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Darko posted:Also, the most ineffective villain that just whines about not being able to get laid then explodes. Also the wierd blend of casual 70s English racism and the pointedly BUT NOT RACIST stuff like the cool black CIA agent looking at Bond like he's the dumbest
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Aug 27, 2018 18:03
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DrVenkman posted:I've really never understood his dislike for that movie, though I think it comes from not liking Brosnan's Bond all that much. I think it’s an okay action movie, but a boring Bond movie - if that makes sense. The Rupert Murdoch villain is somehow simultaneously too realistic and too batshit to coelesce into a fully realized antagonist. Like a singular dude controlling the world’s news is a legit real world issue. Him driving around in a super drill sub... thing... is some poo poo straight out of the Foot Clan. Like focusing on either one of those extremes would have made for a better movie, but the final product just couldn’t walk that tightrope with enough finesse.
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Aug 27, 2018 18:21
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Grain of salt, but this is interesting. Danny Boyle quit James Bond franchise after he ‘REFUSED to kill off Daniel Craig’s 007 in spectacular finale to 25th film’ quote:Daniel Craig, who is said to be filming his final 007 movie, and producer Barbara Broccoli are believed to have wanted to Bond to die in a “spectacular finale”, according to sources.
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Aug 28, 2018 17:25
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Bad form by Craig to demand that Bond be killed imo. And I find the idea interesting, don't get me wrong, I'm not against the idea itself. But Bond is a legacy character, if you want out just have the balls to turn down the money, don't put it on other people to make tough decisions for you. It's one thing to argue for it, another thing to be so attached to it that you run off a good director.
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Aug 28, 2018 17:32
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Pfft. James Bond already died. He was vaporized by a misfired missile during that Alcatraz hostage situation back in ‘96.
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Aug 28, 2018 17:43
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He lives twice, learn the lore.
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Aug 28, 2018 17:46
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Basebf555 posted:Bad form by Craig to demand that Bond be killed imo. And I find the idea interesting, don't get me wrong, I'm not against the idea itself. But Bond is a legacy character, if you want out just have the balls to turn down the money, don't put it on other people to make tough decisions for you. It's one thing to argue for it, another thing to be so attached to it that you run off a good director. Makes for a curious contrast with Cruise on M:I.
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Aug 28, 2018 17:52
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DrVenkman posted:I've really never understood his dislike for that movie, though I think it comes from not liking Brosnan's Bond all that much. Tomorrow Never Dies is not that great, but in this franchise that still makes it more watchable than 75% of Bond films in the catalogue. I'm just happy whenever Jonathan Pryce gets work.
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Aug 28, 2018 17:56
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Fart City posted:Pfft. James Bond already died. What? Vaporized? A body can...vaporize?
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Aug 28, 2018 18:18
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thrawn527 posted:What? Vaporized? A body can...vaporize? Blown out to sea.
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Aug 28, 2018 18:23
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I saw The Rock as a kid years before I'd ever seen a Connery Bond film so to go back to it in my 20's and realize what that character was all about was pretty mind blowing.
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Aug 28, 2018 18:25
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Basebf555 posted:I saw The Rock as a kid years before I'd ever seen a Connery Bond film so to go back to it in my 20's and realize what that character was all about was pretty mind blowing. Reading Connery’s character as a disavowed Bond is a legit fun way to rewatch the movie. And not even in a dumb headcanon way. There’s enough winking and nodding in The Rock itself to make it a viable interpretation.
