Tag: movies

The Bride and why I love all the Frankenstein’s monsters

Frankenstein’s Monster is dead, but he’ll also really never die. 

I love it when a character hits the cultural level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, and can be endlessly reinvented for new eras. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride is the latest reimagining of the bones of Mary Shelley’s tale, a wild, anarchic creation myth and love story. It’s as loose and freaky as major Hollywood productions ever get these days, and while it’s sure to be divisive, I kind of loved it. 

Very loosely retelling the events of Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930s, Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley gives a delightfully unhinged performance as a new “Bride” to Christian Bale’s wounded and lonesome Frankenstein’s monster. The Bride at times feels as rough and patched together as the monster himself, but that’s what charmed me – it tells something new by stitching together ghostly possession, a screwball musical, a blood-spattered romance and a Bonnie and Clyde-style violent lovers on the run arc. 

The monster and his bride tear through polite society, and while the plot is sprawling and doesn’t always add up, terrific turns by Bale, Buckley and Annette Bening as this movie’s “mad doctor” work well. A truly insane homage dance number to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is the most audaciously strange scene I’ve seen so far this year. This one’s for the sickos, and I’m proud to be among them. 

I’m here for all the Frankensteins, to be honest, right on down to campy ‘60s kaiju romp Frankenstein Conquers The World and the ultra-sleazy Frankenhooker. 

There remains endless potential in the story of man creating life, and how it (usually) all goes horribly wrong. 

We’re only a few months from the last great Frankenstein movie, Guillermo Del Toro’s Gothic Oscar-nominated epic of an adaptation of Shelley’s novel with a committed and curiously sexy performance by Jacob Elordi as the monster. That one is as overwrought and passionate as The Bride, but in a completely different way. Those great lonesome Arctic chase sequences – always my favourite part of the original novel – sparkle on the big screen. 

A rough Google estimate tells me there’s been close to 500 spins on the Frankenstein story. Boris Karloff set the standard, of course, and his performance, closing in on a century ago now, remains the template for investing the monster with both humanity and menace. Christopher Lee played the creature as a hurt, abused animal, with melting-egg makeup that seemed startlingly grotesque in 1957’s Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein – then followed by a half-dozen more Hammer movies that totally reimagined the creature’s story each time, even as a woman and once as a New Zealand wrestler with the world’s worst makeup job. 

Every era has its Frankenstein – splattery gore from Andy Warhol in the ‘70s, kid-friendly spoofs like The Monster Squad in the 1980s, bombastic excess like Kenneth Branagh’s 1990s take. I like the weirder angles, like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Bound from 1990 that throws time travel and metafiction into the mix. 

I’m even fascinated by the schlocky look of 1910’s Frankenstein by Edison Studios, the first adaptation of the creature’s story done in a mere 16-minute silent film, with Charles Stanton Ogle as a shaggy, deformed monster that’s memorably bizarre. A mere 116 years old now, it’s more of a curio than a successful film, but it sets the template for many a Frankenstein story in the century-plus since. 

And that doesn’t even get into the non-film realms, like DC Comics turning Frankenstein’s monster into a kind of immortal holy warrior, queer fiction imaginings like Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and the novel and movie of Gods And Monsters, or modern-day parables like Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. 

The Bride builds on all these flocks of Frankensteins, and Gyllenhaal’s weird delight of a film embraces the shimmering fluid identities of the monsters – her romantic duo are alternately enraged and peaceful, needy and fiercely independent. I expect The Bride is the kind of movie a lot of people will hate, and it’s certainly not flawless, but it’s brave in its own weird way.

For a book that came out 208 years ago, Shelley’s Frankenstein is still remarkably futile ground for birthing all kinds of stories about mankind’s hopes and dreams, and nightmares. 

That time the Ramones became unlikely teen movie sex symbols

You know, I love the Ramones a little more every day, and their molten-punk purity of just bashing out pop tunes as fast they could. They weren’t fancy – they were anything but – but they hit on some elemental force that they turned into a 20-plus year career. 

Back in 1979, legendary producer Roger Corman and director Allan Arkush somehow thought the Ramones would be the perfect band to anchor a classic teenage rebellion musical with a warped underground edge. Rock ’n’ Roll High School is a campy screwball delight even now, a time capsule of leotards and neon fashion in that cusp of an era where disco, punk and new wave all scrambled for cultural relevance. 

