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All things Bond...James Bond. Bond 24 Title announced.


The Natural

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DVDVR Films project, JT?

You know, doing a thinly veiled Bond formula ripoff but as a hard R isn't the worst idea ever.

 

No one will be using the license for that shitty Alpha Protocol spy-fy RPG game anytime soon. 

 

Shall we go Uwe Boll and do a video game movie and have Sade provide the vocals for the theme?   Our movie is sure to be more awesome than the game so we can also get royalties from the re-launch of the game franchise.

 

The notion that:

 

Blofeld seems to have formed SPECTRE for the sole purpose of getting back at Bond because Blofeld has daddy issues.

 

nearly took me out of the movie.  Thank God that Big Dave as Nise Oddjob was fucking king sized and the Holy Trinity of M, Q, and Moneypenny were also awesome.  

 

So, Sam Mendes's veiled jab at the Russian government was not so veiled.   RIP Mr. White.

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On the topic of theme songs, I kind of hate that Muse didn't get a Bond theme. You can kind of hear what they were working on for when Skyfall came out on their "The 2nd Law" record with "Supremacy." That song would have worked loads better than the terrible Sam Smith song we got in Spectre. I don't fault them at all for striking the Adele iron while it was hot.

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Supremacy fit in a lot better with You Know My Name and Another Way To Die theme of rock anthems to Craig's Bond.   Someone did the work and put them together, looks fine:

 

 

As for the next Bond, if it's not Idris, there's one guy who looks like he was born for the part:

b03620d8b83b38d10e42b859ab26b55a.jpg

Neville Longbottom

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My god Live and Let Die is just unrelenting in its "virtually all black people are criminals" racism.

I always remember the racism being more casual than it actually is.

 

The movie adoptation of Live And Let Die doesn't really offend me.  It is the most profitable blaxploitation movie ever filmed.  

 

I love the notion that Kananga's master plan to flood the world with cheap heroin seems to have has racism built into it.  

 

He counts on Bond underestimating him because of jingoist superiority and Kananga routinely makes Bond look like an idiot in the first and second acts of Live And Let Die..

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I think the difference is most blaxploitation films have a black hero too not a white British guy. It's just absurd how damn near every single black person in the movie is part of Mr. Big/Kananga's criminal empire, spread between three wholly separate locations.

Yaphet Kotto fucking kills it though. He's extraordinary in the role.

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I think the difference is most blaxploitation films have a black hero too not a white British guy. It's just absurd how damn near every single black person in the movie is part of Mr. Big/Kananga's criminal empire, spread between three wholly separate locations.

Yaphet Kotto fucking kills it though. He's extraordinary in the role.

The white (british) guy is usually the heel in those. :)

Note: just learned corbin bernsen's first credited role was as "boy" in three the hard way.

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I think the difference is most blaxploitation films have a black hero too not a white British guy. It's just absurd how damn near every single black person in the movie is part of Mr. Big/Kananga's criminal empire, spread between three wholly separate locations.

 

Bond is indeed the hero, but his black adversaries aren't a bunch of inept buffoons or minstrel types; they are serious people.  The story of the first act of LALD is all about Bond's jingoist pride getting bruised as he is constantly getting clowned and blundering into traps because he does not take his enemies seriously.  The scene where Kananga's men trail Bond to Harlem is priceless.

 

"You can't miss him.  It is like following a cue ball, man."

 

As far as the expanse of Kananga's criminal enterprise goes, it's pretty obvious that Kananga's character is a pastiche of Papa Doc Duvalier and Frank Lucas.  Kananga has an insular criminal infrastructure similar to Lucas and protects his empire just as much with superstition and subterfuge as he does with muscle and firearms. 

 

His master plan seems to take foolish white pride into account as he (successfully) surmises that his enemies will always be a step behind him because:

 

1. He's got a clairvoyant on the payroll

 

and

 

2. None of his Caucasian adversaries would ever believe that a bunch of black people could run that sort of expansive criminal enterprise..

 

And yeah, Yaphett Kotto's Dr. Kananga is one of the great unsung Bond villains, IMO.  Dude is brilliant and absolutely fucking ruthless.

 

Bond: My name is...

 

Mr. Big:  Names is for tombstones, baby.

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The best thing about the novel, Live And Let Die, is that when you read it, you find out that the whole Felix Leiter being mauled by sharks scene from the License to Kill movie actually comes from this book.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Fuck both versions of LALD. Both are terrible. 

 

The thing that bothered me most about the Sam Smith song for Spectre is that it dropped the chord progression that had been in CR-QoS-Skyfall. That was kind of the musical motif for the Craig movies and then Spectre just drops it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

LaLD really annoyed me with the "EVERY black person in the film is totally evil, they're all part of the Dark Conspiracy" nonsense. And what the hell was even the point of the whole deception with the Mr. Big gimmick? That didn't seem to accomplish anything that Kananga wasn't already doing anyway.

