Bond Ratings

I am a big fan of James Bond. When the movies are on TV, I have to stop whatever I’m doing and watch them. Even the George Lazenby one. And I finally got around to seeing Quantum of Solace last night.

As for a “review,” let me say that it was good but could have been better. The pacing of the movie felt way off. The climax didn’t feel like a climax at all. The catharsis that all Bond movies end with didn’t feel right, mostly because the villain was too weak of a character. The good Bond villains have lots of set-up and exposition. The final “lair” that Bond villains love felt like a half-hearted attempt at a Dr. Evil-style lair with one quick throw-away line explaining its presence.

My biggest complaint is that all the action scenes had too many quick cuts. It’s hard to tell what’s going on when the director is too focused on adrenaline-charged glimpses of different aspects of the action. Those need to be counterbalanced with longer shots that show more details of the car chase, or the foot chase, or the shootout in the church. Mix in healthy use of the queasy cam and the “action” scenes didn’t work for me.

But that’s all the bad. The good news is that there was no laughably bad villain, no terrible acting, no gratuitous product placement, and all of those elements that make Bond movies fun. And Daniel Craig makes a good Bond. But how good? Let’s compare.

Sean Connery

Pros: Still the best Bond. There’s a sign on his tuxedo that says, “You have to be this cool to seduce girls simply by stating your name.” Also, he smoked and drank, because this was acceptable behavior from a superagent in the 1960s. Now you can just drink.

Cons:Too bad he couldn’t get along with producers and we were subject to George Lazenby and Roger Moore. On the bright side, producers saved the money it took to buy his toupee.

George Lazenby

Pros: That it only lasted for one movie. Other than that, um, nice ascot?

Cons: Seriously, what Bond movie would have him pretend to be a gay man named “Hilly” to get into a ski resort? That doesn’t sound like James Bond. That sounds like a bad sitcom. (Don’t tell CBS executives. They’d add a hot girl and advertise it during football and it would open with a 10-share rating.)

 

Roger Moore

Pros: Occasionally funny. Apparently related to Ian Flemming, so you know how he got the role. Appeared in lots of Bond movies, so you have to applaud his longevity, even if it’s because he couldn’t get any other roles worth watching (he had also been the lead in The Saint, another spy show).

Cons: Am I supposed to believe that guy seduced women at will? Into his 50s? He should’ve flipped roles with Christopher Lee in The Man with the Golden Gun. Lee’s 1000 times cooler, and he’s the better actor.

Timothy Dalton

Pros: You can say what you will about Dalton’s two Bond Movies, but they are still watchable to this day. They just weren’t Bond movies, especially to a legion of fans not old enough to remember before Roger Moore. They were, however, good spy movies. After Moore’s movies got goofier and more comedic, Dalton made the character edgier. Maybe he took that too far. The most amusing part of that is that, in his post-Bond career, Dalton’s best known for spoofing spy movies.

Cons: Missed the tone of the Bond series. Had movies with weak scripts and weaker villains. The villain from The Living Daylights was so bad that they reused the same actor to play Bond’s American ally in Goldeneye, and no one noticed.

Pierce Brosnan

Pros: Cool, suave, and great at the Bond sarcastic comment. Better than any predecessor since Connery, and has his own hair.

Cons: Not convincingly athletic enough to be James Bond. Even when he was getting tortured you couldn’t feel sorry for his smug British ass. Am I supposed to believe this guy was a commander in the navy? He looks like he has a daily manicure.

Daniel Craig

Pros: Maybe the best actor to play Bond. He’s also apparently working with the same personal trainer as LL Cool J. The guy is ripped.

Cons: Might be falling into the Timothy Dalton trap of being far too serious, especially in Quantum of Solace. Bond’s got to be funny; he understands the absurdity around him even as he’s being forced to fight a giant squid or die. In Quantum, I felt like I was watching Jason Bourne with a British accent.

My ears are still ringing

I went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert last night. Or, rather, I should say that I went to see one of the original Smashing Pumpkins with a bunch of studio musicians surrounding him. It felt a bit like going to see Roger Waters play Pink Floyd songs – yeah, it’s the right guy singing (most of the time), but it’s not Pink Floyd.

Billy Corgan’s always been a bit of an enigma to me. On the one hand, he’s a great songwriter. On the other, he’s a mediocre technical musician. He can’t sing, but his voice sounds good. He’s clashed with record labels , but he’s a complete sell-out to the point of writing songs for Hole. He’s engaging towards the crowd and everyone likes to work with him (apparently), but he’s also an egomaniac with a God complex.

