Bond #24: SPECTRE

Just watched the trailer for this. Still interested in seeing what they do with it but mannnnn is the digital coloring on this ugly to look at. I'm sure in the theater my eyes will adjust but I don't remember Skyfall being nearly this bad.

god i hated skyfall

i hated the pretty lights too

I liked Skyfall in the theater but it didnt hold up to rewatches, it's not great

It suffers from a lack of exposition (action, not dialogue -- plenty of dialogue) with the main villain, while the subplot that is supposed to pull us into Bond's character has a lack of development.

Or maybe too much development, when it comes to dragging Judi Dench around the countryside

Skyfall was awesomely colored! The fire and dusk in final sequence was one of the best uses of teal and orange in last few years. Spectre trailer doesn't have anything like that, but it could still very well be the same good mixture of beautiful feverish nonsense.

Skyfall is beautiful to look at, esp the Scotland stuff

DP this time is Hoyte Van Hoytema (Let the Right One In, Her, Interstellar)

haven't rewatched quantum or skyfall since seeing them in the theater but iirc they were both a letdown after casino royale, even if bardem was way better a villian than that dude with the asthma inhaler in casino

idk casino royale was way more fun than either quantum or skyfall. those tried to be too serious. i hope spectre is fun

casino royale is so good

hoyte van hoytema is a v fun name to say out loud

let the right one in is gorgeous, havent seen the other two

i hated skyfall in the theatre than watched it again and liked it, i really don't think bond films need to be veering off into his backstory as a person or whatever. the parts of that movie that are just bond doing bond things rule.

i hope spectre is fun

no chance. Looks like it's doubling down on the unnecessary Bond backstory

some speculation suggests it may loosely follow the On Her Majesty's Secret Service storyline

Telly Savalas > Christoph Waltz

mikkelsen>>>>>bardem

altho i tried to watch OHMSS on TV a few years ago and whenever Diana Rigg wasnt on i was bored out of my skull

trailers have all had me wondering re OHMSS

i don't gaf anyway, Bond is awesome, Bond is emo, Bond is po-faced, the only way to fuck up a Bond film is to have him played by that gurning clown Roger Moore and turn it into a fucking Cannonball Run spin-off

scrotal torture > i kidnapped Mommy

xp

not even close imo. le chiffre was a great charming villain w/the right amount of sadism and desperation at the end. bardem was a cartoon and not in the great bond villain way, but in a generic way that was ripped off from countless recent movie villains. that said bardem was "good".

i've said it elsewhere but the sooner we move away from potentially great movie villains whose sole goal is "chaos" the better

i should say RUINED because their sole goal seems to be chaos

altho i tried to watch OHMSS on TV a few years ago and whenever Diana Rigg wasnt on i was bored out of my skull

I saw it in the cinema two months ago and it is definitely the best Bond film, so well-edited that the Moore films should be embarrassed to have ever existed

but the script and Lazenby, ye gods

Batbale has a lot to answer for

xp

i didn't mind it when it was the joker so much, primarily because it fit the character to a degree. but that motivation was such bullshit for khan and silva, and using it to mask true motives was so lazy imo.

villains intent on mere chaos a symptom of a timid post-Cold War industry trying to maximize markets?

surely somebody wants to step up with the Islamophobes' Red Dawn?

Christensen > Mikkelsen

xp's

the parts of that movie that are just bond doing bond things rule.

the sooner we move away from potentially great movie villains whose sole goal is "chaos" the better

OTM to both of these points. my complaints in sub-par bond movies are almost always that bond is not doing sufficiently bond-ish stuff. (roger moore is of course the worst offender here, movie after movie. brosnan could be smug but he almost always seemed to be doing, like, spy stuff or action stuff, not jsut shuffling around and talking to people.) and yeah bardem's villain had this awesome creepiness/bond-villain-vibe face to face, but his actual plan was just a huge ripoff of the dark knight and not really much to get excited about. pretty sure you could cut a quarter of that movie's running time by axing the "he got captured on purpose! now he's heading for M's big hearing! they've got to stop him!" sequence and it would be a stronger film. would keep the showdown at the old house because it was badass, but would not have it be bond's actual old house - did not need that one bit.

i didn't see casino royale til after skyfall so was pleasantly surprised (i did like a lot of things about skyfall) to find it a leaner, pacier-feeling film despite actually being one minute longer. so there's still some dragging parts and again there's a tacked-on feeling to the way the last sequences (the venice stuff) play out. but i thought the key set pieces - the opener, the airport, the car chase - were spectacularly thrilling in a way very few entries in the series actually have been despite the fact that seemingly each and every movie when it came out was praised for supposedly signature thrill-packed excitement. (reading the box of for your eyes only had me lolling the other night, after watching this incredible tepid and hokey affair to hear it described as "A Terrific, Non-Stop Romp!" with "non-stop action" and "unforgettable characters.") thought le chiffre was fantastic - just the kind of menacing, well-connected guy that Bond would take on as antagonist. my favorite line in the film was bond's stubborn i can beat this man. he was the right size villain for Bond to think that about and possibly be wrong.

