Skyfall: Bond #23

I didn't mean the movie needed 10 more minutes - it clearly did not - I meant some writers could have spent 10 minutes thinking about this and changed the existing dialogue.

xp

I actually agree with you fred, I did enjoy a lot of this movie, but asking for a movie to not be dumb is not too much to ask imho. my favourite action movies are all very smartly written.

They are too much to ask from bond movies though --
It is their own fault for raising that expectation by going broody parkour bond in casino royale.
Should have gone Mitchell and Webb route with Thunderwang or something.

movies that turn out to be clueless about basic stuff like cause and effect, time, motivation, or women, are bad. this is a bad movie!

― before and after broscience (goole), 14. december 2012 18:36 (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Who cares about cause and effect and motivation? Yeah, the woman stuff is bad, but directors who were clueless about women include Mizoguchi, Tarkovsky, etc, so... But Time? You can't deny, that the scene at Skyfall was pretty ambitious and spectacular in it's use of time? The only other stuff I've seen this year, that used time so well, was Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Tsai Ming-liang's Walker (though admittedly I live on the periphery of the film-world, so I won't get to see most the good stuff until some time next year)

Skyfall isn't dumb. Most of it is extraordinarily well thought-out and realized. Not the plot though, that is stunningly bad. I just don't like plot, and think it is unimportant, most of the films I care about really don't have plots. And the fun thing is, while most of the time people think that is an elitist view, this time millions of people basically agree with me :)

nobody thinks that liking dumb movies is elitist :)

In the nineties, they sorta did :)

directors who were clueless about women include Mizoguchi

huh?

Who cares about cause and effect and motivation?

spies

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/366364/Screenshots/-le3.png

- Sansho the Bailiff

I don't get this? It might take itself seriously, but it doesn't care about it's plot... It cares about themes, characters and visual thrills, and it delivers on the last two things. Plot is a complete afterthought. Plot progression in Skyfall is Bond finding a chip from a casion -> cut to said casino...

― Frederik B, Friday, December 14, 2012 11:46 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

not convinced it cares about characters tbh

Needed more Naomie Harris IMO

she's well set up as rafe's secretary, i'm sure we'll be seeing more of her hat stand

if anything action movies need a plot to hang together more than, say, a Paul Thomas Anderson movie does. When your whole movie is about Daniel Day Lewis wandering around being a psychopath or a visual essay about Joaquín Phoenix's face, tightly-written and well-paced plotting is not what you're focusing on. In an action movie, where I can't expect anything exceptionally complex to hold much water, I expect the characters to have reasonably clear motivations and for them to act how human beings might act in the circumstances, and for the events that transpire to have a thread of logic that ties them together. It's not a high bar! Make it simpler! I thought Mission: Impossible 4 was an incredibly tight film, and that movie has Tom Cruise crawling up the outside of the Burj Dubai in it! As I recall, the plot of that movie was: a dude wants to blow up the earth, Tom Cruise has to stop him from blowing up the earth. Skyfall was incredibly bogged down by its plot.

ya, i honestly can't think of a spectacle-ish blockbuster movie i really like where the plot WASNT awesome

I thought the plot to MI4 was some revenge money thing for a dead wife who isn't actually dead so there's no actual motivation in the first place?
you really have to rank skyfall's plot against other bond movies and bond movies all have plots that involve villains revealing secret plans to bond instead of shooting him. where skyfall really falls down is in product placement -- really going lowbrow with the caterpillar and sony logos. he'll be wearing jorts in the next movie at this rate.

lol

cmon even Austin Powers covered the talkative non-killing villain trope

they're not allowed to continue the tradition of bondian plotting if mike myers points it out?

i do wish they'd taken this to heart though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAjXYfTtGas

at the same time, upscale flight magazine catalog lifestyle is part of bond dna at this point so it'd be weird to see a bond movie denuded of brands.

Yeah I think the Bond series is the ultimate example of why plot doesn't necessarily matter in action movies. I've watched every Bond movie more than once and with some of my favorites I can't even remember the plot, except what settings it took Bond to. Usually they're ludicrously convoluted.

The Bond Formula helps it and makes it a special case, though. Not saying plot doesn't matter a lot in most action movies.

well they still had to prevent him from releasing the undercover agents names, which was presumably automatic?

