f13.net

so.... first?

There's a (new?) trailer up at 007.com (http://www.007.com/), it touches a little more on the plot than the previous one. It may not be totally new, but it was new for me.

Anyway, this is pretty much the only film on my radar. The trailer looks awesome, and it'll be interesting to see a bond movie that's a direct continuation. I seem to remember two were connected by Bonds wedding to Moneypenny, but I might be wrong. On that note... whatever happened to Moneypenny :(

My only concern is the turnaround time. Considering they concluded filming a while back that's pretty short downtime between films. I just hope they didn't rush to capitalise on the success of the previous one.

Whoever gets to cast bond girls has possibly one of the best jobs in the world too.

That new trailer looks pretty good.  I really liked the change to the Bond series that came with Casino Royale.

That looks even better than Casino Royale, and I thought that was a great film.  I just continue to worry that the studio execs will decide to push it back to "Fill in a summer scheduling hole left by the writers strike" the way Star Trek and Harry Potter were. 

He never married Moneypenny.

You're thinking of the Lazenby one where the bird got killed in the car accident at the end.

It was an awful lot like Casino Royale in that regard.

I'm stoked.  Daniel Craig is an awesome Bond.

Daniel Craig is pretty great in general. Seen most of the stuff he's done now. I feel bad, cuz I talked shit the first time casting was announced (you gotta admit, Clive Owen would have been good too).

Clive Owen still would've been better - not just "good too." Craig just happened to slip into the role better than expected and better than the other bonds since Connery (which isn't exactly QUITE THE TASK)

I like Clive Owen.. but man he just doesn't say Bond to me.  That movie would have also been completely different if it would have been Owen over Craig.

Owen is alot better at playing scummier roles like in Shoot'em Up or Sin City.

He's simply a lot more versatile than Craig.

Croupier, Children of Men, Closer, Elizabeth, Bourne Identity, etc.

The guy is just good. At everything. He's on the short list with surviving reasonably young actors that are fucking awesome with Johnny Depp. Craig is not. Craig is a dapper meathead. Though I'd like to see if he can turn out I, Lucifer without making me choke on vomit.

agreed that Owen is more versatile, but I'm with others. Craig is a better Bond.

Craig is a great Bond. Owen would have been good too, but hey, if you want to see Owen in an action movie, see Shoot 'Em Up NOW.

What?

Owen wasn't in Elizabeth. Craig was.

I'm also guessing that you never saw "Our Friends in the North" or a lot of the TV stuff that Craig has done over the years. Owen has been in some diverse films and I like him a lot but of words used to describe his performances, versatile is not one of them. He plays every role in pretty much exactly the same way. Has done ever since he was in Chancer years ago. 

EDIT: I understand now: Owen was in Golden Age and not the first one.

I forgot that Craig was the psycho Jesuit in Elizabeth.

Theme song from Alicia Keys and Jack White (http://www.thirdmanrecords.com/).  I like Alicia Keys, but this song is kinda crappy.  As far as Bond themes go, it's down there with that fucking Madonna one.  Even Thunderball puts them to shame.

I disagree. I think it's pretty cool and different.

You're awesome.  I now owe you a drink, reason being that's my take EXACTLY.

Some people shouldn't take the fucking gig if they don't know what a Bond Song should sound like.  Madonna should have had her organs removed for hers.

I thought the Garbage one was fucking awesome.  That's how you do it and make it 'updated'.

'The World is not enough' is one of the best bonds songs of all time at least in my opinion and easily on par with 'Goldfinger' and 'Diamonds are forever' as far as Bond theme songs are concerned. Madonna's 'Die another day' was a travesty in comparison. Hell let Dame Shirley Bassey do a fourth one already.

But I also thought that the movie 'the world is not enough' was one of the best bond installments so I'm biased in that way.

Agreed, although I think Live and Let Die was the all time best.

I also try and pretend that all the Brosnan bond films after Goldeneye didn't happen.

That would be a shame. Tomorrow Never Dies (with Michelle Yeoh) was a very good Bond flick. It's only after that one that the Brosnan Bond movies started to suck it.

The problem with this film will be that they are still using the same shitty screenwriters they've been using since The World is Not Enough.

Craig will be awesome.
The supporting cast will be awesome.
The special effects will be great.
I'm optimistic about the director.

But the script will spiral into an incoherent mess about half way through.

It is possible that the death spiral will start much earlier because of the need to carry forward angst from the last film. These guys cannot write angst.

Or dialogue.


Casino Royale is a great Bond film so long as you walk out right where the car flips over - and try to avoid listening to the painful exposition around how to play poker.


