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Saurabh- I’m not a big Bond fan- but I’m looking forward to this one because I’m curious to see what Mendes does with the Bond franchise- plus it’s Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench together in one movie! The teaser looks great.
I saw the Looper trailer- looks promising. BTW Since you always bring up all the Imran rom-com’s every time I dislike a trailer- how come so much excitement for Cocktail and so little for Skyfall? 😛
Huge fan of the franchise though admittedly Bond hasn’t been the same since the end of the Cold War! Casino Royale was an excellent film though (of course this was based on the one Ian Fleming novel that never saw a proper movie.. there was a spoof with David Niven at one point) this should really have been done as a period piece.
Ami, you will never stop pulling my leg right. the thing is once u like a genre too much, u expect the best from it- same is the case with me in action. also somehow bond has never been my fav (though i have seen all the bonds more than once)-huge, huge fan of ‘bourne’ though. according to me the best action film to have ever been made in hwood is the ‘1st die-hard’. nothing and i repeat nothing can match upto it
Bourne has left everything in its wake……simply amazing. It is remembered as a classic. I loved them all and it has to be Matt Damon’s defining moment in his career
“Bond’s loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her. As MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost. ”
Quantum of Solace was really a damp squib after the gripping “Casino Royale”…hope this one puts the series back on track.
yes absolutely fantastic trailer. And though Bond has not been quite the same without the Cold War there is still something inexplicably thrilling about a Bond film! And yeah Bardem looks quite the sicko here!
The icon’s grown past its historical roots. I’ve never been a great fan of the series on a consistent basis but when it gets the world and the character right (as a number if not all the Connery films did, as Craig has done especially in his first outing) it’s pretty irresistible.
Agreed. I know some might find this unthinkable, but Craig is probably my favorite Bond. He reminds me of the late great Steve McQueen – effortlessly cool yet brutal.
If anyone thinks that’s unthinkable they haven’t been paying attention. And actually I do see what you mean with McQueen. Certainly the two actors do share a similar physical presence. Bullitt could easily double for Bond these days.
somehow didn’t much care for this show, the few episodes I watched. Was expecting great things here but was quite disappointing. Wasn’t really the period equivalent of Mad Men in any sense. Perhaps it got better later. I wouldn’t know.
I’ve heard great things about Sherlock. On Downton Abbey. Saw various bits of the first season and it’s definitely well done but to be honest I’m rather bored of this sort of ‘nostalgia’. the whole Upstairs Downstairs (though I adore this show) deal. The British turn to period drama with a hopeless regularity! Again the show itself is fine, it just isn’t interesting enough this late in the day. And of course that whole fantasy is fed. One likes these period pieces because one can indulge in those old class structures and so forth without guilt!
Yeah that’s more or less why I’m not really interested in Downton Abbey. Sherlock actually represents the opposite of this kind of thing btw. The modernization of the icon and the stories has been quite successful. If there’s a gripe here it’s that they are really slow to produce these and there’s only six or seven episodes between two seasons which given it’s an English show is standard but really wish they’d press on. In fact since you haven’t started seeing it I’d even advise you just wait till they’re done with the series before picking it up.
on a related note Norwegian Wood is now available on streaming. In case you haven’t yet seen it. I know this one split reviewers down the middle but I was on the positive side.
“Adele’s voice belies her age”
Arti –shes in her early 20s (as far as I know )!!
Oh, Dya mean her voice seem more ‘mature’ than her age…
Yes-like her voice timber
Gud 2 see an English artiste doing well anyways
This is a damn good number by Adele. Skyfall just seems building up to the greatest Bond event since I started seeing the Bond series as a kid with Brosnan. (I caught up with the older ones later, but Brosnan was my initiation to Bond).
Sam Mendes, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Roger Deakins, John Logan, Thomas Newman and now Adele. That pedigree doesn’t sound like a Bond film, but it is. Totally geared up.
Had a good listen -Yes it is one of the better bond themes
Classical mysterious pop but has orchestral tones
And adding adeles vocals laces a certain ‘edge’ & intrigue to it
Liked the earlier theme by U2s bono…dont think this reaches U2s level though
Yeah it’s iTunes no 1 downloaded & fastest to get there apparently
Good news 4 adele who’s pregnant
This is doing better in uk & best in Ireland, I think
Early reviews are in for Sam Mendes’ Skyfall , the latest film in the James Bond series. Reactions have been overwhelmingly positive so far with the phrase “Best. Bond. Ever.” being thrown about. The Times has given it 5 stars http://collider.com/skyfall-reviews-clip/202696/
November 7, 2012
Movie Review
What a Man! What a Suit!
By MANOHLA DARGIS
When James Bond dashed into Buckingham Palace in July to pick up Queen Elizabeth so they could parachute into the Olympic opening ceremony, it was tough to picture what he could do for an encore. Zip line into the next European summit meeting with Angela Merkel tucked under his arm? Wrestle nude on the frozen banks of the Volga with Vladimir Putin? Turning Britain’s royal octogenarian into a Bond girl was a stroke of cross-marketing genius that profited queen and country both, while also encapsulating the appeal of the 007 brand in the age of aerial drones.
It’s the human factor, to borrow somewhat perversely a phrase from Graham Greene, who worked for Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6. In his novel “The Human Factor,” about a double agent, Greene sought, he said, to portray the British secret service unromantically, with “men going daily to their office to earn their pensions.” Bond is wearing a silver-gray suit when he powers into “Skyfall,” the latest 007 escapade, but it isn’t cut for office work. The suit is seductively tight, for starters, and moves like a second skin when Daniel Craig in his third stint as Bond races through an atavistic opener that — with bullets buzzing and M (Judi Dench) whispering orders in his ear — puts him back on mortal, yet recognizably Bondian, ground.
