It's been an underwhelming start for a so-called visionary genius, but in the hope of digging up something watchable I hereby present the third instalment of my shallow dive into the career of tonsorially unconcerned director Stanley Kubrick. Under the Fisher Price microscope this time is Kubo's second feature film, Killer's Kiss. Is he any good yet? Let's find out! (short answer: almost)
Scene: A man impatiently paces the concourse of New York's Penn Station, smoking like it's the 1950s (which, in fairness, it is) and talking without moving his lips. No, he's not a ventriloquist: it's one of those voiceovers they do in film noir all the time, letting us know that - in what would become one of Kubrick's favourite themes - he is a man and he has fucked up. The story unfolds in flashback, and what follows is an unremarkable stab at a genre which was on its last legs at the time. Kubrick would later claim the story was irrelevant and he just needed the directing experience, and that's crystal clear on viewing: Killer's Kiss uses all the film noir tropes in a disappointingly uninspired way (smoke, venetian blinds and shadows feature heavily), but clues to the future genius of its director occasionally pop up and punch you on the nose to wake you up.
The station-based framing device is the first fumble: where, say, Double Indemnity began at the end with Walter Neff shot, bleeding out and desperate to confess, immediately hooking you into the story, Killer's Kiss has a bloke waiting for a train. Yowzers, how could he possibly have ended up in such an incredible and unique pickle, I can't wait to find out. Turns out he's a boxer by the name of Davey Gordon, played by the kind of actor you hire when you can't afford Burt Lancaster. Preparing for a fight that evening he gazes into a mirror, imagining what he'll look like when he's had his features pulped into face soup - the first of a handful of shots Kubrick lifts from his own documentary Day Of The Fight as if we wouldn't notice (tbf, hardly anyone did because hardly anyone saw it).
The setup goes on to introduce Davey's sexy neighbour, Gloria: a private dancer, a dancer for money, any old music will do - not unlike Davey himself, whose fancy footwork also regularly entertains an undiscerning audience. Naturally Gloria ends up dragging Davey into a whole heap of trouble - not for nothing does the poster's lurid tagline shriek "Her soft mouth was the road to sin-smeared violence!", although that might be over-egging the pudding a bit. Presumably "Her boss's wandering hands meant some guy ended up on platform four" wouldn't have sold as many tickets. Censor-friendly sex, violence and mistaken identity follow, until a bizarre climax that sees Davey and the handsy man lobbing dismembered mannequins at each other in a warehouse, before the tantalising conundrum of what happens at Penn Station is wrapped up to absolutely nobody's surprise.
While the content is unexceptional, Kubrick does play around with the form a little, and that's what we're here for. Unbelievably he still hasn't mastered the 180 degree rule, more interested instead in filming Cheap Burt Lancaster's face through a goldfish bowl in an attempt to find a new way to show a schnook trapped in his own tedious existence, but there are some great moments. Davey's big fight, which he loses because he is a man in a film noir and therefore a loser, is shot with gusto: Stan gets his camera right in there with the boxers and makes you feel every punch. It's not quite Raging Bull, but the desire to put the audience into a situation rather than just show it to them is born here, and would come of age inside Dave Bowman's helmet in 2001 and Danny Torrance's maze run in The Shining.
The gear change between the first and second act is our first exposure to some choice Kubrickian surrealism. Davey dreams of flying down the deserted streets of New York, and we see his point of view but it's in negative, the effect foreshadowing 2001's stargate sequence but at a fraction of the duration, which is a good job because 2001's stargate sequence is almost as long as the whole of Killer's Kiss. It's deliberately jarring but a little vague for such an unambitious narrative: does it represent the desire to escape? The interchangeable nature of light and dark? A titanic fuckup in the processing lab? And Kubrick's next trick isn't entirely original but it is unusual: a flashback within the flashback, forcing the audience to stay on its toes and making Killer's Kiss the Inception of its time.
There is some legit stunning photography in here, shot by Kubrick himself. A scene in which a pair of dimbulb hitmen whack the wrong guy is a staggering work of composition and lighting: three silhouettes shrink slowly into the disappearing perspective of a back alley, Stan cuts away while the dark deed is done, then two silhouettes return towards the camera, their job apparently done. Shooting almost entirely on location in New York, Kubrick also gifts us some lovely time capsule stuff of Times Square at night, and you wonder how someone who would become such a control freak coped with all those randoms wandering through his shot as if they lived there or something. But he does achieve a palpable sense of the city's oppressiveness, with characters hemmed into tiny apartments, narrow streets and corridors, or loomed over by pitiless architecture.