The only English language film that Purvis and Wade wrote before Bond 19 was Plunkett and Macleane. A film so bad you had repressed all memory of it until just now.

He might have meant Elizabeth: The Golden Age.  He played Sir Walter Raleigh in that one.  Of course, he might want people to forget that he ever appeared in that movie.

Wait, what? Plunkett and Macleane was bad? Get the fuck out.

You are still repressing.

Oh yea. I'm repressing allright. I'm repressing the massive boner in my pants that i get when someone mentions Plunkett and Macleane.  :grin:

/rerail

Oh, look at that, I was right.

Where do I pick up my fee?

From the end of my (still) massive boner.  :drill:

Saw this last night. It's a solid action movie, although it could have done with another 20 minutes or so of plot evenly distributed throughout the film. What plot there is is barely enough to link the action segments together. Overall I was entertained, if not wholly satisfied.

Also:

Do you have any idea how hard it's going to be avoid clicking that spoiler tag for 9 fucking days?
Ass.

This film hasn't come out in the US yet?

No. The 14th.

Fucker.

In that case, welcome the the rest of the world for pretty much every other film ever released ever.  :awesome_for_real:

I loved the last Bond movie (other than the Lord Of The Rings-style seven endings), but this one bored me stiff.  I started picking holes in the continuity and physics, which is always a bad sign.


I got excited when they found the Fremen reservoirs, but there was no wormsign so that came to nothing.  I had hopes that "JamesBond" would turn out to be a killing word.

Well, I was entertained but I'd like to find the editor and cure him of his amphetamine addiction and then beat him bloody senseless with his Avid manual. Unlike others on this board, I liked the Bourne films and I liked the shooting style and quick cut editing.  I thought it fit in well with the style and tone of the movies.  But not in this film which has budget and has style and has Aston fucking Martins. You can afford to dwell on the cars and the stunts and the women more when you've got money and you don't need to do the handheld shaky cam stuff at all.  It put me right off.  As did the constant juxtaposition of action sequence to some other sequence of little to no consequence (the horse race and some other such scene).  Fuck you - I want to watch Bond kicking arse not some poncey shots of people in a crowd watching people riding horses.  On the other hand, the Tosca scene almost made up for it.  It should have been longer.

As for the plot, I disagree with Endie but not enough to say anything about it here.

Well I liked the Bourne movies too, and found the shooting style there enjoyable.  However, in this film, I found, for the first time in a movie, that the cinematography was so confusingly shaky that I had no real idea what was happening for periods of several seconds at a time.  The whole rooftop chase set-piece was so pathetically obviously a sub-par repetition of the work of the very same technical team's work in the Bourne Ultimatum that I utterly lost interest, knowing exactly how it would finish (no kudos: it was drearily clear).  I also kinda wanted this grittier, more realistic Bond to tire a little by the end of what seemed like a double marathon (for the viewer, at least) of such effort.

I agree, too, that I found the horse-race intercut with the chase unnecessary, although I could see the Bond tropes it was trying to refer to (esp. View To A Kill?).

I kept looking for a parallel or the elucidation of emotional responses, or even a jarring juxtaposition in these "contrasts" but, for all that the Tosca scene was probably the best in the movie (and its end was a very nice, knowing nod to the end of Tosca), there was nothing of the beauty of, say, the fight at the end of State of Grace or even the well-done execution of Guy Ritchie's rather less subtle hare-coursing/chase scene in Snatch.

I thought the Tosca scene was a by-the-numbers and somewhat botched attempt to recreate the Diva scene from 5th Element.

As you can tell by what I was saying, the best scene for me still doesn't make it great.  The only attempt made to tie the action on stage to what was happening elsewhere was the bit of the opera they didn't actually show (the window scene, in Tosca).

I loved Casino Royale. I will not see this movie under any circumstances. Take that shaky cam shit back to Bourne. Bond is not about that shit and it makes me steaming mad that they did this. I won't even rent this fucking movie. Fuck you lazy ass directors and editors. Fuck you all.

This.

The only thing that I can think of that can possibly any justification for it is that Marc Foster is not an action director. I liked Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction and I hear that The Kite Runner is really worth watching but none of those are action films.

Basically, he was the wrong director for a Bond film and the shaky-cam quick-cut shooting of action scenes was probably installed to cover the fact that he can't direct action.

This does not make it any better.

That's not an excuse. You just hire a fight choreographer and take his advice. You do not ruin a fucking movie with this shaky cam bullshit.