And just in time too, given that he looked as if he were on the Bataan Death March in his last film, “Quantum of Solace.” Directed by a surprisingly well-equipped Sam Mendes, “Skyfall” is, in every way, a superior follow-up to “Casino Royale,” the 2006 reboot that introduced Mr. Craig as Bond. “Skyfall” even plays like something of a franchise rethink, partly because it brings in new faces and implies that Bond, like Jason Bourne, needed to be reborn. The tone is again playful and the stakes feel serious if not punishingly so. This is a Bond who, after vaulting into a moving train car, pauses to adjust a shirt cuff, a gesture that eases the scene’s momentum without putting the brakes on it.
That “Skyfall” includes a sequence on a train — a passenger one, no less — suggests that this may be very much like your granddaddy’s Bond, even without the bikinied backdrop. From the initial sequence, one of those characteristic supersize set pieces that precede the opening credits, Mr. Mendes shows that he’s having his fun with 007. The opening doesn’t just take place in Turkey, one of those putatively exotic locales adorned with woven carpets and dark-complexioned extras, it also includes smoothly choreographed mayhem in both a crowded bazaar and outdoor market. There, amid these familiar action-cinema signposts, Bond and another agency operative, the suitably named Eve (Naomie Harris), chase down a baddie as locals and oranges scatter.
Bondologists may linger over that Turkey location. Globe tripping has always been as crucial to the movies as groovy gadgets: it’s an elegant way to map the geopolitical coordinates while providing armchair adventure for the rest of us. Here, though, you have to wonder if Mr. Mendes and the writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have folded some 007 arcana into the mix. Turkey plays a major role in the second, often most critically celebrated Bond film, “From Russia With Love,” which, like this one, includes a lethal fight on a train, a formidable blond male adversary and an island headquarters. But whether the filmmakers want to intimate that this is the rightful follow-up to the rebooted Bond is less interesting than this type of longitudinal thinking the movies inspire.
One of the satisfactions of these screen spectaculars, one that Mr. Mendes nicely capitalizes on, is that they have made all of us Bondologists. We each have favorite Bonds (Sean Connery for me, followed by Mr. Craig), our preferred 007 women, outlaws, slick gizmos, sweet rides, command centers and double entendres. We know what kind of cocktail Bond savors and whom he works for and that he often behaves more like a killer than a tradecraft wizard. We also know that, like the cowboy’s six-shooter and horse, Bond’s gun and sports car are genre givens, as is a sizable body count. And while, over the years, there have been cruel, suave and silly Bonds, there is always only one Bond, James Bond. The movies have schooled us well.
Mr. Mendes, a British film and theater director whose dubious screen achievements include embalming the American dream in “Revolutionary Road,” gets Bond just right in a story that first turns on a domestic threat and then on a personal one. Mr. Mendes grasps the spy’s existential center, as typified by the ritualistic mano a mano grappling that almost every action movie now deploys to signal that, when push comes to punch, the hero can still kill with his bare hands. There’s brutal death here, but there’s also a pervading sense of mortality that makes the falling bodies register a little longer than they sometimes do in a Bond movie. As a director of films like “American Beauty” and “Away We Go” Mr. Mendes has indulged in a noxious blend of self-seriousness and condescension. There’s none of that here.
Instead he honors the contract that the Bond series made with its fans long ago and delivers the customary chases, pretty women and silky villainy along with the little and big bangs. Whether Mr. Mendes is deploying an explosion or a delectable detail, he retains a crucially human scale and intimacy, largely by foregrounding the performers. To that end, while “Skyfall” takes off with shock-and-awe blockbuster dazzle, it’s opulent rather than outlandish and insistently, progressively low-key, despite an Orientalist fantasy with dragons and dragon ladies. As Bond sprints from peril to pleasure, Mr. Craig and the other players — including an exceptional, wittily venal Javier Bardem, a sleek Ralph Fiennes and a likable Ben Whishaw — turn out to be the most spectacular of Mr. Mendes’s special effects.
saw the movie a few days ago….spellbinding…this review is very good but surprisingly no mention of Judi Bench (M) or I missed it? the movie has a very deep emotional quotient and M has a very meaty roll here…craig, javier (what an act as a villain – OSCAR written all over it), ralph, naomi….they all add their own brilliance to very-well written and directed characters……romance quotient is less and the movie ends on a rather heavy note (not mentioning much as it will be a spoiler) but it is worth every single penny spent on it and much more….
When Daniel Craig took on the role of James Bond in Casino Royale (2006), there was much talk of the real thing. Here at last was the mean, lethal, almost banter-free figure we thought Ian Fleming had invented, the ruthless, funless fellow we imagined we had always wanted. He had a licence to kill but his real licence was his angry work ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert Shaw, the great villain in From Russia with Love, than like any other Bond. He was unshaken, unstirred; dogged not feline, a terrier who made us wonder what those sleek, overdressed catlike figures had been doing these 44 years. Even his smart suits looked like overalls done by Dior – well, by Lindy Hemming, as it happens. When he said, ‘Bond, James Bond’, he was not just identifying himself as other actors had done. He was correcting the record. He was James Bond, the others were impostors, Algernons or Benedicts or something from a quite different branch of the family.
The film (directed by Martin Campbell) was well paced, and organised the old tropes elegantly around the new engine. But by the end it was already beginning to feel tired – with how many more Bond movies to come. It looked good, it was good, but there was some kind of misapprehension lurking in it. Quantum of Solace (2008), directed by Marc Forster, seemed a bit stodgy, but thoroughly faithful to the old-new premise, the labours of the travelling, rough-’em-up bulldog. It was only when I saw it again a few weeks ago – since this is the Bond movies’ fiftieth anniversary year there are places in the world where you can’t see anything on television except Bond films – that I understood. Craig and his directors thought seriousness was a virtue. They had brought a Stanislavskian notion of intensity not just to acting but to fiction. The idea was for Craig to be James Bond and to show us he was no one else. It wasn’t just a matter of dropping the wisecracks and the various excesses of style, running from Connery to Moore via Dalton and Brosnan, or to put it too speedily, from sardonic to camp via brooding and flighty. It was the assumption, which we all half-fell for, that a real James Bond was a good idea. It wasn’t an idea at all, it was a delusion. Why would we want a real James Bond, and what did we want when we thought we wanted him?
