What did you expect, an exploding pen?

Dum, di, dum, dum. Dum, dum di, dum di dum dum…

motorcycle istanbul james bond daniel craig

Any movie that opens with a motorcycle chase across the roof tops of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul is okay with me.  Went to see Skyfall (again… yep went back for a second viewing) last night and was struck by the gorgeous locations all over again.  I mean we know Bond is going to beat the shit out of the bad guys, blow things up, screw the beautiful women, destroy another Aston Martin and shoot stuff up with that pedestrian little Walther he insists on carrying… but kudos to his travel agent over the years!  Istanbul, Venice, Thailand, Jamaica, Iceland etc,.  So many fabulous locations.

macau lanterns boat to casino daniel craig

shanghai boats lantern entrance

Do you and your friends do that thing at the cinema where you find yourself saying to your companions “I’ve been there!” when some exotic locale pops up on the screen?  Myself and BigSal have been apparently insufferable doing this after a few trips through Europe over the years. And Mr K insists on dropping a “I’ve been there” every time a film or TV show is set in New York or Washington now… which is just about every second fucking thing committed to film!  Just realized that must be a really boring game for New Yorkers, with every other film set in New York and all.  I swear aliens will land on the Earth (long after we’ve destroyed it, thanks to climate change denial, of course), find our film archives and think there were only three noteworthy cities on the entire planet – New York, Washington and Los Angeles.  How sad is that?  But anyway I digress…

skyfall film poster daniel craig james bond

I have to say, I think Daniel Craig may well be my favourite Bond ever.  He’s moved from being this impeccably dressed Cold War spy who rarely gets a bruise and orders his pretentious watered down martinis, to something a lot less Inspector Gadget and a bit more Jason Bourne.  He gets shot, bleeds occasionally, falls down, makes mistakes and oh my gawd, even gets dirt on his tux when thrown into a pit with a komodo dragon.

Sam Mendes is an awesome director and his American Beauty style is quite evident in Skyfall… one particular visually dramatic fight scene has Sam Mendes’ name written all over it.  Bond and one of his current nemesis’ henchmen were beating the shit out of each other, but I was just mesmerised by the unusual light show on display in the background.

skyfall jellyfish fight scene

I wasn’t much fussed on Javier Bardem as Silva, The Bad Guy.  Which is really odd considering that he is usually makes a quintessential bad guy… probably something to do with the dreadful peroxide blonde hair do they gave him and the strangely out of place sexual overtures that he made towards Bond during an interrogative scene which sees Bond’s usually unflappable demeanour seem to slip slightly.  🙂

skyfall daniel craig javier bardem silva gay

I also love the new Q.  He’s perfect for the job in the new millennia. Seemingly highly educated, tech savvy, ridiculously young and with that slightly socially inept, dry internet sense of humour we’ve all come to love and loathe from the geeks in our lives, He is played by Ben Wishaw and there’s a nice interplay between Q and Bond as the young whippersnapper vs the cold war dinosaur.

The other thing I love about the Bond movies are the Bond women… M, of course is the inimitable Judi Dench, Moneypenny is a bit forgettable in my book and then there’s the ones whose names we barely learn but who Bond beds quicker than you can say ‘who’s your Daddy?’.  Always absolutely stunningly beautiful women with their air of danger and/or vulnerability about them.  Bérénice-Marlohe is Sévérine, Silva’s long kept mistress/prisoner whose tragic history finds Bond’s soft sport and tugs at the heartstrings of the ruggedly handsome old spy in this film.

Skyfall-Bérénice-Marlohe3 opi nailpolish

All up, Skyfall is a great Bond film and I enjoyed it more second time round… I think the Bond franchise is getting better and better.

My only question is – what colour is her nail polish?  🙂

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EDIT: After THIRD viewing…  Warning: Small Spoilers!

Let me make this clear, I took the Moderately Sized Child to go see this today, not because I thought it was such a great film, not because I wanted to see it for a third time, not because I felt it was something he had to see… but rather because it’s 35 degrees out and our air con is on the fritz and it’s TightArse Tuesday so tickets cost us only $5 each to go get out of the heat in the middle of the day.  But now I have seen it for the third time I have a few more questions than just a vague curiosity about Severine’s nailpolish! 

How does ‘M’ use Bond’s Walther (the only handgun they had) at the Skyfall manor when it is supposed to be ‘imprinted’ with Bond’s own palm print?  

Speaking of the Walther, why does Q insist on giving him such a stupid little gun when he’s up against guys with TEC-9 semi-auto machine guns with up to 50-72 rounds in the mag?

And speaking of Q, who is supposed to be the best, up and coming bright young thing that MI6 has to offer – what the fuck was he thinking when he plugged Silva’s computer into their ‘secure’ system?  

And lastly, how come every time there was a long sweeping landscape shot across the Scottish moors, I kept expecting to see Kate Bush in a horrific red dress, with a bad perm, doing a bizarre late 70s interpretative dance to ‘Wuthering Heights’?

One thought on “What did you expect, an exploding pen?

  1. I think the hand imprinted Walther was left in the Komodo dragon pit when the Chinese dude got eaten, so the gun M used was a replacement and they had run out of personalised ones for him?

    And “no” Q would not be that stupid in real life to plug a suspect machine into his network. We are only a small tech company but we never plug virus infected customer machines into our network, we remove the hard drives and mount them as a slave and virus scan them, blah blah blah……..

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