25 Bits Of Bond 25: It's the No Time To Die trailer breakdown!

For those of us beginning to wonder if the promise of another Bond film was nothing more than a vicious rumour, the first trailer for Cary Fukunaga's No Time To Die dropped today, proving at the very least that 156 seconds of this movie definitely exist. So what can we learn from this exciting blast of Bondery? Let's find out!

Our first look at the brand new Bond film for the brand new decade sees him being chased through picturesque Italy in an Aston Martin. We haven't seen that kind of thing since three Bond films ago!

I fucking love Angry Bond. Bond looks very angry throughout most of this trailer. Maybe he just got out of a screening of Spectre.

When sitting in the passenger seat of an Aston Martin being driven by James Bond, being chased through winding, hazardous streets, maybe pop a seatbelt on? Just a thought.

Bond diving off a ridic high bridge? We haven't seen that kind of thing since two Bond films ago!

Is it just me or does M appear, in the common parlance, to have become something of a chonky boi?

Absolutely wonderful to see Jeffrey Wright's Felix Leiter back after a TWELVE-YEAR absence. Here he is hanging around in a seedy bar waiting for Bond to turn up. We haven't seen that kind of thing since three Bond films ago!

Here's Bond getting a dusty old Aston Martin out of a backstreet lockup. We haven't seen that kind of thing since two Bond films ago! Actually the return of the Aston Martin Vantage from The Living Daylights is a very welcome one. With any luck Timothy Dalton's still in it.

Cary Fukunaga is really pushing the orange and teal colour palette with this one. It's lovely, but it is a bit every-movie-poster-between-2008-and-2016.

Oh mate, a visitor's pass? Embarrassing.

This joke is excellent and has Phoebe Waller-Bridge's fingerprints all over it. More please.

Q's flat! A new sweater! But will we see his two cats? Nice glass in those doors by the way, I'll keep that in mind in case it becomes relevant later in the trailer.

Blofeld is serving time at HM Prison Wakefield, leading to the very real possibility of Bond visiting West Yorkshire for the first time.

He's still angry. Let it go man, what kind of loser stays cross about a film that came out four years ago, Jesus.

Christoph Waltz here, still claiming he's not playing Blofeld.

Here's Rami Malek's villain Safin, trudging around in Roger Moore's skiwear from the pre-title sequence of A View To A Kill. Will Daniel Craig finally get some winter sports action? We can only hope.

Yes we've all seen your watch, just cash the cheque from Omega and get on with it.

Who's this? And more importantly, what's he or she doing in Q's flat? I swear to God if they've laid a finger on his cats or sweaters I will be very cross indeed.

Trapped under a frozen lake? We haven't seen that kind of thing since two Bond films ago!

Disability campaigners: The evil of movie bad guys being represented by facial disfigurement needs to stop!

Bond films: Absolutely. There's not one evil guy with a facial disfigurement in this one. There are two! 

Rami Malek has much to prove here. As Bond himself says: "History isn't kind to men who play rock gods".

They'll be fine as long as they're wearing seatbelts.

I was as thrilled as you to discover that 'Ana de Armas' is an anagram of 'armed assassin'! [note to self: check before publishing]

  

I don't know what's going on in this villain's lair, it looks like some kind of awful performance art. Come on guys, this isn't the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, shove a monorail in there or something.

  

Still time to change the title lads.

This shot had better be worked into the gunbarrel sequence or so help me I will mutter under my breath about it for several years.

Are you excited? I'm excited. Please be good, new Bond film, I can't deal with another Spectre.

We don't talk enough about Will Young's Coriolanus documentary

Because I am extremely intelligent, intellectual and (*checks thesaurus*) erudite and stuff, I recently watched Ralph Fiennes' 2011 film Coriolanus, which is based on a play by William Shakespeare that, according to every single review, is one of his lesser known works. But I had heard of it, because I am highbrow, bookish and perspicacious. In fairness I had only heard of it because Ralph Fiennes made a film of it, but that - as I think you'll find Emilia remarked to Desdemona in Othello - is neither here nor there.

What is both here and there is that after watching Coriolanus on DVD (which is an archaic form of physical media, used for storing audio and visual data on, that we used to have in the olden days), I ventured to the Special Features section. This is something DVDs - and their high definition successors, "Blu-rays" - included to enhance your enjoyment and understanding of a film. In one of many tragedies of the 21st century, streaming has more or less done away with the joy of the Special Features, thus denying the average viewer the chance to witness what I - a proud user of physical media - stumbled across next.

For there, listed casually among the numerous extras (two is a number) as if it was a perfectly normal thing to have on a DVD of a Shakespeare film, was something calling itself Behind The Scenes Of Coriolanus With Will Young. Here's proof, for anyone who quite understandably thinks I'm making this up:

Yes, that's right:

Well now. This was unexpected. I had just sat through two hours of some pret-ty cerebral stuff, let me tell you, and I was not prepared for a deep dive into its creation by the winner of series one of Pop Idol. But, as Shakespeare said in his bestseller The Bible, judge not lest ye be judged. I decided to give Will the benefit of the doubt and see what he had to bring to the party.

