Spectre Extended TV Spot - Bond gets Belluci Up Against Wall

We all know that James Bond can be a bit of a grubby sex pest, but Spectre looks to be taking Bond's ways with the ladies to unprecedented levels of creepy. Or maybe Daniel Craig menacingly saying his name with his face only centimetres from Monica Belluci's face is meant to be sexy and appealing. I don't think it's just because I'm a dude, but if someone introduced themselves to me while I was backed up against a wall and had their nose about to touch mine, I'd be tempted to shove them backwards down the stairs.

The latest TV spot for Spectre shows Naomie Harris struggling to deliver some godawful sounding exposition about how the new film will link back to Skyfall, before revealing some stuff we've already seen in the previously released trailer. We get that awesome 'kite dancing in a hurricane' line again before a bunch of shots of the big action set-pieces.

Christoph Waltz is still purring from the shadows (and definitely not bald or stroking a cat), but the car chases, helicopter attacks and plane crashes look like they are going to be an absolute blast.

Sam Mendes has set the bar bloody high with Skyfall so it will be exciting to see if he can outdo himself with Spectre. Just please get Craig to back off Belluci. Anyone would think Bond had watched Irreversible too many times and is about to reenact its most bloody horrible scene by the way he's harassing her.

With this, The Martian and Hunger Games Mockingjay Part 2 all released in the same month, November is going to be a busy month at the cinema.

Spy Review: Secret Weapon, Jason Statham

Before they take on the all-girl Ghostbusters reboot, Melissa McCarthy and writer-director Paul Feig hook up to pastiche the none-more-male world of spy movies.

Jude Law is the dashing spy of the title until he messes up by shooting the only man who knows where a stolen nuke is hidden and then ends up getting bumped off by the nuke dealer’s ruthless daughter. Stepping up to take over from Law’s agent is the woman who has been sitting in a bat-infested CIA basement, yelling commands into his ear in order to keep him one step ahead of his enemies. Melissa McCarthy is the mild-mannered desk jockey who emerges from the basement to track down Rose Byrne, playing the Bulgarian arms dealer who can help her find that missing nuke.

Along the way, McCarthy is aided, but mostly hindered by Jason Statham’s cocky ex-CIA agent and Miranda Hart’s fellow basement dweller. She must overcome the disrespect of her colleagues in order to regain her self-worth and hopefully stop the annihilation of an American city at the hands of terrorists.

Spy is a showcase for McCarthy’s comedic range but by keeping her constrained for much of the first half of the movie Feig misses a trick. The lonely, sad, lacking in self-confidence and love struck McCarthy that fawns over Jude Law’s superspy and is scared to stand up for herself is far less fun than the unleashed McCarthy of the second half. This is much closer to the woman we all fell in love with in Bridesmaids. When McCarthy finally gets to kick ass and drop an arsenal full of foul-mouthed insults on anyone in her way, it’s like an eruption of awesomeness and Spy finds its groove.

The Bond references come thick and fast with sexy opening credits, slick production values and some fight choreography making this a convincing blockbuster, but it takes McCarthy unchained to give Spy the kick it needs. When McCarthy and Statham are bad mouthing each other, sparks fly and Spy has its fair share of hilarious moments. With some brutal comic violence and even more wince-inducing put-downs, it’s a shame that by the end Spy resorts to a 50 Cent cameo for laughs. Also, more of Rose Byrne and less of Miranda Hart would always be welcome.

While Feig and McCarthy are on fine form, Statham steals every scene he’s in and gets the biggest laughs in the script. It’s a shame, as if Feig and McCarthy can just forget about making McCarthy a sympathetic frumpy figure and instead let her cut loose like a Tasmanian Devil, Spy could have been bigger, ruder and funnier from start to finish.

Kingsman: The Secret Service Review

When super spy Harry Hart loses a member of his team in the late 90s, he makes a promise to look out for the young son of the man who died trying to save him. Seventeen years later, Eggsy is a wayward teen with a permanently distraught mother and violent scumbag of a step father. When Eggsy is arrested for stealing a car, Harry Hart seeks out the troubled youth and offers him the chance to become a part of the mysterious and super secret spy agency known as the Kingsman. Seeing what Harry Hart can do, the gadgets he uses, and the class he oozes, Eggsy agrees to sign up to the competitive training regime that could see him taking on billionaire lisping megalomaniac Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson).