PJ Soles is Riff Randell, a perky punk fan with a heart of gold who’s the Ramones’ biggest fan, while her best friend Kate is a nerdy good girl with a crush on football player Tom. When the no-nonsense new Principal Togar (the wonderful Mary Woronov, veteran of Andy Warhol movies and much more) comes into town, it all sets up your classic clash between teens and authority. 

It’s a wonderfully sincere little punk rock movie, with Soles’ chipper enthusiasm jostling with Woronov’s sexy dominatrix vibe. It lacks the meanness of a lot of teen movies (for comparison, I watched 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds for the first time in decades the other day, and hoo boy that hasn’t aged well). Even the handsome football jock in this movie is kind of a decent guy, despite being an utter horndog. The kids in this movie mostly look like real kids rather than 30-year-old cosplayers, and it’s filled with great character actors like Clint Howard and Paul Bartel’s stiff music teacher who, of course, loosens up and gets down with the punkers. 

And when the Ramones rock into town, they’re like a blast of sleazy adult energy that still manages to feel cartoony. 

One of the beauties of Rock ’N’ Roll High School is just how weird the Ramones are on screen. They don’t appear until around halfway into the movie, riding down the street in a groovy Ramones-mobile and looking like they just fell out of a comic book, a leather-clad blast of menacing charm. 

The Ramones seem rather uncomfortable shoehorned into this teen comedy, and yet, it all works – they’re an intrusion from another world, and you can’t take your eyes off them. Joey, in particular, was all awkward angles and bulbous features covered by a mane of hair and those ever-present dark glasses, and he looked a bit like a scribbled rough draft of a rock star come to life.

The movie’s best scene is a barely-disguised masturbatory fantasy by PJ Soles of the Ramones playing in her bedroom, capped with Dee Dee revealed to be playing in her shower! I love the darned Ramones, but picturing them as Elvis-type sex symbols feels like a stretch. Did they ever even take off those leather jackets, anyway?

The Ramones couldn’t really act worth a lick – most of them barely have lines in the movie, and when they do they sound like the raw amateurs they were at doing anything other than punk rock. A highlight of the film is simply watching them in concert blasting through numbers like “Blitzkreig Bop,” “Teenage Lobotomy” and “Pinhead” and the title song. 

In real life, they were troubled, of course – only one of the band made it past his early 50s, and Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy are all long gone now. The Ramones blazed through the culture like one of their songs, and I’ll always regret that I never saw them live. 

By the time the Ramones show up at the high school and tear it all up in a furnace of punk petulance and a literal explosion, it’s cathartic as hell, even if you didn’t mind high school all that much. Take that, Principal Togar and all the jerky fascist authority figures in this world who think they know what’s better for everybody else. (Um, I might just be projecting about life in the year 2026, a little…)

Amusingly, the behind-the-scenes on the blu-ray talks about how the movie almost came to star other bands – such as Van Halen or Devo (can you imagine?). 

Yet it’s the Ramones, who got so much out of a handful of chords and lyrics about freaks and fumbling love and sniffing glue, who were the perfect fit for this subversive take on teen musicals. Their presence captures the alchemic power a great rock song can have in your life, the way it feels like it blows down the doors of your boring reality and hurls open the doors of infinite potential. Yeah, even if they’re just singing about how Sheena is a punk rocker. 

As both a time capsule and a kind of warped Bizarro version of so many other far worse rock ’n’ roll teen movies, Rock ’N’ Roll High School has strangely endured, closing in on 50 years now. It’s a blast of pure weird joy that makes the world feel a little bit better every time I watch it. Gabba gabba hey!

I finally went to Woodstock, 57 years later

It’s been a rather busy month full of concerts for me, and so I decided to sit for a couple nights and regroup by finally watching the Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock, the nearly four-hour (!) 1970 picture about the grandaddy of all rock festivals. 

The daunting length of Woodstock – 224 minutes in the directors’ cut! – put me off watching it for far too long, but once you sink into its patchouli-scented vibes, director Michael Wadleigh’s uncanny eye for capturing those three days in 1969 (with help from a variety of editors including Martin Scorsese!) sucks you in. 

Woodstock pivots between candid moments of the heaving 400,000+ crowd and intimate, close-up concert footage, swinging between the near and the far in a way that really evokes the scope of the event. Even now, viewing this swelling mass of humanity on Max Yasgur’s farm is startling. These bands were playing on a pretty humble stage and sound set – with no giant screens for the crowd – and yet still managed to hold attention. It all seems so low-fi and ramshackle from our hi-tech world of 2026, but also deeply moving. 