Frost / Nixon. Paxman / Howard. Young / Fiennes.

The half-hour documentary begins with sombre music over establishing shots of Belgrade, where Coriolanus was partly shot, followed by images of soldiers sneaking through streets and shooting at an unseen enemy. Don't panic though, we haven't been plunged into the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-99; these are merely actors, acting in a film. A film called Coriolanus. Having set the tone as one of gloom and dread and with the very real prospect of Slobodan Milošević doing something unspeakable just round the corner, with no warning at all the film suddenly cuts to chirpy pop-moppet Will Young standing in the street and looking confused, like he fears he may have accidentally wandered into an actual war.

A few more behind-the-scenes shots follow, before Will properly introduces the documentary, and himself, informing us that "it's my first time being involved in the production of a film". Now I have nothing against Will - in fact a few years ago I was gifted a coaster bearing his cherubic face as a birthday present, and to this day I still place piping hot mugs of tea on the Young countenance - but I had to admit to total bafflement regarding his suitability for the role of presenter of a Making Of documentary about a film based on a lesser-known Shakespeare play, directed by and starring one of our leading thespians. I mean, was nobody with a little more appropriate gravitas available? Was Derek Jacobi on holiday? Was Nigel Havers too expensive? Had Pam St Clement taken the phone off the hook?

What Will hadn't mentioned, and never does in the twenty-five minutes his documentary lasts, is that he was an executive producer on Coriolanus. That's all he needed to say to ease my troubled mind, but presumably out of modesty he withheld that vital scrap of information which would have made everything clearer. I had to find it out myself later, and while that was a pity, I did unearth the fact that he decided to invest in the film because he basically had buckets of cash lying around and no idea what to do with it. How he arrived at the decision to spunk it on a Shakespeare adaptation and not, say, Anything Is Possible: The Will Young Movie, I have no idea. If you're reading this Will, do get in touch and let me know.

The documentary proceeds in the way most of these things do, with each Head Of Department explaining what they do to an incredulous Will Young. His delight at being on a film set is infectious, and his puppy-dog innocence is charming and endearing, which is lovely but only increases the sense that someone like Patrick Stewart should be asking the questions instead. But then Will literally asks the film's military advisor if the actors shooting at each other ARE USING BLANKS, and you realise that that ferocious line of questioning would simply never have occurred to Sir Pat. Nor would that venerable officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire have dared to tell Coriolanus' make-up artist that "you have the best voice EVER, I think you should do the voiceover for the movie in the cinemas!" It is unclear what Will means by this but by God he is excited about it.

Later in the documentary, Fiennes' co-star Gerard Butler - whose association with a Shakespeare adaptation is almost as unlikely as Will Young's - tries to steal the Leave Right Now singer's thunder by recounting an unbelievably shit practical joke that he got someone else to play on a fellow actor, but we're not fooled. This isn't your party Butler, this is Will Young's party. Perhaps inspired by the bearded Scottish man's tomfoolery, Will later tries to get each interviewee to say something nasty about Ralph Fiennes, but to no avail. Eventually Production Designer Ricky Eyres ("aka Rick", Will says, doing finger-quotes around 'Rick' as if it's the maddest variant of 'Ricky' he's ever come across) capitulates, unconvincingly describing Fiennes as "murder", and Will's pleasure at pulling off this mischief is palpable.

Another trivia nugget that goes unmentioned is that Will had a cameo in the film which was cut for reasons which may or may not be quite obvious. Referring to himself in the third person in another interview I had to find myself, Will says: "There were all these acting greats, and then Will Young pops up to say a few lines. It just didn't work." Is he being too hard on himself? Difficult to say, but bear Will Young's assessment of Will Young in mind as you watch the clip below, which is my absolute favourite moment in the documentary: an utterly astonishing vignette, which is neither introduced nor explained. It is simply allowed to exist in the middle of a documentary about Ralph Fiennes' brutal, brooding adaptation of William Shakespeare's politically-charged play Coriolanus.

I urge you to watch that as many times as possible to truly appreciate it to its fullest.

There's plenty more to enjoy in Behind The Scenes Of Coriolanus With Will Young, but I've given enough away for free as it is. As far as I can tell you can't stream it, so you're just going to have to invest in an actual hard copy of the film if you want to bask in its oddness. It might be a complete and total mismatch of presenter and subject matter, but I have nothing but respect for Will Young for financing a perfectly good movie, making a short film about it and - perhaps above all - resisting the urge to lean into camera and, with a cheeky grin, chuckle about the film's title containing the word "anus".

BlogalongaBond / Spectre:The Author Of All My Pain

Thunderball. Moonraker. Die Another Day. What do these three James Bond films have in common? Two things: firstly, they are the fourth outings in the tux for Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan respectively. Secondly, they're all rubbish.

See if you can guess where I'm heading with this.