Despite those flashes of brilliance, most of Killer's Kiss is unexceptional. But Kubrick has at least lost the arse-clenching pretentiousness of Fear And Desire, and is in effect still learning on the job. Today's auteurs cut their teeth on TV and in commercials, but 60 years ago you had to do the directorial equivalent of standing in front of the class and showing your working out, which is what this is. We're watching Stanley Kubrick become Stanley Kubrick, and that's never going to be anything less than fascinating.
Next time: The Kube finally pulls his finger out and makes a film with a running time of over 75 minutes. Join me soon for The Killing! (Not the Danish TV series. Or the American TV series based on the Danish TV series. Or the film with Lee Marvin, that's The Killers. Or the 2010 Ashton Kutcher / Katherine Heigl action comedy, that's Killers. The fuck is wrong with you?)
Every generation has a legend. Every journey has a first step. Every saga has a beginning. So goes the tagline for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, a film so bad that Stanley Kubrick literally died just a few months before its release in order to avoid watching it. Stan's first step on his own journey to becoming a legend for many generations was almost as fraught with bad decisions and terrible acting as Anakin Skywalker's, but is arguably more worthy of your time. He'd got all that unfortunate documentary business out of his system, thank God, and was all set to launch his career as one of the greatest, most innovative and exciting directors OF ALL TIME. But first: Fear And Desire.
Artistically ambitious and naive (or, to quote one S. Kubrick forty years down the line, "boring and pretentious"), Fear And Desire is a near-perfect example of an unfocused talent learning on the job. There are the striking visual compositions and classy lighting you'd expect from an accomplished photographer; lots of gigantic close-ups; daring editing choices, and evocative sound design being deployed to tell a deeply human story concerned with flawed masculinity and mankind's boundless capacity to overestimate his own control over the universe: all signature elements of the future Kubrick's oeuvre. But we pay for all that with a film student's idea of issue-led narrative, reckless abuse of visual grammar, a misogynist's approach to female characterisation (or, more accurately, lack of) and - most egregiously - colossally ponderous dialogue. Kubrick was yet to learn to trust in his instincts as a visual storyteller, and as a result Fear And Desire probably contains more dialogue in its 70 minutes than in the 160 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fear And Desire begins mysteriously: a small platoon of four stock military characters (Lieutenant Handsome, Sergeant Warmachine, Private Babyface and Private Unremarkable) in an unidentified war are stranded on an island, six miles behind enemy lines. The time is also unidentified, as is the island, because the island is everywhere and everywhen. The island is man. The island is hell. A polar bear appears, and the pilot is abducted by a smoke monst- wait, no, sorry, I was thinking of something else. Lost in the hostile terrain of an inhospitable forest that looks suspiciously like southern California, the quartet make plans to get back to safety. Their lieutenant's idea to float down river on a hand-made raft seems staggeringly optimistic - especially when his first action is to lead his men uphill, which is traditionally not where rivers are found - but off they trot nevertheless.
What follows owes a small debt to the Greek mythology of Homer's Odyssey, and Kubrick is keen to let you know it: the soldiers' journey takes the form of a series of episodic encounters; the first stranger the group meet is a dog called Proteus; a siren (kind of) lures one of the men to madness. It would be churlish to criticise Kubrick or his high school friend Howard Sackler (who wrote the script) for their highbrow intentions, but when they present their ideas via some of the most flowery, flatulent guff you'll ever hear you would be well within your rights to shout "NERRRRRRD!" at both writer and director and pull their shorts down in front of the girls in the next P.E. class. Good luck, for example, making it through this philosophical cabbage-wank without audibly groaning:
SERGEANT WARMACHINE It’s better... it's better to roll up your life into one night and one man and one gun. It hurts too much to keep hurting everyone else in every direction and to be hurt with all the separate hates exploding day after day. You can't help it. A curse buzzes out of your mouth with every word you say and nobody alive can tell which is which or what you mean. Yeah... you try door after door when you hear voices you like behind them, but the knobs come off in your hand...
