Clive Davis is discouraged from seeing Casino Royale, the new new Bond, by of this review by Cosmo Landesman. He shouldn’t be. Landesman fails to grasp even the basics of the (not particularly complicated) plot and then complains that what he thinks is going on is “absurd”. It’s worse than that: understanding what is actually going on is crucial to the most important and disturbing scene in the movie. He implies that the film is racist because at one point Bond appears to kill lots of black soldiers. He doesn’t, but even if he had the whole point of James Bond is that he kills lots of people—usually white ones in jump suits standing at the top of stainless steel stairwells with machine guns—that’s his job. He says Bond “charges around like the Terminator”. The Terminator doesn’t “charge around”; it’s his plodding relentlessness that’s scary. Landesman does make one or two insightful observations about the film, the comparisons with Ursula Andress and Gollum are well chosen, but the article reads like one of those reviews written before the fact. Ignore it, Clive.
27Nov06 — 6
It’s awful, but I can’t help but think of Landesman not as a journalist, but as the bloke Julie Burchill left for Charlotte Raven.
Landesman’s the only critic I bother reading – believe the precise opposite of what he says, and you’ll have a great idea of whether a movie’s worth seeing. He is always utterly, laughably wrong.
Same with Mark Steyn. I agree with most of his politics, but he is always exactly 100% wrong on any film made after the 1970s. If he pans it, go see it.
When I read her turgid humourless prose, I find it amazing that anyone would leave anyone for Charlotte Raven, or that anyone would bother with her even without already having someone else that they need to leave first, or, come to that, that her own parents didn’t kill her in her teens.
My favourite Landesman review, reproduced in its entirety:
“Okay, I confess – I have not the faintest idea what Primer is all about. Sorry. I have just sat through 77 minutes of total incomprehensibility. The only line I could understand is when one character asks another whether he wants to go and get a drink. The rest of the script was a mix of “space energy equals fractured continuum” gobbledegook. As for the plot, I’d rather explain Joyce’s Finnegans Wake than tackle this one.”
(Mind you, I had to review this film for Sight & Sound, and was profoundly grateful for the fact that I had a DVD to work from rather than a one-off screening and frantically-scribbled notes. And I had to produce 850 words and a coherent synopsis, so I didn’t really have the option of throwing in the towel. Or rather, I probably could have done, but payment and future commissions might have been somewhat jeopardised.)
I agree, the review is rubbish. The first “fact” reads: It has been stripped of exotic locations.
Perhaps he saw a different film to me but I thought the exact opposite: that they had finally managed to put the exotic back into to places we are all quite familiar with.
[…] That Cosmo Landesman in The Times disagrees strongly suggests Klavan might a point, given previous experience with Landesman; thiI’m going to make a different but related point. To state the oft-stated again, all films […]