Quantum of Solace

Quantum of Solace (2008) is the 22nd James Bond film by EON Productions and is the direct sequel to the 2006 film Casino Royale. Directed by Marc Forster, it features Daniel Craig's second performance as James Bond. In the film, Bond battles Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a member of the Quantum organisation posing as an environmentalist who intends to stage a coup d'état in Bolivia to take control of the nation's water supply. Bond seeks revenge for the death of his lover, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), and is assisted by Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko), who is also seeking revenge.

Producer Michael G. Wilson developed the film's plot while Casino Royale was being shot. Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis, and Joshua Zetumer contributed to the script. The title was chosen from a 1960 short story in Ian Fleming's For Your Eyes Only, though the film does not contain any elements of the original story. Location filming took place in Panama, Chile, Italy, and Austria while interior sets were built and watched at Pinewood Studios. Forster aimed to make a modern film that also featured classic cinema motifs: a vintage aeroplane was used for a dogfight sequence, and Dennis Gassner's set designs are reminiscent of Ken Adam's work on several early Bond films. Taking a course away from the usual Bond villains, Forster rejected any grotesque appearance for the character Dominic Greene to emphasise the hidden and secret nature of the film's contemporary villains.

The film premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square on 29 October 2008, gathering mixed reviews which mainly praised Craig's gritty performance and the film's action sequences while feeling that Quantum of Solace was not as impressive as the predecessor Casino Royale. It is also the second highest grossing James Bond film, without adjusting for inflation, making $586,090,727 worldwide, while becoming the higher grossing Bond film domestically.

Daniel Craig returns as 007 in this electrifying follow-up to the critically acclaimed CASINO ROYALE. The film opens with two gripping, back-to-back chases, as James Bond (Daniel Craig) tries to heed the orders of M (Judi Dench) and, at the same time, track down the people who blackmailed his love, Vesper. Bond is still struggling with Vesper's death, displaying a new, ferocious violence in his work, and a recklessness that M would very much like to get under control.

When Bond discovers a massive, secret organization called Quantum, he believes it might have been a part of the scheme that killed Vesper. He follows the clues to Haiti, where he meets Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a mysterious, driven woman, whose motives seem unclear. Camille leads Bond to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almalric), a cold-blooded businessman who appears to be working within Quantum. Greene wants control of a valuable piece of land in Latin America, and is part of a massive plan to overthrow the government. Bond knifes, shoots, and kick-boxes his way to the center of the sinister scheme, and discovers that the plot reaches even higher than he imagined, forcing him to abandon M's orders and step out on his own.

Director Marc Forster (STRANGER THAN FICTION) has crafted some truly memorable fight scenes, setting them in the most elegant of locales. Everything is beautifully shot, from Bond racing across the rooftops of Italy, to his showdown at an Austrian opera house. As for Craig, he is once again all cold precision and steely blue eyes. His 007 is positively riveting. He struts determinedly into every scene, ready to display his near superhuman fight moves, or bed a bombshell with merely a glance. Yet, just as in CASINO ROYALE, Craig never lets us forget Bond's humanity. He may fight like a ninja and smirk like Steve McQueen, but beneath his impeccable Tom Ford wardrobe, Bond is still but an ordinary man, wearily battling his own inner demons.

The film was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Visual Effects, Film and Sound Editing at the 2008 Satellite Awards, winning Best Song. It was nominated for Best Action Movie at the 2009 Critics' Choice Awards, and at the Empire Awards, which is voted for by the public, it was shortlisted for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Newcomer, Best Thriller and Best Soundtrack. It was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film, while Kurylenko and Dench were both nominated for the Best Supporting Actress award. An editorial by The Times also listed the film's pre-titles sequence as the tenth greatest car chase in film history.

Source Links:

• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830515/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_of_Solace
• http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/quantum_of_solace/

Memento

Memento is a 2000 psychological thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, adapted from his brother Jonathan's short story "Memento Mori". It stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a former insurance fraud investigator searching for the man he believes raped and killed his wife during a burglary. Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia, which he contracted from severe head trauma during the attack on his wife. This renders his brain unable to store new memories. To cope with his condition, he maintains a system of notes, photographs, and tattoos to record information about himself and others, including his wife's killer. He is aided in his investigation by Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), neither of whom he can trust.