Faulty doorknobs aside, the soldiers' journey continues. They make a brief stopover at an enemy hut where casual death and loss of humanity (a future Kubrickian preoccupation) feature heavily, almost as if war is some kind of violent and dehumanising process. One of the aforementioned sirens - actually a simple but spectacularly hot fisherwoman - is captured by our guys and is forced to watch while Private Babyface, who was clearly never the full metal jacket in the first place, goes increasingly bananas; eventually he shoots her to ensure she performs no further useful narrative function, before declaring the river to be flowing with blood and leaping off for a swim while cackling like The Joker. War Is Hell, evidently, and you can almost feel Kubrick squirming with the obviousness of it all - so much so that when he came to make his three other war movies, he just flat out said it (War Is A Humanity Vacuum in Paths Of Glory; War Is A Bad Joke in Dr Strangelove; War Is Madness in Full Metal Jacket) rather than wrapping it all up in pseudo-intellectual literary and cultural references.
There's more to come though, when we get to meet "The General" - the de facto villain of the piece - only to find that he's played by the same actor who plays Lieutenant Handsome, and his right hand bastard is played by the same guy who plays Private Unremarkable. The General muses portentously on death and his role in dispensing it, lamenting that he has become war, and it's a blessed relief when Lieutenant Handsome and Private Unremarkable put an end to his eye-rolling wittering with a few well-placed bullets. There's just time for them to recognise themselves in their enemies' faces though (because we are very much alike, you and I), before successfully escaping to their own HQ where they are free to ponder further on the physical and spiritual casualties of war because this film definitely needs more of that.
It's easy to pick on Fear And Desire for its heavy-handedness - fun, too - but it's still absolutely worth checking out as a formative piece of Kubrickery. Its formal sloppiness and narrative hamfistedness are hugely at odds with the meticulousness we've come to expect from Stan, but there's an undeniably trippy atmosphere to the piece and enough flashes of cinematic bravado to suggest that this guy might be worth watching in the future. Themes that would eventually be more fully developed lie dormant here, waiting for geeks like me to stumble across them years later, and besides, it's never not fun to witness the birth of a legend. Unless it's in The Phantom Menace.
Next time: Kubrick goes noir in crime drama Killer's Kiss. Will he still have his head up his arse? There's only one way to find out! (Watch it yourself, Jesus, why do I have to do everything around here)
Hello you, welcome to another of my hugely original and trailblazing trawls through the career of a little-known filmmaker of whom I unjustifiably claim to have a much deeper and more meaningful understanding than you do! This time round the subject under discussion is a director called Stanley Kubrick, who you won't have heard of, but let me tell you he knows his directing onions. Present him with any random selection of onions and he would immediately know which were his directing ones. Or at least he would if he hadn't died, which I regret to inform you is exactly what happened 20 years ago today. Just as you'd found out about him, too :-(
Anyway enough about death and onions, let's talk films. The Brick made three short films and 13 features over his irritatingly short career, and I'll be fumbling my way through each of those in separate, semi-regular posts over the next one hundred years. It's only right that we should begin by investigating the infant's daubings that are his early non-fiction short films, what with them being chronologically first and all (more or less; Kubo made The Seafarers after his first feature, Fear And Desire, but it deserves to be lumped in with his other shorts). They're not very interesting I'm afraid, but I am a tedious completist and it only seems fair that you should suffer for that. OK? Great. Let's get Kubrickal!
Day Of The Fight (1951)
The Kubrick shorts, or Kubriquettes as they are widely referred to, are natural extensions of young Stan's career as a photojournalist for Look magazine. Day Of The Fight more so than the others, because he had in fact already told this story via the medium of still photography, which he used as a virtual storyboard for the doc. Following Walter Cartier (a professional boxer, although I am firmly of the opinion that the occupation should be renamed 'twatter') through a single day in the run-up to an important game of twatting, Kubrick shoots, edits and uses sound like he's making a crime drama. It's an itch he got to scratch properly with actual boxing-based crime drama Killer's Kiss two years later, but for now his style weighs its subject down with an appropriately oppressive ennui: a sense that the buildup to a twatting match is a tougher slog than the actual twatting itself.