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Aug 28, 2018 18:29
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Basebf555 posted:I saw The Rock as a kid years before I'd ever seen a Connery Bond film so to go back to it in my 20's and realize what that character was all about was pretty mind blowing. There's a point in Connery's career, after he won an Oscar and had a big revival as a leading man, where most of his roles seem like him playing James Bond who'd gotten old and gone to seed, retired from the secret service and taken up another career. The Rock is the most obvious one but there's shades of it in movies like Presidio, Rising Sun, Entrapment, to some degree The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and so on. Contrast with his leading roles in the 1970s where he was always consciously trying to get out of Bond's shadow in stuff like The Offence and Zardoz or more mainstream movies like Robin and Marian and The Man Who Would Be King. If John Boorman had been able to get his much-longed for adaptation of the Lord of the Rings going in the 1970s, I reckon Connery probably would've ended up playing Aragorn.
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Aug 28, 2018 19:16
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I was listening to the James Bond Radio podcast episode from when the news broke and they speculated that Boyle was the one who wanted to kill Bond. That he had said he had an amazing idea for a Bond story that had never been done before and he would only direct the movie if he could execute his story idea. Who knows?
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Aug 28, 2018 19:42
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Wheat Loaf posted:I think the Brosnan movies even out as being better overall than the Craig movies (so far). The one indisputably solid Craig movie is one of many Dark Knight ripoffs I mean I'm being a little unfair to Casino Royale, but still
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Aug 28, 2018 19:55
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I'd put them neck and neck so far. One "very good"(Goldeneye, Skyfall), one "decent"(Tomorrow Never Dies, Casino Royale), and two "bad"(The World is Not Enough/Die Another Day, Quantum of Solace/Spectre) So Craig has one extra opportunity to put himself over the top of Brosnan or sink below him into Mooreland.
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Aug 28, 2018 20:01
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I was thinking the other day how interesting it is that a lot of the style setting done in Casino Royale was kind of abandoned in the later Craig installments. That first flick is very mobility-centric in its action scenes, what with the parkour chase, exhibition/airport chase, and stairwell fight. And it opens with that black and white filter. Those are distinct, bold tonal choices for a reboot, which were almost immediately discarded in QoS.
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Aug 28, 2018 20:05
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The Craig films are unequivocally better composed and more competently made than the Brosnan Bonds but I don't like his oafish take on the character at all, and I feel like the series has kind of lost its identity. It's no coincidence that Bond's identity in the twenty-first century is a theme that the series tortuously returns to again and again.
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Aug 28, 2018 20:22
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Sodomy Hussein posted:The one indisputably solid Craig movie is one of many Dark Knight ripoffs Huh?
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Aug 28, 2018 20:38
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I'm assuming they mean Skyfall, since it has the whole, "Bad guy gets captured on purpose to execute his crazy complicated plan" plot line, but I'm not sure.
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Aug 28, 2018 20:42
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thrawn527 posted:I'm assuming they mean Skyfall, since it has the whole, "Bad guy gets captured on purpose to execute his crazy complicated plan" plot line, but I'm not sure. Yea, but it's not only that. The whole idea of Joker being this dark reflection of Batman, that the same system that created Batman has also created this agent of chaos, it's the whole framework of the movie and Skyfall basically lifted that and just dropped it into the Bond universe. It all fits pretty well so it still works it's just not super original.
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Aug 28, 2018 20:46
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Skyfall, in which our aging hero has his moral code and worthiness put to the test by the evil, psychotically comical mirror of himself. The villain then gets captured on purpose as part of a convoluted terrorist plot where he momentarily reveals the nihilistic core of his being, evinced by his hidden scars. All the stakes are personal and deeply intertwined with the hero's origin story at the family manor, home of the exposition butler. Victory is impossible without first a sacrifice. Name Change fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Aug 28, 2018 |
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Aug 28, 2018 20:54
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I feel like I'm the only person who actually really liked Spectre. I thought it was much better than Skyfall and comes in only second to Casino Royale for me (I also don't hate QoS like some do but that's another topic). What impressed me the most are a lot of the quieter, smaller moments in the film: the assassins sent to kill Monica Bellucci getting iced by Bond in the background, out of focus; the odd way the people at her husband's funeral move; the hushed tone Blofeld speaks in the scene when Bond first meets him and the way he says "touch it! in the scene with the meteorite; the little camera move that reveals Lea Seydoux sitting next to Bond in the car at the very end, etc. These small touches feel confident and playful but never draw lots of attention to themselves; somehow it really adds up for me in my enjoyment of the movie.