At times it’s almost comical, like watching a grasshopper try to entertain a stadium, like when laidback folk singer John Sebastian alone with his guitar tries to gently lecture a wall of humanity, but then someone like Richie Havens takes the stage and holds the crowd in the palm of his hand with a few strums and footstomps, and it’s magic. 

Everyone remembers Jimi Hendrix’s barn-burning closing performance – which teeters right on the edge of self-indulgence – but how about Ten Years After’s searingly loud take on “I’m Going Home”? Or The Who lurking out of the darkness like rock ’n’ roll spectres? Or Sha Na Na‘s frankly bonkers appearance?

Wadleigh’s eye for both the masses and the music separates Woodstock from many other concert films, and the still-innovative split screen approach gives it an immersive feel not quite like anything else. It’s the small moments that stick with you – the beaming smile on a blonde woman’s face lost in the music during Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice”, or the poignant little interview with the guy cleaning out all the disgusting porta-potties, a hardworking average American joe who says he’s got a kid at the festival – and another fighting away in Vietnam. I wonder how that family came out of all those crazy times (of course, it turns out the toilet guy later sued over being in the movie, so it goes). 

Still, seeing all these hopeful, hairy faces slogging through the mud in Woodstock in 1969, you wonder how and who they are today. The commercialised repackaged idealism of the ‘60s is beyond parody now, but there is a distinct vibe to these times that an awful lot of people have been trying to capture ever since. The occasional sneering angry conservative local and the kindness seen in counterpoint by other locals about Woodstock disrupting their lives seems to evoke so much of the culture wars still splitting America today. It’s not so different, then and now. 

I quickly decompressed from all the hippie peace and love by watching Woodstock 1970’s evil mirror image, the Netflix documentary series Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, the biggest (and last) attempt to pimp hard for that ‘60s nostalgia vibe with a musical journey that went horribly, depressingly wrong. Then again, when you book headliners like Limp Biskit, Kid Rock and Korn, you’re probably not really capturing the vintage Woodstock feeling. Toxic masculinity seems to be the order of the day, with a nihilistic mob of teens lashing out and calling it a “party.” 

Trainwreck was a cold splash of water after Woodstock’s idealism, with an endless army of shirtless frat boys screaming incoherently. Free food and camping turned into price-gouging capitalism run amok. The purpose of Woodstock ’99 was to “get fucking wild” and “party”, and needless to say it all kind of collapsed into a full-on riot of violence, vandalism and fires by the end, which Trainwreck forensically dissects. The desperate need to “repeat” Woodstock ’69 or live up to the impossible nostalgia were the seeds of the festival’s destruction. A sad attempt to do yet another Woodstock reboot in 2019 for the 50th anniversary never even got off the ground. 

Of course, both festivals were flawed, could never live up to expectations and yet probably had their moments, too – Woodstock 1970 glosses over lightly the issue of overcrowding, feeding the hordes and any violence at the scene, while Trainwreck focuses so heavily on the bad vibes and sense of disaster it kind of skims over that there were dozens of non-bro rock artists also playing and that despite everything, some people even apparently enjoyed it all. 

The original Woodstock becoming a proxy for the fanciful mythical never-land of hippie dreams was kind of a happy accident, which defies attempts to do it all over again. I don’t think I would’ve liked to be there, and I know I wouldn’t have wanted to be at ’99, but more than 50 years on the documentary is a powerful piece of cultural history, with some fantastic performances along the way. We put our dreams into music festivals, but in the end, sometimes you just have to go where the day takes you.

 

Take a deep dive with me into My Movie DNA

Hey, you dig reading me ramble on about movies on this here website? Well, now you can listen to me do the same thing, as I made a guest appearance on the new episode of Brit-turned-Kiwi Johnny Andrews’ highly entertaining My Movie DNA podcast! 

24-Hour Movie Marathon veteran Johnny has been doing this for a few years now and had guests including Wellington Paranormal star Karen O’Leary, Lord of the Rings Oscar-winning production designer Grant Major and a whole heap of prominent NZ movie creatives and fans, so it was an honour to be asked to pontificate on my movie hot takes for 90 minutes or so.

Johnny and I talk about everything from Charlie Chaplin’s masterpieces to Point Break to my glimpse of the filming of One Battle After Another to David Cronenberg to the late great Catherine O’Hara, how Sinners tackles America’s history, the wacky, erratic films of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and so much more.

Have a listen at the links below and please enjoy my goofy responses to Johnny’s most excellent questions!

You can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and much more through the links here!