Spectre was a big deal for me. Skyfall seemed to get so much right in terms of balancing old and new, tradition and surprise, character and Massive Fuckoff Explosions, that to get Sam Mendes back for another go seemed like an idea that could not possibly fail. Furthermore, through a combination of incessant Bond waffle from my direction and sheer dumb luck, I found myself reporting on the film from the Mexico set for Empire magazine, a bucket-list event which to this day I can't quite believe actually took place. But it did, I've got hundreds of photos to prove it. Come round one day, we'll have a slideshow.

He was even happier to see me than Pierce Brosnan was that time

So I was invested in Spectre. I knew it would be amazing. It would be the Bond film I could download into my grandchildren's brainports and say: "Hey kids, Grandad stood just out of shot there, dribbling even more than he does now!" But in my excitement I had forgotten two things: one, Spectre was Daniel Craig's fourth Bond film and therefore automatically cursed, and two, I don't have any children and at this stage am extremely unlikely to conjure any up. But that's a blessing, because now I won't have to witness their offspring's hollow-eyed disappointment as they realise I was present at the scene of one of the worst crimes in Bond history and did nothing to stop it. For Spectre is not just Daniel Craig's worst Bond, it's possibly the most crushing disappointment in the series' lifetime.

I outlined a lot of what Spectre gets calamitously wrong in my immediate reaction, bashed out after a preview screening just over a year ago, so I won't repeat myself here. Not much, anyway. I saw the film again a few days later at the premiere, and, having dramatically lowered my expectations, found it just as flawed but not quite so distressingly average. But in the past twelve months I haven't been able to face it again. In fact such was its impact on me that, aside from a desperately needed go on Licence To Kill to remind myself why I love James Bond, I haven't watched a single 007 adventure in all that time. That is unheard of in these parts, let me tell you.

So exactly one year to the day since my first viewing, I gave Spectre another go. Surely, with a year's distance between us, the Bond films and I could reunite, rediscover what we did for each other and enjoy some unbelievable yet firmly metaphorical make-up sex. When I casually mentioned on Twitter that I was planning a rewatch, I received a smattering of ambiguous responses:

@IncredibleSuit I tried recently. Gave up after the opening.

— Olly Gibbs (@ollyog) October 22, 2016

@IncredibleSuit Yeah good luck with that.

— Gray (@gray) October 22, 2016

@IncredibleSuit Sorry, Neil. It'll still be shite.

— Matt Bone (@BoneyAbroad) October 22, 2016

@IncredibleSuit it's shit. Accept it.

— James Catton (@jimmycatton) October 22, 2016

@IncredibleSuit just no.

— Alex Beattie (@alexpcbeattie) October 22, 2016

@IncredibleSuit It's bad. Hope that helps

— Tom Court (@machotrouts) October 22, 2016

I felt like people were trying to tell me something, though I couldn't quite put my finger on exactly what it was, so I pressed on with an open mind and a full wine glass. Alas (and I wish Twitter had made some effort to warn me), it turns out Spectre is still a distressingly average film, and therefore an unacceptably substandard Bond film. I'll be surprised if I ever get round to watching it again. So what went wrong? Apart from - as mentioned in my previous review - the monotony of the narrative, the awful theme song, the unsettling location-hopping, the appalling treatment of Monica Bellucci, the shittest henchman since the one nobody remembers from Tomorrow Never Dies, the sterile fights and chases, the cack-handed retconning of the previous three films, the repetitive guff about the 00 section being obsolete, the inexplicable volte-face of Madeleine Swann's attitude to Bond, Christoph Waltz's bored performance and Thomas Newman's unforgivably lazy score? I could go on, but I won't.

Like most Bond films, Spectre gives its opening sequence everything, and I do love that four-minute unbroken shot, despite the knowledge that it was stitched together from four takes, shot weeks and miles apart from each other. But like the building Bond manages to blow up, the film comes crumbling down around his ears from there on. The helicopter sequence is the first warning sign: the fight choreography is dull; you can practically see the green screen out of the window; the lack of music under it removes any sense of danger (and when the score does begin it's a cue lifted directly from Skyfall); the much-trumpeted loop-the-loop is shot as if by a bystander on their phone (obviously not the Sony Xperia Z5) and cuts away before it even finishes. And then Sam Smith comes along to squeak a strong contender for the series' worst theme song over some mild tentacular erotica, as if everyone involved in the film has lost their fucking mind.

Hentai another day

There's some enjoyable, albeit brief, fan-service in the first act: the first antagonistic meeting between Bond and M in a wood-panelled office since The Living Daylights is most welcome, and only the third recorded sighting of the inside of Bond's flat is a fun bit of production design. Intended to mirror the psyche of Craig's Bond (sparse, functional, unemotional), the set does a similar job to those that reveal Connery's 007 in Dr. No (classic, angular, golf-oriented) and Moore's in Live And Let Die (vulgar, gadget-obsessed, bit porny). Even the Order Of Temporary Guardianship Moneypenny drops off is worth pausing the Blu-ray over, containing as it does the names of Bond's Aunt Charmian and Hannes Oberhauser, both characters from Fleming's books (although Oberhauser was never Bond's legal guardian and he certainly didn't have a snot-nosed son called Franz who went mental when James turned up).

