kbmastin

No one could ever confuse Ian Fleming's world with real espionage. James Bond is a womanizing superhero. For something resembling real-world you would need John LeCarre - ironic, since the fantasist Fleming and the hard-eyed realist LeCarre, were contemporaries in the British secret service.

For that reason, i was never a big fan; it was hard to care about a well-dressed sociopath who uses women as a cigar-smoker uses an ash tray with an unending trail of bodies in his wake, though the bad guys, like Star Wars characters, were often the best part of the yarn.

Craig changed that dynamic. He manages the crazy stunts - and fight scenes that make Connery's look ludicrous - while giving Bond a soul, a wounded orphan with raw skills scooped up by the service and turned into a disposable assassin, but one whose humanity seeps through, and whose tenacity arouses your respect, who has improbably survived to middle age, but will inevitably see his body, skills and luck erode - and may well be seen as a liability his service feels safer disposing of.

Add to this, Craig can manage to convey a man who can, after all, form real attachment - and something, apart from King and Country, worth living for - and dying for.

The movie gives Craig's Bond the only proper ending 007 could have.

I hope that the series ends, for Craig, the Broccolis, and Bond, right here: the end of a repugnant and magnificent anachronism.

Virtually everything here is a referential copy, mostly of prior Jurassic Parks, like (spoiler alert), where the frilled dinos get the bad guy, who even has a can (The can?) of Barbesol,, the heroes saved - repeatedly - when the apical preditor gets distracted by another. On the other hand, the motorcycle/rooftop chase is a direct copy of Borne, with a velocoraptor standing in for the Treadstone assassin.

And isn't it time a raptor or allisaurus ignored Chis Pratt's stop sign and swallowed his arm? At least Bryce isn't doing her running in stilettos.

Apart from adding a non-dino threat, there is not an original scene in the whole movie.

Of course, if the kids have been cooped up by Covid and haven't seen JP on a big screen, go ahead and budget the popcorn.

It appears this borrows from the first American loss in the America's Cup to spin an entirely fictional narrative. The nonsense about four lost people developing a winning America's Cup Yacht team at a derelict Nevada airport was particularly silly, though it may have saved enough to keep the producers from killing the project. Not even Cliff Robertson could do anything with this movie. Nice sailing scenes, though.

If you've seen one Hallmark you've seen them all, and as with most Hallmark stuff, the reunited 40ish leads are mailing it in to pay the bills and can't even pretend there's real feeling. However the older mentor-artist is a terrific character actor, as is the widow he makes a connection with; they even get some decent lines: the best - which gets attribution, Is life is art without an eraser.

The other believable relationship; the connection between the lead actress and her 20yo daughter is the most convincing love relationship in the film.

If you just want a pleasant uncritical diversion, you could do worse.

I should say at the outset that I've never seen the original, so this won't be about comparisons.

Beautifully choreographed heist scene at the beginning, topped by the last museum scene, an absolute classic.

The movie is carried by Russo, and a sizzling interplay of the leads; a pleasure to see an unabashedly hot tango of the two leads, figuratively and literally, and consummation with two actors in their mid-40's, speaking as someone their age.

I was also delighted to find the sharp repartee with seductive undercurrent with his therapist was played by none other than a very fine-liiking Faye Dunaway, who my memory has it was famously stroking Steve McQueen's, um bishop in the original about 30 years earlier.

It was also a pleasure watching a heist show with zero firearms or bodies. All of the characters were sympathetic, something you rarely see, especially in a movie about a criminal. Even the soundtrack was unexpected but worked well. I doff my bowler hat to everyone that created this movie.

As is pointed out by others more well versed the history, Amelia Wren is at best a confabulation of one or more actual female aeronauts and of Henry Tracey Coxwell, who apparently saved Glaisher's life and his own. The fact that they survived at all, ascending ten thousand feet above the death zone of the atmosphere, is remarkable, and made possible only by the brevity of the flight and Coxwell's success in getting them to descend. How Coxwell managed it I don't know, but I feel confident in saying that not even Reinhold Meissner could climb to the top of a balloon without oxygen at nearly 37,000 feet, though Coxwell must have done something remarkable to take an action to arrest the balloon's ascent at way over 30,000 feet. I'll leave the history to others better versed on the events.

Having said that, and that I don't blame people who slam the movie for historical liberties, I think it also deserves to be looked at as a movie, and as a piece of Hollywood magic.. Both main characters are compelling, multifaceted people with backstories, placed convincingly in their time and place, in a story related with restraint and a great deal of heart. To pack as much as this movie does in terms of the human journey into a balloon ride no longer than the movie itself is remarkable.

I also think kudos are due to the cinematography. I don't have time to educate myself about how the scenes were filmed, but am going to assume that the balloon scenes were filmed on a sound stage in front of a blue screen. Having said that, although it might be barely possible by use of very advanced drone technology or actual unmanned balloon footage to get those upper atmosphere shots, I think that would be very difficult, let alone usable on a blue screen. However, if they were computer generated, it's a tribute to the craft, and rivaled only by the movie Pi for it's recreation of a magnificent, mostly natural world.

The movie also deserves credit for managing, no doubt with a lot of help from makeup and practical and computer special effects, to simulate the appearance of people actually in the death zone, hypoxic, frostbitten, and mentally impaired, About the only miss - probably not possible to include with the dramatic centerpiece of the film - is the breathlessness, the take one step, stop, catch your breath, take another stop of someone at the level fo Everest. If someone did manage the impossible task of climbing a balloon above 30,000 feet, they would be stopping and gasping every step of the way.

But no matter. As history, it ain't, but as great storytelling, I think it's one of the best movies of the decade, wonderfully acted by both of the principals.