And now, it’s my top 10 pop culture moments of 2025!

At this point, complaining about what a terrible year life has thrown at us is a bit of a cliche, eh? So yeah, bad things happened in 2025, oh boy did they … but if you try to doomscroll less and open your eyes a little more to everyday goodness, sometimes things can feel like they even out.  

As always, the soothing balm of pop culture – a good book, a great album, a rad comic or a mind-blowing movie – helps make the world go down a little smoother sometimes. So, at the end of year in review week for me, let’s hopescroll, with the 10 best pop culture moments I had this year! 

Photo Brenna Jo Gotje/The 13th Floor

Amyl and Sniffers live at the Powerstation, February 16: This was not a very big year for live music for me, but I promised 2025 would be my year of punk rock because right now being a punk seems the best way to fight all this enshittification. Australia’s awesome punk rising stars Amyl and the Sniffers delivered a hell of a show, full of joyful rage and a reminder that not everyone has turned evil in 2025. They’ve already played to far bigger crowds this year than the cozy Powerstation, but I’m glad I saw ‘em when I did. 

Superman saves squirrel: If you didn’t like this moment in Superman, what can I say? It’s the essence of Superman – he won’t even let a squirrel die if he can help it! and a welcome return to optimism after far too many grimdark Superman tales. 

Pluribus: Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s apocalyptic new epic starring a fantastic Rhea Seehorn might be the year’s best television – full of fascinating worldbuilding and a methodical yet hypnotic pace – a welcome novelty in this era of endless distractions. While some armchair critics called it ‘boring’ because it didn’t feature Walter White blowing up stuff every episode, I don’t think they get Pluribus. It’s a unique vibe that leaves you thinking about what it really means to be human and part of humanity. I only hope it continues to pay off whenever Season 2 comes around. 

The Pitt: Old-school and yet up-to-the-minute, this electrifying hospital drama was also a sharp reminder that despite all the endless glut of “content” flooding streamers with meandering plots, sometimes you can just pare everything back to good characters and plot momentum and score one of the best shows of the year. 

That juke joint scene in Sinners, which  floored me with its sheer beautiful audacity and confidence that the audience would keep up: “So true, it can pierce the veil between life and death.”

The Collected Cranium Frenzy by Steve Willis: One of the coolest little projects this year was a comprehensive reprinting of Cranium Frenzy, the surreal and hilarious small press comics of the legendary Steve Willis. Never heard of him? You should! As I’ve written in the past, Willis is absolutely one of the greats of the minicomics scene ever since the 1980s, but like most minicomics, it was literally impossible to find his work in print. Phoenix Productions have picked up the ball with five gorgeous little books collecting decades worth of work by Willis all on Amazon, well worth seeking out for the adventures of Morty the Dog and many more!

Wet Leg, moisturizer: I’m an old geezer whom Spotify now tells me is roughly 110 years ancient, but my favourite album by a “new” band this year was Wet Leg’s sprightly, sexy and hook-filled second album, a catchy fusion of alternative rock (does that still exist), post-punk, dance and whatever else you’d like. I’ve been humming along to “liquidize” for months. Be my marshmallow worm!

Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum: A wonderfully quirky miniseries by Ice Cream Man creators W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo that embraces all the wacky insanity of vintage Superman comics and gives it a surreal spin, kind of like if David Lynch tried to write a Spider-Man comic. I’ve sampled Ice Cream Man and it wasn’t my thing, but this Superman miniseries is such a colourful “elseworlds” delight that I’ll be keeping an eye on these creators from now on. 

This one amazing shot in Guillermo Del Toro’s terrific Frankenstein:

Writing a book: I hit 30 years in journalism at the end of 2024 and decided it was time to put together a “greatest hits” of sorts of my columns, essays, articles and more. It’s a total vanity project but I’m really pleased with how Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 came out and the kind words by family, friends and even a few complete strangers who’ve bought it. It’s more than 350 pages of scribbles that somehow sums up my so-called career. Get it now over on Amazon (and you can pick up a few collections of my long running comic series Amoeba Adventures there too)! 

Let’s all try to have a decent 2026!

Monsters, madness and heroes – My favourite movies of 2025

The calendar is on its last page yet again and it’s Year In Review week here. Let’s kick it off with my 10 favourite movies of 2025* – a surprisingly excellent year for mainstream Hollywood where a lot of clever and edgy horror and drama managed to sneak into cinemas. 