After that, sadly, everything else is lacklustre and uncharacteristically inert, as if someone's forgotten to wind the film up before letting it go. Much of Bond's dialogue consists of clipped, cursory answers like "I can hardly wait", "That sounds marvellous", "I completely understand" or "Of course", delivered in a way that's meant to sound sardonic but just comes across as bored. Rubbish thug Mr Hinx has the mysterious power to make all the extras in his set-pieces disappear (where is the population of Rome at midnight? What happened to all the people on the train?). The biggest explosion ever captured on film somehow manages to be so flat that it barely ruffles Léa Seydoux's hair.

*ffft*

Then there's the hamfisted unpicking of some of the good work done in the previous films, perhaps best exemplified by Q branch rebuilding the Aston Martin DB5. The destruction of one of Bond's most iconographic elements in Skyfall was so ballsy and laden with feels that it really hit me in the nuts (in a good way, if that's possible), so to just glue it back together like a child's broken toy is frustrating and pointless. Systematically depriving Bond of the few things he cherishes - his true love, his car, his boss - has been a sadistically enjoyable motif of the Craig era, but Spectre loses its nerve in its rush to return to Old Bond. (Interestingly, an early draft had Rory Kinnear's Tanner as an MI6 mole, which would have taken the concept even further, but ended up being one of the few absolutely terrible ideas that was dropped before filming. In the books, Tanner is Bond's only real friend in the Service, and although the films have left that relationship woefully underserved so far, that would have been A STEP TOO FAR DAMMIT)

As for the film's Big Reveal, well. One of those early drafts had Blofeld as an African warlord (to be played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, rumour has it), which may have set him up as Just Another Villain but at least we wouldn't have had to put up with all that brother bullshit. More importantly though, the character was introduced early in the script, thereby negating all the is he / isn't he bollocks we had to put up with in the year running up to Spectre's release, as if the Star Trek Into Darkness Khan fiasco had never happened. What's the point of Oberhauser revealing that he has another name? NO POINT. It means nothing to Bond, because he's never heard the name before; only we, the audience have. And we, it seems worth pointing out, are not characters in the film. It would have made more sense for Waltz' character to call himself Blofeld for the majority of the film, only to reveal himself as - ZOMG - Bond's surrogate sibling all along; at least that would have had some dramatic impact.

But Spectre's biggest crime is its feeble attempt to slot into the plots of the previous three films; a device so lame in its inception and execution that it is an unfathomable mystery why nobody in the film's production ever stopped to think about just how dumb it was. Oberhauser / Blofeld's "It's always been me" speech is such absolute bullshit it makes me cross just thinking about it. It makes literally no sense that he was in any way behind any of the events of Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace or Skyfall, and the very notion not only makes Spectre look stupid, it retroactively renders those three films nonsensical too, which really is quite the achievement. And let's not even get into Blofeld's dunderheaded plan to tell Bond everything, then make him forget everything (wuh?), then kill him (eh?). People complain about the villain in Quantum Of Solace, but at least that guy wasn't a total fucking moron.

That said, it could have been worse. Spectre's script was notoriously leaked during filming, and while I would never condone obtaining and reading it, I did somehow come across a bunch of other ideas intended to demonstrate how Blofeld had been the author of all Bond's pain. They didn't make it into the finished film, but maybe they should have:

Ten more examples of Bond's pain which were authored by Blofeld: Just after the black-and-white bathroom fight at the beginning of Casino Royale, Bond goes to the toilet only to find that someone has recently done a poo and not flushed it. That person... was Ernst Stavro Blofeld At some point between the events of Casino Royale and Skyfall, Blofeld moves the steering wheel of Bond's Aston Martin DB5 to the other side to fuck with his mind Blofeld edited all the action scenes in Quantum Of Solace to try and stop people seeing how good Bond was at fighting and that It was Blofeld who hid the stationery in Bond's hotel room in Quantum Of Solace. Unfortunately his plan backfired; little did he know that the absence of a free pen and notepad was exactly the kind of thing that made Agent Fields' fanny damp For most of the last four 007 films Blofeld is standing directly behind Bond, mockingly pulling his own ears out and making a pouty face. You just can't see him because he's smaller than Bond One night in 2010 Blofeld crept into Bond's tailor's and altered all his measurements so that none of his suits would fit When Moneypenny accidentally shot Bond off the train in Skyfall, it was Blofeld who - just offscreen - whispered the word "bumtrumpet" in her ear and made her do it For most of the first act of Skyfall, Blofeld repeatedly hides Bond's razor Just before Bond does the gunbarrel walk at the end of Skyfall, Blofeld put a little bit of olive oil on the floor, making Bond do a silly little wobble In order to make Bond's heroic deeds appear dull and uninteresting throughout the events of Spectre, Blofeld wrote the score

From now on, then, I would like to impose a rule on the James Bond films: each new actor who plays Bond must do three films in ten years. No more, no fewer. A cursory glance at the Bond back catalogue demonstrates the genius of this idea: no Thunderball, no Moonraker, no Die Another Day, no Spectre, plus we'd have had one more film with Timothy Dalton in it (ignore George Lazenby, he buggers up my otherwise foolproof plan). As much as I've enjoyed Daniel Craig as Bond (he's far and away the best thing about Spectre, even when he's at his most monosyllabic), I think it's time he went. And he can take the bloody DB5 with him.

