Skyfall: Bond #23

Werner Herzog and komodos would have been great. Klaus Kinski would have killed and eaten some on camera.

Well, Herzog did have some lizards in his Bad Lieutenant...

Klaus Kinski would have killed and eaten some on camera.

whislaw as Q had me hoping the villain was Nathan Barley.
funniest bit is how thoughout the entire movie, the biggest emotional reaction from Bond is when they blow up his car.

Hahah yes. Down to the musical sting.

the biggest emotional reaction from Bond is when they blow up his car.

yes ! that was a great moment (with the music blasting at the same time) !

as well as the old theme playing when he gets the old car out !

yeah there were quite a few quality lols in the film, i forget mostly.

Bardem does a fabulous "OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE" eyeroll just after the knife hits him in the back and he turns round to face Bond, he's not even angry

Haha, yeah, Bardem's annoyed "fer crissakes" take after Bond shoots the ice around him and the henchman is absolute gold.

yeah, it is really fun, for various reasons and in various ways.
the "how do you know it would be the first time?" moment was another good lol.

Thought large amounts of the intro was pretty lol. Good old fashioned crate-busting car chase through a market! Driving a digger on a train! Good old fashioned fist fight on top of the train! Bond playing drinking games with a scorpion!

thought the scorpion cgi was a bit amiga 500.

was he shown taking drugs, or was that just something alluded to in the assessment report?

and having depressed sex !

he has pills in the bungalow before he leaves for the beach bar, hasn't he ?

i think the pills are pain-killers but clearly he's been caning them. the opening chase was fully hilarious

the opening chase reminded me of the big chase in the Tintin movie !

back to the movie as deconstruction of the Bond series

Silva has such a tormented relationship with MI6, to an extent it being the flip side of the government's need for secret agents. We're told via the hearing that agents are a cold war relic, that they're not as useful in a more transparent society, and possibly more of a liability when they're outed. M isn't just justifying the existence of agents, she's justifying the public's want for Bond pictures. Silva is what happens when governments don't need secret agents -- they still exist, but he's outside the system. Even makes a reference to coming up with his own "secret missions." He, as much as the audience, fetishizes and sexualizes the idea of agents as much as he does Bond.

Silva as audience stand-in

Silva as private contractor potentially having public work outsourced to him

or, as my friend reminded me:
"this is the bond that returns M to the paternal figure with a feminine assistant, and the bad guy was an unstable homosexual who wanted to die with his mother, whom he felt betrayed him"

kind of not the best movie when it comes to presenting reasonable social views

the opening chase reminded me of the big chase in the Tintin movie !

― AlXTC from Paris, Monday, November 12, 2012 11:23 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, I thought so too!

did I imagine Bond doing a "dude, stop hitting me, there's a komodo dragon behind you" gesture to his opponent before he gets eaten. kind of out of character to warn a guy. maybe this nu-bond has more empathy for henchmen?

this whole transition was strange, i didn't quite understand her plan or his. in macau he's like "who do you work for" and she's basically like if you can make it out of here alive and get to my boat before i leave i'll show you. so he sneaks aboard, immediately STRIPS and bonks her in the shower, which she loves obviously, then.. they're woken with juice, toast, and a few submachine guns pointed at their noses? bond tries to take out the baddies offscreen but fails? or they just stroll up to the deck and wait to be cuffed? in which case she has basically sacrificed herself?

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, November 12, 2012 8:38 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes this exactly! i assumed he had taken out her minders... but he didnt? and he just moseyed onto the deck the next morning unaware or not caring that there were guards all around?

also can anybody fill me in on what the assassin was actually doing in shanghai? who did he kill? some kind of art expert? the whole thing was a set-up i guess?

"this is the bond that returns M to the paternal figure with a feminine assistant, and the bad guy was an unstable homosexual who wanted to die with his mother, whom he felt betrayed him"

I liked the movie but this is a good summary of some stuff in it that was icky

also Bond girls are by definition pretty disposable but "that was a waste of good Scotch" after she got shot seemed needlessly cruel

add me to the list of people who didn't understand what the heck happened on the boat

well replacing M wasn't really icky in itself but the whole "women aren't cut out for field work" thing with Moneypenny, and Bardem seeming like a mincing gay stereotype at first (this kind of got less pronounced as the movie went on)

that scene where he took his teeth out was great

Bond is trying to meet her boss why because radio + gunships -> he convinces her that he can kill her boss -> she tells him about the ship going to meet her boss -> Bond arrives on the ship and basically gives himself up, possibly because fuck finding Silva in a place that size when he can be just taken to him, possibly because he is sure that he can escape why because Bond -> she has judged poorly.

Or she figures that she doesn't mind dying if there's a chance Silva will be caught.

The assassin was doing a completely different job, Bond as always relying on blind luck.

no right i got that it was a totally difft job, just wondering what the job actually was (and why bond seemingly needed to wait for him to shoot the dude before wreckin shop) - it didn't bother me, actually i liked how it was this window into the routine workaday world of the international assassin, just wondered what was up

if the assassin didn't execute, the employer would have gotten suspicious.

how come bond only had the one bullet wound? shouldn't he have at least another from being pegged by moneypenny? plus years of spying.

He had a couple, the one that was swole was where he still had shrapnel in there

I love how trying to understand stuff that make no sense in this movie make the movie even better !

if the assassin didn't execute, the employer would have gotten suspicious

see i'm starting to realize why mi6 never called me back

haha also i will admit that for a long time i thought the bullet he extracted FROM HIMSELF like a goddan RONIN HARDMAN was the moneypenny bullet and i was like, why are you having this analyzed, just ask moneypenny, wait why is moneypenny using radioactive rounds that makes no sense, wait oh

guess i was the only one...

is bond canonically half-French? it'd be a weird thing to add to the franchise just now unless the next movie they reveal le chifre was his uncle or something.

well it would explain his retrograde attitude towards women and his need for approval from a mother-figure

/yeah that's right

yeah, I was also quite suprised that his mother was french (or canadian ?).
there are many french bond girls, that said !

maybe it's because I come from a backwards country, but kinda surprised "what makes you think it's the first time? (smirk)" hasn't gotten more attention. het sex icon in gay-brag shocker?

The MI in MI6 stands for "Male Intercourse." True story.

the flirty back and forth between bond and bards SCANDALIZED the audience in the theater i was in

haha, really?

A guy in our theater yelled "WHAT?!?!" like he was very taken aback -- it was one of the most emotional responses to a movie I've seen since a guy ran out of Crossroads crying.

lol

haha, really?

― d-_-b (mh), Monday, November 12, 2012 4:38 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah—i don't think they were grossed out, just... scandalized

hope you mean the macchio crossroads

steve vai... oh god *chin trembles* i can't take it

Parental stuff is canon, but she's not quite French:

James Bond was born of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud.

Tracer you were NOT the only one about the bullet, I promise, I thought the same thing at first