Skyfall: Bond #23

Aside from CR, last time Bond was awesome was probably the 80s

Goldfinger holds up!

er, Goldeneye

yeah pretty much. plus they couldnt decide what kind of villain he was - joker clone, genius cybercriminal, burnt out ex-agent? it shifts from scene to scene.

Goldeneye's a sack of shit. i just watched it on thanksgiving and found that it was way worse than I remembered, like a bad Moore flick. brosnan is totally vacant and dull. famke janssen and the tank chase are the best things it has going for it

can confirm that goldeneye is worse than any given person probably remembers, but it does have those two things + robbie coltrane

bardem was totally wasted in this movie; i can't remember a single line. i remember his hair.

wasted as in unused i mean. would have been better if he'd been wasted.

everybody probably just has really fond memories of the video game

yeah pretty much. plus they couldnt decide what kind of villain he was - joker clone, genius cybercriminal, burnt out ex-agent? it shifts from scene to scene.

this was a problem with the movie generally -- no idea what kind of bond it was, changing every 20-30 minutes

Honestly the only thing I really liked about this was the cinematography and the Komodo dragons

Still the dopest reptile

yeah, if yr gonna make a bourne movie, then do so -- you don't also get to use the quips and the sleeping with everyone and whatever

goldeneye's opening had bond jumping after a falling plane, catching it, and pulling out of a dive, which is the kind of 007 suspension of disbelief i can get behind

btw was everyone calling m 'mum' in previous installments? i don't remember that, and either way it is some pretty heavyhanded shit

i couldnt decide if they were calling her mom or if thats how british people pronounced "ma'am"

my only previous experience with it was blackadder calling queen elizabeth mum

goldeneye's opening had bond jumping after a falling plane, catching it, and pulling out of a dive, which is the kind of 007 suspension of disbelief i can get behind

oh right. i love this. the kind of ultrajoyful stunt where the joy isn't in the stunt itself it's in the "yeah we thought of this and decided to make it look like it could happen" part.

i also like "james is it really necessary to drive quite so fast" / "more often than you might think."

i prefer the bungee jump off the dam tbh

I think we can agree that the mean for a Bondfilm is average; a depressing percentage of'em are garbage.

i think we can indeed agree that the mean is average

there are the known unknowns

whyyougottabesoaverage

I haven't watched this yet because 2 hours 23 minutes + Bardem in blond hair + not wanting to break my streak of not watching a Bond film in the theatre since License to Kill.

The "mum" thing is British, it's weird but I've heard it in lots of things and it always throws me.

i watched license to kill on thanksgiving too, and that one turned out to be way better than I remembered. I guess I never gave Dalton his due

I need to rewatch it. I quite liked revisiting The Living Daylights except that Bond was written without a second humor and Dalton looked decidedly uncomfortable drinking a martini.

he orders a budweiser with lime in License! he doesn't drink it though.

*sense of humor

bond films continue to be educational, they teach you that rich people are beautiful, have beautiful things, spend time in beautiful places, and are all repulsive sociopaths. for example, open-air markets are an excellent backdrop for a romantic afternoon, but equally fun to drive your sports car through at high speeds while spraying bullets in every direction.

dalton's angry Bond in license is sort of the precursor to Craig's this time its personal take, but License is really funny in its own way. Robert Davi gets one of my favorite one-liners ever

i couldnt decide if they were calling her mom or if thats how british people pronounced "ma'am"

― turds (Hungry4Ass), Sunday, November 25, 2012 5:12 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have never been able to figure this out tbh

i still find the whole timothy dalton thing weird and somewhat hard for my brain to accept

I do recall a couple of "mum"s previously, but only in the Daniel Craig era.

i feel like this bond was so good in concept -- bardem is an ex 00 agent! he doesn't have a crazy scheme for world domination he just wants to fuck with M a bunch and then kill her! -- that they didn't bother to execute making a good movie!

