Probably nothing has done as much in recent years to make James Bond a figure of fantasy once again as the photo spread in the premiere issue of Talk magazine showing Rupert Everett as a bisexual Bond. The thought of an actor with Everett’s wit and sexiness stepping into the role of 007 is enough to get you drooling. Cherish those fantasies. They’ll prove to be a hell of a lot more sustaining than the latest Bond adventure, “The World Is Not Enough.”
If Bond long ago became part of your fantasy life or your pop iconography, then the anticipation of a good Bond movie would probably survive even if “The World Is Not Enough” were worse than it is. But it’s not even up to the level of what used to be below par for the series (say “Thunderball” or “Moonraker”); nor is it pleasantly diverting (“Octopussy”); and it’s not even in the same stratosphere as the peaks — “Goldfinger,” “The Spy Who Loved Me,” “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” or the best of the lot, “You Only Live Twice.” It’s also not as bad as the last entry, “Tomorrow Never Dies,” possibly the worst-directed of all Bonds. But they share similar problems.
Somewhere along the way the people behind the series stopped thinking of Bond movies as comic books for adults and began thinking of them as action movies. The sex and luxury quotient started taking a nosedive as the destructo quotient headed through the roof. “The World Is Not Enough” opens with a chase that progresses from land to water back to land and finally to air. It’s frequently spectacular and yet not terribly distinctive; you respond more to the audacity of the idea than the execution. And you’re aware of how the sequence is just an excuse for explosions and all sorts of destruction. There’s none of the clean efficiency you remember from the car chase through the nighttime woods in “Goldfinger,” or the virtuoso ski and bobsled chases Peter Hunt devised for “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
Perhaps the reason nearly every Bond movie now features a ski chase is that it lets the camera revel in the vistas of snow-covered space and allows for a visually uncluttered chase. The ski chase here is the movie’s visual high point as Pierce Brosnan’s Bond and Sophie Marceau, playing the daughter of a hugely rich industrialist who’s been murdered by terrorists, are pursued by machine-gun-wielding snowmobiles that hover above them via black parachutes; appearing over the mountains, these deadly machines look like some swarm of mutant mosquitoes.
“The World Is Not Enough” offers so little of the series’ Playboy fantasies of “the good life” — swanky resorts and casinos, lush uncomplicated sex — that when the movie tosses you a little tidbit, like a throwaway shot of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, you’re almost pathetically grateful. I think I counted one vodka martini going down Bond’s gullet in this movie, and he downs it fast, as if he’s racing to catch a bus. I was rather more encouraged when, early on, Bond seduces British Intelligence’s house doctor. I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.
On the tally sheet of recent Bond-inspired fantasies, the casting of Denise Richards probably ranks right behind that Rupert Everett photo spread. There’s probably no other current movie actress who has roused as many pornographic longings as she has (at least among the straight men in the audience). The focus is invariably Richards’ fuller-than-full lips, particularly the nasty little curl of her smile.
When filmmakers take Richards’ dirty-girl appeal into account, as John McNaughton did in the deliriously trashy “Wild Things,” Richards practically squeals naughtiness. Here she’s playing a nuclear weapons expert named Christmas Jones — the launching pad for a few of the film’s better double-entendres — and the movie seems practically afraid of making fun of the ridiculousness of that conceit. So Richards has to stand around trying to muster some authority while snapping off her lines and sounding more like a high school kid in a snit. What’s the point of casting Denise Richards in a Bond movie if not to make her into a sex fantasy? There are some obligatory shots of her wearing a tight white T-shirt in a submarine filling with water, and the poverty of pornographic imagination they represent is rather appalling. Nearly as appalling is how long it takes for her and Brosnan to do anything — even exchange racy repartee.
Marceau, whose smudged dewiness doesn’t bring much to the party, is another letdown. Marceau’s Elektra (I guess her parents were inspired more by their old Doors albums than by Euripedes) is the focus of the movie’s rather dull plot. She’s trying to finish her late father’s pipeline, while international terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle) may be trying to destroy it. Complications ensue from Renard’s having once kidnapped Elektra, who escaped by killing two of her captors.
Renard has been given a great bad-guy gimmick: An unsuccessful assassination attempt has left a bullet in his skull that inures him to pain. And damned if the fool filmmakers don’t do diddly with that either. Instead of giving us a super villain crazy-high on his own power and invincibility, Carlyle looks as down in the mouth as a guy who’s learned to live with terminal migraine. That glumness is appropriate, though, to the Elektra/Renard plot, which is inappropriate for the fantasy tone of a Bond movie. When “The World Is Not Enough” isn’t trying to win the Thanksgiving action movie sweepstakes, it’s making half-hearted attempts to be a serious espionage fiction. And that was always the material that the Bond movies opposed.