It is very clear from watching Kingsman that director Matthew Vaughn is not ready to give up on directing a Bond film yet. Whether he will ever get the gig in the future on the back of this film is very questionable. Kingsman is more like the film we would get if Tarantino ever gets to make a Bond film. It’s self-referential and smart, has a brilliantly foul mouth and is uber-violent from start to finish. Not to mention the fact that it takes an outsider’s perspective on Britain and fills the film with stereotypes of the class system, from the stiff upper lipped suited gents of the Kingsman to the ‘yeah bruv’ yoof of working class ladland.

Early contender for best scene of the year?

Kingsman takes great pleasure in pinching from Bond films, while giving tradition a good shake up. Valentine’s lisp, blade footed hench-woman and mountain lair all feel like they border on homage and parody, whereas other moments indulge in characters talking conventions before shockingly subverting what audiences have come to expect in these films.

To take the Tarantino comparison further, Matthew Vaughn really knows how to revel in the joy of a good splash of ultra-violence. The scene where Firth’s skilled spy is unleashed on a church congregation to the sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird is one of the most excitingly executed, thrillingly shot and edited and funniest massacres in film history. Nothing in the rest of the film can touch it, but that doesn’t stop Vaughn from trying.

With its cast including Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Michael Caine, Samuel L. Jackson and Mark Hamill, it’s a wonder that Taron Egerton even gets a look in as Eggsy. Doubters may think that he is a poor man’s substitute for the swagger and savagery of Jack O’ Connell but Egerton emerges as a winning choice to hold the film together, charming with his sly grin and convincing with his way with an umbrella.

Though there is a worrying undercurrent of upper class superiority and even scepticism about those who campaign  about climate change, if you can cast those niggling fears aside, there surely won’t be a more gleefully violent film than Kingsman this year. 

Watch the trailer:

More recent reviews:

Son of a Gun

Big Hero 6

Inherent Vice 

Birdman

A Most Violent Year

Wild

Whiplash

Testament of Youth

The Theory of Everything

American Sniper

Bond 24 Titled Spectre and gets a Teaser Poster

Big things are about to happen in the world of Bond 24 so get watching below:

Sam Mendes calls the 007 stage ‘The stage where budgets go to die’

The title will be: Spectre

7 month shoot across the globe.

Sam Mendes mentioned the key new additions to his crew:

Editor: Lee Smith

Cinematographer: Hoyt van Hotema (Interstellar)

Mendes then unveiled the new Aston Martin DB10

Before he introduced his returning cast:

Rory Kinnear as Tanner

Ben Whishaw as Q

Naomie Harris as Moneypenny

The 'extraordinary' Ralph Fiennes as M

and Daniel Craig back as Bond

As for new cast members, it's a tantalising bunch: 

Andrew Scott as Denby

David Bautista as Hinks

Monica Belluci

Lea Seydoux as Madeline Swann

Christoph Waltz

And here is the teaser poster:

 

James Bond is the Job Seeker

Love a bit of Cassette Boy. Not sure how I'd missed this one but it's well worth a look. Cassette Boy cuts up bits of audio/visual material and makes them into his own brand of silly, often satirical humour. He's hit Harry Potter, Nick Griffin and Jeremy Clarkson in the past and with this video he takes on the modern Bond film.

Hit by budget cuts, it seems Danial Craig is going from posh spy to down and out wino in the new Bond films. He's a brand new hero for our recession hit times:

Avatar Sequels and Next Bond Director

Recently I've been writing about all sorts of strange ponderings over at Filmoria including my thoughts on the Avatar sequels and who I'd like to see as the next Bond director. Click this link to check out my thoughts on James Cameron's Avatar sequels and why they are a step in the right direction for Hollywood in certain ways. To check out who I'd like to see as the director of the next Bond films, please click here.

