JazzG it has been a disaster, but LucasFilm didn't really have a great track record. The last four movies they made were the prequels + Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The quality hasn't gone down, but it's more bloated than before due to too much content.
One More on the Telly
I quite liked the Daniel Craig Bond films (especially Skyfall), but I agree, the world probably needs a fun Bond series again.
I was dreading them making Bond American - "howdy y'all, the name's Baaarrrnnnd, Jaames Baaarrrnnd."
Asterix I thought Skyfall and Casino Royale were excellent. Probably my two favourite Bond movies. The others were decent but lumpier - either overdone villains (without being fun like Sean Connery rivals), incredibly long run times, and bloated casts at times but a good run overall. The best since Connery
Casino Royale is probably the best bond movie of all time.
banduan I agree, but other than that one I've never rewatched any of the other Craig movies. Don't remember much about them either.
QuincyAbeyie Agreed, the mandalorian which was a great series has spun off two series and it feels like content is just being made for the sake of it rather than quality story telling. As a star wars fan Obi Wan series looked really appealing and apart from a few great moments it was largely average. Same for another iconic character in Boba Fett. Ahsoka to be fair wasn't too bad, Ray Stevenson was superb and sad he passed away.
Agreed about Indiana Jones, I haven't even watched the last one and have heard it isn't great, most will watch it for nostalgia and seeing Harrison Ford which is sad because he deserves better.
Gazza M don't how why she was still around after the sequel trilogy turned out to be a critical and commercial flop
So bad, the story was all over the place and on top they butchered Luke Skywalker, the Mandalorian showed what fans we could see with Luke and instead we got this depressed version of him! Force Awakens wasn't too bad but the second was just terrible.
banduan Casino Royale is probably the best bond movie of all time.
It was a great movie but hard to explain this but it didn't feel like a Bond movie if that makes sense. It felt more like a fusion of James Bond and Bourne Identity! That is fine and maybe they needed to change with the times but I grew up watching Roger Moore & Sean Connery so those newer films have a much more gritty and darker feel to them.
JazzG wasnt Timothy Dalton already darker and grittier? I think the critique back then was the series had lost its fun element, and then they rebounded hard with Pierce Brosnan.
Other thing I liked about Casino Royale was the supporting cast - Eva Green, Mads Mikklesen and Judi Dench were all great.
JazzG It was a great movie but hard to explain this but it didn't feel like a Bond movie if that makes sense.
It's good because the premise is "What if James Bond is actually so emotionally dispassionate because ... he's traumatised?" And that's a one off Bond origin story that ends the possibility of Bond as pulp entertainment.
I dunno if "contemporary Bond" really works. Bond embedded in today's screenwriting is Don Draper, and has to be relatively rich with interiority. Either that or you play it as period pulp reenvisioned as satire, and that doesn't last long before it gets very boring.
Womanizer Bond doesn't work anymore. But in terms of a spy/action movie with ridiculous gadgets etc. it could still work. Something like Kingsman (the first one, only the first one) without the over the top R-rated violence.
Claudius wasnt Timothy Dalton already darker and grittier? I think the critique back then was the series had lost its fun element, and then they rebounded hard with Pierce Brosnan.
It has been so long since I've seen a Dalton movie I can't even remember! My friend who passed away was a big James Bond fan and said Dalton was underrated as Bond and did a great job. He also hated the idea of Henry Cavill becoming Bond and when Jeff Bezos asked who the next Bond should be many put forward Henry Cavill.
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QuincyAbeyie Sorry Quincy, but I really despised that film. Sexless English public school pornography, Matthew Vaughn doing Guy Ritchie. Speaking of which I think MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. was better than it, though still bad.
QuincyAbeyie Womanizer Bond doesn't work anymore.
The womanisation is not quite the issue, it's more subtle. The character can no longer be portrayed without a certain "he's psychologically tough enough to love 'em and leave 'em" shock factor built in.
The successes of feminism have generated a heteromasculine ressentiment that makes this almost unavoidable. Today even when gender conservatives make deliberately revanchist, sexist films or novels, they make some form of concession to the problem just by celebrating "Look, we've got our misogynistic James Bond back" or similar. This creates a butthurt "crying wojak" vibe to these works that means they never fully satisfy the originary resentful manbaby urge.
Of course, the manbabies say they enjoy the works, but ultimately, no one wants to remember them. No one thinks the Snyder cut is any good.
It's a cultural variation of the second law of thermodynamics—we all know that women are politically equal to men now, whether we like it or not.
An animated Bond (ARCHER played straight), or Bond done as the video of a pop song, or a ballet could overcome this perhaps, that gets around the problems of the media with forced habits of richer psychological depiction.
So my suggestion to these people, if they really "want Bond back" would be: get Austin Butler to learn a public school boy accent, change the character's name to James Man, and film the whole thing as an action ballet in the Stahelski style, interspersed with Brechtian monologues derived from some fascist substack, and 8½ WEEKS style simulated sex scenes with currently leading OnlyFans girls. Unfortunately, Bezos will never approve such a vision.