The movie does some things right, and most of them are done by the supporting characters. Robbie Coltrane, in a smashing series of lounge-lizard formal wear, returns as the Russian mobster Zukovsky. With his deadpan understatement, Coltrane exudes total corruption and revels in it.
The recurring characters are given particularly nice bits. This is the first time Samantha Bond has made an impression as Miss Moneypenny (though nothing can keep me from pining for Lois Maxwell). Judi Dench’s M has been given a bigger role to play, the better for us all to bask in her authority. I can’t think of another actor who could deliver the line “We will follow them to the furthest ends of the Earth if need be and bring them to justice,” and not sound like a cardboard cutout. In a lovely nod to the actor who proceeded her in the role of M, an oil portrait of Bernard Lee hangs over her desk.
I wish there were more for Michael Kitchen as M’s assistant, but someone had the very bright idea of casting John Cleese as the protigi of Desmond Llewelyn’s Q. It’s an inspired choice: They share the same dotty disdain. And Llewelyn has been given a charming, fleeting scene with 007 where he seems to be taking the bow he’s earned after 17 appearances and nearly 40 years in the series.
Brosnan’s another matter. He could probably play Bond at a masquerade party or in a comedy sketch. But it’s almost about impossible to detect any of the character’s cool sadism or sensual gusto or just plain dirty-mindedness in him. You don’t even get any of the self-parody that finally made Roger Moore rather endearing. Brosnan delivers the double-entendres in the manner of a man who’s trying to teach himself to swear; you just feel embarrassed by him. Imagine Sean Connery delivering the line Brosnan hands Richards as they sit on a balcony in Istanbul — “I’ve alwaysh drr’eamed of having Chrishmash in Trr’key” — and you’ll be laughing for days. Brosnan was so good in “The Thomas Crown Affair” because the role allowed for his finicky quality. As Bond, he continues to be a good-looking stand-in rather than a star.
You wouldn’t want to see a top-flight director with a distinctive personal style at the helm of a Bond movie. You want someone whose work is clean and efficient, adept at keeping the thing moving along and balancing the ratio of silly to serious. Apart from the ongoing documentary series (whose latest entry is “42 Up”) and the first half of “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Michael Apted has never had a style that is either distinctive or personal. I was grateful in the early scenes that, unlike Roger Spottiswoode in “Tomorrow Never Dies,” Apted shot and cut the action sequences so you could follow what was going on. But it doesn’t take long for his dull, somewhat somnambulant anonymity to take over.
The movie feels about a half-hour longer than its 128-minute running time, and though the story is fairly simple, it’s complicatedly told. By the time Apted launches into the big, final set piece, it feels as if you’ve been in your seat for hours, and yet it all happens before you’ve had a chance to care. He’s also not especially gifted at violence. Maybe in deference to the wrongheaded attempt to make the series more “realistic,” the fight scenes have a lot of grunting and thudding rather than the swift painlessness that should characterize a Bond fight.
How hard can it be to make a good Bond movie? The best are little disreputable miracles, the lucky combination of craft and keying into the pop moment. There must be brisk, efficient directors out there who are capable of finding the right pace and tone. And there must be screenwriters who can come up with the right mix of smut and sophistication. There are plenty of worse disappointments this year than “The World Is Not Enough,” but those disappointments don’t have nearly four decades of audience affection built into them. Maybe it’s time to start saying “God Save James Bond.” The new Bond films bear the same relation to the originals as those MCI ads do to the original Looney Tunes.
The New York Times is reporting a former CIA officer’s claim that the Bush White House and the CIA asked operatives to spy on university professor, blogger (and frequent Salon contributor) Juan Cole in 2005 and 2006.
From James Risen’s Thursday morning Times piece:
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on [Professor Cole]. …
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
If Carle’s claims are true, it would likely mean the CIA acted illegally; as former Agency lawyer Jeffrey H. Smith tells Risen: “The statute makes it very clear: you can’t spy on Americans.”
Cole has already responded to the news on his blog, calling for a full congressional investigation of Carle’s claims, which he says he believes are true:
It seems to me clear that the Bush White House was upset by my blogging of the Iraq War, in which I was using Arabic and other primary sources, and which contradicted the propaganda efforts of the administration attempting to make the enterprise look like a wild shining success.
Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that the Company and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens. …
I hope that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned.
He concludes by telling readers “what alarms [him] most”: “I know I am a relatively small fish and it seems to me rather likely that I was not the only target of the baleful team at the White House.”