This is not quite the way the publicity for Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, has been running, but the makers of the film have in principle understood both the delusion and the question. Craig has said in an interview that he thought it was a mistake not to allow Bond to be funny, and that the new film would be different. The thought of Craig being funny brings to mind the monster doing ‘Putting on the Ritz’ in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, and he isn’t funny in Skyfall. But he does make a grim gag now and again – returning from his supposed grave he says he has been ‘enjoying death’ – he is less righteous, he is damaged, and he thinks. He is – what do you call it? – acting. And the film is often funny, even if its psychoanalytic freight finally tugs it down.
When a drowning man dissolves – the pun is in the image too – into the film’s credits, the joke is quick and allusive. The old Bond theme tune surfaces and rapidly vanishes whenever the action – the motor- bike chase across the rooftops of Istanbul, the slug-out on top of the moving train – gets a little too hokey. It’s not less exciting because it’s hokey – on the contrary – and it reminds us that in the previous two Bond films, as in several thousand other recent movies, mere explosions and the wreckage of vehicles are not action. They are just noise and expense. Q in Skyfall is not an ageing gadgeteer and not dropped from the story. He is a young nerd (played by Ben Whishaw) who gives Bond a radio and asks: ‘Were you expecting an exploding pen?’ When Bond and M, on the run, need to change cars, they switch from an up-to-date Audi (I think) to an old Aston Martin – the old Aston Martin.
This is all knowing without being obtrusive, and the film respects its lineage while both mocking it and escaping from it. It’s all about age in other ways too. Judi Dench (who has always known how to act as distinct from earnestly impersonate) is M again, but her career is about to be terminated, as a smooth-talking Ralph Fiennes tells us. When Bond reappears from his apparent death, he looks terrible, and has no doubt kept himself gaunt and unshaved as a reproach to M – she did after all tell a British agent to take a shot at him. He says that both of them have been in the game ‘maybe too long’. She says, ‘Speak for yourself’, but she must at least share his worry. MI6 itself is ageing – or at least the politicians think so – and M’s retirement is part of a larger picture of supposed obsolescence. What are old-time spies to do in the age of infinite technological intrusion? The movie’s writers (Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan) obviously want to side with tradition against the mindless modernisers but their heart’s not in it. Even M herself is aurally present on a wire while Bond is chasing through Istanbul on his bike and leaping onto a train. This is a fine effect, borrowed from the Bourne movies but put to good use. No spy is ever alone now; or rather, he is still alone enough to do the dying, but also himself spied on perpetually by his listening bosses in another place.
What’s happened in Skyfall is that some unknown enemy or enemies – if you’ve read the credits you’ll know it’s Javier Bardem – has stolen the hard drive of an MI6 computer which contains the names of all the Nato agents embedded in terrorist groups around the world. Don’t ask why the agent we see dying at the beginning was carting this sort of information around on his computer. But Bardem, playing one Raoul Silva, is not in the service of some alien country or corporation, he’s working for himself, and his only interest is mischief – and M. Once a British operative, he feels betrayed by her and seeks revenge – unlike Bond, who is a little ruffled by her willingness to have him killed in the line of her duty, but nevertheless concedes she was just doing her job. The two men are twins in a way: mother’s boys with different priorities. Bardem doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance, but he’s a little underused here: first splendidly creepy, then just another tall guy with a gun and a couple of disguises. The movie is not really interested in him; only in his interest in M. Silva blows up MI6 headquarters, callously tortures and kills a beautiful French sidekick called Séverine (Bérénice Marlohe in real life, but I would like to think she has migrated from Belle de Jour), takes over various disused bits of the London Underground, allows himself to be caught so that he can be close to M, and … but this is where you need to see the movie for yourselves.
Skyfall has provoked wildly enthusiastic critical reactions in England; calmer manifestations in the US. It’s not impossible that patriotism plays a part here. The gimmicky Olympic association of Bond with the queen continues, since M is constantly addressed as ‘ma’am’ – you could almost confuse it with ‘M’ – and it’s clear that in many respects she is England. When Bond is given a word-association test to prove he’s fit to return to the field, one of the words is ‘country’. He says ‘England’. Normal enough for an English spy, but he says it with a peculiarly loyal, even dreamy look in his eye. This is a different Bond. When offered the prompt-word ‘murder’, he says ‘employment’, and although the answer is grim enough and appropriate enough – what else is his licence for? – there is a sense of service in the idea. This is what he does for her – for various ‘hers’. And this is how she – M, that is – talks to the government commission questioning her work, when she is trying to defend ‘old-fashioned human intelligence’ and its capacity to interrogate what is going on ‘in the shadows’:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Time and fate and Tennyson – and the passage of empire, disguised as the advent of technology and bureaucrats. Sounds like a retirement speech to me. ‘You’re living in a ruin,’ Silva says, and he’s not just describing the underground headquarters of MI6.
There was always a nationalist streak in the Bond image, and you can track fantasies of Englishness through the long series. Clearly the English don’t have quite the same fantasies about their identity as others do, but dreams of Englishness are international in all kinds of ways, and it’s no small feature of the irony and complication of these projections that perhaps the best of these Englishmen was a Scotsman. The dates are interesting: Connery, six films, 1962-71 (plus one comeback in 1983); Lazenby, one film, 1969; Moore, seven films, 1973-85; Dalton, two films, 1987-89; Brosnan, four films, 1995-2002. The Connery films were about a spy who refused to come in from the cold, who refused to believe the cold could be come in from; the Moore films were merely nostalgic for some sort of war, cold, hot or tepid. The high/low point was perhaps Octopussy, where Moore, faced with a large angry tiger, says, ‘Sit,’ and the tiger does. That’s the way we ran the empire: Carry on up the Khyber meets Gunga Din. By the time we got to the Dalton and Brosnan films even fantasy politics seemed left behind, and we were in an alternative universe, a cinema version of Playstation, although of course not without all kinds of charm. The high point here was Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies driving his BMW out of a German garage while lying on the back seat and using a remote control – literally as if he was engaged in a thumbs-only computer game.
