2021 - THE DIG, yet another archelogy based on a true story film

Another based on a true story film although in this case it's barely based on a true story.  After sitting through The Lost King I ended up watching yet another dig up the countryside story looking for old stuff.   In this case a ship buried in the dirt from the middle ages.  

Set during World War II, The Dig in many ways has a lot in common with The Lost King.  It has another talented but untrained archeologist working against significant odds.   Once again the archeology group network of "good old boys" from Cambridge University conspires to ace him out of the credit he deserves.  Interestingly enough The Cambridge Archeology department is about as bad as the Leicester Archeology department the main villains in The Lost King when it comes to taking credit for other people's work.

This film introduces us to a young archeology couple Stuart and Peggy Piggot.  Based on some real people they are also involved in the dig. They are having marital problems according to the screenplay. The woman falls in love with an RAF pilot so we have to sit through this love affair plot.  The film implies that their marriage fell apart during the excavation, in reality they were married for 20 years.

 

 

Ralph Finnes plays Basil Brown the untrained archeology digger who is sort of a savant digger as kind of like a Limey Pa Kettle badly in need of a bath.  Carey Mulligan is the rich land owner Edith Pretty who hires Brown.  She may be kind of a upper class snob but she has a sense of fair play in that British tradition and she works to make sure Brown gets credit for his discovery.  Well anyway...

 

 Written by Moira Buffini, time wasted 112 minutes. 

2021 - NO TIME TO DIE, hopefully the final Daniel Craig Bond film

This James Bond film, supposedly the last one with Daniel Craig had a lot of production problems.  The film lost it's original director Danny Boyle who left the project over the usual "creative differences." The replacement director Cary Joji Fukunaga who was brought in faced the task of trying to get a decent screenplay out of the 7 different writers that took a pass at the script.

Daniel Craig hurt his ankle during filming which required surgery.  The film's original composer was replaced with Hans Zimmer who contributed an unmemorable score with the highlights basically reused bits from old John Barry/Bond films.  The film was further hampered by the COVID  pandemic which had it's release date pushed out 3 or 4 times.

This is another James Bond film that runs over two hours and in this case almost topped 3 hours, that's a lot of time for any film much less a James Bond film.  The film tried to tie together plot threads from the previous Craig/Bond films but this just seemed to muddy an already confused mess of a story line which has Bond mad at his current girlfriend for some reason.  Throw in final and gratuitous appearances from Bond characters Blofeld and Felix Leiter and the film ends up with an overstuffed approach to this Bond adventure.

 

As far as the cast goes, frankly Daniel Craig always seemed to play the character as a street thug instead of Ian Fleming' gentleman secret agent.  Attempts to update the Craig series always had a kind of desperation about them.  Q is now gay and Moneypenny is black.  The only character that received any kind of positive comments was Ana de Aramis as the CIA agent Paloma, she's the one person who seems to be having fun because Craig isn't a lot of laughs.

 

The film has a couple of plot twists that don't really work and frankly the action has a kind of been there done that feel to it. 

The mess of a screenplay was credited to Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukinaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge but there were clearly others involved.  The running time is a deadly 163 minutes.