Skyfall: Bond #23

s1ocki I've always liked you, you know that right

yeah i have to say "that's a waste of good scotch" pretty much turned me against the movie actually

btw i'm not a craig hata at all! he's probably the best bond ever. but if you go back to spy/counterspy by dusko popov, aka agent tricycle, so named for his predilection for three-ways, i.e. the guy ian fleming was apparently a little bit obsessed with and the inspiration for bond, the guy wasn't exactly pierce brosnan (look at the photos of him some time) but he certainly knew how to enjoy himself, and how to get ladies to cackle

otm re: scotch line

also.. SPOILERS..

the movie rather firmly and happily reinforces the patriarchy in the way it ends... M is a man again, that pesky female agent is a secretary now...

also wordlessly creeping into the shower and bonking a victim of sex slavery, nice moves bond

aaaand removing bookmark from thread for a week

eek sorry d00d

it actually IS in character for bond to be a fairly unpleasant person in a few respects, and the last act of casino royale certainly set him up to be a bitter little cunt, so it's not like the scotch line is out of character for him exactly (though calling it "scotch" is...) but i dunno, it's like the movie had a little too much fun with it, i was genuinely horrified at the outcome of that scene and the movie's like welp, finito, put a quip on it, onto the next bit, seeya lady

If there's a spunky lady and a sultry lady in a Bond movie the sultry lady usually gets offed.

also wordlessly creeping into the shower and bonking a victim of sex slavery, nice moves bond

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, November 1, 2012 2:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this scene didnt make much sense, after he does that, they go on deck the next morning and immediately get apprehended... i had kinda assumed bond had 'taken out' her handlers when he did the bonk-sneak? or was that his whole plan?

it actually IS in character for bond to be a fairly unpleasant person in a few respects, and the last act of casino royale certainly set him up to be a bitter little cunt, so it's not like the scotch line is out of character for him exactly (though calling it "scotch" is...) but i dunno, it's like the movie had a little too much fun with it, i was genuinely horrified at the outcome of that scene and the movie's like welp, finito, put a quip on it, onto the next bit, seeya lady

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, November 1, 2012 3:24 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya i agreed, i thought this was supposed to be the moment where bond got really mad, and he was just like, LOL scotch

can we both agree that the bladerunner-esque shanghai sneak-up and fight was awesome though

yeah, str8 up homage to collateral by my lights

the boat scene was a weird one.. when the henchman comes down and says "we're ready to cast off in 5 minutes" he gives her this weird stare.. what was that about? was bond already on the boat at that point? if he was, did she know? it seemed set up to be a wistful "well i guess he got killed and isn't coming" scene, but if that's really what was going on it makes the shower scene even weirder..

by the way.... whatever happened to the hard drive?

also do you think the movie is aware that the bad guy basically succeeded at his plan and bond in the end did nothing to stop it in any way?

I assume that the hard drive was recovered from the last level of Inception, thus putting a stop to Silva's "plan" (tho the "ah that was just a plan so he could get us in close for his planned-to-the-second real plan" kind of annoyed me)

ya i kinda hate that plotline... "we caught him... but he wanted to be caught... so he could... escape."

any movie where it turns out everything the hero did was part of the bad guy's elaborate plan kinda retroactively makes the fun parts less fun imho

Also, everything Silva did in the whole film was a totally cackhanded and elaborate and excessive way to execute a plan which could have been achieved v. easily with a single bullet at any given moment.

Shanghai fight scene was awes though, but ugh, the pay-off for Eve was ridiculous.

They flag that fairly early though - he waits until M is out of the building before blowing it up, he wants her to suffer first - the "plan" is to kill her at the point where she's seeing her life's work crumbling in front of her (but instead he presumably causes the government to take MI6 much more seriously - good thing he's crazy)

Yeah, I got that, but it's such a shit plan!

I liked the "waste of good scotch" moment, if only because I hated that the rest of it was far too much in the vein of The Dark Bond Returns - now filled with more anxiety, self-doubt, and holding onto a childhood loss. I want Bond to be less stubbly and bleary-eyed, and kind of more of the smug thug of old.
The film felt really flat, tonally, as well. Some nice looking sequences, but so dreary.

Also: teal & orange!

