Yeah, I'll just keep singing the praises of that movie. The opening (the car chase followed immediately by that duel with the henchman that ends in the bell tower) is fantastic. (At the same point in Skyfall you're watching a bunch of boring meetings.)

Right, and the dog doesn't seem to mind at all.

Cool!

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that the complexity of the villain's story was the main reason the movie was disliked. I was just pointing it out as a contraindication: clearly this isn't what people need from Bond, since the fan favorite has the least of it and the disliked one has the most.

Right! And (like I said below) the utter meaninglessness of "the Chitari" and whatever they're trying to do somehow doesn't work against the film. It's almost like porn, where the plot is transparently unnecessary and they barely bother with it.

Wait — I thought I liked them and you didn't? Now I'm (cordially) confused.

Right. You have to admit that "the Chitari" are part of an interesting new trend where we and the filmmakers pretty transparently don't care who the villains are, what they're about, or what they do, because our focus is almost completely on what's going on between the foreground characters.

Now there I disagree with you. The mythic-scaled battle in the middle of a densely populated urban center is absolutely crucial to the whole ethos of comics and action movies. I mean, it's a no-brainer; of course that's where the fight's got to happen.

Would you rather have the Lucasfilm version where Luke or Indy kill dozens of people and it ain't nothing — it's treated like a joke, or just like mannequins falling over?

Fair enough; I forgot about that.

When he buys the chocolate…God, that will never stop cracking me up.

Maybe I'm crazy or overly nostalgic or both, but I like to believe that not a single New Yorker got killed in the climax of the first movie, just because it had that glorious feel of a Silver Age Jack Kirby comic book battle where nobody actually gets hurt. (They even had the cutaway to those cops reacting; it's…

I understand everything you wrote except "Marketers love ScarJo's pants." What does this mean? Is somebody out there selling "Black Widow pants" or "Scarlett Johannson pants"? Are you talking about that new shot where she's sashaying around with the big guns and the camera's at butt-level behind her? Or what?

That was the dumb part

Armageddon was pretty good (mostly because of the J. J. Abrams script) but the rest of it is God-awful.

The line is "Forget it; he's rolling"

That whole sequence was pretty silly. Especially the part about how Loki just hangs around and waits while they do it.

Maybe she'll do a Leonard Nimoy change-of-heart and they'll have to elaborately bring her back.

I got the joke!

It's too bad Frank Silva's no longer with us. I wonder how they'll work around that.