Articles | Study: James Bond & Western Cinema
This article was originally written in early 2015. It has been touched up and re-released in 2018.
Do you like rants? Here's one that's been stewing in my stool for a few months.
You will have to forgive me, as I am not much of a movie reviewer by any stretch of the imagination. Still, there are some observations I made during my scattered marathon of Bond movies during the time I was moving and had nothing to do during mid-2014.
Observation 1 - The camera work in movies predating 1995ish is in large part superior to everything released thereafter.
Actually, choreography as a whole in the older movies is in large part far superior. I mention this quite a lot during analysis of interactive media. All newer movies have this obsession with shaking the camera and making it hard to follow what is obviously a poorly choreographed scene. Not just combat, but in general. In some cases it makes sense to shake the camera, and the newer bond movies pretty much take every case that doesn't make sense and run wild with it.
The absolute worst camera out of the bond movies has to be in 2002 Die Another Day, where they begin utilizing slowdowns and speedups in random areas for no apparent reasons, have these 180 degree sped-up circles for no reason, and otherwise seem just at the cusp of exploring bad cameras. This trend continues into all the newer movies thereafter, but is not quite as obnoxious. Often times DAD left me in tears from laughter, especially in what were supposed to be "dramatic" scenes completely butchered by camera slowdowns.
In all likelihood, if you're shaking the camera arbitrarily, you should be hung. Speedups and slowmos are almost always an extremely bad idea, and have no place in a movie franchise like James Bond. Honestly, while I thought 300 was an ok movie overall, the slowdowns tremendously detracted from it and did nothing but destroy its hopes to make an otherwise energetic atmosphere. They really shouldn't be used willy nilly. I'd be fine if basically no one slowed down time in any game or movie unless it actually made sense mechanically. But it never does. (See: Conan, Lords of Game Testing, Die Another Day, 300, etc.)
The fight choreography also goes sharply downhill at this stage, with the newer movies being exceptionally hard to follow because their fights are so long-winded and unimaginative compared to the older movies. The other thing is they need to make every fight "dramatic" in the newer movies, while failing to actually make them dramatic. Again, the way the camera is handled plays in large part of this. Being able to clearly see the action is a big deal, and if trainwrecks like the Transformers reboot are anything to go by, camera shaking and obscuring information is almost always done because the actual production is really bad. Frame-by-framing these productions always takes you down a hysterical road, yielding tons of blatant clipping and other laziness in cg productions especially.
The camera, choreography, script, and overall prose of the 007 movies remains fairly consistent throughout the titles with a few unnotable rough spots until we hit about Goldeneye. Until Goldeneye, most bond movies that didn't really sit well with me were merely denoted as "mediocre" without any real outstanding element that caught me as being noteworthy. Just, simply, the production value as a whole was not very high. That isn't to say that Goldeneye is necessarily really bad, it just begins to expose what would eventually lead to the downfall of the franchise.
The problem with goldeneye is it stops taking its time. James Bond often had points of the spy navigating buildings and other terrain and working his way around in a much more believable manner than the movies to come later. These "slower" moments helped build up energy and made sense given the context. Grounding the series in reality made the more unrealistic portions of the movies, such as space stations and gadget-rigged automobiles, more believable, since they never took the one step too far in distancing themselves from realistic projection. Goldeneye is about when they start ditching a lot of this in the favor of "faster, more intense!" The very same mantra that cost Starcraft 2 its chance to be a good game.
In this sense, the camera really can't stay still for long in new movies. It has to reflect the ever-moving ever-changing lifestyle of the hipsters where no one can ever stop to smell the flowers. There is virtually no attempt to build atmosphere or "set your feet on the ground" in modern cinema, and bond is a fantastic way to visualize that devolution of direction in Western media.
Goldeneye changes a lot of other things, too, including actors, characters, and overall prose of those characters - all just to be edgier. James Bond covers a huge franchise and a vast swath of time, so it's expected actors are going to get cycled, especially when you consider the vast majority of the MI6 branch in the older movies were also already quite old. Goldeneye has to go out of the way of making the new M "sassy" and "a strong womyn", a prose that is softened over the next titles somewhat, and is probably a result of a personal quest on the director for those movies. Personal quests are a big deal in Western media - JJ Abrahms wanted to prove to the world he could make a budget Star Trek series that wasn't even about Star Trek and still make money off of it, and he was wildly successful. Uwe Boll wanted to prove to the world he could make movies that had game names in them that had virtually no relationship to the games whatsoever and still make money off of it, and he was wildly successful. And that's not even touching on Michael Bay, the literal king of talentless design, still in the business. Vendettas and quests are what holewood is all about, and the newer Goldeneyes perfectly reflect that new generation of financial mismanagement and thirst for instant gratification we see so much in media. Even more concerning is the rise of SJW's and their hipster ilk, where their desperate cries for attention and attempts to find relevance are actually somehow pressuring developers and directors into crumbling to the ridiculous censorship of an inconsequential minority screeching aimlessly on the corner of a city block.
