MARK SIMPSON .com

Mark Simpson straps Mr Bond into a rim-chair and aims a knotted rope at his nuts

‘I’d rather stay in a morgue!’

So sniffs Daniel Craig in the latest Bond vehicle Quantum of Solace when presented with less than salubrious accommodation in La Paz, Bolivia. Instead of checking in, he sweeps off to a flash five star Wallpaper magazine hotel even more preposterous than his new movie’s title.

The audience at my local cinema seemed to mistake this sniffiness for quippiness and giggled nervously - perhaps out of desperation for any gags or relief at all in this morgue-like movie that I for one was very sorry I’d checked into: a couple of deathly hours that felt like a very long dark night of the soul indeed.

I quite enjoyed, in a slutty kind of way, my one-night stand with the new 007 a couple of years ago in Casino Royale, especially the way that Craig’s glistening tits announced that Bond had finally become his own Bond Girl, but this was a rematch that made me want to lose his number big time. In fact, by the end of it I desperately needed his BMW defibrillator from Casino.

So yes, I’m feeling a little bitter and jaded, not to mention used and abused - and not in a good way. So bear with me while I get pedantic on Mr Bond’s perky ass, strap him into a rim-chair and aim a knotted rope at his nuts.

For starters, ‘morgue’ is an Americanism, and Bond is meant to be a very British kind of action hero in a very British franchise. 007 resorting to such lazy transatlantic tics is tantamount to the Queen greeting heads of state with WASSSSUP! and a fist-bump. Adding hypocrisy to inaccuracy, this film has some very creaky anti-Americanism in it - tempered, equally creakily/cynically, by a ‘good guy’ CIA man with dark skin who is clearly meant to be Obama in a trenchcoat.

Worse, the ritzy hotel Craig checks into instead of the dowdy down-market one he’d been presented with has a cold, impassive, glossy Wallpaper magazine black and white décor that looks much more like a mortuary than the one he sniffed at. And in fact it ends up one: a dead body is placed on his swanky bed later in the film (dipped in oil, a jarring, ill-conceived visual reference to a much superior, gloriously trashy film from another century, another civilisation: Goldfinger - black gold, geddit?).

I’d like to think that the deathly boutique hotel was a deliberate commentary on the morbidity of consumer culture, but given the murderous lack of wit on evidence in this undead movie I suspect it was rather unintentional. Likewise, the way that the cancellation of an AWOL Mr Bond’s credit card by his MI6 Sugar Mummy Judi Dench is presented as one of the worst chastisements possible, almost on a par with losing his girlfriend in the last movie.

Perhaps the most unforgiveable thing about a film as expensive as Quantum is its cheapness - a cheapness it thinks is ’seriousness’. If Quantum is a hotel, then it’s one of those fashionable ones that charges you the earth but doesn’t bother to change the bedding. The destruction of the villain’s lair sequence at the end, which should look orgasmically expensive, instead looks like something papier-mache exploding in a sub-par episode of Thunderbirds (come to think of it, Craig does walk like a Thunderbird…). Cheaper still is the use of Sony product placement instead of Q’s gadgets: show us something we can’t buy, please.

Cheapest of all is the quick-cut editing used during ‘action’ sequences, such as the car chase which opens the film. Instead of extensively storyboarded, carefully choreographed and laboriously shot fights and chases presented for your lazy, scopophiliac enjoyment, you get a blur of bad editing that is literally unwatchable on a big screen unless you enjoy the sensation of your eyeballs bleeding. An episode of Top Gear is much better shot than Quantum. Actually, even the made-for-TV ads that appeared before the film, crudely blown up for cinema, are better edited. Because you can see bugger all, this kind of editing could make John Sergeant look like an action hero.

Tellingly, the last Bourne had the same infuriating jump-cut mania. And while Casino made a superannuated Bond franchise look like he’d got his mojo back from the less stuffy American Bond rip-offs like Bourne, Quantum just looks like a more tedious, lower budget - more ‘morgue-like’ - Bourne Identity.

At least Craig gets his tits out again - though only once, during the film’s only sex scene (and of course, this being the new out-and-proud metro-Bond we see much more of his tits than his lady friend’s). But the scene is spoilt by his terrible chat-up line: ‘I can’t find the stationery. Perhaps you can help me?’ A chat-down line almost as resistible as this movie.

Though maybe he was being serious. Maybe Craig, who can act when given the chance, had decided - since no one else had bothered - to write himself some lines and a plot.

By far the best and most luxurious scene from Quantum doesn’t appear in the film at all. It’s the Sony HD ad that has been running on heavy rotation on telly for the last few weeks which portrays a well-tailored, well-groomed, cheek-sucked Craig as a kind of CGI Saint Sebastiane, lacerated by slo-mo explosions. He doesn’t say anything, just shares his pale blue masochism with us.

At under a minute and free of charge it’s the better Bond not by a quantum but by a country mile.

Matt Damon is the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’, according to People magazine.

Perhaps it’s time to hit the graveyard.