Finally saw Spectre; and my god, what a disappointment. The best thing I can say about it is, well, at least it was better than Quantum of Solace. That's mostly because Sam Mendes is very good at directing exciting yet coherent action scenes, while Marc Forster resembles the polar opposite of that statement. But jesus, the script for Spectre is pretty fucking terrible (what happened to Monica Belluci?). I'm tired of every single Craig Bond being a never-ending origin story for the character, especially since they do the exact same goddamn "Bond defies orders and goes rogue" subplot in every single film. What's worse is the movie never once made me feel like it's a big deal that THIS IS FUCKING S.P.E.C.T.R.E. WE'RE DEALING WITH; nobody even spells out what the title is an acronym for! If they'd done the exact same movie but just kept the group's old "Quantum" name, it would've felt entirely appropriate. And the movie's palpably desperate attempt to be a greatest-hits highlight reel of the Bond franchise was aggravating, the sort of fanboy pandering which comes off as clumsy, like the movie is a dog doing a trick and begging for you to pat it on the head.

Worst of all, Cristoph Waltz is a raging letdown as Blofeld, either miscast or misdirected or both. Seriously, they couldn't even shave his damn head? Others have already mentioned how lame his new backstory is, so there's no need for me to belabor that, but it is worth repeating that it's really fucking lame. His final fate is so shockingly anticlimactic that I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing (really, it's worth noting that all of the villains go out like total bitches in this movie, their defeats are more appropriate for the Wet Bandits rather than fuckin' Spectre). The film is trying SO hard to convince me that Blofeld is Bond's ultimate nightmare opponent, just like it insists that Madeline is Bond's ultimate dream girl, and it was a really horrible case of a movie telling us stuff rather than showing us stuff.

On the plus side, Lea Sedoux and Batista were awfully good; and it's nice to see the team of M/Q/Moneypenny/Not-Agent-Coulson all getting their own sidequest. As mentioned, the action scenes are all very well done, particularly a car chase which was actually good enough for me to go "hey, this car chase is good" when normally I'm bored to death by every damn one of those things nowadays. Craig is dependable as ever, although his performance does feel a little bit tired and perfunctory this time around (that's appropriate, movie #4 is where most Bonds just stop even trying to give 100%). So it's a damn shame that the storyline and the characterizations were so weak this time around.

EDIT: and oh yeah, motherfuck Andrew Scott and everything related to him. Terrible actor. And the movie doesn't even try to pretend he's not a villain (while oddly still ACTING like he's not supposed to be a transparent villain), he's basically playing Moriarty pretending to be John Ashcroft. It's awful, heavy-handed "social commentary" of the worst kind, up there with the "shock and awe campaign" line from Avatar. Coupled with such a bad performance in the role, it takes an already-shaky movie and knocks out a few more load-bearing pillars. And really, his demise... I'd say such an embarrassing fate was deserved for such an ignominious asshole, but it's yet another example of the laughably bad villain deaths in this movie and so I couldn't even enjoy the look on the schmuck's face when it happened.

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LaLD really annoyed me with the "EVERY black person in the film is totally evil, they're all part of the Dark Conspiracy" nonsense. And what the hell was even the point of the whole deception with the Mr. Big gimmick? That didn't seem to accomplish anything that Kananga wasn't already doing anyway.

 

MI-6 and CIA were already on to Kananga.  Bond is called in because agents who were already investigating the heroin operation were turning up dead.. 

 

Mr. Big was invented to throw MI-6 and the CIA off the trail bit and allow Kananga to directly oversee some of the operations of the heroin scheme..

 

Yes, it is a needlessly convoluted plan and yes, the alter ego of Mr. Big is a painfully obvious caricature of Frank Lucas, Nicky Barnes and other prominent Black gangsters / drug dealers of the time so the character is a not so veiled jab / parody of real life crime figures and their organizations.

 

As far as Dark Conspiracies go, we should be lucky to get such good billing.   Kananga makes Bond look like an idiot at almost every turn up to the third act and neither he nor his minions are depicted as buffoons or minstrels.  They outfox Whitey because they act the way Whitey expects them to act while in actuality they are three or four steps ahead of Whitey. 

 

They are so far ahead of Whitey that MI-6 has to call in a Double 0 to sort things out.

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  • 1 month later...

 

And the Oscar for best song goes to... the Worst Bond Movie song ever! Great job, the Academy~!

NO_RLY.jpg

 

Lulu and Madonna say hi. 

 

(So does Jack White, but that's just my opinion.)

 

Not just you.  That Jack White / Alicia Keys theme blew goats.

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It's definably not a good Bond song, but I prefer to the Keyes/White track as well.

Still, it won an Oscar why?

 

Because no one in the Academy gives a shit about Best Original Song.  Seriously, one year the only two nominations were Rio and The Muppets.  Now listen, I love the Muppets, but if that's all they could get, you don't have very many people in the Academy paying attention to or stumping for this award.

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It's definably not a good Bond song, but I prefer to the Keyes/White track as well.

Still, it won an Oscar why?

.

Also because no one saw The Hunting Ground, the movie the Lady Gaga song came from. 

 

And because no one stuck around to see the credits roll for 50 Shades and hear the kickass song by The Weeknd.

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IIRC, they changed the qualifying process for Best Original Song a few years ago.  It takes quite a bit for a song to get through.  So couple that with a category few care about anyway, and we're lucky they remember to vote for anything at all.

 

Plus, I suspect The Weeknd was hurt by no one wanting to say "Oscar-winning film 50 Shades of Grey."

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  • 5 months later...

I read in the paper that one of Dan Craig's stunt doubles from Skyfall and Spectre was in Australia shooting Thor 3. They asked him which of the movie's stars should be the next Bond. He said Chris Hemsworth.

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