This is an incredibly scary age for people who actually have any shred of standards in entertainment.
Speaking of womyn, James Bond has always had a variety of super easy women in all of the movies, which is perfectly fine and fits with the theme. The problem is when they start getting all personal about the characters and the direction. Sure, almost all of the related side characters had some kind of story involved with them regardless of year, but the new movies (Casino Royal+) all take this direction way too seriously, and manage to literally forget the entire purpose of James Bond. The term "spy movie" usually makes me think about a guy conducting spy work, but what actually happens is we get to watch my grandmother's extremely low budget soap operas instead. I'd always felt the introduction of romance and social commentary in entertainment was entirely unnecessary unless it was explicity a media about romance, given I've never once seen a such an arc performed in a believable manner. James Bond used women as a stopgap for filler and to put a pretty face onscreen with only the bare minimum fluffed on the sides until they decided they wanted to be edgy and realistic. The whole system collapses instantly.
Another thing that really bothered me about the new movies, especially Skyfall, when the new Q is introduced as some typical nerdy youngster with geeky attributes who somehow seems to "catch bond off guard" with his modern technical skills and attitude. I am not sure if this was actually intentional, but the first discussion between the two was not only abruptly placed but felt extremely forced. Just about everything involving the new Q was some vain attempt to appeal to the "new generation". Not to mention it greatly played down Bond's position as being the best spy in the agency with top class skills related to his line of work. The whole interaction between the two at that moment was just badly placed and badly written. These scenes were probably driven by marketing rather than the script writers.
Even so, this is a minor offense in the grand scheme of things, and one I would normally be willing to just account to my exceptionally nitpicky tastes regarding scripts, if not for the direction the newer movies took as a whole.
Observation 2 - Evil Fortresses Are Not Hip
Die Another Day is the last movie we see an evil fortress/doomsday plot used in a Bond movie in the form of an ion cannon, clearly just ripped from Goldeneye to begin with. While just about nothing makes sense about it, and the movie in general is kind of a clusterfuck, that's the final movie that attempts to actually stick to the old Bond ways. All the newer movies seem to be about personal grudges, being a dangerous rogue agent, and pointlessly convoluted over the top relationships. As a result they lose their interesting aspects and become more about social drama than anything actually productive. The worst of them has to be Skyfall. A great opportunity was presented to make an island fortress in Skyfall and they threw it out the window for some bullshit instead.
I don't necessarily feel the new movies were bad, they are certainly a far cry from the bargain bin rubbish that is JJ Abrahms and Michael Bay, but they aren't Bond and certainly aren't good. I guess big bad villains with cats and space stations are just not hip these days. The closest we get is in Quantum of Solace which, despite its efforts to make homage to the older titles, remains a social drama movie. They are just average action movies that stand a cut above the everyday drivel of holewood but don't really have the thinking behind them to achieve anything noteworthy. The action is forgettable and characters, despite their attempts, remain just as one-dimensional as their counterparts in the older films who had significantly less script time. All of their attempts to make everything edgy only succeeded in eroding out the charm of the older titles. That was literally the only thing they did.
The big action scenes in the old movies may not have been overly dramatic in a choreographic sense, especially if you compare them to many dedicated action movies to come afterwards, such as Asian martial arts films, and indeed much of the combat is rigid and hilariously fake, but the fact they don't attempt to overblow combat and make every single thing some dramatic moment lends to a style that remains easy to follow and somewhat believable. The problem with this particular element, like many others, is Americans suddenly realized they have to make everything dark and edgy to make it believable since the vast majority of Americans have never seen sunlight or even a properly lit room before, spending most of their time sleeping on a sea of razorblades.
