Bond #24: SPECTRE

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

might be a good time to start that 'nolan vs mendes: which is lix's most bad and hated' poll i've had in mind for a while

i can imagine a Nolan 007 being better than the Mendes ones. i mean i think Nolan is capable of making movies that are not boring and ever so slightly less portentous.

Might nip to the bookies and put a tenner on Tom Hardy as next Bond.

Mendes is the director who portrays in his films a dumb person's idea of an emotional, thoughtful man
Nolan is the director who portrays in his films a dumb person's idea of a thinking man

or maybe they make movies for people who think they're emotional/deep thinkers but are not

otm

the best Bond director since the peak era has been Martin Campbell, who is exactly what Bond requires: someone skillful and unflashy and who understands exactly what makes Bond movies good. the humorously smug, very smart, and slightly more woke Bond of Casino Royale was pretty damn perfect, it's actually kind of depressing how the last three films made him humorlessly smug, dumb, and completely retrograde.

otm

Agree. Also, weirdly, License to Kill has some exceptional action scenes - exciting, well-choreographed and shot, nifty stunt ideas - and the slow bits are luxurious and fun. It's (obvs) much better than Glen's other Bonds. I don't really understand second units and editors and cinematographers - presumably a change of hands there?

I wondered if anyone would rescore the opening sequence, they dropped the ball by not using the Radiohead song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4mIWoLg69Y

It's better, not that it's hard to top the Sam Smith doodle. Tomorrow Never Dies's intro rescored with kd lang's song is the best of these.

i love that kd lang song

I love the Radiohead theme, though I can sort of see why they didn't go with it - you can't really make out the lyrics.

But yeah the Sam Smith one really is crap.

The Kd Lang song is nice, yes, but the actual Sheryl Crow theme is one of the best in Bond.

Really? Not even top 10, tbh.

Surely there has been a poll for the bond songs, right ?

I think the much hated post-Goldeneye Brosnan era was strong in terms of themes that were just playful enough and not just Shirley Bassey pastiche ala Adele and Sam.

A poll would be good