Kingsman: The Secret Service

Michael Vaughn’s Kingsman:The Secret Service is like The Shining meets Pygmalion. The movie which lies firmly in the tradition of Tarantino’s meta cinema features a millenarian mogul, Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson). who frequently threatens that the outcome of what we’re watching is “not going to be that kind of movie.” Jackson’s persona references Pulp Fiction in that the character he played in both films has an inclination for Big Macs. Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is the movie’s Galethea who will be transformed from a tough growing up in council housing into a slick and impregnable secret agent by a Bond rip off (Colin Firth). In terms of the theme of transformation, La Femme Nikita, Pretty Woman and Trading Places are all referenced in the movie, which could also be subtitled Film History 101. The crazed Jack Nicholson character of The Shining hatcheting through a door is played by a mother trying to murder her 4 year old. All the agents in the super secret society of the film’s title whose offices occupy the backrooms of a Saville Road tailor shop are named after the Knights of the Round Table, Galahad (Firth), Arthur (Michael Caine), Merlin  (Mark Strong) and Launcelot (Jack Davenport). Eggsy is given a shoe with a spike like the one Colonel Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) sported in From Russia With Love, though that’s nothing compared to the murderous Oscar Pistorius blades sported by Valentino’s side kick Gazelle, (Sofia Boutella). Without giving away the plot we can reveal that the Queen of Sweden will allow Eggy to fuck her in the ass if he saves the world. To take offense at either the film’s violence or silliness simply misses the wonderful pointlessness of it all.

Skyfall

Skyfall the new James Bond employs philosophy’s Trolley Problem as a a basic plot device. This use of a famous problem in logic to fuel the narrative, is in itself an innovation in the annals of chase movies. But there other innovations in Skyfall, not the least of which being the force of evil, Silva (Javier Bardem), whose ideology has taken on a decidedly personal tone. Gone are the cold war and even the villains representing rogue international consortiums. Bardem is literally the guy next door, a former agent whose has turned against his boss, M (Judi Dench) in a big way. Which brings us back to the Trolley problem. An out of control trolley can either kill one person or a multiple of people. Naturally, the decision is to turn it towards the one. M does it to Bond (Daniel Craig) early in the movie and she had done it to Bardem, years before and thus the grudge. Other leitmotifs include entrapment and escape and old versus new. M represents the old order of things which must be replaced, perhaps along with Bond who is urged to retire by Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), the superior that both he and M report to. But there is some degree of ambiguity in the old versus new sweepstakes. The new is plainly inevitable, but is it always desirable or necessarily effective? Skyfall is the name of the ancient Scottish manner on which the James Bond character was born and it is in this setting that he is finally able to engineer the victory that brings about the film’s quasi-happy ending. Ironically, with all the examples of newness on display (for instance the video game graphics operated by a youthful Q, who is a computer geek), the latest addition to the Bond cycle lacks the kind of invention to be found in say a 60’s movie like From Russia With Love with its evil rivals, SPECTRE and SMERSH and its Colonel Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) who has a poison spike that pops out of her shoe. Then, of course, there’s the magnificent Oddjob (Harold Sakata) of Goldfinger. The modern and post-modernist touches and the creation of an action film that flirts with interiority might be explained by the fact that Skyfall was directed by Sam Mendes, best known to film goers for American Beauty.

From Russia with Love

Classic rock and oldies stations still proliferate, and so, apparently, do cold war spies. Just when a new generation of John Le Carrés was getting set to produce novels about the revaluation of the Renminbi, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps with the lethal capacity to destroy countries like Iceland and Ireland, the FBI discovers a good old fashioned spy ring, replete with everything from suburban couples to a vampish real estate agent who used Facebook as a cover for espionage. “Much of the ring’s activity…took place in and around New York,” the Times reported (“In Ordinary Lives, U.S. Sees the Work of Russian Agents,” NYT, 6/29/10). “The alleged agents were spotted in a bookstore in Lower Manhattan, a bench near the entrance to Central Park and a restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens.” The question naturally arises: under what conditions does an agent go so deeply under cover that he or she is no longer a spy? If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck—surely this is one of the first laws of espionage learned at War College. Apparently, these spies were so much a part of the American fabric that neighbors were shocked to find out that the Murphys of Montclair, N.J. were Russkies, or that 28-year-old Anna Chapman, or Anya as she called herself on Facebook, was a latter-day Colonel Rosa Klebb, the murderous agent played by Lotte Lenya in From Russia with Love whose secret weapon is a venom-tipped blade in the toe of her orthopedic shoe. Furthermore, what were these agents doing that was so different from what ordinary citizens like you or I do? “The alleged agents were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy toward Iran, C.I.A. leadership, Congressional politics…” explained the Times. Aren’t these the same things most patriotic Americans want to know about?