Bond #24: SPECTRE

he's great at hiring cinematographers!

Watched Casino Royale recently - it's actually way more cheerful and cheesey than I remembered - much closer Goldeneye than Skyfall. Wish they'd stayed on that course.

Re: the cinematography - the only other Bond film with great art direction is OHMSS - that's a great looking film. Skyfall looks more like... semi-professional Instagram. And the opening sequence to Spectre is so ugly and incoherent.

i think you've got the direction of influence backwards with 'semi-professional Instagram' - the extent that skyfall looks like instagram (which i'd argue is... not much) is more of a reflection of the influence of roger deakins on the art of photography than the other way round

I guess I'm using Instagram as shorthand for "pretty but affectless". That works for Barton Fink but I'm not sure it's the right choice for a Bond movie - and then the sumptuousness just ends up highlighting how pedestrian the script is.

Anyway - it's a fun film until Bardem shows up.

okay, i see where you're coming from - the script is pretty dire but i can't knock deakins for putting together some beautiful-looking sequences. i'd say all sam mendes' films are 'pretty but affectless' to greater or lesser degrees, and the 'pretty' part is kinda mostly down to working with great cinematographers.

The script gets out of the way and allows the images and the scenery to tell the story. I love how the hunt for Bardem goes. Bond takes out bullets from shoulder 'oh, only three guys in the world uses this kind of bullet and one of them is in Shanghai -> Amazing but kinda pointless action sequence in Shanghai, at the end of which Bond finds a casino chip 'oh, this chip comes from a casino in Macao' -> Cool but kinda pointless action sequence in Macao, at the end of which Bond just jumps on a boat that takes him to Bardem... It's effective as hell and makes no sense at all. But who cares about making sense when you got neon?

Also, it's not just pretty pictures. Skyfall is about anxieties of empire, it's no coincidence that Bond travels to the east-west hotspots Shanghai and Macao, and then goes to an island Japan managed to fuck up on it's own.

i think the golden age bonds are about the anxieties of empire; skyfall was about the anxieties of making a bond movie after bourne and batman

also about showcasing premium products with attractive people in exotic locales

another thing that bothered me, maybe not in another Bond film but in this one, was that he was told to stand down and then decides the best way to exercise caution and keep a low profile is to drive a stolen prototype car to Italy. from england!

man the Brosnan bonds where they had to shoehorn in bullshit Ford-era Jaguars were some awkward product placements

That one Dalton installment where he was munching on Cool Ranch Doritos in every other shot and riffing endlessly on AT&T's low long distance rates during a fight scene was particularly distracting.

who uses a sony cell phone? james bond, that's who

Finally watched this. Better than some are saying but I do agree with most of the criticisms. Feels like it was all worked out backwards from wanting Waltz as Blofeld and wanting that to feel like a BIG DEAL which is tough to do when film #2 is largely forgotten and film #3 avoided trying to build up to anything. Telling that it was originally conceived as a two-parter - MAYbe that would have given space to really build up to Waltz and Craig confronting each other. And surely, one imagines, Bellucci would have had more than three minutes onscreen before being packed off to an (unseen) Felix. I don't want two-part Bond films, or continuity in Bond films at all, but you can see how it might have sort of worked.

Instead they try to make up for lost BIG DEAL by loading Blofeld up with a chilhood connection to Bond which barely makes sense (how old is Craig? He'd have been an adult twenty years ago, surely?) and puts us in the VERY bad position of reading Bond from without, as a man with a secret, whose motives drive the plot but aren't known to us until very near the end. Bond is an escapist fantasy, not a character, and the worst choices in Skyfall and this have to do with loading him up with a character's backstory. Well, that and their handling of the female characters which is pretty awful if less out of step with the series's roots. Meantime Waltz just doesn't get enough screen time or ham time to come into focus as a villain in his own right or an ''iconic Bond foe'' or anything - just another Blofeld, better than Gray, worse than Pleasance.

And god, yes, please no more super-hacking. Future installments should either just breeze past the problems that contemporary technology creates for spy stories, or become period pieces because this shit is laaaaame. Also a big misstep to make ''C'' be in on the scheme; imo it'd be more interesting if he was a useful dupe who sincerely believed in his bad scheme due to the latent fascism of Silicon Valley Techno-Libertarianism or whatever. They almost went there but he was so faceless and generic in the end, kinda reminiscent of the Quantum bad guy maybe.

On the other hand, there were some GREAT action set pieces, especially the Alpine chase and the ''From Russia With Love'' train fight. The Rome chase was solid. Mexico City helicopter thing was dumb, but sort of made up for by how slick the preceding sequence was. Seydoux was okay when the script wasn't kicking her to the curb (tho I kept mixing her up with the lead from Toni Erdmann, whose trailer I've now seen like six times).

Veggie shake gag by far the weirdest callback ever - surely someone was thinking of the non-Eon Never Say Never Again, where M is forcing similar things on a skeptical Connery? Shouldn't have bothered if they couldn't have written a better joke around it, or at least had the smoothie get shot out of the bartender's hand or something.

One small, weird complaint: maybe it was just my TV but there were two different shots where it seems like we're supposed to gain important information from written words, but without a closeup reveal shot it remains a blurry mystery. Maybe one of those set up the Bond-Oberhauser connection? As it is he seems to just start talking about someone named Oberhauser and it's like, did I miss him discovering an important clue?