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Aug 29, 2018 07:24
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The film felt bloated and overlong, with 2 or 3 plots all crammed in that could've been their own film. I also took particular umbrage with the fact that Dr Swann oscillated wildly between Scrappy Doo and a generic damsel in distress that ultimately needs big ol' swinging dick Jimbo Bond to come rescue her because "wimmin, amirite, brose?" which I felt was particularly egregious when it was in the same calendar year as Rey and Furiosa's respective films. That bullshit is bad enough, but it just stood out even more because of that. I felt that Mr. Hinx was particularly underused, and Dave Bautista's subsequent work has shown us how much of a charismatic and engaging presence he can be onscreen, so to have him be a generic ME BIG ME CRUSH YOU type character that is almost entirely mute felt like a wasted opportunity. You could almost say the same about the Denbigh and the Nine Eyes plot too. Like, you could have split that film into two, and fleshed out the respective plots. 1. Introduce the Nine Eyes plot and leave it in the background, as Bond refocuses on the Quantum organisation, and uncovers Spectre operating above it, with Mr. Hinx as the main villain of the film (if Silva was Joker to Bond's Batman, you could characterise Hinx as being akin to Bane - a skilled intelligence agent, who is smart and ruthless, but he is also considerably stronger than Bond). Blofeld is revealed late in the film as the mastermind behind Spectre, and the guy that Mr White has to answer to. 2. Focus the plot on Nine Eyes and Denbigh as a front for Spectre to infiltrate and take over the MI6, leading to a confrontation between Bond and Blofeld. I know hindsight is 20/20 and all, but cramming all that poo poo into 1 overlong movie just didn't do anyone any favours. I'd also like to add stuff like Blofeld going "I was behind EVERYTHING from Casino Royale onwards, mwa-ha-haaaa!" and "it turns out we're (step)brothers" just made me groan "aw gently caress off" at an appropriate volume at the movie theatre. Seriously, gently caress off with that poo poo. I mean, why do it? It just creates an unnecessary wrinkle to what should've been a straight-forward rivalry between the two characters. Like, would Die Hard be improved if it turned out John McClane and Hans Gruber turn out to be second cousins once removed? I think the lovely theme song pretty much put a damper on the film for me. It's such a dull song that I think I pretty much disengaged right away because of it. Basebf555 posted:Yea, but it's not only that. The whole idea of Joker being this dark reflection of Batman, that the same system that created Batman has also created this agent of chaos, it's the whole framework of the movie and Skyfall basically lifted that and just dropped it into the Bond universe. It all fits pretty well so it still works it's just not super original. I always viewed Skyfall as being a thesis statement about the state of Bond as a franchise in an era when superhero movies were starting to really take off, with the MCU finishing up Phase One and The Dark Knight trilogy closing out with a $1billion+ box office film. The film felt like it was saying "yeah, I'm getting up there in age, but gently caress you, I'm still relevant" by emphasising what makes the Bond franchise the Bond franchise. Bond hops into a DB5 and take M back to his roots, after all. edogawa rando fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Aug 29, 2018 |
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Aug 29, 2018 07:57
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The main trouble is that people group these films by the actor, when the four Craig films are extremely different. Spectre is a straight-up fantasy movie.
