Skyfall is the best James Bond film of the modern era, and it may very well be the best Bond film of all-time. None of which should come as a huge surprise given we’re talking about a movie directed by Sam Mendes, starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes (among others).
Skyfall is also the first Bond film to portray 007 as an aging – if not wholly antiquated – relic from a bygone era. This is a brave new world, so to speak – one in which both James Bond and his long-time coterie need to either prove their worth or face extinction. To that end, Skyfall favors a more nuanced approach, substituting the term “Mother” for M, “Quartermaster” for Q, and the not-so-subtle shaking of a tumbler in lieu of James Bond’s usual drink order.
We’re dealing with a conflicted 007, as well … one who ultimately returns to the trials of his youth in a vague attempt to confront – and perhaps even exorcise – long-lingering demons. This is an overt tip of the cap to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy – one of several throughout Skyfall, including a central subplot that’s torn almost entirely from The Dark Knight‘s playbook.
Despite the inexplicable parallels, Skyfall still manages to stand tall on its own, moving a 50-year old franchise into unprecedented territory. Javier Bardem will – and should – go down as one of the most diabolical villains James Bond has ever faced. And Daniel Craig, while not necessarily the most iconic Bond of all-time, should probably be considered the best.
In the beginning, it was a simple idea: Put aside all of my freelance gigs for a period of one year and channel that energy into a series of side projects that might not otherwise find a home … projects that wouldn’t require me standing on the shoulders of others in order to get my prose across.
What spiraled out of that idea has proven the single most rewarding creative experience of my life. In 12 short months, IFearBrooklyn has given birth to:
20 well-received editions of Moving On – an ongoing non-fiction series about Wildwood, childhood, and life after drinking (That series winds up its 2nd Season on December 5th, BTW, so – by all means – get your read on, will ya?)
26 installments of Good Pictures/Bad Camera, including various slideshows from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Asbury Park, Bar Harbor, Philadelphia, The Chesapeake Bay and beyond.
34 capsule-style movie reviews/half-a-dozen show reviews
several obscure, long-form quotes, and, of course,
The post that started it all (IFB’s actual anniversary falls on the 10th of this month, but, I mean, really, who goes out blogging on a Saturday, right?)
Anyway, all of this is to say, “Thanks,” to each and every one of you who has either visited or supported IFB over the course of the past year. Your ongoing advocacy means the absolute world to me and I only hope that I can find an opportunity to repay that kindness at some point down the line.
For now, I fully encourage you to have a look around the place. Read the first chapter of Subhuman, check out a few editions of Moving On, get your photog on with Good Pictures/Bad Camera, and – assuming you’re so inclined – “Like” IFB on Facebook; follow IFB on Twitter.
There’s plenty more to come in 2013, including the 3rd and 4th Seasons of Moving On, Good Pictures with a better camera (I hope), and a handful of new features … along with oodles more of what you’ve already come to expect.
“For the last 30 years I’ve been writing in my music about the distance between the American dream and American reality. I’ve seen it from inside and outside: as a blue collar kid from a working class home in New Jersey – where my parents struggled, often unsuccessfully, to make ends meet – to my adult life, visiting the 9th Ward in New Orleans after Katrina, or meeting folks from food pantries from all around the United States, who work daily to help our struggling citizens through the hard times we’ve been suffering. The American Dream and an American Reality: Our vote tomorrow is the one undeniable way we get to determine the distance in that equation. Tomorrow, we get a personal hand in shaping the kind of America we want our kids to grow up in.
I’m a husband and a dad, my lovely wife Patti is here with me. We’ve got three kids growing up and on their way out into the world. I’m 63 (Patti is much younger), but we have both lived through some galvanizing moments in American history: the Civil Rights struggle, the Peace Movement, the Woman’s Movement, we played in East Berlin one year before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and we were with Amnesty International a year before the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. These were days when you could feel the winds of change moving and the world shifting beneath your feet. And we both remember another galvanizing moment, the night that President Obama was elected … Continue reading →
So says global photographer-cum-activist James Balog, who has spent the past five-plus years of his career documenting – and subsequently lecturing about – the clear and present danger presented by global warming on our planet.