There was this Star Trek fan-made kickstarter thing someone in the Sins community had linked me to. I forget what it was called, but it was an interview-styled flashback kind of thing. The really big thing that stood out to me was all of the unnecessarily off-center, overly zoomed in cameras on faces, the extreme bloom and color correction on the skin, all in an effort to make it appear edgier and "more real", as though just a regular camera was not intense enough or some shit. I just can't take that shit seriously whatsoever. It is so fucking tryhard and convoluted it just takes away from every other aspect of their production. Maybe that is why overly cheesy dubbed games like DMC still manage to be more engrossing to me.
In a way this is also reflected in those rancid "retro" indie titles. Notice how basically all of them abuse the fuck out of camera shaking? Yes, some old titles also used camera shaking. Comparing the two, I noticed that, distinctly, old games using camera shaking were rarely as irritating as even the most modest usage in newer titles. These bargain bin web developers simply don't know how to make games appeal to gamers, so instead they appeal to hipsters by helping them distance themselves from the responsibility of interaction. What's the easiest way to appeal to an audience who doesn't want to play a game, but still wants to feel like they are a part of something? Make a game that is all attempted flash and no substance. Hey, that's nearly every game released in the last fifteen years!
Observation 3 - Everything is Gasoline
This is probably something everyone has noticed. After a certain period, I'll say around 1980-1990, film developers suddenly realized that everything in the entire planet was either made out of gunpowder or, more commonly, gasoline. Cars, Mengsk statues, small hovercraft, just about everything explodes into a big orange fireball at the slightest provocation. This cheapens chase scenes and makes the world exceptionally unbelievable. It's also a way to distract would-be hipsters away from shallow choreography. Bond movies start taking this route just like everyone else. It's kind of hysterical, because this is still a trend today. Hipsters are commonly American, and Americans live in a world consisted of Bible physics where just about nothing makes any fucking sense at all. Of course, this is the reason why the vast majority of physics engines in games are hysterically unrealistic and fucked up - because that's how Americans think the world actually works. Jesus told them so and denial usually leads to lawsuits.
The best movies are those where something is supposed to explode from the inside but you see the explosions originate from around the edges or outside. That's a good chunk of the bond movies.
Observation 4 - No One Can Post-Process
Notice how holewood makes bluerays green? Or how Skyrim has this shade of green? Or how everything seems to be missing color? You'll notice that in the newest bond movies. Somehow, tinting everything makes it darker and edgier. I don't know how, but it just does. Else why would people do it, right?
A slight amount of color correction can go a long way. But ramping up one channel just makes everything look bland. Games do it, movies do it. It's pretty stupid. You also have a resurgence of something called Chromatic Aberration. Chromatic Aberration is actually an old camera defect that has since been purged from modern film. A quick experimentation in Unreal 4 yields it's incredibly hard on the eyes. To think that people are actually using software to implement this back into media... wow. I actually run across Chromatic Aberration on fan art quite a lot. People put Chromatic Aberration into still fucking images because they think it looks better. Think about that for a moment. Just fucking sit on that shaft for a while.
Chromatic Aberration causes color banding on the edges of the screen. It leads to eye strain and fucks with the focus of the scene. Objects appear distorted, malformed, overly sharp, and otherwise mangled. I don't know how or why this started appearing in games. I guess lens flares just aren't enough anymore. You gotta be hip somehow. Financial mismanagement. That's what Chromatic Aberration is. Plain and simple. Any time you discover something like this was ever considered by a developer it is time to ditch that developer. Any time someone willfully puts this into their "art" they have declared their retirement as an artist.
Speaking of financial mismanagement, I find it hard to believe any of these newer movies had more than a few thousand dollars in their pocket. The cheap, video co-pilot presets they applied to the post processing only partially manage to succeed in masking the choreography, while the scriptwriting remains ever more clearly evident that it was not produced by an actual writer. Not that Bond was particularly noted in my observations for having strong writing. Perhaps nostalgia clouds my judgement of the franchise, as at times I often wonder how it managed to be so successful at all. Evidently most of the newer titles had extremely mismanaged budgets, very common in holewood and its subsidiaries as no one is ever held accountable for doing things "wrong", and yet still manage to be just as successful - if not moreso - than their older counterparts.