Englishness in all these cases connotes a certain unflappability, whatever the differences in style and relation to any known historical world; an effortless superiority, experienced as a sort of inheritance rather than a skill; a worldliness that means the exotic never seems exotic to Bond himself; and a sense that Bond doesn’t really care about any of this, he might be in it just for the entertainment. The attempt to give him feelings, via the death of Diana Rigg, was a hopeless mess.
We see how different Daniel Craig is as Bond. He is not flappable, but his superiority is full of effort; he is not worldly, and he is not enjoying himself. He is gruff – he was even gruff about his helicopter trip with the queen, claiming to be shirty about having to do the job on his day off. Part of the publicity no doubt. But Bond has changed in Skyfall. Whatever his manner, he is serving his country now instead of his own self-regarding virtue. This is certainly a quaint old fantasy of Englishness – I would have thought the reigning fantasy had more to do with robbing the country – and I had better end before I start quoting Henry V.
On Skyfall I am a bit ambivalent. On the one hand it’s a superb ‘meta’-film, it’s in a sense about the Bond history and therefore constantly allusive and so on. There is additionally the whole retro riff which is quite literally interpreted in tongue-in-cheek ways throughout the work. On the other hand as a pure narrative it’s not as gripping it might have been. It’s true that even here Mendes is hearkening back to the classic Bond films of the 60s where the narrative was always much more of a slow burn and not quite the high octane ride it eventually became. Upto a point I can go along with this idea but it seems to me that even accounting for it there are some relatively flat moments. Will say though that this is visually one of the most interesting efforts in the franchise. From the superb title sequence to the extraordinarily good final section in Scotland (even though I didn’t like this whole backstory bit) the visuals are often very impressive as are some of the tropes used throughout the film. There is even a set of post-apocalyptic cues in this sense from the burned-out island that resembles a war-ravaged metropolis to the wasteland-like quality in the climax portions. Similarly there is all the subterranean stuff.
as I said it’s a film that invites some ambivalence in me. Definitely an interesting effort and certainly one to revisit over time. Incidentally one of the things I missed here was one of those outrageously choreographed trademark action sequences. The one at the beginning of Casino Royale for instance.
Saw it on Sunday and liked it immensely. A very different Bond film filled with history, a “personal” emotional touch. Think Craig looked old throughout and the “Bond” who is like a superman is not here, which is quite good.
Saw Roger Moore on TV the other day. He has a book out on the Bond history. He’s 85 himself and is currently using a pacemaker. Anyway he said that he always considered Connery the best Bond but had changed his mind recently after watching Skyfall. Now he felt it was Craig.
so craig has ignited the ‘rishi kapoor’ in someone^…lol
btw just came across my plumber/handyman, and yeah–hes better looking (than craig)
the problem with craigs looks are they are very very common in a certain part (where he comes from)–but anyhow, every1 is allowed their fetishez to stay sane!
craig is 1 such fetish 4 some–
the one good thing about craig is doesnt seem ‘desperate’ for plum projects–he lets em cum 2 them rather than plotting/ serenading them–he is doin well with his choices & moves–the latest uttering is that he doesnt wanna do bond anymore! –doubt it that he /his producers can resist it though…
Reposting my skyfall review here
I had shown it to anya and she quickly posted it in her name
surprisingly, Satyam just ‘missed’ it –gr8 job anya —
Enjoy —
SATYAMSHOT 
May 21, 2012 at 6:33 AM
Ami:
Forget Cocktail- here is a MUCH better trailer
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May 21, 2012 at 6:46 AM
Saurabh- I’m not a big Bond fan- but I’m looking forward to this one because I’m curious to see what Mendes does with the Bond franchise- plus it’s Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench together in one movie! The teaser looks great.
I saw the Looper trailer- looks promising. BTW Since you always bring up all the Imran rom-com’s every time I dislike a trailer- how come so much excitement for Cocktail and so little for Skyfall? 😛
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May 21, 2012 at 6:52 AM
Huge fan of the franchise though admittedly Bond hasn’t been the same since the end of the Cold War! Casino Royale was an excellent film though (of course this was based on the one Ian Fleming novel that never saw a proper movie.. there was a spoof with David Niven at one point) this should really have been done as a period piece.
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November 8, 2012 at 9:10 AM
satyam, skyfall deserves a separate post
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November 8, 2012 at 10:05 AM
It already has two separate posts, a trailer one (this one!) and then one with images.
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May 21, 2012 at 7:09 AM
Ami, you will never stop pulling my leg right. the thing is once u like a genre too much, u expect the best from it- same is the case with me in action. also somehow bond has never been my fav (though i have seen all the bonds more than once)-huge, huge fan of ‘bourne’ though. according to me the best action film to have ever been made in hwood is the ‘1st die-hard’. nothing and i repeat nothing can match upto it
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May 21, 2012 at 7:19 AM
Actually fieness and Bardem as a villain are the best thing about the film
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May 22, 2012 at 6:58 AM
Bourne has left everything in its wake……simply amazing. It is remembered as a classic. I loved them all and it has to be Matt Damon’s defining moment in his career
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May 21, 2012 at 6:47 AM
Terrific…looking forward to watching the IMAX version here in Mumbai ( Wadala ) !!
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May 21, 2012 at 6:52 AM
This is quite terrific I must say. Can’t wait, really!
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May 21, 2012 at 7:11 AM
As per Imdb, this is the brief plot line :
“Bond’s loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her. As MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost. ”
Quantum of Solace was really a damp squib after the gripping “Casino Royale”…hope this one puts the series back on track.
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May 21, 2012 at 8:19 AM
Amazing shit-Trailer of A new film “FOR GREATER GLORY”
A chronicle of the Cristeros War (1926-1929), which was touched off by a rebellion against the Mexican government’s attempt to secularize the country.
Starring- Andy Garcia, Peter O’ Toole, Eva Longoria and Oscar Isaac
Release date- June 1, 2012
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May 22, 2012 at 6:56 AM
looks avg.
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May 21, 2012 at 8:25 AM
Oh Gosh- A Must Watch! Trailer of “CHERNOBYL DIARIES”- a horror film based on the famous Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
From the writer of Paranormal Activity-
Cast- Jesse McCartney, Jonathan Sadowski, Devin Kelly, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Nathan Phillips, Ingrid Bolso Berdal and Dimitri Diatchenko.