Ralph Fiennes

Fiennes is bloody great as M, isn't he? He's basically playing the role exactly as Judi Dench did, his infuriation with everyone outside his immediate team palpable and his short-fused tolerance with Bond barely concealed. But his military background means he gets to throw a punch every now and again, and although I don't need to see future scriptwriters crowbarring an action sequence in for him every time, I'm happy to see him get his hands dirty once in a while.

Ben Whishaw

Whishaw, meanwhile, is the perfect Q right now. Ignoring the aforementioned DB5 nonsense, Spectre's Q Branch scene shows his comic skills off wonderfully, and his relationship with Bond is fascinating: he's not impressed by what he does but he's a little bit scared of him. Also he is very concerned about his job and his cats, and those are noble attributes. Plus OH MY GOD THAT SWEATER


And finally: There is no 'And finally'. As if to hammer its rubbishness home, Spectre doesn't even have a decent double entendre making reference to James Bond's penis. What a load of old cock.

BlogalongaBond might return

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here

Spectre

James Bond is back, in case you hadn't noticed, and this time his mission is even more impossible than ever: to top Skyfall. Off the back of the most successful, cannily post-modern and downright surprising Bond film ever, Sam Mendes and his crack team of operatives needed to pull something unbelievably amazing out of the Bondbag with Spectre. So does it top Skyfall? Well, no, not quite. Does it top Casino Royale? Er, no. Wait... does it top Quantum Of Solace?

No. It does not.

In actual fact, Mendes didn't need to make a film bigger and better than its predecessor at all; just one that lived up to it, justified our faith in him and rewarded fans with another glorious slice of world-class Bondery. Spectre does none of those things. Where Skyfall was a daringly-structured rolling boulder of excitement, full of knowing winks and arch commentary on the place of the series in modern cinema, Spectre is a paper chase from A to B to C, deviating only to take in M and Q. It's all surface, like most of the pre-Daniel Craig era; given that we've had three films reinventing the character for modern audiences, the temptation to take him back to his 1970s incarnation - as if that's some kind of benchmark - is both understandable and utterly ill-advised. Parts of it work, sure, but so much of it just feels... ordinary. And if there's one thing Bond must never, ever be, it's ordinary.

Chess, for example. Ordinary. Why not 3D hologrammatic space chess?

Things start well - extremely well - with the return of the gunbarrel to its rightful place at the front of the film, Craig finally getting the walk, turn and shoot right on the third time of asking. What follows is a blinding single shot, maybe five minutes in length, following Bond through the Day Of The Dead parade in Mexico City on his way to take down a bad guy for reasons as yet unclear. It's a virtuoso sequence that takes your breath away and promises so much for the two and a bit hours to come. It's no exaggeration, though, to say that things never get this good again. After a great gag involving a sofa and some typically impressive helicopter stunt work (marred slightly by some unconvincing green screen), Sam Smith's pitiful theme song whines in and brings everything back down to earth. Rumour has it Radiohead were strong contenders to perform the song, and in fact they already had the perfect theme for the film: No Surprises.

If you've followed any of the film's build-up, even just the officially-sanctioned synopsis, trailers and so on, you'll know exactly what happens in Spectre. And what they haven't told you, you can probably guess. Bond was sent to find his Mexico target by a "message from his past", which turns out to be a nice touch but makes zero sense when you think about it. Acting against orders (for a change), he jets off to Rome, where the much-trumpeted "Bond woman" Monica Bellucci is wasted in a staggeringly Moore-esque scene that won't do anything to help the argument that Bond girls women females are treated better by writers these days. He also meets Dave Bautista's Mr Hinx, a henchman whose classically bizarre (but frankly silly) USP is introduced in shocking style, and then NEVER REFERRED TO AGAIN. Imagine if Jaws had come on at the beginning of The Spy Who Loved Me, smiled to show his metallic teeth, then never actually used them. That's what we're dealing with here.

That's right, he can bend flexible rubber tubing WITH HIS BARE HANDS

A semi-spectacular car chase is hobbled by the film's decision to dollop jokes throughout, which grate more often than not; Daniel Craig has a wicked sense of humour, and showed it in Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, but he can't do the cheesy stuff that Moore and Brosnan effortlessly pulled off. It just looks out of place. And it's carried through the film in the decision to have Bond treat everything with levity - again, we're going back to the "golden age" of 007 here, but it removes all the threat and menace we've come to appreciate from the Craig era. Sometimes the humour lands - the word "stay" is put to excellent use - but only when it's not trying too hard.