One could probably blame the internet for the greater success of video media today than yesterday, but one really has to ask the million-fedora question: Would the old Bond movies actually succeed today? My guess is no. The new Bond movies are merely adopting the mantra of the industry. "Faster, More Intense!" has been the mantra for a while now, and it is in response to the evolutionary decline of their target audience. Much like game developers, you must ride the waves or start to actually suffer from your budget mismanagement. No one likes responsibility, and no one likes putting effort into anything, so the lowest hanging fruit are always the ones to get plucked from the dicktree. Marketing firms are the gods of the business world, not developers. Developers simply suckle whatever is dangled in front of them to feed their 30 morbidly obese sacks of sentient lard they call budgies.
Observation 5 - Movies and Games are basically identical
What I find astonishing is that James Cameron once actually knew how to make media. He was once capable of actually making movies. And, no matter how lenient I am feeling or how hard I look, I just can't find modern Western science fiction that stands up to Starship Troopers or the average Anime.
That, so many years ago, Anime looked as good as Macross and Gundam's many offshoots.
Yet today, even in the 2d arena, Americans continue to simplify their cartoons. Almost every cartoon or otherwise 2d production I've seen to come from the west, either by passing by a TV or by people linking things on the internet, is "simplified", dumbed down, and completely featureless. Whereas even now ancient Anime still manages to surprise me in how it looks, and modern productions, like Fate/Zero and Yamato 2199, make fair use of 3d technology.
That isn't to say all American animation is bad, particularly Futurama comes to mind as using 3d in fairly intelligent ways, but the ratio of Americans dumbing down quality to Japanese constantly pushing themselves further is absolutely staggering. Both industries are effectively deceased, but some maggots still scurry around, looking to blossom into beautiful moths.
A major exception to the Americans not really pushing things rule has got to be Mainframe Entertainment, who produced Reboot and Beast Wars. With 3d technology still at its infancy they had the balls to not only attempt to build productions out of it, but actually put effort into it. I also felt that Shadow Raiders had some of the best music I have yet to hear come from Western animated series entirely (very similar to Beast Wars). All of these productions had excellent voice acting and fairly solid direction, though both Reboot and Shadow Raiders never saw completion. Mainframe Entertainment is literally the only good content producer of virtually any industry to come out of Canada I can recall. Unfortunately, their kind will not likely ever be seen again, since the company collapsed ages ago.
Despite a few exceptions like Mainframe, the advancement of visual technology ended up hurting American production heavily. It's not that Americans are entirely incapable of making good content, is that in almost every circumstance they have absolutely nothing pressuring them into putting effort into it. Back in the days of Cameron the Movie Director you actually had to make props! By hand! Looking at the miniature ships for Starship Troopers really nails it in just how far we have fallen since then, with garbage like the Battlestar Galactica Web Series somehow gaining momentum, completely forgoing the far superior process schemes of Starship Troopers for what can only be described as an intern's first day in After Effects, with the shittiest smoke and most desynced snow framerate I have seen in many years. Of course, just like every other modern production, Blood and Chrome was a social commentary and had very little to do with the franchise or world. That is to say that I found the Battlestar Galactica reboot as a whole extremely disappointing and virtually pointless to watch. The various youtube compilations of the combat CGI are more fulfilling than the series itself, especially with the hilarious copout they had for an ending. It would have been best if they stuck to combat and ignored social commentary but, as is common the excuse, it was on a very small budget. Maybe they should have just never fucked with a reboot, then! How do you fuck up a simple series about man fighting machines in space? Get nu-America to direct it.
The obsession of the need to build movies around social commentary confounds me more than anything. I can understand people seeing 3d and its mechanisms as a way to dodge getting out of chairs and actually making something, and I can see Western animation dumbing itself down over the years to cater to an increasingly inbred and mentally malnourished market, but I just don't understand where the need to have movies focus on character's chin hairs and tears comes from.
Sometimes documentaries are kind of interesting, like the Team Liquid LCS documentary. It's neat to see how the pro players completely crack under pressure. It humanizes them in a way. They're documentaries specifically about the players and how they live in the pressure-heavy world of sponsors and stage performance. But movies typically are supposed to have some kind of plot, and when we spend more time asking why we should even give a shit about a character before we start reaching inside his anus, we really have to wonder why this was a movie at all. Kind of like The Last of Us, a game that should have been a movie because it was a movie disguised as a game and had virtually no gameplay to it, even though it failed utterly as a "movie" and had no semblance of a plot or character engagement whatsoever. In the same way, movies trying to be social documentaries masquerading as movies is probably one of the biggest reasons why the Bond series took such a steep dive in overall prose. They want to keep the Bond cover but don't quite know how - oh, let's add some gasoline and camera shaking! That'll keep the hipsters attention! Meanwhile we can make a "deep" and "moving" story about "revenge" and "no white and black" because attempting to cleverly circumvent the plain implication you are clueless works so well in the west. Bond is simply a recognized label to give an entirely vapid spurt of extretement traction in a crowded market - just like Blizzard and their releases since Diablo 2.