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May 21, 2012 at 8:56 AM
trailer looks okkkk
But the cast is awesome
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July 31, 2012 at 2:28 PM
New Trailer, one can see the villain, the babe.. and bit of plot…
[added to post]
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July 31, 2012 at 2:38 PM
That is a superb, superb trailer and Bardem looks creepy.
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July 31, 2012 at 2:54 PM
yes absolutely fantastic trailer. And though Bond has not been quite the same without the Cold War there is still something inexplicably thrilling about a Bond film! And yeah Bardem looks quite the sicko here!
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July 31, 2012 at 3:20 PM
The icon’s grown past its historical roots. I’ve never been a great fan of the series on a consistent basis but when it gets the world and the character right (as a number if not all the Connery films did, as Craig has done especially in his first outing) it’s pretty irresistible.
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July 31, 2012 at 8:02 PM
Agreed. I know some might find this unthinkable, but Craig is probably my favorite Bond. He reminds me of the late great Steve McQueen – effortlessly cool yet brutal.
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July 31, 2012 at 11:35 PM
If anyone thinks that’s unthinkable they haven’t been paying attention. And actually I do see what you mean with McQueen. Certainly the two actors do share a similar physical presence. Bullitt could easily double for Bond these days.
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August 1, 2012 at 2:50 AM
“Craig is probably my favorite Bond. He reminds me of the late great Steve McQueen – effortlessly cool yet brutal.”
Hmm-interesting point Shalini ..
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July 31, 2012 at 3:51 PM
Brosnan used to have a white gal along with another colored or a chinese. Here they hv done away completely with the white doll.
Bond is evolving.
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July 31, 2012 at 4:04 PM
“…along with another colored..”
LOL, I can see PC is not your thing!
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July 31, 2012 at 8:35 PM
Berenice is the ‘white doll’- and she is shown in the trailer along with the ‘colored’ actress…
I love this trailer- the Bardem/Craig confrontation scenes are going to be spectacular!
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August 2, 2012 at 10:34 AM
looks badass
The actor playing Q is fantastic….he starred in a BBC drama serial. Top notch stuff – can’t remember the name, but look it up. A must watch!
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August 2, 2012 at 10:36 AM
The Hour..it’s also got Dominic West from The Wire.
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August 2, 2012 at 10:46 AM
somehow didn’t much care for this show, the few episodes I watched. Was expecting great things here but was quite disappointing. Wasn’t really the period equivalent of Mad Men in any sense. Perhaps it got better later. I wouldn’t know.
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August 2, 2012 at 10:50 AM
Wouldn’t know myself. I had the exact same sense – stopped watching after the first two.
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August 2, 2012 at 10:56 AM
The only two BBC shows I’ve like in recent times are Luther and Sherlock. Haven’t seen Downton Abbey which has been getting raves.
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August 2, 2012 at 11:45 AM
I’ve heard great things about Sherlock. On Downton Abbey. Saw various bits of the first season and it’s definitely well done but to be honest I’m rather bored of this sort of ‘nostalgia’. the whole Upstairs Downstairs (though I adore this show) deal. The British turn to period drama with a hopeless regularity! Again the show itself is fine, it just isn’t interesting enough this late in the day. And of course that whole fantasy is fed. One likes these period pieces because one can indulge in those old class structures and so forth without guilt!
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August 2, 2012 at 1:35 PM
Yeah that’s more or less why I’m not really interested in Downton Abbey. Sherlock actually represents the opposite of this kind of thing btw. The modernization of the icon and the stories has been quite successful. If there’s a gripe here it’s that they are really slow to produce these and there’s only six or seven episodes between two seasons which given it’s an English show is standard but really wish they’d press on. In fact since you haven’t started seeing it I’d even advise you just wait till they’re done with the series before picking it up.
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August 2, 2012 at 1:48 PM
thanks GF, will keep this in mind..
on a related note Norwegian Wood is now available on streaming. In case you haven’t yet seen it. I know this one split reviewers down the middle but I was on the positive side.
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August 2, 2012 at 1:58 PM
Yeah, I saw it on the instant play list and it’s on my queue following your enthusiastic response.
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October 5, 2012 at 10:36 AM
Adele’s song for Skyfall:
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October 5, 2012 at 12:01 PM
pretty good..
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October 12, 2012 at 10:12 AM
forget bond. Craig by the pool – I am advance booking this
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October 13, 2012 at 5:57 AM
Adele’s voice belies her age. Liked its texture.
Quite a fitting Bond title track of recent times…
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October 13, 2012 at 6:02 AM
“Adele’s voice belies her age”
Arti –shes in her early 20s (as far as I know )!!
Oh, Dya mean her voice seem more ‘mature’ than her age…
Yes-like her voice timber
Gud 2 see an English artiste doing well anyways
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October 12, 2012 at 11:09 AM
This is a damn good number by Adele. Skyfall just seems building up to the greatest Bond event since I started seeing the Bond series as a kid with Brosnan. (I caught up with the older ones later, but Brosnan was my initiation to Bond).
Sam Mendes, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Roger Deakins, John Logan, Thomas Newman and now Adele. That pedigree doesn’t sound like a Bond film, but it is. Totally geared up.
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October 12, 2012 at 11:17 AM
Agree abzee
Nice piece by adele
And seems a worthwhile effort
Though I prefer brosnan amongst all the bonds
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October 12, 2012 at 11:33 AM
Had a good listen -Yes it is one of the better bond themes
Classical mysterious pop but has orchestral tones
And adding adeles vocals laces a certain ‘edge’ & intrigue to it
Liked the earlier theme by U2s bono…dont think this reaches U2s level though
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October 12, 2012 at 7:13 PM
Instrumental -Njoy gud nite
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October 13, 2012 at 2:35 AM
song is smashing it on the airwaves here in UK…rocking the charts
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October 13, 2012 at 3:24 AM
Yeah it’s iTunes no 1 downloaded & fastest to get there apparently
Good news 4 adele who’s pregnant
This is doing better in uk & best in Ireland, I think
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October 13, 2012 at 4:14 PM
Early reviews are in for Sam Mendes’ Skyfall , the latest film in the James Bond series. Reactions have been overwhelmingly positive so far with the phrase “Best. Bond. Ever.” being thrown about. The Times has given it 5 stars http://collider.com/skyfall-reviews-clip/202696/
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November 8, 2012 at 8:43 AM
NY Times:
November 7, 2012
Movie Review
What a Man! What a Suit!