This feature is often used to show the distinction between plot and story. The film's events unfold in two separate, alternating narratives—one in color, and the other in black and white. The black and white sections are told in chronological order, showing Leonard conversing with an anonymous phone caller in a motel room. Leonard's investigation is depicted in five-minute color sequences that are in reverse chronological order. As each scene begins, Leonard has just lost his recent memories, leaving him unaware of where he is or what he was doing. The scene ends just after its events fade from his memory. By reversing the order, the spectator is unaware of the preceding events, just like Leonard. By the film's end, the two narratives converge in a single sequence that begins as black and white and fades into color.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) wears expensive, European tailored suits, drives a late model Jaguar sedan, but lives in cheap, anonymous motels, paying his way with thick wads of cash. Although he looks like a successful businessman, his only work is the pursuit of vengeance: tracking and punishing the man who raped and murdered his wife. His suspicions dismissed by the police, Leonard's life has become an all-consuming quest for justice.
The difficulty, however, of locating his wife's killer is compounded by the fact that Leonard suffers from a rare, untreatable form of memory loss. Although he can recall details of life before his "accident", Leonard can't remember what happened fifteen minutes ago, where he is, where he's going or why. A former insurance investigator, Leonard is keenly aware of his handicap. Moreover, he's got the discipline to compensate as well as the motivation-the cruel memory of his beloved wife's last moments. Haunted by what he's lost, he's re-built his life out of index cards, photographs, file folders, charts, tattoos and obsessive habits that stand in for memory, fixing him in space and time and connecting him to his mission.
Out of necessity, Leonard must rely on others despite being thoroughly ill-equipped to assess either their motives or basic decency. Leonard remembers his past-up to a point. But just who has Leonard become since losing the ability to hold together the fragments of himself? "Memento" mines this psychological terrain, using non-linear film narrative to mirror Leonard's own effort to interpret the random pieces of evidence he hoards. The murder, rewound in the opening frames, we discover, is logically the endpoint of Leonard's story. What we learn comes from a point earlier in time, a few moments and a few sentences prior to what we've already been shown. As Leonard's story unfolds, the meaning of events changes. Allies, enemies, victims, victimizers swap place almost kaleidoscopically.

Memento premiered on September 5, 2000 at the Venice Film Festival to critical acclaim and received a similar response when it was released in theaters on December 15, 2000. Critics especially praised its unique, nonlinear narrative structure and themes of memory, perception, grief, self-deception, and revenge. The film was successful at the box office and received numerous accolades, including Academy Award nominations for Original Screenplay and Editing.

Lions for Lambs

Lions for Lambs is a 2007 American drama film about the connection between a platoon of United States soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. senator, a reporter, and a California college professor. It stars Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford. It was the first Cruise/Wagner Productions film since the company joined with United Artists subsequent to Cruise's falling out with Paramount Pictures in 2006.

Robert Redford directs this dramatic tale of intersecting lives that weaves together the stories of an idealistic professor's attempts to inspire a privileged student, a former student of the teacher who is wounded behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, and a congressman whose interactions with a seasoned journalist reveal much about the man behind the public persona. Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford star in a film scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan.

With a title that alludes to incompetent leaders sending brave soldiers into the slaughter of battle, the film takes aim at the U.S. government's prosecution of the wars in the Middle East, showing three different simultaneous stories: a congressman who launches a new military strategy and details it to a journalist, two soldiers involved in said operation, and their college teacher trying to re-engage a promising student. The film was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, and directed by Redford. It was released in North America on Friday, November 9, 2007, to mixed but mostly negative reviews and disappointing box office receipts.

The film was partly based on Operation Red Wing, an unsuccessful SEAL operation in Afghanistan.

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No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is a 2007 crime thriller film adapted for the screen and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin. Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men tells the story of a botched drug deal and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama, as three men crisscross each other's paths in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. The film examines the themes of fate and circumstance the Coen brothers have previously explored in Blood Simple and Fargo.

No Country for Old Men has been highly praised by critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "as good a film as the Coen brothers...have ever made." Guardian journalist John Patterson said the film proved "that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors." The film was honored with numerous awards, garnering three British Academy of Film awards, two Golden Globes, and four Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem).

No Country for Old Men premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2007. The film commercially opened in limited release in 28 theaters in the United States on November 9, 2007, grossing $1,226,333 over the opening weekend. The film expanded to a wide release in 860 theaters in the United States on November 21, 2007, grossing $7,776,773 over the first weekend. The film subsequently increased the number of theaters to 2,037. The film opened in Australia on December 26, 2007, and in the United Kingdom (limited release) and Ireland on January 18, 2008. As of February 13th, 2009, the film has grossed $74,283,000 domestically (United States).

