Film Shapes

The best Bond films have always been more than what we associate with 007 - the theme, the women, the gadgets, the villains, the song, etc. Which is why No Time to Die may go down as one of the best of the franchise. It stands alongside Casino Royale , On Her Majesty's Secret Service  (keep an eye out for echoes of this film) and From Russia With Love as a high water mark, mainly due to what's going on behind the veneer of glitz and cool. This fifth film of Daniel Craig's tenure wraps up a lot of the threads that began with Casino Royale and continued on and off through the subsequent films. It acts as a pretty perfect bookend to that first film. Running over the plot seems irrelevant. On paper, it's as you were with 007 films - uber-villain has nefarious plans for world domination or, at least, some sort of large-scale crime; Bond is called in to stop him; there are great action set-pieces; Bond cheeks it up with M, Moneypenny and Q; the CIA get involved; and of cour...

Dodging newspaper and podcast reviews as well as YouTube trailers is fairly easy but it's more difficult to avoid spoilers when a preview is shown ONE MINUTE BEFORE THE FILM STARTS. Twats. Anyway, onto the film itself. Skyfall is Daniel Craig's third Bond effort but not his best - Casino Royale still holds that mantle. It's hard to talk about this movie without bringing the previous two in as comparisons, but I'll try. I enjoyed Skyfall but rather less than I had imagined I would. I think one of the reasons was the storyline, which seemed a bit old hat. Without giving too much away, the villain (a brilliantly camp Javier Bardem) seems based on Sean Bean's character in Goldeneye. Bondies will get the reference. The M-centric part of the plot worked in a kind of oedipal, 'mummies boys' sort of way, with both Bond and Bardem's Silva hovering around Judi Dench, albeit with different motives. But the MacGuffin that begins the film buggers off halfway...

UPDATE : June 1st Michael Haneke has won the Palme d'Or for Amour. This is his second Palme in 4 years after The White Ribbon in 2009. Both times Jacques Audiard has missed out, though this year Rust and Bone was completely overlooked whereas in 2009, Un Prophete at least took the Grand Prix, ostensibly the runners-up prize. Here are the winners in the main categories. I'm pretty chuffed for Mads Mikkelsen (he won best actor for The Hunt ). I first noticed him in a pretty good Danish police show called Unit One . He's since appeared in some average Hollywood films but he made a class villain in Casino Royale , scratching Daniel Craig's nuts. I reckon he's one of the most intense actors rocking the screens these days. It looks like a pretty good year for official entries at Cannes. The stand-out for me is the new Jacques Audiard film Rust and Bone with Marion Cotillard. One of my favourite directors AND possibly my favourite actress working rig...