You can bitch about the minutiae all day long, but it still doesn't fix the fundamental flaw in both this and Casino Royale.  Craig just isn't fucking smug enough.  He *almost* pulled it off in a few scenes, but when he really needed to be smug and charming in the face of certain death, he failed miserably.   Bond can be gritty, but he still needs to be the smuggest bastard on the planet.

That's only a fundamental flaw if that's how you think the character should be. Personally I like this take on Bond and think he's got it right.  It's not as if he isn't smug and arrogant - the "I'm not staying in here, let's go spend lots of money on a posh hotel" scene in QoS being one of the better examples.  There's a difference between being smug arrogant and smug cheesy and I think Craig gets it right.

Yes, but I'm hoping that if they're going to continue a sense of narrative connection between the Craig Bond films, that we see an arc that develops the character a bit towards cosmopolitan hedonism. If Bond is just a glum, grim avenger, well, there are enough of those. This was one of the many many things wrong with Timothy Dalton's second Bond flick: Bond on a Death-Wish killing spree wiping out drug dealers was so not-Bond, whomever they cast to do it. I really, really liked Craig's take on Bond in Casino Royale, but the key to the character is mixing up the ruthlessness with the devil-may-care, the playboy and the killer, the soft and the brutal. Casino Royale, like a lot of revisitations of genre character's "origins", lets you come away with a new understanding of what's driving the character--so for example, the Connery Bond's characterization as misogynistic seducer now has a great new twist to it. But they've got to consistently do something with that revisitation that keeps Bond coming back to something distinctive, keep the character from just being another grim assassin-spy.

That's why the Goldfinger "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" scene is so great, because it follows a smug, sneering Connery asking if Goldfinger expects him to talk.

Bond realizes he's going to fucking die,  not pussyfooting around and keeping him under mild guard.  He almost frantically has to convince Goldfinger that the villain is better off keeping him alive.

I haven't seen QoS yet, but I'm definitely in favor of a hard edged Bond and really like Craig.

But to toss in a semi-related tidbit, if you've been looking to pick up the older movies, amazon has the boxed set of all 21 films, Dr. No through Casino on sale for $89.

Wow, that sounds really goddamn reasonable.  Investigating.

(edit) This one? (http://www.amazon.com/James-Bond-Ultimate-Collectors-Set/dp/B000V3JGI8/ref=pd_bbs_sr_6?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1226770268&sr=8-6)  I think I missed the sale.

Ehhhhh, I enjoyed it.

It was ok. But that's one of those "OK because the stuff they fucked up in serious ways was balanced out by stuff that was pretty good and a few bits that were really good". The action cinematography in this film was, with one and a half exceptions, shit. Shit shitty shit. The Tosca scene and the hotel scene at the end were pretty decent. Maybe the airplane thing, though that was pretty by-the-numbers. The opening car chase and far worse, the chase scene on foot that follows just after that weren't just average shaky-cam stuff, they were worse than that.

Also, I very much like Craig's Bond, but next film, he's got to shake off the gloomies just a bit.

Saw this movie last night.  Reactions:

Positive: Fun.  It was a fun and action-filled movie meant for the big screen.  I like this guy as Bond and I don't know why.  Another very beautiful Bond woman.

Negative: Shaky camera stuff made me insane... almost get_up_and_leave insane.  Story was weak if not non-existent. When I left, I felt like I had watched a two hour ad for Maxim magazine.   

I was entertained but left the theater empty.  I guess that's supposed to be the value of a Bond film, but I seem to remember better writing in the older films.  I give it a 6 out of 10.  See it at a good theater, it won't be as good at home.

This is the first Bond movie without any Albert Broccoli involvement so I am not surprised to read here that the story is weak. Mrs. Broccoli was involved though!

Seeing as Albert Broccoli died in 1996, it's a fair bet that he hasn't been involved in any Bond film released since Goldeneye.  It was still produced by EON Productions which was set up by Broccoli and has produced every Bond film since Dr No. with the exception of "Never Say Never Again".

I liked it.  I thought the plot progression was reasonably intuitive, for the most part I wasn't scratching my head wondering why they were doing something.

The action scenes could have done with less shaky but, whatever.

The scene with the hotel when M comes to get Bond is worth the price of admission with the scene at the Opera being pure gravy.