Back in 2007, Balog embarked upon a multi-year mission known as the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS). The goal: To document the day-to-day impact climate change is having by setting up real-time camera posts in high-risk areas spread across the glacial regions of Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Switzerland, and beyond.
Chasing Ice chronicles Balog’s journey from brash rebel to weary traveler, incorporating oodles of scientific data along the way, almost all of which supports the need for change. The film is beautifully shot, wrought with panoramic views of the great northwest in all its majesty. On top of which, Chasing Ice delves almost metaphorically into the personal price Balog has paid for his vigilance – sacrificing his own body and spirit in order to ensure the work is completed and preserved.
In a cinematic sense, it’s important to keep in mind that Chasing Ice is slowly leading up to something … something very big, in fact. Something so substantial that it may cause even the most fervent of skeptics to step back and consider the need for action on a global scale.
For, as Balog very bluntly points out toward the end of the film, “You can’t divorce civilization from nature. We totally depend on it.” It’s a timely message, to be sure. One that deserves to be both seen and heard. Thanks to James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey team, moviegoers now have an opportunity to do both.
(Chasing Ice arrives via limited release in Toronto and New York this Friday, with a staggered rollout for most major cities to follow. For a full list of theaters and dates, click here.)
“Nothing came easy for him. Nothing deterred him – not the many editors and publishers who rejected his books and stories; not the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago, which rejected not one but two of the theses he wrote for his M.A. degree (awarding it to him only after he was famous); not the Guggenheim Foundation, which rejected his first application for a fellowship; not the doubting relatives and friends from home like his Uncle Alex, who said he couldn’t read The Sirens of Titan, after Kurt had dedicated the book to him, or his Aunt Ella Stewart, who would not stock his books in the bookstore she owned in Louisville, Kentucky, because she found them degenerate; not his Cape Cod neighbors who didn’t read his books and expressed no interest in what he did for a living; not the school boards that banned his books (and in one case burned them in a furnace) without ever reading them; not the academic critics who spurned and dismissed him; not the backbiting reviewers who tried to drag him down after he became famous; not the bureaucrats he battled for the rights of writers throughout the world; not the right-wing Christian religious groups that condemned this man who described Jesus Christ as ‘the greatest and most humane of human beings.’ Anyone who imagines a writer’s life has ever been easy – even one who eventually achieves fame and fortune – will be disabused of that fantasy after reading [Kurt’s] letters. And they will be inspired.”
“In many films there is a great confusion – especially in my particular genre of work – there’s a great confusion between the words ‘mystery’ and ‘suspense’. And the two things are absolutely miles apart. Mystery is an intellectual process, like in a whodunit. But suspense is essentially an emotional process. Therefore, you can only get the suspense element going by giving the audience information. I daresay you have many a film that have mysterious goings-on. You don’t know what’s going on … why the man’s doing this or why that. And you’re about a third of the way through the film before you realize what it’s all about. And to me that’s completely wasted footage because there’s no emotion to it. It’s like a whodunit. And I’ve only made one whodunit, many many years ago. Because in the course of it, before you arrive at that five-second revelation, there’s no emotion for an audience. If you’re reading a book [like that], you’re terribly tempted to turn to the last page all the time. But that’s merely an emotion of curiosity. So mystery has no particular appeal to me, merely because it is a fact of mystifying the audience.”
It was just past four in the afternoon when Eli decided to wander back and move a load of wash into the dryer. The communal laundry room had been strategicallly placed behind Eli’s parents’ house so that seasonal tenants in the rear cottage could have access. As Eli wound the bend, he noticed a strange man in denim jeans leaning up against the cottage. This man stood 5’9 with dust-brown hair and drooping jowls. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt over denim jeans.
Eli looked up at a glass jalousie jutting out above the stranger’s head. Then he looked back down again, establishing direct eye contact with the stranger as a means of discouraging sudden movement. Eli crouched down slowly. He placed his laundry basket on the ground. He stood back up, placing both hands shoulder-wide in mock surrender.
“You mind if I ask what it is that you’re doing?” Eli said.
