My love for Daniel Craig is the Devil

(From August 2007)

Yesterday I dropped a ridiculous amount of money on DVDs at Target...but it was something I had to do. I *never* buy movies anymore - probably two-thirds of my movie collection is still on video. Most of what I bought yesterday are DVDs of stuff I own on video already, so now I can take the videos to Edward McKay (best store in the world) and get some money out of them. So I'm enjoying those, and Netflix is still being good to me.

I did a post a while back writing about several movies I'd seen lately, and I mentioned that I was waiting on a film where my new future husband Daniel Craig (aka The New James Bond), supposedly gets naked. Like, completely. Obviously, it went straight to the top of the Netflix queue. Well, I watched it today, and I still can't decide if it was worth it. Yes, you see everything Craig has to offer (and not one of those poorly-lit split-second jobs, either. It's up there for several seconds.)...but you have to sit through a pretty horrible movie to get there.

The film is Love is the Devil (1998), which is NOT a biography of 20th century Irish painter Francis Bacon. A biography covers the subjects entire life, or at least a substantial portion of it. This film focuses on Bacon's relationship with working-class George Dyer, whom he claimed to have met when Dyer burgled his house. I didn't know much of anything about Bacon before seeing the film, and you don't get much of an orientation. I generally dislike films that operate this way when telling a story based on a real-life person or incident. They seem to expect that the viewer already knows the players and all the implications of their various relationships. But, if you're only telling a story for the people who by and large already know it, then why bother telling it at all?

So it's not a very accessible film. It's meant to be visually stunning, but to me all it looked like was every Film School 101 parlor trick regurgitated onto the screen with no rhyme or reason. You've got your drugged-out fantasy sequences, your reverse shots from places no point-of-view could logically go, your distorted angles - and one entire scene shot reflecting from fishbowl-style glasses. (If I never see another scene where we only see the character reflected in 14 different mirrors - ooh! He's having identity issues! - it'll be WAY to damn soon.)

None of those prentensio bells and whistles would bother me if there were a plot here - which there isn't. It's sad, because Craig and Derek Jacobi, who plays Bacon, are both marvelous and totally believable. But really, I ended up fast-forwarding through the last 45-minutes or so, just because I wanted it to be over. And that's huge for me - I NEVER quit on a movie.Later, I Googled Francis Bacon. This article from Wikipedia has most of the basics, as well as several images of Bacon's paintings. One thing I read made me even more pissed at the movie. Bacon was so devastated after Dyer's death, he spent the last 20 years of his life obsessing over him, even doing a triptych painting of the last few minutes of Dyer's life. But in the movie, Bacon seems to just blow off Dyer's loss, and we never really see its impact on him...at least not sufficiently enough for it to fit for me.

I think you can learn as much if not more from movies you don't like as you can from movies that you do. And what I learned from "Love is the Devil" is...I will do just about anything for the chance to see Daniel Craig naked, including sitting through an excruciatingly pretentious art-house BBC television movie.

But in case you don't share my sense of sacrifice, it happens at the 1 hour, 4 minute mark. You're welcome.