Before long we're in Austria, where previous über-villain Mr White is hunkered down in his cellar, tossing himself off to rolling news channels. This is where we expect to find out the connection between Quantum and the mysterious new organisation, but it's inadequately explained. You'll know from the trailers that Spectre, and its boss man Franz Oberhauser, are responsible for all Bond's pain, but my god does that involve some clumsy ret-conning. "It's always been me", says Oberhauser in his later, inevitable monologue, but frankly we've only got his word for it. The facts don't really add up and nobody can be bothered to show their working out.

It's nice to see Q pop up in Austria, although how he got there is a mystery: remember in Skyfall when Moneypenny said he was afraid of flying? No, neither do the writers. Still, it's fun to see Ben Whishaw - along with MI6 engine roomers Ralph Fiennes, Rory Kinnear and Naomie Harris - get involved in a bit of the action; Fiennes, especially, teases out his M's military background in some of the film's classier dialogue. It's just a shame he has to keep arguing with Andrew Scott's government wonk about how vital the Double-0 section is, given that he spent most of Skyfall disagreeing with Judi Dench's M, who said exactly the same things he says here but with added Tennyson.

"I know a little Roger McGough, will that do?"

If it's Act III, it must be Tangier, and a decent stretch of good stuff plays out in a hotel room between Bond and Léa Seydoux's Madeleine Swann, which is then undone by a conversation on a train which draws inevitable and unfavourable comparisons with Casino Royale's superior Bond / Vesper train-based chinwag. Possibly the film's best action sequence follows, and it owes a huge debt to From Russia With Love, but even that is immediately dampened by an unnecessary coda.

And then, after about a hundred minutes, Christoph Waltz finally shows his face. Was it worth the wait? You guessed it. Waltz is wasted here, trying desperately to add some idiosyncracies to his two-dimensional villain but never being allowed to explore the character like we know he can. His scheme is depressingly low-key, and his personal beef with Bond means nothing and goes nowhere. He will, however, make you even more terrified of going to the dentist. Fortunately the final act picks up considerably, and contains a neat in-joke for hardcore Bond fans (hello, I understood that reference), but by then it's too late to save the film. Nothing we've seen has been especially new, exciting or unexpected, and in a post-Skyfall world that seems like a huge missed opportunity.

I know, man. I know. Let it out.

If you've made it this far, then I'm sorry for your loss, but let me just add one more personal thing: special mention must go to Spectre's chief villain, Thomas Newman, for whom a sauna in hell is reserved for his score. I found his work in Skyfall brilliantly up to date and innovative, different enough from David Arnold's preceding work but recognisably Bondian even without much of the James Bond Theme. It appears Newman felt the same way, because around half of Spectre's score consists of cues lifted directly from Skyfall. Almost every set-piece is scored by music I instantly recognised, and it repeatedly pulled me out of the film, making me more and more furious. That's unforgivable enough, but he also chooses to ignore the Bond Theme again, when it would have lifted so much of Spectre's action. God only knows what John Barry - who knocked out eleven distinct but connected Bond scores, all brilliant, and one of them in just three weeks - would make of it.

We're not dealing with Die Another Day levels of dreadful here, and there's plenty in Spectre to please casual Bond fans and unfussy cinemagoers. But I'm writing this review as someone who cares so much about these films it's embarrassing. I don't expect perfection and I can forgive a lot in Bond; I mean, I actually really like Quantum Of Solace. But Bond is at its best when it ignores what's going on around it and reaches further and pushes harder to be its own thing, to surprise and excite, and to tell audiences what they want to see rather than react to what it thinks they want to see. Spectre doesn't do that, but, you know, maybe Bond 25 will. James Bond will always return.

The Wes Anderson Movie Episode 8:The Grand Budapest Hotel

I've come to the conclusion that reviewing any of the individual episodes of The Wes Anderson Movie, which is now in its eighteenth year of production, is an exercise in staggering futility. If you enjoy the other parts then you'll enjoy Episode 8: The Grand Budapest Hotel, probably immensely. If you don't like the others, you probably won't like this one. And if, like me, you have no strong feelings either way, then guess what?

If you've never seen any episodes of The Wes Anderson Movie, then this is as good a one to watch as any: it's the apotheosis of his uniquely genius / gratingly irritating (delete as applicable) style, with symmetrical, borderline-OCD compositions, 90-degree pans, meticulous production design, wacky characters, a tremendous soundtrack and Owen Wilson all popping up as ordained by the Prophecy which I believe Bill Murray delivered on the day Anderson first picked up a camera. In its favour, this episode does have a panoply of splendid facial hair, a glorious variety of aspect ratios (most of it is shot in 1.33:1) and a more tremendous soundtrack than most, but otherwise it's business as usual. I look forward to copying and pasting most of this post in a couple of years for Episode 9.