No Country for Old Men was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture. Additionally, Javier Bardem won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role; the Coen Brothers won Achievement in Directing (Best Director) and Best Adapted Screenplay. Other nominations included Best Film Editing (the Coen Brothers as Roderick Jaynes), Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins), Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

The film was nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, winning two at the 65th Golden Globe Awards. Javier Bardem won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture and the Coen Brothers won Best Screenplay – Motion Picture. The film was also nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and Best Director (Coen Brothers). Earlier in 2007 it was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Screen Actors Guild gave a nomination nod to the cast for its "Outstanding Performance". The film won top honors at the Directors Guild of America Awards for Joel and Ethan Coen. The film was nominated for nine Orange British Academy Film Awards's in 2008 and won in three categories; Joel and Ethan Coen winning the award for Best Director, Roger Deakins winning for Best Cinematography and Javier Bardem winning for Best Supporting Actor. It has also been awarded the David di Donatello for Best Foreign Film.

Consonant with the positive critical response, No Country for Old Men received widespread formal recognition from numerous North American critics' associations (New York Film Critics Circle, Toronto Film Critics Association, Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Online, Chicago Film Critics Association, Boston Society of Film Critics, Austin Film Critics Association, and San Diego Film Critics Society). The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year for 2007, and the Australian Film Critics Association and Houston Film Critics Society both voted it best film of 2007.

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Burn After Reading

Burn After Reading is a 2008 American black comedy film written, produced, and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The film stars George Clooney, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Brad Pitt. It was released in the United States on September 12, 2008, and it was released on October 17, 2008 in the United Kingdom. The film had its premiere on August 27, 2008, when it opened the 2008 Venice Film Festival. The film is the brothers' first film following their Academy Award for Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men.

Osbourne Cox, a Balkan expert, is fired at the CIA, so he begins a memoir. His wife wants a divorce and expects her lover, Harry, a philandering State Department marshal, to leave his wife. A diskette falls out of a gym bag at a Georgetown fitness center. Two employees there try to turn it into cash: Linda, who wants money for elective surgery, and Chad, an amiable goof. Information on the disc leads them to Osbourne who rejects their sales pitch; then they visit the Russian embassy. To sweeten the pot, they decide they need more of Osbourne's secrets. Meanwhile, Linda's boss likes her, and Harry's wife leaves for a book tour. All roads lead to Osbourne's house.

With their overtly comedic follow-up BURN AFTER READING, the Coen Brothers return--about a third of the way--from the dark, dank recesses of the human psyche they traversed in their Oscar-winning NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. For those unfamiliar with the landscape of modern movie psychoanalysis, this puts the fraternal filmmakers square in the cruel, misanthropic, and farcical realm of their 1990s-era body of work, somewhere between the tragicomic crime thriller of FARGO and the disconnected noir-homage anti-storytelling of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, with 2007's NO COUNTRY retroactively adding new nihilism-tinged dimensions of smart skepticism to the proceedings.
In a more linear trajectory, BURN AFTER READING also stands as the third entry, after BLOOD SIMPLE and FARGO, in what could be an unofficial Tragedy of Human Idiocy trilogy, wherein characters make the most outlandishly moronic moves to devastating consequences simply by adhering to true human behavior. Indeed, Carter Burwell's emotionally weighty score, which washes over biting scenes of explosive, anesthetizing belly laughs, is very reminiscent of his FARGO work. BURN is ostensibly structured and propelled by a spy-thriller plotline involving a classified CD lost by a disgraced CIA spook and found by two simple gym employees. But, in actuality, it's simply--amazingly--a collection of brilliant caricature studies interwoven by veracious, if Coenesque, social interactions, as epitomized by the pathos of the Frances McDormand character's precipitous quest for cosmetic surgery.

Reviews for the film were mostly positive, earning a 77% "Certified Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 213 reviews as of November 26, 2009. The film fared worse among "Top Critics," earning a 59% "Certified Fresh" rating out of 39 reviews. The Times, which gave the movie four out of five stars, compared it to Coen films Raising Arizona and Fargo in its "savagely comic taste for creative violence and a slightly mocking eye for detail."

The movie was nominated at the 2009 Golden Globe awards for Best Comedy or Musical and for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy or Musical. The National Board of Review named Burn After Reading to their list of the Top 10 Movies of 2008. Noel Murray of The A.V. Club named it the second best film of 2008, Empire magazine named it the third best film of 2008, and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly named it the seventh best film of 2008.

Reference Links:

• http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/burn_after_reading/
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887883/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_After_Reading