Yeah, I think barring any more unforeseen financial issues we'll definitely be getting the next movie sooner rather than later.
Oh another thing, the title sequence was fantastic. Maybe the best there's been. Bit of a shame the song's poor and sung by a bafflingly popular chav, but stick the mute on and it's brilliant. Also, considering they convoluted things at the end to be a bit like old Bond (though I never got the impression Maxwell ever shot Connery off a bridge), doesn't that go against the theme about his age? They were going on about how old he was throughout (and his beard was grey), how he couldn't pass the tests and whatever, and he looks like my grandad could beat him up in an argument over dominoes. People often mention how old Roger Moore looks in A View to a Kill (the best one, by the way), but he had nothing on Daniel Craig. Just dug around and found this: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=71802 Looks like Skyfall's every bit as popular as Quantum of Solace.
See I thought the exact opposite. The title song was fantastic, the opening sequence was...disappointing to say the least. This film was brilliant. Long live Sam Mendez.
The one for Die Another Day is still my favorite. I like how they integrated a year of torture into the montage.
Y'know, now I think of it Die Another Day and Casino Royale are contenders too. Casino's let down a little by not having the requisite naked women, which distanced it further from actual James Bond, but just as an animation it was excellent.
This is one of the comments on the Guardian page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user-comments/freshlychoppedbasil Now I can't unhear it!
So I've no expertise on these things, but I remember from when Saddam Hussein was captured and they released that video of them checking his mouth and that. So surely they would have done that when they captured the villain and would have found he's got a mouth thingy to stop his face flopping.
I only want to comment on this bit because you left out the actual "Bond girl" in this movie - M. More than ever, she was featured here and rightly so. Her relationship to Bond may not have bene sexual nor in what might be considered the "traditional" Bond girl sense, but she was the Bond girl in this film for him, the same way "Dawn was Buffy's love story" in season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - this was the woman whose relationship with Bond we were focusing on the whole time.
^ Dench has always had a more substantial role in the films and her version of M has always had a closer relationship with Bond than previous versions of the character, so what we got here didn't strike me as anything special or out of the ordinary. Still, that's an interesting perspective. I never looked at it that way, not even when the ending was compared to the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Saw the movie last night and loved it. I'm holding back on the A+ until I see it again but it's certainly an A. Very nice rebound after Quantum. The ending at Skyfall was so fresh for a Bond film but didn't feel out of place. It's certainl the most Bond-like of Craig's film and I hope we see even more of that in his remaining films. As for the titles, I tend to prefer the early Connery and Moore era ones, Although I liked the one in Casino Royale plenty.
It's interesting to me how Casino Royale spent most of its time showing us how Bond became "James Bond, 007", including his adversarial relationship with M as the closest thing he had to a mother figure... and here we are in Skyfall, seeing an end to that specific element of the story - he's absolutely fully formed as "James Bond, 007" - complete with a Q, Moneypenny, and new M - and Judi Dench's M exits quite fittingly I think in the childhood home (which was also summarily destroyed) of James Bond himself. Too - you have to wonder about Daniel Craig's Bond - all the women he's loved (or at least had dalliances with) have died or been killed. Vesper, Solange, Strawberry, Severine, and now M. Might be a good idea for him to lock it up, if only for the female population! In a lot of ways, Skyfall is the denouement of the (thus far) Craig "trilogy", all at once ending beautifully but also rebooting nicely as well. Bond's last words in the film, I think, are a signal to us (the audience) that though its still going to be Daniel Craig's version of Bond, we are now really back to the basics of what the character has been in cinema - "With pleasure, M. With pleasure." I don't think the next film will be about revenge (as Quantum of Solace was) or about protecting someone close to him (as Skyfall is) - but rather a return to form.
That would be Asian. That's hardly an obscure term. I thought that M's role recalls quite heavily The World Is Not Enough.
Yet Asia is massive. It encompasses the middle east, the Indian sub continent and the Orient or more simply everything between the Bering Sea and the Ural Mountains. So are you proposing that the Orient Express should be renamed as not to offend a small, maybe even fictional minority, or say in a supermarket where there are foods from multiple areas of Asia, it shouldn't have "Indian," "Thai" and "Oriental" but just Asia? That just seems stupid.
I thought jumping genres for the climax of the film was a ballsy move. Turning your spy thriller into a Western was cool as hell. And my god, all those shots after the house is burning look friggin' gorgeous. I'm not sure if I liked it more than "Casino Royale" but I think it's a better film - if that makes sense.
I believe this is a North American versus British thing again. We're more likely to use Oriental to refer to East Asian and Asian to refer to the subcontinent.
Or the ignorance of just how large Asia is - which may very well be one and the same thing. To lump everything in it under "Asia" is just silly. In my opinion, Bones wasn't wrong in calling Shanghai an Oriental city as, well, China is what I would describe as the Orient.
It's true, but I think it is along the same lines as "Paki". Here it's considered a racial slur, there it's just what someone is. We would say Pakistani. Oriental has become a bit of a world like "coloured" over there, I believe.