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What to watch when you’re not eating turkey

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:00:00 +0000

To help you survive the long Thanksgiving weekend in close quarters with your relatives, here’s a guide to what’s worthwhile on TV this holiday.

“Michael Jackson: Bad25” (Thursday, 9:30 p.m. EST, ABC)

On the 25thanniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s epic “Bad,” Spike Lee has assembled a documentary about the making of that album. It features interviews with everyone from Martin Scorsese (who directed the “Bad” video) to Sheryl Crow (who sang a duet with Jackson on the record) to the less directly involved Mariah Carey, Justin Bieber and Kanye West. There’s also behind-the-scenes footage of the King of Pop hard at work (how did he do that leaning dance thing?). Watching a man in his prime hard at work should help you digest your enormous dinner, right?

"Liz and Dick" (Sunday, 9 p.m. EST, Lifetime)

Lindsay Lohan plays Elizabeth Taylor in this made-for-TV movie about the scandalous, explosive romance between Taylor and Richard Burton. If just reading “Lindsay Lohan plays Elizabeth Taylor” makes you ill, skip it, but if you can stomach it, you’re in for a camp classic that’s totally terrible in a totally fun way.

From the Civil War to James Bond in one quick step

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:08:00 +0000

When I set out in the early 1990s to write a short biographical piece on Col. William C. Oates, the Confederate commander of the 15th Alabama Infantry, who failed to dislodge Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment from the slopes of Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, I had no idea where the project would take me. For one thing, that brief sketch led eventually — some 15 years later — to my writing a biography of Oates, cradle to grave. For another thing, it showed me how close our connections are to the past and how relevant is William Faulkner’s comment that the past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past.

Cinema’s 11 most memorable LGBT villains

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:15:00 +0000

James Bond movies have always been charged with sexual innuendo and cast with the occasional homicidal bad guy with a swish, his flamboyance winking at us, alerting us to his homosexuality. But in "Skyfall," the latest installment of the James Bond franchise, there is no winking, no subtext whatsoever. The gay villain — Javier Bardem's platinum-blond-tressed, plastic-surgically tweaked Raoul Silva — is out of the closet. And with this introduction, Silva enters the pantheon of cinematic LGBT evildoers who offer something extraordinary to the commonplace villain: a motive that doubles as a kind of apologia. Because in the movies, LGBT villains appear as either brooding and fiercely guarded or sinister and effete, signifying that these aren't your run-of the-mill bad people. These are villains who are victims of society, their crimes born out of depraved sexuality, unrequited love, self-hatred, gender dysphoria or a desperate need to feel normal. Until the mid- to late '90s, most of the LGBT portrayals on the big and small screens were of killers or sad sacks — or sad-sack killers. So, is it progress that Raoul Silva is aboveboard about his sexuality? Or have we regressed to the same-old offensive depictions? Let's review some of the most memorable big-screen evildoers on the higher end of the Kinsey scale.

Bond soars with record $87.8 million “Skyfall” debut

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:39:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- James Bond's "Skyfall" has extended its worldwide box-office rule to North America, hauling in a franchise-record $87.8 million in its first weekend at U.S. theaters.

Adding in $2.2 million from Thursday night previews at IMAX and other large-format theaters, "Skyfall" has taken in $90 million domestically, according to studio estimates Sunday.

That lifts the worldwide total for "Skyfall" to $518.6 million since it began rolling out overseas in late October. Internationally, the 23rd Bond flick added $89 million this weekend to raise its overseas revenue to $428.6 million.

The third installment starring Daniel Craig as British super-spy Bond, "Skyfall" outdid the $67.5 million U.S. debut of 2008's "Quantum of Solace," the franchise's previous best opening. "Skyfall" more than doubled the $40.8 million debut of Craig's first Bond film, 2006's "Casino Royale."

"Skyfall" already has passed the $407.7 million overseas total for "Quantum of Solace" and by Monday, it will top the $432.2 million international haul for "Casino Royale."

The Craig era has reinvigorated one of Hollywood's most-enduring franchises, whose first big-screen Bond adventure, "Dr. No," debuted 50 years ago.

