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Let's go to the [movies]
Harry Dresden
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
... indoors, since a pandemic's on.
There are dramas,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-HokRJQkAw
espionage,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8wvQkZkxyQ
action,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wlsd9mljiU
fantasy,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4xV2RIlMi4
explosions,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-hnkMHg24g
and Humphrey Bogart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEWaqUVac3M
There are dramas,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-HokRJQkAwespionage,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8wvQkZkxyQaction,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wlsd9mljiUfantasy,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4xV2RIlMi4explosions,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-hnkMHg24gand Humphrey Bogart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEWaqUVac3M +3
This discussion has been closed.
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I wholeheartedly agree, QoS is underrated, and Olga was genuinely terrific in that movie. Vesper was always going to be an incredibly hard act to follow and Olga as Camille did a damn fine job, I thought.
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I got to say that the hint of the theme song: You know my Name, really sells it.
I saw people mentioning Goldeneye earlier, but imo this it is the best theme song for any Bond movie in the Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig eras. Goldeneye is pretty good, I owned the Soundtrack on CD in the beforetimes, but this song just encapsulates the feeling of Bond. Mostly because yeah, you know his name and it means you are going to get an above average movie most of the time.
Worst is Madonna word vomit Die Another Day. Most songs are at least good for the time they where written, able to at least coast on the idea that they are representative of the music of the time. Not so that piece of garbage.
It's fine? Getting very intense "let's just sort of hang out and make a movie" energy from the entire production. Kind of a Beatles movie thing. The supporting cast is weirdly stacked. I almost wish it was actually worse.
Years ago, in the before time, the long long ago, I defended Spice World with similar feelings. The Tardis style bus interior and how it succeeds because of Cool Brittannia and it collected enough british comedians of the time to make it worthwhile. I see Jennifer Saunders pretending to be fashion hip as a meta joke for Absolutely Fabulous and Fry and Laurie show up, I enjoy it. The only really out of place part was the boot camp scene where it should have gone more 'Allo 'Allo or Benny Hill but was a five minute filler.
That would have been awesome but also Bardem fucking killed it in that role. I loved the sexual energy he brings to the role to make it more uncomfortable.
Quoting Shryke - he's got that Big Bardem Energy - BBE
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
The first is pretty explicitly good. But the second is not necessarily good. And the longer a series is the worse it gets. Because the more you have to remember. Since we are calling it baggage let’s continue the analogy. After the first film you have a little tote you barely remember it’s there because it so seamlessly fits your outfit. And after the second film you’ve got a nice messenger bag. But after the third film you’ve got a full duffel bag and it makes maneuvering quickly and efficiently really difficult. By the time you’re starting the fifth film you need an entire compartment for your baggage and you’re no longer able to ride the motorcycle you had hung the series on.
TV series get around this by having fewer arcs. A movie needs an arc every two hours but a TV series can make an arc over 10. So by the time you’re at the fourth movie you’re in the fourth season equivalent of your TV show that comes out only once every 2 years.
A Craig trilogy with CR then QoS then a rejiggered Skyfall to be related to QoS works. It’s three films and you can reasonable be expected to take that through line. Bond falls in love with vesper then she dies and he gets a hollow revenge, realizing at the end he is a broken man, then another man broken by the system shows Bond that he didn’t do it to himself but it was Queen and Country that destroyed him. (In this version he is played by Timothy Dalton and there is no plot surrounding the theft of the personnel info and bond disappearing. We start in the QoS debrief [or another debrief that shows how hollow bond is] and then have the bombing of Ms office. Bond is sent immediately after whomever did it with a short list of possibilities. Dalton intercepts bond on his quest to find the bad guy[on the lie that he wants to do one last good thing for England] and they together explore their disillusionment as they turn up innocent after innocent until they get their man. But wait it’s revealed that Dalton did it. And he wants Bond to help him finish the job and give England the black eye it deserves by doing one more act of terrorism and revealing that England knew it had the wrong person but didn’t care because it was easier to sweep things under the rug and lie about it. Bond refuses because he knows from QoS that revenge isn’t going to help and Dalton tracks him and M down at his scotland house and we finish from there.)
