, if we’re lucky. It happened to me when I saw Get Out in the theater for the first time and it happened when I heard Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. for the first time. It happened when I saw Portrait of a Lady On Fire and then again when I saw the finale of Devs last year (read my article about that here). It’s a beautiful feeling to be overcome by art and affected by it on a deep, penetrating level.

It’s different for everyone, of course. We all react more strongly to what we’re predisposed to. That said, it happens to all of us. You know that feeling. It’s that moment when a piece of media leaves you slightly nauseous because it made you feel so many emotions. The ones that make you sit back in your chair when the credits roll and say, “how in the f*** did they DO THAT?” Well, that’s what Bo Burnham’s INSIDE made me feel.

So, without further ado, here are five reasons why my little chimpanzee brain simply cannot stop thinking about Bo Burnham’s INSIDE:

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ and The Future of Movie Theaters

September 5, 2020 By mwmelugin

It’s a turbulent time for the movie industry and movie theaters, so what better answer than a movie about time?

It was three years, one month, and thirteen days between the domestic releases of Christopher Nolan’s last film Dunkirk and his newest release, the long-awaited and much-delayed Tenet. I lead with those numbers because the auteur director and most of his films, Tenet not withstanding, seem obsessed with the concept of time.

A lot has changed in the last three years, including the way most of us watch movies. The movie industry has evolved since the release of Dunkirk. That evolution has reached a crescendo in 2020 as face masks and home viewing have become the new normal. Movies theaters closed their doors in March and I now go through more hand sanitizer than I do artificial popcorn butter, which feels crazy. It’s a weird time to be alive and an even weirder, more precarious time for the film industry at large.

Finally, movie theaters are reopening. They started the reopening process on August 20th, with over two-thirds of theaters open as of September 3rd. To do so is an admittedly mixed bag; movie-nerds such as myself are elated to see new movies in a theater but there’s an inherent trepidation about the safety/sanity of doing so. One of the most hotly anticipated films of the year is set to open and the big question is whether anyone will actually go out to their local cinema and see it. A year ago, we never would have questioned whether we would be going to the theater to see Tenet.

Weird times indeed. And in these weird and confusing times, I find it incredibly apropos that theaters are set to reopen on the back of a weird, confusing film about time. Enter Tenet.