By MANOHLA DARGIS
When James Bond dashed into Buckingham Palace in July to pick up Queen Elizabeth so they could parachute into the Olympic opening ceremony, it was tough to picture what he could do for an encore. Zip line into the next European summit meeting with Angela Merkel tucked under his arm? Wrestle nude on the frozen banks of the Volga with Vladimir Putin? Turning Britain’s royal octogenarian into a Bond girl was a stroke of cross-marketing genius that profited queen and country both, while also encapsulating the appeal of the 007 brand in the age of aerial drones.
It’s the human factor, to borrow somewhat perversely a phrase from Graham Greene, who worked for Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6. In his novel “The Human Factor,” about a double agent, Greene sought, he said, to portray the British secret service unromantically, with “men going daily to their office to earn their pensions.” Bond is wearing a silver-gray suit when he powers into “Skyfall,” the latest 007 escapade, but it isn’t cut for office work. The suit is seductively tight, for starters, and moves like a second skin when Daniel Craig in his third stint as Bond races through an atavistic opener that — with bullets buzzing and M (Judi Dench) whispering orders in his ear — puts him back on mortal, yet recognizably Bondian, ground.
And just in time too, given that he looked as if he were on the Bataan Death March in his last film, “Quantum of Solace.” Directed by a surprisingly well-equipped Sam Mendes, “Skyfall” is, in every way, a superior follow-up to “Casino Royale,” the 2006 reboot that introduced Mr. Craig as Bond. “Skyfall” even plays like something of a franchise rethink, partly because it brings in new faces and implies that Bond, like Jason Bourne, needed to be reborn. The tone is again playful and the stakes feel serious if not punishingly so. This is a Bond who, after vaulting into a moving train car, pauses to adjust a shirt cuff, a gesture that eases the scene’s momentum without putting the brakes on it.
That “Skyfall” includes a sequence on a train — a passenger one, no less — suggests that this may be very much like your granddaddy’s Bond, even without the bikinied backdrop. From the initial sequence, one of those characteristic supersize set pieces that precede the opening credits, Mr. Mendes shows that he’s having his fun with 007. The opening doesn’t just take place in Turkey, one of those putatively exotic locales adorned with woven carpets and dark-complexioned extras, it also includes smoothly choreographed mayhem in both a crowded bazaar and outdoor market. There, amid these familiar action-cinema signposts, Bond and another agency operative, the suitably named Eve (Naomie Harris), chase down a baddie as locals and oranges scatter.
Bondologists may linger over that Turkey location. Globe tripping has always been as crucial to the movies as groovy gadgets: it’s an elegant way to map the geopolitical coordinates while providing armchair adventure for the rest of us. Here, though, you have to wonder if Mr. Mendes and the writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have folded some 007 arcana into the mix. Turkey plays a major role in the second, often most critically celebrated Bond film, “From Russia With Love,” which, like this one, includes a lethal fight on a train, a formidable blond male adversary and an island headquarters. But whether the filmmakers want to intimate that this is the rightful follow-up to the rebooted Bond is less interesting than this type of longitudinal thinking the movies inspire.
One of the satisfactions of these screen spectaculars, one that Mr. Mendes nicely capitalizes on, is that they have made all of us Bondologists. We each have favorite Bonds (Sean Connery for me, followed by Mr. Craig), our preferred 007 women, outlaws, slick gizmos, sweet rides, command centers and double entendres. We know what kind of cocktail Bond savors and whom he works for and that he often behaves more like a killer than a tradecraft wizard. We also know that, like the cowboy’s six-shooter and horse, Bond’s gun and sports car are genre givens, as is a sizable body count. And while, over the years, there have been cruel, suave and silly Bonds, there is always only one Bond, James Bond. The movies have schooled us well.
Mr. Mendes, a British film and theater director whose dubious screen achievements include embalming the American dream in “Revolutionary Road,” gets Bond just right in a story that first turns on a domestic threat and then on a personal one. Mr. Mendes grasps the spy’s existential center, as typified by the ritualistic mano a mano grappling that almost every action movie now deploys to signal that, when push comes to punch, the hero can still kill with his bare hands. There’s brutal death here, but there’s also a pervading sense of mortality that makes the falling bodies register a little longer than they sometimes do in a Bond movie. As a director of films like “American Beauty” and “Away We Go” Mr. Mendes has indulged in a noxious blend of self-seriousness and condescension. There’s none of that here.
Instead he honors the contract that the Bond series made with its fans long ago and delivers the customary chases, pretty women and silky villainy along with the little and big bangs. Whether Mr. Mendes is deploying an explosion or a delectable detail, he retains a crucially human scale and intimacy, largely by foregrounding the performers. To that end, while “Skyfall” takes off with shock-and-awe blockbuster dazzle, it’s opulent rather than outlandish and insistently, progressively low-key, despite an Orientalist fantasy with dragons and dragon ladies. As Bond sprints from peril to pleasure, Mr. Craig and the other players — including an exceptional, wittily venal Javier Bardem, a sleek Ralph Fiennes and a likable Ben Whishaw — turn out to be the most spectacular of Mr. Mendes’s special effects.
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November 8, 2012 at 9:08 AM
saw the movie a few days ago….spellbinding…this review is very good but surprisingly no mention of Judi Bench (M) or I missed it? the movie has a very deep emotional quotient and M has a very meaty roll here…craig, javier (what an act as a villain – OSCAR written all over it), ralph, naomi….they all add their own brilliance to very-well written and directed characters……romance quotient is less and the movie ends on a rather heavy note (not mentioning much as it will be a spoiler) but it is worth every single penny spent on it and much more….