the only way to fuck up a Bond film is to have him played by that gurning clown Roger Moore and turn it into a fucking Cannonball Run spin-off

OTM

worst character in any bond film is that hillbilly sheriff, it's like putting larry the cable guy in one of chow yun fat's '90s HK action movies

would love to sit down and think for a while about worse bond characters but yeah that guy is so awful it's sort of a foregone conclusion. there are some dull dull villains and forehead-slappingly dopey bond girls, but nothing like sheriff guy where every second he's on screen you want to throw something at the TV. and he's in two movies! thank god he didn't keep coming back.

yea i think my fond memory of bardem is due to bardem and not to any specific details of his character, i don't even remember what his plan as a villian was

that said "dude with the inhaler" mikkelsen was actually pretty good, there is just something kind of "stereotypical eastern european criminal" about that character that was fine enough but not particularly exciting. but i guess that was totally okay bc the showcase was really craig's debut as bond

lol also i have asthma and it was a little hokey seeing the inhaler as symbolism for le chiffre's vulnerability and weakness

i think i really liked that le chiffre was a seemingly low level criminal, like a perfect match for an up and coming secret agent. not sure how bond actually got dumber with each subsequent movie, i hope spectre halts that trend.

like in CR his dealings with le chiffre were pretty smart, in skyfall his big plan in the third act was worthy of a sitcom parody

Mr White, the obvious winner is Mr White.

i just thought he projected menace well while playing cards. did he in fact have a plan? kind of an unusual bond story in that they're there to basically crash a party and execute a spy plan just to like, take down this criminal organization, not because the criminal himself is actively undertaking some world-domination scheme or stealing some crucial piece of technology. looking it up on wikipedia i guess he was known for engineering terrorist attacks in order to facilitate favorable stock transactions, but it wasn't like he was about to do a specifically big one and had to be stopped. which is for the best IMO because otherwise we're going down the road of jonathan pryce in tomorrow never dies who was not exactly the most exciting villain in the series.

actually that reminds me of another least-favorite character - the henchman assassin dude in the world is not enough whose gimmick is that he has a bullet lodged in his brain and can't feel pain. which is like, okay, sure, i guess that's scary. but then they made it a degenerative thing so that over time he's gradually more and more injured, losing his senses, bond can set him on fire and he won't notice, etc. wow, how terrifying. anyone with any sense would just avoid the guy until he dropped dead on his own. not exactly the last of that movie's many horrible problems (i rank it worst of the brosnans and near the bottom of the series overall) but it really stuck out to me as a failure to think things through from what appears to have been a fairly early point in drafting the plot.

agreed totally about le chiffre as low(er)-level criminal being a good match for bond. the movie in general had a good handle on 'scale' and the kinds of challenges to throw at bond where it could feel (as everyone said) more 'grounded' and 'realistic' but still over-the-top in a way that feels totally in the spirit of the series/character. skyfall loses sight of this in a few ways, worst of which being the whole hacker thing, home base being infiltrated... kinda like dark knight rises where we're following minor characters around as they look for a truck with a bomb on it. i don't really need to see Q trying to out-hack the bad guys. if you think the movie needs more elements in it, give bardem some henchmen that james bond can detect trying to break into his hotel room or whatever.

imo, though i am not an aficionado, bond works best when he is a SPY doing SPY SHIT. i.e. pretending to be someone else, the tension of not being discovered, etc. - and the moments when that tension is shattered, and bond has to house some clown and throw him under the stairs a split second before the corrupt dictator's daughter arrives. ya feel me

The henchman assassin is the main villain! Played by Robert Carlyle, I remember him fondly - compared with Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Christmas Jones, Robbie Coltrane being given an arc and heroic death (!) for his returning Fat Russian Mobster, and Goldie as his henchman, I don't think Renard is even on the podium.

(Yes, I looked all of this stuff up - but I do remember him fondly.)

i.e. pretending to be someone else

Er, he does this so rarely throughout the series, and usually gives up the pretense the minute the baddie throws some henchmen at him.

I believe there are even a few instances of him pretending to be someone with a job other than spy who is also called James Bond, but I can't think of any specific ones.

World is Not Enough is clearly the second best Brosnan by the way, which says more about the quality of his run than the quality of the film.

He didn't always get the scripts, but Craig has never topped (and sounds like he never will) Goldeneye.

CR>Goldeneye IMO. Better action, better acting.

The Script Is Not Enough

Er, he does this so rarely throughout the series

MAYBE HE SHOULD START

he produces business cards from "universal exports" a lot.

Genuinely curious whether anyone under 30 cares about James Bond movies anymore.