An incredibly late thought filled blog about Skyfall

When it comes to recent films I'm worried that I've become one of two things;

1. I'm worried that I've got to a point where I'm too old to enjoy current big summer/event films without thinking that this "is a bit silly".
2. I'm worried that if I ever watch another Adam Sandler film (or God forbid I actually watch a film by someone  like Kevin James) I'll actually enjoy it and my brain will reconfigure itself to this pathetic level and never recover.

If number 2 happens I'll just kill myself. it'll save everybody a bit of time and prevent people having to read a useless blog post, but it's the first point I'm worried about. One of the main things I like about films like that is switching off the brain and just being entertained without having to think too much and seeing how much popcorn you can get in your mouth at any one time. There should be nothing to worry about watching superheroes fighting inter dimensional aliens and then having a takeaway after. I first felt about point number 1 after watching The Avengers. I felt it again after recently watching Skyfall.

The main feeling I felt after watching Skyfall was feeling a bit underwhelmed, but that may be the fact that I was expecting truly great things after hearing so many positive things in the media, specifically in the places that you wouldn't normally expect a good write up (Hello Sunday Times Culture magazine). I mean, it's not bad but it's just......well I'll get to that.

As it starts, it features Bond running after some guy who has stolen a bit of a laptop from another guy who's clearly the victim of the government's new crackdown of leaving flash drives on trains, as he's been stabbed (or shot, I'm not sure but he was bleeding and that, I feel, was the main point). Bond displays an unusual thing on his face called "emotion" and then continues his running. He then gets in a car with Moneypenny (sorry SPOILERS) and he fulfills the sexist requisite of the Bond character by implying she hasn't got the balls to drive like a man and therefore crashes it into the bad guy as much as possible before they both jump onto bikes, because the car simply isn't phallic enough. They then do stuff which ends up with them both on top of the a train and M tells Moneypenny to shoot the bad guy, which makes her shoot Bond (coz, y'know girls cant shoot straight and talk about hair and boys and stuff). He falls into the opening credits and pops up at the bottom of a Heineken bottle in an undisclosed location. Centreparks if I'm not mistaken.

Back in Rainy London, M stops watching Jeremy Kyle because Ralph Fiennes comes into say that she's killed enough people and can now retire. Before she can say "heating allowance" a bomb goes off and blows up MI5 (or is it MI6? what's the difference? is MI6 the "Bond universe" one so to confuse movie going terrorists?) Bond sees this on his convenient Sony TV that picks up BBC news anywhere in the world and decides that he has just enough time to come back before he loses j.bond@mi6.gov.uk email address to Jonathan in accounting and he'll have to resign himself to being j.bond1 forever.

So Bond goes through the Physical and mental test and we're now worried as he can't shoot straight anymore, because he hurt his arm earlier. Probably. However despite having a lower competency score than Frank Drebin, M allows him to go out and try and do stuff without killing anybody before getting information. Something he failed ENTIRELY in Quantum of Solace as he killed pretty much everyone he wasn't supposed to. Luckily this time he finds the guy he's after and catches him before he falls to his death and interrogates him. But as his arm is a bit poorly, the poor guy falls to his death.  Bond searches his stuff and seeing there's a contractual obligation that he can't go two films without going to a casino, he find a poker chip. Bond then goes to Shanghai, meets the bond girl "most likely to die in this film" and has an exchange of dialogue so bad Roger Moore would've questioned it before filming.

In "the morning after" Bond and soon to be dead bond girl go on a boat to meet the villain of the piece and somehow wind up as prisoners by the time they get to his bad guy island. The film then actually then begins to turn in to a proper Bond film as Javier Bardem (who apparently was the only one to turn up and have some fun) walks out telling a story about rats and suggests that he fancies Bond.

Bond retorts by flirting back and internally considering that for once sex was not a preferable escape route. The unluckiest bond girls in the world fulfills her destiny as having a completely undignified death and Bond finally thinks enough is enough and kicks the shit out of everyone and takes Javier to Britain.

However the new Q is a complete smug-arse and plugs Javier's laptop into MI6 and all hell breaks loose.

Christ I'm getting bored of this. Look; shit happens, they go to Scotland and Bond kills everyone and M gets in the way and dies. Ralph Finnes becomes M and Moneypenny becomes, well Moneypenny.

As strange as it may seem from the sarky shit I've written I actually did enjoy this film. But there was a lot that bugged me. I think what's really wrong with Skyfall is that it can't decide what it wants to be. Obviously it wants to be a celebration of Bond over fifty years (which in all honesty is something to be proud of. Only Star Trek & Doctor Who is closing in on it's fiftieth anniversary and you get the impression that celebration party would be Bond trying to ditch the Dr and Kirk and Picard with an excuse of having to get up in the morning to fill in paper work on why he's trashed his 15th Aston Martin) and that's not bad thing, but it's playing against the reboot that only happened a few years ago with Casino Royale and by mentioning exploding pens (Golendeye, philistines) and having the Aston Martin DB5 form Goldfinger as a major plot point, then it takes the continuity on a trip through a paradox so confusing you'd want to watch Primer for a more straightforward narrative.