The guy is like a mad scientist’s combination of Kurt Cobain, Freddie Mercury and Elton John, with Lex Luthor’s ego and dome.

  

Not that Corgan can’t pull it off, but you have to be full of yourself to be able to say, “The people of Kansas City only get to hear half of the music we want to play tonight. If they want the rest, they can come back tomorrow.” They then proceeded to play without an opening act – I’m sure local bands starving for exposure love that. Just strange. The strangest show I’ve ever been to. And if I had tickets I’d go back tonight.

 

The Smashing Pumpkins |MTV Music

Something about musicians is that they can’t walk away, even when they think they can. Corgan disbanded the Pumpkins, then came back with a “new” band called Zwan that was just old Pumpkins playing new songs, then went on tour with his new Pumpkins. In twenty years, he’ll be reduced to this.

Read what I read

If you look to the right, you’ll see my blogroll under “Stuff I Read.” I thought I might expound on a few of those. If you have more suggestions for stuff I should be reading, let’s hear it in the comments.

Sports Blogs

I read a lot about sports, baseball in particular. This should come as no surprise to those of you who frequent this site. Joe Posnanski has some of the best stuff written on the web if you can handle his unhealthy Bruce Springstein obsession. Dave Zirin's Edge of Sports site is more crazy-leftist than anything I write, but that doesn’t make it wrong. There’s a whole lot of Kansas City sports stuff on there that may not be of interest to fans from other cites. And if you’re a fan from another city, fuck you. Your team blows.

Pseudo-intelligent crap

I have a couple of sites on there to make you think I’m smart/well read. Don’t worry. I’m neither. Do you think I actually understand what the guys at Five Thirty Eight are saying? The comments at the Freakanomics blog are always interesting in that they’re never nearly as smart as the posts and often degenerate into inane fixed-stance political “debates.”

Personal friends of the blogger

The Israel Situation is run by a longtime friend of mine. He’s really good at staying on-topic, something I’ll probably never learn. For a guy who leans really far left in American politics, he really moves to the right on Israeli politics. Sean over at 124 Monkeys runs a blog more like mine in that he rotates between several themes/topics. Interesting stuff, even if he does have a bit of an insane streak in him. I’d chalk it up to PTSD, but that might be offensive.

The rambling political post; or How your coke dealer helps pay for your corn syrup but hurts our manufacturing business

I’ve spent more time talking about politics on this blog than I thought I would when I started it in October*.  For my efforts, it’s been called a “crazy leftist blog,” among other things. So I feel I need to clarify my political beliefs.

*I don’t know what the fuck I was planning on writing about when I started the blog. Hell, I still don’t know what I plan on writing about. I kinda just like talking. With a blog, you don’t even need someone to listen to you.

As I’m sure my limited but intelligent readership* has figured out, I tend to lean pretty far to the left. But not always. However, I have come to hate the current incarnation of the Republican Party. This is mostly because it is no longer the party of limited government, strict interpretation of the Constitution, and fiscal conservatives. It is more and more the party of the Religious Right. I do not want any part of that.

*That’s limited in size, not limited in intelligence.

I do differ from the Democrat party-line on a few key issues. My biggest quibble is the way Democrats view free trade. Obama has announced that he wants to rework NAFTA. (At least he knows what NAFTA is.) America’s use of farming subsidies is baffling, to say the least.

I had a finance professor who liked to tell a joke about our farming subsidy policy. He’d say, “Did you hear NASA found a way to grow corn on the moon? It’s true. The only problem is now we have to pay someone not to grow it.” The point is that we artificially bump our crop prices up. This leads to the inevitable overgrowth of crops. The farmers don’t care because the government will pay them anyway. So we have all this leftover corn and soybean and milk and chicken and we can either throw it out or dump it on developing nations.

This is how you destroy a developing economy. The developing world relies more on agriculture than we do. We dumped so much powdered milk on Jamaica that it’s cheaper for people to buy our imported milk than their fresh milk. We dump our dark-meat chicken on whomever will take it (and that’s how McDonald’s and your local supermarket can offer “all white-meat chicken”). Our farmers will overwork their land and deplete its soil in a shortsighted attempt to make more money now. Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan government can’t buy its farmers the basic tools to start farming, because that would count as “subsidies” and they would lose their IMF money – IMF money-takers are expected to be entirely free-market. So the Nicaraguan farmer, unable to afford the tools to grow grains, resorts to growing cocaine. It’s an easy cash crop. Did I mention that the US is the leading funder of the IMF? How is this hypocrisy allowed?

