Bad Seeds and Reading Nooks
I read different types of books for different reasons in different locations. I watch three feature films and an animated television special.
Children’s Books, Prose Literature and Comics
Four more children’s books in Spanish that I read with my learner for her to practice teaching me literacy and for me to learn more Spanish.
La Mala Semilla, escrito por Jory John, ilustrado por Pete Oswald
El Paraguas de Cebra by David Hernández Sevillano y Anuska Allepuz
¿De dónde eres?, escrito por Irene Álvarez Lata, ilustrado por Silvia Álvarez
Te quiero, abuela, texto: Giles Andreae, ilustraciones: Emma Dodd
On a crisp Monday morning I got up early and took a free ticket I acquired from the public library to Pier 33 where I boarded the ferry for Alcatraz. On the ferry I wanted to make sure to read one entire chapter of Moby-Dick from beginning to end. It was a good and wild one: Chapter 113 “THE FORGE,” in which Ahab has the ship’s blacksmith forge him from “the gathered nail-stubbs of steel shoes of racing horses” the unholy harpoon that he will use to try to kill the White Whale and which he baptizes in the name of the devil with the pagan blood from the “heathen flesh” of his three non-Christian harpooners Tashtego, Queequeg and Daggoo.
It was a weirdly intense and bleak chapter to read on the way to an infamous prison island, though also one of Melville’s best-written and a late chapter that has some of the meandering book’s most ardent narrative thrust. Most importantly, now no one can say I’ve never read Moby-Dick on a boat. If anyone has a whale I can read it on, please let me know.
After observing a rainbow off the northwestern corner of the island, I went into the Alcatraz cellhouse and picked what looked like an opportune spot to sit and read the library book I’d brought with me, The Gardener of Alcatraz: A True Story by Emma Bland Smith, illustrated by Jenn Ely. Without planning it this way, I realized I had accidentally sat down to read in what had been the prison library. This incurred a few odd looks but I think people probably figured out that I was reading about the history of the place we were in.
After reading the book about Alcatraz while on Alcatraz, I took the ferry back to Pier 33 and walked to a food truck called The Codmother Fish & Chips which had been recommended to me by an SF lifer. I ate overtop more Moby-Dick.
A few days later the aforementioned SF native and two friends and I drove north across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, a facility I’ve been meaning to visit for years as I have a good friend who works there and who gave me some free passes a while back. In the “Paperback Peanuts Reading Nook,” a library-styled exhibition on the publishing history of Peanuts, I squeezed in a quick read of Love, Sweet Love: Romantic Thoughts by the Peanuts Characters, a small Hallmark publication which may represent the shortest amount of time it’s ever taken me to read a hardcover book.
Film Selections: Passing of the Moore Era, Entirety of the Dalton Era and an Animated Television Special
A View to a Kill, directed by John Glen, 1985. The cold open for Roger Moore’s last Bond film finds the series at its stupidest, as it often was during Moore’s run. Then it settles into a first act so boring it could have been excised from the film entirely, with Bond traveling through Paris and then to a fancy horse-racing estate to investigate the film’s hyper-intelligent and psychotic villain named Zorin, played by a well-cast and dashing young Christopher Walken.
Zorin’s plan involves destroying Silicon Valley and manipulating the global market for microchips, so the story takes Bond to San Francisco, giving the filmmakers the opportunity for some lovely on-location images of 007 at City Hall, Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge. (There’s also a spectacular shot overlooking the Bridge and Alcatraz from the cockpit of Zorin’s blimp, at which point Walken and Grace Jones as his lethal henchwoman May Day recite their infamously ridiculous line about “a view…to a kill!!”, smirking as if it is the height of wit for the writers to have crammed the unnatural title into the dialogue.)
It was fun to see Moore-as-Bond cavorting in the famously telegenic city I sometimes inhabit, though Moore was approaching sixty years of age when they shot this film and thus pushing the bounds of plausibility as Bond. The action culminates in a pretty good fight sequence as Zorin’s blimp becomes entangled atop the Bridge and Bond has to both destroy the blimp and save the film’s pretty blonde Bondgenue (a term I just made up) played by one Tanya Roberts. Roberts was attractive in a blandly 1985 type of way but her acting in A View to a Kill is simply execrable. Desmond Llewelyn and Lois Maxwell are still holding fast to their increasingly irrelevant roles as Q and Moneypenny.
This film is neither the best nor worst of the series. It’s too long and has a rather muted, unenlivened affect, like they’re just short on novel ideas. Walken does some good work and Jones is interestingly cast as a badass Bond girl. The theme song performed by Duran Duran did nothing for me. I noted the presence of actors David Yip and Alison Doody, demonstrating further overlap between the Bond and Indiana Jones franchises (cemented by the appearance of John Rhys-Davies in the next film). Moore’s run on the series, closing with him and Roberts in a shower, ends both with a bang and a whimper.
The Living Daylights, directed by John Glen, 1987. Timothy Dalton has the distinction of being the only actor to have played Bond precisely two times. His two entries respectively comprise one of the best and one of the worst of the entire series.