Through his subject, Kubrick ponders the elastic nature of time itself, which for Cartier expands unbearably when he's waiting for the twatting to begin and contracts dramatically once he's in the ring. The gaps between each of the film's time stamps gets increasingly shorter: a neat foreshadowing of the temporal manipulation seen in The Shining's gradually compressed narrative and in Spartacus' running time of approximately eight weeks. In fact there's a lot of the future Kubrick in Cartier's diligence, fastidiousness, preparation and dedication: over one shot of his twatting paraphernalia spread out on a bed, the narrator indicates that "his boxing gear has been carefully laid out", and it's hard to believe it wasn't the director himself who spent two hours arranging and lighting everything and 76 takes getting the right shot of it.
Cartier's patience and technique sees him through to victory as best twatter though, and Kubrick takes note of this route to success before embarking on his own wildly impressive career. First though, he had to prove something to himself, and to the world: that he was equally capable of farting out some painfully dull business about a priest in a plane.
Flying Padre (1951)
Challenging himself to make documentary gold out of the lustreless lead that is a vicar whose USP is that he can't be arsed to drive, Kubrick fails spectacularly. Here's a priest, he says, who gets about his ridiculously massive parish in a small plane, isn't that something? Well, Stanley love, no. Father Fred Stadtmueller is an instantly forgettable documentary subject, a man of the church who does churchly things like conducting funerals, chastising small children and ferrying poorly babies around in his airborne Godmobile. I'm sorry but if he isn't going to round off that funeral by resurrecting the deceased while floating two feet off the ground and making it rain wine then I'm putting Full Metal Jacket on.
There's an attempt to inject tension into the sick baby story with some canny crosscutting, but that's as technically accomplished as it gets. Some of the directing and editing choices here are riddled with schoolboy errors, with Kubrick mistreating the 180 degree rule in a couple of filmed conversations almost as brutally as he mistreated Shelley Duvall nearly 30 years later. Flying Padre is, sadly, no Day Of The Fight, but don't worry, I'm sure the next one will be great!
The Seafarers (1953)
Holy shit this one is terrible. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was this long con, in which he turned the man who quacked out a half-hour corporate video for a fucking sailors' union into the genius Stanley Kubrick, a director so phenomenally brilliant that nerds would watch literally anything he'd ever put his name to, meaning we'd all check out this crushingly soulless dreck in the misguided belief that it might just be comparable to The Shining. It's a testament to Kubrick's genius that this has been included on a DVD of one of his films: is Ridley Scott's Hovis ad included on the Alien disc? No. Does Mulholland Drive list David Lynch's commercial for Clearblue pregnancy testing kits among its special features? No. Does an Easter egg on the Baby Driver Blu-ray take you to Edgar Wright's Pizza Hut promo? I don't know, I haven't got it. Yet here we are, lapping up thirty minutes of propaganda urging us to join the Seafarers' International Union, because Stanley Kubrick banged it out over half a century ago.
Ramming the message down our throats that we'd all enjoy more security, a higher standard of living, a position of respect in the community and a daily sucking off from a Hollywood starlet of our choice if only we joined the union, The Seafarers promises much but delivers little. There aren't even any scenes set at sea, just a handful of shots of blokes looking busy on a boat when the captain walks past, and 22 insufferable minutes have shuffled by before we even get to that. There is, to be fair, a good gag involving an aesthetically pleasing pair of tits, but you have to wade through an awful lot of seamen to get to it, and that's just unhygienic. Still, if you're going to sell out, best to do it at the start of your career and then make up for it, and that's precisely what Stanley Kubrick did. Eventually.
*
If you thought that was bad, then join me at some indistinct point in the distant future as I undertake my virgin viewing of Stanley Kubrick's first feature film, Fear And Desire. Until then, have you ever thought about joining the Seafarers' International Union? Well here's your chance!
They've made another Marvel film guys. Like you, I thought that big, noisy Avengers one was the last one, until I remembered there had been another Ant-Man since then, but surely that was it. What's left to do? Turns out that after ten years of dick-swinging testostersplosions Marvel realised they'd forgotten to put a lady in a super suit, so here's Brie Larson, the world's greatest woman to be named after a soft cheese, in what must surely be the final MCU film: Captain Marvel.
