And so the re-watch comes to an end.

After, what has been 26 movies, the James Bond movies have been re-watched.  I have to admit that, at one point, this felt like an undertaking that was going to be more than what I could finish.  Then came the epidemic and quarantine and time changed.  So I decided to push forward with Dr. No.  After viewing Skyfall (and that horrid 1967 Casino Royale travesty), I came to the last Bond film before the arrival of No Time to Die in November (hopefully).  That film was Spectre.

I saw this film once in 2015 and I did not love it.  In fact, it was quite the letdown for me after the wonderful Skyfall.  Again, I was intrigued to see how my second viewing of this movie might be the same or different.

You know what? I quite enjoyed Spectre this time.

I found this to be considerably more entertaining than I did when I first saw it in the theater.  There could be many reasons why that is the case.  Perhaps expectations outweighed what I saw, considering how much I loved Skyfall.  Maybe I did not understand the references, since I had not seen (or it had been a long time) some of the earlier Bond films in which Spectre makes allusions.  Maybe it was just too long (which it is).  Who knows.  This time, Spectre was a much more engaging film.

James Bond (Daniel Craig) received an ominous video message from M (Judi Dench) from seemingly beyond the grave, setting him on a path to uncover a international shadowy organization called SPECTRE and the mysterious enigma who ran it.  As this was going on, our new M (Ralph Fiennes) was trying to keep the Double O program afloat as a new, big brother type data organization was rising on the worldwide stage, pushed on by Max  “C” Denbigh (Andrew Scott).

Of course, as we all know when in the James Bond mythos, when you mention SPECTRE, the man behind it is the one and only Ernst Stavro Blofeld, now being portrayed by Christoph Waltz.  Spectre was wise about the return of Bond’s nemesis to this new series of films with Daniel Craig at the helm.  While the rest of the Bond lore…sort of… had a continuity and a through-line in the movie franchise, everything had since been rebooted with Craig.  So they took Blofeld and gave him a more compelling and connecting back story that tied him closely with Bond, more than ever before.  I liked the tie, although one wonders how closely this had been planned out.  This movie basically tied everything from the Daniel Craig Bond films together beneath the Spectre umbrella.  I am not sure that if you really analyze the plot it would necessarily hold up, but it does, for the most part, work for me.

Dave Bautista joined the film as Hinx, the silent assassin for this film.  The silent hired gun is a trope of the Bond franchise and big Dave fits right in.

It was fun because a couple of the old Bond motifs showed up here…almost.  They were on a snowy mountain with ski lifts and I though, “Oh look, they will be skiing!”  However, they avoided slapping on the skis for a chase scene.  However, they did return to the “death trap” concept when they could have just shot Bond in the head and be done with him easily.  One wonders that part of the job description for Bond villains is “you must place yourself in a situation where you are going to be caught/killed.”

There had been some belief that Spectre was going to be the final Bond film for Daniel Craig.  Craig had even made some references about never playing the character again specifically the he would rather “slash [his] wrists” than play Bond again.  Because of that, the end of Spectre could have easily been a beautiful send-off for James had it gone that way.  However, we know that they backed up the Brinks truck full of money for him to resume the role once more.

I am pleased to have finished the Bond re-watch and I am ready for No Time to Die.

I do like this movie poster.

That is where my compliments end.

Out of a feeling of completism, with my James Bond franchise movie re-watch coming to an end soon (I am down to Spectre remaining), I felt the need to watch the 1967 version of Casino Royale.

I don’t know what I was thinking.

An aging James Bond (David Niven) comes out of retirement to star in a spoof comedy lacking a coherent plot or, you know, laughs.  Meanwhile superstar actors Orson Welles, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen damage their legacies with appearances in this travesty.

I don’t know if you get the idea, but I hated this.

And it was 2 hours and 11 minutes long.  Holy cow.

This film had five different directors and 10 writers.  Is it any wonder why this film is the mess that it turned out to be.

I’m done.

Skyfall is the third Daniel Craig James Bond film and it was my favorite Bond movie coming into the re-watch.  I was interested in seeing how it would fare this second time.  I had only seen the film once, and it blew me away then.

The cold open was strong and ended with a hugely dramatic moment.  Bond, shot and plummeting into the water, looked to be dead.  As he recovered in secret, a bomb at the MI6 office brought him out of hiding.

The attack on MI6 appeared to be targeting M (Judi Dench), as someone from her past has shown up with a plan.

Javier Bardem, who played the villainous Raoul Silva, and he was one of the very best Bond villains of the entire franchise.  He was menacing, dangerous and manipulative.

