Skyfall: Bond #23

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

so infuriating

assassins choosing desk jobs after a few years seems reasonable

Tbf she started the movie killing our hero, perhaps 00 status wasnt exactly nailed on at that stage

the moneypenny thing was horrible

who was it that pointed out that they never actually recovered that special hard drive of all agents everywhere... oops

If they decrypted the list the hard drive would be completely useless?

YOUR hard drive would be useless

ultimately though nobody besides bardem actually succeeds at doing what they're trying to do in this movie rite?

wow let's get back this decrypted hard drive they could have made a zillion unencrypted copies of

yeah silva is the winner

moneypenny's character arc was so depressingly retrograde

my thought when they were making all the shaving jokes at the end:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cc/A-close-shave.jpg/220px-A-close-shave.jpg

did it seem to anyone else that this was largely stitched together from familiar action-movie tropes? almost literally, in a shot to shot way? some obv (apocalypse now), some less so (i actually can't think of one now, shit), and some overbearing (bond IS the dark knight...like, with a stately home he blows up and an old guy he owns)

bardem earned his keep but his character was a uh-oh-danger-GAY (vs bond teaching us to be MEN) dude that was maybe two-face (on the inside...of his face), maybe jaws, also btw he was locked in a crystal and at one point laughed maniacally I AM JUST SAYING HERE

the reptilian part of my brain kinda loved this, and thought it well-made or w/e, but if i think about it even for a second it's just crappy

i basically agree with that last sentiment, like walking out of the theater i was "bond returns in style in this delightful new--" and then i started to think about it and it fell apart, as if i'd removed the mandible from the movie's jaw and it revealed its horrible true guise.

it's kinda weird that my two biggest complaints are that it was too referential and "young" (hackers! Q has a floppy haircut and a sweatervest! moneypenny isn't just a secretary, she's an agent!) and that it reveled in bond's piggish chauvinism, and excused it maybe? it's like it was written for archer to parody

Yeah it was really trying to have it all with the self-referential shit and the above-being-a-bond-movie shit and idk at least two other layers of overthinking, it rested heavily and shapelessly over some very good action scenes.

an old guy he owns

i thought this was hilarious btw, bond's been gone for years and returns to his family's abandoned estate and ah this old painting, look at the dusty furniture, and why there's that old fella still in the same corner, hasn't moved has he?

Ah, mr bond. I've been expecting you.

an acquaintance of mine used to call it 'james bonding' a film when you were too intent on plot/continuity/reason to enjoy the spectacle of a blockbuster action movie.

and i get that, which is why i don't care that bond survived a fatal shooting/fall in the opening scene or magically picked out the password for q. (was there a 'zoom in! enhance!'? i don't even remember.) or that dude was 'one of six ppl in the world to use these radioactive bullets'.

but the whole plot made no sense. there was ridiculous shit like albert finney and his flashlight as the burning estate lit up the night. craig's bond is humorless; he can get away with shit like 'a waste of good scotch' even less than his predecessors. i liked the bourne movies -- if they wanna go that route it's cool with me, but if so they need to go all the way. as it was, it's a mishmash of bullshit trying to have it every which way.

i mean srsly fucking give slock1 the bond franchise

now i'm just wondering what ronin would have been called if it had been a bond movie

if bond is going to be a tough old relic of the cold war he may was well chase some ice skates wanted by the ira

would have been called bonin obv