The Kung Fu marathon I underwent earlier taught me something very interesting. That is that movies don't really need a plot. They need drive. It's the same thing hidden behind the veil of older game titles, before they became corridor shooters like Killzone and Lords of Game Testing.
Observation 6 - Play to Your Strengths
The attempt to make something deep puts you in a tough spot. If you don't succeed you make yourself look absolutely ridiculous and no one takes you seriously, like James Cameron and Avatar. Just a silly old goose trying to pull a fast one on us. "Look, I paid money on 3d!!!! I'm so talented!!!" Yeah, sure thing buddy. The fact anyone thought that was a good idea, past individuals looking to make a tech demo, astounds me.
Yet you have these Chinese movies who had a budget that is basically incomparable even to low-budget western titles twenty years ago. Their writing remains more interesting than the most coveted of modern cinema, especially when it comes to action or drama movies. Why?
If we take a step back and glance in the general direction of the Castlevania games I've done, much becomes clear.
The presentation and delivery of many games, and thus many movies, matters more than the content. As I analyzed in the Lords of Game Testing review, the developers for that heap of steaming rubbish clearly had no understanding of what made the Castlevania games what they were. They had no idea what immersion, color balance, or prose was about. It wasn't that their new plot idea was necessarily bad, it was that they took this plot idea and filled it with a variety of superfluous social commentary crap that only served to render the writing convoluted and confusing for the sake of appearing deep. Rather than sticking with something relatively simple and letting the game be about what it was supposed to be about - the gameplay - they completely abandoned gameplay in the bid to inject as much "deep" and "edgy" cuts as they could. Without ever having actually tested their game or looking at it as a body, they just assumed hipsters would be too wow'd by their amazing new envision of a darker and edgier castlevania to actually attempt to read anything that was going on.
The willful ignorance of everything being fucky is very common in gaming. How else would the Souls titles have sold, if not for the willful neglect of players, and the people who buy into hype with no recourse? What about the people who cling to Starcraft 2 if only for their attachment to Brood War, with buyer's remorse dogging them at every turn? It doesn't make sense from a neutral consumer's standpoint to buy into a product that is objectively inferior to a previous product. Thankfully for America, consumerism is entirely psychological, and the business of selling increasingly cheaper, lower-investment, lower quality products is the dream of Capitalism and has been firmly cemented in the entertainment industries. Rather, the market has been groomed to accept feces as an acceptable nourishment, and every gooey, chunky meal is met with applause.
The need to tell yourself you didn't waste your time or money helps you deny facts, but facts remain facts. Buyer's remorse is an extremely powerful demon and it afflicts the tech industry heavily. No one likes to feel they made the wrong decision so they try to ignore the flaws and get their money's worth. But no one, ultimately, feels satisfied. Shit is still shit, it still tastes like shit, and eventually the moths will grow tired of eating their own waste.
I never really came out of those Kung Fu movies unsatisfied. They didn't give me a reason to regret losing my time. They are presented as cheap entertainment and that's what they were. They very often, even in the most mediocre of cases, had exceptionally well choreographed fights between actors with no or very little camera shaking or distractions between them and me. There's not much more you can ask for out of an action movie. Again, I don't think those kinds of movies could survive today. The closest you get is Ninja Assassin which still has to inject an unhealthy dose of dark and edgy and tragic history between the action. While not necessarily distant from its clear inspiration, it still manages to come off as pompous and unnecessary. The entire American aspect of that movie could have been abandoned, and it could have focused the protagonist exclusively, and it would have literally been ten times better. But they just had to have the black girl and her cop friends come save the day in ninja town. This forceful injection of completely unnecessary distractions to mask a feign at making writing when it was unnecessary to step in that arena in the first place is a pitfall Americans commonly find themselves sucking dicks in. See: Michael Bay and fucking love stories in Transformers. Jesus Christ. That guy.