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Aug 29, 2018 08:14
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Well the Craig films are at pains to connect themselves to each other no matter how nonsensical it may be to do so
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Aug 29, 2018 11:29
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Vagabundo posted:I always viewed Skyfall as being a thesis statement about the state of Bond as a franchise in an era when superhero movies were starting to really take off, with the MCU finishing up Phase One and The Dark Knight trilogy closing out with a $1billion+ box office film. The film felt like it was saying "yeah, I'm getting up there in age, but gently caress you, I'm still relevant" by emphasising what makes the Bond franchise the Bond franchise. Bond hops into a DB5 and take M back to his roots, after all. That Nathan Rabin feature "Forgotbusters" from a few years ago suggested that there was a similar thing going on in the early 00s when Die Another Day, The Bourne Identity and xXx all came out in the same year and it was like three competing directions for spy-action movies to take: xXx very deliberately positioned itself as an "anti-Bond" with a Bond stand-in getting killed off at the start leading to Vin Diesel getting called in; but Bourne was the one that "won" and which everybody tried to copy for the next five years (like how various movies from the preceding five years had tried to copy The Matrix).
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Aug 29, 2018 11:41
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Gaius Marius posted:Well the Craig films are at pains to connect themselves to each other no matter how nonsensical it may be to do so Which makes it all the weirder that they are so stylistically different in terms of cinematography and action choreography. Like the Craig movies push a sense of true continuity stronger than any other actor’s run in the franchise, but if you watch Casino Royale and Skyfall (both great films) one after another, the actual universe they set in feels radically different. Even though we’re to believe it’s the same character, the Bond from Royale doesn’t really fit in Skyfall. And it’s not just a character growth thing; it’s hard to square the dude who sat in a chair getting his balls tortured with the dude who mugs at a bunch of Komodo dragons.
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Aug 29, 2018 13:47
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nemesis_hub posted:I feel like I'm the only person who actually really liked Spectre. I thought it was much better than Skyfall and comes in only second to Casino Royale for me (I also don't hate QoS like some do but that's another topic). What impressed me the most are a lot of the quieter, smaller moments in the film: the assassins sent to kill Monica Bellucci getting iced by Bond in the background, out of focus; the odd way the people at her husband's funeral move; the hushed tone Blofeld speaks in the scene when Bond first meets him and the way he says "touch it! in the scene with the meteorite; the little camera move that reveals Lea Seydoux sitting next to Bond in the car at the very end, etc. These small touches feel confident and playful but never draw lots of attention to themselves; somehow it really adds up for me in my enjoyment of the movie. Skyfall's cinematography is so much better that Spectre fails in comparison just on that.
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Aug 29, 2018 14:28
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exquisite tea posted:It's no coincidence that Bond's identity in the twenty-first century is a theme that the series tortuously returns to again and again. Goldeneye did this, they make a point of asking how a dinosaur like Bond is relevant after the Cold War, and the answer the film provides is "dinosaurs are awesome." The Craig movies raise the question repeatedly, but have no answer beyond "I guess it's a necessary evil, so we gotta?" Except they exist in a world as deeply silly and disconnected the from real-world geopolitical problems you might want to throw a spy/hitman/whatever as ever.
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Aug 29, 2018 14:48
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sean10mm posted:Goldeneye did this, they make a point of asking how a dinosaur like Bond is relevant after the Cold War, and the answer the film provides is "dinosaurs are awesome." M does have that little call-back(to Dench) speech in Spectre where he explains that technology will never be a substitute for an actual human being who's on the ground and able to make snap decisions. And decisions not only based on the needs of the mission but also their basic humanity. "A license to kill is also a license NOT to kill". Not sure exactly how any of that relates to Bond specifically though, considering he kills or causes the death of basically everyone he meets.
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Aug 29, 2018 15:01
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Spectre has a bunch of really good individual scenes, it's just a terrible shame that they feature in such a terrible movie. Much like Moonraker has the centrifuge scene and Drax killing Corinne (the woman who helped Bond out) which are super tense/chilling respectively but the rest is made up like a (bad) comedy so those few scenes don't really help.
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Aug 29, 2018 16:16
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On reflection, it's actually kind of odd that the scene of Drax setting his dogs on Corinne and the scene of Bond driving his Bondola through Venice and making a pigeon do a double-take are in the same movie.