James Bond’s real-life inspiration

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Tell me about your first book, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, which is seen by some as the first modern spy thriller and said to have inspired the likes of Graham Greene and John le Carré.

Yes, it is a wonderful book both for the espionage aficionado and also for the yachtsman. It testifies to the fact that if you are writing any novel with a technical basis, it is good to do research and get it right. This is the only novel he wrote; he went on to become a very committed political fellow.

It is basically a serious novel about a sailor called Davies who invites a friend to join him sailing around the German coast from the Baltic to the North Sea. The narrator is Carruthers, a civil servant who works in the Foreign Office, and he is at a loose end in August because everyone has gone away. Suddenly he gets this invitation to go yachting from someone he used to be at university with. He packs his white shoes, cap, blazer and white trousers, only to discover when he gets there that this is not how it is going to be. Instead it is a rather dirty, two-man sailing boat. What they do is sail around the Frisian Islands and discover that the Germans have been building up resources to invade England. So there is this kind of mystery gradually unfolding as they explore those sandy channels in Germany’s North Sea coast.

James Bond for the post-Romney era

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

“Every generation needs another James Bond,” says director Sam Mendes, addressing a roomful of journalists the day before the newest 007 film, “Skyfall,” hit American theaters today. And indeed, Daniel Craig as our diminished era’s favorite secret agent is as close to a real human being as we’ve seen: a pint-sized 40-something who bleeds easily. But the key to Bond’s enduring popularity (the brand has produced 23 movies over half a century, more than the “Star Wars” and “Batman” franchises combined) is that every Bond, from the suave Sean Connery to the campy Roger Moore, makes the case for the very existence of Men.

And by “Men,” I mean clear-eyed humans (of either sex) unburdened by emotion, who make life-or-death decisions based on logic, experience, and duty alone. (Never mind that such people don’t really exist; that’s why it’s fiction.)

“Skyfall”: Bi-curious Bond?

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:27:00 +0000

Reinventing the James Bond franchise to fit the sexual and cultural politics of the 21st century is a dicey proposition at best, and it’s safe to say we’ve seen mixed results so far. If Daniel Craig’s 2006 debut as Bond in “Casino Royale” was a smashing success, bringing a new physicality and cinematic verve to the series along with a touch of real-world anomie, the dour and violent “Quantum of Solace” arguably went too far in the latter direction. (I actually thought it was an interesting experiment, if not an entirely successful one, but fans who complained that it didn’t seem much like a Bond movie were correct.) That $225 million misstep nearly succeeded in killing off the series – which left the world of Ian Fleming’s novels behind long, long ago – but now Bond and Craig are back in “Skyfall,” a rich, impressive, overstuffed and rather chilly spectacle that already looks like the biggest hit in franchise history, even before its American release.

The spy game: “No men need apply”

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:51:00 +0000

“Skyfall,” the new Bond movie, is being hailed as the superannuated old franchise’s most feminist installment yet, thanks to its well-drawn female characters and only light sexism from Daniel Craig’s 007, as opposed to the ass-slapping, comically patronizing misogyny of yore. But next time around, the filmmakers might want to consider actually portraying modern reality by changing Bond’s gender. Women, the head of Mossad has proclaimed, are surpassing men in the espionage game, exhibiting markedly superior skills of endurance, perception and multitasking. It’s an appraisal with which Mike Scheuer, the first chief of the CIA’s dedicated al-Qaida tracking unit, would concur: The capture of al-Qaida higher-ups after 9/11 directly resulted from the efforts of his all-female investigation squad. “If I could have put out a sign on the door that said ‘No men need apply,’ I would have done it,” he remarked recently. And of course, it was the forensically detailed intelligence gathered by “Jen,” the agency analyst who spent years tracking Osama bin Laden, that finally led a team of Navy SEALs to his secret compound in Abbottabad.