*Despite the modern age we live in, New Zealand still sometimes gets movies a bit later, so a few releases that were officially in 2024 didn’t make it to our screens until this year. Still, I’m including them, because I’m in charge here!  (This also means there’s more than a few acclaimed 2025 films that haven’t gotten here just yet like Hamnet and Marty Supreme.) 

My top 10 of 2025:

1. One Battle After Another – Was there any other choice, really? Paul Thomas Anderson has been one of the world’s finest directors for the past 25 years, and this year feels like the year that everyone finally noticed. I wish it had been a bigger box office hit but in the American shitshow of 2025 the mere fact this exists is awesome. 

2. Sinners – After Black Panther and Creed, we should’ve already known Ryan Coogler was the real deal, but he takes it to another level in this unexpected smash hit that tackles America’s blood-spattered history and marries it with the power of music, the horror of the unexpected and a series of achingly romantic tragedies. 

3. Frankenstein – Trust Guillermo Del Toro to give fresh new blood to a frequently filmed tale. With darkly gorgeous and tactile lush design and a heartbreaking turn by Jacob Elordi as an oddly sexy version of the monster, Del Toro’s passion project is lush, gory and epic, like a fusion of the Universal and Hammer-era Frankenstein tales. Kind of like his Shape of Water, I very much felt like Guillermo made this movie just for me as a cool little secret to share between mates. 

4. Superman – Thank god, for the first time in decades we’ve got a Superman movie that’s light in spirit and doesn’t hammer us with dreary Jesus symbolism. Embracing the silliness of the Silver Age comics – Metamorpho! – and anchored by David Corenswet’s endearingly cheerful performance, Superman was the freshest comic book movie of the year. 

5. Prime Minister – The rise and fall and rise again of a New Zealand politician, the story of Jacinda Ardern is far more candid than I’d imagined it could be. It’s a wonderful documentary but it’s also kind of heart-breaking, because in the world we’re currently in I can’t see politicians who act like actual human beings instead of sneering hypocritical grifters ever getting anywhere again.

6. A Complete Unknown – This one didn’t open in NZ until early 2025, and left a big grin on my face the whole time. The music biopic is a cliche by now but this succeeds by giving us a single slice of Bob Dylan’s career, and fantastic performances by Timothee Chalamet, Ed Norton and Monica Barbaro. Rose-coloured and sanitised like all biopics, but delightful all the same. 

7. Pavements – A film festival favourite that finally showed up in New Zealand this year, this uncategorisable mockumentary is probably the best possible movie that could be made about Pavement, reimagining their slacker anthem songs as fodder for rock musicals, a museum and pretentious Hollywood biopic, and sloshing fake and real together in the perfect tribute to this beautifully eccentric band. 

8. Bugonia – We don’t talk enough about how awesome Emma Stone has become, and how wild this former romantic comedy star’s career choices have been – a conniving commoner in The Favourite, a sexual Frankenstein in Poor Things, and then a career woman who might just be an alien in the wild Bugonia, the latest button-pushing insanity from Stone’s welcome muse Yorgos Lanthimos. 

9. 28 Years Later – A zombie movie three-quel that goes in incredibly unexpected directions, deep into a post-extinction Britain and anchored by a riveting family drama and an all-time third act performance by Ralph Fiennes. Not at all what anyone expected 23 years after 28 Days Later – like everyone else, I’m still unpacking the Jimmys – but I loved its crazy swerves, and am dying to see where it goes in the upcoming 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. 

10. Eddington – Ari Aster’s blunt weapon of a satire about America during Covid is never subtle, but it’s confrontingly hilarious in its story of a small town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix, excellent) caught up in pandemic unrest. It escalates somewhere beyond cringe comedy to the point of being truly uncomfortable, just like watching America has been this year. I haven’t seen another film yet that so starkly confronts that American society has, well, kind of lost its bloody mind in the last few years. 

And just all lurking around #11, the runners up: The Phoenician Scheme, Conclave, Thunderbolts*, Sentimental Value, Wake Up Dead Man, Weapons, The Brutalist, Companion, Pee Wee As Himself, Fantastic Four: First Steps 

Action! Live on set with One Battle After Another

I’m not expecting anything to dislodge One Battle After Another as my favourite film of 2025 with mere days to go before the rough beast of 2026 slouches in, snorting fire and brimstone. 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ripper of a comedy/action/drama met the rare threshold of being a movie I went to see twice in the cinemas, which at modern ticket prices in New Zealand is a commitment. It feels very much a film about the current seething moment in America, where everyone’s angry and disappointed all at the same time. 