Despite myself, I still enjoy the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is either an inherent flaw in my genetic programming or a canny trick of expensive, laser-focused marketing that I actively look forward to these movies as much as I do. Sometimes they need a couple of viewings to bed in; my feelings towards Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2, for example, improved considerably on rewatching it at home because when I saw it at a press preview it was inexplicably preceded by an unsolicited EDM gig that gave me a splitting headache and made me miss my train home.
So even though Captain Marvel is flawed, a little confusing at times for an old man like me and filled out with the usual messy space-explodey bits that have me checking my watch and wondering what's for dinner, I couldn't help but have a good time. Brie Larson is perfect in every way, Samuel L Jackson gifts us another sidekick-to-an-amnesiac-ass-whooping-heroine role that's almost as good as The Long Kiss Goodnight, and there's a brilliant cat. Sometimes that's really all I need to keep me happy.
It took a while to get there though: the story begins on the alien planet Hala, with Jude Law's Yon-Rogg dispensing pseudo-Jedi motivational waffle to Larson's Vers. Both are noble warrior heroes of the Kree race, who are at war with sprout-headed pricks the Skrulls, and I've got a bad feeling about this. I've already forgotten the name of the planet, and referring to yourself as a noble warrior hero is a bit on the self-aggrandising side if you ask me. But the MCU is an old hand at knowing what's old hat and subverting it for a post-post-post-modern audience, and before you know it (well, after a brief but exciting exfiltration mission which goes south fast), Vers finds herself - and us - dumped on the planet Earth. Specifically, in a Blockbuster video store. In 1995.
So far, so Thor, and like that film, this is where the fun really begins. But where Chris Hemsworth's giant walnut-man was a fish out of water, Vers takes like a duck to it. It's here where she meets up with Jackson's Nick Fury, sporting a complete set of eyeballs and a genuinely flawless de-aged face that makes X-Men: The Last Stand's similar treatment of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen look like it was done by pinching their skin behind their heads with bulldog clips. Vers and Fury team up to fight the Skrulls who've followed her to Blockbuster (presumably not to rent True Lies), and to work out why she has weird memories of being on Earth previously, only in an air force jumpsuit which is arguably more sexually appealing than the tight rubber one she swans around in at home.
So unfolds a fresh take on the superhero origin story, which organically meshes with its potentially hoary old noble-warrior-heroes-versus-sprout-headed-pricks fightgasm. Rugs are pulled and twists are twisted, and as someone utterly ignorant of Captain Marvel lore, I was continually kept guessing and frequently surprised by events, not least the hidden abilities of the cat. I was left a little baffled by a weird subplot featuring blue meanie Roland The Excuser, who I had to be reminded afterwards was the main villain in Guardians Of The Galaxy, but if you're a total MCU nerd then I'm sure it'll mean something to you. I was just happy to be kept entertained by Ben Mendelsohn as Chief Skrull Prick Talos, who spends most of the film buried under prosthetics but seems to have forgotten, so just does his Ben Mendelsohn thing regardless.
Given that one of Captain Marvel's USPs is its 1990s setting, I'm not sure it's 100% successfully mined for its full value. I'd have loved to see it lean into a '90s aesthetic a little harder: maybe it could have been shot on film; some life-size practical models could have been blown up and shot from eighteen different angles with each one cut together to protract the explosion; there could have been an erotic home invasion subplot with Sharon Stone somehow involved, I don't know. Instead we get a very 2019 movie, all arch and knowing, with its period detail limited to lazy references to the '90s. Alta Vista, Gameboy, flannel shirts, CD ROMs and pagers are all obvious gags here, although nobody ever mentions how much they're looking forward to the first Bond film in six years starring this Piers Bronson guy.
But the main attraction is, of course, the conspicuous lack of a cock and balls in the lead role, and Larson proves to be just as magnetic a screen personality as Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans and, uh, Ed Norton. Vers is positioned as a smart, capable woman who doesn't need rescuing, doesn't require a love interest to complete her, shows the guys a thing or two and - most satisfyingly - has close relationships with other females. Despite the frequent pyrotechnics, the film surfs an easy-going wave of charm that its male-centric counterparts sometimes lack. And while the script doesn't shove all this down your throat, it does allow itself a moment to say that women have been told what they can't do for too long, and now time's up. They can do it, and they can do it well. It's no accident that the most memorable scene in a multi-million-dollar, FX-strewn, sci-fi blockbuster is a simple, beautiful montage of shots of a woman standing up.
