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Comments
L-)
I agree that the tie straightening in TWINE looked a little silly! It was like it was trying to echo the tank variation in GE but took it a bit far. Not bad, just a bit cheesy.
The cuff links part in SF... was really cool but I was still a bit perplexed at how he was coping so well with having just been shot! It seemed a bit too unrealistic and harder to enjoy after Bond had just taken a bullet! o.O
Give me a break.....
=))
I understand where you're coming from but I think most of the critics on here made their views pretty clear well before it became clear that SF was going to be the global BO smash that it is.
The flip side of your argument is that once something gains a huge amount of momentum then everyone jumps on the bandwagon and doesn't dare criticise it for fear of being seen as wrong.
Accusing other Bond fans of cultural snobbery is probably also a bit of a non-starter.
So I guess he did not like SF.
"Accusing other Bond fans of cultural snobbery is probably also a bit of a non-starter."
Absolutely, after all have all us bonds fans not put up with cultural snobbery before CR?
I was one of the SF critics and even though I enjoyed it more the second time I still don't see it as a top 10 Bond movie. My Problem was that I was expecting ,what I would call, a Bond movie. However SF imo is a stand alone Bond that has more of an in-house theme. By in-house I mean that:
1. It deals with introducing new characters and the end of the current M.
2. It gives some insight into Bonds past.
3. The Villian (Silva) is an ex-agent.
4. It deals with Bonds loyalty, to Mi6 and to M.
The Bonds I Iove, with the exception of FRWL, all have the classic villian, classic henchmen, villians base, bond girl/s, Unbelievable cars/boats etc.
SF is a still a great movie, but in my opinion only a 'good' bond movie.
I'm suing - this guy has just copied and pasted from my posts. Shocking!
He's obviously just jumping on the 'trendy' SF-bashing band wagon.
The bloke sounds a bit up himself to me. He sort of has a point when he compares SF to the "Best Picture" nominations but was anyone REALLY expecting the film to receive such a nomination itself? Even with a director with the reputation of Sam Mendes it is still "just a Bond film"?
He looks a bit weird as well! May be he's upset he wasn't cast as a villain/henchman
:)) Thats exactly what I thought when I clicked on the link.
I was not expecting SF to be nominated although there have been worse films nominated (and even winning).
I usually doubt the sanity of anyone who lists things using "and" repeatedly, it's a pet peave of mine and I find it childish. Here it looked even worse, in a title. Once again I was right. I don't mind him disliking SF but could he at least paid a bit of attention while he was watching the film?
quotes from the article:
"And Naomie Harris’ female secret agent – Eve, seriously – who presumably expended years of blood and sweat securing her revered double-O status, literally decides “Nah. It’s not for me. I want to be a secretary”."
"A Bond film that uses black British policeman for target practice, shoves its women behind desks, into retirement or into an early grave, and portrays gay men as comedy sadists."
Enough said.
I hate making fun of how people look but that is one strange-looking bloke.
I don't particularly like DAD, I just prefer it to Skyfall :)
Ho ho ho. I've been wondering why the SF fan club insist on claiming you love DAD when you've repeatedly said you think it's mediocre. You have to get used to this kind of playground stuff round here - 'oh, you disagree with me, so you must like DAD', followed by a raspberry sound.
Some people don't seem to understand just how mediocre SF actually is. Comparisons with DAD are not unjustified IMO, although I do think it's better, if only because DC is infinitely preferable to the Brozza. Infact, for me SF feels much closer in tone to the tired hackneyed Brosnan films. All the old cliches are there, nod, nod, wink winks to the past and the ropey, disjointed and nonsensical plotting of Purvis and Wade.
Personally I thought Bardem stole the film but I agree on Connery. He doesn't owe anybody anything but he could show a bit of graditude is Bond did make him a star.
Well if you are going to criticise people for not wanting anyone to disagree with them, then you also have to realise people don't like to be patronised with sentances like that. Whether it's mediocre or not is merely opinion and you can't stand up and be quite so condescending just because fans actually like a film that you don't
I will agree with @Getafix on one important point: it's not because someone thinks less of SF that this someone is a hardcore DAD fan. Such reasoning holds little ground. I honestly think that both sides are essentially complaining with the same false arguments.
In truth, there's no objective proof that SF is 'perfect', nor that it isn't. There is, however, its immense success and the recent Oscar grab (though Deakens should have gotten his as well I reckon.) Now, some will say - and not entirely unjustifiably - that a film's success isn't a measure of its quality as such. And as far as the Academy and its votes are concerned, well, they tend to make iffy choices too. ;-) So you see, we must always return to the simple fact of opinion not being fact at all and that's the funny thing about this thread. We're an impressive 93 pages in, yet we are still trapped in circular reasoning. ;-)
I didn't bother to click on the link, but the bits you quoted are indeed enough. Like you said the guy obviously wasn't paying much attention, which is sloppy and irritating. Over the top political correctness is just appalling, too. He pushes the buttons - women! black people! gays! all get either mistreated or portrayed in a bad light, according to him. That's just total crap. He writes as if only black policemen get shot. He writes of "gay men" - plural - even though he must be thinking of only one character, who is not, in fact, gay.