That being said. The actual problems with Skyfall and Spectre are not that they tie things to prior movies. It’s that they dont, but pretend to. “It was me, Steve, it was me all along” doesn’t hold any weight unless the prior movies have both 1) a who is it narrative at least in part and 2) have that character in them for you to be shocked that it was them. Blofeld isn’t baggage he is a retcon and Silva isn’t a throughline to QoS he is a reset. And neither of them want to be that so they allude to things in prior movies but don’t have actual connective tissue to them.
I think that continuity in a movie series is an explicit cost you have to pay if you choose to have it based on the number of films. Bond was originally planned for 3 films (iirc) and the next two were kind of tacked on. So their poor handling of the baggage isn’t exactly surprising.
To go back to the analogy. If you choose not to have baggage that is fine, you don’t have to pick up the handbag at the start of the second film. But once you do people are going to wonder where it is if it doesn’t show up in the third.
One thing I always thought was weird about this was that Madonna had done Beautiful Stranger three years earlier for the second Austin Powers movie. While it has some moments that wouldn't fit as a Bond theme, it's a pretty solid song.
QoS follows directly on from CR. Like, literally, in that it starts minutes afterwords. It definitely relies on you having seen the previous film but that's not a major problem in any other film franchise. Look at Batman for a similar product that drops movies with wildly divergent styles and continuities but that still come in distinct sets of films. And QoS involves no retcons of anything in CR either.
Skyfall isn't really a strict sequel to either of Craig's other two films. Like, it can easily function as one but nothing in the film I can think of requires you to have seen the other two. It's definitely enhanced by having seen the previous two films and thus having a better sense of who Craig's Bond is and his relationship with M and all that. But hell, M is a beloved character dragged in from the Brosnan films at this point. Bond continuity is weird.
It's only Spectre that wants to act as a sequel to the previous Craig films that also retcons a bunch of shit in a dumb way. And really the problem with Spectre is that it's dumb, not that it's an explicit sequel.
Dr. Christmas Jones aside I quite enjoyed the film too. It seems to be the forgotten Brosnan movie that no one really talks about - not utter shite like Die Another Day! or divisive like Tomorrow Never Dies. Proper bonkers Bond plot too (Let's blow up Istanbul to corner the market on oil!).
An ex mobster (although it feels more like he was just a generic heavy for a mob boss or even just a boxer with mob ties) getting his wife back should feel more serious, like using his old connections to get the job done. You don't get that here and it's weird disconnect since he still has his slapstick korean sidekick character as his co-worker in his new life or that it takes him about thirty minutes in movie time to realize the bad guy was the creepy guy they ran into 15 minutes into the movie. In fact there's a much better movie here set up in the beginning of an ex-mobster trying to make it rich on shady investment schemes (like King Crab legs) and trying to juggle hiding it from his wife while also not wanting to flip the switch and be a baddie again, that would have worked really well as the premise for a mob comedy like Luck Key. The tone is just not there in a consistent manner, which makes the usual thriller moments feel off. And when you have no one really dying in the movie, and the blood shown is bright red like Leone movie paint blood, it's a wasted opportunity.
It's still well paced and doesn't outstay it's welcome, and Ji-hyo from Running Man is Lee's wife which was nice to see. And it does have one good laugh out loud joke about a birthday cake. It's better than a Netflix original, but nothing you'd put at the top of the list for people to watch in modern korean cinema.
I will fucking cut yo
Wait what?
Oh, there's two films called Unstoppable.
Carry on then.
I really like TWINE, the Christmas problem notwithstanding. Sophie Marceau is fantastic in it and elevates the whole thing.
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Looking back the villains in TWINE were like the Bane and Talia in Dark Knight Rises.
Also maybe I just haven't listened very closely to the others but Skyfall's lyrics seem to map much closer to the film than most Bond themes.
Edit: these soundtracks fuck
If you're going to test a sound system, you need to hit the Fury Road
Prometheus - Life Suite
Full dynamic composition
Bladerunner 2049 - Mesa
Test out that sub
Monster Hunter World - Zinogre's Theme
Because it's fucking awesome and these games have better music than 99% of movies
When the horns start up in the song
jesus its amazing
Another recommendation: if you want a Jewish comedy version of Rachel Getting Married, I highly recommend Shiva Baby, which I just saw and which is one of my favorite movies I've seen lately.