Shrewd marketing and its online equivalent, SEO (search engine optimization), dictate that Julia Child’s name gets top billing in both the title of Jennet Conant’s new nonfiction spy saga and in the headline for my review of the same. Yes, the famous French chef of cookbook and public television fame did work for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), a U.S. intelligence agency, during World War II, as did Paul Child, the man she would eventually marry. However, Julia Child’s war was not so exciting as Jane Foster’s, and if Conant’s “A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS” is somewhat of a bait-and-switch, providing more of Foster’s story than Child fans will expect, it’s hard to complain: Foster is such a remarkable, engaging, ambiguous character.
Foster and Julia McWilliams (Child’s maiden name) were part of a cohort of women (invariably referred to as “girls” by their colleagues) who signed up to work for William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS during the war. They wanted to serve their country, but most of them — Julia especially — were looking for adventure, too. Foster’s ability to speak Malayan (the legacy of a brief marriage to a Dutch diplomat in her early 20s) and Julia’s superior administrative skills made them desirable recruits. So did their backgrounds.
Both women were from wealthy, prominent, conservative California families and had gone to tony women’s colleges, as did Betty MacDonald, one of Conant’s primary sources. The word around the OSS offices was that Donovan’s idea of the ideal female hire was “a cross between a Smith graduate, a Powers model and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” He liked to recruit rich Ivy Leaguers of both genders, reasoning that they were more resistant to bribes. Julia — tall, a bit gawky and unworldly — was intent on livening up her own personality after a youth spent in the narrow-minded upper echelons of Pasadena society. Foster, on the other hand, devoted herself to livening up everyone else’s.
Foster seems to have adopted the “madcap heiress” of 1930s Hollywood comedies as a role model. In her first posting, Ceylon, Foster adopted a baby chipmunk, which she raised, named Christopher and took to carrying around in her pocket. The animal’s many escapes and Foster’s subsequent pursuits led to absurd scandals, such as the time Foster crawled under a table to look for the rodent and ran her hand up a general’s pant leg. Charged with Morale Operations (propaganda), Foster devised a notorious operation in which hundreds of condoms were stuffed with anti-Japanese tracts and malaria medication then released by passing submarines off the coasts of Malaysia and Indonesia. She ran local agents and helped devise bogus news reports that mimicked Japanese broadcasts but were subtly tweaked to offend the native population of enemy-occupied territory.
Foster’s duties resembled those of a CIA case officer, although the CIA did not yet exist; Julia, on the other hand, ran the OSS camp’s “nerve center,” compiling the research that came in from the field and dispatching it to Washington and the field operations that needed it. Arguably, Julia’s was the more important job (she had a higher security clearance), but Foster’s was the more thrilling. And while the levelheaded, famously discreet Julia spent her time in the CBI (China-Burma-India) theater pining over Paul Child, who would not realize how perfectly suited they were to each other until after the war, Foster had tragic affairs, got into countless comical scrapes and saw much more of the conflict firsthand.
Things began to go wrong for Foster after the war, when she was sent to Indonesia and Vietnam to help supervise the liberation of POWs and otherwise keep an eye on things. The U.S. was so focused on rebuilding Europe that it was willing to sacrifice many Asian allies who had expected to be granted independence as a reward for helping to defeat the Japanese. Instead, the old, hated, European colonial powers began to reestablish their hold, unimpeded by the Americans. This outraged Foster, who witnessed atrocities and other injustices committed by Dutch and French troops against Indonesian and Vietnamese civilians and believed the U.S was seriously undermining its own interests. She wrote a blistering white paper condemning American policy in Indonesia (it was ignored) and quit her government job to head back to the States.
Meanwhile, after weathering a rough-and-ready posting in Chungking (“It’s dirty beyond belief, utterly inconvenient, full of disease, misery, corruption and mystery,” Paul Child wrote to his twin brother, “but I love it.”), the Childs finally concluded their long courtship. He went to work for the United States Information Service in Paris and she decided to learn to cook. They would not reconnect with Foster until 1952, when they discovered that she, too, was living in Paris, working as a painter under the name Madame Zlatovski. (She had married — or rather, remarried, since it turned out she’d been secretly married to a Russian immigrant throughout the war.) They found her, in Paul’s words, “just as lazy, hazy, impractical and loveable as she was seven years ago.”
The happiness of that reunion was short-lived. Foster and her husband were soon embroiled in the Red Scare, and Paul Child himself was briefly and scarily caught up in the slipstream of her troubles. “A Covert Affair” is a skillfully told tale of espionage, combining just enough background information with the right amount of boisterous anecdote to make the reader feel simultaneously amused and informed. For the early parts of the book, Conant leans heavily on Foster’s own memoirs, as well as Paul Child’s marvelous letters home. But when she gets to Foster’s indictment by a federal grand jury on charges of espionage for the Soviet Union, she has to pick her way across far more uncertain ground. She does so with aplomb.