I’ve been waiting a loooong time to say this….
Where the hell do you pull all this from Burnsy?
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You guys are late to the party accusing me of being a human who sounds like an LLM, I get that all the time. I accept it. It's a bit of a shame the bottom's really fallen out of the market for talking absolute shit lately.
Anyway, I think we all privately agree an animated, pornographic, epic theatre influenced, ultraviolent Wick-style action ballet James Bond ripoff called JAMES MAN with occasional fourth-wall-breaking monologues that sound like they're excerpted from Andrew Tate content—and to be clear, all played perfectly straight with no jokes or laughs—would be way, way better than whatever Amazon is going do with the "property".
Daz I don't have kids!
Burnwinter Sorry Quincy, but I really despised that film.
Oh, I remember that clearly. 
QuincyAbeyie Means a lot to feel so seen
QuincyAbeyie Womanizer Bond doesn't work anymore.
Are we slut shaming men now? Be more sex positive Quincy.
JazzG He also hated the idea of Henry Cavill becoming Bond and when Jeff Bezos asked who the next Bond should be many put forward Henry Cavill.
I like Cavill but he'd be a terrible Bond.
Burnwinter You guys are late to the party accusing me of being a human who sounds like an LLM, I get that all the time. I accept it. It's a bit of a shame the bottom's really fallen out of the market for talking absolute shit lately.
Grow up, grow, grow, grow.
Qwiss Oh, good shout. I related to him, as a matter of fact ... I've been accused by others of using too many long words since I was a pretty small kid.
22 days later
My God, how embarrassingly shit was the SEVERANCE finale.
Burnwinter
Really? I quite enjoyed it myself.
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I think around two or three episodes into this season, I was finding the main arc pretty padded, contrived and grating. The loss of conceptual momentum is felt in the decreased verisimilitude and increasing number of non sequitur and surreal moments. I don't find the Keir cult of Lumon compelling as a block of the overall rote world-building, and the majority of the antagonists are entirely uninteresting pantomime villains.
The show can't decide if it's a Kafka short or a self-consistent dystopia exploring salient social questions. But it certainly knows it's a big hit, so the resolution of a few seemingly very urgent plot developments, such as it turning out that Cobell invented the severance technology, is already held back for future padded seasons.
Innie Mark choosing Hellie R over restoring his outie self to Gemma should've been a good season ender, even if I think it's a misuse of the show's entire premise to narrow focus onto the main character's schizo romances. But the closing "Windmills of Your Mind" montage struck me as the showrunners admitting they'd cornered themselves with material they don't know how to land dramatically.
The sequence critics are all fawning over where Mark spoke to himself via camcorder was also poorly written and executed, for mine. And the Mervyn Peake stylings of the giants' battle between Drummond and goat lady was visually striking, but only contributed to the incrementally self-weakening preposterousness of the whole.
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Just putting this there because the spoilers dont work when seeing the preview of the last post on the main page
I watched all of Severance S2 but won't go back for S3. It was pretty boring for the most part. I asked my wife if Ben Stiller was laughing at us, maybe that's the joke? The finale finally did something interesting with the camcorder and Innie V Outtie situations, but otherwise, a really interesting premise has been milked enough.
The gratuitous blood was fun though.
Big Willie Ah thanks, sorry mate.
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Asterix The gratuitous blood was fun though.
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I was thinking the stature of the actor who plays Mr Drummond was pretty wild, but it turns out he is only about 6'3", so now I'm wondering if the "side elevation" shot of Drummond next to Mark S in the corridor was digitally altered—there's only about six inches difference between the actors in real life. Or maybe I just got fooled … hmm … 
I felt there was huge potential in this show after the first season, really loved it, but I'm disappointed with pretty much every single creative choice made in the second season.
Big Willie This is quite an annoying bug given the damn post summary collapses all HTML whitespace so even the three dummy paragraphs above don't stop the spoiler getting rendered on the discussions list.
9 days later
Any of you watched Adolescence? I thought it was great - one of the best shows I've seen recently. The one take concept could have been gimmicky but it worked really well. Episodes 1 and 3 were the strongest, and the final scene had me in tears.
No, but it seems as if every single person is telling me to watch it. I've had friends, family, colleagues, other friends, the folks I co-program the cinema with, and now OMITT banging on about it.
An amateur filmmaker friend was also raving about the "Ronin" gimbal camera that's used. I didn't realise until then that this show was a Stephen Graham joint done in single takes. The BOILING POINT film is quite fun if you are looking for more of that.
Doing a "one take" in a high school with a cast that includes about 100 school kids is rather ambitious. Props to the kids and teachers who were there to act as AD's for making it work. Quite incredible when you think about it.
Asterix it's not even one of those things where it looks like a one-take but is just really cleverly stitched together. All the episodes are actual one-takes.
I’ve only watched the first fifteen minutes so far, and that was impressive. Both the camera work and the acting by all involved. There is also a cool continuity.
Amazed by how much work they had to do for ea CG episode. I’m sure they were all tired of each other by the end