There are other repercussions. Boeing, the American airplane company, is getting beaten by Airbus, its European counterpart. The EU helps it out by subsidizing airplanes, something that is technically illegal through our trade agreements. However, if America would ever want to fight for Boeing’s right to compete, the EU would counter that we cheat by subsidizing our farmers. This is how farm subsidies indirectly hurt our manufacturing industry.

I don’t know where I’m going with all of this. It started as an example of how I’m supposed to be independent-minded and not a party-line Democrat, but I went on a tangent and ended up on coked-up farmers stabbing GM with their pitchforks.

My starting centerfielder is a breakfast cereal!

The Royals just traded for Coco Crisp (pictured).

What are the implications?

1.) They think they can win next year. Why else trade a good 27-year-old relief pitcher under team control until the next presidential election (Ramon Ramirez) for an outfielder with one year and an option left on his contract?

2.) This is the first in a chain of events. More dominoes have to fall.

Now the Royals have too many outfielders. I expect Mark Teahen to go, but it could be Guillen or DeJesus instead.

3.) If Dejesus stays, he’ll move to left field full-time to make room for Crisp, improving the team defense at two positions.

What would I like to happen? Move Guillen at any cost to clear payroll and a roster spot for Milton Bradley. Not only does Bradley hit better than any current Royal, but wannabe comedic hacks like myself would love an outfield reunion* of Milton Bradley and Coco Crisp. A breakfast cereal and a board game magnate in one place? Awesome.

*They played together in Cleveland in 2002-2003. No one in Cleveland seemed to notice, mostly because they had once been subjected to the comedic stylings of Manny Ramirez and Albert Belle in the same outfield.

Putting Coco Crisp and Milton Bradley back together could be the funniest baseball name duo since Cincinnati had Gookie Dawkins and Pokey Reese as its double-play combination, and certainly funnier than last season’s winner of the Cubs’ Ryan Theriot and Mark Fontenot.

Which way is the wind blowing?

Economics is confusing. I get it. There is such a flood of arguments, evidence, counterevidence, theories, and talking heads that understand it poorly that it’s a wonder anyone can wrap his head around it. Given all the variables out there, it becomes kind of like predicting the weather.

I’m not going to explain any complicated economic theories here. Instead, I’m just going to explain what I find to be the biggest hypocrisy of the Bush Administration’s fiscal policy.

President Bush has professed to believe that the best way to get our economy going is to spend our way out of trouble. This was the stated reason for the rebate checks we got this year. It is a common belief that spending and circulating money stimulates the economy; that point is hard to argue. It is possible to argue the relative damage to our treasury by dolling out money, but I won’t take a stance against that here.

Bush is also a big proponent of so-called “trickle-down” economics. The basis for this idea is that if we give more money to the rich, they will have more money to hire and will thus increase wages to the lower class and/or create jobs.

The problem is that these two ideas, while argued fervently by Bush and his cabinet, are fundamentally incompatible. The reason is that the poor spend a higher percentage of their total income, either through necessity or lack of discipline. Thus, if you want to stimulate the economy through total spending, then it makes sense to give more money to the lower class. The rich are more likely to put their excess money into banks or, because they tend to be older, more conservative investments.

 

My full thoughts on trickle-down economics can be summed up by a month-old political commercial.

Inside Drew Brees’ Mind

Well, no one’s open. Let’s wait and see if something happens. Still no one open? Something’s wrong. Usually there’s some 300 pound guy on top of me by now. What’s going on? Am I wearing that red practice jersey by mistake? Hmm. Wait, someone might be open. Nevermind, that’s just the referee. Boy am I hungry. I could sure go for some of that famous KC barbecue after the game.

Get your head in the game, meat! You might get hit by a defensive end. He’s only a yard away from me now. Maybe if I drift right I can buy still more time.

No one’s open. This pocket sure is lonely. I miss my wife.

Oh, wait. Someone’s open. I’d better throw the ball. There, that was nice. First down. This football thing is easy.

 

…And that’s why the Chiefs are 1-8. Six sacks. As a team. All season. And none yesterday against the Saints and Drew Brees, who leads the league in passing yards.

The Chiefs lead the league in turnovers forced. Usually that makes for a good defense. The problem is, anyone can throw against that defense. They have the youngest defensive line in football – the starters are a rookie, two second-year players, and a third-year player who is hurt. Defensive linemen are notoriously slow to develop at the NFL level. This is the first level where their sheer size and athletic ability does not overwhelm and they have to learn how to use their skills as well. So not all hope is lost for the future, just for the present.

Really, this defense is an end, a middle linebacker, and a year or two away from being really good. The secondary is pretty much set with young athletic ball-hawks. Those guys don’t need all the developmental time that the linemen need. Give it time. This team sucks, but at least they’re not Detroit.