I don’t mean to be cruel - honest - but Matt is preppy, not sexy. The two things are not necessarily antagonistic, granted. But in Matt they are.

Yes, I know, it’s ‘all a matter of taste’. But my taste is the right one. OK?

It’s true I’ve never quite forgiven him for the film that launched his career, the intensely irritating ‘Good Will Hunting’ in which Damon, an Ivy League drop-out, plays a maths-genius janitor - at an Ivy League college (and makes us sit at the feet of Robin Williams talking through a full beard for two hours). But then, why should I? He wrote it.

So here’s a list of entirely objective reasons why he isn’t the Sexiest Man Alive:

• He has too many teeth for a human and reminds me of ‘American Werewolf in London’ when he smiles, and not in a good way
• His nose is much too big, especially in profile when it takes up most of the widescreen
• His chin is bigger than Jay Leno’s
• His body is just there, like a trick you scored at the end of the night just before the lights came on
• He has mildly, wryly interesting lips, but they look like they have been transplanted from someone else’s mouth; possibly a housewife from Knots Landing
• He has nice blue eyes, but they look like they’re by the same manufacturer who makes GI Joe’s
• He has facial timeshare going on with Mark Wahlberg - but Wahlberg seems to wear it better and cuter

When he arrived on the scene all those years ago, Matt’s greatest physical asset was simply that he was bland and young and twinky/WASPy (twaspy, anyone?). Now that he’s no longer so young (he’s 37) his flaws are predominating, as they do, but somehow without turning him into an adult or even a ‘character’ - even when he plays a middle-aged father, with lots of latex, as in the later scenes of The Good Shepherd.

Like most of his generation of male Hollywood actors, including Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, and his buddy Ben Affleck, Matt’s essentially a Cruisette - a Tom Cruise clone. An All-American narcissistic male film star that never grows up because a) we don’t know what a man is any more, and b) the brand must go on forever and be forever desirable. Cruise’s stellar and sustained success from the mid 80s onwards meant that the male Hollywood leads that came after him would be fashioned in his miniature image. (Damon’s actual height, like penis-size on Gaydar, is something of a contested issue: it seems to be somewhere between 5′9″ and 5′11″ - I suppose it all depends on where you measure from).

But unlike Cruise, Cruisette Matt doesn’t have blue-collar credibility, his narcissism isn’t aspirational - and has never quite matched Cruise’s high-wattage on-screen tartiness. Perhaps because he didn’t have to strive as much as Cruise, he’s soberly professional. Though of course, this helps make the Cruisette more palatable to some than the wacky Scientologist original.

As for his acting - yes, we finally get to that - it’s true that Matt’s better than most of his Hollywood contemporaries, but that doesn’t make him sexy. This is Hollywood, after all. Acting is what you do when all else fails. Besides, Matt’s best at roles like The Talented Mr Ripley and his Mission Impossible/James Bond vehicle The Bourne Identity - playing a man who has no identity. That’s far too close to the truth of modern masculinity to be ’sexy’. Interesting, yes. Shaggable? I’ll text you later….

Perhaps what people - or People - find ’sexy’ about Damon, apart of course from his success, is his on-screen masochistic streak, as wide as his many-toothed smile. In the Bourne films his character displays an almost insatiable appetite to be tortured and humiliated and treated like meat - which perhaps stems from his need to find out who he is at any cost, his psycho-reprogramming by his CIA Bad Daddies, or perhaps his need to please us, the audience (Who is Bourne? Why, he’s our punk!).

Admittedly, I too derive some pleasure from seeing preppy Matty, adrift in Europe like some Ivy League Gap Year student who’s mislaid his passport, get it, both ends. But it’s not very erotic. It’s just revenge.

The re-booting of the James Bond franchise last year with Daniel Craig in the lead role was strongly influenced by the success of the Bourne films, which of course were themselves an updating of the Bond concept. (Craig’s Bond is, in postmodern stylee, a copy of a copy of a copy.)

But Craig’s on-screen masochism is as filthy and sexy as Damon’s is antiseptically, twaspily clean-cut. Bond has a tight foreskin; Bourne has Wintergreen-flavoured scar tissue.

I finally saw the new Bond film starring the new Bond Daniel Craig last night (my OUT essay was written sight unseen - winging it entirely by the seat of Craig’s pants).

The new Bond delivered.  Some (swooningly subjective) observations:

Bond is now the ‘Bond Girl’ of the opening credits. It’s his silhouette we see – and nary a dancing naked babe in sight.

Perhaps to compensate for this, in the actual film he gets his tits out a lot.

He emerges from the sea glistening, showing off his pumped boobs, like Ursula Andress in ‘Dr No’ - save his nipples are more prominent.

Perhaps because of all that time he’s spent in the gym with his circuit-party personal fitness trainer he has a narcissistic self-sufficiency and isn’t very interested in shagging birds for shagging’s sake. He uses his body like a female spy: as bait. Luring, teasing, seducing his female targets and fishing for information just as they’re eagerly sliding their tongues down his six pack. Unlike previous Bonds, he doesn’t even have the courtesy to shag the girl after he’s extracted the information about the man he’s after.