Yeah "miserable alcoholic Bond" is not something that needed excavating tbh

I think I have a tendency to shut down all critical faculties while watching Bond-movies, cause I always love them, pretty much unconditionally. Some good points here, though. But I never see them myself.

Wasn't expecting Oedipal Bond - this was even more ludicrous than usual.

I don't know which movie you guys watched. My first reaction was "so they're back to making traditional Bond movies with gags, laughs and over-the-top villains", only allowing Bond to have a personality of his own unlike Brosnan. There was no real anxiety or dreary darkness here. Having said that it's not as good as CR and not as impressively slick as QoS. Fun, though.

Well, there is the entire subplot regarding "Bond is clearly unfit for service but he and M conspire to cover this up"? It bobs in and out of view amongst the usual superheroics, but it's not like it's not there.

Thought the final 30 minutes or so was a cringeworthy embarrassment. I think this could have been a much better film if edited tightly and reined in on the sentimentality.

I think I have a tendency to shut down all critical faculties while watching Bond-movies, cause I always love them, pretty much unconditionally. Some good points here, though. But I never see them myself.

i sympathise with this point of view a lot tbh

Thought the final 30 minutes or so was a cringeworthy embarrassment. I think this could have been a much better film if edited tightly and reined in on the sentimentality.

― Bob Six, Saturday, November 3, 2012 9:38 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god it looked so good how can you say that

i also sympathize with that point of view and everything i've complained about in this thread is more just me having fun picking it apart and didn't bother me THAT much... though i felt the proceedings could have been shorter by about 20-30 minutes. but i feel that way about every movie nowadays

Scottish stuff looked great, glad M brought her tartan blanket. Totally called the Home Alone bit when they mentioned they needed to 'get ready'.
I really liked this although so much of it made no sense. For a start there would be no 'list of agents'. Also why the return to 90s 'OMG CYBERHACKING' movies complete with red laughing skulls and 'oh he hacked it' as a way of handwaving everything? Why was Bond wearing gloves in one bit where he's got a special handprint gun?

Don't know where else to put this, but... http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5izjjbrFAkaRmn6Ovl5w-gyciTYSA?docId=CNG.7aeed17960b063a7c07b9fb34dbbefe7.ab1

BEIJING — A British businessman murdered by the wife of top Chinese politician Bo Xilai had informed on the couple for over a year to his country's spy agency, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Neil Heywood shared details based on his unusually close access to the powerful couple, the paper said, citing his friends and current and former British officials.

"He had been knowingly providing information about the Bo family to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, for more than a year," the report said. ...

Heywood drove a silver Jaguar with the licence plate "007", the Journal said.

I don't know if anyone's been following this - Heywood was no Bond, but the spy links along with the license plate are just more amazing details in what's already a pretty insane story (cyanide poisoning, money laundering, the downfall of a Chinese political star, a corrupt top cop etc.).

Absolutely hated it. Title credits were good and there was a nicely topical line about remote destruction via laptop but everything else, from the muddled plot to the cringe-inducing dialogue was as bad as I have ever seen in a Bond film.

I just gave my two weeks notice to my current job, so I took a long lunch and saw it at a local theater that got it a day early.

It was a solid Bond movie. The opening set piece was really good, and set up some of the recurring themes for the movie. Title sequence, including Adele's theme song, was good and Bond-y. Short car chases were effective, hand to hand stuff maybe a little weaker than CR. The locations were great, and Bardem was a very good Bond bad guy.

I thought the over-arching themes were a little bit strong armed, but nonetheless effective. Captain Obvious point: I took this to be a movie-length defense of the Double 0 branch and it's non-digital means, and a statement that regardless of how computer based and intangible the enemies may get, there are just some problems that need to be taken out with extreme prejudice.

If some parts were too on the nose, so what? It's fucking Bond. It's not Bourne. He's gone through a lot of death and pain, and now he's that wry spy we all know and love.

I dug it. B/B+.

Definitely going to see this this weekend...maybe tomorrow's 1st show before school/work lets out.

Ebert loved it fwiw, 4 stars.

The critics have almost all loved it. The Observer said it might be the best Bond yet.

I'm sure there's an agreement in the media to built it up for the sake of the British film industry. History will eventually bear me out on the terrible last 30 minutes (and the rest of it is only average - at best).