There's more socially relevant stuff, some of which gets lost in the mix a little: an underlying point about refugees and aggressive border controls is a welcome grace note rather than a fully satisfying theme, but the question of whether or not you're on the right side of a war when you haven't really explored all the angles is given a bit more due prominence. These are Good Things to stick in a kids' cape movie, obviously, but they're never going to resonate as much as more pressing issues like how Nick Fury loses an eye.
Still, it's yet another sign of Marvel's exponentially increasing development as a studio that we're now seeing whole films of things we loved seeing in one or two scenes only a few years ago: familiar actors convincingly de-aged; heroic females kicking several shades of shit out of a room full of blokes; Samuel L Jackson. If this does, as I confidently predict, turn out to be the final MCU film, well, they've gone out on a high. Personally I'd like to see Brie Larson team up with some of the other Marvel characters in an experimental crossover story, but sadly I think we all know that simply will not happen.
Like most people, I was expecting this Wednesday to be just another run-of-the-mill, bog standard Wednesday: get up, go to work, get cross about Brexit, come home, get cross about Brexit again, go to bed. But, as it turned out, this Wednesday was no run-of-the-mill, bog standard Wednesday at all. This Wednesday was Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! Wednesday, a Wednesday so packed with incident that I only had time to get cross about Brexit once.
Now you might think that a mildly amusing Instagram video by a famous actor that went viral for a few hours wouldn't be worth lavishing 1,600 words on two days later, but that, my friend, is where you are wrong. I have spent the last 48 hours rewatching Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! because it is a work that demands that level of commitment and analysis. It certainly didn't take me this long to write an excessively wordy and pointless blog post about Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! because I thought of the idea about a day and a half later than I should have done, so you can forget that crazy notion right now.
* THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR PIERCE BROSNAN'S I ASKED FOR A COFFEE AND I GOT MYSELF ! *
*ALTHOUGH IT ALSO CONTAINS THE VIDEO IN FULL, SO IT'S PROBABLY NBD *
I mean, wow. I'll just let that sink in. Maybe rewatch it a few dozen times to really absorb the wonder.
Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! was shot by actress Jamie Chung, who, like me, you may not remember from Grown Ups, The Hangover Part II or Sucker Punch. Chung is currently filming The Misfits, directed by Renny Harlin and starring - yep - Pierce Brosnan. Perhaps you're beginning to see how the intricate workings of the universe, like a cosmic collection of cogs, levers and other doohickeys, have manoeuvred with a divine grace to bring the right people together at the right time to create genuine magic.
Jamie Chung, yesterday. Possibly Wednesday
Shot in a single, fluid take at the luxurious Jetex Private VIP Terminal at the Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai, Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! is eight seconds of glorious, Bronhommy goodness that this world simply doesn't deserve. And yet, despite all the odds, it exists, like one of those animals that's so amazing it almost proves the existence of God. A butterfly or some shit, I don't know.
Chung opens her masterpiece in unforgettable style: there, in full frame, is Pierce Brosnan's face staring into camera, his head nonchalantly propped up by the index finger of his left hand (the other fingers remain casually relaxed, but clearly ready to provide backup should the index finger require it). His shirt is unbuttoned and his tie is loose, but no suavity is lost. The hair is, as ever, impeccable, and the hint of a smile can be seen forming at the corners of Brosnan's beautiful mouth. And yet something's not quite right: the first sign that there's more to Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! than meets the eye.
FAO @OnePerfectShot
For it isn't Brosnan we're looking at here, but a facsimile: a monochromatic rendering, which appears to be floating on the surface of a cup. And not just any old cup - a cup with a silver rim and handle (plated or solid? My heart yearns to know), balanced delicately on a saucer of indeterminate material. It could also be silver or it may be glass, but the bubble effect on its surface reminds one of the tears of an angel, delicately shed around the face of Pierce Brosnan.
With no warning, a hand wielding a teaspoon (silver, naturally) enters frame and the unthinkable happens - Pierce Brosnan's face is rent asunder, shattered by the deliberate penetration of the image by an unseen assailant's ludicrously expensive teaspoon. And yet that isn't even the most dramatic thing to happen at this early point in Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself !. As the Brosnan visage is irreparably and literally defaced, a female voice (we later discover it's that of Jamie Chung herself) utters a single, spine-tingling word:
"BOND".