Hero, as a modern embodiment of the past, has more tuned choreography and the calmer elements inbetween remain relevant and interesting. The same could be said for War of the Arrows, a Korean film, though not exactly a martial arts production. However, Asian productions certainly can slipup, like the Yamato Live Action movie, which was thoroughly rushed. Not everyone is flawless, and no one can remain entirely consistent. But, in general, Asians definitely hold themselves to a higher standards than the west, if only because of their culture. Even China's bootleg games remain remarkably more entertaining than their western counterparts. Chinese dota with Shrek, anyone?
I intend to look more into Asian films should I have the chance in the future.
The curious thing about Hero is that the love story elements in it actually are a part of the story, and are not just some shoehorned in element for the sake of appealing to a casual audience. Much is the same with War of the Arrows and, in fact, a huge number of Asian movies.
Having never been in an actual relationship or felt any real emotion except for disdain for my fellow man, I innately can't identify with love plots. But I can tell you from an unbiased outside perspective that in 99% of cases they are unnecessarily tacked on for the sake of faking substance and end up detracting. Astounding it is, then, when you have as massive and diverse a history as Transformers with multiple major franchises to pull from, and you still manage to make 80% of the screen time about two forgettable teenagers fountaining pop culture references and cringy one-liners. Clear evidence of not simply budget mismanagement, but lack of direction, lack of research, and simple malice from the director. An attack on all those whom cherished Transformers and simply wanted to see some new bells and whistles on a tried and true face.
Hero actually attempts to make the relationships of characters relevant, weaving their elements through the protagonist's and Emperor's plots.
When you look back to American Arcades and how the West started their entry into the gaming industry, and how today's giants started off producing mascot platformers and horrifically bad ports, all because they viewed games as "toys", the decisions they make today don't surprise you one bit. Movies are just as bad for producers looking to push alternate products and plug their brands, but Americans are accustomed to consumerism, so few alerts are really sounded. It does, however, warp the overall presentation and drive behind productions. No longer is it about telling and presenting a story, it's about making just barely enough footage to build a trailer out of, filling the rest with clever pop culture and filler, and balancing the psychological war of keeping hipsters interested just long enough to get some twitter posts. Or, in the case of Transformers, you have the equivalent of clickbaiting - Michael Bay builds something he knows fans of the franchise will find extremely offensive and everyone else will find very offensive with the goal of generating hate traffic. Just like Kotaku, Transformers serves as a conduit for negative traffic - which of course still generates revenue.
The unfortunate thing is that this is a tried and true tactic and has been so for many years. Games review websites are widely regarded as untrustworthy cesspools of publisher-driven marketing drivel, but still attain enough advertisement revenue to stay afloat due to clickbaiting. Entire games and markets are built on this concept. For example, the American legal system is intricately woven into the idea of copyright trolling and baiting, and serves as a revenue conduit for many brand names, such as Apple and EA. You know when you can copyright a shape you've got into the deep end, but that's exactly what American industry is all about. Americans pressuring Canadian ISP's to give in to a copyright trolling free-for-all were given a counter-offered: Pay Us, Get Our Information.
Perhaps my lack of social empathy is not exactly an alien thing to hipsters. Perhaps this is what is so attractive to them about cheap love stories with no substance. It allows them to live the fantasy of actually being able to pollute the already disgusting genepool even further. I, for one, try to hold myself to a sense of responsibility, and it's hard to fantasize about anything so wildly full of shit it makes David Manning look white.
In a way, the argument could be made that this is what movies are all about. Between hipsters trying to make colorful and artsy stories with gritty, edgy realism and Michael Bay trying to piss off the entire planet, you have a large collection of hyper beta casuals who somehow can be absorbed into anything. A colorless mass of demihuman flesh easily corralled into brand-name feeding pens. This would describe the gaming industry for sure. But, somehow, with a history that had reasonably respectable elements in it, I feel maybe the movie industry is a bit more sinister of a creature.
Americans games were never really, as a whole, any good. Not yesteryear, and not today. Americans have, however, produced quality animation and cinema in the past, and still sometimes manage to surprise me. Perhaps it is because as big and aggressive as Holewood is, holewood doesn't own the entire cinema world, whereas American publishers have managed to crush nearly all potentially competition in the gaming market, and Asians have ceded to them.
Although my time with the Bond movies has opened my eyes to the story behind this dark plot, I feel like I'll need to go deeper to truly understand the root of westernisms in cinema. I'll certainly need more time to put words to my observations, and figure out how to better articulate the differences between movies in a written manner.