The stranger put an index finger to his lips. Shhhh. He dropped that finger to his waist, where he burrowed it inside a pocket. Seconds later, the stranger pulled a jet-black ski mask from his jeans. He wrung that mask out like a soiled rag.
“I’m coverin’ up,” the stranger said. He motioned with his hand toward the cottage door.
Eli noticed several bursts of steam rising slowly from a shower vent. That vent was clearly missing two of its main slats.
Eli swung down low to grab the laundry basket. He held it firm to shield his chest. He angled step by step toward the stranger, minimizing any exit points along the way. The stranger stutterstepped before leaping up and over a chain-link fence that ran along the edge of the property. Touching down inside a neighbor’s yard, the stranger leveled out and broke full-stride. He went pounding across a checkered maze of lawnchairs and linens, until he disappeared around the back side of a house.
***
Billy Lee was one of five tenants who had been living in the rear cottage that summer. The other four were all females – Billy’s older sister and a few of her close friends. There was only one tenant at home during the incident, a short brunette named Vicki who had just stepped out of the shower when a pair of police officers arrived at the front door. The officers conducted a routine inspection of the premises, which revealed an additional glass slat had gone missing from the cottage door. That particular slat – or louver, as it is more formally called – ran roughly parallel to the door knob … a knob which Vicki noted she had found suspiciously unlocked, despite having locked it when she had returned an hour before.
The officers informed Vicki that the perp’s M.O. was consistent with a series of similar incidents that had occurred in the vicinity that summer. Two of those incidents had escalated into sexual assaults. This was unfortunate, albeit not so surprising. Cape May County had recently reported a 14% spike in violent crime, with local clearance rates lagging 9% behind where they had stood a year prior. Aggravated assaults were up 16%; sexual assaults were up 11%. Robbery was up to the extent that – by year’s end – there would be more than a million dollars worth of stolen merchandise still left unaccounted for throughout the area. On top of which, a series of highly-publicized incidents had suddenly thrust the City of Wildwood into the limelight.
Back in December of ’92, a suspicious offseason fire swept across Midway Pier, resulting in an estimated $2.5 million worth of damages – a devastating blow, leading skeptics to wonder how a blaze of that magnitude could have erupted during the stone-dead hush of winter. A few months later, a small contingent of L.A. Bloods traveled east to Wildwood, where they carried out a premeditated hit on an unarmed father of three outside a birthday party on West Schellenger Avenue. One of those assailants – a juvenile – was arrested almost immediately, with two more being apprehended outside the Atlantic City Bus Terminal a few days later, and a fourth being extradited from Los Angeles in the weeks that followed.
But the real shocker came on July 20th of 1993, when a team of special agents raided the Sea Wolf Hotel in North Wildwood, seeking to execute an arrest warrant for Matarawy Mohammad Said Saleh, one of 11 federal suspects later convicted in a conspiracy to simultaneously bomb not only the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, but also the United Nations and the Federal Building in New York City. When the FBI confronted Mr. Saleh, he momentarily seized an 11-year old boy and attempted to flee on foot. Saleh was subsequently tackled from behind, and the boy was separated from Saleh unharmed.
***
Throughout the first two weeks in August, the rear cottage on East 10th Street remained on lockdown – bolts fastened, curtains drawn. There was nary a spot of natural light to be found, and even less in the way of laid-back conversation. Nevertheless, Billy and I rushed back there every evening after work, where we’d remain on patrol straight until the break of day. Eventually, the fear passed, and life went back to normal down on 10th Street. Meanwhile, Billy and I had grown so fond of spending nights drinking around his kitchen table that we just went right on doing so.
One night in late August, Billy’s sister and her roommates were all drinking in the living room, waiting for a fourth roommate named Garden to finish getting ready, so they could head out to the bars. Garden was in her bedroom now, fresh out of the shower in a towel. Just before Garden went to get dressed, she noticed something odd in the reflection of her mirror. The bedroom window was ajar, allowing central air to escape into the night. Both of Garden’s bedroom curtains had been pushed aside, as well. Garden put her curler down. She wandered fast onto the window. She forced the wooden panel shut, grabbed the curtains with both hands. Then she froze and squinted hard into the darkness. A silhouette stood staring back behind the glass.