But I also thrilled to it because I got to see a brief part of it being filmed back in Sacramento way back in February 2024 during a visit to see family. One Battle is set throughout California’s epic open skies and coastal towns, including places like Humboldt County and the endless desert hills of far southeastern California, but a big chunk of the opening act was filmed all around Sacramento, not far from where I grew up.

It was a lifelong buddy of mine, also a journalist with the Sacramento Bee, who invited me along as he was attempting to get some photos of One Battle’s filming that February morning. It was a sequence being filmed among the squat brutalist architecture of downtown Sac, a grid of anywhere Americana. Streets were blocked off, bouncer-looking type blokes kept us spectators from getting too close, and like any movie making, there was a lot of standing around.

The scene we saw filmed comes after an explosive bank robbery sequence in the finished movie, and for a few hours we watched director Anderson and crew capture a brief part of a chase scene through Sacramento’s streets, including seeing actresses Teyana Taylor and Shayna “Junglepussy” McHayle running along.

For a film geek and a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan, it was a glimpse behind the magical curtain of movies. There’s something about seeing the sausage get made, if only briefly. 

New Zealand gets a lot of film production now and I know people who’ve worked on them, but my experiences with being quiet on a set are pretty limited – I saw some cool explosions for Die Hard With A Vengeance being filmed on Manhattan streets a million years ago during my New York summer, and once upon a time a big 1990s Hollywood romantic comedy called The Gun In Betty Lou’s Handbag was filmed in my small Mississippi college town, exciting everybody until they saw the pretty lame final product, which flopped. 

For One Battle the moments we saw being filmed did recognisably pop up on screen at a pretty intense section of the movie. Sure, for all we know it’s quite possible none of the exact takes I saw filmed that day are the ones featured, but hey – let a fan dream. And it was nice to catch a few moments of a movie being made that is actually really damned good, and hopefully cleans up at the Oscars in a couple months as it sorely deserves to. 

Anyone who’s ever watched a movie being made knows it’s all about tiny jigsaw pieces that are all later painstakingly put together and you rarely get to watch Robert DeNiro give Oscar-nominated monologues. Most often you’ll watch elements of a scene be gone through over and over again in bite-size chunks. 

That day we watched cars on the downtown Sacramento street be moved in and out of position, each time needing to line up exactly with where they were on other takes, and we watched director Anderson and team rolling along on this adorably cool camera rig vehicle each time shooting the actresses running down the sidewalk.

It’s just a few intense moments of the finished near-masterpiece film… but man, I was there that day, lurking in the gray concrete shadows of Sacramento streets, and those couple of minutes of the film will always sparkle with that trivia for me. Action!

Why Pierce Brosnan never quite worked as James Bond

In theory, he should’ve been the perfect James Bond. He looked great. He was groomed for the role and talked about it far longer than other actors, and yet, 30 years on after his 1995 debut in Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan feels like the 007 who never quite hit his target.

Rewatching all four Brosnan James Bond adventures recently, the main fact I was struck by was how inessential they all seem – even the best regarded of them, Goldeneye. They feel like corporate IP placeholders between Timothy Dalton’s harder-edged Bond in his last hurrah in 1989’s Licence To Kill and Daniel Craig shoulder-charging onto the screen as Dalton’s spiritual successor in 2006’s Casino Royale. 

There was talk of Brosnan playing Bond for years going back to his Bond-adjacent turn on TV series Remington Steele. But when NBC wouldn’t release him from his contact, Dalton became the new Bond after Roger Moore retired, and Brosnan wouldn’t get his chance until 1995’s Goldeneye. He was anointed. It all felt so promising. Yet in the end, he was also disappointing. 

Sean Connery was the sexy and brutal Alpha Bond all others came from, while Roger Moore was the more genial killer, Dalton the cunning professional and Craig excelled at giving us a haunted, bruised Bond. But too often Brosnan was asked to imitate elements of his predecessors. He started to develop a kind of professional, cooly slick James Bond archetype which never quite came into full focus. 

The horny sexism and one-liners of Sean Connery and Roger Moore are products of their time, but when Brosnan tried them on in the 1990s, he always looked vaguely pained to be making awful jokes like “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” His quips generally come off as lame or needlessly cruel. There’s a lot of performative posturing about Bond being an antiquated dinosaur (mostly coming from Judi Dench’s M, who’s the true MVP of the Brosnan era) but little true interrogation into what that would actually mean. 

