Our members in the territories where November Man was release have given us some feedback. For the most part they agree with the CinemaScore B+ rating and they agree a sequel would be worthwhile.
Appears there are Bond references to go along with the former Bond and Bond girl starring in this picture.
bjmdds: To sum it up:”Murder at 1600″ meets “24”, as Olga Kurylenko (Highlight for Spoiler:) reprises the same role as in QOS
I thought the movie was very good and Brosnan did a nice job in the process. We all thought it was a quick paced fun film to watch. The plot gets a little complicated at times but if you pay attention you can keep up with it. Those critics that maligned it are morons. 16 people were in the theatre. It’s not getting a big enough audience because Brosnan failed to do the talk show tv circuit to promote it probably because there are mostly reruns on in August. It deserves a sequel and I enjoyed it more than ANY Cr-egg Bond film, and it looked like the Bond-ish film Pierce always wanted to do.
Omega: Went to The November Man worried it would suck. Despite all the mediocre reviews on RT NM is actually done pretty well.
At it’s heart NM is a movie made for Bond fans stuffed with subtle and not so subtle Bond references.
Of the complaints I’ve read I’d say only a few a warranted. Most IMO are the over critical for the wrong reasons, it’s a spy movie, so it follows the pattern spy movies must follow. It didn’t reinvent Spy movies but it does make a good entry.
Someone complained about the score it didn’t bother me, I wasn’t blown away by it but it wasn’t distracting either. Brosnan is good as an older agent coming back, in some way I though his action was better than some of his Bonds, it didn’t go over the top but the close quarter combat was believable for a older man to pull off.
Remember Olga Kurylenko character from QOS (Highlight for Spoiler:) well her she actually makes sense and is someone you feel for and cheer for. (odd AFAIK this is the third movie I seen her in where she doesn’t become romantically involved with the lead, QOS, Max Payne, and this)
I have two complaints one is the stormtrooper/clone/droid mentality for killing agents, standard for spy movies, shoot up KGB and CIA agents and nobody cares. My other complaint is a spoiler.
Brosnan is not Bond, this spy is colder and meaner than Bond. In an odd way more vulnerable to.
Bottom line I enjoyed it and hope they make a few more of these. I’d really like Dalton to make a similar move as well.
FormerBondFan: I went to see NM the second time yesterday. While I said that it was great the first time I saw it, the bad reviews are trying to harden my heart during the viewing so it takes a second viewing to enjoy it a lot more. I did that by ignore those critics. Plus, the increased ratings on IMDB made the movie more enjoyable for me.
Anyway, let’s talk about the movie. First things first, NM is not James Bond nor that it attempts to be, but it is Pierce’s return to the action genre in a decade. It is good that he is not Bond in the movie (after all, he is a versatile actor). However, Pierce’s portrayal of the title character is something we could have seen in his Bonds if EON had given the creative freedom he needed in terms of the dark and gritty side. If I must say, Pierce as NM makes Tim’s Bond look like a Sunday school teacher. Also, bits of the background music has some Bondian feel it as though that it could fit in a modern Bond film. The action is well paced. It’s not over-the-top, and it’s quite low scale. It’s the first of the planned series. What do you expect? Look at DN. The action wasn’t as intense compared to some of the Bonds that came afterwards.
Overall, I enjoy it a lot more than the first time around. Is it a masterpiece? No. Is it Oscar-worthy? No. Besides, the Oscars’ a joke anyway, but that’s a whole different story. As for the rank of NM in terms of Pierce’s works, I would say it’s just as great his Bonds though sometimes I would rate it a little higher than them mostly because it’s a low-scale actioner. If NM was made into a higher scale, I would rate it much higher, but in the old saying, start off small then work your way up. That’s what NM just did………in a similar way DN did for Bond. That being said, give us the sequel.
On imdb, I often look at the quotes in the triiva pages of actors I enjoy. One that really struck me as useful for animation, was this one:”You build a cage based on your sense of the truth and your sense of the aspects of the character that need to tell the story. If you’ve done your job right, which I’ve had varying degrees of success doing at different times in my life, then you’re able to function very freely within that cage.”This particular quote is from Sean Penn. I love it simply because it’s good acting advice, and also because it’s good animation acting advice. It encompasses how I feel we should approach character animation in film: we should have a supervising animator for each character (especially the complex ones – which, granted, are rare), who defines that. Not just in broad strokes, but way into the base and truth of the character, and perhaps even trying to explain why he/she chose certain things. I think method acting knowledge could prove real valuable in doing that. It’s my understanding that a big part of the method – even though the use of the method is different from actor to actor – is that you try to define certain aspects of your character, “rules” your character lives by, if you will, and then live by those rules yourself on the stage/set. Now when this is done, I’d think it’d be ideal to cast animators depending on how they relate to those definitions of the film’s characters.Now, you could say that this is what they did for Bond, etc, yet the effects weren’t coherent. In this case, you need to remember that we might feel that the lack of spontaneity of animation is something difficult to get past, it’s also got its positive side: we’re in absolute control, every – single – frame. It’s the supervising animator’s job to make sure that what his crew does is right. He can spot wrong acting choices way early in the thumbnailing stage, or he can spot some polish that moves differently than the character would. The reason each Bond is so different, is that live-action actors THRIVE on spontaneity. Their performances wouldn’t be natural or convincing if they were trying to copy someone else’s interpretation. As animators, we might not have the bliss of spontaneity, but we also don’t have its burden.But, also remember the second part of the quote. If the animator interprets the character’s definitions/”rules”/cage correctly, in other words, if he’s done his job right, he’s able to function very freely within that cage. If the cage is built and interpret the right way, it doesn’t matter whether the animator’s acting choices are the same as what the supervising animator would have done… it will fit, it will be right, it will be convincing.A possibility could also be to really involve the voice actor. For big movie productions, chances are that the voice actor as a lot more experience in doing this than the animator. Especially with some of the superstar voices hired, it’d be a great chance to learn from them, trying to define the character together.Though, I don’t think that’s entirely necessary. Unless the voice actor gets a lot of impro leeway, he’s stuck to a really big cage: the prewritten script. So much of the performance is not just the voice, but how the body relates to what (and how) the voice is saying. I think that if the animator is a strong enough actor, it’s he who is in the most control, not the voice actor. But if your voice actor is someone like Al Pacino, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and they and the studio allow it, you’d be stupid not to try to learn from them.One last thing maybe: for the past 4 weeks, I’ve been in California (back home in Belgium now), and was able to visit a few movie sets. What really surprised me there, what I hadn’t considered enough before, and what I learned a lot from (and what I doubt you can really get without having been on a set), is how much direction and specific things an actor still needs to think about and comply to when on set. A whole bunch of people give them each an additional cage, tightening that self-built cage if you will. In very similar ways that an animator could get directions from a director or supervisor. Yet they still do their thing, and do it well. As animators, despite some of our disadvantages, we still should be able to do the same thing, and be free within a cage.