I love how it was just youtube videos and youtube didn't take them down

― iatee, Wednesday, 12 December 2012 22:01 (2 weeks ago) Permalink

YouTube has a shitload of online forms you have to fill out to get them to take it down, it's kind of a hassle. might as well just live with it.

Buried in a bit of self-pity from Ben Stein:

On the other hand, Skyfall came out. Not only is it the best Bond ever, but Javier Bardem, the “villain” is the single most interesting character I have ever seen on a movie screen. He may be the most interesting character I have ever seen in any drama. The depths of his personality go on forever. The vivacity and inventive playfulness of this murderer are overwhelming.
I saw it again tonight. I would call it the best movie since Blade Runner. Maybe better. I have seen it in the theater nine times and I could see it every day. You simply cannot miss this movie.

...uh?

What a weirdo

"Bardem? Bardem?"

Saw this over vacation, it ruled

my lord what a genuinely dreadful film

you're both wrong!

no it was really bad: boring, incoherent, ponderous, dumb - all of these qualities on display

heard Adele theme in supermarket yesterday, i started crouching in the dairy aisle.

albert finney popping out of the corner in a beard was p funny ill give it that

heard Adele theme in supermarket yesterday, i started crouching in the dairy aisle.

"Boys of Winter 2013"

damn u ppl today, D Craig is like 5 years younger than me

I saw this today -- dug it! Loved the motorbike chase across the rooftops, Shanghai/Macau were wowwww, and I enjoyed the repeated themes of ruins/crumbling empires/old age/the past/etc

Albert Finney is a man who knows how to grow a beard. I was happy to see him

And I continue to have a huge dumb crush on Craig as Bond. Hope he keeps it going.

http://ebengregory.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/snoop-no.gif

?

i'm glad you enjoyed it. the bits you singled out were cool (except for albert finney). but it was a letdown. ilx needs a production arm because we could easily craft a better plot

Ridiculous. This is a solid film.

i enjoyed it.

nah it was mediocre overall and egregious at points

like star wars, it came in with a kickass history/backstory but could have been so much better

it's no Casino Royale, I'll admit

Ridiculous. This is a solid film.

counterargue every criticism itt then

I though this was p good, to add sturdy critical weight to Gukbe's exegesis.

Mind you I thought Casino Royale was a sack of shit and QoS one of the very worst films ever made.

two things, Albert Finney is just absurd, a reprise of his role in Ocean's... 13 was it? where the fact that he's Albert Finney is somehow the whole reveal of the film. I've still never been so incredulous in a cinema as when he twirled round in his chair at the end of that goddam film (also one of the very worst films ever made).

Also, continuity stuff is usually boring at best (unless it's I Jones and Crystal Skull - where it's a bloodsport), but it did provide quite a surreal effect where one minute Craig's smiting the sledded Bardems on the ice in Scotland, the next he's standing atop a Westminster building, on a bright breezy day, with Big Ben standing at 7 iirc - only possible in British Summer Time I think? The effect is like another, better spy story, Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, where all seasons occur p much in the space of a single chase through London and across France. (This reminds me of one of the curiosities, for me anyway, of the Bond books: the tempo of the chases. Bond's in his Bentley and it's all about him cutting off x villain where the Villefranche road joins the Chamonix Alpine pass before gunning down to Paris, finally meeting y villain at the Versailles fork, thrashing the Bentley's gears as he goes. With film 'chases' have become something very different to their early versions in writing, such that the early versions seem quite alien and strange, and appealingly unfrenetic.)

your thoughts about this shitty film are much better than this shitty film deserves

sam mendes' greatest talent is in hiring cinematographers

― Author ~ Coach ~ Goddess (s1ocki), Saturday, November 10, 2012

^^^ this.

I wasn't bored once except for the shootout at the Scottish castle but my god this is fucking incoherent, as in "We have no idea what to do with these scenes and Bardem as a bison-voiced catamite with a blond dye job and Shanghai and Ralph Fiennes franchise shopping and Macallan product placement." Totally appropriate that Bond cares more about his car getting vaporized than the child sex slave.

Craig is smashing but I could have watched a whole movie of the Dame looking stern as she's called "mum."

Did Bardem remind anyone else of Taylor Negron in The Last Boy Scout?

he reminds me of what conservatives say gays will do to boy scouts

Bardem dressed as a copper is one of my favourite film images from last year

Did Bardem remind anyone else of Taylor Negron in The Last Boy Scout?

― epistantophus, Sunday, February 17, 2013 10:27 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark

i wish he was that good!