Goldeneye, like most of the Brosnan Bonds, starts with a banger sequence including a still-classic motorcycle leap onto a moving plane, Sean Bean makes a solid villain and Famke Janssen’s feral thrill-seeker is one of my favourite sexy villains. It’s a very good Bond movie that doesn’t quite make it to great, and in his debut, Brosnan too often just seems like a pretty guy in a nice suit to me. 

An overpowering ‘90s excess hangs over most of the Brosnan era, with huge action set pieces but a general lack of any strong character moments to let the story breathe. In Tomorrow Never Dies, it all starts to feel strained. Jonathan Pryce’s scenery-chewing media mogul is a little too over the top, even seen today in the world of Elon Musk. And Brosnan, if anything, is more wooden than he was in Goldeneye, while Teri Hatcher is a dismal Bond girl. Michelle Yeoh, however, is a delight as a Chinese secret agent. It’s all decent enough mid-tier Bond antics, really. 

The third Brosnan picture, The World Is Not Enough gets a lot of slagging off for Denise Richards’ godawful performance as Lara Croft-cosplaying “nuclear scientist” Christmas Jones, but that aside, it’s actually a pretty good Bond romp – Sophie Marceau is terrific as one of Bond’s few female main adversaries and Brosnan finally begins to loosen up and give a little emotional depth to his Bond in his scenes with her. Embrace the camp value of Christmas Jones for what it is, and this underrated one is nearly as good as Goldeneye, I think.

Die Another Day, however, is a sloppy mess. Helmed by the late NZ director Lee Tamahori, it’s wildly all over the show in tone, a bloated and unsatisfying clunker that ranks with the worst in the series. It starts so promisingly – Bond is captured on a mission in North Korea and held prisoner for more than a year, and when freed his 007 status is revoked and he’s out in the cold. But the promising germ of that idea, and haunted Bond with his bushy hostage beard, gets lost – within minutes Bond’s shaved and back to his usual wisecracking self. I’m not a fan of Halle Berry’s co-starring role as shallow quip machine Jinx, and think Yeoh did the “allied secret agent” thing much better. Toss in a terrible cameo by Madonna (!), an invisible car, a rogue’s gallery of absurd race-swapped villains, combine it with some truly awful CGI sequences to all make the campy Moonraker feel like a Nobel Prize winner by comparison.

The Brosnan years also became when the Bond series caretakers started worrying too much about legacy, and legal battles and infighting that keep derailing the series started to come into play. Nobody ran a focus group on whether Roger Moore really should dress as a clown for the climax of Octopussy, but starting with the unceremonious dumping of Timothy Dalton the corporate hand began to weigh awfully heavy on Bond. It’s a big reason why Daniel Craig’s reign feels so choppy and obsessed with canon and continuing subplots.

Brosnan’s James Bond comes off as a cool, unruffled professional, with the potential to seem as unstoppable as Connery did, and he truly does try with the scripts he’s given – I’m thinking of the brief brutal climax where he confronts Sophie Marceau’s Elektra at the end of World, or the few moments Die Another Day gives him to portray a broken Bond after months of torture. 

In the terrific oral history of the Bond franchise, Nobody Does It Better, Brosnan frequently mentions trying to find Bond in what were often still-in-progress scripts. “As I was playing the role, I always said to them, ‘Just what is the character about? Where’s the character? What’s the interaction between them?’” Brosnan is a good actor, but the movies rarely let him lean into his own distinctive qualities. Brosnan’s handsome face isn’t as expressive as Moore’s or Connery’s, to be honest, and perhaps leaning into his sometimes stoic presentation more could’ve given us a scarier, more mysterious Bond. 

In the end, I’d rank Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough as flawed fairly good Bonds, Tomorrow Never Dies as mediocre, and Die Another Day as a true misfire. Other than one-and-done Bond actor George Lazenby, no other James Bond actor’s run feels quite like such a missed opportunity.

Maybe it is about more than just looking the part, in the end. 

Why sometimes we all feel like Lloyd Dobler’s girlfriend’s dad

Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything is a great movie and one of the best teen romance movies ever made – quirky yet sincere, witty yet honest. John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler and Ione Skye’s Diane Court feel real in a way so many ‘80s teen movies never manage to. I saw it at least three times in the theatre back in 1989 when I was deeply underwater in my own series of doomed high school love affairs and I love to revisit it in the years since.

And yet – I think just about my favourite little moment in the movie, even more than that whole iconic boombox scene, isn’t anything to do with teen romance at all.

