This is the 24th edition of the bond series, the first one “Dr. No” was released in 1962. This movie has all the things you would expect in any Bond movie, an incredible opening sequence – this one having an amazing Helicopter fight scene that looked extremely dangerous to film. Several bond women; this movie having the oldest Bond girl Monica Bellucci who is 51 years old. A great fight scene; this time on a train and some very good action sequences. There is also a great car chase in this Bond film; this one having one with 2 very impressive and expensive cars. The downside of most of these Bond films is as always the situation where James Bond can be easily killed, but for some reason the evil villain must have him go through some elaborate escape rather than just killing him outright. Of course much of this has to do with giving the audience some drama but one has to wish that someday there will be some sense of common sense to some of these ridiculous escape scenes -and this movie has one of the most absurd escapes at the end.
One other unusual part of this film is that the villain in the movie doesn’t appear until about 80% of the movie is over, which has to be the first time we have seen this in a Bond movie. There are many scenes which have no connection or logic to them, as the audience has to wonder why is this happening or what was the logical lead-up to this scene and this is especially true of the ending which I thought was particularly ridiculous. There is talk that this is Daniel Craig’s fourth and last Bond film and perhaps the reason for this is that he is tired of some of the nonsensical scenes and scripts which sometimes make no sense. Overall this is a good Bond film but it will not stand out as one of the best that has ever been made in this series mainly because the script and the logic of some of the scenes just do not add up. Also I thought the ending was just not that good at all.
Some 11 years after the news came out that George W. Bush got special privileges and got into the Texas National Guard, anybody you would ask about this issue would say the same thing. Of course Bush got special privileges to avoid the Vietnam war, his father is George Bush who was the head of the CIA and very politically connected. This is how things work for the rich and the politically connected in this country; they can get out of a horrible war like Vietnam and avoid getting killed or horribly maimed for life.
In 2004 the United States was in the middle of a big election between John Kerry and George W. Bush who was running for his second term. Unfortunately for the United States, John Kerry was not a strong enough opponent to run against Bush and Bush won the election. On top of this, we were in the beginning stages of the Iraq War which would drag on for many more years and cost this country trillions of dollars and many more lives. One could argue that were it not for the Iraq war, Bush would have never won the election in 2004.
The movie “Truth” is about a story on 60 minutes anchored by Dan Rather that claimed that there were documents that proved George W. Bush not only got special consideration for getting out of the Vietnam War by entering the Texas National Guard, but also did not meet many of the requirements that he had to meet to stay in the National Guard during the 6 years he was in the service. CBS News had one witness who turned out in the end to be lying about some of the sources of these documents and the validity of how they were obtained. It was in fact true that Dan Rather’s friend and producer Mary Mapes; played very well by Cate Blanchette, and her team made several mistakes in verifying all the statements and documents involved in this very complex case. But it is also clear that whatever this CBS team did in verifying all of the facts of this case; this was what they normally did for all stories and that included getting other verbal statements on the record from military officials including Air Force Generals to verify that the statements in these documents were true. Soon after this story came out, several bloggers came out stating that the published documents were fake because the type and character fonts were not available in 1973 when the documents supposedly came out. This was later proved to be untrue, but by then political pressure became too great and the US Military officials who originally verified that the documents were true, started to recant their stories and refused to go on television to support what they originally said. What then followed as a witch hunt where many people lost their jobs including Mary Mapes who never worked in Television Journalism again. The worst tragedy of all was that Dan Rather lost his job as the anchor of CBS news which he had held for 24 years, the longest anchor in television history. Of all the people involved with this scandal it was the biggest injustice that Dan Rather had to lose his job because a good deal of his job was to rely on his producers, researchers and reporters who support what he does.
The end of this movie concludes with a huge investigation of Mary Mapes and the best scene was when she defended the documents that were in question by stating a long list of things that any forger would have to know about the Military and inside information from some 30 years earlier in order to trick CBS News into believing that the were accurate. This list is so long, that any semblance of common sense would convince anyone who was not convinced already, that the documents in question about George W. Bush’s military service were in fact true. George W. Bush, probably because he was an admitted alcoholic in the 70’s, did receive special privileges to not only avoid the Vietnam War, but to also avoid his required duties in the Texas National Guard. In the end, none of this mattered and Mapes and her entire staff were fired from CBS and some time later, Dan Rather stepped down as the anchor of CBS news. All things being equal it seems that CBS went after the wrong president; because what they should have remembered from the 2000 Presidential election is that politics wins over what is right, every time. George W. Bush was given the presidency by the US Supreme Court, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote and would have lost the Electoral Vote should the votes in Florida had been counted to completion. Considering what happened to the United States in Bush’s second term, culminating with the financial crisis of 2008 is the real tragedy. It is also suggested that Mapes could have brought out this investigation of Bush before his first term in office which could have meant that Al Gore would have won the Presidency that year, but her mother died and she was not able to put out the story. Another sub plot of this movie were the stories of Mapes father, who use to beat her and her sister during their childhood and who later came out against her when this scandal first exploded in the press. A very touching scene was when Cate Blanchette begged her father on the phone to stop bad mouthing her to the press with a simple “Daddy please stop”.
“Our Brand is Crisis” is a strange title for a movie even though there is a line from the movie when the main character who is a political operative played by Sandra Bullock determines that the only way for her candidate to win is to create an environment of crisis in Bolivia so that her aggressive candidate would be more accepted by the voters. Despite this fact, the title of this movie is rather bad but so is this movie.
I have noticed over the years and seeing many movies that one of the signs of a bad movie is what are called “filler scenes”, where the director realizes that there are not enough of a story to fill out an entire 2 hour movie, so there are cuts to scenes of music and unnecessary action. In this movie, this happened about 5 times and some of these filler scenes (including Bullock’s character mooning people in a passing bus) are just plain ridiculous. This entire movie could have been shown in about 1 hour and 10 minutes, rather than the 2 hours of boredom and pointless dialog that this movie has.
At the end of the movie there is a scene where Sandra Bullock’s character puts a strange metal hat on her head which makes absolutely no sense. Also at the end of this movie when the election is over with a predictable result, Bullock’s character decides to stay in Bolivia for reasons that are never explained to the viewer. The one thing I did admire about this bad movie is the 3 stars, Billy Bob Thornton, Sandra Bullock and Anthony Mackie and the fact that they spent probably several months in Bolivia which is a poor and perhaps dangerous country to live in; so many dues were probably made there to earn their salaries. Its too bad that after all this money and effort such a bad movie was created. There is a scene where a Lama is killed by a passing car which was in very bad taste and was actually offensive. Obviously the producers of this movie either forgot about or never heard of PETA. Why was this scene even in this movie? Was this suppose to be funny? It sure was not funny and was very disturbing.
Another very bad thing about this movie is the constant smoking of several of the main characters, continuing this Hollywood tradition of showing so many people in movies with the worst health threat we have to humanity. It seems we are a long way from a ban of all smoking in movies and that is a real shame.
A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies. 