BlogalongaBond / Skyfall And The Wilderness Years

FAIR WARNING: This post is a festival of spoilers. It assumes that you've either seen Skyfall or you don't mind knowing most of its surprises. If neither of those apply to you but you still fancy some Skyfall review action, head this way for completely spoiler-free waffle.

Here we are then. This is the end; hold your breath and count to ten. After nearly two years of incessant Bondwaffle, the world's greatest blogging experiment comes crashing to a climax with the world's greatest twenty-threequel (excluding Carry On Matron), Skyfall. With Quantum Of Solace still stinking out the memories of Bond fans and normal people alike, could Daniel Craig's third Bond film be his Goldfinger, his The Spy Who Loved Me?

Well, not quite. Skyfall is undoubtedly great, but it's no Casino Royale. In fact it's hard to rank it alongside any other Bond films, simply because for half the time it doesn't feel much like a Bond film at all. The familiar half - the bits with the Bond theme, the OTT set-pieces, the tux and so on - goes to enormous lengths to reassure after two films light on the perceived tropes. Direct references to previous entries abound: an opening in which Bond is apparently killed (You Only Live Twice); an Aston Martin with an ejector seat (Goldfinger); an escape via reptile-hopping (Live And Let Die); and a gun which only Bond can operate (Licence To Kill). That's Connery, Moore and Dalton fans taken care of right there; all we need is a beefed-up role for M, as we saw in the Brosnan years, and a Lazenby-era last-minute death of a loved one and everyone's happy.

Well. Almost everyone.

The remainder of Skyfall, though, is so unlike the rest of the canon that it takes every ounce of director Sam Mendes' skill to make the film work. Like master chefs, Mendes and writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan blend old cheese with fresh milk and come out with delicious Skyfall sauce. The film's delicate balancing act is executed flawlessly, never tipping too far into crass comedy or overwrought drama, and its unexpected twists and turns free the series from the shackles of the past, making anything possible in the future.

Ironically though, the future looks oddly familiar - at least if the final scene of Skyfall is anything to go by. The roughly ten-year cycle that Bond films go through from knockabout caper to frowny revenge thriller looks to be heading back to the former, and for once I'm excited about it. I love Serious Bond, but I'm ready for him to relax now, enjoy himself, maybe find Quantum and blow up a volcano or two. Let's leave the brow-furrowing introspection for Fassbender to deal with in 2018.

Of course no Bond film is perfect (not even Licence To Kill), and Skyfall sports two major wrinkles which, while not enough to derail the film, are difficult to ignore for those of us tragic enough to care about what remains of the franchise's Craig-era continuity.

The first is the feeling we're left with at the end, which is uncannily similar to that with which we were left at the end of the previous two Bond films. By Casino Royale's climax, this MI6 noob had gained his licence to kill, his Aston Martin, his theme tune and his excuse for treating women like tissues to jizz into and dispose of immediately, so that when he defiantly pronounces himself "Bond... James Bond" at the end, he's finally ready to serve Queen and country. Hooray! Then, in Quantum Of Solace, it turned out he wasn't quite James Bond yet - he still had to go through a deeply personal mission in order to get a load of emotional baggage out of the way, after which he was finally ready to serve Queen and country. Hooray, again! Now, at the end of Skyfall, after going on another deeply personal mission and getting another load of emotional baggage out of the way, he's *sigh* finally ready to serve Queen and country. Hooray again, again. Can he get on with his job now? Please?

The other problem is Skyfall's portrayal of 007 as a knackered old codger. So recently rebooted and shown in his formative years as a double-0, Bond is a dinosaur just four years later. He must have gone through a hell of a lot after locking up Vesper's double-crossing boyfriend to be so jaded so soon. In its defence, it's the emotional core of the script that requires Bond to be past it: it's imperative that he and M, who's also under attack for age-related incompetence, identify with each other and stick together. The James Bond of Quantum Of Solace could have gone through the same motions as Skyfall's Bond, but he would have been doing it out of duty rather than the friendship and, dare I say it, love that underpins his actions here. As a result, 2012 Bond is a far more human hero; it's just that barring even more indistinct timeline-hopping (don't be surprised if Bond 24 is set between Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace and explains why he changed his suit), Bond can only get even older from here on in.

But like so many niggles (the bizarrely empty tube train; the sudden onset of darkness when Silva attacks Skyfall lodge; the fact that Bond doesn't even loosen his tie or undo his jacket on his 500-mile drive up the A1), this timeline-mangling is just something you have to get over. If you can't get over it though, fear not: Bond's diaries are readily available, and explain everything you need to know about the wilderness years between Quantum Of Solace and Skyfall...