Instead, it’s Diane’s father Jim, played by the late great John Mahoney, singing alone in his car off-key along to Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” just before his life is about to fall apart. 

Poor old Diane’s dad has been defrauding the rest home he manages and will soon be arrested, and it’s a tragic little twist in the movie that the father she idolises turns out to be an inept con man. At this point, Jim probably knows there’s bad things coming, and they do, but just for a moment, he’s in a car and Steely Dan comes on the radio and that’s everything. 

Diane’s dad sings happily along with Steely Dan with all his heart, not caring that he sounds awful, but the music has snagged something deep inside of him and it won’t let go. Sometimes a song gets you like that, usually when you’re alone, and you feel it pulling you inside whether you want it to or not. I have a frickin’ awful singing voice, but sometimes you move on sheer primal instinct. 

Music hits on a different level than most things, and it can break you open in new ways when you least expect it. 

A song by the great Neutral Milk Hotel came on Spotify while I was out exercising a year or so back, and Jeff Magnum’s strained and aching voice hit me hard, bringing to mind all the love and loss we go through and the things we just can’t fix. Almost unconsciously I started singing along with “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” and damn it, the lines “How strange is it to be anything at all” got me suddenly choking up in the middle of a suburban walk, sucked in. It felt wonderful and painful all at the same time, in an inchoate way I can’t even fully explain.  

Or the other day that ‘80s chestnut “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears came on and for some reason this time the chorus got me, and I began singing along alone in the car, ecstatic and sad and nostalgic and hopeful in all the ways a good song can unearth in you. And don’t even get me started about Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” also featured so prominently in Say Anything… that song contains entire multiverses for me.

There’s a part of everyone that sometimes is just like Lloyd Dobler’s girlfriend’s dad, singing along by yourself about Rikki, hoping she doesn’t lose that number, knowing she probably will, but maybe she’ll send it off in a letter to herself. 

There’s a beautiful loneliness to Jim Court’s car singalong, but there’s also the music, keeping him company and for just a few seconds, making everything all right again. 

That cinematic jolt: Spike Lee and those double dolly shots

I’ve been on a bit of a Spike Lee binge lately, re-watching some of my favourites like Do The Right Thing and The 25th Hour and BlacKkKlansman and dipping into some of the more obscure byways of his filmography. I’ve been a fan since first having the sweaty chaos of Do The Right Thing blow my mind more than 30 years ago and even when Spike swings and misses, it’s usually worth a watch.

And there’s one thing that always gets me, whenever it pops up in his films – the jolt of the double dolly shot. For non-film nerds, dollies are basically cameras mounted on carts to capture fluid movement. In Spike’s films, he’s popularised using the “double dolly,” where two cameras on dollies work together to create an eerie sense of actors “floating” through the background, like they’re on an unseen riverboat wafting downstream. 

I love the double-dolly moments in Spike’s movies, which frequently illustrate emotional chaos like in Inside Man or foreshadowing fate as in Malcolm X. They’re kind of a cold splash of water that burst the fourth wall of film, like the kick of a 3-D movie effect without having to wear those dorky glasses.

When Malcolm X, shortly before he meets his brutal death, suddenly begins to glide through the New York streets, he no longer seems quite human – and yet, you can’t take your eyes off the effect.

Lee has always liked to shake the audience to remind them they’re watching a film, with those confrontational to-the-camera monologues in movies like Do The Right Thing. Sometimes it doesn’t work – as much as I like his coming-of-age comedy/drama Crooklyn, a bizarre choice to distort the aspect ratio to an elongated box for 20 minutes or so of the movie almost derails the whole thing. 

But when it works, for me, Lee’s double dolly shots deliver a shock to the system of passive film watching. In that same Crooklyn, there’s a few shots when the young girl Troy has vivid nightmarish dreams driven by double-dolly shots, which seem to emphasise how little control she has over her swirling life. At the movie’s end, the double dolly shot bursts into the real world in a cathartic moment when Troy and her brother attack the neighbourhood drug addicts. 

Is it a bit flashy and show-offy as a film technique? Certainly, and it’s a good thing generally Spike uses it sparingly, and not in every film. But if you save it for those critical moments – Philip Seymour Hoffman’s existential despair in The 25th Hour, or the startling burst of violent anticipation that ends BlacKkKlansman – it lands with a sharp impact.

The cinema screen often bends but it doesn’t quite break, but for me, in the quick brief moments of those trippy double dolly shots, Spike Lee comes very close to exploding the whole idea of what a movie can be.