In the excellent The Living Daylights, Dalton does a full pivot from Moore’s wry and unflappably goofy Bond and registers a brooding, violent, over-adrenalized take on the character. The production team also organized a more realistic and plausible (by Bond standards) story around him, using an old-fashioned espionage construction that positions 007 at the juncture point between Cold War spycraft and organized crime. In trying to manage a high-profile Soviet defection and track down the murderers of several of his colleagues, Bond travels through Eastern and Western Europe and to Morocco and Afghanistan.
Everything about this film gives the usual Bond concepts an overdue reimagining for the Eighties, and credit must be given both to the writers and to John Glen, who directed five Bond pictures in a row, all of the officially sanctioned entries from this decade. The Living Daylights has more stripped-down, serious, violent action and dialogue and less kooky and silly gadgets; Glen and the writing team of Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson seem relieved to be out of the Moore woods, and Dalton seems determined to make his mark by doing none of what Moore did. Dalton treats the role with lethal seriousness and intensity while somehow managing to interlace healthy threads of humor and charisma. To me he’s great in the part and a genuine rival to Connery’s and Craig’s resounding takes on 007.
I really liked that Q provides 007 with bombs that are activated by Bond whistling a particular melody. Lois Maxwell has retired from Moneypenny and the role has been recast with a quietly beautiful and cool young actor named Caroline Bliss, playing Moneypenny as a bespectacled wonk who helps Bond with espionage itself and not just stage-managing his relationship with M. Jeroen Krabbé, for whom I’ve always had a fondness from his villain role in The Fugitive, is well-cast as one of the villains in The Living Daylights, with the other being played by B-movie action star Joe Don Baker. (His character gets thoroughly neutralized by Bond, but for better or worse this isn’t Baker’s last dalliance in the Bond franchise.) Maryam d'Abo plays an interesting and sophisticated Bond girl: an accomplished cellist, KGB sniper and eventual ally/lust object for Dalton’s Bond.
There are none of the ghastly nondiegetic jokes of the Moore era. The film has a rejuvenated look and feel, with more modern lighting and especially with excellent editing by John Grover and Peter Davies, who demonstrate a flair for ending scenes with bolt-action snaps that propel the viewer into the next sequence.
The negative things I’ll say about this film are that the plot gets a bit muddled with all of the double- and triple-crossing being slightly glossed over in the breathless transition from the second to third acts, and that the theme song by A-ha has already completely faded from my memory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems that the Eighties were the worst era for Bond songs. Otherwise this film comes highly recommended, especially as an entry point for modern viewers.
Licence to Kill, directed by John Glen, 1989. Here’s what I think they were doing with this picture. With the Cold War well and truly winding down, and trying to push forward the period-appropriate reinterpretation of the Bond movie, I think the team was trying to make this almost entirely into a modern Eighties hardcore action flick. Moore’s last outing was in 1985, right in the midst of the decade when movies like First Blood, To Live and Die in L.A., Lethal Weapon and Die Hard had shown that action thrillers could be better, glossier, more violent. To me Licence to Kill appears to be molding Dalton/Bond into this formula, right down to a premise that involves Felix Leiter getting mutilated and his new bride murdered by members of a drug cartel. The lead bad guy drug impresario is played by Robert Davi who had previously played Special Agent Johnson in Die Hard, while the actor Grand L. Bush who played his partner Agent Johnson in Die Hard shows up as a DEA operative in Licence to Kill.
And most of this movie is set in Florida and Cuba, which I feel was the producers vaguely trying to rip off Miami Vice, which was popular at the time.
Other people in this movie include a boring actor named David Hedison as Leiter, Cary Lowell and Talisa Soto as gorgeous but shallowly-written “realistic” Bond girls and the return of Llewellyn and Bliss in their assigned roles. Henchmen are played uninterestingly by Everett McGill, Anthony Zerbe and Wayne Newton, and noteworthily by a marvelously interesting and handsome young Benicio del Toro, radiating the menace, strangeness and charisma that would make him an international A-list movie star within a decade. His oddball performance and ability to spin something fun out of such thin material is one of the highlights of this misguided effort.
This film looks rough, perhaps because the practiced hand of Glen was ill-suited to the shift in genre. They did a good job with the previous film but this one pushes too far out of the espionage stories and into the unfamiliar crime/hard action territory. It’s inferior to both the Bond material from which it too far strays and the non-Bond material it’s rather shamelessly aping.
Play It Again, Charlie Brown, directed by Bill Melendez, 1971. When we got to the Schulz Museum, my friends and I ducked into the on-site theater to watch a screening of this delightful Peanuts television special focused on Schroeder’s identity as a musician, Lucy’s desperation to get him to like her and Peppermint Patty’s resourcefulness in arranging for Schroeder to perform publicly (which he in turn does not want to do because the venue wants him to play rock n roll instead of Beethoven). As with every classic-era Peanuts special I’ve seen, this one was great fun, full of pleasantly insouciant child voice-acting, Schulz’s funny writing, simple and effective animation and terrific music composed by the legendary Vince Guaraldi. Highly recommended!