One of the other problems is that Daniel Craig appears to be trying his hardest to accommodate a script with comedy beats in it but he just doesn't look comfortable. At all. I'm not saying he's not a competent Bond, he holds the action brilliantly and looks good in a suit, but there's something about it that just doesn't fully convince that he's Britain's greatest spy. However, on the plus side the cinematography is wonderful, it's truly beautifully shot. Especially Scotland. Also, props must go to Judi Dench who fully conveys the full weight of all that shit that's been thrust upon her (mostly her own doing, if we're honest) and makes Bond cry. I assume Geoffrey Palmer cried as well.

Some smug people in the critics circles mention that the ending is like Home Alone because of all the the traps they set for the bad guys. Except that in Home Alone Kevin doesn't actually kill Joe Pesci as otherwise he would spend the rest of his life in therapy and foster homes.

the thing is with Skyfall, if you hold it up to the rest of the Bond series then it doesn't really work. But the thing is since they rebooted the series with Casino Royale, none of the Daniel Craig films work. Bond grew up and changed. Sure they still have the references and the cars and the weapons that we're all familiar with but it could never continue the way it used to be as those times of raised eyebrows have long gone. Bardem evokes the time when Bond villians were larger than life but it it also goes to prove how dull bad guys are in a millions other sub standard thriller films these days. Barden brings a new kind of fun, that's what the series needs now.

Casino Roayle set a precedent to what the bond films can be. Skyfall doesn't help this cause, but the next few hopefully take the franchise in the way that's it meant to. Forward. But hey, it make a billion at the box office, so what do I know?

a review thing

So I'm doing a film review.....

Warm Bodies:

So you know that feeling when you're attracted to a walking corpse?

No me neither, its fucked up. But this is one of the situations that's covered in Warm Bodies, the second Zom-rom-com that's ever existed in modern cinema and the first to have a zombie as the male lead (that I'm aware of). Our Undead hero named 'R' has the advantage over other movie zombies of having a Joss Whedon inspired internal dialogue, and despite being dead, being more attractive than everyone you know. (Seriously, his hair in the film is impeccable and he's fucking dead.) R spends his undead days in an airport shuffling about and grunting to his best friend 'M' (sadly not played by Judi Dench) and collecting trinkets and being cool in his Boeing 747 converted home, listening to the films groovy soundtrack. Then, on a food recon mission, R stumbles into Julie (whilst eating her twat of a boyfriends brain) and does what any love struck man would do, smear his entrails over her face and take her back to his home. From here Julie realizes that R isn't going to open her up like a box of malteasers and feast on the chocolaty goodness. What begins is a pathway to what potentially could be a revolution for the lives of every living and unliving thing on the planet.

Having a dead guy for a leading man is something of a risky choice seeing that he's not much of for talking, but having a fully functioning internal dialogue is a genius idea and Hoult delivers it very well.
Of course the internal dialogue was an original idea adapted from the book, Coincidentally called Warm Bodies (written by Isaac Marion, who incidently was interviewed by my brother on his awesome website right here).
Teresa Palmer (who I'd never heard of and imdb does nothing to help me in this regard) plays Julie as a smartarse army brat you'd expect what with John Malkovich has her Dad, but gives her enough depth that you don't want R to eat her limbs.

As with pretty much every zombie film, the metaphors for living your life are thrown around with a carefree abandon. There's a great little moment at the start where R bemoans being able to connect with people which leads to a flashback to a pre-virus time where everyone in the airport are staring into their phones and tablets, completely oblivious to each others existence.

The overriding theme that comes across (not often subtly) is the importance of connecting with your fellow human. As R gets further down the line of potentially regaining his humanity, we get the reminders of what happens if the connection is completely lost if the form of the "Bonies". These skinless super-evil zombies are essentially the poor CGI creations from 'I am Legend' loaned out to a film with a lesser budget, they look out of place but they are indeed, the necessary evil that is needed to inspire an unlikely alliance that propels the story forward.

There's not much else to say about this to be honest. It's a great little film that occasionally has a different take on the zombie film and has great soundtrack and a good central performance from Hoult and solid support from Palmer and that bloke from "Hot Tub Time Machine". If your stuck for something to watch then it's a great compromise. I know this as I wanted to see Les Miserables but there wasn't a decent showing for it.

Next time, an attempt to write something about Skyfall and why I was pissed off about there being an advert for a VW Beetle within 5 minutes of it starting.

After that, probably Total Recall again.