However, Bardem’s plan as shown in Skyfall is really a stretch and depends completely on coincidences or knowing things that you cannot know.  This was not something that bothered me the first time and does not make a huge issue this time, but it is something that I see and affects me.  It may be a minor truth, but it does take me back a step.

Judi Dench is magnificent here.  The first time, I heard someone talking in the theater and the end result was spoiled for me, mitigating my emotions for the situation (SPOILER… M dies)END OF SPOILER.  However, it is still a strong moment and it was just as powerful this time as before.

Skyfall feels as if it is a transitional film too, as Bond is being moved back into a more familiar situation with the re-introduction of Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Ralph Fiennes assuming the new position.  We also get a new Q (Ben Whishaw), though the gadgets are kept fairly realistic.  The joke about the exploding pens was very funny.

And… we were back to the carnivorous animals as a danger. No sharks or piranha.  This time…Gila monsters.

The ending sequence at Skyfall is utterly cinematic, with some of the best imagery ever seen in a Bond film.  The shots in the film are beautiful and rousing.  It does not surprise me when I discovered that EYG Hall of Famer Roger Deakins was involved.  He received an Oscar nomination for his work on Skyfall, and that is well earned.

The title track by Adele is one of the best themes recorded as well.  Skyfall has that perfect flow for the feel of this Bond film.  Adele deserved her Oscar win for that song.

In the end, I loved Skyfall, but, to be honest, it is not my favorite Bond film right  now.  It is close to the top though.  There is not much about Skyfall that isn’t fantastic and it is easily in the top 3 Bond movies of all time.

Recently, I joined the Patreon of Dan Murrell, formerly of Screen Junkies and now starting his own YouTube channel.  I have been a fan of Dan for several years, back to the old days of Movie Fights.  I joined his Patreon basically to join his Movie Club.  One of the first films he put forth as a film to watch was the animated An American Tail.

Produced by Steven Spielberg, An American Tail tells the story of little mouse Fievel (Phillip Glasser), a Russian immigrant to the United States, who gets separated from his family on the trip.  Fievel’s family came to America because they believed that there were no cats in America.

The animation here is surprisingly good, though it looks like a basic cartoon.  There are some scenes that are just beautifully drawn and the imagery is, at times, haunting.

The music is really well done, but it is not overused.  Somewhere Out There is a beautiful song and the duet with Fievel and Tiger (Dom DeLuise) is a lot of fun.

Fievel sure goes through a lot in this movie and the near misses with him and his family were maddening.  The little mouse has to face so much adversity that it really builds to a powerful emotional moment in that third act of the film.

This movie is certainly from the perspective of an immigrant to the United States, something that is relevant in this point of time in our history.  An American Tail uses imagery of the Statue of Liberty to promote that theme.  The attitude of the mice in coming from Russia, looking for a better life in America is a powerful message that we should still embrace.

I think as well that the fact that these Russian mice are basically Jewish is a great use of the animation.  It allows children to see a different culture represented on the screen without it being called into attention.

This was the first time I actually saw this movie and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

After a bit of a break with James Bond, I have returned to get the second of the Daniel Craig Bonds with Quantum of Solace.

When I first saw this, I was very disappointed.  After the stunning success that was Casino Royale, I had high expectations for this film and, honestly, it fell flat for me.

James Bond becomes involved in a case to try and stop a shadowy and mysterious international organization from doing general bad guy stuff (it is not clear).  The story leads Bond to a environmentalist named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who was involved in an assassination attempt on M.  There is a storyline involving a South American despot too, but it is fairly convoluted.

I still enjoyed the performance of Daniel Craig, and I also enjoyed the relationship that they were building between Bond and M (Judi Dench), but the rest of this action film was just blah.  The villain was forgettable.  The story was lacking.  They did not give me much specifics to care about anything that was happening here.

They tried to recreate the stunning foot chase scene from Casino Royale, but this one was a pale imitation.

There are some good action set pieces, including a thrilling scene with airplanes, but action without reason or connection is Transformers movies.  Especially after the rousing masterpiece of Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace was all the more lacking.

Daniel Craig holds no level of disappointment though as he continues to be outstanding as a grittier, more hard nosed Bond than we have seen before.  There is a feeling that this guy would rip your throat out if he felt like it.  This Bond is a killer first whereas the other Bonds are more of a lover first.  Craig did have some solid emotional moments too though, specifically in a scene with Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini).