Feels like it was all worked out backwards from wanting Waltz as Blofeld and wanting that to feel like a BIG DEAL which is tough to do when film #2 is largely forgotten and film #3 avoided trying to build up to anything.

this

iirc the movie tries to build up some kind of suspense regarding whether or not blofeld is dead or alive (with all sorts of minor characters being like "no that's impossible!") but it doesn't generate doubt or paranoia or suspense since we saw him on screen and are like, "duh, yeah he's alive!"

imo we knew he was alive because we'd seen a cat and the right clothing but no face scar, so one of his main physical identifiers was missing

oh yeah, but the suspense is not wrt Waltz' character being blofeld, but whether or not Waltz' character exists (which for the audience makes little sense) - the waltz=blofeld "reveal" makes no sense

(this is all from fading memory btw so i might totally be wrong)

he's introduced way too early in the film for it to be a real mystery and Bond is sure from the first face-to-face encounter that it's the guy from his childhood and it's everyone else that needs convincing

that's not even extrapolated as a major plot thread since it's really only Q who's left to follow up on that line of inquiry

- The point, 007, is that Franz Oberhauser is dead. Dead and buried. And unless you come back with me right now, my career and Moneypenny's will go the same way. Do you understand? All hell is breaking loose out there and...
- I saw him.
- You thought you saw him.
- We've been through the records. He died in an avalanche with his father 20 years ago.
- Yes. I know that. But I saw him.

from the audience pov: there is no basis for doubt since we saw him and have no reason to believe a backstory with no exposition abt his death

so yeah, totally agree

so many things were dumb about this.

possibly the worst was that the world's largest international criminal/terrorist organization meets FACE-TO-FACE - IN PERSON - in a city building that you can just walk right into if you have the right spoken password and a ring. gtfo w/ that bullshit

you can't, though. it was a trap!

I mean, they let him in but presumably after they did an actual check they were just going to kill him

i love that bond just wanders into the base with basically no plan and ends up escaping certain death much more by accident than design. great work james, you're the best

(also he is most likely no longer be able to tell faces apart after blofeld drilled away that part of his brain)

blofeld's desert base, i mean, not the super-secret villain hangout

I did like the ambiguousness of whether the minor brain surgery did anything other than give him a headache

tbf that isn't the most precise surgical technique

i wouldn't mind the ambiguousness if one of the outcomes in question wasn't whether the lead of your movie has suffered catastrophic, life-altering brain damage

like, clearly we're supposed to assume that bond is fine but blofeld spends five minutes gloating about what his drill will do to bond's brain, we see bond getting drilled (so to speak) and then he's apparently fine, with no explanation has to how he avoided his certain fate?

maybe we're just supposed to assume that blofeld is a shitty brain surgeon

tbf bond just divides the world into people you take orders from, people you shoot, and people you fuck

idk why he needs to see faces

some people belong to more than one group

Lol

Was going to skip this, but my in-laws are in town and we needed a movie last night (and they'd already seen The Martian). Credit low expectations, perhaps, but I really enjoyed it (more so after Sam Smith stopped singing). For all of his noted deficiencies as a filmmaker, Mendes brings a kind of old fashioned elegance to this that I found it easy to get into--the movie, for all of its Seriousness, was neither overly "gritty" nor annoyingly busy. Waltz is precisely the right level of ham to pull this role off, too--all of his scenes (too few, I agree) are a delight. Nice to see Craig smiling a bit more, too.

I stand by my earlier comments especially "our society is a self-congratulating compost pile"

All of the set pieces in the second half are stupid. rogermexico also otm re: except you should have hated it. it didn't think much of its audience.

one thing that was great about Casino Royale (beyond Craig having a blast and delivering the best Bond since peak Connery) was that there was zero "shadowy organization" bullshit and no glacially paced introductions to a criminal mastermind, it was just "look there's this guy Le Chiffre and we need to get him", then Mads Mikkelsen shows up and does his thing and it's incredible. christoph waltz running the world's most diabolical IT department isn't sinister or fun.

also did we need however many cuts to M vs Moriarty in the office building with the shitty dialogue?
"you're under arrest"
"well you're old"
"yeah well, I'm putting you under arrest"
"you're unemployed"
"shut up"
"you're meaningless"
"OK but some stuff isn't"

Waiting For Moneypenny

All of the set pieces in the second half are stupid. rogermexico also otm re: except you should have hated it. it didn't think much of its audience.

i felt way more insulted by skyfall but yeah

was of two minds about how much this one wanted to be from russia with love

our society is a self-congratulating compost pile
otm

not my favorite Morrissey album tbh

haha

To get me to re-watch this, you'd have to pay me maybe like $10 a minute, and that might not be enough. Most other Bond movies I don't loathe this much.

I like a bunch of things about this film in isolation but when out together it displeases me

put together, that is

it is fun to imagine the desert base explosion and the helicopter crash, meeting each other for the first time, then awkwardly settling on drinks, not coffee

then mh glances at them out together, from his booth, and thinks "this displeases me"

... and wonders 'should i be enjoying this?'

the shadowy silhouette of Waltz looks on as one assassin auditions for the job by killing another

then a minute later he's addressing Bond with too much dialogue

Genuinely forgot most/all of the plot points on this.

A month(ish) later, I already find the film fading from memory, but I still think that Waltz's brand of ham is just what the series needed.

Nolan doing Bond #25?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-68zccXoAsD3mi.jpg

From

IMDbPro - because this is totally info worth paying for. pic.twitter.com/jW4LwWwqbv

— Phil Nobile Jr. (@PhilNobileJr) May 3, 2017

uh-oh