Seeing this Saturday morning

Somebody said to me earlier taht they'd heard Craig had said he wasn't going to do any more Bonds. I really hope that isn't true, been enjoying him as him. Looks really moddish in bits of this, maybe its just the well cut suits.

Did really enjoy this last night, though I really wasn't sure about the return to an equivalent of the original M & Moneypenny. The Fiennes character seems to be an attempt to portray the role pretty similarly to Bernard Lee. Ex-military commander etc, did just occur to me on thinking that that I wondered if some of the character's body language was based on Bernard Lee's. Don't think I've really watched Lee that closely but there seemed to be some really old-school-tie body movement from Fiennes that on further thought might have been his attempt to base himself on various Bernard Lee roles.

Might go and see it again, or just wait for it to continually turn up on tv over the next few years.

sorry, was that too many spoilers. Maybe I should leave that for another week or so.

Was wondering about product placement earlier cos I couldn't really think of taht much. & somebody had asked about it on another list

Volkswagen Beetles - not really seen in full but used as props.

Heineken just about recognisable though Craig's fingers are over the label. So surprising that I'd seen Heineken ads based on their sponsoring of the Bond film or something.

Not sure about other brands of booze, I didn't notice any of the labels being readable. & the martini when it appears doesn't get named just the barmaid extolled for having made a perfect one.

London Underground & the Metropolitan Police, the latter portrayed as a multiracial group, to the extent that the same black cop gets shot twice which was one of the few gaffes I noticed.

Went to midnight showing last night. I don't mind Serious Oedipal Bond, but the movie felt like the answer to "what if Russell T Davies wrote a feature-length episode of Spooks?" Visually striking (Shanghai scenes = A+), but halfway in, I was unengaged enough to be sympathetic to the bureaucrats who wanted M out. Bardem's character was more just an asshole than psychopath. For that matter so was Bond.

Missed Felix Leiter.

Adele song a stormer, but wasn't used thematically anywhere else. Did I miss it?

Yup - when he was riding the gondola to the casino in Macau. It scored over the slow tense ride amongst the lanterns.

Check this out:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/guides/james_bond_countdown/

Although the last 30 minutes had the most amazing dusk-turns-to-night thing going on, I agree with Bob Six, it was horrendously staged, was a stupid plot development and left me feeling bad about the whole movie.

Once Javier shows up the film stopped feeling like a Bond film and felt like a lot of shots of Daniel Craig walking from one place to another

And the "Bond dies!" thing off the top seemed to serve no dramatic purpose whatsoever

There were a lot of great things, though! I loved the music. The dialogue-free sequences in Shanghai and Macau were beautiful.

Well this should have an awesome opening weekend. Tried to go see it tonight, but all 11 screenings were sold out already at 5:45.

Had a work outing and the rest of the afternoon off, thoughts to come. Wish they'd had more creepy disfigured Silva shots. Was the island they were on earlier that Japanese coal mining one that was abandoned, or just made to look like it?

(I half-view films as cinematographic and architecture porn)

bob six otm. this wasn't bad; it was really pretty and the action was coherent again. when it comes to the Emotion Experiments i am ok all the way w bond/m relationship-developing scenes cuz it means more dench (altho i thought a lot of her dialogue in this was p flat), but the "backstory", which unless i missed something they hilariously never actually explain in any detail (his parents died somehow and he had to hide in a cave?) and which even if they did is just a Childhood Trauma anyway, torpedoes the end of the movie. also around exactly the same time it gets really wink-winky w 50th anniversary metajokes and having that hit you at the same time as all the out-of-nowhere sentimentality is this bizarre kind of exhausting like someone's trying to make you cry about people you've never heard of while you're on a theme park ride. (literally could not believe it when the crusty old bond estate gameskeeper showed up to make scotland jokes and was played by albert finney instead of sean connery, which like: after introducing the crusty old bond estate gameskeeper is not the time to show taste and restraint). bardem kinda disappointed me but it was really his lines that let him down: he's not any more smartly written than jonathan pryce in 1996 and his Hacking looks p much exactly the same as alan cumming's in 1992, so he pulls some good faces, plays w a couple intonations, goes for some laddish-bond-audience gay panic, and outsources the rest to his thinly veiled assange hair which i totally loved. the only things i loved more than it were judi dench's fuzzy little power fleece, macau, and daniel craig who i think is connery-level.