Sadly, this movie feels like a placeholder between Casino Royale and Skyfall, which will be up next.  I have just two more Bond films (three if I choose to go back for the 1967 Casino Royale) and Skyfall has been one of my favorites since it came out.  We’ll see if it holds up.

A new animated Justice League Dark film is being released today on VOD streaming systems so I figured it was time to take a look at the first Justice League Dark film.

When a magic problem comes to the earth, Batman (Jason O’Mara) has to find some heavy hitters that are more likely to be effective than the normal heroes he hangs out with.  He is pointed in the correct direction by Boston Brand aka Deadman (Nicolas Turturro).  The correct direction is toward Zatanna (Camilla Luddington) and John Constantine (MattRyan).

Throw in Jason Blood, who has been bound for years to the demon Etrigan (Ray Chase) and a little help from Swamp Thing (Roger Cross) and you’ve got Justice League Dark.

Unfortunately, there are several issues with this animated movie.  First, there is just too much exposition.  I understand why that is considering we have all of these new heroes and we have to introduce them.  The problem is the movie does not do a great job of showing us these heroes.  Even times when they did show us who these characters were, there was too much exposition involved (ex. the origin of Etrigan.

The magic use here is another problem because we do not have a basis for what the magic looks like.  The spells used by Zatanna and Constantine are confusing and is not clear.  The whole battle with Felix Faust (Enrico Colantoni) was boring.  Faust was a terrible antagonist in that second act.

A third issue is that, despite there is a lot of exposition, I still did not understand what a lot of these people are and how they are connected.  I do not have a deep understanding of who John Constantine is or how he was connected to Zatanna or to Ritchie (Jeremy Davies) and the film does not give that info outside of the very surface answers.  That kept me at a distance with all of those.  Perhaps if I knew Constantine better, maybe it would not have bothered me as much.

Now, I did enjoy Batman here.  Swamp Thing was a nice surprise (although he is dispatched too easy at the end).  I enjoyed the part at the hospital and I wish there was more like this.  I have always enjoyed Deadman so it was nice to see him get a little focus.

The animation was not at the level that these movies should be at.  DC animation has been great over the years, but they have consistently not had the kind of animation that they should.  These movies could be huge hits if they would put a little more into them.

I do think there is one major factor about this.  The next Justice League Dark movie will not require the amount of set up as this one needed and it could be good. These characters are interesting and deserve to be seen, but the first film was just too much set up.

Wow.

I had not seen Casino Royale for quite a long time.  It may have been since it was released.  I remember really liking the movie at the time, but, now on re-watch, this thing was simply brilliant.

Daniel Craig took over from Pierce Brosnan and brought with him an all new Bond, unlike any before him.  The closest Bond to Craig before this would be Timothy Dalton, but there is still no comparison.  I might go as far as to say that this is the single best performance by any Bond actor in the entire 40+ year franchise.

This whole film felt like a reboot of the franchise, despite the fact that M was still here and still being played by Judi Dench.  However, in the film, it started with the promotion of James Bond to Double O status.  The cold open flashback in black and white was beautiful and set the stage for the new version of 007 we would be getting.

This was an all-new Bond.  A gritty, dirty, hard-hitting and violent Bond that embraced the violence.  All other Bonds felt as if they were somehow slightly above the violence, even when he was killing people.  The very aura of Bond is different.

And if the black and white beginning wasn’t cool enough, the movie moved right into what is one of the greatest chase scenes in movie history with an utterly amazing parkour style chase that had scene after scene of just jaw-dropping stunts.  The best part of this chase was that it was real and look as if it could be done.  Compare this to the chase scene in Die Another Day with the speedboats.  That was ridiculous.  This was epic.

Casino Royale also showed us some of the most anxiety-ridden poker scenes you are going to see.  The tension in those poker hands were just as distressing as any of the action scenes.

Mads Mikkelsen was the perfect foil for Bond in these poker scene.  Playing Le Chiffre, Mikkelsen kept the audience off balance the entire time.  You knew that Le Chiffre was not just after the money.  We knew that he was in danger during the whole time, which kind of mitigated the steps he took.  Well, sort of.

The whole poisoning/heart attack scene with Bond was unbelievably remarkable.  This showed us what our new Bond was going to be like.

Then the end of the film was unlike other Bond films.  He did not wind up sleeping with the Bond girl as the credits rolled.  It turned the Bond formula on its head and revitalized the entire franchise.

After the last couple of Bond films, Casino Royale was completely welcome.  It was serious and violent.  It was great performances all around and boy was this fantastic.