#31, January 27

My friend James contacted me this afternoon and informed me that it had been long enough, it was time to delve into the next chapter of the Bond saga.

“Contacted me”. That sounds ridiculous. He actually tweeted me. Which sounds even more ridiculous.

I’ve got no problem with the new technology, in fact, I love it. The vast majority of my interactions with other humanoids is best handled in a quick and easy burst of text (there’s something about a telephone turns me into an uber-nerd of Jerry Lewis proportions). IM is the greatest invention since the telephone, and Twitter is glorious… I am a crazy person and Twitter is my intersection.

I have a serious problem with the language of the new tech. Tweeted? Are we all 17 year old girls now?

I’m a linguistic curmudgeon. But I digress.

Quantum of Solace. I love the title. It actually does come from an Ian Fleming story, and although the short story and the movie have absolutely no narrative similarities, they actually share a common theme, that as the “quantum of solace”, or the comfort you can take from another, is reduced to zero, the relationship is over. I love that the title is incredibly obscure, almost no one is going to get the reference; and if you don’t know what it means, it doesn’t really tell you anything… and yet, it does tell you something. This movie is actually about something, but you don’t have to worry about that. You can just watch shit blow up. And shit does blow up. Lots of it. Quantum is much faster paced than Casino. That, by the way, isn’t always a good thing.

It’s still about something. I think that, on the surface it’s easy to think the movie is about the aftermath of Bond’s relationship with Vesper, his quest for revenge and the resulting costs that said revenge enacts on his soul. And that sounds really good, but it’s wrong. That’s the surface.

It’s really about the relationship between Bond and M. In Casino, the relationship between the two was guarded; Bond was testing boundaries, M was rubbing every mistake in his face… it was clear that Bond’s future in MI6 was by no means assured. In Quantum, we see that relationship become solid. M chooses to trust Bond, Bond proves himself worthy of that trust, everyone can go to bed trusting that there will be many more Bond adventures to come.

And somewhere in there is where the name, and everything else, goes a bit wrong. Just as the title sounds meaningless unless you do some research to see where it comes from and what it does in fact mean, the movie seems to loose track of what it’s doing. The A plot is submerged beneath the B plot, which isn’t all that good and leaves you feeling like you were supposed to get something more than what you actually got.

Let’s be honest, at this point I don’t ask for much from a Bond film. Quantum of Solace entertained me. After Casino Royale I was expecting a bit more… but it is what it is. Sometimes entertaining is enough.