"It's time to get out." - James Bond

What stifles creativity? Tedious third party rudeness, fear of appearing the fool, fear of failure (stigmatizing mistakes), fear of authority, fear of bucking the team or the trend?

MK12, the title and motion graphic designers for director Marc Forster's 2008 entry in the James Bond franchise, Quantum of Solace, englobes 007 with women in the dunes and the persistence of arid visions; a zoetrope in free fall and sandy contrails of a bullet on its way. Taking the title design reins from names like Binder, Brownjohn, and Kleinman, MK12 – billing itself as a "full-service lateral hyperthreaded tactical design and research bureau" – seems to have attained a self-fulfilling creative kinship that flies in the face of what author Bruce Sterling describes as the flux of "Hollywood film ad-hocracies."

So MK12 is a collective that capitalizes on true collaborative creativity realized (or not) by and with the hands of friends. Why is this alternative not the well-practiced norm from the damn beginning? What progressive, Vandermeerish planes of warped Gothicism would we be exploring? Even as we take solace in the knowledge that we will have a crack at it in this lifetime, the underbelly's nibblet tugs are ever-feeding with the awareness that we might've been there sooner.

Jack White steadily builds with an upholsterers touch in prelude to the opening title sequence in Davis Guggenheim's "It Might Get Loud." It is a turning out of battered axes and the men who wield them, their names embossed or tracking in the grain with the promise of one last caress like some tough poetry.

What immediately comes to mind upon viewing these end titles as a stand alone consideration, is that there is great discipline in the master calligrapher's graceful yet contrasting Chinese brush strokes.

His magic carpet ride reminds one of Masaki Kobayashi's "Hoichi the Earless"; only here the Chinese characters -and Kanji, respectively- become life-taking daggers rather than a life-saving shield. Too, I am reminded of splattered ink at the point of impact and the panning flight of a classic aircraft -both seen in the aforeposted "El Don," in addition to owing an incalculable debt to the "300" end titles and, in a true sense, to Frank Miller.

While some frames seem partially rendered (exploding diamond? the odd alignment and spacing of the trekkers? an uninspired mouth of a cave?) others offer flashes of originality (snake-strokes from a blood sun, lettered mountaintop, inkblot blood of fleshless adversaries, a halved opponent, yetis in profile).

Who envisions a throat slit crescentic to a curving world, all its ephemera owned by one of the most famous cocaine dealers in Latin America?

Cutthroat indeed. Blood flows, drips, is fired from gun (in one example the splatter is wonderfully conceptualized as an entry wound), saturates sultry backdrops, is squeezed from a handshake and seeps from a not quite dead body before it explodes and finally, blood blots the frame.