License to Kill RULED

Benecio del MANIAC

dalton's angry Bond in license is sort of the precursor to Craig's this time its personal take, but License is really funny in its own way. Robert Davi gets one of my favorite one-liners ever

― turds (Hungry4Ass), Sunday, November 25, 2012 5:55 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah totally, re: dalton as pre-craig. Ahead Of His Time

i feel like this bond was so good in concept -- bardem is an ex 00 agent! he doesn't have a crazy scheme for world domination he just wants to fuck with M a bunch and then kill her! -- that they didn't bother to execute making a good movie!

― goole, Sunday, November 25, 2012 6:05 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was the worst kind of bad movie where you spend the whole flick sitting there wondering why no one ever consults you because you wouldve made this movie SO MUCH BETTER

always avoided those dalton bonds growing up, have heard enough about them in recent years to make me curious (esp license to kill - 'bond + cannon films'?), thanksgiving i almost had my chance but there was only ten minutes left in it by the time i noticed it was on; ended up watching roadhouse again. skyfall was enjoyable, opening was great and enjoyed bond chasing bardem thru the shootout at the hearing, enjoyed most of the setup for 'proper bond' though everyone's right that the moneypenny setup that seems to have been devised to vaguely modernize and empower her (this ain't yr grandparent's moneypenny!) only did the opposite, esp paired w/ 'm is a man again, the natural order of the universe is restored'. considering how much bourne hangs over the craig bond i wish they'd gone just a step further (or focused a bit more or thought thru the story at all) and made bardem effectively bourne minus amnesia w/ more regret and anger fueled vengeance, but bond still the hero, basically a reactionary response to the bourne movies - 'the state makes us ruthless killing machines who follow orders or ppl die, you need me on that wall, etc'. i still enjoyed it - i enjoyed quantum of solace or whatever - but this was somehow more frustrating, for reasons max states above. hoping the next one is the lighter, breezier, this time it's not remotely personal trad-bond installment it hints we're at.

made bardem effectively bourne minus amnesia w/ more regret and anger fueled vengeance

this would have been brilliant!

bourne v bond, c'mon someone, make this happen

seriously have the same opening (maybe change macguffin, maybe not), then spend twenty minutes focusing solely on bardem - him prepping plot, motivation speech to some other mi6 agent he offs, establish that in the movie where he's the star he's the good guy, maybe there's some mission where he ended up killing a child and m knew it would happen but fuckit england, and then when he lands his first blow (maybe he blows up mi6, hacks their computers) enter bond, our 'hero'. 'yknow under different circumstances we might have been friends' etc.

Goldeneye also had a terrific title credits sequence. Can't remember a thing about Skyfall one.

definitely felt like bardem was coming close to saying "look at what they make you give" a few times

Feel like I'm always banging on about it when Dalton comes up in a Bond thread, but The Living Daylights is solidly in my top five.

the part with Charles Trenet's 'Boum' was one of the most eerie, kinda sinister uses of music since Hurdy Gudry Man in Zodiac imo.

yeah The Living Daylights is easily in my top few Bonds; i still treasure my sheet of stickers that came free with Weetabix.

This movie was pretty ok.

Admit it, we could make any movie better, right?

Sam Mendes does think gay dudes are creepy, though

Sam Mendes is pretty creepy.

His wife seems nice but also likely to fall for the devices for crepes. If only I'd met her.

* of crepes

Sam Mendes does think gay dudes are creepy, though

i never thought about this but yeah, the only other sam mendes movie i've knowingly seen also had a huge gay panic moment in it

(i.e. american beauty)

thing about severine/bond was that i thought at first she was playing bond with the victim steez, and he was happy to go along with that. Then it seemed likelier that she was being straight with him (ridiculous but sure fuckit) and he was all up for the rescue. Then i figured it was more in character for craigbond to play along with a rescue attempt just to get closer to the target, ans she's disposable all along.

I think that could have been a neat line, but the playout of this strand was such a mess (like so much else) that it's tough to credit mendes with enough lucidity to say anything for sure beyond 'girl seems vulnerable, bond screws her, she's written off callously almost immediately' without us being able to attribute any character insight into either bond or our villain.