Stirred AND shaken, right guys? Guys
WHAT. THE. FUCK. Are we watching an early scene from the new 007 film? Is Brosnan somehow back in the tux after a 17-year hiatus? Or is he, in a devilish twist of casting, the villain? It is all, as yet, a mystery, although Bond fans around the world have by now accepted that Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! must be canon.
Pierced Brosnan
Not content with opening a gaping wound in the image of Pierce Brosnan's face that takes that hinted-at smile and carves it into a Joker-like grin, the hand continues its wanton destruction with a delicate but merciless stirring motion. Brosnan's face swirls into oblivion and the camera slowly pulls out, revealing a stunning truth: all this time we've been looking at a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee with Pierce Brosnan's face on it. Gradually we get a tantalising glimpse of the party responsible for the caffeine-based carnage: a man (presumably) in a smart blue suit, the warmth of which contrasts with the clinical whiteness of the surroundings. Whoever it is, they had better have a damn good reason for smooshing Pierce Brosnan's chops into a creamy froth.
Running out of joke captions now
And then, the kick in the guts none of us could have prepared for. A rug-pull of such intensity that it makes Iron Man Three's Mandarin twist look like Spectre's reveal that Christoph Waltz is actually Blofeld. Everything we thought we knew about Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! has been turned upside down and inside out, or at least it would have been if he hadn't given away the plot in the text of his Instagram post.
For the diabolical mastermind behind the opening scene of facial devastation is none other than Pierce Brosnan himself, smiling directly into camera as if he's actually enjoying the damage he's inflicting on his own mug. What are we to make of this Brosnan-on-Brosnan butchery? What parallel cinematic universe has opened up before us? As Brosnan delivers the subtlest of pouts (a clear nod to Daniel Craig's signature Bond look) and a brief but unmistakable eyebrow raise (ditto Roger Moore), the answer - one possible answer, at least - comes from Chung again, with the words we'd already begun to form in our minds but never really expected. With a whisper of love, a whisper of hate, she lets the name slip out from between her lips like cigarette smoke escaping from a femme fatale's mouth in a 1940s film noir...
"James Bond".
Yeah, nothing, sorry. Think I peaked with "Stirred AND shaken"
This is almost more than I could take. I don't know where I am any more or what my name is, let alone who the figure before me, rendered in an otherworldly square of pixels from across the globe, can be. And yet that name is unmistakable. It's James Bond. Hold me.
But that's not all. Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself !'s final, unexpected act piles another layer of possible meaning onto the metatextual lasagne that has already filled me up and given me Brosnan-flavoured gas. James Bond, for it is now definitively he, appears to break character, his face creasing into a laugh that makes a mockery of everything we've seen, as if it was merely a gag; a throwaway moment of mischief tossed off to fill time while waiting for a luxury jet. Chung, too, cackles maniacally from behind camera, as if the two of them have been in on this baffling piece of performance art all along. And who knows, perhaps they have?
Is this the last one? Oh thank fuck for that
And then, perhaps reflecting the inevitable circularity of all things, Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! begins again, the face rebuilt, ready for another massacre at the hands of its own, er, hand. How Pierce Brosnan's face got onto his own cup of coffee is never explained: was it painstakingly created by the world's greatest barista? If so, did Brosnan request it himself? Or did the image, as was suggested to me by Empire magazine's Helen O'Hara (a woman whose steadfast anti-Bond stance was demolished in the eight seconds it took her to watch the video), appear there organically, like the face of Jesus in a tortilla? Quite rightly, Chung has remained silent on the subject. The mystery must remain intact, unlike the coffee-froth Brosnan we were introduced to so long ago.
More than that I cannot add. Pierce Brosnan's I Asked For A Coffee And I Got Myself ! is open to so many interpretations that there simply isn't room on the internet for them. Whether it's a splintering of the James Bond franchise, a sophisticated experiment in social media or simply a man stirring a cup of coffee, I doubt we shall get to the bottom of the enigma in our lifetimes. Hopefully these words I have recorded may provide some context for future generations studying the 21st century's most formidable achievements. If that's you, then I hope you find the truth. You deserve it. PS Sorry about Brexit.