Plan B is funnier, but Spontaneous was the better of the two. Both are worth watching.
On the other hand, I enjoyed Purple Noon a lot more. Sure, it's nasty and cynical, but it has a much better understanding of what the story is it's telling. There's a tension to Minghella's film that stems from him trying to tell Highsmith's story, which requires Tom to be something of a psycho, and also making Tom a character of tragic proportions, and that tension isn't altogether productive. Sure, an adaptation can be a retelling and this can be interesting, but this time around I felt I was watching the Wicked or Maleficent (or Cruella, I guess) version of the Tom Ripley origin story, and it no longer works for me. Though I definitely see how Matt Damon would crush on Jude Law in his mid-twenties, even if that Jude Law is an entitled rich brat.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
The shootout at the opera is yet another point in this movie where it’s not afraid to diverge from convention. A lengthy, silent shootout set to Puccini’s Tosca is just weird enough and sublime to continue to elevate this overlooked film
Ugh and he’s drunk and almost crying now, pounding “Vespers” and quietly brooding. Sad Bond.
I love it when the series actually shows something that seems like a thing a real spy might do
As the Canadian agent sneaks out before whatever physical horror Bond is about to deliver upon the Algerian, she whispers to Bond a nearly inaudible, “Thank you.”
Again, it’s these convention-defying moments of humanity that really elevate these films. Bond leaves the scene, purpose renewed, having gotten his vengeance but in the same measure proving his evolution from flailing brute to restrained professional capable of seeing the bigger picture and his role in it.
Don’t sleep on this one. Between the continued storyline, the more intimate compositions and exchanges, and the bold styling (it’s shot on low-grain celluloid!), it’s one of the series’ best.
Every single action scene in Quantum of Solace is incoherent to the point of dizzying frustration, this one included. The only thing more incoherent than its action scenes was its plot. Also, John Woo did the whole "gun fights set to classical opera music" 20+ years earlier, and had his "Hollywood moment" over a decade before Quantum hit theaters. So I wouldn't say it was unconventional so much as a poorly-done derivative (it also tried to crib from the Bourne films) with a bigger budget.
I might be misreading your comment a bit, but I didn't see the kiss as chaste or platonic. I thought there was a lot of passion in the kiss, just not the sort that leads to normal Bond movie sexytime. More like that despite the fact that they've both, very recently, faced down and overcome some of their personal demons, they're still very much not in a good place; so while there's something, or a potential something there, they realize that going there would be bad. But totally ignoring that potential isn't great either, so there's this kiss that ends up feeling far more intimate and mature than all the other 'Bond fucks' action in all the other films combined. It was good.
Maybe “chaste” is the wrong word, but it’s such an empty physical thing for both parties, especially for Olga Kurylenko’s character, who just walks away right after. Bond’s still scrambling to figure out who he is supposed to be and doesn’t look like he’s even on the same planet. He’s stuck in his head, she’s in her head, and both of them are just done for a minute. But there’s still that intimacy of shared trauma and motivation that gives the context of them being closer than just two colleagues.
To clarify, it isn't a good movie but it's also not in the vein of "so bad that it's good". It was entertaining in the same way a lot of 90s action movies were entertaining.
It features an american family being the MOST american family(tm) where they are just continuously making the most stupid decisions over and over again.
It also went some places I never would have expected.
Oh and some absolutely horrid animal CGI.
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King of the Monsters.
I wouldn't agree at all. You can like load it up on youtube right now, like I did in the last thread. It's quite coherent. The cuts are a little quicker between the opera scenes and the fight scenes then I'd like, but it's still readable.
It’s a direct sequel, so it’s not trying to be anything on its own. It’s in the same vein as ESB, or Dead Man’s Chest, or Civil War. None of these films work in a vacuum, but none of these films try to. They’re still good films, bront.
Also I’m really excited to see this last film in the series. Fukunaga is such a talented director and in every interview so far he’s been so confident in the film.