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Aug 29, 2018 16:22
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Wheat Loaf posted:On reflection, it's actually kind of odd that the scene of Drax setting his dogs on Corinne and the scene of Bond driving his Bondola through Venice and making a pigeon do a double-take are in the same movie. Moore's movies are all full of this. The Spy Who Loved me ends with multiple gunshots to the dick of the villain.
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Aug 29, 2018 16:28
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Sure, but I think the example of Corinne fleeing through the forest - from the way it's shot and everything - set against everything else in the movie is most egregious. I don't think other goofy moments in Moore movies (A View to a Kill with 58-year old Roger Moore hanging off a fire engine's ladder yelling, "GET ME OFF THIS CRAZY THIIIIIIING!" like George Jetson; Octopussy with Moore doing a Tarzan yell while he swings from a vine then dresses up as a clown to infiltrate a circus; The Man With the Golden Gun where a genuinely cool stunt where they corkscrew a car over a river but it's accompanied by a slide-whistle sound effect) have any corresponding scenes to contrast with within the same movies. I guess The Spy Who Love Me is probably closest because it has that scene you mentioned (though I don't think it was necessarily played for comedy) but it has that sequence with Jaws chasing Bond's contact in Egypt, cornering him and fatally biting him, which I think is a well-done creepy scene with the way Jaws is all lit up with green lights in front of the Sphinx. Wheat Loaf fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Aug 29, 2018 |
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Aug 29, 2018 16:37
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Wheat Loaf posted:Sure, but I think the example of Corinne fleeing through the forest - from the way it's shot and everything - set against everything else in the movie is most egregious. I don't think other goofy moments in Moore movies (A View to a Kill with 58-year old Roger Moore hanging off a fire engine's ladder yelling, "GET ME OFF THIS CRAZY THIIIIIIING!" like George Jetson; Octopussy with Moore doing a Tarzan yell while he swings from a vine then dresses up as a clown to infiltrate a circus; The Man With the Golden Gun where a genuinely cool stunt where they corkscrew a car over a river but it's accompanied by a slide-whistle sound effect) have any corresponding scenes to contrast with within the same movies. Octopussy has 004 or whatever being hunted down. That scene is shot a lot like the dog scene in Moonraker. I agree otherwise.
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Aug 29, 2018 17:28
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I forgot to mention the other thing Skyfall has in common with Nolan Batman, it loudly beats the drum for cold war conservatism, including all the associated corruption, as necessary to uphold public order. People to the left of Dick Cheney may question your methods and your results, but they will either come around or be slaughtered like sheep when the bad man comes.
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Aug 29, 2018 18:07
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Ehhhhh, TDK says that only a superhero could use conservative methods properly, he still can only do it when there are no other options, and then has to never use that method again. It basically makes that kind of thing a fantasy and part of the whole comic book fantasy. Bond makes it more of a continuous necessary evil.
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Aug 29, 2018 18:14
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Darko posted:Ehhhhh, TDK says that only a superhero could use conservative methods properly, he still can only do it when there are no other options, and then has to never use that method again. It basically makes that kind of thing a fantasy and part of the whole comic book fantasy. Bond makes it more of a continuous necessary evil. They rest on "only your intentions ultimately matter." Obama with a panopticon drone missile assassination program good, Trump bad.
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Aug 29, 2018 18:17
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It doesn't really go as far as Batman. Raoul Silva is the creation of Judi Dench's M and she is his ultimate victim. The IC takes broken people like Silva and Bond and ultimately creates as many problems as it solves, etc. There is some light criticism there. But yea, Bond overall is a pretty conservative film series, with messages ranging from "Anti-nuclear activists are Communist patsies", "Environmentalist types can't be trusted", "The Blacks are all part of some sort of international drug ring" and "Even when a woman says no she means 'Yes'". Not as bad as the books.
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Aug 29, 2018 18:21
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