And how come it's mostly men who seem upset how women are treated or portrayed in SF? Shoving women behind desks? Really? Not Eve's own choice? Hadn't Mallory also decided to leave field work himself? I bet the guy wouldn't write that Mallory was shoved behind a desk. The previous M, a woman, was presumably also just shoved behind a desk? That's where the political correctness line folks get it wrong. The assumption here is that men can make choices for themselves, but women can't, and field work is a male area and a desk job is a female area. While being so concerned about poor little women the guy doesn't even realize how patronizing he sounds.
Yes it was patronising, but so was the original comment. I'm sure @jetsetwilly can cope.
I didn't pick up on the way the women are depicted when I saw it. It's a Bond film - you expect slightly retrograde gender politics to be at play. However, if you did actually read what he says, it might make a bit more sense... When you step back and think about it he's also completely right, and it's something my better half commented on as soon as we left the cinema - the women are either past it, victims or incompetent.
What makes it even odder is that despite the often lazy assumption that the women in the early films were just there as eye candy, the early Bond girls actually had a lot of toughness. I read MR recently and was actually really impressed by the character of Gala Brand - she's sassy, smart, in control and nobodies fool. She actually seems a million miles away from the slightly pathetic Severine and Eve characters in SF, or the over the hill (and also slightly pathetic and ineffectual) M. You might not like it, but the women in SF are pretty useless - a throwback not so much to the 1950s/60s, as a potrayal of women that might not have been out of place in the nineteenth century. None of them do anything very well apart from shooting the wrong person or getting shot themselves.
I've heard multiple explanations for why Eve is not actually incompetent, but the fact is that she shoots Bond, very nearly kills him and is supposed to be on his side. How many times have you seen Bond's male accomplices shoot him by mistake in 22 preceding movies...? M is depicted as an arrogant and foolish old bat who's lost her touch and is a liability to MI6 and a danger to those around her - don't remember Bernard Lee being depicted that way. And Severine is the ultimate sacraficial lamb - so much so that she hardly appears on screen, except to smoulder briefly in the casino and then get her kit off. The fact she was a victim of child sexual exploitation and practically the chattel of Silva only adds to the cliched 'helpless victim/damsel in distress' backwardness of the character.
It's all very well accusing this guy of being patronising, but the evidence is up there on the screen. A number of people (including female members) have commented on this aspect of the film, although this being a male dominated forum it's not a subject that's likely to generate a huge amount of discussion.
If you want to venture into that field we should look at a few other female characters in Fleming. Not all of Fleming's characters were portrayed the upmost subtlety or sophistication and it makes SF look fairly tame.
-a lesbian who ends up getting killed by Oddjob
-a lesbian (named Pussy) who was abused by her father as a child and then "turned" by Bond in the final couple of pages
-a Japanese girl who names her thong her "black cat"
I actually feel that M was initially portrayed as an old bat but became more sympathetic as the film developed. She was basically a flawed but dedicated figure as the Tennyson sequence shows. I love her delivery of the line "orphans always make the best recruits" on the moors with Bond - she says it with a subtle hint of sadness and tragedy. Ultimately she recognises her failings and, in the process, her successes ("I did get one thing right").
I agree.
My comment was in regard to hoppinmike stating he didn't like SF because certain aspects were unrealistic, yet in the same token thinks DAD is better. Double standards galore with that statement, surely.
Anyone with half a brain cell can see DAD is as about as far removed from heightened realism as it gets.
I'm starting to think hoppinmike is an extremely good wind-up merchant at best, and a troll at worst. There is no other explanation for such dumb comments.
But feel free to keep siding with him Getafix. At least he hates SF, so you have plenty of things in common. ;)
True enough, @Getafix :)
As for the DAD vs SF comparison... to me they are both films that are considerably flawed. DAD has a weak plot, weak visuals and so on, and SF to me feels unbalanced, basic, crude and sloppy.
So, with that aside, it basically comes down to personal preference. I never found DAD offensively bad, I just found it a bit weak. I left the cinema merely feeling a bit disappointed, but only a bit. I expected another GoldenEye and what I got was like a rather watered down GoldenEye. No biggie.
With SF, I found it so dramatically different to CR and QoS and to the Bond approach I enjoy that I dislike it far more. It's not just like a poor man's Casino Royale (as DAD kinda was to GE), but a completely different direction and I for one really disliked it.
So, ultimately what places DAD beyond SF for me is merely personal (artistic) preference.
I MUCH prefer the light, bright, fun style of the Brosnan Bonds to Skyfall WHEN DONE RIGHT. They were cool, stylish, fun and unafraid of getting stuck in to the world of Bond. Skyfall almost seems scared of its own tail.
You're changing your argument. You said that he 'liked' DAD. Sir Henry accused him of saying the same thing. He has never actually said that he liked it, infact he has repeatedly said he thinks it's pretty poor. What he has said is that he prefers DAD to SF. Even I think that's taking it a tad too far, but frankly I find the prospect of watching either of them pretty unenticing so as far as I'm concerned a DAD v SF fight is pitching the awful against the simply not very good.
I might be a gullible fool who has been taken in by this cunning infiltrator, but I don't find anything remotely trollish in hoppimike's comments. Like I said before, I think part of the problem is that you don't want to take on board just how weak a movie some people think SF is.
Hey! Don't forget about ME! I hate SF too!
Well, not really. It's okay. As good as FYEO, surely.