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November 8, 2012 at 7:16 PM
Craig wants skyfall 2 b his last bond film !
http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sG9clGD1s5jBOI7nF8dg6uA/view.m?id=15&gid=film/2012/nov/08/daniel-craig-skyfall-last-james-bond&cat=film
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November 13, 2012 at 2:37 PM
At the Movies
Michael Wood
When Daniel Craig took on the role of James Bond in Casino Royale (2006), there was much talk of the real thing. Here at last was the mean, lethal, almost banter-free figure we thought Ian Fleming had invented, the ruthless, funless fellow we imagined we had always wanted. He had a licence to kill but his real licence was his angry work ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert Shaw, the great villain in From Russia with Love, than like any other Bond. He was unshaken, unstirred; dogged not feline, a terrier who made us wonder what those sleek, overdressed catlike figures had been doing these 44 years. Even his smart suits looked like overalls done by Dior – well, by Lindy Hemming, as it happens. When he said, ‘Bond, James Bond’, he was not just identifying himself as other actors had done. He was correcting the record. He was James Bond, the others were impostors, Algernons or Benedicts or something from a quite different branch of the family.
The film (directed by Martin Campbell) was well paced, and organised the old tropes elegantly around the new engine. But by the end it was already beginning to feel tired – with how many more Bond movies to come. It looked good, it was good, but there was some kind of misapprehension lurking in it. Quantum of Solace (2008), directed by Marc Forster, seemed a bit stodgy, but thoroughly faithful to the old-new premise, the labours of the travelling, rough-’em-up bulldog. It was only when I saw it again a few weeks ago – since this is the Bond movies’ fiftieth anniversary year there are places in the world where you can’t see anything on television except Bond films – that I understood. Craig and his directors thought seriousness was a virtue. They had brought a Stanislavskian notion of intensity not just to acting but to fiction. The idea was for Craig to be James Bond and to show us he was no one else. It wasn’t just a matter of dropping the wisecracks and the various excesses of style, running from Connery to Moore via Dalton and Brosnan, or to put it too speedily, from sardonic to camp via brooding and flighty. It was the assumption, which we all half-fell for, that a real James Bond was a good idea. It wasn’t an idea at all, it was a delusion. Why would we want a real James Bond, and what did we want when we thought we wanted him?
This is not quite the way the publicity for Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, has been running, but the makers of the film have in principle understood both the delusion and the question. Craig has said in an interview that he thought it was a mistake not to allow Bond to be funny, and that the new film would be different. The thought of Craig being funny brings to mind the monster doing ‘Putting on the Ritz’ in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, and he isn’t funny in Skyfall. But he does make a grim gag now and again – returning from his supposed grave he says he has been ‘enjoying death’ – he is less righteous, he is damaged, and he thinks. He is – what do you call it? – acting. And the film is often funny, even if its psychoanalytic freight finally tugs it down.
When a drowning man dissolves – the pun is in the image too – into the film’s credits, the joke is quick and allusive. The old Bond theme tune surfaces and rapidly vanishes whenever the action – the motor- bike chase across the rooftops of Istanbul, the slug-out on top of the moving train – gets a little too hokey. It’s not less exciting because it’s hokey – on the contrary – and it reminds us that in the previous two Bond films, as in several thousand other recent movies, mere explosions and the wreckage of vehicles are not action. They are just noise and expense. Q in Skyfall is not an ageing gadgeteer and not dropped from the story. He is a young nerd (played by Ben Whishaw) who gives Bond a radio and asks: ‘Were you expecting an exploding pen?’ When Bond and M, on the run, need to change cars, they switch from an up-to-date Audi (I think) to an old Aston Martin – the old Aston Martin.
This is all knowing without being obtrusive, and the film respects its lineage while both mocking it and escaping from it. It’s all about age in other ways too. Judi Dench (who has always known how to act as distinct from earnestly impersonate) is M again, but her career is about to be terminated, as a smooth-talking Ralph Fiennes tells us. When Bond reappears from his apparent death, he looks terrible, and has no doubt kept himself gaunt and unshaved as a reproach to M – she did after all tell a British agent to take a shot at him. He says that both of them have been in the game ‘maybe too long’. She says, ‘Speak for yourself’, but she must at least share his worry. MI6 itself is ageing – or at least the politicians think so – and M’s retirement is part of a larger picture of supposed obsolescence. What are old-time spies to do in the age of infinite technological intrusion? The movie’s writers (Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan) obviously want to side with tradition against the mindless modernisers but their heart’s not in it. Even M herself is aurally present on a wire while Bond is chasing through Istanbul on his bike and leaping onto a train. This is a fine effect, borrowed from the Bourne movies but put to good use. No spy is ever alone now; or rather, he is still alone enough to do the dying, but also himself spied on perpetually by his listening bosses in another place.
What’s happened in Skyfall is that some unknown enemy or enemies – if you’ve read the credits you’ll know it’s Javier Bardem – has stolen the hard drive of an MI6 computer which contains the names of all the Nato agents embedded in terrorist groups around the world. Don’t ask why the agent we see dying at the beginning was carting this sort of information around on his computer. But Bardem, playing one Raoul Silva, is not in the service of some alien country or corporation, he’s working for himself, and his only interest is mischief – and M. Once a British operative, he feels betrayed by her and seeks revenge – unlike Bond, who is a little ruffled by her willingness to have him killed in the line of her duty, but nevertheless concedes she was just doing her job. The two men are twins in a way: mother’s boys with different priorities. Bardem doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance, but he’s a little underused here: first splendidly creepy, then just another tall guy with a gun and a couple of disguises. The movie is not really interested in him; only in his interest in M. Silva blows up MI6 headquarters, callously tortures and kills a beautiful French sidekick called Séverine (Bérénice Marlohe in real life, but I would like to think she has migrated from Belle de Jour), takes over various disused bits of the London Underground, allows himself to be caught so that he can be close to M, and … but this is where you need to see the movie for yourselves.