2008 Busy year. Lots of it went by in a near-incomprehensible blur. Found out all sorts of stuff about Quantum and managed to not kill the two people associated with it that I wanted to kill the most. M reckons this is progress. 2009 Quiet year at work. Couldn't find Quantum so stayed in and watched Straw Dogs a lot. I liked the guy defending his isolated home from nutters. I could see myself doing that, only I'm never going home because I hate that place and there's a weird old man who lives there by himself with no supplies of any kind and thinks he's Sean Connery. Haven't killed anyone for ages, starting to wonder if I've still got it in me. Found my first grey hair too. 2010 Not that I'm having a midlife crisis or anything but I decided to soup up the DB5. Took it into Q Branch where they made it right-hand drive and fitted revolving number plates and machine guns like in a film I saw once, then they stuck in an ejector seat for LOLs. Those guys! Agent Ronson gave me a new watch for Christmas. It's an Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean 600M. It follows in the footsteps of its illustrious predecessors by sporting a raft of specialist diving features including a rotating diving bezel, a chromium nitride diving scale and water resistance up to 600 metres. Also it goes nicely with these Tom Ford suits. Ronson is just the best. I call him 'my new Leiter', LOL! We go to the gym together a lot, although he's much fitter than me. He introduced me to Home Alone, a film about a kid defending his home from nutters with all these crazy traps. As if! Still haven't found Quantum. Beginning to worry that I'm losing my edge. 2011 I'm definitely getting old: thought I saw Quantum's Mr White in Waitrose so I shot him in the head. Turns out it was M's husband buying her weekly bottle of Macallan Scotch. Awk-ward! Not as awkward as the funeral though: I got drunk with M on Heineken (won't be drinking that shit again unless I'm in a VERY bad way) and slept with her. In a way it brought us much closer. Even moved in with her for a while but she kicked me out for watching Straw Dogs and Home Alone all the time. Still got a key to her flat though, never know when it might come in handy. Got drunk at the Christmas party and slept with Agent Ronson. Interesting experience. Still, there's got to be a first time for everything. He's taking it all a bit seriously, says he'd die for me, all that stuff. Trying to avoid him by changing gyms and spending all my time there. As a result I'm pretty buff right now, which means that none of my suits fit. Must do something about that. 2012 Got a bit depressed about the M situation this year so went to the cinema a lot to try and forget. Watched The Dark Knight Rises eight times. Batman sure knows how to pick himself up from a crippling incident that nearly killed him and defeat a formidable ally despite being a bit out of shape! Inspiring stuff. Saw M in Waitrose and patched things up. While we were chatting some guy nicked her laptop out of her handbag and neither of us noticed till we got to the office. We're definitely both losing it. Now I've got to go to bloody Turkey with Agent Ronson to try and find it. Hope he stops banging on about dying for me, it's embarrassing. Also some bimbo's coming with us but for some ridiculous reason she won't tell me her name. Says she's 'waiting for the right moment'. Not sure I trust her: I watched her at the shooting range the other day and she couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if she was in it. Not to worry, I'm sure she can't do too much harm.   So I leave for Istanbul tomorrow. Left a note in the kitchen for May, my elderly Scottish housekeeper: "Pls cancel milk. Oh and don't let those MI6 bastards sell the flat. James Bond will return."

The cuff adjustment

In moments of extreme Bondiness, Pierce Brosnan straightened his tie. Daniel Craig prefers to ensure that his cuffs are protruding exactly the right length from his sleeves. This is the first sign that Skyfall isn't taking itself too seriously, and it's perfectly judged.

The Shanghai fight

The zenith of Roger Deakins' cinematography in Skyfall comes in this incredible scrap between Bond and Patrice. Shot in one take, entirely in silhouette, with humungous neon jellyfish floating across the background, it's the artiest fight Bond's ever had. It's also a triumph of choreography; every crunching kick and punch looks brutally convincing.

Silva's introduction

The lengthy, one-take monologue about rats is one thing, but the following banter between Bond and Silva is absolute gold. Craig wisely lets Bardem provide the pantomime, so that when he deadpans "what makes you think this is my first time?" it deflates Silva and slays the audience. It would be great to think that Bond has had to go mano y mano in the past to get the job done, although if Ian Fleming were alive he'd have an absolute dickie fit, the massive homophobe.

Tennyson

Skyfall drops a devastating slice of near-arthouse cinema on us in this tremendous scene which further encapsulates all that is Bond. Reciting Tennyson's Ulysses in voiceover while 007 legs it up Whitehall to her rescue, M reminds both her inquisitors and the audience that although the British Empire may be a distant memory and secret agents may be a relic of the Cold War, the world still needs heroes. And most of all, it still needs James Bond.

M's death

It was a long time coming (as great as DJD is, her presence in the post-Brosnan films has always stopped me sleeping at night), but when M finally resigns for good in Bond's arms, orphaning him again, I don't mind saying I wept for the first time in a Bond film since Roger Moore snowboarded to the Beach Boys. She may have been a continuity-buggering irritant but I'll miss her potty mouth.

And finally: Hopefully New Bond won't be forgetting Little James in the future:

EVE is apologising to BOND for shooting him in the chest, thereby ruining the mission and injuring him so badly that he almost died.

BOND

It was only four ribs. Some of the less vital organs...
(he leans closer to EVE and whispers)
nothing... major.

BlogalongaBond will return with Spectre

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

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