It was a Sunday afternoon in August 2012 and Gert-Jan Schenk, the European head of cyber security giant McAfee, had just arrived home from summer vacation.
As he busied himself with unpacking luggage, Schenk’s mobile phone rang, displaying an unfamiliar number. The father of two had his hands full with bags and kids, so he let it go to voicemail. Then the number rang again, and then a third time, before Schenk finally put his things down and answered the phone.
To Schenk’s surprise, the person on the line was the chief information officer of the world’s biggest oil company. And he sounded worried.
‘Skyfall’ in a lot of sense is an anti-thesis of a James Bond movie, that attempts to decode the persona of Bond, instead of making it bigger and brighter. The movie lacks the grander set-pieces, huge spectacles and the franchise strengths, and instead becomes a brooding and soul-searching effort with the director (Sam Mendis) offering his tribute to ‘Rosebud’. (Orson Welles and ‘Citizen Kane‘)
Sadly, the approach of Mr.Nolan’s unmasking the superhero isn’t the appropriate delineation for a Bond movie.
With some positive reviews (Wired, being one of them) floating around, my view could be seen as counterpoint. May be a back story isn’t out of the order.
My introduction to James Bond transpired in a rather old fashioned way, when a chummy of mine narrated the lead scene to the opening titles of “The spy who loved me”.
He did it to perfection, including the act of mimicking the the James Bond theme that kicks in when the parachute bursts open. For a ten year old kid, it was a heady experience, imagining the terrific chase, villains chasing the hero and finally hero jumping off the snow clad mountain.
But, the true appreciation for the man who has a penchant for scantily clad women, exotic locales and an assortment of gadgets n’ cars, came in a little later, when in my early teens, a norm in our household was broken.
It was a routine in our house to fast forward all the rain and item songs in Telugu and Hindi films, and it was never challenged as the powers that be, mostly my father, controlled what came out of the Video Cassette player. However, for some mysterious reasons the Bond films were left intact.
I wonder, if it were my father’s way of telling me that with Bond and God (read Lord Krishna), everything is not what it seems and merely watching them indulge in girls, guns and gadgets wouldn’t influence me (read mortal) in any way 🙂
My fascination for the franchise continued even as I picked up years (a-k-a getting old) as I watched bond movies both on the big screen and on home video. It sort of reached a peak when one of my favorite bands, A-ha, performed the title song for ‘The Living Daylights”.
Interestingly, all along I became a ‘serious’ movie fan itching to dissect each and every movie I watched. While all the other movies were laid to bare on my post-mortem table, the Bond movies (Jim Carrey, Govinda, Manmohan Desai and a few others included) escaped my scalpel of story n’ structure. You could say that I reinforced my childhood gyan about Bond and God 🙂
Now, you could imagine my puzzlement after watching ‘Skyfall’ and its painful attempt to make ‘sense’ of Bond and his world.
The director unearths just about everything about the psychological profile of Bond, barring his extreme virility and libido, or did he make an innuendo that they are on the wane? 🙂 He brings down Bond to just an extra-ordinary human being (like in ‘The Expendables” ) and in the process justifies the ‘fall’ in the movie title 🙂
May be, he should have listened to Steven Spielberg, who (supposedly) believes in following up with bigger things in the sequels in terms of scale and surprise, and sticking to the original ‘format’.
Hopefully, we will have a new director at the helm (and a clean shaven Daniel Craig) for the next outing. Hmm…how about a remake of Dr.No, just to practice the basics? Hope the folks at Eon, MGM and Sony have something exciting planned for the movies to come.
But, NoDr.s (read shrinks) and ‘Rosebud’s, please.
Everywhere you went, virtually or physically, the Obama and Romney campaigns followed you. Did you start noticing Romney ads popping up in your browser, even if you just went to his website briefly and had no intention of voting for him? That was because of browser tools the candidates used or built to harvest data.
Campaigns and political strategy firms paid good money for your web usage data, filtered it through their predictions for associating your browser history with your political affiliation — NPR junkie? You lefty, you — filtered it again through publicly-available elections data and slipped in a candidate’s plea for $5. Time reports that Obama’s homebrewed datamining dives — given sublimely geeky nicknames like Narwhal and Dreamcatcher — helped the campaign determine such minutiae as which celebrities made the most compelling pitchmasters to demographics as specific as deep-pocketed West Coast women aged 40 to 49.
Ironically, Obama’s techniques drew on those George W. Bush used to win re-election in 2004, which themselves drew on the synthesis of piles of consumer data. Team Romney designed a vote-tracking data hunt called Project Orca to track “the hour-by-hour whims of the electorate,” according to the Washington Examiner, but it apparently crashed in the final hours of the race: “Somebody said Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it,” an aide said.