Skyfall has provoked wildly enthusiastic critical reactions in England; calmer manifestations in the US. It’s not impossible that patriotism plays a part here. The gimmicky Olympic association of Bond with the queen continues, since M is constantly addressed as ‘ma’am’ – you could almost confuse it with ‘M’ – and it’s clear that in many respects she is England. When Bond is given a word-association test to prove he’s fit to return to the field, one of the words is ‘country’. He says ‘England’. Normal enough for an English spy, but he says it with a peculiarly loyal, even dreamy look in his eye. This is a different Bond. When offered the prompt-word ‘murder’, he says ‘employment’, and although the answer is grim enough and appropriate enough – what else is his licence for? – there is a sense of service in the idea. This is what he does for her – for various ‘hers’. And this is how she – M, that is – talks to the government commission questioning her work, when she is trying to defend ‘old-fashioned human intelligence’ and its capacity to interrogate what is going on ‘in the shadows’:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Time and fate and Tennyson – and the passage of empire, disguised as the advent of technology and bureaucrats. Sounds like a retirement speech to me. ‘You’re living in a ruin,’ Silva says, and he’s not just describing the underground headquarters of MI6.
There was always a nationalist streak in the Bond image, and you can track fantasies of Englishness through the long series. Clearly the English don’t have quite the same fantasies about their identity as others do, but dreams of Englishness are international in all kinds of ways, and it’s no small feature of the irony and complication of these projections that perhaps the best of these Englishmen was a Scotsman. The dates are interesting: Connery, six films, 1962-71 (plus one comeback in 1983); Lazenby, one film, 1969; Moore, seven films, 1973-85; Dalton, two films, 1987-89; Brosnan, four films, 1995-2002. The Connery films were about a spy who refused to come in from the cold, who refused to believe the cold could be come in from; the Moore films were merely nostalgic for some sort of war, cold, hot or tepid. The high/low point was perhaps Octopussy, where Moore, faced with a large angry tiger, says, ‘Sit,’ and the tiger does. That’s the way we ran the empire: Carry on up the Khyber meets Gunga Din. By the time we got to the Dalton and Brosnan films even fantasy politics seemed left behind, and we were in an alternative universe, a cinema version of Playstation, although of course not without all kinds of charm. The high point here was Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies driving his BMW out of a German garage while lying on the back seat and using a remote control – literally as if he was engaged in a thumbs-only computer game.
Englishness in all these cases connotes a certain unflappability, whatever the differences in style and relation to any known historical world; an effortless superiority, experienced as a sort of inheritance rather than a skill; a worldliness that means the exotic never seems exotic to Bond himself; and a sense that Bond doesn’t really care about any of this, he might be in it just for the entertainment. The attempt to give him feelings, via the death of Diana Rigg, was a hopeless mess.
We see how different Daniel Craig is as Bond. He is not flappable, but his superiority is full of effort; he is not worldly, and he is not enjoying himself. He is gruff – he was even gruff about his helicopter trip with the queen, claiming to be shirty about having to do the job on his day off. Part of the publicity no doubt. But Bond has changed in Skyfall. Whatever his manner, he is serving his country now instead of his own self-regarding virtue. This is certainly a quaint old fantasy of Englishness – I would have thought the reigning fantasy had more to do with robbing the country – and I had better end before I start quoting Henry V.
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November 13, 2012 at 2:46 PM
On Skyfall I am a bit ambivalent. On the one hand it’s a superb ‘meta’-film, it’s in a sense about the Bond history and therefore constantly allusive and so on. There is additionally the whole retro riff which is quite literally interpreted in tongue-in-cheek ways throughout the work. On the other hand as a pure narrative it’s not as gripping it might have been. It’s true that even here Mendes is hearkening back to the classic Bond films of the 60s where the narrative was always much more of a slow burn and not quite the high octane ride it eventually became. Upto a point I can go along with this idea but it seems to me that even accounting for it there are some relatively flat moments. Will say though that this is visually one of the most interesting efforts in the franchise. From the superb title sequence to the extraordinarily good final section in Scotland (even though I didn’t like this whole backstory bit) the visuals are often very impressive as are some of the tropes used throughout the film. There is even a set of post-apocalyptic cues in this sense from the burned-out island that resembles a war-ravaged metropolis to the wasteland-like quality in the climax portions. Similarly there is all the subterranean stuff.
as I said it’s a film that invites some ambivalence in me. Definitely an interesting effort and certainly one to revisit over time. Incidentally one of the things I missed here was one of those outrageously choreographed trademark action sequences. The one at the beginning of Casino Royale for instance.
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November 14, 2012 at 3:38 AM
Saw it on Sunday and liked it immensely. A very different Bond film filled with history, a “personal” emotional touch. Think Craig looked old throughout and the “Bond” who is like a superman is not here, which is quite good.
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November 14, 2012 at 7:33 AM
It’s had the best Bond opening ever..
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November 14, 2012 at 7:35 AM
Saw Roger Moore on TV the other day. He has a book out on the Bond history. He’s 85 himself and is currently using a pacemaker. Anyway he said that he always considered Connery the best Bond but had changed his mind recently after watching Skyfall. Now he felt it was Craig.
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November 14, 2012 at 4:24 AM
i missed those outrageous action scenes tooo.
and i felt bond was bland.
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November 13, 2012 at 5:34 PM
so craig has ignited the ‘rishi kapoor’ in someone^…lol
btw just came across my plumber/handyman, and yeah–hes better looking (than craig)
the problem with craigs looks are they are very very common in a certain part (where he comes from)–but anyhow, every1 is allowed their fetishez to stay sane!
craig is 1 such fetish 4 some–
the one good thing about craig is doesnt seem ‘desperate’ for plum projects–he lets em cum 2 them rather than plotting/ serenading them–he is doin well with his choices & moves–the latest uttering is that he doesnt wanna do bond anymore! –doubt it that he /his producers can resist it though…
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November 21, 2012 at 1:53 PM
Reposting my skyfall review here
I had shown it to anya and she quickly posted it in her name
surprisingly, Satyam just ‘missed’ it –gr8 job anya —
Enjoy —
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