Was Foster a Soviet spy or a victim of overzealous anti-Communist crusaders who were far too willing to believe the testimony of a showboating informer who also happened to be a proven plagiarist and con man? Without relinquishing her fundamental sympathy with Foster, Conant faults her subject for “her denial and her self-delusion” as well as her refusal “to confront the truth about herself at the most fundamental level.”
The larkish first half of “A Covert Affair” gives way to a much darker but more intriguing consideration of how personality becomes destiny; the very qualities that make Foster so much fun to read about also led to her downfall. The Childs are relegated to the sidelines in this final act, but it hardly matters; by that point, Foster is the one you really care about. Her considerable talents went to waste after the war, mostly because she insisted on saying things about Southeast Asia that the officials back home just didn’t want to hear. No surprise, they all turned out to be true.
The Pentagon has poured millions of dollars into the development of tiny drones inspired by biology, each equipped with video and audio equipment that can record sights and sounds.
They could be used to spy, but also to locate people inside earthquake-crumpled buildings and detect hazardous chemical leaks.
The smaller, the better.
Besides the hummingbird, engineers in the growing unmanned aircraft industry are working on drones that look like insects and the helicopter-like maple leaf seed.
Researchers are even exploring ways to implant surveillance and other equipment into an insect as it is undergoing metamorphosis. They want to be able to control the creature.
The devices could end up being used by police officers and firefighters.
Their potential use outside of battle zones, however, is raising questions about privacy and the dangers of the winged creatures buzzing around in the same skies as aircraft.
For now, most of these devices are just inspiring awe.
With a 6.5-inch wing span, the remote-controlled bird weighs less than a AA battery and can fly at speeds of up to 11 mph, propelled only by the flapping of its two wings. A tiny video camera sits in its belly.
The bird can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways, forward and backward. It can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise.
Most of all it can hover and perch on a window ledge while it gathers intelligence, unbeknownst to the enemy.
“We were almost laughing out of being scared because we had signed up to do this,” said Matt Keennon, senior project engineer of California’s AeroVironment, which built the hummingbird.
The Pentagon asked them to develop a pocket-sized aircraft for surveillance and reconnaissance that mimicked biology. It could be anything, they said, from a dragonfly to a hummingbird.
Five years and $4 million later, the company has developed what it calls the world’s first hummingbird spy plane.
“It was very daunting up front and remained that way for quite some time into the project,” he said, after the drone blew by his head and landed on his hand during a media demonstration.
The toughest challenges were building a tiny vehicle that can fly for a prolonged period and be controlled or control itself.
AeroVironment has a history of developing such aircraft.
Over the decades, the Monrovia, Calif.-based company has developed everything from a flying mechanical reptile to a hydrogen-powered plane capable of flying in the stratosphere and surveying an area larger than Afghanistan at one glance.
It has become a leader in the hand-launched drone industry.
Troops fling a four-pound plane, called the Raven, into the air. They have come to rely on the real-time video it sends back, using it to locate roadside bombs or get a glimpse of what is happening over the next hill or around a corner.
The success of the hummingbird drone, however, “paves the way for a new generation of aircraft with the agility and appearance of small birds,” said Todd Hylton of the Pentagon’s research arm, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
These drones are not just birds.
Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple leaf seed, or so-called whirly bird, loaded with navigation equipment and imaging sensors. The spy plane weighs .07 ounces.
On the far end of the research spectrum, DARPA is also exploring the possibility of implanting live insects during metamorphosis with video cameras or sensors and controlling them by applying electrical stimulation to their wings.
The idea is for the military to be able to send in a swarm of bugs loaded with spy gear.
The military is also eyeing other uses.
The drones could be sent in to search buildings in urban combat zones. Police are interested in using them, among other things, to detect a hazardous chemical leak. Firefighters could fling them out over a disaster to get better data, quickly.
It is hard to tell what, if anything, will make it out of the lab, but their emergence presents challenges and not just with physics.
What are the legal implications, especially with interest among police in using tiny drones for surveillance, and their potential to invade people’s privacy, asks Peter W. Singer, author of the book, “Wired for War” about robotic warfare.
Singer said these questions will be increasingly discussed as robotics become a greater part of everyday life.
“It’s the equivalent to the advent of the printing press, the computer, gun powder,” he said. “It’s that scale of change.”
