Bond #24: SPECTRE

we have beaten this into the ground of course but it's beyond me how the world came to the consensus that quantum of solace was bad and skyfall was good.

QoS was... not good

they were both good

one was good, one was bad.

poll.

I would love to be a contrarian on this one but Morbs is correct

QoS is much better if you watch it immediately after Casino Royale imo

but i am quite alone in this opinion

nah goole otm.

i was sort of surprised at how bad people thought QoS was, since though it's clearly not nearly as good as CR, it's still watchable enough. it still doesn't make any sense but it's also a little less unoriginal and misogynist than skyfall though i'm not sure it's better or anything. interesting that in the first two craig bonds we don't see the villain die, nor is he killed by bond.

Skyfall isn't much better on a screenplay level, it's just really great to look at and features nice lucid action sequences where QoS' action is choppy and impossible to follow

but i am quite alone in this opinion

you are not alone in this opinion at all

I still feel bad for Darren Aronofsky tbh

― the naive cockney chorus (Simon H.), Thursday, October 22, 2015 1:49 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno, i kind of feel like that pretentious asshole got what he deserved.

rachel weisz defies nature, btw. she is 45!

http://cdn.yournextshoes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Rachel-Weisz-Face.jpg

photographed at the premiere for the new almond milk iced coffee i guess?

maybe it's what she rubs on her face to give her skin that lustrous glow

that signature blend of vitamin E, lactose, and caffeine

daniel craig seems alot cooler than aronofsky

<-- understatement.

Most of the way through I was thinking it could be a tie withheld CS for best Craig Bond - great, crisp action, wonderful atmosphere, gorgeous cinematography. But they really botched the third act. I in no way ever again need to see James Bond pilot a motorboat down the Thames, or bring down a helicopter with a single shot.

I need to stop reading this thread til SPECTRE's out here in the US haha

This is going to sound wanky but I thought the photography in a lot of the first part was wack. there was one particular clanger I thought in the gorgeous and underlit dream-villa of Belucci's where she's in focus in the foreground and Craig is out of focus in the bg, and Craig walks right up next to her, dramatically, as she's talking, and... he stays out of focus! Your eye's like oh, sorry, thought you wanted me to pay attention to BOND JAMES BOND who just came WALKING UP.

Not only the photography but everything about the first helicopter scene was dreadful. Ohh it's a helicopter doing a slow barrel roll! Oh, and again! Oh man, and AGAIN!! Good plan Bond, immediately incapacitate the PILOT of the copter because that'll totally help. Really playing the angles there. FFS!

But but but... I kid because I love. Somehow it turned into a legit good movie somewhere in there. Which seemed to coincide exactly with the length of time Lea Seydoux was an active presence in it..

I want to say I saw maybe 15 minutes of QoS, but it was incoherent, almost to a Michael Bay degree. Enjoyed Skyfall, though. Don't remember a lick of Casino Royale.

SPOILERS
it's fantastic. and tense! a few mis-steps but as Tracer says soon as he meets Mr White.. showtime. weird the extent to which this is kinda 'wrapping up' all 4 of the Craig Bonds isn't it? especially seeing as Skyfall never seemed especially 'sequel-y' but this one is all suddenly 'hey remember this freaky dude from 2 films back?' etc
Moneypenny kinda.. vanished in all that A Team style hoo-ha with the gang running around near the end. seemed a little ungallant.

And v ungallant of me not to even notice :(

So like, what was up with the dress on the bed (and why ffs did she wear it???) Seemed significant, but.. no

I liked how when Bond was asked what he was doing there he's like "well I'm here to kill YOU." Shades of Luke inside Jabba's lair with the startling confidence inside the heart of darkness. Like - "what's he planning?" Was he planning anything, by the way?

mm i dunno you know.. after he gave the gun up to the butler, i expected him to at least have an extra hidden gun in his sock. and the torture seemed to have no effect whatsoever! originally he killed him at the end too, according to leaked early script drafts which the studio execs hated supposedly
http://defamer.gawker.com/new-bond-script-leaks-execs-scrambling-to-fix-awful-en-1670479885

Seydoux gonna be proper megastar huge IMO.

Haha yeah there was just no consequence to the drilling. Bit cheap to make us wonder - "will he really get drilled? or won't he??" and then have the answer not matter.

Still properly horrible and ball-tightening so job done I guess..

Was he even trying to find anything out, I can't remember?? It seemed like just sadism

Bad guy was trying to get Bond to forget who Seydoux was before he died for some reason but Bond was just like 'I can never forget... you are... too... hot' or whatever so it didn't work

basically he was an amateur neurologist on the side? "Bond... I'd like to talk to you about computational aspects of neurological modeling"

60% on RT is pretty pathetic... but it won't matter.

i choose to take the critic who says "Craig's boredom is contagious" at his word.

i get a real sense of the 2nd wave of reviews reviewing-the-earlier-reviews with this tbh. i forget what that phenomenon is known as.
the disparity btw the uk and the us reviews a week later is.. quite something.