Here's one other thing that was frosting my nipples a little: I could do without M whining at Bond about how he fucks the ladeez and then they end up dead. This totally does not work in a Bond movie. I don't mind Bond himself getting momentarily grim or even guilt-ridden that some woman he's had a fling with ends up dead in some baroque way. That adds emotional weight to what he'll eventually do to the villain of the film. In Casino Royale, without Bond seducing the woman in the middle of the film, Le Chiffre's scheme would have worked and M would be up shit creek. In this flick, it's not even Bond being cynical, really: she's a pretty woman, she's attracted to him, and about the only thing he gets out of his seduction is that she doesn't call in the MI.6 hounds on him that night. In both cases, M and MI.6 benefit because Bond seduces women, and M knows it. (In real-life espionage, getting scruples about luring people with sex is about as laughable as getting scruples about luring people with money.) So listening to M tut-tutting Bond is really fucking annoying, and not in a good way.

On a side note, what was the deal with the coat and boots combo Fields was wearing?  I kept waiting for her to say "Oh, I don't actually work for MI6, M just sent you a strip-o-gram!"

Did not watch this one yet. Guess I'll be going because its a long time I haven't seen a Bond film and I need some entertainment, this should fullfill these two requirements

Really.  You didn't wonder why they were doing things?

The plot is there pretty much solely to set up the action sequences, it's really nothing more.

That's pretty much the recipe for a Bond flick. Mike Myers exaggerates this in his movies.  The plot only has to explain the existence of sharks with lasers or overly elaborate ways to kill Bond. 

I gave up trying to figure out the motives & thinking of the baddies in movies a LONG time ago.  As far as the motives of high ranking career CIA, government or military people with stars on their collars are concerned, if you follow the Hollywood train of thought you would just naturally assume none of them had IQ's above 60 or enough foresight to wonder why they should tie their shoes so trying to ascribe reason or motive to characters like that is simply a waste of time.

So, I'll restate: for a recent mainstream movie, it had a fairly unambiguous and direct plot that if you start from the point that their stated goals are, somehow, sane to them in their frame of reference then their actions, mostly, logically followed.

As far as Bond films go, though,  that DID make more sense:

- Breaking into Fort Knox to explode a nuclear bomb and irradiate the US gold supply?  (In actuality, a small portion of the gold supply...) 

- Plotting to start a nuclear war so that your minions could live happily Under the Sea?

- Ditto, except live happily In Space?

- Rather than sell your uranium and top secret knowledge of nuclear physics to the highest bidder, you attempt to destabilize US rocket launches?

- Intricate plan to infiltrate NATO at the highest levels so that you can steal a helicopter to steal a top secret Russian EMP device?

- Instigate war in Asia so that you can make big money covering it?  (I think this was the grand plan....  that really wasn't much plot in that one)

etc.

I think the silly things you mentioned make more sense when you realize that they are part of a potentially bigger picture.

 

Edit:  It's a minor thing, but I really liked the way they introduced each of the cities, by working the name into the scenery and things like that.

Yes Rishathra, no spoiler is needed for that, since it's been publically announced and openly discussed that this is the second of three movies about Quantum, and that sure, it'll all make wonderful sense when you see the three together.  Hmm.  Taking the much-lauded Star Wars 1-3 route?  The fact that the last movie was great fun (probably my favourite Bond movie) and stood alone perfectly well means that there is no suxh excuse for this one being dumb until you watch the next one in a couple of years, until which time it's nonsensical bollocks.

It really didn't seem that stupid to me, though.  Just incomplete, and deliberately so, but not so incomplete that it took me out of the story.

It's been a week, I declare the spoilers dead.  :grin:

Just saw this today and enjoyed it. The camera was annoying but I lived. The one thing I think people missed is that 95% of the movie is table dressing. This isn't a movie about some idiot villain with a genius plan... it's about Bond's relationship to M and how far it can be stretched -- and if there can be redemption after stretching.

There weren't many words used to tell it, but that was the actual story we watched. Would Bond go apeshit crazy and do bad things forcing M to walk away from him, or would he get the job done and stay a "good agent" despite his crazy methods?

Bad film was Bad.


Thin and nonsensical plot.  Bad acting from everyone not British or Felix (and on that note, so many fucking accents it made things even harder to follow) and a sex scene that was thrown in there last minute because they wrapped the whole thing up and then realised that Bond hadn't FUCKED ANYONE YET.  And, really, the rape in the hotel.  Let's throw that in because the mustache twirling bad guy wasn't EVIL ENOUGH YET.

Total, total bollocks, though I still think he's the best Bond yet.  Don't ask.

Fuck stupid without the appeal of the first film.  Further, I would like to see a Bond film, not an episodic zomg you must wait and see the next 5 films shite.

Not a fan.