President Barack Obama’s spokesman is labeling as “ridiculous” an assertion by the founder of WikiLeaks that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton should resign if she was involved in asking U.S. diplomats to gather intelligence at the United Nations.
In an online interview with Time magazine from an undisclosed location, founder Julian Assange on Tuesday called on Clinton to resign “if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations” in violation of international agreements.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday that Assange’s statements “are both ridiculous and absurd.” Clinton, he said, has done nothing wrong, and U.S. diplomats do not engage in spying. He spoke in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.
State Department officials said Tuesday that secret instructions to American diplomats to gather sensitive personal information about foreign leaders originated from the U.S. intelligence community but did not require diplomats to spy. Requests for DNA and biometric data on foreign officials were contained in leaked classified cables published by WikiLeaks.
“Secretary Clinton is doing a great job,” Gibbs said. “The president has great confidence in and admires the work that Secretary Clinton has done.”
Hamid Karzai (left) and the ladies of "Sex and the City 2"
Today the New York Times reports that a still-unidentified Afghan man was posing as a Taliban leader in secret peace talks with Afghanistan officials. It’s unclear whether this individual was a con man out to line his pockets, a Taliban agent out to sabotage the talks, or a plant from Pakistani intelligence. The writers, Dexter Filkins and Carlotta Gall, note that the incident “could have been lifted from a spy novel.” Regrettably, they may be right. The days when writers of espionage fiction conceived of impostor spies who called themselves Julian or Raoul seem to have passed in favor of writers who are less interested in the glamour of international intrigue than in impostors who don’t drink and call themselves Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.
Further reports on the story are sure to observe that the entire episode might have been plucked from the movies. This is incorrect. Plucked from films, yes. The story is half-ready for the art house. Strip the tale of glamour, remove any potential for excitement and you’ve not only got a greenlight, but guaranteed analysis in Cineaste, and a panel accompanying the New York opening consisting of Naomi Klein, a New York University expert on the Middle East, and any film critic dextrous enough to use “hegemony” in a sentence.
But the movies? Forget it. Hollywood is too besotted with sequels, reboots, animation to stick a toe into the real world. And the supposed change from this routine that the holiday season offers consists usually of adaptations of the kind of novels (usually Booker winners) that are purchased instead of read, or a Nancy Myers comedy in which a 50-ish divorcee (Meryl/Goldie/Diane) who has founded her own successful wrapping-paper company has to decide if her heart lies with her younger lesbian business partner (Debra Messing) or with a rakish older European diplomat (Bernard-Henri Levy).
Opportunities for film viewing in Kabul are understandably sparse. Salon’s sources in the city report that there are only two screens in operation at the city’s sixplex and they are currently offering “Speed Racer” and “Lambada: The Forbidden Dance.” Clearly, it’s time for America to intervene. Despite our massive expenditures in the country, our officials can surely afford a selection of DVDs designed to train Afghan officials on not falling for an impostor.
We suggest:
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (1967) — We direct Afghan leaders to the suspicion shown by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the early part of the film toward the doctor their daughter brings home as her fiancé. The audience may consider their fears unreasonable because the doctor is, after all, Sidney Poitier and the young woman could as easily have brought home Eldridge Cleaver or Sonny Liston. But had the Afghans treated the impostor’s moderate proposals with even a smidge of the skepticism Spence and Kate show toward even such a paragon as Poitier, surely this embarrassing situation might have been avoided.
“Brokeback Mountain” (2005) — Was this individual really in close contact with the Taliban? If he had, he surely would have shown some inclination to the rugged, and all too often lonely, life that solitary figures like insurgents or closeted gay cowboys lead. Simply the mention of certain items — Ralph Lauren flannel shirts; beef jerky; a pet mule named Faiza — would have elicited a certain gleam in the eye of the real McCoy.
“Footloose” (1984) — Certainly only as dedicated a zealot as an actual Taliban leader could resist the combined lure of Kevin Bacon’s dancing and Kenny Loggins’ music. Slip the movie on during a break in negotations. Does this alleged mullah tap his feet, or nod his head sternly during John Lithgow’s fire-and-brimstone sermons? For the sake of the money you’ve just shelled out, pray it’s the latter.
“The Passion of the Christ” (2004) Four words: It’s the Jews’ fault. Sure to warm the heart of any true jihadist.
“Sex and the City 2″ (2010): Watch your man as he watches Carrie and the girls live it up in Abu Dhabi. Does he chuckle at their antics or make proclamations about profanations of the infidel harlots? (Note: The film can also be useful for other methods of recognition. See: “Brokeback Mountain.”)
Hamid Karzai (left) and the ladies of "Sex and the City 2" 