I haven't paid attention. What's the disparity?

Saw this yesterday. Opinions, I have them.

Was he planning anything, by the way?

He expected.. TO DIE! No but seriously it's a suicide mission, he warns Scarlett Johansson off in pretty much exactly those terms, all he has is a watch that goes boom and a hope that the villain will explain his whole plan.

I am surprised that I'm surprised that after she does one thing in character and walks away, she becomes the damsel to save - half of me feels I have been let down, and the other half has no idea why the first half thinks that.

I fairly certain that no-one has ever said "I do like the action scenes and the sexy ladies and the cocktail tip, but what I really return to the Bond films for is the tightly-bound mythos": watching them continuity-wank the Craig reboot with one hand and the 50-year history with the other, I couldn't help wondering who really cared.

One of the effects of trying even the short-term continuity is that there's probably some people watching the film thinking "WTF is a picture of Hannibal doing in that cell?"

Always terrible: a Mocking Maze of Memories, also all hacking, ever.

A fucking waste of Andrew Scott, though: "Did you see, from my first scene, that I was the baddie? Did you spot that? Hmm?"

I was surprised by there only being M and Q and C (big laugh at the line before "Careless") in that room, because I'd just been thinking that Rory Kinnear had been growing into an actor who'd be at home in LeCarre, a deft hand from housekeeping, dependable if you needed a gun kept on someone. Of course he's also growing into Roy Kinnear, which he may not be as happy about.

Whatever about the second drill and the ability to remember faces (Blofeld says "Oh, if you get it in the right place"), I'm more struck by how the first drill was meant to make Bond woozy - cut to a presumably concussed Bond dead-eyeing a half dozen goons five minutes later.

The IMDB page talks a lot about how this was going to be filmed back to back with Bond 25, which Craig is apparently still contracted for - but the ending seems very much like a sign-off, even not counting Craig feeling free to say he'd rather slash his wrists than do another. I mean, I'm not befuddled how they'd do it, it'd be a bullet in the head of Madeleine Swann before the opening credits, because Bond.

I did largely enjoy it though - like chap, I think it's only the last reel that goes off the rails. One thing we're sleeping on though is Dave Bautista, who is great in every scene he's in and clearly enjoying himself immensely. His one line is great - I keep thinking that I've seen the method of his departure before but nothing comes to mind - a tight and tense fight scene that ends in slapstick is something that I think of as a Bond staple, and indeed not a bad simile for the film.

He really deserves to become a meme, popping up in a car, leering at you, never actually hurting you but never going away

And then I guess hurting you quite a lot in a train. Hard to put all that into one image macro though

This just wasn't much fun at all (not for lack of supercars or pyrotechnics). Needed more Moneypenny! Needed more jokes.

Agreed. I heard some bellyaching about how Skyfall was humorless, but that was fun and colorful while this one was beige FPS Bond all around w/the exception of the introduction, maybe. Entertaining enough, I suppose. Waltz is as wasted as Bardem was, and his villain backstory was much more nonsense.

I guess at least Davebomb Batista got some work out of it

It wasn't stolid or self-serious, it just wasn't funny, ever.

I thought this was a gigantic amount of fun.

Kind of a mixed bag, but so much better than Skyfall that I'm not mad or anything.

I REALLY dug Batista here, kinda hoping the character somehow isn't dead and randomly pops up in, whatever, the next reboot or iteration, Craig or no Craig.

There were at least two moments where I wished VegemiteGrrl was in the theater next to me so I could jokingly elbow her after some of her earlier insistences about the plot :)

chekov's cat -- if Q mentions a cat in the first act...

so someone strokes a cat in this?

no comment

this was great! I caught myself being disappointed she didnt get offed at the end, i was feeling the OHMSS nods lol

love a train fight, bautista was so good!!!

the sheer physicality of that fight was amazing, just brutal

might have just been the large screen nature but the 'romance' seemed more intense, lots of close shots of almost-kissing, heavy breathing

i don't know. that scene where Bond "seduces" Monica Bellucci was classic Bond nonsense cheese

I felt like Bellucci was kinda wasted in this, she deserved a bigger role imo

also the Bautista eyeball popping - did he have metal thumbnails? i didnt quite catch them

Fell asleep :(. Was enjoying but just was exhausted. Gonna try again

in the UK they shaved some seconds from 2 scenes to get a 12A, i'm thinking one musta been the eyeball-popper.