For the first time it’s entirely possible to imagine Bond sleeping with a man – especially if it meant he would get something he wanted. Not least because Craig’s Bond is clearly MI6’s rent boy.

Speaking of which: The main sex scene in the film, and certainly the most explicit, features Craig being tortured in the buff in a rusty dungeon (or is it a back room in a gay leather bar?) by the evil Mr Big who pauses to compliment him on his physique. Craig sits strapped bollock naked in a rim chair while his (unseen but vividly imagined) blond bollocks are bashed with a big ugly heavy knotted rope. Although in agony, he appears to actually enjoy the experience and eggs his torturer on: ‘To the right a bit!’ When the rope thwacks his gonads even harder and repeatedly he yells: ‘YESSSSSSSSSSS!’. All in all, he comes across as a classic Pushy Controlling Bottom.

His masochism is of a piece with his narcissism and his sex-object status. According to Dr Freud, to invite the gaze, as Bond does in this film over and over again, like a tart in the last shopping week before Christmas, is passive and therefore masochistic. Craig’s Bond may oscillate between thuggish sadism and kinky masochism, but our voyeuristic, sadistic enjoyment of his physical and ultimately emotional suffering (he falls in love) is a constant. We keep bashing his bollocks with a big knotted rope, long after he’s told us what we wanted to hear. Or, if our name is Judi Dench, we simply keep pulling his OHMSS string.

The film makes several other explicit statements about Bond’s position in the new (metro)sexual order of things. In one scene he gives his pretty female sidekick (Vesper Green) a dress and tells her, over her protests that she has already chosen one: ‘I want you to look fabulous’. She gives him a dinner jacket, over his protests that he has brought his own, saying she wants him to look like someone she would have on her arm. Bond looks pouty but does as he’s told. He’s clearly intrigued by the idea of a woman who might boss him about and dress him up.

His pushy controlling bottom is at the forefront of her mind when they first meet. ‘I will keep my eye on our Government’s money and off your perfectly-formed arse,’ she promises, unconvincingly. ‘You noticed then?’ says Bond, a little too eagerly.

Yes, she did. So did we, Daniel. But I think you know that.

She, of course, doesn’t quite keep her mind on the job – and we don’t keep our minds on the plot.

Which is just as well. An occasionally slightly silly film which is also rather overlong (the endless, unintelligible card game almost makes you miss the ‘countdown to Armageddon’ explosive cliche of previous Bond films) is redeemed partly by being as well-made as his Aston Martin, but mostly by the spectacle of Mr Bond’s perfectly-formed 21st Century exhibitionism.

Bond has become his own Bond girl and is finally the sex-object of his own movies in the way that the stars of Bond knock-offs have been for years - like Tom Cruise in the Missy Impossible series. (You can be sure that flat-chested Mr Cruise has turned quite green with envy at the sight of Mr Craig’s bazookas.)

All in all, the best Bond movie in decades and the best Bond - perhaps the only Bond - since Connery.

The new blond Bond has a surprising amount in common with the brunette original – precisely for the reasons he’s been bashed, says Mark Simpson

(Out magazine, November, 2006)

BOND IS BLOND! He’s smooth! He works out! He doesn’t have any eyebrows! He kissed a guy!

Ever since English actor Daniel Craig was cast last year as the U.K.’s most famous spy—and the face of the world’s most successful, longest-running blockbuster brand—the British popular press and Bond fanboys have been up in arms, shrieking about his unsuitability for the role.

They complain about all sorts of supposed failings, including that he required coaching to handle a gun and play poker, and that he snogged another male on film (as Francis Bacon’s lover in Love Is the Devil and also in Infamous). Apparently, you see, he’s “not manly enough” to play cinema’s most famous action hero. Essentially, they’ve got their off-white tighty whities in a twist because Bond has gone metrosexual.

However, there is something that needs to be pointed out here, like the pleasing bulge of a Walther PKK semiautomatic in a Savile Row trouser pocket: The early Bond movies were thrillingly perverse, shockingly sexy, and not a little queer. This will traumatize millions, but the original James Bond, by the dingy, stringy-vested, “no sex please it’s bath night” standards of early 1960s Britain was something of a metrosexual, albeit a latent one (he’s a secret agent, after all).

Watching again the very first Bond film, Dr. No—released 44 years ago and played a zillion times on TV and cable but nevertheless something of a revelation—I’m struck by a number of things about the original Mr. Bond, supposedly the gold standard of authentic masculinity and virility in an increasingly sissified world:

(1) His fake tan
(2) His full, glossy, pink lips, much more luscious than Ursula Andress’s (or even Tom’s in the Missy Impossible franchise)
(3) His worked-out body (Connery represented Scotland in the Mr. Universe contest in 1953.)
(4) His fine tailoring, careful grooming, and manicured hands
(5) His fetish for gadgets and gizmos
(6) His taste for fussy cocktails (shaken, not stirred)
(7) His wigs (Connery went bald in his early 20s.)
(8) His overacting in the famous big-hairy-spider-in-bed scene….

Read the article in full here: