Skyfall: Bond #23

Finney thinking Dench's character is "Emma" is still great

at least Connery wd've had one of those rare career highlights where he cd do the accent

and Bond is in large part a celebration of loathsomeness, i cd really give a fuck about that aspect of it, i just like joshing on Finney cos he didn't just phone it in he sent it overland on the back of a beermat from Irkutsk

Finney thinking Dench's character is "Emma" is still great

kinda feel like finney himself originally thought so and they were just like, let's keep it in

oh god, I hope so

i like how he said "mum"

what did y'all think of pingu as Kid Q?

hot as fuck

hotter than pingu as scentless apprentice in Perfume?

disappointed no one threatened Q with electrical zapping

The q shit was so shit

i was kinda surprised by how much i disliked this

I do think that fixating on the awfulness of the line with the scotch might be pulling ppl's attention away from how stupid and lazily held together the rest of this really was

i feel like bond's final ploy to draw silva out should have been met with blank stares and termination of his employment.

He'd just have refused to be sacked, like m earlier on

Silva's an expert at modern technology, Bond faces him in a no-technology area, and M still manages to die

it's so crazy it just might work*

(*it didn't, at all)

Yeah we all seem to be forgetting that this movie just sucked

what would have been awesome is if Bond called in a drone strike, provided as a favor by his CIA friend Felix Leiter, blowing up his family home and Silva, as he and M hide in the chapel

Or even better, Bond and M make Silva think they're in the chapel, drone blows it and Silva, and he remodels the family home as a shaggin' pad

then there's an implied Oedipal scene where we figure out if he's really saying "mum"

TURN OFF YOUR FUCKING TORCH YOU OLD FOOL THE CHURCH HARDLY FUCKING SHIFTED SINCE YESTERDAY

he should have turned off his flashlight, too

ha yes, excellent tradecraft there

used that word twice already today, that's my limit

despite everything i did have a pretty good time watching the film (craig is still good, deakins is awesome, action scenes as standalones were pretty cool) but it definitely has diminishing returns.

i feel like bond's final ploy to draw silva out should have been met with blank stares and termination of his employment.

loloolol

the other thing that didnt resonate at all for me in this was the angle about bond being made obsolete. no attempt is made to give it context, everyone just talks about how he's a dinosaur so he can have the triumphant Sometimes My Old Man Ways Are The Best arc. are we meant to imagine unmanned drones taking his place offscreen? what makes it a relevant issue in 2012 instead of when the last bond came out, or the one before that? it irritated me way more than it should've, like they just wanted to have the gritty old guy shows the young punks that hes still the best story without laying any groundwork... maybe i just missed the point or something

I thought the point was that he was an older dude who got shot on a mission and wasn't bouncing back as quickly as he would have had he been younger

right but its the springboard for a bigger theme about the relevancy of agents in this brave new world or whatever

m's big speech in front of the british... panel.. of upset people. whatever that was

I thought it was less the relevancy of agents in general and more the specific relevancy of M and Bond because they are old fossils who should be replaced with young sparkly models like baby Q

and M's baseline argument was "bitch I've seen some shit, don't front" and then the building blew up and Bond and The English Patient shot everyone in the face

(that was my takeaway anyway)

yeah u could be right. also, lol

the british... panel.. of upset people

the script is the worst thing about this, and that's including Sam Mendes existing

sans news and credits, you would not have known this was Mendes.

I loved this till about halfway through, when I popped into the lobby to buy a couple of Cornettos, fell down some stairs and did my back in.

When I came back, Bardem was in some blonde wig spouting bollocks doing Homosexual Panic 101, then he shot the sex slave in the head, and it all sort of fell apart. And my back hurt.

Deakins was great but he can't shoot a gunfight for toffee.

xp

well i don't know that Mendes has a "style", but he makes incoherent story-telling choices and likes to throw some big empty "makes you think" moments into everything so that ties in with Skyfall

xxp Needed a scene of Bond sitting on a London street watching a plastic bag blow around an alley.

(if there are different Britishes words for "plastic bag," "alley" and "Bond," I don't know them, sorry)

he makes incoherent story-telling choices

visually? othwise you should blame the writers, yes?

i think ade is right, i remember a LOT of stuff about like, "why do we need agents when we can HACK people" or whatever

which is SO dumb because like a) they never actually sell this in the movie itself, in fact they specifically UNDERMINE it at the start with the whole hard drive chase and b) within the 'bond universe' he has literally been dealing with 'hackers' for 20 years, basically every single brosnan bond involved hacking of some kind

yeah exactly

eh I remember explosions and ppl getting shot a lot

which is basically what I go to a Bond movie for

in the bond universe it should be received wisdom that british agents like bond are not only needed but the most skilled purveyors of the jobs no one else can do, even those colonist savages in the u.s.

i feel like half this movie was spent trying to elide the true identities of certain characters so we could have catch-your-breath moments like when you realize, holy shit, it's fucking Q.

the moneypenny thing infuriated me too