Avatar is the biggest box office behemoth of all time and I'm curious as to why that is the case. Are we going to have a generation of Avatar fans who are as dedicated as Star Wars fans? Will James Cameron's sequels live up to the ludicrous expectations that fans of the first film will have? I remember reading on the release of the film that people were getting depressed and even semi-suicidal that they could not live their lives on Pandora. So immersive was the world Cameron created and so luscious was his 3D cinematography that fanatical fans were taking the whole cinema as escapism thing a bit far and walking out of the darkened theatre back into their real lives and feeling miserable.

I'd like to think that some of these fans found the environmental warnings of the film also very concerning and decided that we needed to make a change right here and right now on Planet Earth and start looking after the rainforests better and getting back to nature a bit more. Perhaps as they left the cinema and saw their decaying, dirty, polluted cities, they did indeed feel depressed at what this planet was becoming. If that is the case, then good on Mr Cameron for making people think twice about the destruction of our planet.

In completely different news, Sam Mendes stepped away from Bond after his huge success with Skyfall. I think it's a real shame but I'm sure there are plenty of others who are thinking that Mendes should get back to making sensible films about suburbs and repressed emotions and stuff. Skyfall was a truly awesome Bond film. I'm not the biggest fan of the franchise but this one had loads of great character stuff as well as some breathtaking action. Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins made it both beautiful and thrilling and I would have loved to see them have another go. However whoever takes the reigns now has seriously big boots to fill and I don't envy them!

What do you think about Avatar's success? Does it really deserve to be the biggest film of all time or do kids just have more money to spend on going to the cinema these days or what?

And who do you think should direct the next Bond film?

October’s Best of British

In the first part of a new series, Pete Turner brings you details of the best new British films hitting cinemas next month…

October is always an exciting time for British cinema with the blockbuster season over, Halloween approaching and the London Film Festival bringing world cinema to the capital, as well as shining a much needed light on Britain’s talent.


Of course October 2012 also sees the return of a certain very British, very popular icon to cinema screens. You know the name. You know the number. More on him later…

But first let’s take a look at some of the other British films fighting for your hard earned pounds this month. Speaking of a certain super spy, first up is a documentary released to help commemorate the 50th anniversary of his cinematic outings. Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007 charts the 50 years since Mr Bond first hit screens in Dr No in 1962. Odeon cinemas will be giving the film a limited release on October 5th and fans will no doubt be desperate to catch the nostalgic trip through one of the most successful film franchises (and longest running) ever made...

Read more on the new British films of October 2012 at Boolean Flix.

Found Footage PhD Update

Been a bit quiet on the blogging front and that's because for the last week I've been working on clarifying what my thesis is actually aiming to do.  It's taken me eight drafts to get this right.  I won't bore you with the details but for anyone who is interested.  This is the nuts and bolts of what I've been researching for the last year and a half and what I will be working on for the next three and half years:

Identification, Self-Consciousness and Proof in the ‘First-Person’ Contemporary Horror Film 

 My investigation will focus on the use of the mock-documentary format in contemporary horror cinema, and more specifically on those films such as The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999), Paranormal Activity (Peli, 2007) and Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008) that create the impression of a character within the film being in control of the camera. It is my aim to analyse the aesthetic, technological and perceptual elements of these films in order to:

 

• Ascertain all the key influences on the body of films studied here as concerns production, reception and aesthetics
• Establish who or what the audience is encouraged to identify with when viewing the films and why this identification occurs
• Establish the aesthetic, technological and psychological means by which the audience is primed for the viewing experience of these films
• Ascertain how the level of self-consciousness (e.g. the characters’ awareness that they are being filmed) impacts on the viewing experience and thought processes of the viewer 
• Determine how video recording technology is used as a method to gain proof and often fails in the task of collecting evidence of the supernatural by the characters in the film 

 So that's it bascially.  That's what I'm spending five years of my life and a shitload of money on.  If anyone does have an interest in seriously academic analysis, I will try and do the occasional update on this but I can completely understand if you think this sounds desperately boring and pretentious.  And if so, my humble apologies!



Meanwhile in completely unrelated news, have you seen the Skyfall teaser?


   

What do you reckon, best Bond ever?  Well until Nolan grabs the reins (fingers crossed)!