Skyfall: Bond #23

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!

this film was good but I'm getting tired of villains who have zero motive beyond creating chaos that's supposed to *~~make you think about things~~*. More die hard ramblings here but one of the nice things abt 1 (and 3 to a lesser extent) was that these cunning sociopaths just wanted to score megascrill and were going through the motions of a higher calling.

bardem's part in this was rock bottom bad and that ben stein piece above about how he "may be the most interesting character I have ever seen in any drama" cuz he comes onto james bond a lil is astounding

Ben Stein into homoeroticism non-shocker

tbf Bardem - is it telling i can never remember the character name? Silva? - doesn't want to create chaos he just wants to get back at the woman/organisation that hung him out to dry

he's a dog without a master, or so he claims, but he still has an attachment to M even though she abused him and gave him away

the entire "I make up my own secret missions and play my own games" thing is overshadowed by his obsession with facing her, really

I don't disagree but he does cause chaos and then sends mi6 messages telling them to think about it.

think on your sins -- kind of directly aimed at M?

I get the point, though - his M.O. is very "I sow the seeds of chaos to prove to you that you don't really have the world all sewn up, things will fall into murder and mayhem if pushed" a la the Nolan Batman trilogy which is really what ran this into the ground. Nice of them to give him a direct, actual motivation on top of that but it didn't exactly make him interesting.

"More die hard ramblings here but one of the nice things abt 1 (and 3 to a lesser extent) was that these cunning sociopaths just wanted to score megascrill and were going through the motions of a higher calling."

Why did you leave out the die hard movie with kevin smith?

tbf the new Die Hard returns to the megascrill formula

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dsdp_7bxIc

Lynda Carter...Lynda Carter...uh, wha?

still mad about this stupid movie

I don't mind attempts to humanize bond but bruce wayning him wasn't really the way to go.

I mind the fuck out of attempts to humanise bond, go make yr own stupid movie if you don't want to make a bond one you pretentious fuckin hack

bardem's villain was really pretty bad, not remotely scary, total fred armisen character

Fred armisen is a classic Bond villain if be had some deformity.

I knew the day would come when I liked a big hit movie more than youse philistines

this guy loves star wars prequels and sam mendes bonds and all of the sudden we're the philistines

do not slander me, sirrah. I have never expressed love for Vader: A Psychohistory.

haha I kind of am amazed at the virulent feelings against this movie

i liked lots of it but as a movie its a pretty goofy shitbag

maybe my impression is colored by rewatching Ultraviolet before seeing Skyfall but it seemed pretty coherent and entertaining to me

haaa oh god that's the best way to watch

Ultraviolet is beyond terrible - it's like that animated esurance commercial made into a movie

the funny thing abt the attempts to humanize bond was that concurrently there were awkward stabs at old school ice-cold bond, w/him wisecracking about ruined scotch in the wake of the violent death of a sex trafficking victim.

couldn't tell if he was still trying to look like hardman secret agent to Silva after the whole intimidation sequence prior

i really feel casino royale is the emo bond movie with him broken up over eva green. this is just return to form.

"total fred armisen character"

oh god this is it

xmas candy also otm about the cognitive dissonance

i like that we have finally arrived at the exact, distilled logic behind this movie's faults

xp: I think you mean Quantum of Solace

is quantum the one where he's sad le chifre killed eva? then he's sad. then he thinks she's a spy. then he's mad. then M says she wasn't. then he's sad again.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/tumblr_m8gvfzBeN21r6lveko1_500_zps878a5046.jpg

just before I saw this my eye caught the headline for an interview with Rory Kinnear that said "....PLAY BOND VILLAIN..." or some such and I quickly turned away to avoid spoilers.

Then when I went to see it I kept telling myself to try and pretend I didn't know RK was ACTUALLY going to be the big villain after all - the faceless insider behind Bardem's theatrical mask. And if you watch it, there's loads of scenes where RK's standing in the background and they're going "It's likely to be someone in the shadows, someone we cd never guess at" and I was trying to work out how cleverly the dramatic irony had been achieved.

Then it got to the end and I was oh fuck, headline must've said WISH I CD PLAY BOND VILLAIN IN NEXT FILM or something.

Still makes a lot more sense my way tho.

lol

w/him wisecracking about ruined scotch in the wake of the violent death of a sex trafficking victim.

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Tuesday, February 19, 2013 1:22 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

that line gets worse and worse to me as time goes on. i cant think of any previous iteration of the character, even at his coldest and most heartless, that would crack wise about an innocent woman being murdered by the bad guy - much less joke that her life was worth less than a glass of scotch. its like the transformation of mcclane from guy who's scared to die and even fears for the life of a scumbag like ellis, to smirking poochy bruce who goes 'heh, that had to hurt' as he maims dozens of innocent people in a carnage-packed moscow car chase

yeah and it's not even some random stranger, it's a woman he slept w/ last night

a sex trafficking victim he slept w/by sneaking onto her boat and into her shower!

did any bond girls die during the pierce era?

Famke Janssen
Teri Hatcher
Sophie Marceau
Rosamund Pike

guys, i cd be off here, but i think the point is he doesn't want to let Silva know he's got to him so he fronts it out? i guess the delivery cd've been better maybe but it's pretty obvious.