Amazing new theme song for the trailer :heart: (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoJRLStD9c)

Saw it yesterday. Enjoyed Craig and the relationship he has with M. Enjoyed the stuff with Felix. The action was good, when it wasn't overshakeycammed, which meant about 40% of good. Liked both girls, though neither will make my all time list. Theme song was meh, and worst of all, the bad guys were meh. Greene was way to wuss, even went he went nuts with the fire axe, too really ever seem a threat. The general was justa complete characature.

I'll give it around 6.5 out of 10.

I think the lame bad guys are the main thing that made this movie feel incomplete. I mean, laugh all you want about irradiating Fort Knox, but that at least has the ring of a Nefarious Plan to it and is fantastical enough to be memorable.  Overcharging llama herders for water is like something a really lame Captain Planet villain might do.  Heck, it's something a real-life corporation would do if there was money in it, and it probably wouldn't even make front page news.

In defense of a still silly plot, they weren't just trying to get a water monopoly over Bolivian farmers.  Bolivia was just the point of the operation that Bond happened to expose.  The general idea was to get control of water supplies all over, not just that one place.

I went to the cinema today to get entertained, and I did. That's all that matters to me. It could've been a plot about turning the moon into a gigantic cheese-factory and I might still have enjoyed it. Stop overanalyzing, already.

There was no clue to that.  They just said "what is needed worldwide?  Water."  There was no hint as to how they were going to stop it raining like a motherfucker in Scotland.

If the big reveal in the new film is that they have a way of stopping rain worldwide, which is what it would take, then it will be the Worst Plot Ever.  It would go down the Avengers (Sean Connery version) route and make Moonraker seem grittily realistic.

Were the Quantum Group able to achieve such an end, I'd mail a cheque.

Seriously, who do I make it out to ?

Just saw it. Avoided this thread until then. There was plenty of hints about this (particularly in the MI6 briefings with that cool Microsoft Surface thing). It's kind of like that Michael Crichton book about anti-global warming. If global warming isn't happening fast enough for you to get rich off of it, make it happen to hasten the pace of the money. I imagine the next movie will feature some high tech stuff in the pacific and masers from orbit and whatnot. And even if it's not, they seemed to go to lengths to make the point about the water supply anyway. It was almost like a product integration strategy for Al Gore. My guess is either they cause the global warming that gives them the monopoly on potable water, or they're just planning ahead.

This isn't the old Bond. The complaints I skimmed on page 2 I suspect will transport over to the pending Star Trek rants about how things just aren't done. The shaky cam here to me felt more like an intended divergence from Bond, to try and get to Bourne on purpose. If I was the Bond IP holder, I'd also be wondering why this upstart not-a-spy was upstaging my decades old franchise.

It was fun, the fight scenes looked realistic, and the personalities believable. Remember, this was a character reset. Bond was a "new" agent in the the last film which timeline-wise just preceded this one. The only thing that annoyed me is that Dominic Greene really should have been Gary Oldman.

I hadn't bothered to see this film given the luke-warm reception, but did get around to it last week. It was a lot better than its reputation. The villain was a bit lame, but overall it felt like a solid continuation of the Craig Bond.

Yeah, it's hardly brilliant, but it's a decent Bond flick.

He was a wrecking machine almost thru the whole movie because of an incident in the first movie.  I think that hurt the film because of his obsession.  But not a bad JB film at all.

Hopefully he'll get back to being James Bond. 

I still say Idris Elba would make an awesome James Bond.

Like +1

It's the shaky cam that really fucked this one, I think, not the plot (which is actually closer to real life than most people think.)

Well they had to gritty up Bond after Jason Bourne came in and stole the genre from him, shoved a rolled up magazine down his throat and tossed his body into the river.

Actually I think the rapid cuts did more to destroy the film than the shaky cam. I could have handled the shaky cam in the couple of seconds it took me to make sense of the scene they had switched to a different camera shot and I'd have to start over. So most actions scenes were just a jumble of blurry images I would barely have time to figure out who was who before suddenly the camera was looking at them from above and I had to figure out which black blob was which by which time the camera was now facing them and I could see one guy's back, etc., etc. It really killed the fight scenes and most of the chase scenes and that was a pity because the rest of the film held well enough together for me to enjoy if the action scenes had been good. I mean water theft is hardly fucking exciting by itself but as long as it's providing a semi-plausible basis for ass-kicking, making out with hot girls and general mayhem it's fine.

See, and here I was thinking he Bourne movies were pretty much ass.

The Bourne movies were directorially ass, but the stories were ok. Quantam of Solace was decent right up until the final set piece which was down's syndrome retarded in the extreme.