No Time to Die (10.22.21)

If you are an actor who happens to be British, then odds are you will probably play one of two characters sometime in your career: The Doctor (of Doctor Who fame; call him “Doctor Who” around a Whovian and you will probably be drawn and quartered) or James Bond. Okay, this is an exaggeration (duh), but both characters do have a surprising amount of longevity for a nation that regularly cancels successful television shows after six episodes. This being said, I was, naturally, a bit skeptical when I saw that No Time to Die was being advertised as the grand finale of everyone’s favorite chauvinistic superspy. One thing was for certain, however: After five movies and fifteen years in the role, it would at very least be Daniel Craig’s last outing as the character, and No Time to Die turned out to be the perfect swan song to his modern-Bond era.

If I had to describe Craig’s tenure as 007 in two words they would be “gritty” (sometimes to a fault) and “deeper.” No, the movies are not epic character dramas full of Shakespearean acting and thoughtful dissections of the human psyche, but they at least gave Bond some character other than “suave spy who spouts one-liners between shags and martinis,” and nowhere is this more apparent than in No Time to Die, which, like Skyfall before it, actually allows Craig to give a fairly moving performance. And while it is still “gritty” and fairly “realistic,” No Time to Die finally allows the series to be fun again as well. The gadgets are back (including the beloved souped-up Aston Martin), his allies are all in on the game (including Ralph Fiennes as M, Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Swann, Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, Naomi Harris as Monepenny, and Ben Whishaw as Q) and the script may surprise you with a post-kill pun here and there as well as Bond battles against Rami Malek’s sinister Lyutsifer Safin and Christoph Waltz’s iconic Blofeld. It seems as if finally, at the end, Craig’s series has struck a perfect balance between serious and silly.

But all is not perfect in No Time to Die. For one thing, it lacks the giant action set pieces that have been a trademark of the series for decades, opting instead for isolated spurts of violence that are separated by a whole lot of exposition. Good exposition, mind you, but those going into the movie expecting non-stop action for the entire two hour and forty-three minute runtime will be a bit disappointed. The plot is also pretty straightforward, which I appreciated and liked, but others might see it as undaring or even underwhelming. All I know is that I enjoyed the fact that I didn’t have to tie my brain in knots just to understand why some guy was punching another guy.

Daniel Craig may have taken his bow, but No Time to Die proves that James Bond himself still has plenty of places to go. If you have a British accent (or can at least fake one well enough), then who knows. Maybe you can be the one to take him there someday. Time is certainly on your side.

No Time to Die is now playing exclusively in theaters.

This review was first published in The Keizertimes on October 22nd, 2021. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/

Star Wars: Visions (10.08.21)

For a series that regularly takes us to a galaxy far, far away, it’s crazy that Star Wars has never journeyed to the much closer, equally mysterious land of Japan. Enter Star Wars: Visions, a new anthology series made up of shorts created by some of the most renowned anime studios in the Eastern Hemisphere (or so the official blurb tells me, anyway… I’m not a huge consumer of the genre so I wouldn’t know). Since Jedi are pretty much just space samurai with laser swords instead of katana and mystical powers instead of… well, non-mystical powers, the crossover was bound to go down as smoothly as a Mandalorian bounty hunter down the throat of a sarlacc. And it does, for the most part, although like all anthology works Visions definitely has some stinkers in the mix as well.

The animation across the nine episodes varies from fairly realistic (well, as realistic as anime ever gets, anyway) to almost painfully colorful and goofy, each style adequately matching the story that is being told. All the tropes of anime are there, from questionable physics (not that Star Wars was good with this to begin with) to wacky, impractical, and awesome weapons like the thing in the first episode that can only be described as a spinning lightsaber umbrella. The stories range from pretty cool to painfully bland, and some of them take much more advantage of the vast amount of storytelling potential the universe has to offer than others (the episode about the rock band in particular could have been set pretty much anywhere if you changed a word or two in the script). And while some episodes seemed to be geared more towards older fans like me, some were clearly written with children in mind, although none of them are adult adult, by any means. Star Wars: Visions is a series you can and should watch with your kids if they are burgeoning Sci-Fi/Fantasy geeks (and if they’re not, well, you’re raising them wrong).

One conversation that has always existed amongst western anime watchers is whether you should watch a series in the original Japanese with English subtitles or if you should watch it dubbed over with English voice actors. I opted for the latter, as it was the default, and I was too lazy to press a button or two to change it to the former. The English cast is stellar and includes some big names such as Neil Patrick Harris, Alison Brie, George Takei, Lucy Liu, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Simu Liu, and they all sound like they are having a blast, even if their dialogue is occasionally awkward to western sensibilities, as was the case with Harris and Brie (apparently over explaining is a thing that happens in some anime, however, so I will allow it). Star Wars: Visions was clearly created with a lot of love and it shows.

With only nine episodes that vary from fifteen-ish minutes to thirty, Visions is a quick, easy watch. And if you don’t like an episode, just skip ahead to the next one. What do you have to lose?

Star Wars: Visions (season 1, perhaps?) is now available in it’s entirety on Disney+.

This review was first published in The Keizertimes on October 8th, 2021. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/




Hindsight: looks like I started two articles in a row with the phrase "for a _________." Whoops.