Don’t trust the mouse with “Star Wars”

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Temporarily turning even Sandy's aftermath into an also-ran all over the Twitterverse, the news earlier this week that Disney had acquired George Lucas's entertainment empire for some $4 billion—including the right to make more Star Wars movies, with the first post-Lucas installment set to roll out in 2015—seems to have left fans about evenly divided between feeling stoked at the prospect (how can more Star Wars be bad?) and dismayed at Papa George's sellout to the Dark Side. "Get your childhoods ready," one negativist tweeted. "They're about to get pissed on again."

Since I don't have a dog in this fight—not my childhood, kiddo, and we all know Disney will eat everything one day—it surprised me to notice I wasn't totally indifferent. An as yet not-quite-formulated regret was creeping in, despite my basic allergy to Lucas and the Millenium Falcon he rode in on. While I've never bought into the "Star Wars killed the movies" rap that some of my crustier colleagues like to peddle, the whole franchise's appeal has never exactly caught me up in its fever.

James Bond: The least interesting man in the world

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

IN THE EARLY 1950s, Ian Fleming, an Englishman living in Jamaica, was working on a spy novel and, as he told The New Yorker a decade later, he conceived the central figure as “an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened.” Searching for a suitably boring name, Fleming found it on his bookshelf, in the name of the ornithologist who authored the field guide Birds of the West Indies: James Bond.

The inherent anonymity of those two syllables, and the blank slate they imply, hint at why the fictional British secret agent is at the center of the longest-running film franchise of all time. Skyfall, which opens this fall, will be the 25th Bond film (all but two made by the same production company), and it arrives 50 years after the release of the first, Dr. No. Bond may not have the thousand faces of Joseph Campbell’s mythic hero, but he has comfortably fit the features of six quite different actors, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig.

Bardem: I’ll say “whatever the hell I think is right”

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:48:00 +0000

It’s tempting to feel skeptical about celebrities’ involvement with humanitarian crises, which can appear to be more concerned with generating favorable publicity for glittering A-list parties than with helping the people of Tibet or Darfur or Eritrea. But Javier Bardem has little to gain, and a fair amount to lose, in trying to focus international attention on the unsolved and seemingly unsolvable problem of the Western Sahara. That thinly populated patch of desert in northwestern Africa — which is not yet an independent country but not quite a colony either — is a tangled and painful piece of Cold War blowback that the major world powers have been eager to sweep under the carpet.

Since 2008, when he first visited the Algerian refugee camps where up to 150,000 Sahrawis — the formerly nomadic people native to the Western Sahara — have lived for more than three decades, Bardem has become a leading international activist on an issue that few in the Western world even know about, let alone want to touch. Right now Bardem is using the publicity platform provided by his villain role in the upcoming James Bond adventure “Skyfall” to spread the word about a much smaller project, a memorable and moving documentary on the Sahrawi crisis called “Sons of the Clouds,” which he produced.

British spy agency feeling shaken, not stirred

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:45:00 +0000

He may have held a license to kill for 50 years — but in the chiseled form of actor Daniel Craig, James Bond has never looked better. If only the same could be said for his real-life counterparts.

Friday has been named James Bond Day to mark half a century to the day since Sean Connery first brandished his Walther PPK revolver onscreen, and movie theaters worldwide will screen “Skyfall,” 007’s latest big-screen outing, in coming weeks.

But while the rest of the world revels in hoary old Bond clichés, staff in the corridors of MI6 — the organization whose officers and agents are charged with safeguarding Britain from foreign threats — are likely to be too shaken and stirred by their own problems to join the fun.

Hit by a series of allegations that threatens to disrupt its clandestine operations, the British spy agency — officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) — is currently undergoing one of the most troubling periods of its hundred-year existence.

Adele confirms James Bond rumors

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:46:00 +0000

After months of speculation, Grammy-winning singer Adele has confirmed rumors that she has recorded the next James Bond theme. Earlier today, she tweeted the cover page of "Skyfall," which featured her name (A. Adkins), along with P. Epworth, the producer and co-writer of her 2010 hit "Rolling in the Deep."
[embedtweet id="252762323884847104"]

"Skyfall," 007's latest romp, will be released in the U.S. on Nov. 9.